TWENTY-ONE
At Least Fall with Ease
A curious warning preceded Abigail’s November arrival in Philadelphia. The coming winter, John had written her on October 25, 1799, the “red letter day” of their thirty-fifth anniversary, would be the last they would ever spend in Philadelphia. She would be wise to leave early in April, and not come south again for a year and a half at least. An election was approaching, he said, that would set them at liberty from their “uncomfortable journeys,” and he would never have her think of “going to Georgetown upon uncertainties, or rather upon the certainty of leaving it on the fourth of March, with five hundred fifty or six hundred miles to ride through the mud.”1
Despite John’s pessimism, which could only have been deepened by the heartbreak of Charles’s impending death and the bleak certainty of Colonel Smith’s future, Abigail was swiftly entrenched in her role of President’s wife. It was a tribute to her stolid sense of duty, her pride, her vanity, her constant moralizing (“No cup so bitter, but what some cordial drops are mingled by a kind Providence,” and “Gloom is no part of my Religion”), that she was almost immediately on arrival able to plan drawing rooms, receive and visit, even note in scathing detail whose bodices were too revealing (and “litterally look like Nursing Mothers”), whose cheeks were “Rouged up to the Ears.” Her own interest in fashion, however, was far from casual. Just how fastidious she was—and Mrs. Smith as well—was revealed in her requests of Mrs. Cranch.2
Would her “dear Sister,” Abigail wrote on December 4, look in her clothes trunk in her Quincy garret for her white lutestring dress and silver-trimmed coat, which she regretted having overlooked?—also for the silk-embroidered muslin dress belonging to Mrs. Smith, who, with Caroline, was spending the winter with her parents. Meanwhile, the colonel, head of a regiment at Washington’s recommendation, was settled at his camp in Plainfield, New Jersey. Abigail wished for some red broadcloth as well, since cloaks of this material were “all the mode,” especially when trimmed with white fur, and “much more rational” than wearing only a shawl in winter. And though she appreciated the practicality of muslin (“new every time it is clean & new trimmed”), she preferred the use of silks and thought at her age she was privileged “to sit a fashion.”3
As exhaustively as Abigail was preoccupied by social and domestic concerns (she turned to New England on behalf of her larder as well as her wardrobe, sending for twenty bushels of white potatoes and half a dozen barrels of cider), her correspondence flourished. The trick, she found, was to rise one hour earlier than her family to go into the President’s room and write as quickly and fully as she could manage in this rare time of privacy. The hushed room, with its three tall southerly windows and the eastern one that caught the earliest sunbeams, seemed not only to invite but to foster Abigail’s fluent, frank, and often impassioned observations on the current scene. She pronounced the political sky of Pennsylvania “more dark and gloomy than the natural Horizon,” and, still at dagger’s point with the majority of the press, she was ever vulnerable to the “curiosities” produced by its “Tools.” Allowing that she would rejoice in being a false “prophetise,” she predicted that the state would weep “tears of Blood” over its “unbounded” reception of foreigners.4
In an equivocal mood, tainted with defeat these days, Abigail portrayed a President abused by strangers and supposed friends, and complained of the “uphill machine” that was her nation’s government, failed by “American Ambition, delusion and frenzy” and by “underminers” serving local and personal views and interests at the expense of the greater cause. As for the “Mad democratic Stile” and the “impudence” of the British-born, Oxford-educated Thomas Cooper, who blasted the President for his “seizure” of power to make treaties and to enact laws against foreigners, she could only “presume,” she told Mrs. Cranch, that he subjected himself to the penalty of the Sedition Act.5
The claws of partisan politics were also visible to Abigail in that winter’s irksome tale of Jonathan Robbins, the wretched seaman accused of piracy and murder aboard HMS Hermione. He claimed to be an American born in Danbury, Connecticut, and therefore impervious to British punishment. In truth, Robbins was an Irishman named Thomas Nash, whose surrender to British authority by the President’s decree, defended by Chief Justice John Marshall before the House of Representatives, was governed by the terms of Jay’s Treaty. Abigail deplored the time wasted on this “trifling business” inflated unfairly by the “noise” and “clamour” of the Jacobins, who deliberately fostered the suggestion of presidential injustice to a deserving American, who threw “obstacles in the way of every measure useful and benificial to the public.” And sensitive to private as well as party forms of sabotage (“the time for intrigue is approaching”), Abigail wrote her chilling indictment of Timothy Pickering on December 11, 1799, five months and one day before his dismissal.
