TWENTY-TWO
Faithful Are the Wounds
Abigail “trembled” for their safety, and now, “God be praised,” John Quincy, Louisa, and their five-month-old infant, George Washington, had docked in Philadelphia on September 4, 1801, after a fifty-eight-day passage from Hamburg. Naval officers carried this welcome news to the Adamses’ Quincy door on September 12, and John responded with instant hospitality. Accountable for John Quincy’s return—to save him possible embarrassment with the incumbent administration, he had instructed John Marshall to prepare letters for his recall from Prussia the previous February—the father wrote that he could “hardly wait” to see him and his family. Further, he hoped John Quincy would consider his parents’ house as his home, for himself, his “lady,” his son, and for their servants and domestics. With somewhat oracular cadence, he had added, “We can accommodate you all as well as Destiny intends that you and I ought to be accommodated, at least until you have Time to deliberate your future arrangements.”1
Eleven days later, Abigail sent her special “Welcome, welcome” to her “Dear Son” after a seven-year absence. She was concerned about the effect the sudden change would have on him and his family, and about their exposure to the prevalent fever. Implicit in her abiding solicitude for her son was concern for her daughter-in-law Louisa. She now knew a great deal about Louisa and feared for her. Louisa’s difficult confinement the past April had made Abigail anxious for her son “in all respects.” She thought of him as “burdened” by his “poor weake and feeble wife and Boy” and confided as much to Thomas, especially now that she anticipated “how many cares of Body and mind” John Quincy would encounter “to Begin anew the World in a profession he never loved, in a place which promised him no great harvest, where there are so many reapers.”2
Abigail was plain-spoken on all counts. “Mrs. Adams is going to a place, different from all she has ever yet visited, and amongst a people where it is impossible for her to be too guarded,” she wrote on September 23. Furthermore, “every syllable she utters” would be received with “carping malice; such is the spirit of the party.” Abigail’s concise explanation was penetrating, nevertheless. Louisa’s family “have been very basely traduced—There are persons no doubt hurrying after Mr. Johnson’s office.” Abigail referred to Louisa’s family, living in pressed circumstances in Washington, her father “very very much broke in spirits,” supporting his family as Superintendant of Stamps, a position he owed to John’s presidential largesse.3
Abigail hoped that Mr. Johnson would retain his post in the new administration, but meanwhile it was not only Louisa but John who must keep vigilant. “You too my son must look for your share of calumny and arm yourself against it by patience temperance and moderation, and,” she concluded, “by applying yourself solely to your own private affairs.” Not only personal but political tides surged against this vaunted son. His mother despaired over the humiliating prospect of a mind “so richly stored” for employments of the highest kind, obliged to go to the “drugery” of law. That the “post of honour” during the ruling administration was a private station was hardly consonant with her ideals of patriotic service. Despite bitterness toward those who had thwarted her husband’s career, she recalled with pride the “refined sense of duty” that had led to John’s sacrifice (and therefore hers), in the “great interest of the public.”4
On their arrival in Philadelphia the couple had separated, John Quincy to go to Quincy and, as he explained to his parents, Louisa and the baby to spend a few weeks in Washington with her family. In both cases the reunions proved difficult. John Quincy’s “inexpressible delight” at “finding” his parents once more was severely diminished by the feeble state of his mother’s health. Louisa felt the “great emotional strain” of her family meeting almost too much for all of them. That her “very much altered” papa seemed quite enchanted with George, and would seldom let him out of his hands, was somewhat consoling.5
During their brief separation, John Quincy assured Louisa on several occasions that both his mother and father would receive her in Quincy with “most cordial affection.” He also urged her to bring her sister Caroline with her to pass the winter, as his parents would be happy to see the latter as well. Further, until they were settled, Louisa’s stay in Quincy would contribute, he said, “to make this spot more the abode of happiness.” In this series of tender letters to his “best beloved,” John Quincy wished to be remembered “most kindly” and “affectionately” to her parents, sent “ten thousand kisses to George,” and guaranteed his wife that he was her own “to the last gasp.” Expectations heightened, John Quincy was not alone in his appreciation of Louisa. Thomas, charmed by her, wrote to tell his mother she would be “pleased with the sprightliness and vivacity” of John Quincy’s wife; “when she is in only tolerable health, her spirits are abundant.”6
Unfortunately, Louisa was not in “tolerable health.” She suffered a fever, fatigue, cramps in her hands, and “unusual agitation of my spirits,” undoubtedly aggravated by this intimate encounter with her compromised family. Furthermore, her troubled papa “had so set his heart upon receiving you,” Louisa wrote John Quincy, that he would not let her go to Quincy until her husband came to fetch her. In response, John “resolved to indulge my own inclinations,” to please his father-in-law and, more important, to assuage his apprehensive wife. In late autumn he journeyed to Washington to bring his “dearest Louisa” home to Quincy, where she remained until their move to Boston, the week before Christmas 1801.7
Louisa suffered an alarming cough and pain in her chest, and was confined to the house during her entire visit. She remained ill, despite being bled and blistered. Dismayed by her daughter-in-law’s pitiful state, the “frame … so slender” and “constitution so delicate,” Abigail harbored “mean fears” that Louisa “will be of short duration.” Her fears for Louisa, however, were subordinate to those for John Quincy. Abigail had reached the anguished conclusion that her son’s constant state of anxiety on his wife’s behalf added “a weight to his brow” which years alone could not have effected “in double the space.”8
Both Abigail and Louisa left separate versions behind of those perilous weeks in Quincy. Abigail’s are recorded in her immediate correspondence. Louisa’s corrosive first impressions are summarized beginning July 1, 1840, when, it is essential to remember, she set out at sixty-five to recollect them in Adventures of a Nobody. Adventures, Louisa’s third autobiographical sketch, both substantiates and contradicts her earlier Record of a Life; or, My Story, begun July 23, 1825. Louisa, then fifty, claimed “no pretentions to be a writer and no desire to appear anything more than a mere commonplace person with a good memory and just observation.”9
Before reading Louisa’s Adventures, it is also imperative to recall the author’s emotional composition at this period in her life. In later years, “lagging hours” hung on her “with a tedious weight,” producing “too vivid and too painful contemplation of the past.” Louisa was pathetically aware of a “constitutional irritability” that was “trying to her friends and painful to myself,” and “disagreeable” to all who lived with her. Few, Louisa supposed, “laboured harder” than she to “correct their faults so keenly” that she might not “burthen” those whose happiness she most desired. Adventures, she granted, was written with the “sincere consciousness” of her “defects.”10
