FIFTEEN
One of the Choice Ones of the Earth
In her first sprawling letter to Thomas Jefferson, in Paris, written almost immediately on her return to London, Abigail cheerfully explained her reasons for “freely scribling.” Their obviously comfortable, trusting, uniquely familial relationship was one that Abigail was not about to abandon. Rather, she harbored a “little vanity” in the hope of sustaining it: “Having heard you upon some occasions express a desire to hear from your Friends, even the Minutia respecting their Situation, I have ventured to class myself in that number and to subscribe myself, Sir, your Friend and Humble Servant.” Jefferson’s reply on June 21, 1785, was handsome. Having “duly” received the honor of her letter, he thanked her for her “condescension” in having taken the first step in a correspondence he had “so much desired.”1
Their exchange of thirty-five letters (of which Abigail wrote twenty), spanning thirty-two months, is remarkable in all ways: in its affectionate intimacy, in its preposterously bitter ending, as well as in its infinite variety. They gossiped: Jefferson pronounced Cardinal de Rohan a “debauchee, and a booby”; Abigail suggested, with feline flair, that Madame Helvétius must be “melancholy” now that Franklin, “as she used to call him,” was gone. They consoled each other on the vagaries of “hireling scribblers.” They consulted on whether to charge house rent to the government”; Mr. Franklin had always done so and if Mr. Adams did, Mr. Jefferson would follow (experience having taught him, he said, that “my expenses will otherwise exceed my allowance”). They passed cultural notes—Abigail referring to Jefferson’s “favorite passion,” Handel—and fashion notes, Jefferson wondering, now that the French Queen had vowed to wear none but French gauze, what might happen to the English looms. They shopped for one another attentively, at all times conspiring on ways to avoid customs duties. An American might bring in the Irish linen shirts Abigail ordered for him, Mr. Jefferson suggested, when he crossed the Channel; someone could tuck her small orders of lace and ribbons in his pocket, Abigail proposed.2
In the ensuing months, Abigail was able to send Jefferson a five-yard-long tablecloth with twenty napkins (the usual size was 4 3/4 yards with eighteen napkins) at seven pounds, and two pairs of nutcrackers, among other collectibles; Colonel Smith, whom he’d gotten to know during his stay in London, tended to bulkier errands concerning a harpsichord, a letter press, and a horse’s harness. Jefferson responded to Abigail’s favors with generosity and flattery. Requests for yards of cambric and four pairs of shoes (one of “blew” satin) were graciously filled. Concerning the choice of biscuit figurines, he was painstaking and gallant. Three of her choice, Minerva, Diana, and Apollo, were readily available, but the fourth would have to be entirely of his choosing. He had settled on Mars, after much searching, he explained, declining the offer of a fine Venus on the grounds that two figurines at one table, at the same time, would be “out of taste.”3
Abigail was apologetic about having Jefferson run errands for her; he, in turn, insisted it was the other way around. John had advanced the sum (roughly thirty-two pounds) that both men agreed was needed to secure Jean Antoine Houdon, who was bound for America, to do a sculpture of George Washington. Jefferson, therefore, insisted he was “considerably” in debt to both Adamses, but especially to Abigail. Certainly he would not entertain her contention that her trivial requests were “a little like putting Hercules to the distaff.” Rather, he insisted, he gave Abigail so much trouble that unless she found some means of employing him for herself in return, she would leave him with an “unpleasant load” on his mind. This was hardly a serious threat, considering how copiously Jefferson poured his opinions on page after page, making the ground for their discussion only that much greener.4
If Jefferson’s distaste for the British was adamant, Abigail’s was hardly less so. But even her admission that London’s superb hackney coaches were superior to Paris was going too far; her “boast” Jefferson considered a “flout.” He wrote back shortly that he would not give up “the polite, self-denying, feeling, hospitable, good-humoured people” of France, though their carriages might be “rather indifferent” for ten such races of “rich, proud, hectoring, swearing squibbling, carnivorous animals” as that with which Abigail resided. Steadfast in his protection of the French, he claimed that with a better religion and a better form of government, their country would be most enviable. Whatever their failings, he painted a joyous picture of the people he did “love” with all his heart—one he would alter with darker colors before too long.
