First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Second, in a nearly simultaneous exchange over the role of “the aristoi” (aristocracies or elites) throughout history, Jefferson argued that the American Revolution had “laid the axe to the root of the Pseudo-aristocracy … founded on wealth and birth without either virtue or talents.” In that sense, the American Revolution represented a clean break with the vestiges of European feudalism and had thereby cleared the ground for a new kind of egalitarian society in the United States based on merit and equality of opportunity.

  John disagreed, arguing that the problem was not European feudalism but human nature itself, which had not undergone any magical transformation in crossing the Atlantic. Jefferson’s vision of a classless American society was, therefore, a romantic pipe dream. “After all,” John observed, “as long as property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families and … the Snow ball will grow as it rolls.” Pretending that the new American republic would be immune to the social inequalities of Europe was Jefferson’s seductive version of the grand illusion. And at the political level, elites would always exist here as well as in Europe, and exercise disproportionate influence unless managed by government.60

  Again, with hindsight as the guide, one could argue that John’s position on the first disagreement was vindicated by the Civil War; his position on the second, by the New Deal. But in the crucible of the moment, such prescience was unavailable, and Jefferson’s more optimistic forecast enjoyed a decided rhetorical advantage. The more historically correct conclusion would be that the Adams-Jefferson correspondence had exposed the two conflicting versions of America’s original intentions, each passionately embraced by founders with unmatched revolutionary credentials.

  INDIAN SUMMER

  Although John’s recovered friendship with Jefferson eventually became famous, even legendary, for its symbolic significance, his all-time dearest friend—no one else came close—was Abigail. And the feeling was mutual. When her sister somewhat mischievously asked her if she would marry John if she could live her life over, Abigail responded with an unambiguous declaration: “Yet after half a century, I can say my first choice would be the same if I again had my youth and opportunity to make it.” This was in February 1814, when she was still recovering from Nabby’s death, another bout with rheumatism had confined her to bed, and her sister Mary and the ever-faithful Juno had just passed away. But the dominant Adams pattern, for Abigail as well as for John, was to rally in the face of adversity. “I bend to disease, totter under it,” she explained, “but rise again … feel grateful for the reprieve and wish so to number my days as to apply my mind to wisdom.” She and John had not only lived so much life together, they had also suffered so much pain together that it was impossible to imagine doing it with anyone else.61

  Unlike the renewed friendship with Jefferson, which was recorded in letters, no correspondence between Abigail and John was necessary because they were together all the time. And, in fact, the routine intimacies that did not make it into the historical record were the most emotionally important moments: John reading a recent letter from Jefferson by the fireside while Abigail sorted laundry; Abigail reading to John from Shakespeare, her favorite writer, late at night, when the candles could not compensate for John’s failing eyesight; John fulminating over Mary Wollstonecraft’s romantic delusions about the French Revolution while Abigail silently shelled beans and eventually announced it was time for bed.62

  As their friends, close relatives, even their own children died around them, as the irrevocable aging process and accompanying physical failures made each look into the mirror a moment of horror, as the extended family that surrounded them at Quincy came to resemble a menagerie of wounded animals, Abigail and John remained resolute, infinitely resilient, the invulnerable center that would always hold. If love, like leadership, could never be defined, only recognized when it presented itself in its most ideal form, they embodied it. The long melody played on.

  Their mutual obsession was John Quincy, who now single-handedly carried the prospects of the Adams family for the next generation. For this reason, they wanted him to have a brilliant political career, presumably culminating in the presidency. Yet the more they aged, the more dependent they became on his proximity. And so his appointment as American ambassador to Russia in 1809, which should have been greeted as another step toward his appointment with destiny, became a bittersweet occasion: “I find it very difficult to reconcile my mind to it,” Abigail lamented. “At the advanced years both of his father and myself, we can have very little expectation of meeting again upon this mortal theatre … Both his father and I have looked to him as the prop and support of our advanced and declining years.” For the next seven years, Abigail claimed to be clinging to life until her eldest son returned home.63

  John Quincy was gone so long because history seemed to have a larger claim on him than his family obligations. (Louisa Catherine also opposed the Russian posting, deeply resenting that George and John had to be left behind with their grandparents at Quincy.) His presence lent stature to the American mission at St. Petersburg, where the British minister observed that “he sat among us like a bulldog among spaniels.” In 1815 he was ordered from St. Petersburg to Ghent, where he negotiated the treaty with Great Britain that ended the War of 1812, repeating his father’s triumph thirty years earlier in the Treaty of Paris. Then, again like his father, he was dispatched to London as America’s first postwar ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Then his star rose even higher in 1816, when President James Monroe tapped him to serve as secretary of state, which had become the acknowledged stepping-stone to the presidency.64

  One would expect Abigail and John to be thrilled that their child prodigy was fulfilling his promise, and at some level they obviously were. But they also wanted him nearby during their own last chapter, as John forcefully apprised him in 1816: “One thing is clear in my mind, and that is you ought to be home … My sphere is reduced to my Garden and so must yours be. The wandering life that you have lived, as I have done before you is not compatible with human nature. It was not made for it.” As if John Quincy had not gotten the point, John wrote him again two weeks later: “You must return to Montezillo, renounce all public employment forever, and lay down your bones here with your Ancestors.”65

  This was not going to happen, as John surely realized, since John Quincy had been programmed for success on the public stage from early childhood, and the same lust for fame that had propelled his father to answer every call also consumed the son. While John’s request—almost an order—had a somewhat selfish sound, his primary motive was protective. He saw John Quincy following in his own footsteps, and he worried that his son would suffer the same bitter disappointment in the end.