There is a man in the cabinet, whose manners are forbiding, whose temper is sour and whose resentments are implacable, who neverless would like to dictate every Measure. He has to deal with one, who knows full well their respective departments—and who chuses to feel quite independant, and to act so too, but for this He is abused. But I am mistaken if this dictator does not get himself ensnared in his own toil. He would not now remain in office, if the President possesst such kind of resentments as I hear from various quarters, he permits himself to utter—From this fountain have flowed all the unpopularity of the Mission to France, which some of the federilists have been so deluded as to swallow large draughts off.6
However persuasive, vivid, or prescient Abigail’s observations were, it was probably her response to George Washington’s death on Saturday, December 14, that demonstrated most uniquely her unsurpassed talents as commentator on the passing scene. On Christmas Day she reported that all classes were plunged into “universal melancholy” because of the former President’s death. And yet her drawing room, two days later, drew its largest crowd ever, upwards of a hundred ladies whose grief, she noted wryly, “did not deprive them of taste in ornamenting their white dresses.” But if the black fans, flowers, plumes, and swags of ribbon commemorated the death of the beloved statesman with a touch more elegance than was seemly under the circumstances, Abigail was understanding. As she expected this to be the last winter in Philadelphia that would afford them the opportunity to wear “gay attire,” the ladies, she said sympathetically, “intended shining.”7
Initially, Abigail’s own tribute to Washington was luminous with appreciative insights, though characteristically not without critical edge. The whole was formally conceived as though meant to be addressed to the nation at large, instead of an audience of one, Mrs. Cranch:
This Event so important to our Country at this period, will be universally deplored. No Man ever lived, more deservedly beloved and Respected. The praise and I may say addulation which followed his administration for several years, never made him forget that he was a Man, subject to the weakness and frailty attached to humane Nature. He never grew giddy, but ever mantaind a modest diffidence of his own talents, and if that was an error, it was of the amiable and engageing kind, tho it might lead sometimes to a want of decisions in some great Emergencys.
Having hinted at Washington’s possible flaws with masterful subtlety, Abigail was perhaps somewhat less delicate in calling attention, at long last, to her husband’s attributes. She continued:
If we look through the whole tennor of his Life, History will not produce to us a Parrallel. Heaven has seen fit to take him from us. Our Mourning is sincere, in the midst of which, we ought not to lose sight of the Blessings we have enjoy’d and still partake of, that he was spaired to us, untill he saw a successor filling his place, persueing the same system which he had adopted, and that in times which have been equally dangerous and Critical. It becomes not me to say more upon this Head.8
Undoubtedly genuine in her professed appreciation of “the Man who united all Hearts,” Abigail wearied of a mourning period that was too long and fawning. In the words of one writer she admired, “Our Washington’s Character was whiter than it was brilliant,” yet the brilliance had “drugged” all beholders. By the end of the year, Abigail was convinced that “sufficient” had been done to express grateful feelings of a people toward the “Character of even a Washington.” Her worst fears that things had gone “too far” were surpassed when she read the eulogy delivered in Newburyport’s First Presbyterian Meeting House, referring to the “saviour” of the country, who, “having reached the summit of human perfection,” had “quitted the region of human glory.”9
Abigail had even less tolerance for the “Mad Rant of Bombast” heard by parishioners in Charlestown and reprinted in the Boston Centinel. In twelve pages and twenty-three paragraphs, Rosewell Messinger assured readers that while the sun of the firmament was not darkened, the foundations of the earth did not tremble, the rocks did not fall to dust or mountains melt away, nonetheless the veil of liberty’s temple was “rent in twain” with the retirement through the portals of everlasting fame of their “spotless high-priest.” The most trying passage for Abigail must have been one suggesting that grief must pierce the center of Adams’s heart now that the “prophet” with whom he walked had departed, and offering the hope that God would make him “Columbia’s second Savior.”10
By January 28, 1800, Abigail was clearly out of patience:
To no one Man in America, belongs the Epithet of Saviour of his Country That Washingtons Character, when we take into view, his Education, the place of his Birth, and the various scenes in which he was call’d to act, exhibits a most uncommon assemblage of Modesty, Moderation, Magninimity, fortititud, perseverence and disinterestedness, will be most readily allowed.…
However, Americans needed to be reminded of the simple fact that in her estimation, “at no time, did the fate of America rest upon the Breath of even a Washington, and those who assert these things, are Ignorant of the spirit of their countrymen, and whilst they strive to exalt one character, degrade that of their Country.”11