Here we have singing, dancing, laugh, and merriment. No assassinations, no treasons, rebellions nor other dark deeds. When our king goes out, they fall down and kiss the earth where he has trodden; and then they go to kissing one another. And this is the truest wisdom. They have as much happiness in one year as an Englishman in ten. The presence of the queen’s sister enlivens the court. Still more the birth of the princess. There are some little bickerings between the king and his parliament, but they end with a sic volo, sic jubeo (“as I wish, so I rejoice”).5
As Abigail concurred eagerly that the English suffered from a great want of many French commodities, such as good sense, good nature, political wisdom, and benevolence, Jefferson’s facetious remarks about King George III could not have fallen on more responsive ears. He wrote Abigail, in late summer of 1786, about news of an attempted assassination of “your King,” who was, in his opinion, truly the “American Messias, the most precious life that ever God gave, and may god continue it.” A startled Abigail read on, as Jefferson explained:
Twenty long years has he been labouring to drive us to our good, and he labours and will labour still for it if he can be spared. We shall have need of him for twenty more. The Prince of Wales on the throne, Lansdowne and Fox in the ministry, we are undone! We become chained by our habits to the tails of those who hate and despise us. I repeat it then that my anxieties are all alive for the health and long life of the King. He has not a friend on earth who would lament his loss so much and so long as I should.6
While the tone of their letters was generally bright—even sunny—on more than one occasion it slipped to a melancholy gray, especially on Abigail’s part. Her discontent had little to do with the physical aspect of England—only a mile into the countryside one could have as fine weather and clear sky as any to be found in America, and be easily rid of the city’s smoke and fog. Rather, it was the attitude and values that troubled her; “if the manners of the people were as pure as their Air,” no one would have reason for discontent. But such was not the case, and her dissatisfaction was only heightened by John’s frustrations and his observation of conscious guilt and shame in the faces of the noblemen, who seemed to make the most awkward conversation with him.7
Already, in February of 1786, Abigail had expressed the hope of returning to “the purer and honester manners” of her native land, “where domestic happiness reigns unrivalled, and virtue and honor go hand in hand.” She hoped to make their “escape” in one more season, complained of being in “the situation of Sterne’s starling,” the caged bird of Sentimental Journey. Nabby’s marriage, pleased as she was about it, left her more introspective than ever, and lonelier. Nothing seemed to go right; even a barrel of cranberries had arrived that fall in poor condition. Her generally irritable state was aggravated by the general mourning in court that November for the late princess Amelia; if all the faces there were not black, all the bodies appeared so, in Abigail’s opinion. Nor was she about to fill Mary’s request for some dark brown silk. Dark colors were for women with dark pasts or peevish dispositions, Abigail wrote back. Besides, she added, dark clothes did not suit dark complexions.8
At her most homesick, Abigail spoke of her gratitude for Elizabeth’s account of the song of her children’s bird. “Do you know,” she asked Elizabeth, “that European birds have not half the melody of ours? Nor is their fruit half so sweet, nor their flowers half so fragrant, nor their manners half so pure, nor their people half so virtuous.” Wryly conscious of her partiality, Abigail had the wit to warn Mrs. Shaw, “But keep this to yourself, or I shall be thought more than half deficient in understanding and taste.”9
Some might have attributed Abigail’s gloomy spirits to the sameness of her surroundings, but such was not the case. She had traveled into the country in July with John and the Smiths; in August she joined John on a business trip to Holland concerning America’s commercial treaty with Prussia and the need for a Prussian minister’s signature (the nearest such minister residing at The Hague). John and Abigail left London on August 3, and made a 120-mile crossing in about eighteen or twenty hours, by way of Harwich, Hellevoetsluis, and Rotterdam. Rather pleased by their mission, Abigail wrote home about “one of those theatres, upon which my partner and fellow-traveller had exhibited some of his most important actions, and rendered to his country lasting blessing.”10
On the whole, the trip was a success. Profoundly moved, John believed that the constitutional reforms wrought by the Dutch patriots were the first evidence that the American Revolution had made its mark on Europe. However, while the neat, cordial people, with their hospitable greetings, including bells and a military guard, were thoroughly appreciated, Abigail was not intrigued by the scenery. The silence and dead calm were monotonous, wanting in “dear variety.” One saw meadows, trees, canals; then one saw canals, trees, meadows. At one point Abigail thought she would have welcomed an English robber, and would have heard with pleasure the drumming of carriage wheels along the way. Her greatest mistake, she said, was taking along Plutarch’s Lives. Between reading about the cruelty, devastation, and horror of the Roman emperors and visiting the dark and dreary Dutch churches, she claimed she was haunted every night with troublesome ghosts, and vowed the next time to bring Don Quixote as her companion.11
* * *
Of her next tour, in January 1787, Abigail could hardly complain of want of variety. After she had spent a fortnight in “amusement and dissipation” at Bath, “that seat of fashionable resort,” frequented by William Pitt, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and Sarah Siddons, she had returned, she assured Richard Cranch, “with double pleasure” to her own fireside, adding virtuously that this was “where only, thank Heaven, my substantial happiness subsists.” She admitted that she sometimes liked to mix in the “gay world and view the manners as they rise,” but she was grateful not to be entirely absorbed by it. Revealingly, she understood that her early education had given her “not an habitual taste for what is termed fashionable life.”12
Abigail’s party in Bath included twelve Americans, a Venetian nobleman called Count Zenobia, and an entourage of domestics. Architecturally, Bath was a picture, and hardly an Ionic column escaped her vigilant eye, let alone a crescent, parade, square, or circus chiseled into the sweeping valley crowned with stubby hills. “Noble” and “magnificent” were Abigail’s words for the precise beauty of Bath. But Bath was more than architecture; it was a resort for the infirm (its waters were said to cure leprosy) and for the “gay, the indolent, the curious, the gambler, the fortune-hunter,” and even for those, like the thoughtless girl from the country, who went “out of wantonness.”13
Abigail was obviously dazzled by the sights, the decoration and dress, the balls and concerts, plays and private parties that Bath offered. She was also uncomfortable; in contrast with Holland, she now encountered too much variety. She felt threatened, her values challenged. In Bath, a “glittering star” was all that mattered; character was unimportant. Defensively, she said she thought a place ought to be select, to consist of persons respectable for morals and understanding. Her exposure provoked a “train of moral reflections”:
What is the chief end of man? is a subject well worth the investigation of every rational being. What, indeed is life, or its enjoyments, without settled principle, laudable purposes, mental exertions, and internal comfort, that sunshine of the soul; and how are these to be acquired in a hurry and tumult of the world?
