TWENTY-THREE

Rather Too Much than Too Little

Warning of Colonel Smith’s “don Quixot expedition” came to Abigail indirectly. John Quincy reported to his mother that the colonel, in his letter of November 28, 1805, was soliciting his “friendly attention and Civilities” on behalf of his “very intimate friend General Miranda.” Abigail sensed danger immediately. She was convinced that Francisco de Miranda was one of Talleyrand’s agents, “and as such,” she cautioned John Quincy, “every movement should be carefully watched as we shall hear more of that man. He is capable of tumbling the waters and fishing in them too.”1

Abigail’s interpretation of Miranda’s powers was prophetic, though she probably did not envision how directly they would assault her immediate family. Shortly, Colonel Smith stood accused of “High Misdemeanor,” or “providing means for a military expedition against a nation with which the United States is at peace.” The colonel, in his efforts to further Miranda’s dream of liberating South America, particularly his native Venezuela, from Spanish rule, recruited soldiers to sail southward on February 2, 1806, aboard the Leander, a merchant vessel chartered from a Mr. Samuel Ogden, in the company of several other vessels.2

The colonel had made one other provision for which his family, rather than his government, held him liable, and caused his father-in-law to wonder whether he was “mad.” He had secretly encouraged his son, William Steuben, to leave Columbia College to enlist in Miranda’s cause. Soon, at Puerto Cabello, two schooners were unexpectedly lost to the Spanish, and William, among other Americans, was rumored, falsely, as it turned out, to be imprisoned in Caracas, threatened with a sentence of death unless his father would disclose to the Spanish minister, Don Carlos Martinez de Yrugo, everything he knew of Miranda’s plans. The colonel refused, but William, after harrowing delays, found his way home. Meanwhile, that May, Mrs. Smith joined her husband at a small house within prison limits, where the couple anxiously awaited the colonel’s trial in the circuit court in New York that began on July 14, 1806.3

One of the perplexities of “the mysterious project and expedition of Miranda” was to judge the truth of the American government’s involvement, along with Colonel Smith’s, in this catastrophic venture. The colonel swore in an affidavit that the Miranda expedition “was set on foot with the knowledge and approbation of the President,” but claimed that the latter had prevented the Secretary of State, James Madison, from testifying to that effect. The colonel, a broken, pathetic figure, superseded by a Mr. P. A. Schenke as surveyor of the port, the post he naïvely hoped might at least have gone to his brother Justus rather than to a stranger, knew his enemies had been “long struggling” to remove him from office. Only he had “never supposed the President of the United States and Mr. Madison capable of uniting with them in his destruction.”4

The extent of Jefferson’s implication in the affair was difficult to fathom. Miranda, the colonel claimed, had told him that “certain propositions” had been made to the President and the Secretary of State, but that the degree of assent, acquiescence, or negation that they gave was “altogether” unknown to him. But this much the colonel did know: he, who was “trembling alive” for his country, “tottering on the confines of perditions, had been made a sacrifical figure,” cast away in order to “tranquillize the Minister of an Usurper, a Military Despot, trampling on the liberties of his country.” The colonel, the irrepressible, frustrated warrior, disassociated himself from the speculative aspects of Miranda’s expedition. His effort, he protested, had been made in a far nobler and immediate cause. He did not mention Napoleon, but predicted the worst in his name: “Millions may be lavished to tranquilize a Tyrant for a moment, but his insatiable appetite will never be gratified, untill the whole resources of our Country are subjected to his will.” Then he would finally prove to America what he had already proved to Europe, the colonel said, “that he knows no rights but his own, nor no rule of Justice, but his pride and ambition.”5

John Quincy, to whom the colonel had turned as though to a sympathetic juror, studied the colonel’s letters and was, indeed, compassionate, though realistic. From a legal point of view, John Quincy was convinced that “the knowledge or even the encouragement and approbation of the President and Secretary of State to the original prospect will be of no avail on the question of the legality of the enterprize.” He also concluded that the “gloomy cast” of the colonel’s future, and that of his family, was “only the natural consequence of the principles and practices which have for many years been in unceasing operation.” Nevertheless, he believed that Jefferson’s removal of the colonel from his office was sufficient punishment, seemingly implying that the trial imposed excessive hardship on his beleaguered brother-in-law.6

