EIGHTEEN

A Sense of the Obligations

Abigail was frankly threatened by John’s “elevated station.” The presidency encompassed so many dangers and difficulties that it appeared to her “as a slippery precipice, surrounded on all sides by rocks, shoals and quicksands,” she wrote Elbridge Gerry on December 31, 1796. If a man such as Washington, in the “full tide” of favor and affection, tasted the bitter cup of calumny and abuse, she could not help worrying incessantly about his successor’s expectations. The bitter cup, she said, was an “imported cup, a foreign mixture, a poison so subtle as to have infected even native Americans.”1

Weeks before, on December 5, John, the Federalist candidate, had won seventy-one votes in the presidential election. He had edged out Jefferson, the Democratic-Republican candidate, by three votes, and Thomas Pinckney and Aaron Burr by somewhat more comfortable margins: fifty-nine votes were cast for the former, thirty for the latter. The hazards implicit in John’s minuscule lead did not escape Abigail. “President by three votes,” some would call him shortly. When she concluded that in no one but Washington could there “again” be united “such an assemblage of fortunate circumstances to combine all hearts in her favor,” she was more prescient than even she herself might have imagined.2

In many ways Washington, in his prime, symbolized an innocent and already bygone America. The “Assemblage of fortunate circumstances” had altered; it would seem a simpler matter to battle for independence than to manage its victory. The description of Washington’s administration as “perplexed” and of his measures as “impeded” also applied, in Abigail’s mind, to the latest phase of her country’s development. Its infancy had involved matters of moral decision and physical peril; its adolescence was arousing unnerving strife in all directions in the realignment of objectives, values, and friendships. When she spoke of being sensitive (“perhaps too keenly”) to the “abuse of party,” she referred to a new phenomenon, the crystallization of the two-party system in America. Henceforth, there would be not only Federalists but Republicans, opposing champions of centralized versus decentralized government. The ramifications of the close election and the polarized parties, as well as the persistent enthusiasm of so many Americans for the French Revolution, posed burdensome problems for Abigail and John. None was more provocative, perhaps, than the unnerving fact that Jefferson, once their most esteemed friend, was now their most threatening rival. The press seemed to revel in the situation, undermining John’s confidence almost at the instant he took office.3

*   *   *

John referred to them as “insidious compliments.” These were the insults showered on him, principally, at this time, by the publisher of the Aurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache. John was accused of having “immortalized” himself as an advocate for hereditary government; Jefferson was held up as a “true republican.” It was implied that John would somehow perpetuate Washington’s appointment on May 30, 1794, of John Quincy Adams as Minister to the Netherlands, leading to an Adams line of “seigneurs or lords” of America. By contrast, Jefferson, with daughters only, would have no successors.4

Jefferson himself was concerned by the damage the press perpetrated during the election period. On December 28, 1796, in a postelection letter, he wrote to John Adams:

the public and the public papers have been much occupied lately in placing us in a point of opposition to each other. I trust with confidence that less of it has been felt by ourselves personally. In the retired canton where I am, I learn little of what is passing: pamphlets I see never; papers but a few; and the fewer the happier.

Jefferson also took the trouble to warn Adams that he might be “cheated” of his succession by a trick “worthy of the subtlety” of his “arch-friend.” Jefferson was referring to Alexander Hamilton, who, he said, was able to make Adams’s real friends “tools” to defeat their and his best wishes. He also remarked that since the day the Treaty of Paris was signed, America’s outlook had never been so grim. “I devoutely wish you may be able to shun for us this war by which our agriculture, commerce and credit will be destroyed.”5

But all of this was not his real concern, Jefferson maintained. Blithely he protested that he left to others “the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with sound sleep and a warm berth below, the society of neighbors, friends and fellow laborers of the earth, than of spies and sycophants.” Furthermore, no one, he predicted, would congratulate John with “purer disinterestedness” than himself. “I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office.” Jefferson had ended his letter with high hopes that the newly elected President’s administration might be filled with glory and happiness for himself and “advantage” to others. This, he continued, “is the sincere wish of one who tho’, in the course of our voyage thro’ life, various little incidents have happened or been contrived to separate us, retains still for you the solid esteem of the moments when we were working for our independence, and sentiments of respect and affectionate attachment.”6

It was a pleasant letter, under the circumstances, and probably would have been appreciated by John. The latter never received it, however, owing to Jefferson’s punishing ambivalence about his old friend and recent rival. Instead of sending the letter directly to John, he enclosed it with another he wrote four days later, on January 1, 1797. In this letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote about the new election at length, discussing how its outcome had never been “a matter of doubt,” how no arguments were wanting to reconcile him to relinquishing the first office, or “acquiescence under the second.” In fact, with regard to the presidency, he thought it was “impossible that a more solid unwillingness settled on full calculation, could have existed in any man’s mind, short of the degree of absolute refusal,” than his own. He had, however, no feelings that would “revolt at a secondary position.” Being Adams’s junior in years, in Congress, in diplomatic service, and in civil government, he assured Madison that pride did not enter into this “estimate.”7

It was in the last part that Jefferson explained his reasons for the enclosure of his letter to John. He wished Madison “to possess the actual state of dispositions” between himself and John. More important, he asked that Madison return the letter “if anything should render the delivery of it ineligible” in his opinion. And for someone who protested his innocence of all political machinations, Jefferson was amazingly current. Under certain circumstances, he suggested to Madison, concessions to Adams might be appropriate:

If Mr. Adams can be induced to administer the government on its true principles, and to relinquish his bias to an English constitution, it is to be considered whether it would not be on the whole for the public good to come to a good understanding with him as to his future elections. He is perhaps the only sure barrier against Hamilton’s getting in.…8

In contrast with Jefferson’s disingenuous behavior over their eroded friendship, both Abigail and John discussed the dismaying breach with honorable sincerity. How this awkward state would affect their relationships in neighboring and highest government offices was explored for months after the election with various friends. Of several, including Tristam Dalton, John’s Harvard classmate, a United States Senator, and General Henry Knox, it was Elbridge Gerry who assumed the role of confidant and arbitrator, who made prolonged attempts to explain the one to the other in his letters to Jefferson, Abigail, and John. The respectful replies of the Adamses to this venerable friend amply reveal the acute sensitivity of the problem he so sincerely meant to solve. Abigail was candid but affectionate about Jefferson in her letter to Gerry of December 31, 1796:

I fully agree with you in sentiment as it respects the election of Mr. Jefferson. I have long known him, and entertain for him a personal friendship, and tho I cannot accord with him in some of his politicks, I do not believe him culpable to the extent he has been represented. Placed at the head of the Senate, I trust his conduct will be wise and prudent, and hope it will be a means of softening the animosity of party and of cementing and strengthening the bond of union.

As ever, Abigail did not evade a major point:

There never was any publick or private animosity between Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson. Upon the subject of Pain’s Rights of Man there was a disagreement in sentiment. Mr. Jefferson “does not look quite thro the deeds of men.” Time has fully disclosed whose opinion was well founded.9

In general, John, too, discussed Jefferson with genuine regard, an almost contrived sense of optimism, and, given the record, eminent vulnerability. His reserves of bitterness were deep, however, and in rare moments he acknowledged their existence. Had Jay or some others in question been elected in his place, he would not have been “alarmed” for the public, though his vanity might have been “less modified” by such an event. But to see such a character as Jefferson, or such an unknown being as Pinckney, brought over his head and “trampling on the Bellies of hundreds of other men infinitely his superior in Talents, Services” filled him with apprehensions for the safety of all. He was convinced that if such a “project” had succeeded earlier, the Constitution could not have lasted four years, at which time the people of America would have been “set afloat and landed the Lord knows where.”10

Despite this devastating confidence to General Knox at the end of March 1797, John was in a conciliatory frame of mind, judging from his other correspondence. He seemed to be counting on his “high” friendship with Jefferson to ward off the realities of recent truancies, though Jefferson’s “entanglements with characters and politics” were admittedly a source of “inquietude and anxiety” and thought “pernicious.” He was hopeful, however, that Jefferson’s advancement to the vice-presidency, and his situation in the Senate, “an excellent School,” would “correct” him and “keep him steady,” despite the flattery of the too many French surrounding him. John optimistically summed up his position on Jefferson to Gerry on February 20, 1797:

The cause of the irritation upon his nerves which broke out in some disagreeable appearances a few years ago is now removed.… I expect from his ancient friendship, his good sense and general good dispositions, a decorum of conduct at least if not as cordial and uniform a support as I have given to my predecessor, which is and shall be the pride and boast of my life.…11

Jefferson’s response to Gerry’s “dispositions” on the subject of John Adams was expectedly cordial, dissimulating, and ruinously prophetic. Knowing Adams’s worth “as intimately and esteeming it as much as any one,” Jefferson discounted all inferences of ambition or jealousy on his own part. As far as he was concerned, he assured Gerry, the second office of the government was “honourable and easy,” the first but “a splendid misery”: “You express apprehensions that stratagems will be used, to produce a misunderstanding between the President and myself. Though not a word having this tendency has ever been hazarded to me by any one, yet I consider as a certainty that nothing will be left untried to alienate him from me.”12

In the course of his protracted letter to Gerry, Jefferson ignored the possibility that his recent correspondence with Madison, among others, might well have “hazarded” the “misunderstanding” between him and John Adams, and would encroach further. He also seemed to ignore a letter the past April that indeed proved him a master of the “stratagems” of alienation. To Philip Mazzei, his former neighbor, he had written:

In place of that noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly through the war, an Anglican monarchical aristocratical party has sprung up, whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance, as they have already done the forms, of the British government. The main body of our citizens, however, remain true to their republican principles; the whole landed interest is republican, and so is a great mass of talents. Against us are the Executive, the Judiciary, two out of three branches of the Legislature, all the officers of the government, all who want to be officers, all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty, British merchants and Americans trading on British capital, speculators and holders in the banks and public funds, a contrivance invented for the purposes of corruption, and for assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model.13

“It would give you a fever,” Jefferson had continued, to name the “apostates” who had gone over to these “heresies,” the “men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.” Though Jefferson avoided mention of John Adams, he achieved the effect of having spelled out his former friend’s name in capital letters. Yet he seemed forgetful of the existence of this or any other negative expression, and a year later failed, in his letter to Gerry, to assume any responsibility for promoting the “tendency” toward the “misunderstanding” between himself and the President. On the contrary, it was more convenient for Jefferson to blame the “machinations” of the Hamiltonians who surrounded Adams, and who were “only a little less hostile” to the President than to himself. Unfortunately, at this time, Jefferson’s point was shrewdly made; Hamilton was a far more immediate threat to Adams than he himself.14

Inferences of intrigue on the part of Alexander Hamilton and his followers were not, of course, news to Gerry, who had loyally reported the “active agent” to Abigail. Hamilton’s mysterious allegiances during the presidential elections had raised grave doubts. As John was a wholehearted admirer of Hamilton’s newly conceived banking system, the latter’s support of Thomas Pinckney as the Federalists’ candidate for President was indeed a puzzle. Surprisingly, John adopted a seemingly benign attitude, choosing to speculate that Hamilton had thought to vanquish Jefferson rather than him in his support of Pinckney, or that he had favored closer connections with Britain than he thought John “disposed” to foster.15

Abigail, however, took a very different tack regarding Hamilton’s defection. His political connivances made the presidency the “slippery precipice” Abigail had feared even before John’s election. Now, uninhibited by sentiment, as in Jefferson’s case, she lashed out in fury at this faithless colleague. Speculating on Pinckney’s attraction for Hamilton, she wrote to Gerry on December 31, 1796:

There are some characters more subtle than others, more easily wrought upon, more accomodating, more complying. Such a person might be considered as the ostensible engine which a Master Hand could work. To what other motive can be ascribed the Machiavelian policy of placing at the head of the Government a gentleman not particularly distinguished for any important services to his country, and scarcely heard of beyond the State which gave him birth until sent upon a publick embassy.16

Given Abigail’s anxieties about the hazards of office, age, and her poor health, which was only accentuated by Philadelphia’s seasonal heat and disease, retirement to Braintree seemed more “eligible” to her on the eve of the presidency. She harbored no illusions whatsoever about the “elevated seat” to be occupied by her husband; she judged it as a “mark at which envy, pride and malevolence will shoot their envenomed arrows.” Regardless, she did not permit alternate choices. While her “desire and wish to shine in public Life” was “wholly extinguished,” she confided to Gerry, she personally considered herself “as the small dust of the balance; when compared to the interests of a nation. To preserve peace, to support order, and continue to the country that system of government under which it has become prosperous and happy” was life’s purpose. “The sacrifice of an individual life,” on the contrary, was important only to its near connections, and “ought not to be taken into consideration.”17

The ultimate extent of Abigail’s commitments was expressed in a magnificent letter to John, when they had been separated for three months. A beaming sun, streaming across her writing table, gave “honors” to this day on which he was to declare himself in the Senate as head of the nation. She wrote on February 8, 1797:

My thoughts and my meditations are with you, though personally absent; and my petitions to Heaven are, that “the things which made for peace may not be hidden from your eyes.” My feelings are not those of pride or ostentation, upon the occasion. They are solemnized by a sense of the obligations, the important trusts, and numerous duties connected with it. That you may be enabled to discharge them with honor to yourself, with justice and impartiality to your country, and with satisfaction to this great people, shall be the daily prayer of your A.A.18

On the following day, February 9, the official announcement of his election having been made, John sent off a brief note to Abigail: “The die is cast,” he wrote, “and you must prepare yourself for honorable trials.” He also said they must wait to know whether Congress would do anything about helping them to furnish their house. If it didn’t, he would have no house before the next fall, and then “a very moderate one, with very moderate furniture.” By March 5, the housing question was answered; they would occupy the Washingtons’ dwelling. John also confided that he had never had a more trying day than the previous one, his inaugural day, March 4.19

*   *   *

John did not sleep well the night before; in fact, he thought he might faint during the delivery of his inaugural address. But he did get through it and reported that there was scarcely a dry eye at the ceremony in the House of Representatives in Philadelphia, except, perhaps, in the case of Washington, who looked as “serene and unclouded as the day.” It was John’s impression that he even seemed to enjoy “some sort of triumph” over him, as though saying to his successor, “I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest.”20

John’s inaugural speech commemorated the justice of the country’s Revolutionary War. He also spoke of the future, of an “inflexible determination to maintain peace and inviolable faith with all nations,” and to maintain “neutrality and impartiality” among the belligerent powers of Europe. He mentioned his “attachment” to the Constitution of the United States and a “conscientious determination to support it, until it shall be altered by the judgments and the wishes of the people.” He also spoke of an “equal and impartial regard to the rights, interests, honor, and happiness of all the States of the Union, without preference or regard to a northern, or southern, eastern or western position.” He expressed “personal esteem” for the French nation and a “sincere desire to preserve the friendship” that had done so much for the “honor and interest” of both nations. Not least, he spoke of a citizen, without mentioning President Washington by name, whose actions, regulated by “prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude,” had led a people to “independence and peace, to increasing wealth and unexampled prosperity.”21

“All agree that, taken altogether,” John wrote to Abigail, his inaugural day was “the sublimest thing ever exhibited in America.” Four days later, however, he was far from exultant. According to a general report, there was more weeping at his inaugural address than ever seen “at the representation of any tragedy.” But whether it was from grief or joy was the question on his mind. Whether it was due to the loss of their beloved President, or the accession of an unbeloved one, or to the pleasure of exchanging Presidents peaceably, or to the novelty of the thing, he just could not say. One thing he knew: he was too sensitive to act well in such an “exhibition.” Perhaps there was little danger of his having another such scene to “feel or behold,” he speculated. Two or three people did venture to whisper in his ear that his speech had made an agreeable impression. Now, however, as of March 17, the world was “as silent as the grave.”22

John, disturbed by the sudden “stillness and silence,” turned to Abigail, as always. There was a desperate tone to his letters. The President’s house was not ready; he was constantly busy at business mostly new to him; the weather was bad; the news wasn’t pleasant; he had a “great” cold. He was cryptic about his meeting with the Vice-President, saying only, “He is as he was.”23

From what John could see and hear and read, the Federalists were afraid to approve of anybody but Washington, and the Jacobin papers damned with faint praise and undermined with “misrepresentation and insinuation.” John sounded naïve, bewildered, almost inadequate, even sullen. The future was suddenly dark and secretive and ominous. He foresaw a “scene of ambition” beyond all his former “suspicions or imaginations” and a government, therefore, about to turn “topsy-turvy.” He made doomful predictions about the next election. Anglophiles would back Jay or Hamilton, and Francophiles would support Jefferson, “and all the corruption of Poland would be introduced” unless the American spirit rose and said, “We will have neither John Bull nor Louis Baboon.” Even now, so transparently threatened by Jefferson, he told Abigail that if the Federalists took to “playing pranks,” he would resign office to let his former friend lead the people “to peace, wealth and power if he will.” However prepared John thought himself, he was unprepared: “Jealousies and rivalries, have been my theme, and checks and balances as their antidotes till I am ashamed to repeat the words: but they never stared me in the face in such horrid forms as at present.”24

In this downcast state, John yearned for Abigail’s “invaluable” company and support, as ardently as he had in his youth when an ocean sprawled between them, and he mentioned this in every letter. He appreciated that Abigail was home nursing his mortally ill mother, but he was impatient. “I must go to you or you must come to me. I cannot live without you till October,” he wrote on March 13, 1797. One month later, not knowing his mother was dead as of April 21, and that Abigail would come, John pleaded again for attention: “It seems to me that the mother and the daughter ought to think a little of the president as well as the husband. His cares! his anxieties! his health? Don’t laugh. His comfort; that his head may be clear and his heart firm, ought to be thought on more than the husband.”25

Abigail wrote to John on April 26, a day before her departure, saying that her “agitated” mind wanted repose. She had buried their aged parent and a niece. She was free to come to him; she no longer suffered “apprehensions” that either of her charges would be lost without her care. Echoing bygone times, she reassured John: “I want no courting to come. I am ready and willing to follow my husband wherever he chooses.”26

At noon on Thursday, May 4, Abigail reached the Smiths’ residence in Eastchester, that family having returned from England after less than a year’s stay. Mrs. Smith, the mother now of a two-year-old redheaded daughter, Caroline Amelia, born 1795, appeared to be in good health, though “fleshy” and morbidly silent, her heart apparently “too full” to discuss her plight. The colonel was absent, visiting properties elsewhere. Just what properties these were, or their status, Abigail was too polite to question. But she was dismally aware that her daughter’s fortunes had once again plummeted. It was astonishing to think that just a few years ago, on their return from England, Abigail’s principal worry, thoroughly articulated by John, was how to curb the colonel’s flamboyant display of wealth. Given to riding about in a coach-and-four, full of “monarchical trumpery,” disdainful of government “favors” (meaning appointments), the colonel soon was the recipient of explicit advice from his father-in-law. “Tell not of your prosperity, because it will make two men mad to one glad,” John had warned, “nor of your adversity, for it will make two men glad to one sad.”27

