TWENTY-FIVE
The Close of the Drama
Abigail rose from her writing table to retrieve a piece of paper from another part of her room. On the way she caught her image in her “faithful” mirror. She used the word faithful as a synonym for accurate. Though she did not like the “pale meagre vissage” that “started up to her view,” what she described to Elizabeth Peabody as a “striking emblem of yellow autumn and the falling leaf,” she admitted that she had known the “same serious truth” about her appearance for some time now.1
Old friends did not recognize her; she agonized for them and for herself as they searched her withered face for some familiar clues to earlier impressions. When John was able, at last, to bring home the portraits Gilbert Stuart had initiated twenty years before, Abigail regarded John’s as a “Speaking likeness,” but hers, “alas,” was recognizable only to those who had known her twenty years ago, and never now to her grandchildren.2
In the winter of 1814, when her house was like a “hospital of invalids,” herself among them, Abigail suffered a violent cough and rampaging rheumatism—she wrote with her middle finger bound—that all but imprisoned her in her upstairs chamber. John fell ill in February, more critically than in several decades, due to a cold caught when he walked in the snow during a venture into Boston. “Great care is necessary for us both to prop up our feeble fabric,” Abigail conceded to Mrs. Peabody.3
Her hair was “frosted,” her eyesight failing, her memory like a “sieve.” As the world seemed to be “receding” from her, she foraged with greater anxiety for the “mental food” essential to her “support,” by which she meant her “survival.” Try as she did to retain what she read, she was often left only with an “impression” that she likened to a “press copy—faint, difficult to retrace,” and that sometimes eluded her entirely. John shared this “calamity” of mental and physical debility, though Abigail thought his powers of retainment much better than hers. Sometimes, depending on circumstances, she sounded as though she would accommodate herself to the prerequisites of age with amiable grace, expressing the hope that she might not be found wanting in “patience and submission, humility and gratitude,” in retirement from active scenes. As there was an order to nature, as there was a morning and a noon, there must be an evening, she supposed, when the “lengthening shadows admonish us of approaching night—and reconcile us to our Destiny.”4
At other times, however, Abigail was less reflective, less conciliatory, more eager than ever to strike a bargain with “Time.” Her outer appearance, she insisted, distorted her true image, a far more glorious one than her humiliating mirror reflected. The mirror’s image was superficial, recording decay rather than virtues of the heart and “the faith of Hope that invigorates the Soul.” The mirror showed the “witherd” exterior but did not substantiate her belief that “as we approximate nearer and nearer to the source of excellence we may find our graces increasing with added years untill we Bloom with celestial lusture Brighter & Brighter.”5
Of considerable significance was the fact of Abigail’s endurance, her amazing recuperative powers, mightily reinforced by her abiding faith. She marveled at her very existence, at being permitted “a longer sojourn” than she had ever expected, and this thought inspired her conviction that she was meant by some great design “to fulfill some duty, to report of some mission or commission, to relieve some wants, to correct some errors, to sooth some anguish,” and, if she could, to “dispell gloom” among her friends. Suffering from rheumatism, scarcely able to walk, and having to rub her side and hip with camphorated spirits and tincture of flies, Abigail insisted that she was nevertheless quite prepared to serve in any capacity, august or humble. “At the age of seventy,” she told Harriet Welsh, “I feel more interest in all thats done beneath the circuit of the sun than some others do at—What shall I say 35 or 40? Yet such people say they feel as keenly and as sensibly as others? Who can think it?” she asked. Obviously, she could not. “Well everyone to their fancy,” she allowed.6
Faithful to her vision, Abigail proceeded to fulfull the obligations, as she now conceived them, of her prolonged destiny. She reported, corrected, supported, soothed, as need arose, especially regarding Mr. Madison and the war, her granddaughters’ marriages, the deaths of friends, the burning of her nation’s capital. As a devoted admirer of President Madison, believing him to be “what Pope call’d the noblest work of God—an honest Man,” she was dismayed that the Peabody household seemed “to have imbibed an undue prejudice against the chief majestrate from the papers stiled Federal.” “Justice” was all that their government sought, yet they were “maligned abused and ill treated by their own nation, and falsly accused” of waging war for the sake of ambition and conquest. “You good folks,” Abigail reminded Mrs. Peabody, “hear and read one side only—remember truth and justice have two ears.”7
The Peabodys, as opposed to Abigail, sided with the many New Englanders who railed against the administration’s “restrictive system,” the burdensome taxes, and the embargo. “Now I will tell you wherein we differ,” Abigail wrote Mrs. Peabody on May 12, 1814. She had not liked embargoes and restrictive systems “any more than you,” she assured her sister, but believed the government had resorted to them “with the purist and best intentions.” Her sister could rest assured that Mr. Madison would no more sacrifice the interest or independence of the nation than would any of his predecessors, no more than John Quincy “who would sooner lay down his life.” Correcting and soothing and, in a sense, informing all at once, Abigail wished Mrs. Peabody to understand that Mr. Madison was no more hostile to commerce than General Washington had been, that he had had embargoes in his time, “tho,” she allowed, “not of so long duration.”8
Abigail advised from experience, furthermore, that it was “impossible” to judge the difficulties that arose on all sides to “obstruct the best intentions, and wisest plans which are suggested by the rulers of a nation.” Many of these “obsticals which are every where springing up” could not be known to the people at large, and therefore it was “much easier to blame to find fault, and to complain, than to find remedies for the evils.” After assuring Mrs. Peabody that she could “instance” many cases that had occurred during the administrations of previous Presidents, Abigail concluded with only a tinge of embarrassment that there was “no knowing” where she should stop, once she touched “the chapter of politicks,” and that she could preach on the subject … “as long as many long-winded gentlemen—and perhaps with as much effect.”9
Even Colonel Smith complimented his mother-in-law on her “affectionate and correct Counsel” to his daughter, Caroline, in regard to her forthcoming marriage to her brother John’s friend John P. De Windt. Abigail’s thoughts on marriage, aired on the eve of her fiftieth wedding anniversary, her “golden jubilee,” were honest, even intimate. She had had “few rubs” of a matrimonial nature, but she had had “some” in her long life. And there were times when she “insisted upon my own way, and my own opinion, and sometimes yealded silently!” Yet, after half a century, she could say “my first choice would be the same,” if she had the youth and opportunity once again to make it. But her specific advice was to “look out well,” for, “the die once cast, there is no retreat until death.”10
In Caroline’s case, though marriage meant separation from the “prop” of her age, her “Solace,” her “comfort,” Abigail was relieved “to see and know that she was happily settled in life,” for to have left Caroline “destitute of a protector” would only have increased her anxiety. She recognized that her beloved Caroline was neither beautiful nor wealthy; nevertheless, she considered her granddaughter “a jewel of no small value,” and vowed she would be “very scrupelous for her.”11