Memories, once unlocked, were haunting and insidious. Louisa illuminated her introduction to Quincy in-laws, relatives, and neighbors and their customs of worship, dining, and dress with brilliance, but also with relentless self-pity that bordered on madness. Always, she returned to her financial plight. She had no private expenses because she had no means and therefore no responsibility; thus, she asked, “Could it be surprising” that she was “gazed at with surprise, if not contempt?”11
It took Louisa very little time to decide that the qualifications necessary to an “accomplished Quincy lady,” were in “direct opposition” to the life she had led in London and at court in Berlin. Her “dreadful ignorance excited no sympathy,” and though Abigail gave her instructions and advice, Louisa did not “readily” learn. Worse, her strength failed her and, concluding that she was inadequate, even useless, she became “cold and reserved, and seldom spoke at all which was deemed pride.”12
If time did not bemuse Louisa’s memories, it is certain that her chaotic emotions fazed the entire family. On her first day in Quincy, Abigail’s niece, her deceased brother’s daughter Louisa Smith, would not eat her dinner and ran sobbing from the table. She was thought to be jealous “to excess” of the Adamses’ show of “too much distinction” to their daughter-in-law, according to the latter’s interpretation of this unseemly occurrence. Furthermore, Abigail’s attempts to treat John Quincy’s wife in the “kindest manner,” with special dishes and delicate preserves, were miserably rejected. Though she said she was “very grateful,” the special effort only made Louisa feel even more alien, stamping her with “unfitness,” as if she were “aparté” in the family. In perhaps the only cheerful passage of her lament, Louisa does record that the “old gentleman” took a “fancy” to her, and that “he was the only one” to do so, thereby initiating a rare relationship with John, her admirer to the end.13
When Louisa looked beyond her in-laws’ house, she found even less to admire. Her caricature of Quincy is a classic. Hindsight found her caustic in her “impressions” of Quincy:
Had I stepped into Noah’s Ark I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished. Dr. Tufts, Deacon French! Mr. Cranch! Old Uncle Peter! Capt. Beale!!! It was lucky for me that I was so much depressed, and so ill, or I should certainly have given mortal offence. Even the Church, its forms, the snuffling through the nose, the Singers, the dressing and the dinner hours, were all novelties to me; and the ceremonious partys, the manners, and the hours of meeting 1/2 past four were equally astonishing to me.14
Beyond Quincy there was the experience of Boston. Though the latter might be considered the land of learning, never would Louisa consider it the land of wit. There was something, in her opinion, “lourd et pesant” in that scientific atmosphere that destroyed all sympathy for “les folies brilliantes” that gave “a playful varnish to the sombre colourings of real Life.” Quincy and Boston were too demanding. They disallowed fantasy, which was perhaps the essence of Louisa’s being. Even at fifty, Louisa owned she would “willingly deceive myself with the idea that the world is young and innocent.”15
* * *
Louisa seems to have deceived herself concerning some of the most significant periods and relationships of her life. In her bewildered search for comprehension of her “faults” of character, truths wavered according to vantage point. At one time in her life she looked back on an idyllic infancy and youth “fraught with Bliss in the bosom of strong and unchanging Parental affection.” At another, recalling the difficult move from French to English schools in 1783, which had coincided with an attack of pleurisy, she conjured up a “serious, melancholy, and almost gloomy” ten-year-old whose mother always talked of her “awkwardness.” In this version of her youth, she became the “object of ridicule” among her classmates because she did not speak English. She had, in self-defense, developed a “hautiness and pride of character” that proved impossible for her to sublimate. As a result she was known as “Miss Proud.”16
This suffering Louisa also reminisced about her attraction to Roman Catholicism, her abhorrence of the mechanical drudgery of music and everything in the shape of work, her fondness for dancing and singing. She established the fact of her sisters’ fine health, and how little they felt the sensitivity that proved “allways” so great an obstacle to her own happiness.17
Like the pendulum of a clock, Louisa swung from one mood to another. She spoke of her “visionary education” and at another time regretted that many of the “modern studies” were not thought “requisite” to women because they had a “tendency to render them masculine.” Although in certain instances it is impossible to choose fact over fiction, in other cases, tangible evidence belies Louisa’s interpretations. To be dismissed is Louisa’s claim of learning “too quickly” that because of her father’s misfortunes, and despite John Quincy’s utmost exertions, she was “sunk” in the latter’s estimation “without a hope of ever recovering the standing that was irreparably lost.” Evidence to the contrary, on October 8, 1801, and in countless other instances, proves that John Quincy was a “devoted friend and husband” and father who wrote of his longing to kiss his infant’s “slavering lips!” As for those of the mother, he had continued, “I say nothing—let her consult my heart in her own and all that pen can write or language express will shrink to nothing.” He would “creep or wade or swim,” go to Washington by stage or land or water, in order to “fly to the arms of my best beloved under her paternal roof.”18
Louisa’s version of Abigail’s relationship with Catherine Johnson gives more cause to doubt Louisa’s veracity. Her mother, she claimed, was “excessively disliked” by Abigail, possibly because of Mrs. Johnson’s “too earnest” entreaties on behalf of her husband. As a result, Louisa guiltily supposed that the President, in appointing her father to office, had “indulged the kindly feelings of his heart contrary to the interests of his future prospects,” thereby laying the foundation for his future loss. “My own sense of the injury to himself was as strong as that of Mrs. Adams,” she concluded.19
Contrary to Louisa’s impression, her mother enjoyed a cordial relationship with Abigail, with whom she maintained a politically sophisticated correspondence until her death. Abigail had gone out of her way, upon the Johnsons’ return to the States, to invite Mrs. Johnson and her son Thomas to visit the first week in April 1800. Only passingly acquainted with Mrs. Johnson before John Quincy’s marriage, she said, she felt “a much greater and more powerful attraction” to know her more than casually since the families were “united by marriage.” She had found Mrs. Johnson, Abigail told her sister Mary, “more than an agreeable person,” in fact, “a sensible well bred woman with polite and affable manners.” She also wrote John Quincy on April 27, to ask that he “tell your Louisa, I have had the pleasure of her Mother’s and Brother’s company for the past three weeks, that her mamma looks youthful, for a grandmamma,” and how the women sat together and talked of their children “with all the delight of fond parents.” Abigail proved herself a “sympathizing Friend” at Mr. Johnson’s death in May of 1802. In her kindly condolence note she spoke of the injustice inflicted on Joshua Johnson and his family and hoped the widow might “Bind up her bleeding heart, and heal her wounded mind.”20
Louisa’s latter-day memories of Abigail, so coldly critical in some cases, may blur but can never negate the earlier years when she addressed a lifetime of letters to a “Dear Mother” from an “Affectionate Daughter.” Abigail responded in kind. Louisa always acknowledged her own inadequacy in the face of Abigail’s worthy strengths. She considered herself neither as patriotic nor as religious nor as gifted a writer. She sometimes implied indirectly that Abigail was too possessive of her grandchildren. Yet these women had a compelling bond. When Louisa was lonely, ill, and mourning the death of her infant daughter in St. Petersburg, she was “solicitious” to return home for many reasons. Among these was her need for her mother-in-law. She was quite sure that in “Mrs. Adams I should have found a comforter a friend who would pity sufferings which she would have understood.”21