The colonel’s excessive appetites betrayed “weakness” and “too little knowledge of the world; too little penetration; too little discretion,” John complained to Abigail. Yet there was a strain in this obviously flawed character that appealed to the critical father-in-law, who admitted as much. “I wish, however, that my boys had a little more of his activity,” John said. They were overprotective parents, he implied, suggesting to Abigail that he might soon treat his sons as the pigeons treat their squabs: “Push them off the limb, and make them put out their wings or fall.”28

All this was a sampling of what had gone before; present circumstances “depresst” Abigail’s already “too low” spirits and robbed her appetite. If the mother could not find the words appropriate for discussion with her daughter, she could confide unsparingly in her sisters. Mrs. Smith was the blameless victim of “folly and madness of speculation and extravagance,” who had been educated in different “habits” from those her husband would accustom her to. Yet now, alone with her children, she was paying dearly for the life of dissipation she had never enjoyed. A ray of hope was provided by the boys, but certainly the grandmother was not free of worries on their behalf. As though the atmosphere at the Smiths’ was contaminated, Abigail wished her grandsons might be sent away to live with her sister Elizabeth, widowed and now remarried in 1795 to the Reverend Stephen Peabody of Atkinson, New Hampshire. Abigail was certain the influences in that household would be more wholesome. In this helpless and hopeless frame of mind, Abigail continued on to New York. There she was somewhat cheered at seeing her son Charles, his baby, and his wife, Sarah, a younger sister of Colonel Smith’s whom she found surprisingly “discreet” and “quite different from many of the Family.”29

On Wednesday morning, May 10, Abigail concluded her two-week journey from Braintree. Her party of thirteen, including the Briesler family—Mr. Briesler she continued to find indispensable to the “Wheels” of the President’s family—was met by John about twenty-five miles outside of Philadelphia. Abigail promptly left her carriage for his, stopped for dinner in Bristol, then suffered a hazardous road the rest of the way, furrowed to a depth of two feet by torrential rains. At sunset the Adamses reached the ample brick mansion on the corner of Sixth and Market streets, recently vacated by the Washingtons.30

Worn emotionally and physically, Abigail spent two days in bed recovering from her travels. But shortly she was caught up in events, and plotted her days in timetable order within the third week of her arrival. She rose at 5:00 A.M., ate breakfast at eight, tended to family arrangements until eleven, then dressed for the day. She received callers, an average of sixty a day, from noon until two or three, dined, then paid her own calls, or simply drove out for pleasure, until seven. She was also committed to dinners of almost forty guests with some regularity (though she complained that her drawing room was not yet furnished), including the Cabinet of five, thirty-two senators, and the Vice-President. Finding suitable domestics was still a problem, though Briesler, to Abigail’s relief, did the hiring and dismissing among a “very sad set of creatures.” At the end of May, despite her complex responsibilities, Abigail would claim she felt “less anxiety” about the ceremonial part of her duties, though she certainly did not minimize them. She was reminded that Uncle Tufts’s wife had once “stiled” her niece’s situation as a state of “splendid misery”—unknowingly echoing Jefferson’s description to Elbridge Gerry of the presidency—and thought this description “not far from Truth.” On the whole, though reasonably settled, Abigail was considerably less charmed with Philadelphia this time around. Mostly, it was changed because speculation in property, politics, and religion had gone far, in her judgment, in “depraving” the morals of the higher classes. There was a tawdry aspect to Philadelphia; in her less charitable moments she pronounced the city as “vile and debauched as the city of London.”31

*   *   *

Generally it was Abigail’s custom, once the details of her household were neatly drawn, to look to a broader canvas. Even John commented on her “admirable faculty” of employing her mind, and on her studious addiction to “scribbling” letters to one member or another of her family, which would become the vivid and nearly weekly bulletins of his presidential years. With dauntless freedom, Abigail reported now about friends and, even more often, about foes—brilliant testimonies of her political curiosity and monolithic loyalty to her husband, which would not tolerate a ripple, let alone a gust of criticism. Her weather eye covered the French and the English, all nationalities of ships at sea, Indians at war, predators on Louisiana and other controversial territories, members of the Cabinet and Congress, and, precisely two months after the inauguration, the press, who had pained her before, but never with such nightmarish brutality.

The President was well aware that his entrance into office was marked by a misunderstanding with France, and he had written as much to John Quincy in March. At noon on May 16, he met with both houses at the first session of the Fifth Congress to explore a peaceful resolution of this grievous “misunderstanding.” The facts were not promising. Angry members of the French Directory, lashing back at Jay’s Treaty, at what they believed to be America’s overly conciliatory settlement with Great Britain, not only refused to recognize America’s minister to France, Washington’s appointee, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, but annulled the treaty of amity and commerce written into the Franco-American Alliance of 1778. Detaining hundreds of vessels previously granted freedom of the seas, capturing and plundering them, was indeed, at the least, conducive to misunderstanding, and, more realistically, to declaration of war. The President, however, was committed to the policy of neutrality he had helped Washington to nurture; salvation, to his mind, lay in negotiations rather than warfare. “Thrown on perilious Times,” John proposed to send a commission to negotiate the alarming breach.32

Not surprisingly, Abigail believed John’s proposal admirable, and was dismayed by those who thought otherwise. As a result, however, and as he had predicted, John was quickly acquitted of the “crime” of praise from the likes of the Chronicle, Argus, and Aurora. The Francophile press turned with sickening swiftness on the President who had committed the “unpardonable sin” of proclaiming that America was “just and impartial to foreign Nations.” Though the Senate had backed the President, and despite ample evidence, including Pinckney’s dispatches, of what Abigail considered the “unbecomeing and indignant conduct of France towards the United States,” she was shocked to find there were factions so protective of French interests as to be willing to risk the lives and futures of Americans. An unquestionable leader in this divisive pursuit was Benjamin Franklin Bache, founder of the seven-year-old newspaper the Aurora, whom Abigail accused of opening the “batterys of abuse and scurility” for which John would serve as the unhappy and constant target.33

Her early and enduring fears were rudely affirmed. A press that had vilified the beloved President Washington could certainly be expected to turn on his successor. Just the past March 6, the Aurora carried an article applauding the end of Washington’s service to his country. America’s first President, it read, had “carried his designs against the public liberty so far as to have put in jeopardy its very existence.” As a result, Bache, its publisher, was beaten by an angry reader, despite his disclaimer that one Dr. Michael Leib had printed the insult during his absence. Rather than being resolved, Abigail’s fury was only heightened.34

She had been over this territory before, exploring at length, especially with her son Thomas, the principles that enabled a man, “not insensible to due praise,” whatever criticism he might be subjected to, to concentrate on the “real good” of his fellow citizens. Of course, she had concluded, a man who attained eminence of “any kind, and by whatever means, even the most honorable,” would be exposed to envy and jealousy. Steeling herself against Bache and his compatriots, Abigail dismissed their insults. “I can read them all with a true Phylosiphical contempt,” she wrote Mrs. Cranch that June. Further, she would have liked them to know the President’s true opinion of them: “Their praise for a few weeks mortified him, much more, than all their impudent abuse does.” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was her model:

There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats;

For I am arm’d so strong in honesty

That they pass by me as the Idle wind,

Which I respect not.35

For all of Abigail’s studious rationalizations, she was, understandably, supremely miserable over the “low Billingsgate,” the scathing language hawked at John’s every move, and his family’s as well. Determination was not enough to make her invincible. She studied the newspapers out of habit, and what she read crippled her composure and undermined her sense of security over what were to be catastrophic consequences.36

It was at the beginning of May 1797, while Congress deliberated America’s course regarding the French, that the twenty-eight-year-old editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, nicknamed “Lightning-Rod Junior,” with his illustrious grandfather in mind, went into full battle with President Adams. Filling columns of the Aurora with Anti-Federalist, anti-Adams propaganda, mimicking and mauling, Bache ignited such intense hatred on Abigail’s part that he might have been shooting bullets instead of words.37

A President who considered France’s refusal to receive the American minister as the “denial of a right” must be in his dotage, Bache suggested. Also, any advocate of Jay’s Treaty must be “as foolish as the napping old negro woman,” and furthermore, Jay had been sent to the Court of St. James “to throw himself on the magnanimity of the British Kings.” Without hesitation, Bache went on to clarify—in five columns, in one instance—his belief that America had therefore given improper advantages to the enemy and violated its faith with the French, who justifiably declared all “common intercourse at an end.” Was this the “denial of a right” on the part of the French Republic? Bache asked. Such “round assertions” might answer Mr. Adams’s purposes to a degree, he concluded, but their influence must be “very limited and of transitory duration,” for “they cannot deceive long.”38

Needless to say, Abigail found Bache incorrigible and his insults insufferable. He insisted that the President held out the idea of negotiation only to “deceive” the American people, that his protestations were so much “Presidential War Whoop” in which his peace initiatives masked preparations for war. Adams could talk all he wished of foreign influence, but what a pity, said Bache, that he was not as free from British influence as from French. The President did not mention a word about British depredations, Bache challenged, “and yet Mr. A. is not under foreign influence!!!” Bache posed a question to his readers, simultaneously providing a taunting answer: “Does Mr. A suppose that ‘the most enlightened nation upon earth’ is to be gulled by such bare faced artifice?” If he can believe this, he must suppose himself the President of a nation of Ourang Outangs instead of men.” Unsatiated, Bache would call Adams a “hypocrite for the purposes of the basest deception,” and remind him, at still another time, that “His Serene highness” was “the President by three votes” and never the choice of Pennsylvania.39