Because she believed much of happiness in life depended on “connexions,” Abigail justified her need to know more about De Windt than the facts of his being an only son, having an independent fortune, being discreet and regular in his habits, and not “in the least given to the expence of fashionable pleasure.” After prodding the colonel for details, Abigail was pleased to learn that the mother of this “solid sensible young gentleman” was fifty years of age and had been a widow for ten of them, that the family estate at Fishkill, New York, was “handsome,” and that every inquiry made about him was “satisfactory.” While she admired the fact that De Windt had asked the colonel for Caroline’s hand, taking care to have “as few repellents as possible,” she insisted to the colonel that she maintained “the supremacy of the Ladies in this matter.” The father, after all, might give his consent when the “Lady might be otherways engaged,” or choose to reject the suitor. On the whole, although she approved of the outcome in Caroline’s instance, she “rebelld” against the system, she confided to Harriet Welsh, “as encroaching upon the sovereign heights of the Ladies.”12
Caroline was married in Quincy on Sunday evening, September 11, 1814. Abigail, though feeble after a ten-day illness, had “rallied all my resolution and fortitude” to provide the cake (already at hand) and a cold supper of ham, chickens, pies, puddings, custards, whips, cheesecakes, and melons for twenty-six, including Dr. Welsh and Harriet. The couple left on Monday by stage, accompanied by the colonel and a servant, meeting up with their carriage-and-four in Boston. De Windt always kept such a conveyance, and although this method of transportation was considered “making a Dash,” and provoked gossip in Quincy about the bridegroom being “dissapated,” the truth of the matter was “far from this,” Abigail assured Mrs. Peabody. Betraying her deeply embedded disapproval of Colonel Smith, despite her true affection for this errant son-in-law, Abigail continued: “There is not anything in his manners the least ostentatious or concequential. His habits and taste are quite the reverse, and very different from part of the stock from which she is descended, altho she has not a spice of it in her own composition.”13
The specter of the colonel’s frailties was raised once more, this time in connection with the marriage of Abigail Louisa Adams, the daughter of Abigail and John’s dead son, Charles. Unlike Caroline, Abbe was beautiful, like a “half blown rose,” Also, unlike her cousin, she was naturally pensive—a trait instilled in her, her grandmother supposed, by her religious sentiments, with which Abigail differed sharply. “Negation of every amusement,” she insisted, was not part of her own religion, for, as she interpreted the Scriptures, “there is a time to dance and to sing.” Nevertheless, despite edgy but affectionate disapproval of this granddaughter, Abigail was as zealous about Abbe’s prospects as she had been about Caroline’s.14
The fact that Abbe was only sixteen years of age was an additional cause for Abigail’s and John’s concern. “I have always been an advocate for early marriages,” John wrote to his daughter-in-law Sally Adams, Abbe’s mother, on October 26, 1814, “when circumstances of character, fortune could apologize for them.” But sixteen was a very early age to assume the care of “so important an establishment as that of a family.” The grandparents left no doubt as to the requisites of their seal of approval of this marriage. They wished to know “the young gentleman’s age, his profession, whether farmer, merchant, lawyer, physician or divine; the residence and condition of his family; his own means of subsistence etc etc,” John concluded, “for I am as little an advocate for enthusiasm in love as I am in politicks or religion.”15
Fortunately for all, Mr. Alexander Johnson of Utica, New York, the prospective groom, was the son of a “most respectable and worthy merchant,” and there was reason to be satisfied with the connection “on all counts.” Mr. Johnson was “well bred, self possessed, affable, conversable,” and he had an independent income. Also, there was nothing in his personality or background that “savors in the least,” Abigail told Mrs. Peabody, “of conceit, foppery or arrogance.”16
Though Abigail was appreciative of the “faithful and constant” attention of Louisa, her brother’s child, and of the “sprightly vivacity” of Susan, her son’s child, neither compensated for the irreparable void that Caroline’s departure had made in the Adams household. If Caroline found as many “joyful faces” to receive her as she had left “sorrowful hearts” behind her, she would have no reason to complain as her grandmother did now. It was, however, the permanence of their separation that saddened Abigail, a reminder of other separations of even more awesome finality. One of the penalties of a long life was loneliness; the death of her friend Mercy Warren acutely accentuated Abigail’s solitude.17
It was her habit now, writing to Caroline, to confide in her at length and in depth, observing how her “pen runs on,” because she tended to forget “all time” in writing to her. Abigail was comforted that Caroline had visited Mrs. Warren, and predicted that her granddaughter’s memories of her would always be pleasant. “Seldom does old age wear so pleasing, so instructive an aspect,” she told Caroline.18
Mercy Warren turned eighty-seven on October 6, 1814; her death twelve days later, on October 18, her son wrote Abigail, had made “another inroad in their friendship.” The son referred kindly to Abigail’s “constant, ardent, almost sisterly affection” for his mother. Regarding the more painful aspects of their friendship, of the previous “inroad” on it, he remained silent. Their rapprochement after the schism created by Mercy’s History, in which John thought he had been demeaned by being given too shallow a niche in the grand monument that was his country, was due, most of all, to mutual ties that transcended the presumptions and vanities of both principals.19
Though the friendship had been resumed only after the affectionate mediation of Elbridge Gerry, Benjamin Waterhouse, and perhaps Abigail most of all, the framework had never completely disintegrated. When their mutual friend, Waterhouse, conveyed Mercy’s conciliatory regards to John, the latter’s reply was affable, though he remained sorely wounded. “I should have no scruples to return her love,” John replied, “for it is very certain I can never cease to love her, let her treat me with ever so much Injustice or Cruelty.” Despite genuine anguish, as it had been with Jefferson, so it was to be with Mercy: John had “long since found by Experience,” he told Waterhouse, “that when I have once conceived a real Friendship for another, I can never lose it all.”20
Though her own efforts to mend the breach between John and Mercy initially seemed somewhat stilted, Abigail proved herself a judicious and effective arbiter. On her return from a visit with Mercy at Plymouth, she wrote on August 9, 1812, that after reviewing the subjects of controversy between the “two ancient Friends,” she must candidly tell Mercy that she judged “both in the wrong.” It was her theory, however, that if “unavoidable circumstances” had not obstructed personal intercourse, “neither party would so have judged, or so have written.” Abigail further assured her friend that no personal animosity existed in the “Breast of the person who considered himself as injured,” although, she admitted, he did harbor a reservation. This was the “regret,” she continued, “that his principles and actions should thus be transmitted to posterity by the eloquent pen of Mrs. Warren, whose sentiments and opinions so cordially harmonized with his own in former days.” Her own delicate situation had prevented the expression of her sentiments, she concluded, until she had found that her silence might be “misconstructed.”21
Mercy’s response was exuberant: “Blessed are the Peace-makers!” In that “glorious band of righteous” she classed her friend Mrs. Adams. She also politely reminded Abigail of John’s promise to forward from his letterbook a number of letters both “wounding and grievous” to his aged friend, “beyond what either he or Abigail may imagine.” On December 17, 1812, it was clear that Mercy’s cheer was premature. Elbridge Gerry reported to Mercy that Mrs. Adams appeared “a little uneasy” at his expression of pleasure over the possible termination of differences. “Should there be any future prospect of restoring mutual friendship to my respected, my highly respected friends; I shall pursue the object with unremitted endeavours,” he promised Mercy.22