Jefferson was no favorite of John Quincy, or of Louisa. Both frequented the President’s house, and both reacted adversely, in private. Louisa, in retrospect, called everything about Jefferson “aristocratic except his person which was ungainly ugly and common.” She would remember his manner as “awkward, and excessively inelegant,” and judge his “peering restlessness” as a sign of his fear “of being scanned more closely by his visitors, than was altogether agreeable to his self-complacency.” John Quincy’s impressions of Jefferson, though less scornful than his wife’s, betray impatience, disbelief, and disrespect.7

Pride where his father was concerned, and a sense of protectiveness of him as well, had dampened John Quincy’s nostalgic memories of his walks and talks with Jefferson in Paris. He made a promise to himself that he “certainly never should solicit Mr. Jefferson for any place whatever.” He was also less than admiring of the “waxing and waning opinions of this Gentleman concerning the French Revolution,” and scorned Jefferson’s “itch for telling prodigies.” The latter’s contention that he had learned to speak Spanish in nineteen days at sea was crisply dismissed in a single sentence: “But Mr. Jefferson tells large stories.” Given John Quincy’s disaffection with Jefferson, it was no wonder that his sympathies lay with Colonel Smith regarding his involvement with General Miranda. “As far as relates to Colonel Smith the President, I should think has already done enough,” John Quincy wrote Louisa. “He has ruined him as completely as his heart could wish—more is unnecessary.”8

In May, Abigail’s sister Elizabeth Peabody had written to her to say that the accounts in the newspapers regarding the Leander and the colonel gave “all much pain, and regret.” Whether Miranda’s motives were “any better [than] those of Cortez, or the first Mexican Adventurers,” she could not pretend to say. What she could express was her regret that, at the President’s and her sister’s stage of life, any of their dear children should be “involved and tormented with Evils.” She would have hoped their virtues “should have prevented & secured” their elders from such stress. In August, Elizabeth wrote again to say that she was glad Colonel Smith had been honorably acquitted, though she was fearful that his wife must have gone through “many distressing scenes.”9

Unfortunately, even as late as December, Mrs. Smith’s position was still “more necesitous” than originally realized. Rumors abounded now that Colonel Smith had gone west and was somehow involved with Aaron Burr’s purportedly treasonous plot to separate the Western states from the United States. With the colonel away, Mrs. Smith’s family was affectionately solicitous of her needs. John Quincy, for example, offered, with Louisa’s wholehearted approval, to care for young John Smith, just graduating from Harvard and in need of support in his study of law during the ensuing three years. John Quincy was also his mother’s intermediary in this situation. Abigail was confident of her daughter’s “prudence and her desire to economize,” and that she would make a little go far. Still, Abigail asked that John Quincy, on his visit to his sister, inform himself of her needs “as fully as you can,” without wounding her feelings any more than such an inquiry necessarily must. Her next request was that John Quincy converse “freely and fully” with his sister to prevail with her to break up housekeeping and come to Quincy for the summer. Abigail wished she might have said more, but, in an effort to be discreet, she acknowledged that there were many things not “proper” to write. “There are delicacies to be observed towards those who are in distress.”10

Though she did not mention the possibility of the colonel’s association with Aaron Burr, she did say that the latter had led President Jefferson’s administration into an inextricable “labyrinth.” She was sympathetic and even understanding, though somewhat enigmatic as she continued: Mr. Jefferson was so much blamed for countenancing de Miranda’s “wild enterprise that I cannot but suspect he has committed himself equally by crying the wolfs the wolfs, when no harm was intended.”11

*   *   *

In early March 1807, Abigail had barely recovered from a rheumatic attack (“my head still feels cracked,—shattered I am sure it is—”) when she received a letter from Mercy Warren. The letter, a reminder of “ancient friendship,” made Abigail intensely reflective. Frail physically, she sounded, for the first time, defeated by passing events. She seemed to assume that Mercy felt similarly. “So rapid have been the changes,” she told Mercy, “that the mind, tho fleet in its progress, has been outstriped by them and we are left like statues at what we cannot comprehend.”12