May 31, 1797, was the official date of President Adams’s appointment of a commission to heal America’s crippled relations and to secure a treaty of commerce and amity with France. As Abigail predicted, the designation of the three envoys extraordinary, including Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, as with every other governmental measure, was indeed “censured by those who made a point of abusing every thing.” On the whole, Abigail was comfortable with the appointees. John Marshall, the lawyer from Virginia, she judged a “very fair and Honorable man, and truly American,” who would meet with no objection—unless it was that he was not Frenchman enough for those who preferred to send Jefferson or Madison, among others of similar sentiments. When Francis Dana turned down the appointment on grounds of health, Abigail recognized that his substitute, Elbridge Gerry, was controversial. Not a sound Republican and “at least an unsound Federalist,” or so it was said, he could count opponents on both sides. But Abigail was firm. She had great confidence that John would not have nominated Gerry if he did not believe him to be an honest man and a friend to his country who could be neither “deceived nor warped.”40

As Abigail assumed, the newspapers did not hesitate to “abuse” John’s appointment. Nearly daily, Bache proclaimed that “if ever a man playd the hipocrite for the purposes of the basest deception the President by three votes is the man.” Bache’s assaults, however, were neither unexpected or unique. Abigail was also infuriated by the “misrepresentations” of Peter Porcupine, the pen name of the English-born William Cobbett, who advertised at the beginning of the year, in the pages of the Aurora, the provocative premise of his new publication, Porcupine’s Gazette & Daily Advertiser. It was Porcupine’s contention that newspapers had done Americans “more real injury than all its open enemies,” and that they misled the people at home and misrepresented them abroad. Furthermore, these “vehicles of sedition and discord” had encouraged the Western territories to rebel, had given rise to the depredations of Britain “by exciting the people to such acts of violence against that nation, as left her no room to doubt that we were determined on war.” At the conclusion of his editorial, Porcupine, aptly named, bristled for the kill. He mentioned the existence of a party in America “who favour monarchy and aristocracy,” and, without naming John Adams, though the implication was obvious, wondered whether its members ought not to be considered “traitors.”41

*   *   *

By June, Abigail saw the task of the President as “very arduous, very perplexing and very hazardous.” He needed a rest, and respite from Philadelphia’s heat. She too needed a change; she longed for her rosebush, her clover field, the “retirement” of Quincy, and a chance to talk to her sisters and friends. If she appeared homesick in her letters, it was because she was worn with criticism, shrill with anger. Attacks based on political differences were difficult enough to weather, but those that pierced the family domain, such as Bache’s criticism of John Quincy’s recent nomination as minister plenipotentiary to the court of Berlin, drew blood.42

Abigail was extraordinarily sensitive on the subject of family appointments, singularly so in the case of John Quincy. She and John took great pride in the letter George Washington wrote at the end of his term in office regarding their son. If his wishes were of any avail, it was the departing President’s “strong hope” that his successor would not withhold “merited promotion” from Mr. John Quincy Adams because he was his son. Washington had elaborated this point on February 20, 1797: “Without intending to compliment the father or the mother, or to censure any others, I give it as my decided opinion that Mr. Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad, and that he will prove himself to be the ablest of all our diplomatic corps.…”43

John Quincy himself plainly and firmly expressed his private feelings on several occasions when he discussed his career with his mother. After he had been notified of his transfer from The Hague to Portugal, his letter to Abigail of November 14, 1796, bordered on the sarcastic:

The appointment to the mission of Portugal I find from your letter was, as I had before concluded, unknown to my father. I have already written you upon the subject, and I hope, my ever dear and honored mother, that you are fully convinced from my letters which you have before this received, that upon the contingency of my father’s being placed in the first magistracy, I shall never give him any trouble by solicitation for office of any kind. Your late letters have repeated so many times that I shall in that case have nothing to expect, that I am afraid you have imagined it possible that I might form expectations from such an event.… I had hoped that my mother knew me better that she did do me the justice to believe that I have not been so totally regardless or forgetful of the principles which education had instilled, nor so totally destitute of a personal sense of delicacy, as to be susceptible of a wish tending in that direction.44

It was no wonder that Abigail, knowing the background of her son’s appointment, and his own sensitivity about his position, was crushed by the “misrepresentations” of the press. She sensed the “spirit of envy and Jealousy operating,” and accused Bache, who was “never at a loss for a lye,” of getting his news “wholesale.” There was a perfectly plausible reason for John Quincy’s seemingly abrupt change of missions from Lisbon to Berlin. In the President’s judgment, the north of Europe was “more interesting” than the south “at present,” the neutral powers of Denmark, Sweden, and Prussia being more naturally allied to American interests. John Quincy, therefore, with his “talents, Sagacity and Industry,” might be more profitably engaged in collecting and transmitting intelligence of the “views and designs” of those courts and nations. The role of the King of Prussia in future relations with France and England was crucial; the emperors of Russia and Germany were “important luminaries for the political telescope.” In short, as the President explained to his son, “the future system of Europe and how we can preserve friendship with them all, and be most useful to them all,” was the sum of his latest assignment. To have so purposeful a mission undermined was an outrage, and Abigail confided as much to Mrs. Cranch. “But Malevelence is unbounded,” she concluded at the end of this sorry tale, without realizing the ugly dimensions of her complaint until not quite a week later.45

Abigail sat down to read the July 7 edition of Boston’s Independence Chronicle & Universal Advertiser and rose in fury and disbelief. Incredibly, the “impudent” Bache’s Aurora had been surpassed in its insulting practices. Judging from the day’s contents, the editor of the Chronicle achieved “more of the true spirit of Satin” than even Bache by combining the poisonous “billingsgate of all the Jacobin papers” with “Lies, falshoods, calimny and bitterness of his own.” How could she judge otherwise? For what other purpose could he print a paragraph about how the President was to receive $114,000 for his four-year term? As everyone knew, the salary was the same “Nominal” sum granted to President Washington, without half the value. Furthermore, the money was no more the President’s than the money voted to rig one of the frigates being built at that moment. Every dollar was at the country’s disposal, to be accurately accounted for.46

Compounding the insult, the Chronicle attacked John Quincy, claiming that the twenty-three-year-old son of the President was receiving a salary of ten thousand dollars a year, as though it were a personal grant from his father. Actually, John Quincy was ten days short of turning thirty, and salaries such as his were settled by law. Furthermore, a resident minister received $4,500 yearly, and a minister plenipotentiary, $9,000. John Quincy’s fault lay in his being the President’s son rather than in his being singled out for a larger salary. Abigail wished that she could somehow get the papers to print the truth; she thought the “mischief” due to lack of inquiry into facts. But she despaired of being able to rectify matters, and repeated her now practiced vow that her family “addhere” to duty and keep themselves “unprejuced” [unprejudiced] as the best means of survival.47

With little or no respite from the press, however, Abigail was increasingly embittered. Never one to nurture her grudges in secret, she confided to her cousin, the merchant William Smith, her solution for dealing with that “contemptible Hireling” Bache and his associates. It was her recommendation that the “triumvirate” of printers in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia “richly” deserved that “French Freedom and Liberty” exercised against the eighteen or twenty printers in France. Not one to turn the other cheek gracefully, Abigail could not let Bache’s reference to John and herself as “Darby and Joan” slide by without comment. One line of Henry Woodfall’s ballad about “The Happy Old Couple” surfaced: “When Darby’s pipe’s out, Joan won’t smoke a whiff more”; for the rest, Abigail sought Mrs. Cranch’s research. Fully attuned to the ridicule intended, Abigail seized the chance to repay Benjamin Franklin’s grandson by commenting on a void in his existence. Abigail considered Bache’s “polite allusion,” in contrast with Franklin’s dubious marital status, “highly honorary to the domestic and conjugal Character of the President who has never given His Children or Grandchildren cause to Blush for any illegitimate offspring.”48

*   *   *

Abigail was relieved to survive the celebrations of the Fourth of July more easily than she had anticipated. Fortunately, the weather was cooler than its usual “Bake House” temperature, but, in general, she thought the day a “tedious” one. Washington had set the style that she was obliged to continue—a costly one, involving the expenditure of five hundred dollars to provide the two hundred pounds of cake and two quarter casks of wine, besides spirits, that were consumed. Counting the governor, the military, and all of Congress, the guest list averaged 150 people, and Abigail, who dreaded the day, admitted to moments when she thought “President Washington to blame for introducing the custom, if he could have avoided it.”49

Once this celebration was out of the way, Abigail focused on Quincy. She worried about the President’s health and thought it “absolutely necessary” that he return home. Her need was equal to his; she cherished, as always, every mention of her garden, particularly her rosebush, and yearned to “enhale one & taste the other.” She sent instructions ahead for preparation: she wished to have her house whitewashed, and she required more female help, particularly a cook; she hoped some black woman in Boston would undertake the job for two months. Mattresses needed to be put on featherbeds; extra beds needed to go into the new “out Chamber” for the male servants. Wine could be drawn from casks in the cellar; punch was to be made by the gallon, with brandy added. Also, a quarter-cask of Madeira wine must be purchased for immediate use, along with quantities of flour, loaf sugar, brown sugar, coffee, Hyson and Souchong teas, crackers, and dozens of lemons. She did not forget to request oats, without which the coachman and horses would be “undone.”50