In subsequent correspondence, Abigail and John were uniquely in contradiction with one another, regarding Mercy Warren. On December 30, 1812, Abigail “could not suffer the year to close,” she wrote Mrs. Warren, “without noticeing your repeated favours and thanking you for them. So long as we inhabit this earth and possess any of our faculties,” she continued, “we must and do feel for our posterity for our Friends and our country.” It was a long letter, touching on the personalities, events, and problems that had led them “so near the close of the drama.” It reaffirmed Abigail’s belief in the need for the war, and conveyed her resignation to the likelihood that neither of them should live to see its end. In conclusion, Abigail forwarded to her “Dear Friend” a token of love and friendship, a lock of her own hair, combined with one of John’s, “at his request,” placed in a handkerchief, in a pin set with a pearl, with the promise, health permitting, to pay a visit to her in the spring. Abigail meant to reciprocate, by this memento, for a ring of similar content that Mercy had sent earlier along with the “assurance that we can never forget former amities,” that “the age of us all now reminds us that we have more to think of than the partial interruptions of sublimary friendships.”23
John, however, was not to be entirely placated by the contents of lockets or rings. Months after the women’s effusive exchange, he was checking on historical versions of America’s earliest naval transactions. He had thought it “natural” to begin with Mrs. Warren, and after reading her account, he was dismayed at how she had “carelessly and confusedly hurried over” what he believed to be “one of the boldest, most dangerous and most important measures and Epochas in the History of the New World, the commencement of a new maritime and Naval military Power.” Had Mrs. Warren never read the “Law of Massachusetts. Nor the Journal of Congress? One would think that this momentous Business was all performed by a few rash Individuals and private Adventurers. History,” John had concluded, writing to Elbridge Gerry on April 17, 1813, “is not the Province of the Ladies.” With obviously pained effort, John sought to balance his critique, saying “These three Volumes nevertheless contain many Facts, worthy of Preservation.” On the other hand, “Little Passions and Prejudices, want of Information, false Information, want of Experience, erroneous Judgment, and frequent Partiality, are among the Faults.”24
Though Mercy undoubtedly was never able to reconcile John to her historical interpretations, she, being the “ingenious Lady” he deemed her, was able to recreate at least the aura of their formerly affectionate relationship with considerable elegance. Having heard that his health was declining, for example, she was “quickened” to answer this letter, inviting him to ride out for a visit: “What think you, Sir,” she asked, the summer of 1814, “of a little jaunt to Plymouth in company with Mrs. Adams and my sweet Caroline?” And though she did not label it an official apology, she most certainly extended a peace offering of sorts when she wrote: “The years admonish that the harbingers of dissolution are drawing near after three score and ten,” yet she most sincerely hoped that the life of a gentleman “who acted so great a part in a revolution that astonished the world and lived to set his seal to an honorable peace after a desolating war” might be spared to see peace restored to the United States, “notwithstanding the severe threats of our old inveterate enemy.”25
Mercy’s victory was considerable. John could not accept her “polite” invitation to Plymouth because threescore and nineteen years had reduced him to the “situation, the temper and humor” of the man who, the British historian Clarendon had said, “would not have slept out of his own bed for any office the King could have given him.” But he could visit in spirit and by pen and feel free to speculate on the character and conduct of New England (Would Mercy have thought that in the short span of forty years, New York would rival and even exceed Plymouth, Duxbury, and Boston in “Patriotism, Fortitude and Courage?”) and predict that the war between their country and Great Britain, if sustained, would soon “rekindle the flames in Europe.” He could also sign the letter “Old Friend John Adams,” and did so. At her death, then, Mercy, John, and Abigail were reunited. It was Abigail, however, who paid singular tribute to the “venerable friend” of “more than fifty summers ripening,” telling Caroline on October 23, 1814, that she could “with truth say” that “take her all in all, we shall not look upon her like again.”26
* * *
As “deprest” as Abigail was, owing to the deaths of “Early Friends,” to her collapsing health, to her country’s “calamities,” a letter from John Quincy, now in Ghent, gave a “new spring” to her spirits and she felt, she said, greater “warmth” in the atmosphere for his being so much nearer to her. She could not “endure” the thought of John Quincy’s returning to the cold of Russia, much as she esteemed and respected its sovereign, and she frankly wished for his release from his mission so that she might once more “behold” him on his return home.27
Abigail was bursting with questions, but she did not dare ask any of John Quincy, knowing that every syllable was “watched for and multiplyd and missaplied.” This autumn of 1814 was a time of “anxious expectation” for their country, when, she wrote John Quincy, “every Breize that blows comes fraught with tydings.” New York was “all alive” now, taking every measure for its defense. Boston, just waking from its lethargy, was like a “sleeping Lyon,” which, when chased, will at last “manifest” its strength.28
The “chase” was spurred by the British destruction of Washington on the morning of August 25. Abigail groped for language vivid enough to express her fury over this “Humiliating and disgracefull Catastrophy,” and her disdain for the apathy that had blinded her government to a sense of its dangerous and defenseless situation. It was one thing to be afflicted by events beyond one’s control—to these she would “bow with submission to the Sovereign will”—but when calamities accrued through lack of foresight and energy, through the “incapacity of those who govern and direct the counsels of the nation,” there was reason to complain.29
According to Abigail’s analysis, the “whole force” of Great Britain, including fourteen thousand veterans of the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular campaign, liberated by the routing of Napoleon Bonaparte the past April, was now “leveld” against every vulnerable quarter of America on the seacoast and in the cities, including Chesapeake Bay, New Orleans, and Lake Champlain. Entirely “sensible” that destruction of the capital by these “modern Goths and Vandals” was “intended to disgrace us in the eyes of all nations and posterty,” Abigail was determined to minimize their success. Her son must know, she wrote, that Washington was a city “in name in embrio—a wilderness city, thinly inhabited, without a back country to supply a Militia and inhabited by slaves who were as much feared by the inhabitants as the enemy who attacked them.”30
Abigail had elaborated on the subject of Washington to Mrs. Peabody. “The Capital,” which “softer ages might have made … a city,” was, after all, the foster child of General Washington, intended to perpetuate his name, fame, and achievements, and projected to cost more than a million dollars. “Such was the Capital invaded by six thousand regular troops and a large British Squadron,” actually “a Giant to contend with a pigmy.” Regretfully, Abigail concluded that America had become a divided house, and that nothing but union and decision could save its citizens from becoming “hewers” of wood and “drawers” of water for their British taskmasters.31
Weeks later, on October 18, 1814, Abigail reported to John Quincy that the defense of Boston was satisfactory, that she was not “at ease” about Baltimore, that her grandson John Smith was an orderly sergeant of a company called the Iron Greys (formed of the “best blood and families of New York”), and that she thought the British defeat at Lake Champlain and Plattsburg was “marvelous in our Eyes.” Perhaps it was best, after all, she speculated, “that Great Britain should show herself thus haughtily, overbearing and insolent to unite all parties in execrating her government and holding her in as much abhorence as the Exiled Tyrant of Elba.”32
* * *
On the thirteenth of February, 1815, bells of the Old South and Federal Street churches rang so suddenly that Bostonians within hearing distance thought they must signal a fire. Then they heard people crying “Peace!” and saw them shaking hands and congratulating one another; other men and women just ran about wildly. Printers, working a small press, struck off the handbills pronouncing peace and showered them on the crowd, while rockets thrown from the State House roof lighted the sky and bonfires blazed on neighboring hills. Bakers, hatters, and papermakers wove back and forth from State Street to the South End, then to the North; three sleds full of sailors, drawn by fifteen horses apiece, were preceded by a military company. Until official intelligence arrived, however, Boston would postpone an oratorio, an illumination, and a public ball, planned in public celebration of the momentous event.33
