First Family (10 page)

By late August the two dramas seemed to be playing out along
parallel lines. As the two armies faced off on Long Island, Charles’s life hung in the balance: “Amidst all my Concern for the Army,” John remarked, “my dear Charles is continually present to my Mind. I don’t know what to think.” Early reports from New York were not optimistic. “I fear,” he worried to Abigail, “that we have suffered a great deal.” The truly bad news arrived a few days later. The Continental Army had suffered a devastating defeat, and the surviving remnant was retreating up the Manhattan peninsula in order to avoid being trapped there and face total annihilation. “In general,” he explained to Abigail, “our generals were out generalled.”
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But good news arrived at the same time. “Little Charles stands by me and sends Duty to Pappa,” Abigail was pleased to report. His fever had broken and his recovery was now assured. John had almost lost an army, but he had not lost a son. Abigail advised him to leave family concerns to her and focus his attention on an investigation of the reasons for the American debacle at New York. She herself wanted to know what had gone so terribly wrong, adding that “if all America are to be ruined and undone by a pack of Cowards and Knaves, I wish to know it too.”
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John desperately wanted to return home, but did not feel he could leave his post with the Continental Army in such disarray. He had been working eighteen- to twenty-hour days for over two months, his eyes were permanently bloodshot, and his sight was strained, making it difficult to read, especially at night. The emotional toll of witnessing a colossal blow to the American cause was high, and he knew better than most that Washington’s army had gone through a near-death experience. The celebratory mood of early July was now replaced by the somber recognition that it was going to be a long war.

Remaining in Philadelphia, it turned out, allowed him to launch his diplomatic career. Soon after his decisive victory, the commander of the British army, General William Howe, apprised the Continental Congress that he was prepared to offer new and more acceptable terms of reconciliation that would put an end, once and for all, to the bloodletting. John made it known that he regarded such a promise as disingenuous and wanted no part of a parlay with Howe. Because of his stature in the congress, he was nonetheless selected to join Benjamin
Franklin and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina to meet with Howe and hear him out. John’s assessment proved to be correct. Howe had no authority to negotiate a realistic political compromise, only to grant pardons, and as John was delighted to inform him, the Americans had no need for pardons, because they had done nothing wrong.
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While this little episode marked John’s first appearance as an American ambassador, it subsequently enjoyed considerable prominence in the history books, first for John’s matter-of-fact defiance of General Howe’s authority, and second for his colorful version of the story in his autobiography. As he told it, he and Franklin were forced to sleep in the same bed at a tavern in Perth Amboy, where they engaged in a spirited conversation about the window, whether it should be open or closed. Franklin insisted on the former, John on the latter, the first indication that these two giants of American independence represented two wholly distinct temperaments, as subsequent events in Paris were soon to expose.

This was one of the few occasions in his long relationship with Franklin when John had the last word, for in his old age he liked to point out that Franklin died with a bad cold, caught because he slept with the window open. He never told Abigail or anyone else about the window argument at the time, which suggests that it was one of those latter-day embellishments that Franklin, if he were alive and able to tell his own story, would have remembered differently.
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More substantially, John was the primary author of the Plan of Treaties, adopted by the congress in September. At the most immediate level it recognized that some kind of alliance with France, Great Britain’s long-standing rival for European supremacy, should be a goal of American diplomacy. (For several months John had been urging Abigail, who knew the rudiments of French, to teach the language to all the children.) But John also insisted on inserting a paragraph that denied France any permanent holdings in North America as a reward for its prospective alliance. More strategically, the Plan of Treaties urged commercial relations with all European nations, but no binding diplomatic commitments to any foreign power. John did not know it
at the time, but he had almost offhandedly defined the abiding goals of American foreign policy for the next century.
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By the beginning of October many of the other delegates had departed, making it difficult to achieve a quorum. But John regarded his duties as head of the Committee on War and Ordnance as compelling reasons to linger, especially with the fate of the Continental Army still unclear. About the same time, unbeknownst to John or anyone else on the American side, General Howe was deciding not to pursue Washington’s remnant of an army into New Jersey, without much question the biggest British tactical blunder of the war. For if Howe had chosen to pursue Washington, the consensus among military historians is that the Continental Army was in no condition to defend itself. The destruction of the Continental Army would most probably have meant the end of the war, and American history would have flowed in a different direction.
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As the days passed, even John began to think that he was like the last sentry maintaining his post on a deserted battlefield. “I have been here,” he complained to Abigail, “until I am stupefied.” Worn down like the nub of an overused eraser, he eventually decided that he could accomplish little by hanging on: “I suppose your Ladyship has been in the Twitters, for some Time past,” he chided Abigail, “because you have not received a Letter by every Post, as you used to do. But I am coming to make my Apology in Person.” He cautioned her not to expect him for two or three weeks because of British patrols in New Jersey that he would have to evade. But he was coming home.
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Because of the paradox of proximity, we know very little about what happened within the Adams family for the next three months. We can presume with some confidence that John encouraged Nabby to press on with her French, that he told John Quincy, now called Master John, that his destiny depended upon an austere devotion to his study of the classics, though mere academic learning was less important than a virtuous character, which could not be learned, only lived. As
for Tommy and Charles, aged five and seven, they were too young for such injunctions. Their experience of inoculation had introduced them to hardship, the ultimate schoolroom, but for now they just needed to be good boys who listened to their mother.

But these are mere presumptions, deduced from letters John wrote later. As for Abigail, for similar reasons, we can presume she talked about John’s prominent role in the Continental Congress, the fragile condition of the Continental Army, the vulnerability of the revolutionary cause, the need to remain strong at this difficult moment. These, however, are also only educated guesses based on what they wrote to each other before and afterward. The one thing we know with complete confidence is that Abigail was pregnant.