  On August 10, 1817, John declared that “Yesterday was one of the most uniformly happy days of my whole life.” He had just learned that John Quincy, Louisa Catherine, and their three boys had landed at New York and the whole entourage would be arriving at Quincy in about a week. The joyous homecoming on August 18 was the highlight of their retirement years, a festive occasion to which Abigail invited a host of local dignitaries. She put on one of her best dresses and insisted that her famous son sit at the head of the table for dinner. The minister from Salem described her as the model of competence, seated on the sofa, sorting laundry while answering questions about Madison’s conduct of the recent war: “She had a distinct view of our public men and measures,” he reported, “and had her own opinions.”66

  She also had her own property, or at least property that she regarded as her own. According to Massachusetts law, all family property was legally owned by the male head of household. But in January 1816 Abigail prepared a will, parceling out to her children, grandchildren, and niece, Louisa Smith, her silk gowns, jewelry, a lace shawl, beds, blankets, and $4,000, which was the nest egg that resulted from war bonds purchased during the 1770s. She also distributed to John Quincy and Thomas two parcels of land she had inherited from her family. Though a clear viol
ation of the law, neither Abigail nor John regarded her will as an especially defiant act. It simply reflected the underlying assumption of Abigail’s personal independence that had been the basis of their life together for over fifty years. John endorsed the terms of her will as a statement by the saucy woman he loved, but who never belonged to him or anyone else. No legal official in the commonwealth dared to challenge her claims in court.67

  The will also reflected Abigail’s looming sense that the end was near, that her nearly miraculous ability to recover from each bout with debilitating illness, almost to reclaim her life by sheer act of will, would eventually run its course. Blessedly, for the year following John Quincy’s triumphant return she enjoyed excellent health, which permitted her to join John in carriage rides over the Quincy hills to visit friends and relatives. She even made two trips to Boston, where they were feted and fussed over as New England’s most venerable couple and one of the last surviving links to a glorious but bygone era.

  It was a kind of Indian summer for the now legendary partnership, a final fling celebrating their central satisfaction of being together. John’s only complaint was that Abigail’s overly assiduous devotion to her domestic duties sometimes prevented them from spending more time together. He lamented her “uncontrollable attachment to the superintendence of every part of her household,” despite the obvious reality of “how few minutes either of us have to live.” For almost a full year, however, they recovered the old rhythms, walking the gardens, riding the fields, reading aloud to each other at night—Abigail was particularly intrigued by a biography of an emerging American hero named Andrew Jackson—relishing together the seasoned quality of their ongoing conversation.68

  It all came to a sudden end in October 1818. Abigail collapsed with typhoid and probably suffered an accompanying stroke that made it difficult for her to speak. Interestingly, John first reached out to Jefferson, who had lost his own wife many years earlier: “The dear partner of my life for fifty-four years and for many years more as a lover, now lies in extremis, forbidden to speak or be spoken to.” Abigail was in great pain and at one point murmured to John that she knew she was dying, that it was just a matter of time. After leaving her bedside in tears, John was inconsolable: “I wish I could lie down beside her and die too … I cannot bear to see her in this state.” Despite Abigail’s chronic ailments, as almost ten years her senior, John had always expected to go first. With John at her bedside, Abigail died on October 28. She was seventy-four. The music they had made together for so long finally stopped.69

  Of the many eulogies, Louisa Catherine’s was the best: “She was the guiding planet around which all revolved, performing their separate duties only by the impulse of her magnetic power.” John remained adrift and in mourning for nearly a year: “My House is a Region of Sorrow,” he explained to one friend. “Inhabited by a sorrowful Widower … burdened with Multitudes of Letters from total strangers, teasing me with impertinent inquiries.” He felt strangely alone, like a dancer without a partner: “The bitterness of death is past,” he told John Quincy. “The grim spider so terrible to human nature has no sting left for me.” The time that remained for him was just an earthly limbo while he waited to join her, either in heaven or under the ground, whatever providence decreed. He had no way of knowing that he had eight years left.70

  EPILOGUE

  1818–26

  “Have mercy on me Posterity, if you should see any of my letters.”

  JOHN DID NOT THINK of the years that remained as a final chapter so much as an epilogue. With his partner of fifty-four years gone, he waited for the summons to join her and resume their conversation in the hereafter. (If it turned out there was no such place, his bodily remains would at least rest beside hers in the cemetery of Quincy’s First Congregational Church.) As he told Nabby’s daughter, he was ready to go at a moment’s notice, and growing increasingly impatient with “my distemper, Old Age, which I will not say with Franklin is incurable, because the ground will soon cure it.”1

  He missed the daily banter with Abigail: the routine exchanges about children and grandchildren, Jefferson’s latest letter, John Quincy’s achievements as secretary of state, the annual manure shortage, Thomas’s embarrassing slide into alcoholism and permanent depression—the whole motley mix of large and small interests that, taken together, had filled their well-lived life together. He felt empty.