Understandably, Abigail’s spirits were in a “whirl” as she savored the news of the total defeat of the British forces at New Orleans. This “late glorious victory” had closed the war with a “lustre” upon the American army that time, she predicted, would not efface. The peace, though she regarded it as a “blessing,” left many “difficult points” unsettled, and therefore she welcomed John Quincy’s letter of December 24, 1814, the date of the signing of the treaty of peace between America and Great Britain.34
Abigail had studied John Quincy’s healing words gratefully and decided they must reach a larger audience. Therefore, on March 5, 1815, she seated herself by the fireside, adjusted the green eyeshade that soothed her precarious vision, gathered sheets of paper and a pen, and proceeded to copy the entire contents of John Quincy’s letter. The conditions of the peace, John Quincy had written from Ghent, were not those that might have been the most desirable, but those that the “situation of the parties at and during negotiation made attainable.” Though decisions on key issues such as impressment, indemnities, and military control of the Great Lakes lay in abeyance, John Quincy was at ease with the compromise. Abigail took heart, and hoped Harriet Welsh would, and others beyond, with her son’s assurance that “we have abandoned no essential right, and if we have left everything open for future controversey, we have at least secured to our Country the power, at her own option to extinguish the war.” Abigail had forwarded this particular letter to Harriet with specific instructions. She relied on her friend to see to its publication, and she asked that John Quincy’s evaluation of the circumstances of the peace be attributed anonymously “from one of the ministers to his friend.”35
Abigail was aware, when she wrote to Harriet Welsh, that John Quincy would join his wife in Paris to wait for further orders from the President. She learned the nature of these orders on March 7 with his nomination as ambassador to England. Understandably, she thought it “a singular circumstance in our Family History, that both Father & Son should make peace with the same nation at the distance of 30 years.” On March 8, 1815, she wrote to John Quincy: “You are now my son, to appear as your Father did before you, the first minister after peace. You have the advantage of knowing the Country to which you go and the nation is to receive you. May you find both honor and honesty. You will have some knotty affairs to discuss, and adjust, in all of which, I wish you success.” Meanwhile, Abigail assumed that during his stay in Paris, John Quincy would “certainly” pay his respects to Louis XVIII, and revisit the spots of his youth. As for England’s Queen Charlotte, just five months younger than she, Abigail would not, even for her crown, she said, “be obliged to exhibit her person at court, so old and decayed.”36
On May 5, 1815, Harriet Welsh flew to Abigail’s door “like a winged mercury,” with a letter, at last, from John Quincy. The first to come her way since December, it was “a sunshine,” she said, “breaking through the clouds” to brighten the gloom of the past month. Abigail had cried till her eyes were swollen when her sister Mrs. Peabody died suddenly in her sleep at three o’clock in the morning of April 10, and then, eight days later, when her grandsons George and John sailed on Sunday, April 18, aboard the New Packet bound for England, like Odysseus’s son Telemachus, she thought, “in search of their father.”37
Abigail thought of her sister’s death as a “loud call” to live in habitual preparation for her own departure. Her age and her infirm health gave her little reason “to boast of tomorrow” and therefore to hope to see her grandchildren again. And yet, with almost miraculous recuperative powers, she managed to recharge her own spirits by practicing what she preached to others. “Cultivate a cheerfulness of mind which doeth good like a medicine,” she would urge seemingly vanquished friends, begging them not to permit “rubs and stings of outrageous fortune” to deprive them of their serenity. Furthermore, seasons in human life differed; some called for mourning, others for rejoicing. Mid-June 1815 found Abigail once again viewing her life and times with optimism.38
Now Abigail spoke of being “delighted” by prospects on land and sea, by “thriving” industry, by borders “at peace,” by waters “covered” with ships. And, as one who was “ever curious,” she was full of “wonder and astonishment” at the “novel scene” in France, at Napoleon Bonaparte’s return from exile in Elba to force King Louis XVIII’s abdication, so that he might reign as Emperor. Always a riveting figure to her, Abigail called Napoleon the “8th wonder of the world,” and as long as no blood was spilled and he ruled “peaceably,” she was willing that he “enjoy his power, and authority.”39
In August, when a defeated Bonaparte was rumored to be seeking asylum in America, Abigail deliberated the consequences. Bonaparte was “quite done over, teeth and claws all drawn,” she assumed, and therefore she did not believe “he would eat us all up.” On the contrary, she wrote Harriet Welsh, she thought it “a novel winding up” if, after so many battles, and “so many hair breadth scapes,” the beleaguered warrior should lay his bones in America, the “only free country now in Being.” Concentrating on the larger picture now, Abigail wondered what the allied powers would do about “poor suffering France.” Would they put the Bourbons on the throne again? Would France be quiet then? “Only from necessity—yet they must be reinstated,” she concluded.40
With the end of the war in America, Abigail admitted ruefully that “that fruitful subject” which had always given her something to write about had also ended. As she was “not living in the world,” in either the political or the social sense, and had “retired from all the gay scenes of it,” she was “reduced,” she claimed, to the state of Madame Sévigné, to writing about herself and her family. Because she thought news of family “occupations, occurrences, situations” made for the most interesting letters of all, or so she presently claimed, she offered “no apologies therefore” to her correspondents.41
John, frail as he was, enjoyed his books, his pen, and the company of those who shared his literary interests. Abigail’s situation was identical. Both of them challenged Quincy’s limitations with brilliant success. Though her eyes might “complain,” making it necessary at times for her to sit in darkness, shading them, she could never stop putting them to work. “Participation,” after all, was “the root of pleasure in reading a fine passage,” and to share it with someone only heightened its enjoyment. Abigail was in perfect agreement with Laurence Sterne, who had said he would have a companion “if it was only to say how the shadows lengthen as the sun darkens.” Solitude was a “cold, unsocial feeling,” and Abigail was frank about searching out companionship, about wanting a “talk” with a friend, as she wrote one morning to Harriet Welsh.42
In the course of her remaining correspondence, Abigail enjoyed “talks” with many people on many subjects. She was strikingly candid, for example, on the subject of religion. “There is not any reasoning which can convince me, contrary to my senses,” she told John Quincy, “that three, is one, and one three.” Though she allowed that “we are permitted to see but through a glass darkly,” her conclusion was incontrovertible. “I acknowledge myself a unitarian—Believing that the Father alone, is the supreme God, and that Jesus Christ, derived his Being, and all his powers and honours from the Father.” At one point she had observed, to her sorrow, “a narrow selfish exclusive system gaining ground, instead of that Liberal spirit of Christianity recommended by St Paul.” It was to Louisa that she wrote on January 3, 1818, “True religion is from the Heart, between Man and his creator, and not the imposition of Man or Creeds and tests.”43
Another subject she explored in depth and with conviction was that of modern writers and their works. She found in Byron a “wild exentric imagination—some touching and pathetic strokes of nature and genius,” but concluded he was a “gloomy malicious envious and unprincipled man, neither capable of love or friendship,” that his genius was “abortive and misapplied.” Swift received even less flattering notices. Abigail could never love Swift. He had none of the milk of human kindness in his nature.44