After six weeks had been devoted to honoring George Washington—more time than was accorded kings or princesses, to her knowledge—Abigail came to terms with how his memory might best be honored: “Wise and judicious observations upon his Character are those only which will out live the badges of mourning. Simple Truth is his best his greatest Eulogy. She alone can render his Fame immortal.”12
* * *
More than the melting snows or the flowing rivers, it was the weeping willow that Abigail hailed as the “first harbinger” of spring. Usually, the sight of the hopeful yellows and promising greens renewed her spirits. But this time they saddened her, and each time she rode by them she was reminded of the final farewell she must say to this city of bricks and crowds and ceremony that she had learned to live with in comfort. The idea of leaving a place for the last time made her pensive. “It is like burying a Friend,” she said. But leave-taking was always difficult, especially when the alternative seemed particularly unsuitable. The city of Washington, from all she could tell, was “ill calculated for the residence of such a Body as Congress”; the houses, she had heard, were “so distant, the streets so miry, and the markets so ill supplied.”13
By March, Abigail’s sense of displacement was dramatized by political deliberations that sapped her of optimism and cramped her perspective. She was disdainful of congressional debates prolonged for electioneering purposes. If, for example, Virginia’s “Little Johnny” Randolph lived to be the age of an antediluvian, his services would never be worth the cost of his lingering “magpye” chatter on the merits of disbanding what he insulted as a “mercenary” army, an army of “ragamuffins.” This tiresomely zealous congressman, who looked no more than a lad of seventeen or eighteen, was like the fly on the wheel in the Aesop fable, as far as Abigail was concerned, calling attention to the dust he had raised. She was even more discouraged by the “contrived business” of the anti-Federalists and wondered just how long the “Ghost of Nash” would be allowed to haunt Congress. Brooding over the handling of the Nash-Robbins case, which she did repeatedly, she was more and more convinced of the shameful way the Jacobins wasted every “subterfuge, mean art & declamation” on the subject, and “not from a Love of Justice, or apprehension that a fellow creature was unjustly punished, but merely to hold out to their party that the President had Encroached upon the Judiciary, and assumed an influence which was unconstitutional.”14
Abigail knew the truth to be different, and that the President had acted “in strict conformity” with Jay’s Treaty. She was shattered that her husband should suffer such political turbulence, let alone such virulent criticism, especially when the nation he governed enjoyed as much peace, quiet, security, and happiness as any people could boast. Abigail’s recommendation for a solution to the insulting dilemmas of political life indeed verified her admission that her mind was not in a cheerful state, or a particularly hardy one. Her talk of limiting elections was pitiful testimony to the crushing pressure that was the eternal price to be paid by those who occupied high office. Sadly, though momentarily, the democratic way had failed her. It was her suggestion to Mrs. Cranch that “one or two more Elections will be quite sufficient I believe to convince this people that no engine can be more fatally employd than frequent popular Elections, to corrupt and destroy the morals of the people.…”15
* * *
On May 2, Abigail held her last drawing room in Philadelphia. The same day, her trunks were loaded, along with newly carved marble hearths and special jams, on a boat bound for Boston. Though she was extremely busy winding up her affairs in Philadelphia, planning, supervising, and even staffing her ambitiously expanded house in Quincy from afar, political questions of the day had never received her closer scrutiny. “As present appearances indicate,” this would be the last time she would live or visit in Philadelphia. Latest reports were extremely sobering, and obviously anxiety-provoking, she told Mrs. Cranch:
That New York would be the balance in the skaill, scaill, (is it right now? it does not look so), New York by an effort to bring into their assembly anti-federal Men, will make also an antifederal ticket for President; and this will give all the power sought by that Party, which at the sacrifice of all that Good men hold dear and sacred, they are determined upon.16
Abigail bitterly doled out blame for the President’s unfairly compromised position to Cooper and Randolph, and to William Edward Livingston, the representative from New York who had introduced a resolution calling for examination of the presidential papers pertaining to Jay’s Treaty with England. The “host” of James Thomson Callender’s lies about the President, circulated in The Prospect Before Us, wrought irrevocable damage, according to Abigail. The Scottish “wretch” warned readers about taking their chances “between Adams, war, and beggary, and Jefferson, peace and competency.” He also made savage references to the President as “that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness,” and, worse, insisted “the people of the United States have a million good reasons for wishing to see a peacable, a constitutional, and a speedy termination of the reign of Mr. Adams.”17