  No one could replace Abigail, but the closest approximation became Louisa Catherine, another highly intelligent and well-read woman, not as saucy or self-confident as Abigail, though formidable despite her frailties. He had grown accustomed to being in constant contact with a woman’s voice, so he initiated a correspondence with Louisa Catherine to fill the void.

  “The world falls to pieces around me,” he confessed to her in his most candid mode, “my friends and my enemies disappear.” This was the kind of emotional honesty that he had formerly reserved for conversations with Abigail. Louisa Catherine responded with equivalent candor, sending John drafts of her poetry and her translations of Greek and Roman classics, requesting his advice about how to handle the delinquency of her eldest son, George, now at Harvard, and—this was risky—exposing her own discomfort with the social and political obligations of a wife whose husband wished to become the next president of the United States. John was all commiseration: “You will find in no department of public life any exemption from frequent twinges,” he explained from deep experience. “You must retire to Montezillo … for perfect serenity.”2

  He confided to Louisa Catherine his frustration at never quite fitting into the Ciceronian mode of retirement. She responded by suggesting that he should not even try, since the role did not fit him: “You, my dear Sir, have ever possessed a nature too ardent … to sink into the cold and thankless state of stoicism.” Abigail could not have put it better.3

  From Louisa Catherine’s perspective, John’s heartfelt letters conveyed a level of unconditional acceptance that she had always wanted but never received from Abigail, whose matriarchal stature seemed so forebidding and whose efforts at intimacy often struck Louisa Catherine as thunderbolts hurled from atop Mount Abigail. If John needed to be in regular contact with a woman’s voice and mind, Louisa Catherine needed endorsement from the family headquarters at Quincy. John gave it to her: “The old gentleman took a fancy to me,” she recalled in her autobiography, “and was the only one [to whom] I was literally and without knowing it a fine lady.”4

  John had always worried about “dying at the top,” but just the opposite aging process was happening to him: most of his teeth were now gone, and his “quiverations” made it impossible to hold a pen, so he had to dictate all letters to different grandchildren. He could ride a horse three miles but could not walk without a cane, and stairs had become insurmountable mountains. On the other hand, his mind remained hyperactive, at times almost childlike in its reckless release of innocent energy and endless curiosity.

  An ice storm in the early spring of 1820, for example, caused him to conjure up the frozen rain on the trees as nature’s equivalent of a diamond necklace that was “more striking than all the diamonds worn by the Queen of France.” He was convinced that “all the glitter of her jewels did not make an impression upon me equal to that presented by every shrub.” Or when rereading Cicero’s De Senectute, the classical handbook for retired statesmen, his mind took flight while contemplating the punctuation: “I have never delighted much in contemplating commas or colons,” he observed, “or in spelling or measuring syllables, but now, while reading Cato, if I look at these little objects, I find my imagination … roaming in the Milky Way.” As his body shriveled, his mind soared.5

  In 1820 he was named a special delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, which had assembled to revise the document he had single-handedly drafted more than forty years earlier. He claimed to feel like a witness to his own second coming: “I feel not much like a maker or mender of constitutions in my present state of imbecility,” h
e told Louisa Catherine, “but I presume that we will not be obliged to carry windmills by assault.”6

  He rose to speak on two occasions, first to argue for the retention of the property qualification to vote, then to urge the removal of any religious requirement. He was outvoted on both occasions, prompting him to observe that he was simultaneously too far behind and too far ahead of popular opinion to win an election: “I boggled and blundered more than a young fellow just rising to speak at the bar,” he apprised Jefferson. “I believe the Printers have made better speeches than I made for myself,” meaning that his own toothless mumblings had been rendered more cogent by newspaper editors than they deserved, perhaps the only occasion in his political career, he claimed, when the press seemed disposed to protect him from himself.7

  It was not clear whether he ever conquered his demons or simply outlived them. Clinching evidence that all had either been forgiven or forgotten with Jefferson came in 1823. One of his old letters to a friend, castigating Jefferson for his multiple duplicities, had found its way into print, threatening the recovered friendship with an explosive blast from the past. Jefferson’s response was Monticellian gallantry in its most lyrical form: “Be assured, my dear Sir,” he wrote John, “that I am incapable of receiving the sightest impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth, and wisdom, and to sow tares between friends who have been such for nearly half a century. Beseeching you then not to suffer your mind to be disquieted by this wicked attempt to poison its peace, and praying you to throw it by.”8

  John was overjoyed, only wishing that Abigail were there to read the letter alongside him. Instead, he insisted that it be read aloud to the entire extended family at the breakfast table, calling it “the best letter that ever was written … just such a letter as I expected, only it was infinitely better expressed.” He promised Jefferson that he would join him in all-out war against “the peevish and fretful effusions of politicians,” then signed off as “J.A. In the 89 year of his age, still too fat to last much longer.”9