Plans for home always reminded Abigail of her children. She had arranged, in fact, to have Mrs. Smith and the infant Caroline stay with her in Quincy. At first thought, her association of Mrs. Smith’s family with those of John Greenleaf, Robert Morris, and their partner, John Nicholson, seemed remote, as her son-in-law, the colonel, was not connected with their case. As the bankruptcy proceedings involving the three men unfolded, however, it was apparent that Abigail’s almost fanatical preoccupation with its sordid details had a drab logic of its own.51

Because of the collapse of the North American Land Company and its grand-scale speculations in Northwestern real estate, both Greenleaf and Morris would be locked in debtors’ prison, the latter for more than three years, before the Federal Bankruptcy Act of 1800 effected his release. And for Abigail, in the aftermath, to visit Morris’s wife, Maria, the sister of William White, Pennsylvania’s first Protestant Episcopal bishop, was a wrenching experience. The companion of her youth, in Abigail’s memory “gay and blithe as a bird, blooming as a rose in June,” had faded to a pale, dejected figure, the image of that of her own daughter, the colonel’s wife. Abigail searched Maria Morris’s situation for intimations of Mrs. Smith’s fate, and made no secret of her profound worry for the one with whom she was “more closely connected.” With “one bubble bursting after an other,” Abigail pondered a lesson lost on both the Morris and Smith families. They ought to have been taught, she said, that all speculative wealth had a “shallow foundation.”52

*   *   *

Gray melancholy ignited to white fury when Abigail turned to the subject of William Blount, senator from Tennessee, and his “diabolical plot.” A letter from the senator to the Cherokee Nation had been intercepted and forwarded to the President, who, in turn, sent it on to the Senate. Its contents, disclosed to the public on July 6, 1797, told of Blount’s attempts to enlist the Creeks and Cherokees to help the British gain the Spanish territories of West Florida. “When shall we cease to have Judases?” Abigail worried, considering the incident an insult not only to her country but to her husband in particular, providing “a glorious kettle for the Jacobines to swim in.” Though she was comforted to learn that the British had not accepted Blount’s services, she wished only the worst of punishments for this disgraceful public servant who had been arrested for debt on four different occasions. The Senate would expel Blount, she predicted, and she was positive it was the responsibility of the House to impeach him.53

“We are in perils by Land, and we are in perils by sea, and in perils from false Breathren,” Abigail concluded after the exposure of Blount’s treachery. Nor was she alone in her fears; they were seriously confirmed by Oliver Wolcott, the Secretary of the Treasury. Knowing of the Adamses’ plans to return to Quincy that summer, Wolcott was said to be “anxious” about the President going so far from the seat of government “at so critical period.” Abigail must have given Wolcott’s thoughts—which, in hindsight, might have been interpreted as a warning—at least passing weight, as she did mention them in a letter to Mrs. Cranch. But the next sentence, written as though to soothe Wolcott’s fears or perhaps her own, assured her sister that her husband would never leave his ministers if he thought his presence necessary. Her fatigue—she wrote with desperation of her need to escape the heat and the oncoming “sickly season,” and of her chronic “Complaints of the Bowels”—undoubtedly blurred her judgment.54

In truth, she could hardly wait to leave Philadelphia to forget the prospects of “an Indian war on all sides,” of the threats of “quarrel with Spain,” of, all in all, “so many affairs so very critical” occurring daily. She spoke longingly of her need for a sea breeze and for the comforts of family friendship. Her scathing impatience with Congress was recorded for the benefit of William Smith weeks before. On June 10 she had written:

We hope that Congress will be warmed out of the city by the middle of July. I believe they will rise before, not by accomplishing the business but by not doing it, this dead weight of Pennsilvanna consisting of members who are always opposed to every riming proposition, more Jacobins than any other city, who all wish to see our Government prostrate, and a proportionable part of timid men who fear offending the terrible nation. All these causes have their influence upon a proportion of those members who wish for an excuse to rise without doing anything more than negotiate.…

Plainly, Abigail felt shortchanged and knew the reasons why:

We want more men of deeds, and fewer of words—a speech which space take[s] up ten collums of a newspaper and part of an additional supplement must contain very weighty and important matter indeed to induce people to hear it patiently, or read it afterward.

But on July 19, she wrote Smith in an entirely different vein:

You must not think me too variable when I inform you that the wind has changed to the Northward, and that if no western or southern gale assails us we propose sitting our Faces towards you on the beginning of next week.…55

The main event of the summer of 1797 was, in family terms, the news of John Quincy’s marriage to Louisa Catherine Johnson in London on Thursday, July 26. The President supposed the “match” had grown out of a spark kindled at Nantes in 1779—a faint one indeed, as Louisa had been four years old at the time—when he and the twelve-year-old John Quincy had visited the Johnsons on their return to America. Louisa was the second oldest among seven daughters and one son of the prosperous Joshua Johnson, whose brother Thomas was governor of his birthplace, Maryland. Johnson, originally employed in London as factor of an Annapolis shipping firm, had waited out the Revolution in Nantes. Then, at Washington’s appointment on August 7, 1790, he served as American consul in London, until the year of Louisa Catherine’s marriage.56

The consul’s ample house, staffed with eleven servants and located near the Tower of London, was not only convenient but inviting. John Quincy found his way there on his return from Holland, the morning of November 11, 1795. He was twenty-eight years old on his reintroduction to the Johnson family. Louisa Catherine was twenty, with dark cascading curls, angelic cheeks, and pleading eyes. Her grandson Henry likened her to a Romney portrait as a bride, and to a figure of delicate Sèvres porcelain in old age. The news of the romance came as a surprise to Abigail, still worrying over the anguished tone of her son’s most recent letter. Owing to the usual two-to three-month delay between the mailing and delivery of letters, her calming words were no sooner dispatched than she received the next installment from her son insinuating a special interest in an “amiable young lady.”57

Until now, John Quincy, serving his country abroad, had viewed himself as a “banished man condemned in foreign climes to roam.” His brother Charles mourned with great sensitivity that his brother’s “virtue and genius and talent” seemed “doomed” to vegetate in foreign soil. To remove a twenty-eight-year-old American from his country to be “in a measure” forgotten by his fellow men, to deprive him of “that domestic happiness” for which youth “so ardently sigh[s],” was a cruelty for which the honor of the appointment could scarcely compensate. The comparison was indeed dramatic. Charles was settled in a mutually devoted, loving marriage, able to support his wife with a “charming prospect” of putting something by in his youth for “the wintry blasts” of age; by contrast, John Quincy was far away, “unconnected with the woman he most admired, supported on a bare maintenance.” John Quincy would forgive him, he hoped, “if I exhibit a wish too ardent for your concern.”58

It was Charles’s marriage to the “choice of his heart” that had “awakened the dormant feelings of your soul,” Abigail assured John Quincy, “and uncovered the fire which smothered, gleamd up again, upon the recollection of the sacrifice you had made.” His reaction was “natural,” she said, and despite his remorse that “stern prudence” had quenched the “unwilling flame”—undoubtedly a reference to Mary Frazier—all was not lost. There was still time, despite his conviction that “sincere friendships” were more generally found at an early age, when the heart was “tender soft and unsuspicious … before Ambition and avarice freeze up the generous current of the Soul.” He was not to despair, therefore, of one day feeling a similar regard for a “kindred soul” yet in reserve for him. Meanwhile, she clearly was hoping that he would remain single; his destiny was to be considered. That “particular providence” which presided over all creatures had some demands upon him, and called him to exercise those talents entrusted to him. These could better be performed in a single state than a married one.59

Abigail again referred obliquely to Mary Frazier as she continued, reminding her son that a “connection” at that earlier period of his life would have “embarrassed you, and greatly frustrated your future usefulness.” It was her advice to “let the consciousness of having acted right console you.” Conceding that she might be encouraging false hope, she believed the “object of his regard would never connect herself while he remain single.” Then again, Abigail speculated, this “object” might not appear to him in a few years with all those “outward attractions” that the bloom of eighteen years had given her. Still, Abigail remained even-handed, musing that “Time will dim the Lusture of the Eye, and wither the bloom of the face, tho it may perfect and mature those mental attractions which yeald a more permanent and solid satisfaction, when the ardour of passion setles into the more lasting union of Friendship.”60

*   *   *

It was in May that his parents realized John Quincy was not quite the pitiable fellow they fretted about. Beginning with letters dated from February 20, 1796, he hinted repeatedly at his new situation. During the mild winter “beyond all example” he could hardly “snatch” so much as a quarter of an hour to write even a short letter. Perhaps he might give the reason for this at a future time, “or perhaps you may guess at it without being told.” Another letter mentioned Louisa Catherine Johnson as having chosen, with her mother, cloaks for Abigail and Cousin Louisa. He said the Copley family was well, but “perhaps you will hear of another family that has been still more attractive to me; but of this I may write more on a future occasion.” Still another time he said he considered the birth of a son to his cousin as a “sort of reflection upon me; for a good example always contains a censure upon a bad practice.” In exhilarated spirits he had begun, he informed his mother, “to think very seriously of the duty incumbent upon all good citizens to have a family.…” If she thought this was the language of a convert, he invited her to inquire “how he became so,” though he thought he was not yet prepared to answer that.61

Reactions of both parents to John Quincy’s inferences were equivocal, to say the least. His father wrote back that his son’s last letter to his mother had caused him to “suspect” that “some family—or other afforded the means of making your winter in London tolerable at least.” The same letter caused his mother to surmise that her son was not so proficient in the maxims of Horace and Pope as he flattered himself. “Some fair one has shown you its sophistry, and taught you to admire. Youth and beauty have penetrated through your fancied apathy and you find yourself warmed by one and invigorated by another, as you tell me that the enthusiasm of youth has subsided.” Still unwilling to relinquish her vision of John Quincy as a patriot and a public man—a public trust, in a sense—Abigail hoped “for the love I bear my Country that the Syren is at least half Blood.” And at the bottom of the letter she added a forlorn parenthetical sentence, alluding most likely to Mary Frazier: “(Marie—has she no claims)?”62