* * *
Christmastime 1802 was a time to focus on Thomas’s “entanglement.” Persistent queries from friends about a Miss Ann Harrod, called Nancy, whom Thomas had known for years, launched Abigail into a grave discussion of marriage.22
Her theme was unsurprisingly constant. How could she not approve of the institution, when her own marriage was her raison d’être? She had read somewhere that “Celibacy is existance thrown away, and every unmarried day is a blank in life,” and quoted as much to Thomas. Nevertheless, she did not recommend early marriages, or ones the participants could not afford.23
Finances were fundamental to Abigail’s philosophy. In principle, when she despaired that the world was unkind to her children in its “gifts of fortune,” she consoled herself that their “virtue honour and integrity” were “riches of more value than silver and gold!” In practice, however, one could not pay bills with character alone, and Abigail’s reservations about her sons’ marriages, in all three cases, always stemmed from this most practical issue, though she argued on broader concerns. There were many ramifications to marriage. “So important an event as a connection for life” introduced into a family “a near relative with all those claims which bind society together,” claims having to do with honor, peace of mind, domestic comfort, and happiness. Abigail was somewhat defensive when she wrote Thomas on December 13, 1802, that “I have not in any instance opposed my will to the inclination of my children. I have only advised them not to hazard their happiness or that of others, by connecting themselves before they saw the path plain before them.”24
In her blunt evaluation of his brothers’ marriages, Abigail left Thomas no doubt that their paths were navigable but not ideal. “None of them had disgraced themselves or family by dissolute or unprincipled connection,” she said, nor “have any of them advanced themselves in the world by their marriages, or confered any honour, or brought any Emolument into their family by them.” In conclusion, Abigail told Thomas, “You therefore stand upon a ground of equality with them.” Having said her piece, Abigail relented. If Thomas’s “attachment” was of “so constant so persevering a nature as to be fixed upon Miss Har[r]od,” she assured her son that she had “not the smallest objection” against the young lady. “Nay,” the more she thought of this “very amiable girl,” the more she was convinced that Miss Harrod was “calculated” to make Thomas as good a wife as anyone with whom she was acquainted. “Nor,” she assured Thomas, would she be “ashamed to place her” beside either of her daughters.25
The questions of Thomas’s life at this time had to do with occupational opportunity as well as marriage. His parents were both anxious and sympathetic. Abigail offered him a small allowance, some “pin money,” and asked that he “say no more,” except to write to her. Thomas’s relationship with his mother was a close one. He was often her confidant, and sometimes she worried that she was thought to “deprecate” him in favor of John Quincy. On the contrary, Thomas was her “good and amiable,” always “dutiful and affectionate child.” He was younger, however, and hadn’t been placed in “such conspicuous stations,” she would explain, and therefore could not be “supposed to have the knowledge and experience of his Brother.”26
Thomas’s abhorrence for law was fully understood by Abigail. In her support of her son, Abigail intimated one of her rare differences of opinion with John. She knew “very well,” she told Thomas, that “it has been in compliance with the wishes of your father that all my sons studied Law—but it was contrary to my judgement, and I know it was so to your inclination.” As a lawyer, Thomas complained, he did not earn as much as a clerk, and certainly could not think of supporting a wife.27
It was not for lack of enterprise that Thomas had remained in law. The previous winter he had grasped at John Quincy’s invitation to move to New York State, to make their home on lands they would take in settlement for the discharge of Justus Smith’s notes. “It is the most promising spot on the continent for enterprize and industry,” John Quincy had written Thomas. “What say you to joining me in the plan, and going with me?” The lands promised “Independence, thrift and sport,” and represented John Quincy’s last attempt to control his own destiny. “Why should we wither away our best days, and sneak through life,” he asked, “pinch’d by penury over the black letter for the sake of a few luxurious indulgences in a large town?”28
Thomas was thirty at this amorphous period of his life. He was a ready convert to his brother’s invitation. He was prepared “only at a shortwarning” to embrace with “zeal, ardor, any practicable enterprize which may justify a renunciation of my present ill-requited labors in an ungracious profession.” Thomas, who was said to be a “handsome man, of fine manners and address, and of an agreeable vein of conversation,” was also a modest man. He had reached the amiable conclusion at this juncture in his life that “head-work is bad business, and I never was fond of it.” His capital, he thought, was chiefly “in my hands and feet.”29
John Quincy’s invitation proved fruitless, but Thomas left the law for publishing, attempting to revive a failed journal called Portfolio, to which his father and elder brother contributed. In two years’ time, Thomas was again at loose ends, out of patience with everyone, including himself. Thomas prospered in an atmosphere of affection, optimism, and approval. He was therefore emotionally unable to tolerate John Quincy’s propensity to “doubtful speculation.” Would John Quincy “leave off croaking?” he asked. Thomas appreciated the value of “anticipating … evils and dangers, the more surely to avoid them.” However, from a “constitutional infirmity of mind,” he was “stimulated most to action, not by adversity or the apprehension of it, but by the hope of reward,” he explained to his brother. “You must sometimes at least give us cheering and comfort, if you wish to see us smiling.”30
The year 1803 was decisive for this vulnerable young man. In December, reluctant but respectful of John Quincy’s advice, Thomas returned to Quincy vowing to make a “show” of his profession, which haunted him “like a spectre.” He hoped to find the solitude of Quincy “in some measure supportable.” He vowed that he would “not be idle,” but read, study, “buckle to with some earnestness.” He would do his utmost “to keep off the Blue Devils,” those savage attacks of depression that overwhelmed him periodically. It was “great comfort” to him, this December of 1803, to find his mother “wonderfully recovered” from her fall down an entire flight of stairs the past June, and “as active and busy as ever about her family.”31
However severe or “croaking” John Quincy appeared to Thomas at stressful times, he was a patient, perceptive, and loving brother. He instructed his mother as to the terms on which she was to receive Thomas back in Quincy, and in so doing, he probably aired some of his own idealized preferences. Abigail, John Quincy advised her, was to leave Thomas “entirely and in the most unqualified manner to his own choice and humour.” In fact, he wished “that no advice” be given on his brother’s “mode of life and his pursuits.” John Quincy was “fully confident,” he continued, “that the most effectual means” of reconciling Thomas “both to his removal and to his future residence at home will be to leave him in the complete satisfaction with his own independence; that sentiment so natural and so powerful upon every mind, and which is of peculiar weight upon his.”32