Unfortunately, Abigail did not have to look to the likes of Callender for sources of defection. Her cryptic paragraph to her cousin William Smith only hinted at the insidious turmoil within the President’s Cabinet. On May 16 she wrote: “You will learn that great Changes have taken place in the Cabinet—some will mourn, some will rejoice, Some will blame others will confuse, all this was foreseen.” This was not quite true. Neither Abigail nor John indicated any knowledge of Hamilton’s hope that Adams would be succeeded by Washington; his conspiracy had been foiled only by the latter’s death. Nor was it probable that either realistically suspected the breadth of the network of opponents rallied by Hamilton—or their treacherous capabilities. Yet a day of reckoning did inevitably arrive. The President’s explosive condemnation of his Secretary of War, whose deference to Hamilton insulted his own judgment, precipitated McHenry’s offer to resign, which was readily accepted on May 5, effective three weeks later. Emboldened by this first step in fortifying his staff, the President’s next move was the dismissal of Pickering. Proud of their replacements—John Marshall of Virginia as Secretary of State, Samuel Dexter of Massachusetts as Secretary of War—the President had no knowledge, apparently, that in his retention of Oliver Wolcott as Secretary of the Treasury, his political life was still terminally threatened.18
Before Congress adjourned on May 13, each party held a caucus of congressmen to select its candidates for President and Vice-President. The Federalists nominated President Adams and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and the Republicans nominated Jefferson and Aaron Burr. There was nothing about the “Election Storm” that promised Abigail the sun she craved. Gloom hung “heavey” at her heart. As one who “must” share all the malice and reproach accorded her “better half,” knowing how sincerely his measures were meant to promote the best interests of his country, she was openly dismayed by the “tongues of falshood.” Surely, she thought, she suffered enough anxiety to humble a prouder heart than hers.19
* * *
Summer in Quincy by no means brought the tranquillity Abigail sought. She was troubled by news from Berlin, five months past, that Louisa Catherine had suffered her fourth miscarriage. She fretted about Thomas and whether this “good, amiable, and virtuous” son would succeed in business. But most of all, she concerned herself with events as they affected the President, none more provocative than the trials held in Philadelphia the summer of 1800. They were conducted by Judge Samuel Chase, a native of Maryland, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and appointee of George Washington to the Supreme Court on January 26, 1796, and were thought to make a mockery of the First Amendment.20
Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont was sentenced to jail for four months and fined because he had protested Adams’s “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation and selfish avarice.” Thomas Cooper was convicted of tending to incite “insurrection against the government” because he had attacked Adams for enlarging the army and navy and because, in Chase’s words, he had “intended to mislead the ignorant and inflame their minds against the President and influence their votes in the next election.” Though William Duane (successor to Benjamin Franklin Bache, who had died before coming to trial) managed, by legal machinations, to keep out of jail for his anti-Federalist attacks, he would eventually be indicted the following October.21
However much Abigail thought she was prepared for the worst—she had predicted an entire year of abuse and scandal, “enough to ruin & corrupt the minds and morals of the best people in the world”—she was continually unnerved by the severity of the diverse attacks on the President. There were Hamiltonian factions everywhere striving for the election of Pinckney over Adams, spurred by their leader’s vow to do anything, at all costs, even at the price of electing Jefferson, to prevent Adams’s reelection. The Hamiltonians’ complaints were numerous: both the President’s mission to France and the treaty with Great Britain diminished the military and, therefore, Hamilton’s ambitions to command a grand army; the Alien and Sedition Acts had been controversial from the start; the President’s handling of the Robbins-Nash trial was unacceptable; his secrecy and independence were intolerable.22
The President’s decision in May 1800 to pardon John Fries, the Pennsylvanian charged with treason and sentenced to death for inciting hundreds of men to rebel against a federal property tax instituted two summers before in preparation for war with France, would prove unpopular with members of both parties. The death penalty was shocking punishment, in the President’s opinion; it required “the closest attention of my best understanding, and will prove a severe trial to my heart,” he had written Colonel Pickering during the latter’s last days in office.23
Pickering, too, declared the idea of taking a man’s life “painful,” but felt a “calm and solid satisfaction,” he said, “that an opportunity is now presented, in executing the just sentence of the law.” Wolcott backed Pickering: the execution would “inspire the well-disposed with confidence in the government, and the malevolent with terror”; the execution would “be enough to show the power of the laws to punish.” To Pickering and Wolcott, and to Judge Chase, who confirmed the death sentence on retrial, the President submitted a series of questions on May 20 in an attempt to weigh other opinions before arriving at his own decision to free Fries. “It highly concerns the people of the United States, and especially the federal government,” he had said, “that, in the whole progress and ultimate conclusion of this affair, neither humanity be unnecessarily afflicted, nor public justice be essentially violated, nor the public safety endangered.” Federalists called his act of pardon a “fatal concession to his enemies.” His enemies, however, viewed his reversal of their considered opinion as still another insult, another example of his intolerable independence, another proof that his reelection was undesirable.24