There was no question that Abigail was uneasy about John Quincy’s foreign “connection.” Though she had not heard so much as a “lisp” from anyone but himself, she wrote John Quincy that she was persuaded it was one of the Misses Johnson who had become his “flame.” “Have I guest right?” she asked. “Whom you call yours shall be mine also,” she offered cordially. He had sufficient years to judge for himself, only, she added, “Weight well. Consider maturely of the most important actions of your Life.” Some weeks later, when she presumed that John Quincy had returned to The Hague, she wrote Thomas that she wished his brother might not have “staid too long in England for the peace of his mind and the tranquility of his Heart,” as, from some hints in his last letter, she inferred that Cupid has “new bent his Bow, nor misd his aim.” She also said she hoped “however my dear Thomas” that he would be “proof” against Cupid’s shafts until he returned to his native land, and there “chuse a wife whose habits tastes & sentiments are calculated for the meridian of your Country.”63

As soon as he became aware of his mother’s reservations, John Quincy sought to ease them as thoughtfully as he knew how. A solicitous and sensitive son, he wrote with amazing candor, considering the complexity of his position:

Your apprehensions as to the Tastes & sentiments of my friend; your fears that they may be Anti American or liable to contrast too strong an attachment to the tinsel of courts was perfectly natural, and all your observations on the subject were received by me with gratitude, as I know them to proceed from serious concern and the purest parental affection. I should be a bold man indeed to affirm that there is no ground for them; that the Lady is Superior to such attractions and despises such splendour.—But she has goodness of heart & gentleness of disposition as well as spirit and discretion and with those qualities I shall venture upon the chances of success, and hope you will find her [to] prove such a daughter as you would wish for your son.64

John Quincy, when abruptly called back to The Hague in June 1796, had asked Louisa Catherine to accept his portrait, as a “token of affection [that] will cease only with the last pulse of the heart of him whose image it is.” He hoped it would often meet her eye with half the delight he derived from looking at a corresponding pledge, her miniature. “Albeit unused to the melting mood, I found the separation not a little painful,” he confided to his mother, to whom he painstakingly unburdened the logistics of his immediate future.65

This was to be, first of all, a temporary situation. The reason was plain. Though older with this second love, John Quincy was no wealthier and could not support a family on the salary he received. And while the “matrimonial propensity” was “irresistible” to him, he had “very reluctantly,” owing to the “Grace of consideration,” concluded that he might not yet take upon himself the encumbrance of a family. Despite postponement, John Quincy left his mother in no doubt that his affections “have taken their direction, and if those with which they have been returned can stand the test of an absence which must be of indefinite duration, you may consider my choice as irrevocably fixed.”66

In his own thoughts, John Quincy’s plans were firm. He proposed to complete the three years he had originally planned to devote to his present mission. Meanwhile, he intended to explore opportunities that would afford him the means to support a wife. He knew that he could always return to the bar, but felt keenly that these years abroad, years of “total abandonment” of both the practice and study of the law, had deprived him of whatever fitness he had for a profession that, in truth, held little appeal for him in the first place. In his search for a profitable future, he allowed that he might be induced to settle in one of the Southern states. John Quincy hesitated as he wrote these last words. Going south would take him a great distance from home, his beloved “native spot,” and “more especially from you,” he told his mother. He also admitted that it must seem like ingratitude or want of public spirit for him to be thinking along these new lines.67

*   *   *

John Quincy had anticipated a difficult “test of absence” in his relationship with Louisa Catherine. The hazards of separation, however, were as nothing in the face of the trauma caused by the extraordinary event of the collapse of Joshua Johnson’s finances. In less than a year, John Quincy, the debonair bridegroom-to-be, the yearning family man, the aspiring private entrepreneur, vanished as abruptly as he had materialized, a charming but illusory figure destroyed along with his father-in-law’s fortune. The effects of these catastrophic circumstances on Louisa Catherine, and John Quincy’s increasing sensitivity to his patriotic duties, polarized the couple. Indeed, to Louisa’s despair, John Quincy seemed to change into a moralizing monument to public service, whose boasted philosophy—his “unlimited attachment and devotion to his country—was a “dreadful” thing. His bookishness was “obnoxious,” his affection questionable. To John Quincy, Louisa betrayed for the first time “repellent spirit” of bitterness and wounding sarcasm. Perhaps, unwittingly, the two were revealing the elements of personality that would undermine their future happiness.68

Had Louisa’s adored father not met with such a debacle, the “test of absence” would not have exposed such frailties. Certainly there would have been little cause for the pressure exerted by daughter and father to expedite a wedding at The Hague. Joshua Johnson’s determined letters of November 29 and December 16, 1796, left no doubt as to his desire for a speedy marriage. A troubled and embarrassed John Quincy replied on January 9, 1797, “I regret sincerely the impossibility which will prevent me from concurring in a measure so conformable to my wishes.” In his present situation, “so unsettled and precarious,” he regarded the assumption of a family and its necessary appendages as an act of folly that would subject him to “dependance,” a state to which it was his “settled Resolution” never to submit. His “removal” from his post was the only circumstance that could possibly justify his indulgence of his inclinations, and that seemed a questionable event at this time. He added apologetically, “It is an awkward task to unfold the state of ones personal concerns to any Man,” and the next day he wrote to Louisa Catherine advising resignation and acquiescence during the separation they were “doomed” to suffer. Though their marriage seemed more remote, he said, it was not less secure. She ought to consider “untoward Events as a test of character, and that a large portion of all human merit consists in suffering with dignity and composure, without weakness or unavailing regret.”69

John Quincy was not insensitive to Louisa’s unhappy position; he could not “give pain without sharing it” himself. Nevertheless, he seemed to dwell on the more hurtful aspects of the matter. “You will perhaps enquire why I return to a subject which I know must be disagreeable,” he wrote, when he had already explained his position. Perhaps he felt a continuing need to clarify matters, or excuse what he must have regarded as unseemly, aggressive behavior on the part of the Johnsons. After studying both the father’s and daughter’s letters in sequence and contrast, John Quincy “concluded,” he wrote Louisa, that she had made the proposal, and that her father’s anxiety “to promote the object of our wishes and his affection for you prevailed upon him to determine upon this Step.” He betrayed his susceptibility to social rigors by adding that an abrupt wedding at The Hague would have been “consistant neither with your dignity, nor my delicacy.”70

The series of Louisa Catherine’s letters that follows expresses, not surprisingly, the humiliation, stress, and anguish of an exceedingly mercurial, vulnerable young woman scorned. First she blamed herself—“It is my too great anxiety to see you that has created this impression and distrust”—and claimed that “love too warmly expressed, too candidly avowed,” had precipitated her anguished embarrassment. Then she scolded: his very “decisive” letters, especially one of December 20, had “astonished and mortified” her—so much so that she could scarcely believe he could recall to whom he was writing. With some sarcasm she swept away the “unnecessary apprehensions” he had “indulged” in, that she might go to Holland. She would clear up his misunderstanding. Her father had informed her that the calamitous state of his affairs might necessitate the family’s departure for America; consequently he had suggested—“if it would tend in any way to alleviate my distress”—the possibility of a meeting in Holland. Louisa had “fondly and foolishly” imagined that such an opportunity would be welcomed in mutual joy. Furthermore, there were ways John Quincy might have softened his rejection—but never mind:

I go to America, you to your embassy, where I ardently pray the greater disposer of events, to grant that peace to your bosom which mine has, and will lay a stranger to untill that period arrives which will prove, that I am as incapable of betraying affection or slighting engagements as of breaking a determination decidedly adopted. In this sentiment I am proud to acknowledge myself as firm as you.71

Louisa reproved John Quincy’s behavior—“harshness, so evidently displayed”—and then, in a mercurial, abrupt change of tone, continued almost cheerfully. Her letter in no way signified a change in her affection:

No my best friend rather esteem it a proof of the sincerity of my attachment, rest assured that the woman who is capable of calmly submitting to receive such a letter without asserting very sufficient spirit to answer it, is not, cannot be worthy of your esteem.