Instead of exciting a “gayety of disposition,” Abigail took refuge in the depths of her New England soul. She vowed never to visit Bath again.14
* * *
Interestingly, despite her driving chauvinism about her native country in almost all its aspects—from terrain to dress to entertainments to birdsong to people and politics—Abigail was not unaware that America was in trouble, at least in the Massachusetts area. On the contrary, she wrote on January 20, 1787, referring to Daniel Shays and his followers, that the “riots and dissensions” in her state were a matter of “very serious concern.” But it was gratifying that a book that Captain Cushing was carrying home with him would show that John had worked hard to strengthen and support their government and to help people understand the dangerous consequences of unbalanced power. If only people would read and listen, Abigail urged, they had the “means of being the first and the happiest people upon the globe.”15
She was referring to the first volume of Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, just published in London. John had been moved to write these “hasty speculations” for many reasons. “To defend the separation of the legislative, executive, judicial powers from each other, and the division of the legislative into three branches, from the attacks of county committees, riotous assemblies, and uninformed philosophers and statesmen, will be the burden of my song,” he explained. Such a distribution of power was “the unum necessarium of liberty, safety, and good order,” and therefore, John promised, “no pains taken to preserve it will be thrown away.” The essay, the first of three, seemed especially urgent at this time because of the “commotions” in New England and John’s fear that it was “much easier to pull down a government in such a conjuncture of affairs … than to build up, at such a season as the present.”16
* * *
Eventually, Abigail would have the satisfaction of knowing that John’s Defense had reached America and some of its intended audience at the time of “great crisis.” Richard Henry Lee would write the following September (1787), that the book had probably had its “proper influence in forming the federal government.” Meanwhile, Abigail brooded about the “Tumults,” and had not, since the start of their correspondence, spared Jefferson any of its threats. In her opinion, men without conscience or principles were leading a deluded multitude to an “allarming” height. Pretending to harbor grievances that had no substance except in their imaginations, these ignorant, restless desperadoes cried out for a paper currency, for equal distribution of property, for annihilation of all debts, for the abolition of the state Senate as a useless branch of government, and the Court of Common Pleas as unnecessary.17
The list would give Jefferson an idea of the “materials” of which the rebellion was composed, and the necessity of the wisest and most vigorous measures to suppress it. Instead of the laudable spirit of which Abigail knew Jefferson approved, which made people watchful over their liberties and alert to their defense, those “mobbish” insurgents, she feared, were for “sapping the foundation, and distroying the whole fabrick at once.”18
Perhaps because Jefferson immediately responded to Abigail’s fears with soothing assurances that he was not alarmed at the “humor” shown by their country, and that, on the contrary, he liked to see a people “awake and alert,” Abigail modified her position. Attempting to deal judiciously with what she could not stomach, namely disloyalty of any stripe, she conceded that the rebels, who were certainly a minority, though a troublesome one, might prove “sallutary” to the state at large. They might lead to correction of the causes of the “commotions”—the luxury and extravagance that pervaded all orders of their countrymen and women. These made vanity “a more powerful principle than patriotism.”19
Jefferson only reinforced Abigail’s most recent position a few weeks later. On February 22, 1787, he wrote:
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere.