Furthermore, Walter Scott’s recent biography of Swift put him in such a “cruel and Barberous light” in respect to his treatment of three ladies, that her dislike had “arisen to detestation and abhorence of his character.” As to Scott’s verse—it reminded her, though she liked to read it, of silver and gold lace, the lamé trimming on women’s dresses, “more ornamental than solid.” By comparison, Milton, Pope, and Thompson were “sterling Bullion and have never been rivaled by any of their successors.”45
* * *
With Louisa in London, Abigail found herself reliving her own past with extraordinary intensity. She rose before daylight to write by the rays of the early-morning sun, though she could not “make returns with equal interest.” Louisa had “performed” her journey from St. Petersburg, she wrote Abigail, with “as little uneasiness and as few misfortunes as could possibly have been anticipated,” and she had, as a result, “really acquired the reputation of a heroine at a very cheap rate.” Once settled in the London suburb of Ealing, Louisa wrote of Spain’s attempts to “shake off aggression,” of France’s “gloom” as the Bourbons carried with them “destruction in all its varied forms,” of England’s “poorly conducted drawing rooms.” She lapsed only occasionally into melancholy references to her father’s vanished fortune and to her dead infant, and, on the whole, Abigail sensed that Louisa’s mind was more at ease than it had been in “that cold dark region of Russia.” She also gratefully acknowledged that her daughter-in-law was a “very good correspondent,” making no secret of her bitter satisfaction at the astonishing similarity between Louisa’s critique of British society at present and her own, thirty years earlier.46
The two women, a continent apart, had in fact achieved a remarkable degree of friendship. As a result of their letter-writing they acknowledged openly and generously a sincere appreciation of one another’s gifts. Louisa marveled at Abigail’s talent for endowing even “trifles” with interest; the “Easy course” of her thoughts seemed to the younger woman “to flow upon the paper like an unruffled stream, clear and smooth.” By contrast, Louisa regretted that she could never “mould” her own thoughts to her will, that her style was “always loose, unconnected and irregular,” and that she frequently found it “impossible to express a single idea.”47
Abigail, sincerely pleased by Louisa’s “flattering and complimentary” appreciation, knew not, she said, “how to replie to it.” Somewhat apologetically, she launched into a discourse on her under-privileged education, how neither grammar nor spelling had been a consideration for women in her youth, and how she had lamented this “deficiency” throughout her life. If, as Louisa said, she wrote with care, it was from habit. She made no pretensions to style and trusted to the candor of her correspondence “to receive the matter, as flowing from the heart; without regarding the elegance of diction.” Nor would she permit Louisa to “deprecate her own letters. “Your stile,” Abigail assured her daughter-in-law, “is much more correct and elegant than mine, and your letters are much approved and admired.”48
Louisa, who became a frequent and valued correspondent of John’s after Abigail’s death, would later translate French literature into English (La Morte de Socrate, by Lamartine), and write poetry of a dark hue, such as “To the Raven” (“Ill boding would’st thou seem to say/That Lifes a dream?/That time unheeded flits away/like younder stream?”). Louisa had earlier expressed how much Abigail’s “approbation” meant to her, that it afforded her “the greatest pleasure” and did, indeed, “excite encouragement.” John, complimented her as well, telling her how her journals had “the form and impression of the age.” When Louisa’s grandson Henry Adams read her papers, he pronounced them “Good, too—some of them.” It was this grandson who found Louisa “an exotic, like her Sèvres china,” who declared her “Louis Seize, like the furniture.” As both china and furniture had belonged to Abigail and John, Louisa, in regard to her writing as well, owed something to the earlier generation.49
* * *
Swept back in time, now that Louisa was in London, Abigail could not refrain from passing on the latter’s report that all was “ceremony,” all was “show,” all was “stile,” and that the United States did not furnish its foreign ministers with enough salary to make them “conversant” with the nobility, “except in Business.”50
Ten months later the picture was radically altered, and Louisa, never so healthy since her marriage, and fearful of growing fat, would tell Abigail of being “plunged into the great world” until three or four in the morning, of waltzing with the Duke of Wellington, of counting the Duchess of Cumberland among the number of her “fashionable” acquaintances.” For the present, however, Abigail, spurred by Louisa’s litany of deprivations, speculated about the King and Queen, about court dress and manners.51
Thirty-year-old memories were precipitated by vivid and painful realities. Remembering that George III had always treated her “both politely and respectfully,” she was sorry for the “poor old King,” for his “derangement.” The Queen, she speculated, “must have grown pretty old, and the few personal graces she ever had, time must have diminished.” Then again, on thinking of what sort of a figure she herself would make, if obliged to hold a drawing room, she concluded that “constitutions in England wear better than in our climate.” Abigail, who had always taken notice of fashion, as much out of pride as preference, now combed English periodicals for details, acknowledging to Louisa that she had some curiosity to know “whether the old fashion of large hoops still prevails; and how the head is decorated.” In her day, she recalled, capes and feathers were worn, and those so high as to make it difficult to sit in a carriage. If these still prevailed, she supposed “they must make an awkward appearance.” For all her disdain of the English, their customs and royalty, Abigail expressed fawning delight at the thought of her family being invited to two royal marriages. “Your attendance in your Diplomatic Character at the Celebrations, will make an Epocha in the History of our Family, if it should be written,” she would tell Louisa on September 30.52
* * *
On the morning of January 18, 1816, Abigail, describing herself as attacked by a “dangerous complaint,” chose to write her will. She wrote carefully, considerately, and, she hoped, impartially. She gave one farm property, a bequest from her uncle Norton Quincy, to her son John Quincy Adams; she gave the half she owned of the property left to her by her father to her son Thomas Boylston Adams; she considered both of equal value, worth about $2,200 apiece. She directed that her stock, amounting to four thousand dollars, “perhaps more,” be disposed of and divided in varying proportions among her grandchildren, daughters-in-law, sister-in-law, and nieces, along with specified pieces of jewelry, dresses, and coats of silks, satins, and lace, and “bodily Linnen.” She parceled out one share apiece in the Haverhill Bridge among granddaughters, as well as her gold necklace and “drops” of her earrings; one share apiece in the Weymouth Bridge went to each of her sons. She gave Rebecca Dexter, wife of Richard Dexter, in token of her faithful nursing in various sicknesses thirty dollars; Esther Briesler received twenty dollars and a red silk dress. She hoped that “no unkind or hard thought will be entertaind” because she had given more to Louisa, her brother’s child and her devoted companion. “Her case is peculiar,” Abigail stated, “having no relative upon her Mothers Side but a Sister—I commend her to the kindness of my children.”53
Six weeks after writing her will, Abigail was surprised and grateful to be alive, though so “feeble” that she was convinced she would “never be good for much again.” Theoretically, she had been cured by quantities of bark wine and the solicitous care around the clock of Louisa and Susan and others. Abigail harbored another theory about her recovery. She was convinced, as she wrote to John Quincy, that the desire to see her dear children once more was “one of the strongest ligaments which has bound me to earth.”54