She never doubted John Quincy’s affection, after all. Nor could she have supposed for “one moment” that he was capable of betraying affection or slighting their engagement. Further, she did have a mature understanding of his nature; she reminded him that she knew him too well to doubt that he would ever vary from a purpose “deliberately formed decidedly adopted.”72

Louisa Catherine had perhaps touched on the essential characteristic of the young John Quincy: he was a man in transition, sorting through his relationships with his family, country, and beloved. On January 18, 1797, he wrote his mother that he was still awaiting orders to proceed to Lisbon, to fulfill the duties of this last May’s appointment as minister plenipotentiary to Portugal. In an apologetic mood, John Quincy reexamined his reasons for wishing to quit his diplomatic career and to settle in a Southern state, both suggestions having met with parental disapproval. His station at The Hague, though comfortable for a single person, would not support a family. Therefore, he thought it was “certainly” preferable to try to earn his way by private efforts than to “chill in the torpid and comfortless solitude of a celibacy without prospect of its termination.”73

Also, addressing another parental issue, John Quincy did not think himself indispensable to the public good. The affairs of his country would not suffer “in the smallest degree” by his retirement, and many able and willing young men might substitute for him “with perfect ease.” Furthermore, when he originally proposed his plan, he had no right to expect that President Washington would encourage an extended diplomatic career, and under the next President—his father—he was “certain and determined never to be the subject of an appointment.” Then again, if his father was not made President, he was “strongly suspicious” that he should not hastily receive one. However, all these reservations had evaporated with his appointment to Portugal. With new obligations to continue in public service, his views of a private settlement were “no longer the same.”74

John Quincy now broached to his mother the subject of his domestic arrangements, allowing that he did not know whether he would find it in his power to make final plans. It was his intention, when he received orders, to go through London and marry his “companion” there, but—and his sigh was almost audible—he said that “various accidents may take place to make this design impracticable.” “If so,” he concluded, “I shall submit to the gloomy prospect of a solitary life during my future mission like that which I am leading in the present; or even much worse, unless I can prevail upon my brother to continue with me a year or two longer in case he should not be stationed here at the time of my departure.”75

Should the “Spirit of Party intrude itself into the chair of the Union,” his father knew as well as he did what he should have to expect, for no other reason than their relation to one another. But this possibility did not represent a catastrophe. He had never been anxious for promotion, he assured his mother, nor, he trusted, would he ever be. This was “far from being a pungent Passion” in his heart. Furthermore, his strong conviction of the “vanity of all human greatness,” coupled with “a sense of Independence and delicacy,” would always deter him from a “very fervent wish for anything that it is in the power of man to confer or deny.”76

Finally, on July 6, 1797, John Quincy received orders to leave for Lisbon. He wrote to his mother of finding himself for the third time “launched upon an unknown Ocean, without Plot or compass,” and of plans to go to London, but to stay no longer than “absolutely necessary.” On July 18, while in London, he received a new set of letters from both the Secretary of State and the new President—his father—directing him to wait for a commission, and instructions to the court of Berlin. Eight days later, he was married to Louisa Catherine in the church of the parish of All Hallows Barking. Abigail learned of the wedding on November 2, in Quincy, while reading the newspaper. The lapse of information was a matter of distance, not lack of affection or courtesy.77

The couple had written to “dear and honoured parents” a combined letter dated July 28, which had not yet been received. “I have now the happiness of presenting to you another daughter,” John Quincy wrote,

worthy as I fully believe of adding one to the number of those who already endear that relation to you. The day before yesterday united us for life. My recommendation of her to your kindness and affection I know will be unnecessary. My sentiment of her merit, will not at this moment especially boast its impartiality, but if there be as I believe an inseparable chain of connection which binds together all the domestic virtues, I have the strongest pledge that she, who has in an amiable and respectable family, adorned the characters of a daughter and Sister, will prove an equal ornament to that of a wife.…

Louisa Catherine added her own postscript:

The day before yesterday by uniting me to your beloved Son, has given me a claim to solicit your parental affection, a claim I already feel will inspire me with veneration to pursue the path of rectitude, and render me as deserving of your esteem and tenderness, as those who stand in the same relation my pride would be severely wounded to yield the palm in the fulfillment of my duties either as wife or daughter. To be respected as these characters, and to meet the approbation of my Husband and family, is the greatest wish of my Heart. Stimulated by these motives, (your affecion the Reward) will prove a sufficient incitement never to sully the title of subscribing myself your Dutiful Daughter.…78

Both inscriptions are poignant in view of ensuing difficulties. Louisa Catherine, especially, would torment herself for the rest of her years over the innocence of her words and her role. With hindsight, John Quincy said that although he had “indeed long observed” his father-in-law’s distress and that of his family, he had never anticipated its direct impact on his marriage. The new bridegroom’s most immediate problem was the defense of Mr. Johnson against his creditors, but in a sense it was Louisa Catherine who was the episode’s most serious casualty. Her idol—her father—had toppled; her security was forever undermined, and the loss of her small personal fortune was forever mourned. Across the years, “beggar as I am” was her echoing phrase; with no private means she dismissed herself as a figure of “contempt.” Repeatedly she explained her father’s bankruptcy as one of those “unforeseen misfortunes, so cruelly taught to our Mercantile Community.” Throughout her adult life, the failure of a very small payment, she claimed, “threw a shade over our brightest prospects, and gave a colour of imprudence to a marriage, formed under the brightest and most promising auspices.” Her father’s misfortune

gave a colouring to my future days, which could never be eradicated. It overtook me in the zenith of my happiness, at that peculiar period of life which marks a future destiny; and that colouring appeared to stamp my character, with a base deception which my Soul utterly scorned, and no evidence could ever be brought forward in my favour afterwards, to prove the perfect innocence of my conduct. The loss of Fortune so small as the best to which all knew I could have pretended to was scarcely a consideration—but the apparent dishonour of palming myself upon a family under such circumstances, was a baseness from which my spirit was revolved, and it has and still does make the wretchedness of my life. It has turned every sweet into gall.79

It is essential to realize that this devastating appraisal of the effect of her father’s loss of fortune was written in 1840, in her journal, tellingly called The Adventures of a Nobody. She was sixty-five years old then and savaged by chronic illness and the deaths of unborn children as well as those of an infant son, a treasured namesake and only daughter, and a grown son. By her own admission her temper was so “harrassed, so imbued with strange and singular opinions” that she was “utterly and entirely incapable [of] repose and contentment.” She felt that she had been a torment to herself, and a still greater one to her husband, who “bore with her with the patience of Socrates,” she said, but “who like Socrates glides smoothly on in the course which he has laid out for himself.”80

Abigail, aware of John Quincy’s marriage, oblivious of any hint of catastrophe, cordially and fittingly requested that her nephew William Cranch call on the Johnson family, who had embarked early in September for Maryland.

I have not yet heard of their arrival which gives me no small anxiety. I pray you to give me earliest intelligence of them, and I request you to visit them and present my congratulations to them on their arrival and to inform Mrs. Johnson that Mrs. Adams was well on the 19th of September and sustaind the painful separation from all her family with a becoming fortitude.81

Meanwhile, Thomas Adams, one of the three witnesses to the wedding, other than the bride’s immediate family, had written home to tell his mother of his newly acquired “amiable and accomplished sister.” John Quincy was “very happy,” Thomas said, and doubtless would remain so, as the young lady had “much sweetness of temper” and, in his estimation, seemed to “love as she ought.” Thomas also spoke highly of the Johnson family, who were returning to Washington, where they owned property. He elaborated still further on his affectionate portrait of Louisa Catherine that September 10. His remarks, given his customary reticence, were especially meaningful to his mother: “She is indeed a most lovely woman, and in my opinion worthy in every respect of the Man for whom she has with so much apparent Cheerfulness renounced father and Mother kindred and Country to unite her destinies with his.” “This is a great deal for Thomas to say,” Abigail reported to Mrs. Cranch. Meanwhile, she wrote abroad for a miniature of her new daughter-in-law and a lock of her hair.82

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Considering that Abigail, by her own ready admission, would rather prepare “to come Home than to go from it,” her return to Philadelphia in November was marked by some pleasant surprises. She found her house in perfect order, and her staff of old hands, responsibly managed by Briesler, unscathed by the summer’s epidemic of yellow fever. In fact, she said she could not wish to be better off than she was, respecting her domestic help, which, admittedly, greatly enhanced the comfort of life. But she would wish, had she a choice, for another set of circumstances where Mrs. Smith was concerned. There was little that was redeeming about the situation in Eastchester, from her firsthand observation.83

Mrs. Smith had lived on a farm for eighteen months, twenty miles from New York City, awaiting the return of her bankrupt husband, who seemed periodically to seek refuge from his creditors. Her life was so solitary—locating a newspaper was almost impossible—that, as far as Abigail was concerned, her daughter might have been living outside of America. Abigail hoped that Mrs. Smith and Caroline might spend the winter with her in Philadelphia, but she was decidedly wary of how to approach her troubled daughter. What she could and could not say to Mrs. Smith, she bared with characteristic candor to her sister Mrs. Cranch. The continuing dialogue was reminiscent of an earlier period in all their lives. Though Abigail did not go to the trouble of setting up a system of marking envelopes in the interests of privacy, she did mention, on a number of occasions, John’s concessions. After she had “scolded so hard,” he pledged not to open any further letters from Mrs. Cranch and would be satisfied, he promised, with whatever parts Abigail was willing to communicate to him.84

Whether Abigail wished to spare her husband her own anguish over their daughter’s delicate situation and what looked like total abandonment, or whether she feared he might disapprove of Mrs. Cranch’s and her own so-called solutions, was not entirely clear. The former was as resourceful as ever, and her advice appeared to be a continuation of the past summer’s conversations and observations. Mrs. Cranch might even have suggested divorce, judging from the content of Abigail’s answer of mid-November:

I have contemplated the plan you mention. It may be put into effect if future circumstances require it. At present, it would be expensive and lonely, and not less subject to unpleasant feelings than being here on a visit, which is all that at present is expected, nor will she be obliged to appear on my publick Evenings, unless it is her choice.85

At her bleakest moments, as the winter wore on, Abigail did not believe that the colonel would return. Her negative outlook was understandable. Months of failed promises and dead ends had undermined her faith. She had been present when Mrs. Smith received word from the colonel’s brother that a letter with money enclosed awaited her. The two women’s journey to New York proved to be a fruitless search for the would-be messenger. In spite of all her doubts, however, Abigail was relieved by the colonel’s return the week of February 17. Though she did not suppose he could satisfy his creditors, she had feared that her daughter would “lose” herself, if left alone any longer. It was almost as though Mrs. Smith hinted at suicide, talking as she did of existence being a “burden to her.” Abigail was still wary of the colonel’s “vissions, of Ideal Schemes etc.,” and believed that at most her son-in-law might “settle” so as to be able to do business in the future. But, on the whole, the colonel’s return released Mrs. Smith from “that worst of States,” which, in Abigail’s thoughts, was “a constant anxious expectation, and anticipation.”86