Once again, Jefferson had had the final word. His political differences with Abigail, and, for that matter, with John seemed a matter of nuances. Expressed so openly and genuinely, they could hardly be considered harbingers of a less fortuitous relationship, unless one construed a few falling leaves as proof of a rotting tree.20
Although their correspondence maintained a dependable rhythm, at least in its early period, a three-month hiatus occurred during the autumn of 1786. Jefferson might have waited even longer to resume it, considering that an injured wrist left him with obstinate swelling, but for urgent news that depended on Abigail’s cooperation. When friends informed him that his little daughter would be sailing for England in May, he had taken the liberty of writing back that Abigail would keep her under her wing until he could send for her. About his daughter Mary, who was called Polly, he continued:
She is about 8 years, and will be in the care of her nurse, a black woman, to whom she is confided with safety. I knew your goodness too well to scruple the giving this direction before I had asked your permission. I beg you to accept assurances of the constant esteem with which I have the honor to be Dear Madam your most obedient and most humble servant.21
Abigail’s reply, on January 29, was entirely reassuring. She suggested the use of British oil on his sprained wrist and was sending a servant in search of some, presumably to forward to him. As for his daughter, she would be “punctually” attended to, with all that was in Abigail’s power.22
That same month, Abigail could talk of expectations of still another visitor. Mrs. Smith (as Nabby was now dignified in letters home) was expecting a baby. This meant that Abigail would turn “Grandame” in the spring, and there were some days, she allowed, when she did not feel so ancient as that event would make her. Certainly she did not take the news lightly, convinced as she was that “a thousand new cares and anxieties as well as pleasures attend new relatives.” In preparation, there was a nurse to be looked for and clothes to be made, and often she and Mrs. Smith, “looking as sober as a Deaconness,” spent afternoons together edging fine white linens and muslins with delicate laces.23
Abigail, however, had no intention of waiting the winter out, for either the Smiths’ infant or her friend Jefferson’s small daughter. The course of philosophical lectures she had subscribed to took up much of her time and she was “loth to lose any of them” as she might never again find “so good an opportunity,” she wrote Mrs. Cranch. Her health, unfortunately, very much circumscribed her aspirations. Her inability to go out to dinner, the theater, or the Court of St. James was a trivial matter; to be deprived of seven of the twelve lectures she counted on was, she feared, a permanent loss. The five lectures she managed to attend, on electricity, magnetism, hydrostatics, optics, and pneumatics, she considered “connected with and … subservient to the accommodation of common life.” She was thrilled by the “assemblage of Ideas entirely new”: “It was like going into a Beautifull Country, which I never saw before, a Country which our American Females are not permitted to visit or inspect.” She wrote wistfully about the lectures she had missed, and how they would have afforded her “much matter for future recollection and amusement.”24
Exposure and frustration made Abigail analytical about her own lot. She decided she would not choose to quarrel with the assertion that the study of “Household Good, as Milton terms it,” was no doubt the “peculiar” province of the female character. Yet surely, as rational beings, women had to have an alternative, a way that their minds might “with propriety receive the highest possible cultivation.” The advantages of learning were quite specific, according to Abigail’s reckoning. Mary Cranch was her immediate audience; yet Abigail reached out, at the same moment, to argue on behalf of the world of women:
Knowledge would teach our sex candour, and those who aim at the attainment of it, in order to render themselves more amiable and usefull in the world, would derive a double advantage from it, for in proportion as the mind is informed, the countenance would be improved and the face ennobled as the Heart is elevated, for wisdom, says Soloman, maketh the face to shine.
Counting on Solomon to reinforce still another argument, Abigail pointed out that even the “Luxurious Eastern Sage” did not think that a woman who spoke with wisdom was “inconsistent” with one who tended to her household, or less inclined, for having gone beyond the limits of her room and kitchen, “to superintend the domes-tick economy of her family.”25
Remarkably, Abigail’s impassioned arguments on behalf of women having learning opportunities did not exclude an awareness of the price. And there was a price, for she believed sincerely that it was most dangerous for a female to be distinguished for any qualification beyond the rest of her sex. Whatever her deportment, she was sure to encourage “the jealousy of the men and the envy of the women.” Abigail’s solution was succinct: the remedy lay in “increasing the number of accomplished women, a monopoly of any kind,” she concluded, “is always envidious.”26
* * *
On June 26, 1787, almost five months after the date of Jefferson’s note regarding his daughter, a party of three presented themselves on Abigail’s doorstep; Captain Ramsey delivering a clinging, miserably tearful Polly, accompanied by a young mulatto named Sally Hemings. Minutes later, Abigail wrote to advise Jefferson to collect his child in person as her adjustment was painful. Also, the “old Nurse” that Jefferson had counted on to care for her, Betty Hemings, had been replaced by her daughter Sally, who appeared to be fifteen or sixteen years old, though she was in reality only fourteen. In the captain’s opinion, Sally would be of “little Service.” On further acquaintance, the sister of James Hemings, Jefferson’s young servant in Paris, did not inspire greater confidence, but rather deepening concern. Abigail thought of her as wanting “more care than the child,” of being “wholly incapable” of looking properly after Polly, “without some superior to direct her.”27