However, in spite of protestations to the contrary, Abigail traversed the realm of current affairs and personalities as nimbly as of old. Having done with Napoleon and Burr, in particular, Abigail’s conclusion to her letter was superbly cordial: “We shall always be happy to hear of the welfare of friends whom we have loved from our early years.…” Also, she had derived, she said, “sincere and durable gratification” from their communication.13

Only four months later, all had changed, Abigail’s sentiments having been bitterly altered by Mercy’s “misrepresentations” of John’s role in her History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations. Mercy’s History was published in 1805, and why it took John until July 11, 1807, to state his objections remains a puzzle. Perhaps his increasing need to be read to, due to failing eyesight, delayed his completion of Mercy’s three-volume work. Or possibly a sense that his critique might impair their friendship caused him to hesitate. Nevertheless, as of July 1807, John had read “much, if not all” of Mercy’s History. He was not about to write a review of it, but, as there were “several mistakes” relating to him personally, he proposed at his “leisure” to point out some of them to Mercy in the “spirit of friendship,” so that she might have an opportunity “in the same spirit to correct them for any future edition of the work.…”14

John, cut to the quick, took issue with Mercy passage by passage, all three volumes worth, initiating an exchange of ten long, involved letters of accusation and reproach that mounted to screaming pitch before they were done. John meant to answer “insinuations rather than charges,” but whatever he might call them, he ardently refuted Mercy’s claims that “Mr. Adams’ passions and prejudices were some times too strong for his sagacity and judgment,” that “nothing was done” when Mr. Adams was sent to England, and that (“in the most exceptionable passage” yet found) “unfortunately for himself and his country,” Mr. Adams became “so enamoured with the British Constitution and the Government, manners and laws of the nation, that a partiality for monarchy appeared, which was inconsistent with his former professions of republicanism.”15

Furthermore, among what John considered her many injustices and inaccuracies, Mercy claimed that John had resided in England for four or five years when actually it had been less than three, the dates being August 1785 to April 19, 1788. But this, John conceded, was “an erratum of little consequence.” The same could not be said of the passage on page 392 of the third volume that an almost apoplectic John proceeded to quote. In this passage Mercy claimed that “after Mr. Adams’s return from England he was implicated by a large portion of his countrymen, as having relinquished the Republican System and forgotten the Principles of the American Revolution, which he had advocated for near twenty years.”16

John acknowledged that “a man never looks so silly as when he is talking or writing concerning himself.” However, he had no choice; her “severity” he told Mercy, “had reduced him to the necessity of pouring out all myself.” What, indeed, was he to conclude from her history? Was he to suppose that General Warren and his lady were the “first propagators of the stories which were spread through the Union before the election of Mr. Jefferson, and which were fully believed by the ignorant German boors in Pennsylvania and by many of the ignorant voters in all the Southern States … that John Adams had married his daughter in England to the Prince of Wales, and his son John Quincy Adams to the Princess Royal of England, and had entered into a treaty with King George to make his son-in-law King of North America?” Or was he to attribute to the Warren family the “honor” that was done him in the backwoods of Pennsylvania and Kentucky “of being hanged in effigy by the side of Mr. Jay with a purse of English guineas in my hand?”17

Painstakingly, John enumerated further “demonstrations” of Mercy’s friendship. He bridled at her contention that he was “ridiculed by the fashionable and polite society of France” as being “deficient in the je ne sais quoi so necessary to polished society.” He posed a question to her: “Franklin, Jay, Laurens, Jefferson, Monroe, Livingston, Morris and Armstrong, I suppose, were not deficient in this je ne sais quoi? Now in full stride, John cited numerous other examples of Mercy’s friendship, of her “disposition to wink him out of sight, to represent him in an odious light, to lessen and degrade him below his station.” In essence, Mercy had denied John recognition of his contribution to his country in terms of years and substance, and, in doing so, had wounded him to the core of his being.18