The word was out—confidentially, of course—that “Mr. Adams must be sacrificed.” Hamilton charged himself with compiling the evidence, freely given by such persons as the recently unemployed Wolcott, who believed “it would be a disgrace to the federal party, to permit the re-election of Mr. Adams.” Hamilton could count on Wolcott’s cooperation “in every reasonable measure” for effecting the election of Pinckney in place of Adams.25
By the end of October, with the subversive assistance of Wolcott and others, Hamilton’s paper, “The Public Conduct and Character of John Adams Esq., President of the United States,” was complete. Though meant for Federalist consumption, it was, thanks to Aaron Burr’s mysterious interception during its printing stage, destined for a far wider audience than originally anticipated. Avidly dispersed by the opposition press, Hamilton’s document was considered by the despised editor Willian Duane as having done “more mischief to the parties concerned than all the labors of the Aurora.”26
Perhaps the strangest aspect of what John Quincy would call the “strange history” of Hamilton’s paper was its author’s failure to realize that the product of such warped logic would destroy not only Adams but Pinckney and the Federalist cause at large. Hamilton, leaving no insult to the imagination, stated with breathtaking boldness that though he did not deny Adams’s “patriotism, integrity, and, even talents of a certain kind,” he would be deficient in candor if he concealed his conviction that the President did “not possess the talents adapted to the Administration of Government,” and that there were “great and intrinsic defects in his character, which unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate.…”27
Hamilton had reached his conclusion, he assured his readers, after “careful observations” of Adams several communications, of his conduct of foreign affairs and so-called diplomatic negotiations, and of his “serious errors” of administration. After intense scrutiny, Hamilton had concluded that Adams was “a man of an imagination sublimated and eccentric; propitious neither to the regular display of sound judgment, nor to steady perseverance in a systematic plan of conduct.…” Hamilton had begun, in fact, he wrote, “to perceive what has been since too manifest, that to this defect are added the unfortunate foibles of a vanity without bounds, and a jealousy capable of discoloring every object.”28
In sustaining his assault, Hamilton had turned his quill into an all but lethal weapon. Mr. Adams was responsible for “undermining” the government; there was “real cause to apprehend” that it might “totter, if not fall, under his future auspices.” And yet, most grudgingly, having vented all his prejudices and insults, Hamilton granted that he resolved not to advise withholding a single vote from the President. It was even apparent to him, he added, that the majority of Federalists, “for want of sufficient knowledge of facts, are not convinced of the expediency of relinquishing him.” And finally, after dismembering his target, Hamilton perversely stopped short of burying him. “Reluctantly,” Hamilton decided he would not oppose Adams’s reelection, despite his “unqualified conviction of his unfitness for the station contemplated.…” Party loyalty had apparently won the day. He would not entirely abandon the President because of the “great importance of cultivating harmony among the supporters of the Government on whose firm union hereafter will probably depend the preservation of order, tranquillity, liberty, property; the security of every social and domestic blessing.”29
The President’s immediate reaction to Hamilton’s cruel paper was remarkably magnanimous, at least outside the family realm. He would wait nine years before answering Hamilton in a series of eighteen letters published in the Boston Patriot. More vengeful with age, or perhaps freer to speak his mind, he would, still later, refer to Hamilton as “a bastard Bratt of a Scotch Pedlar.” But for the time being he was almost generous. “I am not his enemy, and never was,” the President had written to a friend on December 3, 1800. “I have not adored him, like his idolaters, and have had great cause to disapprove of some of his politics. He has talents, if he would correct himself, which might be useful.” The President insisted he would dread neither Hamilton’s “menaces” nor his pamphlets, and observed that Washington had been similarly threatened. He had nevertheless reached a conclusion regarding Hamilton: “There is more burnish … on the outside, than sterling silver in the substance.”30
* * *
As a result of Hamilton’s attack, Abigail was, not unexpectedly, even more defensive of her husband. She wrote again of the President’s “pure views and intentions,” of his walking “steadfastly on, tho the shafts and arrows of disappointed ambition are hurled at him from every quarter.” She wrote Mrs. Cranch that she could not speak for the President regarding “the little Gen’ll,” as she referred to Hamilton, “because no one else knows all the circumstances, or can deny what he has published for facts; many of which are as grose lies as Duane has told in the Aurora.…” Someday soon, she promised her sister, the two of them would laugh at the folly and pity the weakness, vanity, and ambitious views of Hamilton, and there would be a time, she hoped, when Hamilton might appear “still more odious than he now does.” For now, however, Abigail was resigned to the fact that the damage was done. The voice was unanimous in all quarters: “It is Hamilton has done his own business.”31