Because the etiquette of the era forbade any direct mention of Abigail’s condition, John’s letters back home after he returned to the congress require some interpretation: “I am anxious to hear how you do,” he wrote from the new location in Baltimore. “I have in my Mind a Source of anxiety which I never had before, Since I became such a Wanderer. You know what it is. Cant you convey to me, in Hieroglyphicks which no other person can comprehend, Information which will relieve me? Tell me you are as well as can be expected.” Leaving behind a pregnant wife made him feel guilty and joyful at the same time. “When I think of your Circumstances,” he explained, “I rejoice in them in spight of all this Melancholy.”
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Abigail wrote Mercy Otis Warren that she had considered asking John to stay with her, “and I know I could have prevailed, but our public affairs at the time were so gloomy an aspect that I thought if ever his assistance was wanted, it must be at such a time.” A ray of sunshine broke through the gloom on Christmas night, 1776, when Washington crossed the ice-choked Delaware River despite horrible weather conditions and surprised the British garrison at Trenton, which surrendered after a spirited fight. A week later he struck again at Princeton, a somewhat larger engagement in which Washington himself led the final charge that broke the British line. Neither Trenton nor Princeton were major battles, but taken together they signaled an important psychological shift, rescuing the American cause from what had seemed like certain death. As John settled into his new
quarters in Baltimore—Philadelphia was deemed too vulnerable to British attack—he could tell himself that a new life was stirring in his beloved wife and in America’s prospects.
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“I feel you have gone to a foreign Country,” Abigail complained after not hearing from John for over a month. The gossip mills were churning out all kinds of outlandish stories. Was it true that Washington had won a great victory at New Brunswick, capturing fifteen thousand British troops? (No, it was Trenton, and six hundred British prisoners.) She presumed that reports of Washington’s death and John’s death by poisoning were just British or Tory propaganda. But she needed to hear from him to be sure, most especially about the latter story.
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When his first letter arrived on March 9, 1777, it was full of distress about not hearing from her, especially because of her “delicate condition.” All was fine, she assured him, and the movements inside her were “a constant remembrance of an absent friend, and excites sensations of tenderness which are better felt than expressed.” Master John had told her that he had never seen anyone so fat.
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John explained that he was buried under paperwork, some of it grisly reports on the standard practice of Hessian troops to bayonet all American soldiers who surrendered in battle. But his biggest headache was the bizarre pettiness of so many officers in the Continental Army, who were “scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts.” Mention of the military turned his mind to a lamentation that he was too old to serve; then that thought ricocheted to the regret that his boys were too young: “I wish my lads were old enough. I would send every one of them into the Army, in some Capacity or other.”
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All his children were old enough to read, save perhaps Tommy, and John made a vow to write them all in March. He urged John Quincy to read history, the seminal source of “solid instruction” about human nature, beginning with Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War, eventually in the original Greek, but for now in translation, available in the family library. For poetry, he should begin with Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. Nabby also received educational advice, mostly to recognize that she was expected to follow her mother’s path beyond what was considered appropriate for women and should make French
a special focus. Charles was not pushed as hard as John Quincy. He had the most engaging personality of them all, John told him, but what calling best fitted him remained a mystery. The military was not an option, since the war would be over before he came of age. Tommy, who was only five years old, was encouraged to consider a medical career, perhaps to do research on better ways to stamp out smallpox.
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Smallpox was very much on John’s mind. His own family, now inoculated, was safe from the scourge, but John correctly believed that the disease was an even greater threat to the Continental Army than the British. After the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia in March, he went to a cemetery where two thousand fallen American soldiers were buried, the vast majority of them victims of smallpox and dysentery. “Disease has destroyed Ten Men for Us,” he estimated, “where the Sword of the Enemy has killed one.” Fortunately, Washington agreed with John’s assessment, so it became mandatory for all new enlistees in the Continental Army to undergo inoculation before reporting for duty. It was one of the most important strategic decisions of the war.
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John went into confessional mode with Abigail, suggesting that he had reached a high level of authority within the patriot camp that he could never fulfill: “I begin to suspect that I have not much of the Grand in my Compositions,” he wrote. “I long for rural and domestic scenes, for the warbling of Birds and the Prattle of my Children—Don’t you think I am somewhat poetical this morning?” If poetical, he was also misleading, as John himself acknowledged by adding: “is not the Heart Deceitful above all things?”

What he meant was psychologically complicated. By remaining in Philadelphia rather than with his children and pregnant wife, John worried that he was acting selfishly, allowing his political ambition to dominate his domestic responsibilities. He recognized that he was a deeply ambitious man. But he needed to convince himself, and Abigail, that “Ambition which has Power for its Object, I don’t believe I have a Spark in my Heart … But there are other forms of Ambition of which I have a great deal.”
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By “other forms” he meant the desire to live forever in the memory of succeeding generations, rather than the desire to accrue power and
wealth in his lifetime. He was so anxious to press the point, however, because he recognized that the distinction invited suspicion. And no matter how sincere he felt about it, he was also trying to assure himself. There was therefore a constant refrain about abandoning the “infinite Noise, Hurry, and Bustle” of the Congress, the urge to escape the “lonely melancholy Life, mourning for all the Charms of Life … for all the Amusements that I ever had, which is my farm.”
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John was being sincere, but Abigail knew he would never leave his post. Both of them adopted a sacrificial perspective: he would suffer pangs of guilt to serve his country; she would suffer the pain produced by the absence of her husband. Her resolve had its fleeting moments as her pregnancy progressed. She complained that she was denied the pleasure enjoyed by others, “of having their mate sit by them with anxious care during all their Solitary confinement.” She wanted him home before the birth of the child in July, but she never asked or ordered him to return, because she knew that he would find it impossible to refuse, and she did not want to impose such choices.
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