At first, Abigail despaired of making a conquest of Polly. After five weeks at sea, in the company of only men, except for Sally, she was as “rough as a little sailor” and almost inseparable from the captain. When Abigail tried to comfort Polly and to distract her with promises of a visit to Sadler’s Wells, and the glories of the amusement park’s dancing, music, and trained animals, she met with sobbing rejection, Polly insisting that she would rather have Captain Ramsey’s company for “one moment, than all the fun in the World.”28
Abigail persisted, however. She ordered new clothes for Polly, and Sally as well, believing the ones they wore only “proper for the sea.” She collected a library for the child, who delighted in reading aloud to her hostess. She also listened with earnest sympathy to Polly’s pitiful story. The little girl, who was five when her mother died, nearly four months after giving birth to another daughter, Lucy, also dead, had lived most recently with her Aunt Eppes in Philadelphia, whom she loved. Their parting was hard enough without the two cousins, who had helped her board ship at Norfolk, having disappeared while she slept. To Abigail’s mind, this had understandably left her hostile and suspicious.29
On July 1, Jefferson wrote that he could not come for his little daughter, though he had wished to do so. But he had just returned from his journey, useless in terms of healing, though not in terms of his study of the difference between the quality of rice of the Carolinas and that of Piedmont, so plentiful in Marseilles. He would be sending a French-speaking servant, Petit, in his place. As the departure neared, Abigail was tormented, “almost in a Frenzy,” fearing the burden of still another adjustment for Polly.30
Both wept as Polly stepped into her carriage; the child’s promise of a return visit eased the break. Abigail was captivated by Polly’s maturity, intelligence, womanly behavior, and beauty, and saddened that “such fine spirits must be spent in the wall of a convent.”31
Even John was won over completely: “In my Life I never saw a more charming Child,” he wrote Jefferson. Abigail was touching in her claim to Jefferson that she had turned into so “successful a rival” to Captain Ramsey, as far as Polly’s affections were concerned. Unpredictably, the bond that had been forged so resolutely, in such a short time, between woman and child, would soon be the single lasting link between Abigail and Jefferson.32
One of the reasons Abigail “consented” to part with Polly so soon was her plan for a journey into Devonshire County, recommended by Dr. John Jeffries, for reasons of health. She had been ill through much of the mild, early-blooming spring with a chronic disorder “long accumulating,” which she blamed on the bilious state of her blood, on the dampness, and on the long wait between meals, of which there were only two a day. Her condition provoked an intermittent fever that not only kept her from her studies, but also drained her of the energy needed for looking after her newborn grandson, William Steuben Smith. Euphorically, she had announced the infant’s arrival the previous April 26, 1787:
I am a grandmamma. A grand—oh no! That would be confessing myself old which would be quite unfashionable and vulgar. But true it is. I have a fine grandson since three weeks ago today. I regret a little that it was not a daughter for then I would have claimed the little for the great one.
Abigail’s regret about her own incapacity was mollified a good deal by Nabby’s attitude; the young mother’s instant devotion and competence (“who could have thought it?”) was as surprising as it was pleasing.33
Three months later, on July 20, when Abigail set out on her medically advised tour, she was fortified by a substantial party that included infant, mother, and nurse (the colonel was on a mission to the Queen of Portugal), Esther Field, not yet married to John Briesler, their coachman, a postilion, and Edward Farmer, a footman. The six-hundred-mile, month-long itinerary would include visits with relatives (or, more accurately, relatives of relatives—Richard Cranch’s nephew John, for one), and to ancestral places such as Weymouth, which was a pleasingly familiar town, a small seaport surrounded by hilly countryside, comparable to its American namesake.34
Whatever Abigail lacked in physical strength, she did not suffer diminished powers of observation. Her journal and letters reveal the full flavor of her reportorial gifts—and also her rabid nationalism, which blinded her to the fact that she was sounding very much like the “mob” at home she so deplored. Three years after her arrival in England, the “mere American” apologized for nothing, much less her impassioned criticism. In a country as fertile as the Garden of Eden, it seemed an outrage to her that the landed property vested in lordships, and controlled entirely by the rich, left the peasantry “but slaves to the Lord, notwithstanding the mighty boast they make of liberty.” It was intolerable to her that money earned by the sweat of the peasant’s brow must go to feed the pampered lord and fatten the greedy bishop, while the poor, in their sunless, crumbling cottages, slept on rags and ate all too little.35
Abigail’s idealistic view of America persisted; it still seemed beyond her ken that there could be a body of poor in Massachusetts deprived enough to fight for the right to keep their farms and to stay out of debtor’s prison. Having such a determined sense of justice, Abigail had to be totally ignorant of the truth when she railed on to Mrs. Cranch about how the United States had such “little cause of complaint,” not just by comparison with despotic monarchies, but with England, the so-called “land of freedom!”