However much Abigail was consumed with family, extending to nieces and nephews—she offered one member a set of law books, another a remedy for a lung ailment (“I have a great opinion of cabbage leaves”), another a fashionable “drapery dress” (“too youthful for me”)—her eye on the outside world stayed keen and steadfast and guarded. News from abroad that the Holy Roman Emperor of Austria, Francis II, had made peace with the Directory of France (“to call it a Republick would be a subversion of terms”) was an event “big with consequences” to Abigail’s mind. But then, every tremor regarding the French aroused her suspicious interest. That Bonaparte’s troops had invaded Switzerland—their capture of Basle in December was vivid in her mind, and Berne would be taken in March—only substantiated her conviction that “tyrants stick at nothing.” And though she tended to discredit rumors of a threatened invasion of England, she did not doubt that the French might be “mad enough” to make the attempt. The news out of France that was of most vital concern to her, however, was that regarding her fellow Americans. France’s dealings or lack of them, with the American envoys, and the deadening silence concerning their peace mission, aroused what she referred to with deliberately measured understatement as “unpleasant sensations.”87

One aspect of the relationship absolutely escaped her. She was “at a loss” as to how people who fought against England’s “usurpation” of America could “crouch so tamely” to France, a much more dangerous and daring nation. She plainly feared the French, and accused them of aiming not only at American independence and liberty but at “total annihilation” of the Christian religion. The French laws were those of the loathsome Athenian legislator Draco, whose punishments were said to be written in blood. The French were “Robbers, Murderers, Scoffers, backbiters”; in short, in Abigail’s opinion, there was no crime, “however black or Horrid,” that was unfamiliar to them.88

The deeper, in fact, Abigail concentrated on the French and their influence in America, the more discernible was the hysteria that permeated her thoughts: “America must be punished, punished for having amongst her legislatures Men who sanction these crimes, who justify France in all her measures, and who would rejoice to see fire, sword and Massacre carried into the Island of Great Britain untill she became as miserable, as France is wretched.” The news confirming her grievous suspicions—word from John Marshall via Ambassador William Vans Murray that neither he nor his colleagues had been recognized by the French—pitched Abigail into near despair. She feared for her nation, for her husband’s political party. Her volatile state was dramatized in prayer. She wrote Mrs. Cranch on January 20, 1798:

O My Native State, wash ye, make yourselves clean from these abominations. You are Guilty of sending three such Men, V[arnu]m, F[reema]n, S[kinn]er. Not a single state but what has some, Connecticut excepted, the many of them would not go all lengths. Virginia has but two Federilists, North Carolina but one. Can we expect such measures to be adopted as the safety and security of the Country require? Every Man who sees the danger may toil & toil; like Sussaphass [Sisyphus], (I believe the Name is misspelt) the weight recoils.

Furthermore, Abigail was sure that the envoys did not write for fear of interception, and she understood they were not permitted to associate with any French citizens. In short, she concluded that they were “in a mere Bastile,” and that their return was expected daily.89

In a sense, Abigail’s outpourings were measures of her frustration. She had no recourse, no way of defending her husband’s views to the world at large. Periodically she would refute bruising attacks by requesting members of her family to place in a sympathetic newspaper a letter or essay of rebuttal that one or another of them had written. Essentially, however, she was a warrior without arms or armor, a Federalist without office, a writer without a journal, a lecturer without a platform or audience. That “The Spots of the Leopard” were “constantly visible” was both redeeming and punishing. She took notice of each public happening but, also, in her wounded state, assessed its impact on the President’s image with an extraordinary bias that often distorted its significance.90

Such was certainly the case in Abigail’s relationship with the Philadelphians. Their intended celebration of George Washington’s birthday was a cruel blow. Needing to “vent” her indignation on paper, she pleaded with Mrs. Cranch not to expose “it, nor me.” She feared “It will be call’d pride, it will be calld mortification.” She despised both, caring nothing for herself, “but as it respects the Character I hold—I will not knowingly degrade it,” she explained on February 15, 1798:

These Philadelphians are a strange set of people, making pretentions to give Laws of politeness and propriety to the union. They have the least feeling of real genuine politeness of any people with whom I am acquainted. As an instance of it, they are about to celebrate, not the Birth day of the first Majestrate of the union as such, but of General Washingtons Birth day, and have had the politeness to send invitations to the President, Lady and family to attend it. The President of the United States to attend the celebration of the birth day in his publick Character of a private Citizen! For in no other light can General Washington be now considerd, how ever Good, how ever great his Character, which no person more respects than his Successor. But how could the President appear at their Ball and assembly, but in a secondary Character, when invited there, to be held up in that light by all foreign Nations. But these people look not beyond their own important selves. I do not know when my feelings of contempt have been more calld forth, in answer to the invitation.91

The President took the earliest opportunity to decline his invitation. Abigail commented that if the Virginians pleased to do so, it was “natural & proper” for them to celebrate the day, and so might others who “chuse.” But it was the propriety of doing so “in the Capital in the Metropolis of America as these Proud Phylidelphians have publickly named it, and inviting the Head of the Nation to come and do it too,” that was, in her view, “ludicrious beyond compare.” Somehow the President’s reply had found its way into the Aurora, achieving results not intended by its editor, but polarizing its readers instead.92

“Every one was inquiring the why? & the Wherefore?” Abigail reported to Mrs. Cranch weeks later. Many who had subscribed to the ball did not attend, once they learned of the President’s position on the invitation. Even the Vice-President was said to be “shocked” with the “impropriety” of the proceedings, though he lent his name to them. Abigail seemed pleased, if surprised, at Jefferson’s position, unaware of his comment to Bostonian Harrison Gray Otis, a member of the House of Representatives, that “The late birth-night certainly has sewn tares among the exclusive federalists.” Refusing to believe rumors that Jefferson had been the “first mover” in implementing the birthday celebration—“give the devil his due, but lay no more than he deserves to his Charge,” was her philosophy—she also found some consolation in the fact that among the 150 in attendance, only fifteen were women, and these so “mortified” that their presence went unannounced in their newspapers.93

Six days after the celebration of February 22, Abigail was able to achieve some detachment, some face-saving reason for having been so acutely insulted. It was as though national rather than private esteem had been at stake in the commemoration of Washington’s birthday. She told Mrs. Cranch, “I hope in time they will learn how to appreciate themselves as a Nation. They have had, & now have a Head, who will not knowingly Prostrate their dignity & character, neither to foreign Nations, nor the American People.”94

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Abigail was up with the rising sun on the morning of March 27. “Visions” occasioned by “reflections” made sleep impossible. It was a critical time at home and abroad, and she agonized over John’s dilemma as President, “knowing what he thinks ought to be done,” yet faced with the eternal puzzle of his administration, the uncertainty of whether the people were “sufficiently determined” to second the government. Dispatches from abroad, dating to January 9, had arrived and were completely pessimistic, reinforcing Abigail’s fears of an America driven to war with France and bound to defend herself.95

The dispatches posed another problem. Their message must remain private, contrary to clamoring opinion, or endanger the lives of the envoys, who were still in Paris. Support of the President’s views came from an unexpected source. Of all people, the journalist Peter Porcupine, “a strange mixture,” defended John Adams against accusations that he was deliberately provoking war. Distinctly, Porcupine was all for rousing those who, in Abigail’s words, were “for going shares with France submitting intirely to her will,” those quietly disposed to receive “every lash she pleased to inflict.” In contrast with Bache, Peter Porcupine was saying that all men now agreed that Congress ought to do something, and immediately. If they did not, the journalist warned against the “odium” attached to indecisive measures. Furthermore, everyone knew that the “Snail like mode of proceeding which we have long beheld is not the fault of the President.”96

It was no wonder that Abigail embraced this remarkably friendly opinion and allowed that she had a “great curiosity to see the Creature” who was the only “thorn” in Bache’s side. She was plainly puzzled by this man who called himself Peter Porcupine, who could write “very handsomely,” and also “descend & be as low, and vulgar as a fish woman.” And she could not understand why there weren’t others who did not sense the country’s precarious position. She was eloquent in her frustration, and wrote to Mrs. Cranch on March 27, 1798:

Union is what we want, but that will not be easily obtaind. It is difficult to make the people see their danger, untill it is at their doors, or rouse untill their country is invaded. The Senate are strong. They are much more united in their measures than the House. There is an attempt in this city to get a petition signed to congress declaring their determination not to go to war with France, and they hope to sit this measure in opperation through the different States. Is it possible that any person can suppose this Country wish for war by which nothing is to be obtaind, much to be expended and hazarded, in preference to Peace?

As Abigail continued her explanation, her exasperation was almost audible:

But in self defence we may be involved in war; and for that we ought to be prepared, and that is what the President means. What benifit can war be to him? He has no ambition for military Glory. He cannot add by war, to his peace, comfort or happiness. It must accumulate upon him an additional load of care, toil, trouble, malice, hatred, and I dare say Revenge. But for all this he will not sacrifice the honor and independance of his Country to any Nation, and if in support of that, we are involved in war, we must & we ought to meet it, with firmness, with Resolution & with union of Sentiment.97

These were the days when Abigail thought “All Good people” ought to pray “Heartily” for the President and for the country. The minister, Samuel Blair, Jr., prayed “that he may hear a voice saying unto him this is the path, go thou in it.”98