In response, Mercy was intransigent. She was “so much at a loss” for the meaning of very many of Mr. Adams’s paragraphs and the “rambling manner in which your angry and undigested letters are written,” she told him, that she “scarcely” knew where to begin her remarks. But begin she did, by saying: “Had not Mr. Adams been suffering under suspicions that his fame had not been sufficiently attended to, or that his character was not invulnerable he would not have put such a perverse construction on every passage where he is named in a work in which the author aimed to do him complete justice.…” The exchange was finished on August 27, when Mercy turned accuser: “There is a meanness as well as malignancy in striving to blast a work that many of the best judges of literary merit … have spoken of [as] very flattering to the author.” In conclusion, Mercy told John that his late letters “cap the climax of rancor and decency and vulgarism. Yet, as an old friend, I pity you, as a Historian I forgive you.”19

Mercy, less self-righteous than she appeared, fretted, nevertheless, about her injured relationship with John. She proceeded to turn his correspondence over to an “astonished” Elbridge Gerry, the successful arbiter of later years, who was already a skilled diplomat. Able to pass judgment only after seeing the letters, he advised that “very angry, vindictive, and indecent phraseology” warranted “but one dignified line of conduct on the part of a lady, and that is silence.” Mercy followed Gerry’s advice only halfway. At almost the end of the year, on December 28, she referred indirectly to her differences with John. She was of the opinion, she wrote Abigail, that “no variation of sentiment with regard to subjects which make up the great Bustle of the world” ought to affect “the hearts of true friendship.” Furthermore, she believed that it was possible to denounce one another’s politics, “yet love you as ever,” and hold fast to esteem and affection. “Men nor women were not made to think alike—it cannot be.”20

For Abigail, the friendship was in ruins, although she was wrenched by the course she chose. When Mercy’s husband died the following year, at the age of eighty-four, Abigail expressed her belief that “former friendship” demanded a “sympathizing letter” from her. However, she recognized Mercy and John’s fundamentally opposing political beliefs, and was sadly resigned to the fact that the “Bitterness of Party spirit had severed [them].” After the injustice to John’s character, and the chance given Mercy to acknowledge her errors, “which she wholly omitted to do,” Abigail felt she had no alternative. “I thought a letter of the kind would appear insincere,” she wrote to her daughter on December 8, 1808, “and altho I feel for her bereavement and know how heavily she must feel it, I have declined writing to her.”21

*   *   *

Frequently, when friends thought her overburdened with care, Abigail would tell them that she would “rather have too much than too little,” that “life stagnates without action.” She understood her needs; it all came down to the fact that she could never bear “merely to vegetate.” Treated with calomel and opium pills and a gruel-and-water diet to alleviate her rheumatic pains and frequent fevers, it was so common for her to be “indisposed” for weeks at a time that she dismissed these confinements as “a matter of course.” Undaunted, she refused to concede that “age is dark and unlovely,” and deliberately sought the “rich mental feast,” to be found in the story, for example, of a young American who had accompanied her father to the Scottish Highlands, told in Letters from the Mountains by Mrs. Anne Grant. Such a story made her forget “that the roses had fled from my cheeks, and the lustre departed from my eyes.”22

Weather was definitely a factor in Abigail’s outlook. Just as snow did not “suit” her constitution, spring, on the other hand, symbolized the “renovating season,” bringing her “innocent pleasure” in the charms of the first asparagus, the first “daffies,” the newly leafed gooseberry bushes. When she reported the production of eighty tons of English hay, she sounded rashly boastful. Enthusiasm being, to her mind, “the wine of life,” if all else, including books and the bounties of the earth, failed to sustain her interest, politics alone might have provided the magical elixir that “cheers and supports the mind.” It was inconceivable to her, aged as she felt herself to be, that she or anyone else might willingly stand remote from current events. She summarily dismissed her daughter’s claim to a hatred of politics. “When your native country is so seriously threatened,” she told Mrs. Smith, “you cannot be a descendant from the spirit of ’76 to be totally indifferent to what is passing.”23