Perhaps more sensitive to Thomas’s perplexities than John Quincy might credit her, Abigail had already attempted to ease them in her own way. If she could not solve his career problems, she would at least smooth his romance, or attempt to do so. To this end she had deliberately sought out, almost a year before Thomas’s return to Quincy, the company of a “very charming young lady” for a week’s visit. “Can you guess who?” she had asked Thomas, rather coyly. She explained further that she had “had a Mind” that his father should see Nancy Harrod and was pleased to report that he had liked her “very well.” Her own enthusiasm was dulled, however, by what must have seemed to Thomas almost hopeless equivocation. Abigail again pronounced Nancy a “serious solid sensible amiable woman” qualified to make a good wife. “You will never meet with any obsticle from me,” she added, “when you can see your way clear to support a family.”33
Practical considerations did not, however, interfere with Abigail’s truly affectionate relationship with Nancy. The latter was to become a favorite in the “social circle” clustered at the Quincy fireside, where discussions of poets and profundities flourished. Abigail shared with Nancy her admiration, for instance, of Robert Burns, “poor fellow,” who had felt “povertys cold wind and crushing rain beat, keen and heavy on him.” Abigail claimed Burns as a “sympathizer” with her own philosophy. His “vivid Immagination, his delicate sensibility, his strong and ungovernable passions, his high sense of honour and pride of independence,” she concluded, made him “ill calculated to bear the insolence of office, or the proud man’s contumely.” Here, undoubtedly with John in mind, Abigail digressed into speculation about “whether the fine and delicate sensibilities of the soul are a real blessing.” She knew the cost only too well:
They so often are wounded by the insensible by the unfeeling beings which surround them of which much the larger portion of mankind are composed. That like the rose of Cowper they are shaken by the rude blast—or witherd by cold neglect, instead of having the fear of sorrow wiped away by the sympathizing hand of congenial tenderness.
But she also valued them, and would not, in fact, tolerate the alternative:
Yet who that possesses them would be willing to exchange them for a cold hearted apathy, and a stoical indifference. A fine tuned instrument is soonest put out of order, yet what lover of musick would wish to possess in preference an ordinary-instrument?34
On February 19, 1805, Abigail wrote Nancy that the time was not distant “which will give me a legal right to call you mine.” Meanwhile, she assured Nancy of “both love, and esteem,” and added an endearing postscript. Miss Juno, the companionable Newfoundland puppy, “wags her kind remembrance,” feeling the loss of “one kind benefactor.” One month later, before her marriage to Thomas, Abigail suggested that Nancy, if she could “wave all difficulties,” come to live with her in Quincy and, in so doing, feel as though she had “only exchanged one parents House for another.” It was her “sincere and ardent wish,” Abigail assured her prospective daughter-in-law, “that we may prove mutual comforts and blessings to each other.”35
* * *
Nancy and Thomas and their eventual offspring were far from the only family members Abigail invited to live with her and John. At times the so-called “tranquil shades of Quincy” teemed with children, grandchildren, and servants, a force of twenty-one by actual count. Louisa Smith was a permanent member of the household. Sally Adams and her daughters were always welcome. Abigail considered her widowed daughter-in-law “a valuable woman,” deserving of a “better lot” than she had met with, and therefore she was “desirous of showing her every kind attention” in her power. With grandchildren “driving around” enough to “craze” and concern one, her namesake Abigail, called Abbe, “wild as a bird,” little John “pale as a corps,” it wasn’t any wonder that Abigail found it necessary to apologize for having “avoided” writing, except to sisters and children, for the past two years.36
Her official excuse was offered on political grounds. Private letters were often intercepted and therefore, “the most innocent expressions so warped and twisted—so ungenerously mangled as to be made to speak a language wholy foreign to the Heart and to the Sentiments of the writer.” In truth, however, Abigail’s writing was circumscribed for personal reasons, as well, having to do with health, mood, pressures of duties, and sheer lack of space.37
Sometimes, Abigail allowed, she was in such a turmoil that she did not feel “retired or quiet enough” to sit down with her pen. She would begin a sentence, be interrupted, return to it again, and decide that what she had written was of “no value.” Forenoon was best for thinking and seeing, she had concluded, but not for privacy, especially during the winter.38
The parlor belonged to John Adams in the forenoon, and was where he read and wrote. John, who had earlier complained that there was nothing but the plow between himself and the grave, who had wished he might have been a “shoemaker rather than an American Statesman,” was enjoying life. He might talk about being “buried and forgotten at Mount Wollaston,” but he was happier in retirement, to his overwhelming amazement, than in all the years before his presidency. John had taken immediate “shelter,” as predicted, not only in the labors of agriculture, but in the “amusement of letters.” He began his autobiography in October 1802, supposing that some of his posterity might “probably” wish to see in his own handwriting “a proof of the falsehood of that Mass of odious Abuse of my Character, with which News Papers, private Letters and public Pamphlets and Histories have been disgraced for thirty years.” Not only in memoirs, but in correspondence, he reviewed, affirmed, and defended his role in building his nation, exchanging hundreds of letters with colleagues, friends, and family until his death. John was encouraged in his endeavors, and his position in the parlor was uncontested. “It is proper he should have it to himself,” Abigail decreed.39
As her own chamber afforded her no serenity—her grandchildren played there, her daughters-in-law congregated and wrote there—Abigail, who loved to be by herself when she wrote, could only snatch a few moments at a time to maintain her own correspondence, while Juno lay at her feet and snored. Though her eyes suffered, and though she did not write as prolifically as usual during this period, her scope had not diminished, nor was her pen less pointed. She took strong issue with both national and international figures. Aaron Burr’s “duplicity” was a disturbing phenomenon. “Are all means lawful,” she asked Thomas, “to accomplish the views of Ambition? So thought MacBeth, and so acts Bonaparte,” she would conclude.40
Her “obituary” on behalf of Alexander Hamilton, confided to Hannah Cushing on September 1, 1804, was honestly put, almost tinged with generosity, considering his destructive role, as she viewed it, in her husband’s career:
Altho I do not wear crape I rejoice not in the face [fate] of a man who possest talents and was capable of rendering himself highly serviceable to the country—he had merited their praise and their gratitude—God only knows whether it was in Mercy or in judgement that he is taken away, but I believe the sun will rise as bright and benign and diffuse its Blessing as equally now as before. I believe the seasons will perform their annual round tho Hamilton sleeps in the grave and that should occasion call for Heroes and Statesmen and patriots, we shall find them springing into Life and activity as we have before.