Repeatedly of late, Abigail mentioned “trials of various kinds” that seemed reserved for her grey hairs and declining years, and talked of how she counted on a “strong imagination” as a refuge from sorrow, as a “kindly solace for a feeling heart.” In the case of her son Charles, it almost seemed as though his death was to be her refuge from sorrow over his life. Passing through New York on her way from Quincy to Philadelphia the second week in November, Abigail had realized that Charles was dying. She had visited him at the home of a friend, where his wife, Sally, was tending him. Bloated with disease, sometimes deranged, her son was mortally ill, beyond hope of recovery, the doctor said, and she knew then that she had seen him for the last time.32
Three weeks later, on November 30, Charles, an alcoholic wreck, was dead of complications of liver and lung disease and dropsy. “Weep with me,” Abigail beseeched Mrs. Cranch, “over the Grave of a poor unhappy child who cannot now add an other pang to those which have peirced my Heart for several years past.…” Sorrowful as she was, Abigail faced the truth of Charles’s last years. She was consoled by knowing that the once “darling” of his Father’s heart was “beloved, in spite of his errors”; people spoke in grief and sorrow of his “habits.” Grasping for straws of comfort, Abigail noted that Charles, even near death, had not looked like an intemperate man. Though bloated, he was not red.33
* * *
It was just as they were about to sit down to supper that the grandsons, William and John Smith, who were boarding with Aunt Elizabeth Peabody, in Haverhill, heard Jefferson announced as successor to their grandfather. As a result, neither could swallow a bit of food; their aunt scarcely managed better. Both of the colonel’s sons recognized their economic dependence on their grandfather; it was John who wondered, now that their benefactor was jobless, who would carry them through college.34
The monetary issue was also John Quincy’s urgent concern, but for entirely different reasons. Even though his father had managed his properties prudently, he had hardly grown rich in public service. He wrote to Thomas from Berlin on December 20, 1800, authorizing “all and every part” of his own property to be placed under his brother’s management, “whether of principle or interest,” as subject to his father’s disposal. “You will not mention to him that I have given you this instruction,” John Quincy had added, “for I wish not to make a show of offering service where it is not wanted.…”35
Abigail’s own reaction to having her husband voted out of office was complicated and difficult, no matter to what degree she had prepared herself for the outcome. Despite “Peace with France,—a Revenue increased beyond any former years—our prospects brightening on every side,” her husband was rejected. “What must be the thoughts and the reflections of those, who, calling themselves Federalists, have placed their country in a situation full of dangers and perils; who have wantonly thrown away the blessings Heaven seemed to have in reserve for them?” she wondered. She blamed New York as the source of the defection, and specifically the intrigues of two men. In her opinion, Hamilton had sowed the seeds of discontent and division among the Federalists, and Burr had seized the lucky moment of mounting into power on Jefferson’s shoulders.36
According to Abigail’s analysis, South Carolina’s abandonment was also fundamental to the Federalists’ loss to the Jacobins. Spring’s “advance skirmishes” had failed, despite Hamilton’s encouragement, to persuade Pinckney’s state to elect its native son. When votes were counted, Pinckney had won sixty-four, one less than Adams, and far from the hoped-for mandate that would have elected him President. With seventy-three votes counted equally for Jefferson and for Burr, Abigail was reminded of an “old and just” proverb: “Never halloo until you are out of the woods.” The Federalists had been gulled by Southern promises that had “no more faith, when made to Northern men,” she said wistfully, “than lover’s vows.”37
In dealing with the consequences of the election in her private life, Abigail was sensible and even gracious. She confided to her son Thomas that for herself and for the family she had few regrets: “At my age, and with my bodily infirmities I shall be happier at Quincy. Neither my habits, nor my education or inclinations, have led me to an expensive style of living, so that on that score I have little to mourn over. If I did not rise with dignity, I can at least fall with ease, which is the more difficult task.” She was, however, concerned about her husband, and told Thomas her reasons: “I wish your father’s circumstances were not so limited and circumscribed, as they must be, because he cannot indulge himself in those improvements upon his farm, which his inclination leads him to, and which would serve to amuse him, and contribute to his health.”38
As absorbed as she was by personal and immediate concerns, however, even in defeat she remained the eloquent patriot above all:
I feel not any resentment against those who are coming into power, and only wish the future administration of the government may be as productive of the peace, happiness, and prosperity of the nation, as the two former ones have been. I leave to time the unfolding of a drama. I leave to posterity to reflect upon the times past; and I leave them characters to contemplate.