In times of abiding loneliness and stress, Abigail, who seldom thought twice about her dreams, tended to elaborate on them. On one occasion, during a seemingly interminable separation, she had mentioned dreaming of seeing her daughter. Another time some weeks before John took his oath as President, she wrote graphically of dreaming of large black bulls, twenty-four-pound leaden missiles, flying in the air, all “directed” at her. Now she dreamed of her grandson John running into her arms on his return from Europe. Having survived such a threatening illness, she now assumed that there were “yet further duties for me to perform or further trials for me to endure,” and in either situation, she concluded, “I trust the ruler of the skies.” Her most recent dream affirmed her faithful hope that she would live to see John Quincy and his family once more.55
On June 7, 1816, Harriet Welsh invited Abigail to come to have strawberries fresh from the vine. On June 10, Abigail visited Boston for the first time in a year. She was rapidly (and surprisingly) gaining strength, but she was correct. There were further trials to endure. Colonel Smith had been reelected to office on the Democratic ticket, but his opponent, Westel Willoughby, had challenged him on his small majority. As a result of the decision reached by a committee headed by his old adversary Timothy Pickering, Smith relinquished his seat on December 13, 1815.56
Six months later, on June 16, 1816, the colonel was dead of a liver ailment and gout. To witness the deaths of persons younger than she, Abigail considered “one of the afflictions of a long life.” She had not thought she would survive the colonel, and she mourned, as did John, this “good hearted, unfortunate gentleman.” John, in fact, claimed that “the viccissitudes of human life have not been more exemplified in the biography of Napoleon, than in that of Colonel Smith.” Abigail wrote Louisa that she considered the colonel “a Brave Officer, but through Life an unfortunate man, with a Noble and generous spirit, a tender heart, and kind affections.” Meaning “no ill and not suspecting it in others,” he “too often became the prey of the artfull and the designing.”57
In early July, John happily issued a report on his wife’s health. John Quincy, he wrote, would be “overjoyed” to see how his mother had recovered “her former alacrity, spirit, wit,” and how he himself took “great delight in riding out with her every fair day.” The fact that Abigail was restored to her “characteristic vivacity, Activity, Witt Sense and Benevolence” presented a problem, however, to her loving but anxious husband. At this time of her life and his, when he foresaw “but a few minutes before both of us must depart,” Abigail’s “incontrollable attachment to the superintendence of every part of her household” made him “tremble.” He despaired over her rushing activity, her conviction that “she must take upon herself the Duties of her Grandaughter Neice, Maids Husband and all. She must allways be writing to You and all her Grandchildren,” John observed, an activity he apparently judged to be as dangerous to his wife’s health as her domestic exertions. “I must say she must,” he added, “because she will.”58
Abigail and John lived the last moments of their lives with humor, intelligence, and courage, above all. John, in genial spirits, referring to himself as “Mr. Old Folks,” wrote exultantly of being invited into all societies and how he was “much caressed” by so many. Abigail was amused and delighted as well by their popularity. “Your father and I have lived to an Age, to be sought for as Curiositys,” she wrote John Quincy on August 27, 1816. Accordingly, they had not received so much company in years. Mixing now with what John called “all the aristocracy,” the “bonton” of Quincy, Abigail reported four parties in a row, asking Harriet Welsh, “Will you be allarmed to hear that the President & Lady have and are to attend them all?”59
Further capitalizing on her prized momentum, Abigail even journeyed into Boston. While John visited the governor, Abigail was determined to watch the troops from her carriage as they carried on their “evolutions.” When Commodore Bainbridge and his officers insisted on improving her view by detaching her horses and lifting her high in her carriage, the gentlemen demonstrated, to her delight and satisfaction, she would report to friends, that “gallantry still exists.” Also, with the drive and concern of former years, Abigail sought to further the career of her granddaughter Susan’s young suitor. Abigail thought the “tall” and “well made” Charles Thomas Clarke a “modest, solid sensible gentleman” with a “good face.” She not only investigated his family background, but also wrote to U.S. Attorney General Richard Rush (the son of Benjamin Rush) on November 20, 1816, expressing the hope that President Monroe might intercede on the young man’s behalf, her theory being that a transfer from an inactive ship to one in the Mediterranean would facilitate his promotion.60
There was, indeed, a sense of energy rather than resignation about Abigail’s approach to her waning life. Time, whatever measure was left to her, afforded challenges which she accepted, almost welcomed, with anxious appetite. It was as though she meant to profit from past errors, to make amends for having “spent in vain” so much “valuable Time” when she might instead have “done more service in the world, and acquired more substantial knowledge.” Brushing aside her wistful regrets, Abigail admitted to succeeding “pretty well” in reading, in French, the essayist Jean-François de La Harpe’s correspondence with the Czar of Russia and Count Schavaloni. On the whole a confirmed optimist, she vowed to look ahead and never behind.61
Abigail was “sick of that conversation which spends itself in railing at the times we live in,” she wrote John Quincy on November 5, 1816. She was, in fact, “apt to think they are not made better by these complaints” and, on occasion, “to know they are made worse, by those very persons who are loudest to complain of them.” If living in the past was one of the habits of age, Abigail pronounced it “high time” for every man who grows old to guard against doing so, for, in her opinion, “there is no occasion to invite more peevish companions for the last hours of Life than time and decrepitude will bring in their train.”62
As Abigail now evaluated her “journey,” she admitted to having met up with her share of the “too selfish—too ambitious too uncharitable, the malicious and the envious.” But, on the other hand, “these vices were counterbalanced by opposing virtues” and, she reasoned, “this is a very good world.” She added that she had always considered a “laughing philosophy much wiser than a sniveling one—as he who enjoys must be happier than he who suffers.” She was “determined,” therefore, she promised John Quincy, “to be pleased with the world, and wish well to all its inhabitants.”63
On November 20, 1816, when newspapers reported John Quincy’s recall to America to serve as Secretary of State under President Monroe, Abigail’s prevailing belief that her life had been “lengthened out” for a reason was resoundingly confirmed. “I should rejoice in any honorable circumstance that would bring you, to your native Country,” she wrote immediately to John Quincy. Four months later, on March 12, 1817, Abigail’s message conveyed greater urgency: “The voice of the nation calls you home. The government calls you home—and your parents unite in the call. To this summons you must not, you cannot refuse your assent.” Nor would he, she presumed, “have a disposition to regret so honorable an appointment—by so unanimous a vote.”64
Abigail beamed with pride. John Quincy’s nomination had been confirmed by one dissenting vote only; no one since George Washington had been chosen for public office with “more universal approbation.” In fact, her son’s appointment “was more agreeable to her,” she claimed, “than if he had been elected President.” She did not fail to recognize that, in part, her motives for wanting her son home were “selfish and personal.” At the same time, she and John truly believed that John Quincy, now fifty years old, must return, or “renounce” the idea forever.65
Though supremely dedicated to John Quincy’s homecoming, she was nevertheless wary that his path was somewhat problematic. Her principal source of “uneasiness” was the rumor that Henry Clay was “openly unfriendly” to her son, and consequently had refused a Cabinet appointment. Abigail knew that John Quincy and Clay had differed, during negotiations at Ghent, on the importance of such issues as the fisheries and the navigation of the Mississippi, yet, even allowing that these issues might generate animosity, she could not conceal her disappointment that Mr. Clay was not “a more liberal minded man.” A veteran of the vagaries of political life, her experiences enforced perhaps by the situation with Clay, Abigail felt compelled to remind John Quincy that he must never be “so dazzled by the brightness or glare of high station as to forget that a Breathe can create, and a Breathe destroy.” In still another effort to prepare him for his return, she warned him that he “could not fail to be shocked at the changes.” He would find the old mansion “like its owners, gone to decay—when I look in the glass I see that I am not what I was, scarcely know a feature on my face—but not the less ready or willing to welcome you and yours, and to accomodate you, untill like a bird of passage, you again take your flight.”66