In regard to her country’s present situation, Abigail foresaw more danger from the divisions and parties into which it was split, and the “innovations” made in the Constitution, “than from the Death of any one man however Brilliant his tallents or distinguished his abilities.” She fervently hoped that her country would not be “intirely shorn of its beauty” because one star had fallen. “Surely,” she insisted, “we must have had small pretentions if shrowded with Darkness visible, and coverd over with gloom and despair We sink under the weighty fall of one man.” Probing her judgment about Hamilton, “willing to allow him all he deserved,” she concluded:
If there was much to praise—there was much to pardon and forgive. Why then idolize a man, who showd on many occasions that he was a frail, weak man subdued by his passions, against his solemn vows and obligations that he was a vain ambitious man aspiring to govern when it was his duty to submit that he daringly insulted the Authority whose Station he knew forbid him to reply or retaliate.…41
On the subject of John Quincy and his election to the United States Senate on February 3, 1803, to serve beginning March 4, Abigail was far more than a keenly opinionated spectator of the passing political scene. In some ways, she began to relive the vicissitudes of her husband’s career; she was proud of her son but wary of his future. John Quincy understood that his election would “probably affect very materially” my future situation in life. And Abigail was just as positive that her son had begun another ascent, steeper and more treacherous, though possibly more rewarding, than any of his earlier years.42
In Washington, on October 21, at 11:00 A.M., John Quincy took his seat in the Senate. Only ten days later he sharply disagreed with his colleagues over a resolution to wear black crepe to honor three illustrious patriots. His argument was firm. He considered the proposal “improper in itself, tending to unsuitable discussions of character, and to an employment of the Senate’s time in debates altogether foreign to the subjects which properly belong to them.” The matter of the black crepe presaged larger issues on which John Quincy would take an independent stand, proving himself accountable only to his own intelligence and conscience, as when he opposed his party in his votes for the Louisiana Purchase and for the Embargo Act of 1807.43
By late December of 1803, John Quincy was already worried about the consequences of his conflicting positions. In a country so “given up” to party that “not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offence,” he knew he was in trouble. Between both parties he already saw the impossibility of pursuing the dictates of his own conscience “without sacrificing every prospect, not merely of advancement, but even of retaining that character and reputation” he had enjoyed. Yet his choice was made. If he could not hope “to give satisfaction to my country,” he was “at least determined to have the approbation of my own reflections.”44
Abigail, following his career rumor by rumor, syllable by syllable, was acutely aware of John Quincy’s problem. “No Man in Congress,” she wrote him on January 10, 1804, was “so delicately situated.” Taking his family connections into consideration, he must expect that “a jealousy will be ever awake” in both parties. Whatever the hazards, she was imperturbable: “I wish not to see you a cypher, nor is it possible you can be one.” Furthermore, her support was his armor. She was “always” satisfied with his vote, she wrote John Quincy, “because I know that it will proceed from a sense of what you consider right, and proper devested of party spirit.” She acknowledged, however, that he had “indeed” embarked on a tempestuous life and must prepare for the storms.45
Abigail might have been John Quincy’s devout admirer, but she was not a blind one. She took him to task literally, exhaustively articulating her criticisms of his personality, conduct, diet, health, and appearance. She was concerned about his “stiffness,” his “reserve and a coldness of address upon entering company,” allowing that this characteristic might be due to his having lived abroad “during critical periods.” She reminded him to be “guarded in words and looks so that nothing improper escaped his lips.” She warned him that his proclivity toward pen and books would only “further his difficulties” in health matters. John Quincy suffered from rheumatism, loss of weight, and an insistent cough, and it bothered Abigail when friends described him as looking “pale, thin and slender.” Straight as she was on matters of religion, morals, and ethics, she was not above compromise on the subject of dress. To John Quincy she repeated what she’d read in a play that won her wholehearted approval: “A good coat is tantamount to a good character and if the world be a stage it’s as necessary to dress as to act your part well.” He might have been a schoolboy instead of a senator when his mother preached to him:
Now I hope you never appear in the Senate with a Beard two days old, or otherways make, what is called a shabby appearance. Seriously I think a mans usefulness in society depends upon his personal apperance. I do not wish a Senator to dress like a Beau but I want him to conform so far to the fashion, as not to incur the Character of Singularity—nor give occasion to the World to ask what kind of Mother he had? or to charge upon a Wife negligence and inattention when she is guiltless.46
At one point, Abigail enlisted Louisa’s assistance in remedying John Quincy’s problems, virtually dictating her recommended solutions. “I wish you would not let him go to Congress without a cracker in his jacket,” she wrote, advising that “the space between Breakfast and dinner is so long that his stomach gets bled with flatulencies and his food when he takes it neither digests or nourishes him.” Another time, should her son’s cough persist, Abigail advised Louisa to “put a Blister between his shoulders—coughs are dangerous if of long continuance.” In her effort to have Louisa “unite” with her in the cause of John Quincy’s diet and appearance, Abigail tried tactfully to make her point without undermining her son’s gift or character.