What was passing, the effects of the Embargo Act imposed by Jefferson on December 22, was of keen interest to Abigail, not only as a patriot but as a concerned parent. Regardless of John Quincy’s personal reservations about Jefferson, he had publicly backed the President’s policy regarding the Embargo Act, to harsh accusations of desertion from his own party. In fact, his sense of duty had led him to support the administration and therefore to find himself in opposition to the Federalists “in general.” In his forlorn position—he had no communication with Jefferson other than in the “regular order of business in Senate,” and yet was severely estranged from his own party—John Quincy viewed his political prospects as “declining,” and his term of service “near its close.”24

From the beginning, Abigail and John had agreed with their son’s position. “Under the decrees of France and Great Britain, dooming to capture and confiscation all our ships and cargoes trading with either of those powers, we had no alternative but this or taking our side at once in the war,” John comforted his “Great and Good Son” at this critical moment. All three had studied the tumultuous events leading to the passage of the Embargo Act, which was meant to end British impressment of American seamen. All three were infuriated when, on the previous June 22, 1807, the British frigate Leopard had fired on the American Chesapeake, claiming four men aboard to be British deserters. The Americans’ denial was answered with earsplitting broadsides that killed three and wounded eighteen, in the process of capturing the alleged British deserters, who, in reality, included one American Negro, an Indian, and a native of Maryland.25

On July 2, Abigail, John, and John Quincy were exposed to another display of British belligerence. In response to Jefferson’s decree that British warships leave United States territorial waters, the British had only more aggressively pursued impressment of British subjects from neutral vessels. The Nonimportation Bill of December 14, proving ineffectual, had then given way to the Embargo Act, put into law on December 22, under which United States vessels were forbidden to leave for foreign ports; those heading for American ports, bound for coastal trade, were required to post a bond double the value of the craft and the cargo in order to guarantee that the goods would again land at an American port; and foreign vessels were forbidden to carry goods out of American ports. Now all would be chaos. Trading became a matter of smuggling, and shortly it was apparent that the embargo was more damaging than healing, the opposition strongest in New York and New England. The legality of the act was questioned; Timothy Pickering proposed a New England convention for the purpose of nullifying it. On March 1, 1809, President James Madison, having little choice, would repeal the Embargo Act. On March 15, trade would be reopened and Madison authorized to proclaim resumption of trade with France or Great Britain, should either power, or both, cease violation of Americans’ rights.26

Even at its inception, when John Quincy had considered the Embargo Act as the “last anchor of our peace,” and predicted that the “little finger of war will be heavier than the loins of Embargo,” he had fully understood that his own party would punish him for his theoretical disloyalty. His situation was “critical” and his future in doubt. So patent was his party’s hostility that Louisa wrote Abigail at the start of 1808 that their situation that winter was “not very pleasant” because it was “universally” believed that John Quincy had in fact changed his party. As a result, Louisa reported, the Federalists were “extremely bitter,” and yet John Quincy’s talents were of “too much real importance for them to venture publicly to throw him off,” though “in private they circulate reports very much to his disadvantage.”27

Both parents, knowing how much John Quincy risked now that he seemed to have lost all party support, were more intensely loyal than ever. His father, his consummate admirer, praised his son for having “too honest a heart, too independent a mind and too brilliant talents to be sincerely and confidentially trusted by any man who is under the dominion of party maxims, or party feelings.” His mother, ever his implacable advocate, reminded John Quincy of the example set by the Roman Fabius, who had exposed himself to universal censure and reproach for making the cause of his state and its preservation his foremost concern. “This love of the public good was the soul of his actions,” Abigail informed John Quincy, “and inspired him with that inflexible firmness and constancy for the service of his Country … whatever injury he received from it.” Fabius, then, she said, was a “Character worthy of imitation—deserving of just applause.” Furthermore, she continued, although John Quincy might differ from some of his nearest and best friends in his judgments and opinions on important subjects, she would “much sooner suspect the soundness of their judgments than the purity and uprightness of your intentions.” And finally and most urgently, it was “the sincere wish and fervent prayer” of his affectionate mother that “so long as you live, may you hold fast your integrity.”28