Her own intentions were clear; she expected to return to Quincy as “conveniently” as she could. As it was John’s thought that they retire together, “and not one before the other,” it was mid-February before she headed north.39
The day after he arrived in Washington, November 2, John had issued an invitation to Abigail: “The building is in a state to be habitable, and now we wish for your company.” He was obviously moved by the potential, if not the immediate, physical splendor and political significance of what he referred to as the President’s House: “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house, and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof!” He would not attempt a description of the house, however, telling Abigail, “You will form the best idea of it from inspection.”40
The wise husband was not to be disappointed. Abigail left Philadelphia for the “unseen abode” with a party of nine borne by ten horses, and arrived at her destination on Sunday, November 16. Woods were all that Abigail saw from Baltimore to Washington, except for one windowless cottage. It was, indeed, coming into “a new country,” negotiating through the ten-mile clearing of trees and tree stumps, circled by wilderness, however romantic.41
Within the city (“which is only so in name”), she seemed rather surprised to find that enough buildings had been built to accommodate Congress, but, as they were scattered rather than close by, she saw “no great comfort” for their inhabitants. She could not, however, once ensconced in the President’s House, deny the fascination of her view of the Potomac River and its thriving traffic. Nor could she fail to be somewhat awed by the “grand and superb scale” of the “great castle,” her temporary home, or be dismayed that there was not a sign of a fenced yard without, and not a single completed apartment within; the main staircase, furthermore, would not be up that winter. Necessities were to be tended first. Twelve fireplaces must be lighted to alleviate the chilling dampness; there was no place to hang the laundry for the time being but in “the great unfinished audience Room”; replacements were needed for broken or stolen china and looking glasses only tall enough for dwarfs, she insisted, before she established the drawing rooms the ladies clamored for.42
A demanding perfectionist as usual, when it came to organizing her household, Abigail was hardly satisfied by either the number or the abilities of her servants. Even though she said thirteen white servants were worth twenty blacks (it would take thirty to manage house, garden, and stables when complete), she was not impressed. She was quick to criticize the former for their general lack of diligence, enterprise and energy, as she was the latter for listlessness, indolence, and “apparent want of capacity for business.” As always, it was Briesler who seemed to pave the way to somewhat gracious living; in this instance, he located nine cords of wood, two hundred bushels of coal, and the bells that were so essential for communication in the vast and understaffed household.43
As much as Abigail complained about housekeeping and social obligations—it was a day’s work to market and to return calls, especially to those who lived in Georgetown, the dirtiest hole she had ever seen to trade or live in, and an absolute quagmire after a rain—she was in an adventurous spirit. She was proud of her ability to content herself almost anywhere for three months, and she was entirely appreciative of her neighbors’ cordial attention, manifested by Major Custis’s welcoming note, Mrs. Lewis’s haunch of venison, and regards with “love” and an invitation to Mount Vernon from Mrs. Washington.44
The city of Washington and the President’s House were, after all, Abigail understood full well, not built for immediate gratification, but “for the ages.” As critical as she appeared, she meant to hurt no one. She specifically asked that her comments not be repeated. “You must keep all this to yourself,” she told Mrs. Smith. Instead, she would have her daughter, when asked how her mother liked Washington, say that the “situation is beautiful, which is true.” And even now she found the crimson-draped upstairs oval room “handsome,” and thought that when it was completed, it would be “beautiful.” Essentially, her complaints about her living situation, taken as a whole, came down to this very matter of the finished and the unfinished. The meticulous housewife who made an art of supplying, staffing, and even building her home sincerely believed things would have proceeded more efficiently in Washington in other hands—Northern hands, specifically. “If the twelve years, in which this place has been considered as the future seat of government, had been improved, as they would have been if in New England, very many of the present inconveniences would have been removed,” she had assured Mrs. Smith.45
Abigail suffered from feverish chills, rheumatism, and depression, and yet she could barely tear herself away from Washington before February 13, “the great important day” when it was expected that the future President (“future Ruler,” she called him) would be known. Though she recognized present politics as a “mere turn penny,” and professed to leave speculation to others more closely involved, she was as deeply absorbed as ever in the personalities who governed her nation’s affairs. She turned over and over in her mind the merits and demerits of Jefferson and Burr, the principals in the drama of the “present Crisis.” She was hardly clear in her own mind as to how she hoped the House of Representatives would enforce their responsibility to differentiate between the candidates initially tied by equal votes for the President’s office.46
“Long acquaintance, private friendship, and the full belief that the private Character of one” was “much purer than the other” inclined her toward Jefferson. Also, his age and experience seemed to give him prior right. And yet she was too much of a conservative to be comfortable with this choice, with the “visionary system of Government” that would undoubtedly be adopted under Jefferson. Worrying about the resulting “Evils” that would affect the country, she was sometimes inclined toward Aaron Burr, the more “bold, daring and decisive Character” who would support, she believed, the present system for a longer time. Shakespeare’s King John seemed to exemplify what she was talking about:
A Sceptre, snatch’d with an unruly hand
Must be as boistrously maintain’d as gain’d;
And he that stands upon a slipp’ry place
Makes nice of no vile hold to stay him up.47