The ease with which honest industry may acquire property in America, the equal distribution of justice to the poor as well as the rich, and the personal liberty they enjoy, all, all call upon them to support their government and laws, to respect their rulers, and gratefully acknowledge their superior blessings.…36
Perhaps the most comfortable part of the journey was spent with John Cranch, visiting various branches of his family such as Mr. Burnell, the shoemaker, and Mr. Tratham, the grocer. They were serious, industrious, good people, “more like our New England people,” she claimed. Uneasy about British distinctions between tradesmen and gentry, Abigail was for the “middle ranks of society,” where virtue and morality could be found. Furthermore, she said, in regard to education and manners, American farmers, tradesmen, merchants, and members of the “learned professions” were certainly equal to the English gentry.37
Fortunately, Abigail’s report on her tour was not entirely negative. She recorded the high spots with care and unstinting appreciation. Her visit to Blenheim Palace inspired her admiration, for both aesthetic and political reasons, because of its beauty and because the British had thought to reward the Duke of Marlborough, victor at the battle of Blenheim, so magnificently. A tidy figure in summer cottons, shawl, and cap, Abigail must have brought her notebook with her, for not a bush or a blade of grass, a marble bust, a bridge, a lake, a valley, a painting, or a piece of patterned damask eludes her record. Upon consulting the gardener of twenty-five years, she learned that his staff of sixty-three cared for the eleven miles of park and the four miles of gardens. Possibly only a farmer’s wife could appreciate the grass that was mowed and swept every other day to a “looking-glass” smoothness.38
Once indoors, prompted by an attendant who had “by heart the whole history of all that is to be seen,” she noted fastidiously the measurements of Blenheim (348 feet from wing to wing), and counted the library (184 feet long, with 24,000 volumes under gilt-wire latticework) as being sublime in scale, “the most costly, as well as beautiful place” she had ever seen. A life-size statue of Queen Anne, dressed in damask-patterned marble, presided at one end; the inscription at its base was duly noted:
To the memory of Queen Anne, under whose auspices John, Duke of Marlborough, conquered, and to whose munificence, he and his posterity with gratitude owe the possession of Blenheim, in A.D. 1746.39
Abigail was most moved, however, by another inscription. It honored John, Duke of Marlborough, and was carved into the 130-foot column fronting the palace, which supported his statue:
… In a long series of uninterrupted triumphs
Broke the power of France
When raised the highest, and when exerted the most;
Rescued the empire from desolation,
Asserted and confirmed the liberties of Europe.
A rueful Abigail wrote in summary: “Thus is the gratitude of the nation expressed, and thus do the heirs of Marlborough triumph.” She could not help but compare John’s tenuous situation with the permanence of the recognition accorded the English hero. Lately, and increasingly, John had complained of spending “thirty years a rolling like a stone,” never three years in one place, and the uncertainty of his fate and his reception at home—whether he would “sit down” in a private life as a farmer, or go to Congress, or “God knows what.”40
Far from planning on any monument to be built in John’s honor, Abigail was grateful to learn, after she had returned from her tour in the fall of 1787, that final arrangements had been made for the purchase of the handsome house formerly owned by Royall Tyler, which had reverted to the possession of Leonard Vassall-Borland, a grandson of the West Indian sugar planter whose property encompassed eighty-three acres of fields, pastures, salt marsh, and woodland. Cotton Tufts and Thomas Welsh concluded negotiations on September 26 for the sum of six hundred pounds and, that same day, Tufts wrote to John regarding the adjoining fifty-six acres selling for twenty-five dollars an acre. John’s reply echoed a devoted theme:
My view is to lay fast hold of the Town of Braintree and embrace it with both my arms and all my might, there to live—there to die—there to lay my bones—and there to plant one of my sons, in the Profession of the Law and the practice of Agriculture, like his father.41
In reality, Abigail had been thinking in practical terms about returning home since the past spring, when she had written Mrs. Cranch about “trimming” her cottage, and requested the dimensions concerning a “floor cloth” for the little parlor in Braintree. Her plans were obviously propelled by the knowledge that in preparation for the expiration of his commission on February 24, 1788, John had written last January to Secretary Jay, requesting formal recall, not only from the British court, but from his mission to the Netherlands, and from his joint mission with Mr. Jefferson to the Barbary powers. He was, he explained, determined to come home, and wished to embark in early spring. On October 5, 1787, Congress voted that the Honorable John Adams be permitted, as per his request, to return to America. They also accorded him the only monument he and Abigail might have hoped for, that “the thanks of Congress be presented to him for the patriotism, perseverance, integrity and diligence with which he had ably and faithfully served his Country.” What Congress did not think to do was to enclose actual letters of recall, thereby posing problems of protocol, especially as far as the Dutch government was concerned. This meant that John might not return to America without a final visit to Holland to take his leave personally.42
* * *
Wherever Abigail turned now, in the fall and winter of 1787 and 1788, she was increasingly ill at ease. She could not abide the “studied civility and disguised coldness” covering the malignant hearts of St. James. John brought her no reassurance; a basic factor in his determination to return home was his belief that Congress could not renew his commission with “honour and dignity” when Britain failed to send a minister in return. And, he complained, as it seemed that England had wholly forgotten that such a place as America ever existed, he thought it almost beneath their dignity to take pains to refresh British memory.43
Looking beyond England afforded only further worry. “To what do all political notions tend which are agitating France Holland and Germany?” Abigail asked of Thomas Jefferson. “Will Liberty finally gain the assendency, or arbitrary power strike her dead?” she wondered. Jefferson’s reply was stirring, but not comforting. In Paris, he said, “great events” were in preparation that would change the face of Europe. Provincial assemblies were already at work shrinking the powers of the Crown.44
All tongues in Paris (and throughout France) had been let loose; it seemed to Jefferson as though none in London had spoken more freely or more universally against the government. A new France was in the making:
Caricatures, placards, bon mots, have been indulged in by all ranks of people, and I know of no well attested instance of a single punishment. For some time mobs of 10; 20; 30,000 people collected daily, surrounded the parliament house, huzzaed the members, even entered the doors and examined into their conduct, took the horses out of the carriages of those who did well, and drew them home.