When John Quincy chose to support Madison instead of Federalist Charles Pinckney, as the next presidential candidate, he incurred further abuse from members of his own party, and applause from his mother. Abigail had come to believe “Mr. Madison the fittest and one of the most sensible and candid of Virginians, a moral man unexceptionable in private life.” Practicing what she had preached to her son, she chose an independent course. In her country’s present state, she judged that “union is essentially necessary to our very existence.” As the Federalists amounted to very little on the political scale, and had “not the least” possibility of success, she concluded that “the best and least exceptionable on the other side is a desirable object.”29

*   *   *

Spring of 1808 was mild, but that was the best one could say. The embargo had taken its toll. “Commerce is dead and agriculture is chief mourner,” Abigail reported to Mrs. Smith, now reunited with her husband and living in the Chenango Valley, in New York. “Not a ray of light breaks through the Gloom,” she added. Information had arrived that Napoleon was “hunting” for ways to tighten restrictions on commerce and oblige Americans “if possible” to take a part for or against him. Abigail also noted that “another unhappy affair” had taken place in the East Indies between the British and the Americans on the issue of impressment, and had resulted in bloodshed. She feared there might be a war, what with the British, so “very insolent and haughty,” exercising their power “without much regard to right.” But she took consolation in the belief that “all events are under the controul of a Supreme Being who will order and direct them. I trust for our best good: and may it please him to avert from us the horrors of war.”30

John Quincy’s term as senator was to expire on March 4, 1809, but he was denied the opportunity to run again. James Lloyd was named in his stead, nine months ahead of the normal date of election, and on June 8, John Quincy sent a letter of resignation to the two Houses of Congress, “consistent,” Abigail thought, “with his principles.” Her indictment of the Federalist party was complete. The party had behaved in a most “ungenerous” fashion—one that no honest man could justify. Her son had been “vilified abused and calumniated” because he would have an opinion of his own. As the Federalists had abandoned him, the Republicans had courted him, behaving toward him “with more candour and liberality than they usually practice.” Certainly, John Quincy had been wounded in the “House of his Friends, yet his elevation of mind,” Abigail consoled herself, “will enable him to bear with mildness and patience the jealousy of his equals which upon this occasion has been very conspicuous.”31

By the end of August, Abigail was worn with the “vexatious topicks” of politics, but could not turn her back on them. It seemed to her that “party spirit distorts every effort for the public good into a conspiracy to overturn the constitution; and native Americans united with foreigners to degrade the hand which gave them birth and humiliate themselves to become tributary vassals.…” For all her anguish, she was probably the proudest mother on American turf. John Quincy dwelt in a superior realm. From her beatific vantage point, Abigail viewed John Quincy as a “man who loves his country better than gold; and who dared to strip the mask from the face of deformity—and hold up to public view the true and real picture—I consider it a family trophy—as a coat of arms and pride myself more in being the Mother of such a son, than in all the honours and titles which monarch could bestow.”32

*   *   *

A year of being “teazed” by rumors—Federalists were betting that Mr. Madison would offer John Quincy a foreign embassy post provided that he joined the President’s party—concluded with John Quincy’s appointment, three months after his nomination, as minister plenipotentiary of the United States at the court of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of All the Russias on June 29, 1809. The appointment was meaningful to John Quincy for immensely disparate reasons, positive and troublesome: he was proud to be chosen; he regarded the post as one “of great Trust and importance”; and, blessedly, it was “totally unsolicited.” He accepted the post with the “vague hope” of rendering to his country “some important service,” and, in turn, it was his “desire to justify the confidence” shown him by Mr. Madison. It was, after all, the “duty of a citizen to obey the call of his country,” but John Quincy was frank about an underlying cause for his “satisfaction.” This was the opportunity “of being removed, at least for a time, and with honor,” from “most virulent and unrelenting persecution.”33