Whilst the sublimity of his genius intitles him to admiration the cut of his coat, the strangeness of his wigs, or colour of his neckcloth are the subjects of reprehension. It is vain to talk of being above these little decorums—if we live in the world and mean to serve ourselves and it, we must conform to its customs, its habits and in some measure its fashion.47
In her zeal to promote a more attractive John Quincy, Abigail might appear to have been superficial if not presumptuous. But her letters reveal perceptive and profound reasons for the “anxious hours” she spent on her son’s behalf. She was a firm believer that “when a man enjoys Health, good spirits are a natural attendant, and he is more disposed to attend to his personal appearance.” She confided her secret fears to Hannah Quincy that John Quincy’s self-neglect signaled deeper problems. “There are some Maladies so deep rooted, that the most delicate hand dare not probe.” An attempt might reveal “an incurable wound.” In Abigail’s most candid judgment, she was “certain” that a “depression of spirits” was the chief cause of her son’s “low state of Health.”48
* * *
After summering at home, John Quincy and Louisa returned to Washington in November of 1805, leaving their children, George and John (the latter born July 4, 1803), in Abigail’s charge. Louisa felt “hourly” the loss of her children, and “suffer’d” constant anxiety at not hearing from them, she wrote from Washington. Having been “compelled” to leave them behind, she could not “command” her feelings and must trust to her mother-in-law’s kindness, she wrote Abigail, to hear about them frequently.49
Abigail responded in affectionate detail. John, her favorite, stayed with her; George boarded with the Cranch family. She painted an enticing portrait of John for his parents. His face was as round as an apple, as rosy as a carnation, his eyes as brilliant and sparkling as diamonds. His preoccupation with opening and closing the shutters of her chamber seemed to delight rather than annoy her. John met weekly with George, whose “remarkable appetite” Abigail thought worth mentioning.50
Something, however, about the word compelled in Louisa’s letters jarred Abigail’s sensibilities. She would tolerate sentiment but not what she judged to be self-pity. Her stern admonitions may have been more damaging to Louisa than either woman realized at that time. Abigail assured Louisa that her children were fine, “better off than they would have been in any boarding house in Washington where they might have been confined in some degree or mixed with improper persons.” On January 16, 1806, she wrote:
There cannot be anything more disagreeable than transporting young children twice a year, either by water, or in crowded stages at such a distance, and however reluctant you might feel, at being separated from them, I should suppose that your own judgement experience and good sense would have convinced you of the propriety of the measure without compulsion. I have experienced separations of all kinds from children equally dear to me and know how great the sacrifice and how painful the task—but I considered it the duty of a parent to consult the interest and benefit of their children.
A month later, Abigail verged on the unkind when she wrote: “Whilst as a Mother you must be anxious to hear frequently from your Children, You will still bear in Mind that they are Mortal, and that no solicitude or care can at all times shield them from the common lot of mortals.”51
Perhaps she was not so absolute as she seemed to Louisa. A curious sentence crops up in a letter that she wrote to Hannah Quincy. She mentioned that she found John “lively and sensible,” affording her much amusement. She added, “I hope I shall not have any cause to regret that I undertook the care of him.” The latter thought strikes a doomful note, all too prescient, had Abigail substituted George’s name for John’s and lived to know his tragedy.52
* * *
Of all of Abigail’s intriguing though restricted correspondence during the early years of retirement to Quincy, by far the most extraordinary was her exchange with Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson’s daughter Mary, known as Polly, died on April 17, 1804, John Quincy did not exaggerate in reporting that his mother “was a good deal affected at seeing the account of it” in the newspapers. Polly was twenty-five years old, married to Congressman John Wayles Eppes and a recent mother at her death, but Abigail’s “attachment” of her London years to the small, tearful, lonely, nine-year-old visitor “to a strange land amongst strangers” was indestructible. From the moment she learned of the tragedy, Abigail had wanted to write to Jefferson, and fought her more immediate feelings of resentment of this long-ago friend. Even at the depths of their relationship, however, Abigail always tried to understand Jefferson and, perhaps unwittingly, forgive him. She said as much to her son Thomas; she “could not believe all Jefferson’s better intentions are swallowed up by those who hold a rod over him.” She continued: “There is a little corner of my heart where he once sat, as a friend whom I esteemed and loved for his real or imagined benevolent propensities—from whence I find it hard wholy to discard him—notwithstanding I pitty his weakness and abhor those principles which govern his administration.”53
Pity overwhelmed all other emotions as Abigail struggled with the compassionate letter she could not suppress. She initiated the exchange of seven letters with Thomas Jefferson over a five-month period predicated on far more than sympathy. Affectionate respect and valued friendship were revealed as acute considerations in the care and time expended by both in their explanations to one another, alternately judging and judged, accusing and defending. On May 20, 1804, Abigail confided her dilemma to Jefferson:
Had you been no other than the private inhabitant of Monticello, I should e’er this time have addrest you, with that sympathy, which a recent event has awakend in my Bosom. But reasons of various kinds withheld my pen, untill the powerfull feelings of my heart, have burst through the restraint, and called upon me to shed the tear of sorrow over the departed remains, of your beloved and deserving daughter, an event I most sincerely mourn.54
Abigail’s recollection of her bosom wet with the tears of the clinging child who had met such an untimely death awakened memories of another loss of which she rarely spoke. It had been some time since she conceived of “any event in this Life” that might, at least on her part, evoke feelings of mutual sympathy. Now, she wrote Jefferson, they had the loss of a child in common, and she knew all about “those chords which bind the filial to the parental Bosom,” and “when snaped assunder, how agonizing the pangs of separation.” Mutual wounds drew mutual sympathies. “I have tasted the bitter cup, and bow with reverence and humility,” Abigail said, “before the great dispenser of it, without whose permission, and over-ruling providence, not a sparrow falls to the ground.”55
Jefferson had forwarded Abigail’s letter of condolence to his widowed son-in-law, who fully appreciated Abigail’s extraordinary gesture. “If I am to judge of its excellence from the sensibility excited by its perusal it contains the generous effusions of an excellent heart,” John Eppes replied on June 14, 1804. “The successful rival of her husband in public estimation could not under any circumstances excite sympathy in the breast of any ordinary female.” Therefore, Eppes concluded, “a sound heart and a sound understanding could only under such circumstances have produced such a letter.” Eppes then advised Jefferson that in expressing toward Abigail “the Sentiments of your heart you will of course know no limit but the extent of your feeling.” On the other hand, under “existing circumstances,” how prudent it might be to indulge in the expression of any private feeling toward John Adams was “extremely doubtful.” Eppes was convinced that “the thread of friendship between you is on his part broken never more to be united.” Furthermore, “The mind capable of receiving … a successful rival with his honours blooming round his brow is not to be found in the man who bore implacable hatred to the living Franklin, who has not withdrawn that hatred even from his ashes.”56