As for the royal family, Jefferson reported that the Queen, going to the theater at Versailles, was greeted with a “general hiss”; the King, long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, “plunges deeper and deeper; the queen cries but sins on.” With the added threats of England arming, and the King of Prussia’s invasion of Holland, Jefferson posed an inconvenient question. “May not the scene which is preparing render it necessary,” he asked, “for Mr. Adams to defer the return to his own country?”45
The question was academic. On December 5, Abigail wrote a short letter to him, asking if he would permit Petit to purchase ten ells of double Florence of any fashionable color, except orange. She noted that the Massachusetts convention would be considering the ratification of the United States Constitution the second Wednesday in January 1788. She also added that Mr. Adams’s resignation had been accepted and that they would quit England as soon in the spring as they could go in safety.46
* * *
Repeatedly, as Abigail planned for her return to America, she spoke of changes she would find, as though to prepare herself for the worst, as well as for the simply different. It was natural to wonder about the impact of the new Constitution: “There are things in it which stagger all my dispositions to subscribe to what such an assembly has proposed,” Jefferson had written. John, too, expressed reservations about the remarkable document. He wished, for instance, for a Declaration of Rights “with all my Heart; though I am Sensible of the Difficulty of framing one, in which all States can agree.” A more complete separation of the executive branch from the legislative would be “more safe for all,” he said. The press, he added somewhat enigmatically, he wished “better secured,” by which he may have meant better regulated. But a man in his position, after a ten-year absence from his country, ought to be “modest” about his judgments, he said, and he concluded that he would vote for the Constitution as proposed and promote a convention “after some time,” to amend it.47
Abigail was also concerned about John Quincy’s problem, which Mrs. Cranch had brought to her attention. What some would eventually judge a nervous breakdown, she treated as a simple case of severe fatigue. She feared a little, she answered her sister, that her eldest son would be “so much of a bookworm and scholar that he will grow negligent of those attentions which are due to the world.”48
Abigail would not only have her own children to settle with, but the additional responsibility of her brother’s wife and children. William Smith had died in the winter of 1787, and in spite of his acknowledged “follies,” Abigail could not help but be sympathetic to his distressed family. Mention of her brother’s name invariably provoked a tortured exploration of his life, from which she and her sisters kept, by plan, a guilty distance. The roundabout references to the “gentleman,” the “unhappy connection,” the “poor man,” and total avoidance of his given name, afforded a protective code. Yet there were lapses from such determined objectivity and anonymity, in which Abigail roamed her memories trying to understand her brother’s “strange” disposition, his implausible mixture of “benevolence and kindness without judgement, good sense without prudence and learning without conduct.” His wife hadn’t helped either. Catherine Louisa was a sentimental, excessively ambitious woman who read too many romances, and who tried to live out her fantasies. There would be no stopping her if she could move herself and her children into the enchanted castles she built, Abigail supposed.49
It was one matter to speculate on the damage done to her brother by his wife, but another to analyze her parents’ role in his failure. Yet she could not help acknowledging in retrospect that some “very capital mistakes” had been made in his education, though they were unintended, of course. Abigail, whenever she thought in this vein, was quick to apologize to her parents’ memory. Perhaps the prospect of taking care of her own sons once again aroused dormant worries. There were no grounds, thus far, for coupling her son Charles’s name with that of her brother, no intimations that their fates might be similar. On at least one occasion, however, she did, perhaps subconsciously, follow the one name with the other. She did speak of her hopes that Charles’s conduct would never “pain” his friends. And she did speculate about children having little knowledge of the solicitude and anxiety of a parent, and recall her father’s deathbed prayers for his son’s reformation and salvation. One cheering note in her momentary gloom was her plan for her niece Louisa, her brother’s daughter, whom she truly loved, to come to live with her in Braintree.50
* * *