On the other hand, John Quincy had reason to pause at this juncture in his forty-three-year-old life. His was a heightened awareness of the “deep sense of the stormy and dangerous” elements of this new phase of his career. Also, his personal motives for staying at home were, in his own words, “of the strongest kind”; the infancy of his children and the age of his parents were causes of immediate concern. In his mother’s case, he had to deal with the upsetting facts of her distressed health. By her own admission, Abigail had not felt so ill in the past five years. In February 1809 she suffered an extreme and dangerous case of dysentery and later struggled with what she termed “St. Anthony disease,” which caused her face to swell and inflamed her eyes until she was nearly blind. Her description of her plight to Elizabeth Peabody conveys Abigail’s fortitude and wit, but also her enveloping depression, which she longed to overcome. St. Anthony “must be a very bigoted saint, a favorer of the Inquisition, and a tyrant,” to punish her so severely that she had come near losing her senses. “If such are the penances of saints,” she told Mrs. Peabody, “I hope to hold no further intercourse with them.” She would have liked, that June of 1809, to take a little journey, and thought that one would be of service to her, but found, she said, that “as years and infirmities increase, my courage and enterprise diminish.”34

*   *   *

At noon on Saturday, August 5, 1809, all members of the party bound for St. Petersburg gathered at the corner of Boylston and Nassau streets in Boston. Those who ascended the waiting carriages that would trundle them over the Charles River bridge to Mr. William Gray’s wharf in Charlestown, where they would board his ship Horace, included John Quincy, Louisa, and their youngest child, Charles Francis; Louisa’s sister, Caroline Johnson; John Quincy’s nephew and private secretary, William Steuben Smith; a chambermaid, Martha Godfrey; and a black manservant named Nelson.

On August 6, the morning was cool and foggy, land had evaporated from the horizon, all the women were seasick, and John Quincy confided to his diary that while separation from his family and friends had always been painful, it had never hurt to the degree he felt now. He had left behind two children and parents he was in “hopes” of meeting again. His father and mother, he wrote, were also “deeply affected” by his departure. His mother’s letter, received just before sailing, was unforgettable and “would have melted the heart of a Stoic,” he said. “My dear Children,” Abigail had written, “I would not come to Town to day because I knew I should only add to yours and my own agony. My Heart is with you. My prayers and blessing attend you. The Dear Children you have left, will be dearer to me for the absence of their parents.”35

Both John and Abigail had, admittedly, looked to John Quincy as the “prop and support” of their advanced and declining years. His “judgment his prudence his integrity his filial tenderness and affection his social converse and information” had made his society “peculiarly” dear to his parents as the world receded from them “with its pleasures and amusements.” Each day they had valued these qualities increasingly; they were John and Abigail’s “Solace and Delight.” Indeed, Abigail had suggested to Mrs. Peabody that a man of John Quincy’s worth “ought not to be permitted to leave the Country—a Country which wants such supports.”36

Illness had perhaps made Abigail extremely vulnerable, mainly because she did not really believe she would see her son again. Parting with him “was like taking our last leave of him,” she wrote to her sister Elizabeth on August 27. “We can barely stretch out our hands to the Anchor of hope with the prospect of living to see his return even should providence spair his Life. We know and feel,” she continued, “that we are cut off from that society which was our delight; from that fillial attention which smoothed the rugged road of life, and supported our declining years.”37

She had not grown so infirm, however, that she had lost her vision of John Quincy’s proud destiny. As though raising her head higher, sitting firmer in her chair, she assured her sister that John Quincy had received “an appointment which did honour both to the giver and receiver,” and that he conceived it his “duty not to decline the service of his country from whatever party calld.” John Quincy had “embraced the whole,” and his mother was convinced that as the “interest and welfare” of his country was his “object—without consideration of party distinctions—his soul feels no contraction.”38

On Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 30, 1809, Abigail was unable to attend church owing to a troublesome eye. But she did go to dinner with a thankful heart, she hoped. She could not help noticing, however, and even counted exactly the empty places at her festive table. She consoled herself that the “young shoots and branches remained,” two from each family, the “promising successors of their dear parents.” She wished that they would enjoy their plum puddings, and that she might keep secret her “anxious solicitude … respecting some of their absent parents.”39