Jefferson had not waited for Eppes’s response, however. The latter could have had no notion of the earlier ties of Jefferson to Abigail and all her family. In Jefferson’s piteous state (“Having lost even half of all I had,” his “evening prospects” now hung on the “slender thread of a single life,” his remaining daughter), he greeted Abigail’s overture with fervent appreciation. He should “ever remember” her kindnesses to Mary with gratitude and friendship, knowing full well the “indelible impression” she had made on his dead daughter. At the same time, he was thankful for the occasion “furnished” him of expressing his regret “that circumstances should have arisen which have seemed to draw a line of separation between us.”57
Reaching out now to reconstruct a happier past, Jefferson assured Abigail that the friendship with which she “honoured” him had “ever been valued, and fully reciprocated.” Though past events might be trying to some minds, he never believed hers to be “of that kind, nor felt that my own was.” Without shading the truth of their presently tarnished relationship, Jefferson was gallant. “Neither my estimate of your character, nor the esteem founded in that,” he assured Abigail, “have ever been lessened for a single moment, although doubts whether it would be acceptable may have forbidden manifestations of it.”58
The olive branch was now offered Abigail with whole heart. Jefferson gave notice that he intended to open himself to her “without reserve,” to take advantage of an opportunity he had “long wished” was his. Though he had no idea how he would be received, he felt relief “from being unbosomed.” When he was assured by return mail of Abigail’s mutual feelings, he apologized for “this transition from a subject of domestic affliction,” and launched into political events and their “unfortunate bearings” on private friendships. “The injury these have sustained has been a heavy price for what has never given me equal pleasure.”59
The thrust of Jefferson’s grievance against her husband was quickly put to Abigail. “I did consider his last appointments to office as personally unkind.” By naming some of his “most ardent political enemies,” John had seen to it that Jefferson must forfeit “faithful cooperation” with his own views, or be put to the “odium” of appointing replacements friendlier to his policies. If his respect for her husband did not permit him to ascribe the whole blame to the influence of others, Jefferson told Abigail, “it left something for friendship to forgive.”60
Abigail, of course, flew to John’s defense. Here was Portia revived, only this time her argument was lame and flawed. She could muster reasonableness, proceed with deliberation, but in this almost singular instance, facts rendered her case faulty, and also puzzling. It is unlikely that Abigail meant deliberately to deceive Jefferson; it is also unlikely that she could have so miserably confused dates pertaining to her husband’s last appointments in office.
Writing to Jefferson on July 1, 1804, she was certain that John’s act was not intended to give “any personal pain or offence.” She thought it was her duty, however, to explain, so far as she then knew them, her husband’s “views and designs.” Patiently she continued: “The constitution empowers the president to fill up offices as they become vacant. It was in the exercise of this power that appointments were made, and Characters selected whom Mr. Adams considerd, as men faithfull to the constitution and where he personally knew them, such as were capable of fullfilling their duty to their country.” Furthermore, Abigail reasoned, John had followed the example of President Washington, who had left no vacant offices to be filled by his successor.61
Abigail continued to placate Jefferson on this sensitive subject. “No offence was given by it, and no personal unkindness thought of. But the different political opinions which have so unhappily divided our Country, must have given rise to the Idea,” she supposed, “that personal unkindness was intended.” It was in the next sentence that she committed her basic error:
You will please to recollect Sir, that at the time these appointments were made, there was not any certainty that the presidency would devolve upon you, which is an other circumstance to prove that personal unkindness was not meant. No person was ever selected by him from such a motive—and so far was Mr. Adams from indulging such a sentiment, that he had no Idea of the intollerance of party spirit at that time.…62
In fact, Thomas Jefferson was elected president on February 17, 1801; John’s appointments were made in March. It was another fact that John Adams was excruciatingly aware of “the intollerance of party spirit.” While Jefferson and Abigail would tend, in this brief exchange, to reexamine their differences, the issue of the appointments died here. Jefferson, discreetly silent on the matter, offered no rebuttal. Now it was Abigail’s turn to “freely disclose” what had “severed the bonds of former Friendship” and placed Jefferson in a light “very different” from that in which she had once viewed him. This was the liberation from jail and the reimbursement of the fine of the “wretch” James Callender, imprisoned initially for his crimes of writing and publishing “the basest libel, the lowest and vilest Slander, which malice could invent, or calumny exhibit” against the character and reputation of her husband. The act of overruling her husband’s decree Abigail regarded as a “public approbation” of Callender’s conduct and therefore as a “personal injury” to herself. “This was the Sword,” Abigail explained to Jefferson, “that cut assunder the Gordian knot, which could not be untied by all the efforts of party Spirit, by rivalship by Jealousy or any other malignant fiend.”63
As though to bolster her argument, Abigail went on to mention how Callender had proven an enemy not only to her husband, but also to Jefferson. She made her point about Callender without specifying the latter’s breathtaking reference, in July 1802, in the Richmond Recorder, to Jefferson’s “concubine,” his slave Sally, and the latter’s child, whose features bore a “striking though sable resemblance to those of the president himself.” Abigail rested her case: “The serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you sufficient Specimens of his talents, his gratitude his justice, and his truth.”64
Though the subject of Callender was explosively provocative, it proved to be the catalyst of a sweeping discussion on the entire issue of political loyalties. Abigail argued for respect “which is a necessary bond in the social union, which gives efficacy to laws, and teaches the subject to obey the Majestrate, and the child to submit to the parent.” How, then, could such “vipers” as Callender be “let lose upon Society,” thereby leveling “all distinction between virtue and vice”?65