On the evening of August 9, 1817, Abigail learned from her “watchful centinel Harriet” that the ship Washington had docked in New York. In response to this “grateful intelligence,” she wrote to John Quincy the next day to say that she and John were waiting to welcome “one and all” to the “old Habitation, altered only by the deprivations of Time, like its ancient inhabitants. Come then all of you,” she urged, “we will make you as comfortable as a cup of cold water, tempered with love and warm affection can render you.” In turn, Louisa notified her mother-in-law of her family’s imminent departure for Quincy on August 15, warning her that changes were not a one-sided matter. Her family “too were much altered” since last they all had met. Furthermore, she had lost all her good looks and all her flesh on the voyage, she claimed, “owing to a bad miscarriage at Sea added to the usual inconveniences attending the passage.”67
At 10:00 A.M. on August 18, Louisa Smith announced a carriage in sight descending the hill. When it arrived moments later, Abigail was already at the door. Young John, just as she dreamed he would, was the first to run to Abigail, flinging his arms around her neck. George, calling out to his grandmother, “Oh! Grand! Oh! Grand!” followed immediately. Only Charles hung back, half frightened, though respectful. Time would pass, he was to admit in his memoirs, before he understood his brothers’ sensitivity to their grandmother’s rebukes, or “fully shared” their “affection and reverence” for her.68
Contrary to Louisa’s admonition, Abigail found her daughter-in-law looking “better and younger—all sunburnt and brown.” Within a week she had persuaded Louisa to take a short holiday in Boston, to leave her to tidy up the house, now covered, from parlor to her own bedroom, with trunks, books, and papers. Many of the last, Abigail noted, were inscribed in her daughter-in-law’s handwriting: Louisa was now acting as her husband’s private secretary, owing to his weak eyesight and trembling hands. And, as Abigail had anticipated, John Quincy and Louisa, “like Birds of passage,” departed for Washington one month after coming to Quincy, leaving their three sons behind. George was at school in Cambridge, John and Charles in Boston, and Abigail appeared as responsive as ever to their moral, intellectual, and physical needs, as she assessed them.69
Shortly, Abigail would be describing John as a “fine boy” provided his spirits did not “run away with his Judgement,” and Charles as a “thinking Boy, much slower, but not less sure in the end.” She advised her nephew William Shaw, whose help she had enlisted on her grandsons’ behalf, of the “great importance that they should be kept Steady,” explaining that, as they had been out of school for three months, it would be hard to return, “especially amongst all strangers.” Besides, the books differed from those they were used to studying. With seemingly unabated energy, Abigail, far from delegating responsibility, also wrote her grandsons directly to advise them to be “strict” about observing rules concerning their studies, that “diligence and punctuality” would not fail to make them esteemed by preceptors and schoolmates. To remedy their depleted wardrobes, Abigail engaged Mrs. Sampson to sew them new pantaloons.70
* * *
The fall of 1817 was cold and dry. Abigail suffered chills and “violent” pains in her hands, yet she persisted in her successful attempts to “rouse” herself. Her grandsons came to Quincy on Saturdays; George often read to his grandfather. The De Windts, including Caroline’s mother-in-law and servants, paid a lengthy visit. On the whole, Abigail was content. Having kindled her own fire at six in the morning, she wrote Harriet Welsh, rather gloating that her friend must be “fast asleep” at that hour; she had “much to brag of at 73.” Though she could not see “to thread her needle, nor sew quick nor go here and there as she could in days past,” she was in better health than in other periods, “in general good spirits, always endeavoring to look on the bright side without gloomy anticipations.” She allowed, however, that some things took place that she could wish “otherways.”71
One situation that she certainly wished to be altered was the miserable plight of her grandson William Smith, who was, according to Louisa, living in the “cheapest” of boardinghouses, his wife, Louisa’s sister, pregnant. The entire set of circumstances conjured up unhappy memories for Abigail, and fears, which she expressed to Louisa, that William, whose monetary inheritance could probably not equal the colonel’s debts, was “as deficient in judgment as his father was.” Still, Abigail was able to end this letter, written December 12, 1817, on a positive note. Though she had wished for their parents’ presence to complete the “festival,” she had passed a “Pleasant Thanksgiving Day” with nine of her grandchildren.72
January 7, 1818, was as mild as a September day, yet Abigail lay ill, dosing herself with barley water. Confinement was always difficult for her, as much if not more in old age than when she was younger. As she explained to a friend who might think her “impudent” for venturing into Boston if the weather was the least bit unfavorable, or permitting John to do so, “there is such a thing as staying at home until it becomes wearisome to us. Change of pace or dear variety compose part of our happiness.”73
These days it was her daughter-in-law Louisa who once again rescued Abigail from monotony, who provided her with “a rich entertainment.” Louisa’s letters transported Abigail from her Quincy fireplace to the heart of Washington, plunged her into the center of Monroe’s administration. As they had during Louisa’s stay in London, they made Abigail a “sharer” in her daughter-in-law’s life, exposing a grateful mother-in-law to more information “in this way” than she could glean in a whole session of Congress. Only in her correspondence with her children did Louisa intimate her more problematic nature, her need for “timely reflection,” her tendency to “fret under disappointments” where her family was involved. Apart from these letters, Louisa, addicted, by her own admission, to “larking the follies” of her neighbors, “highly entertained” Abigail, who pressed for their continuation, though she might only be able to offer a “meagre dish” in return. But Abigail had underestimated the results. Louisa’s Washington soon became Abigail’s, and in the process of feasting on the present, she provided her daughter-in-law with a vast banquet of the past, seasoned in her own provocative way.74
* * *
Abigail had met President Monroe in July, when, on his tour of the Northeast states, he had called on her and John in Quincy. She admired him, and had presented him with two roses, one red and one white (“York and Lancaster United”), and commented on his “agreeable affability and unassuming manners.” Louisa, too, used the word “affability” in connection with Monroe. She mentioned his six footmen in livery, two head servants out of livery, his elegant furniture. She also described Mrs. Monroe’s white figured-silk dress with a profusion of point lace, her white hat and feathers, her “high polished and easy manners” that did “honor to her station.” But tastes differ, Louisa had added, and “dear Dolly was much more popular.”75
Years fell away as Abigail responded on the subject of the Monroe White House. She was as objective as she could be, having been recently attacked for behaving “coldly” in her own drawing rooms. But ancient bitterness surfaced, as she asked, “What would have been said in her day if so much style, pomp and etiquette had been assumed?” Of course, she knew the answer: “The Cry of Monarchy monarchy would have resounded from Georgia to Maine.” She did not, however, condemn this new system, though she would not have “ventured” upon such steps. She thought, however, there was no other way than the Monroes’ to bring order out of confusion after Jefferson’s and Madison’s “medley of Liberty and equality.”76