There were other differences between the candidates that disquieted her. Neither one met Abigail’s standards on the question of religion. Jefferson made “no pretentions to the belief of an all wise and supreme Governour of the World.” He was not, therefore, in Abigail’s opinion, a believer in the Christian system. And though she would not accuse him of being an atheist, she rather thought he believed religion was only useful for political purposes. As for outward forms, she had once heard him dismiss them as “mere Mummery.” Burr, on the other hand, was hardly a desirable alternative. Though he might be more of a believer, Abigail was convinced, because of his practices, that he had more to answer for.48
Members of the House of Representatives began to cast their votes on February 11 and were finished six days later, on the thirty-sixth ballot, when Jefferson won the backing of ten states, one more than was essential to his election. But Abigail had not been able to wait for the final count. She was persuaded to leave before the roads were even more tortuous, and by Friday, February 13, she had safely reached Baltimore, in spite of her niece’s pleas to turn back. Abigail seemed in fine humor, and nearly smug as she reported to William Shaw that in answer to her companion’s nervous queries about how she could travel such “horrid” roads through such “shocking wilderness” without some gentleman with her, other than the coachman, she had laughed, scolded, and “bragged” that she was too independent to want a gentleman always at her side. Though she allowed it would have been “very agreable” to have one along, she explained that she was “accustomed to get through many a trying scene and combat many difficulties alone.”49
John was to follow Abigail, he promised; he would begin his five-hundred-mile trip home on March 4, as soon as he had done with unfinished business. Meanwhile, he was burdened with preparations for his leave-taking, with nominations of judges and consuls and other officers. March 3 found him signing commissions of his new appointees under the Judiciary Act passed on February 13. By appointing John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and others whom Jefferson deemed his “most ardent political enemies,” John committed, at least in his successor’s opinion, the most provocative, perverse act of all his term in office. It was the “one act” of his life, “and one only,” that Jefferson would claim as a source of “personal displeasure,” as “personally unkind.” It was “but common justice,” Jefferson would explain, to leave a successor free to make his own choices.50
Unquestionably, John had concerned himself profoundly with the realities of “total relinquishment” of public life. For all his yearning for Penn’s Hill, for his trees and flowers and fences and rocks, he was enormously apprehensive when they were almost at his fingertips. What should he do with himself? he wondered, posing the question repeatedly to many of his friends. “Something I must do or ennui will rain upon me in bucketts,” he had confided to Cotton Tufts the past December. Would books and farms answer his needs? Or foddering his cattle morning and evening? Or a walk every noon to Penn’s Hill? Perhaps, if he had enough money, he might work at his farming, but clearly he did not. Nor was the bar available. He claimed to have forgotten all his law and lost his organs of speech, and besides, he had given all his law books away. Suffused with worry, he was preparing for the worst, fearing that he would suffer another trial when he came to exchange the routine of domestic life, without much exercise, for a life of distant voyages in which he had been engaged for forty-two years.51
John came home to the stillness of Quincy and his shrunken realm on March 23 to find one hundred loads of seaweed in his yard, to be used as fertilizer. With a certain bitterness he was reminded of another wayfarer. “I thought I had made a good exchange,” he wrote to Samuel Dexter, “if Ulysses is an orthodox authority in this case, which I do not believe, of honors and virtues for manure.”52
* * *
For months it was not only John but Abigail who worried about adjustment to rural life. Elaborating on concerns already mentioned to her son Thomas, she talked to others about John’s being too old to have further opportunities to labor in the bustling world, and said his “small means” did not promise a great deal. And though she dwelt on the “fervent Wish” that she and John be allowed to lead “peaceable and quiet Lives” from now on, she too did not find it easy to relinquish power. As she explained to Elizabeth: “As one of the principle pleasures of my Life has been to do good according to my ability with the means indulged me; my sole regret, as it personally respects myself is, that those means will in future be so greatly curtailed, and limited.…”53
Just as she had trusted that the “wish and the will” to help others would not forsake her in private life, so Abigail trusted she would behave with grace in other trying circumstances. She had no “disposition” to seclude herself from society just because she had met with unkind or ungrateful returns from some of its members. She vowed to have the discipline not to become “querilious” with the world, “not to molest or disturb the administration of the new government”—provided it did not adopt measures “ruinous” to her country. With inspired vision she wished “for the preservation of the Government, and a wise administration of it. In the best situation, with the wisest head and firmest Heart, it will be surrounded with perplexities, dangers and troubles, that are little conceived of by those into whose Hands it is like to fall.”54
Certainly there was no reason to question Abigail’s idealized dream of her future role. But as clover is to the bee, so politics was to Abigail. In May, settled in Quincy, possibly inspired by such an abundance of flowers and greenery, she was her own vigorously opinionated self. Her view of the United States, as of spring 1801, was guarded: “If we do not look down and pitty Things, we have equal reason to commisirate an infatuated deluded multitude who are hastning upon themselves more missery than they have enjoyed of tranquility & happiness for twelve years past.” And her prediction for the future was indeed pessimistic: “Measures are in agitiation which will darken our Hemisphere, and overspread the whole Horizon; and the multitude are driving, not knowing the Destruction which must overwhelm us in one common calamity.”55
More cheerful, another day, Abigail thanked Colonel Smith for his present of raspberry bushes and a pot of strawberry vines. She also asked that he give a message to his wife: “Tell her I have commenced my operation of dairywoman; and she might see me, at five o’clock in the morning skimming my milk.”56