In response, Jefferson stood up to Abigail. Patiently and at length, he explained his position. He had discharged every person prosecuted and punished under the Sedition Law, because he considered “that law to be a nullity as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.” Furthermore, he had freed all charged under the “pretended Sedition law” without asking “what the offenders had done, or against whom they had offended.” As a result, there were those who accused him of acting “to protect, encourage and reward slander.” But there were other motives, he suggested, such as “those which inspire ordinary charities to objects of distress, meritorious or not, or,” he continued, “the obligations of an oath to protect the constitution, violated by an unauthorized act of Congress.”66
Though Abigail made some concessions to Jefferson’s arguments, she hardly capitulated. Jefferson’s motives for liberating Callender wore a “different aspect” from her original impression, or that of others she had heard speak on this subject. With regard to his explanation of the act under which Callender had been punished, however, Abigail allowed that “different persons entertain different opinions respecting it.” It lay not with her, she said “to decide upon its validity”; that, she presumed, “devolved upon the supreem Judges of the Nation.” Still, she would argue:
I have understood that the power which makes a Law, is alone competent to the repeal. If a Chief Majestrate can by his will annul a Law, where is the difference between a republican, and a despotic Government? That some restraint should be laid upon the asassin, who stabs reputation, all civilized Nations have assented to.… No political Character has been secure from its attacks, no reputation so fair, as not to be wounded by it, untill truth and falsehood lie in one undistinguished heap.67
Clinging to the Federalists’ notion, derived from English common law, that the First Amendment did not deprive Congress of power to influence speech and press, Abigail feared the worst without definition. “If there are no checks to be resorted to in the Laws of the Land, and no reperation to be made to the injured, will not Man become the judge and avenger of his own wrongs, and as in the late instance [alluding to the duel between Hamilton and Burr] the sword and pistol decide the contest?”68
Abigail and Jefferson exchanged two more letters at this time, three months before his reelection in December as President, with George Clinton voted Vice-President. Jefferson’s last, written September 11, 1804, alluded to Abigail’s mention of the “one other act” of his administration that she considered as personally unkind. This was Jefferson’s dismissal of John Quincy from his appointment, made by a local judge, as commissioner of bankruptcy. This action, taken shortly after Jefferson became President, looked “so particularly pointed” that even some of Jefferson’s friends had commented on it.69
Jefferson now seemed to sense a permanent barrier that all his goodwill could not penetrate. “Perhaps indeed I may have already trespassed too far on your attention,” he replied. But he still cared about establishing rapport with Abigail. “With those who wish to think amiss of me, I have learnt to be perfectly indifferent,” he explained, “but where I know a mind to be ingenuous, and to need only truth to set it to rights, I cannot be as passive.”70
On his honor, he continued, this was his “first knolege” of John Quincy’s replacement. The position had not been official, and the commissioners were not permanent officers, but chosen occasionally, as cases arose, their nominations confined “exclusively to federalists.” Dissatisfied with this system, or lack of one, the legislature had voted that the President be responsible for the appointments. The object of the new law was to “correct, not confirm, what was deemed the partiality of the judges.” Jefferson, attempting to achieve political balance, had thought to “put in a proportion of federalists equal,” he believed, “to the proportion they bear in numbers through the union generally.” Had he known of John Quincy’s involvement, he assured Abigail, “it would have been a real pleasure to me to have preferred him to some who were named in Boston in what were deemed the same line of politics.”71
Abigail’s reply was delayed by three weeks of illness. On October 25 she was at last back at her desk, acknowledging that she had “little thought” of entering a correspondence on “political topicks” when she had first written to him. She did not regret having done so, however, as it had led to “some elucidations and brought on some explanations, which place in a more favourable light occurrences which had wounded” her. “Having once entertained for you a respect and esteem, founded upon the Character of an affectionate parent, a kind Master, a candid and benevolent Friend,” Abigail told Jefferson, she could not “suffer different political opinions to obliterate them from my mind.”72
In summary of the result of their discussions, Abigail delivered varying evaluations. She could not consider Jefferson’s sprawling explanation of his role in John Quincy’s dismissal in any other light “than what the Gentlemen of the Law would term a quible—as such I pass it.” She also reminded Jefferson of his assurance, on his last visit with her in Washington, that “nothing” would give him “more pleasure” than to serve her or her family. “I will do you the justice to say at this hour that I believe what you then said, you then meant.”73
Nor did Jefferson win her over in his argument that the right to control the freedom of the press was the states’ rather than the nation’s. Abigail could not agree “that the constitution ever meant to withhold from the National Government the power of self defence, or that it could be considerd an infringement of the Liberty of the press, to punish the licentiousness of it.” Furthermore, she would question whether in his ardent zeal to “rectify the mistakes and abuses” of the former administrations, he was not led “into measures still more fatal to the constitution, and more derogatory to your honour, and independence of Character?” Abigail had, of course, known the answer to her question all along: “Pardon me Sir if I say, that I fear you are.”74
For all her convictions, Abigail did allow that time and posterity would judge, with “more candour and impartiality” than the conflicting parties of their day, what measures best promoted the happiness of the people. Meanwhile, despite nostalgic affection and respect for one another, it was apparent that more than “mere differences” blocked a continuing relationship. “Faithful are the wounds of a Friend,” Abigail told Jefferson. She bore him no malice, cherished no enmity, would not retaliate if she could. Rather, in the true spirit of Christian charity, “I would forgive, as I hope to be forgiven.” And now she would not further intrude upon his time, but close their correspondence with her sincere wishes that Jefferson might be directed to that path “which may terminate in the prosperity and happiness of the people … by administring the Government with a just and impartial hand.” In his doing so, no one would “more rejoice” than herself.75
Weeks later, on the evening of November 18, 1804, Abigail asked John to read the copies she kept of her correspondence with Jefferson. The next morning he had completed the whole of them. Noting this event in a footnote, he wrote, “I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place.”76
Six years later, on January 16, 1811, Jefferson sent his copies of his correspondence with Abigail to Dr. Benjamin Rush, explaining that “yielding to an intimation in her last letter, I ceased from further explanation.” Owing to Rush’s persistent efforts at mediation, Jefferson and Adams revived their correspondence; Jefferson’s next brief and poignant exchange with Abigail was again to be initiated by personal tragedy.77