As Abigail now had a captive audience, Louisa’s references to most any subject, such as protocol, etiquette, or finances, stirred fluent memories and evoked impassioned advice. Louisa must remember that she had “a very circumspect and critical part to act,” that her “every step” would be “more critically scrutinized” than in any previous situation, that “an Heir apparent is always envyed.” Louisa must spare herself with entertainments, must “return the civility” but not “sacrifice too much to it; the sallary of a Secretary of State did not justify the expense.” Louisa must be aware, owing to demeaning official salaries (“not one of all the Presidents who have held office—have not carried poverty home with them”), that Abigail had had to make her own pastry and bake without an oven, as no such conveniences were available, or affordable, in the “great house” in which she had lived in Philadelphia. Consequently, should houses be built for heads of government departments, Louisa must urge the formation of a committee of ladies to “superintend” them, and the architect Charles Bulfinch to plan them. Bulfinch, architect of Boston’s State House and, after Benjamin Latrobe, of the nation’s capitol, might not design these according to the prevailing “National Stile,” Abigail did allow. But he would, she assured Louisa, bear in mind practical considerations such as family conveniences, insulation against the cold, and the limitations of five-thousand-dollar salaries in regard to servants.77
She advised the formation of still another “council of the Ladies” to “set in concert” how they must deal with the matter of rank between senatorial and secretarial wives, Mrs. Monroe’s own practice to be taken into consideration, of course. And, while on the subject of protocol, Abigail would propose, she told Louisa, the creation of a new office, that of a Minister of Ceremonies, similar to the British Garter King of Arms. For “with all our boasted simplicity,” Abigail insisted, “there is not upon the Globe a prouder people; or one more tenacious of Rank and titles from the Subaltern, to the president of the United States, without the honesty to acknowledge it.”78
Returning to the subject of finances still another time, Abigail was unusually succinct. She would not recommend parsimony, but would, on the other hand, avoid extravagance. And finally, she hoped Louisa did not think she had taken “improper Liberty” with her. The “ground which I have travelled, is new to you,” she explained, and “to find it safe is an arduous task.”79
* * *
The first sign of a green pea shooting through the earth was proof that spring, after weeks of chilling rain, had arrived the third week of May 1818. Sprouting plum blossoms were another sign, but Abigail was too preoccupied to enjoy this favorite season fully, in view of news she had just learned: Louisa, in writing to Harriet Welsh, had indicated that she did not feel up to visiting Quincy. Abigail now set herself the task of appealing that unhappy decision, pathetically admitting that “I cannot bear the idea.” Both would need respite, John Quincy especially, after five or six months of strenuous labor. Her son was already said to have “the Character of the most industerous man in Washington,” and Abigail reminded Louisa that “a string too long stretched will Break.” Then again, what stronger motive could John Quincy have for visiting than the prospect of seeing his children and parents? “How few times more” would he see the latter?80
Abigail rephrased her message a number of times, writing her son directly only at the end of the congressional session, “unwilling to add” before then, she said, to his “incumberances.” Desperate in her desire to see him once more, she described the plight of age in pitiful detail. With each passing hour she felt less able to read, to write, even to breathe. “Every day steals something from us,” she said, reminding her of her inability to sustain her faculties against the “depradations of time”; a body without mind, she observed, agreeing with Mr. Jefferson, was “one of the most humiliating Spectacles” of all. “Come thou and see us, while something of that remains,” she begged her son.81
At the beginning of August, Abigail still hoped for visitors from Washington. Despite profound anxiety over her eroding abilities, and concern that their age “with hasty steps” was pushing them off the stage, she and John courageously stayed their dwindling course. They gathered daily in the parlor overlooking the garden, where John, no longer able to guide his pen, now dictated his letters; Abigail, seated on the sofa in rustling silks, sorted baskets of fresh laundry, wrote letters, and read—specifically, this August, the life of Andrew Jackson. The general who had first earned her admiration during his daring victory at New Orleans appeared to her now “as suave as Bonaparte without his unbridled Ambition.”82
A most welcome letter from Louisa informing Abigail that she and John Quincy were leaving on August 25 almost coincided with the couple’s arrival one week later in Quincy. They had returned once again to Washington when John Quincy received warning that his mother was ill. Benjamin Waterhouse had visited Abigail on October 20, and “fear,” he said, had induced him to write the next day that Abigail was suffering from typhus fever and had the “free use” of Madeira wine to “compensate” for her natural vigor.83
It was Louisa who wrote to her father-in-law immediately. She explained that John Quincy was “totally incapacitated” by the tragic news and unable to write to his father, revealing, meanwhile, her own tangled emotions. She would “readily” set out for Boston “if in any shape” she could offer assistance. On the other hand, knowing that Abigail was surrounded by “the most tender and watchfull friends,” she would “only add one to the many who are desirous of proving their attachment.” Then again, if she did go to Quincy she would have the satisfaction of knowing that she had exerted herself in every way “to restore one on whose existence so much of the happiness of the family depended.…”84
On Thursday, October 22, Harriet Welsh, Lucy Greenleaf, and Mrs. Dexter took turns sitting at Abigail’s bedside. That night, Dr. Holbrook seemed more encouraging. Abigail, aware of how weak she was, remained alert the next day. On October 26, Harriet Welsh wrote for the third time to Louisa that “we have still hopes,” as Abigail was holding her own. Finally, with Abigail “seemingly conscious until her last breath,” according to Thomas, the “apaling event” took place on Wednesday, October 28, when she died around 1:00 P.M. She was buried on Saturday, November 1; John insisted on walking to the meeting house in the procession, faltering only at the end, in the unseasonable heat.85
Thomas Jefferson read in the newspaper of the death of his “old and steady Friend”—for that was the way Abigail had signed her last letter to him—John’s warning of October 20 having already instilled in him an “ominous foreboding” of “the fatal event.” On November 13, 1818, Jefferson wrote his bereaved friend: “Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure.” The same trials had taught him, as he had said before, that “for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicines.” He would not, therefore, “by useless condolances, open afresh the sluices of your grief, altho’ mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more, where words are vain.…”86
It was four years after Abigail’s death that John captured, with quill and ink, the definitive portrait of her valuable life. Reading the Life and Letters of Rachel Wriothesley, Lady Russell, took him back forty years, he told his granddaughter Caroline, to the time in 1775 when he had sent them to his young wife that she might “contemplate herself.” At that time John thought it extremely probable “from the daring and dangerous career I was determined to run” that Abigail would one day find herself in the same situation as Lady Russell, that is, with her husband without a head. Much as he admired the Englishwoman, he admired his own “Lady” far more. In loving tribute he wrote: “This Lady was more beautiful than Lady Russell, had a brighter genius, more information, a more refined taste, and at least her equal in the virtues of the heart.”
John also spoke of Abigail’s “equal fortitude and firmness of character, equal resignation to the will of Heaven,” of her being “equal in all the virtues and graces of the christian life.” Again, like Lady Russell, Abigail had “never by word or look” discouraged John from “running all hazards for the salvation” of his country’s liberties. And perhaps most crucial to the spirit of their lives, Abigail had been willing to share with him, and had encouraged their children to share with both of them “in all the dangerous consequences we had to hazard” which, at times, must have seemed infinite.87