On February 20, 1788, John was to have his final audience with George III. On Friday, nine days later, John planned to make “that most horrid passage” to pay his respects at The Hague, Abigail informed Jefferson. Though an inconvenient and unpropitious journey—time was “short and pressing,” and the counterrevolution had catapulted his friends from office—John had no choice. Congress, Abigail explained, was to blame; without a proper letter of recall, John could not risk any offense that might affect credit arrangements adversely. Then, on what seems to have been her own initiative, judging from the previous correspondence between the two men, in which Jefferson had sought John’s counseling on the subject of Dutch credit, Abigail followed with a remarkably ambiguous thought, as though plucked from midair. In one breath she allowed that John would be “delighted” to meet Jefferson at The Hague, but held out little hope of his doing so, as time was “pressing”; then again, she suggested, her letter might reach Jefferson early enough to allow the “possibility” of his joining John.51
On March 11, John complained to Abigail that he would have been in London at the hour he was writing, if she had not laid a “Plott” that brought him to Amsterdam. Because of her letter, Jefferson had come “post” to meet him; their mission would be to put money matters on a surer footing. Money borrowed from the Dutch would sustain the United States through a “trying interval,” Jefferson insisted; it would help them to pay their debts and avoid bankruptcy for the next two years, until the new government could accumulate a treasury through taxation. “I was very much averse to this, but he would take no denial,” John wrote. At Jefferson’s urging, John arranged for America’s fourth and final loan of one million guilders, at five percent interest, to be redeemed in fifteen years. Balefully, John continued, “I thought myself dead, and that it was well over with me as a public man”; now he had begun to think that he should be forced “after my decease, to open an additional loan.”52
Due to negotiations, John was not sure when he would be able to leave—either on Saturday or the following Wednesday, March 19. The delay was extremely painful, he assured Abigail, telling her that “you must blame yourself for it altogether.” In consequence, should she meet southwesters on the coast of America, and have her voyage prolonged three weeks, he cautioned her to “remember it is all your own intrigue which has forced me to open this loan. I suppose,” he concluded, “you will boast of it as a great public service.”53
In spite of the last-minute tensions, and in the midst of the “bustle and fatigue of packing, the parade and ceremony of taking leave at Court, and else where,” the three friends left no doubt of the “unchangeable esteem and respect” in which they held one another. When Jefferson wrote Abigail that “young poets complain often that life is fleeting and transient,” it was inconceivable, at that time, that he might be writing an epitaph to their friendship. On the contrary, he would feel “bewidowed” without them; their presence on his side of the Atlantic had given him “confidence” that he could turn to them in difficult times. A lonely Jefferson confided to Abigail: “Insulated and friendless on this side the globe, with such an ocean between me and every thing to which I am attached the days will seem long which are to be counted over before I too am to rejoin my native country.” It would lighten his days, Jefferson continued, if Abigail would honor him with her correspondence. He also thought she would have much to tell him, and he little that would interest her. Perhaps, he allowed, she could make him useful in the “execution” of her European commissions.54
Abigail was ardent in her appreciation of Jefferson’s affectionate words. She thanked him for “all his kindness and Friendship” toward herself and her family, “from the commencement” of their acquaintance. The offer he made of correspondence, she told him, was “much too flattering, not to be gratefully accepted.” Furthermore, she requested him to “say every thing that is affectionate for me” to his daughters, meanwhile assuring him that she was “With the Greatest respect Esteem and regard” his “Friend and Humble Servant.”55
* * *
On the first of May, with England out of sight, and weeks of sailing ahead, Abigail took stock, as she tended to when she had the luxury of objectivity. She felt confined, and found the ship tedious, as before, but her troubles were nothing, she reminded herself, compared to those of her pregnant maid, Esther, who required “as much care as a young turkey” and was “very near her Time.” The desperate situation demanded all her faith: “I think that God will suit the wind to the shorn Lamb,” she wrote in her diary, “that we may be carried through our difficulties better than any apprehensions. Abigail’s worst fears were realized. On May 28, Esther was delivered of a daughter, “a poor little starvling” who was either born dead or died a short while later. Abigail, somewhat in shock, dressed the dead baby, which she referred to as “the little animal,” for its burial. The day after, in a state of immense relief, she decided they had all gotten through “this business” much better than she had feared, and now their only concern was for a “good wind.” She also hoped and prayed she would never have to go to sea again. This was her “absolute” wish. She was exhausted and out of patience. She had seen enough of the world. From this point on, she ended her diary, she would “be content to learn what is further to be known from the page of History.”56