First Family (5 page)

In late 1766 and early 1767 John published eleven essays, using multiple pseudonyms, to engage “Philanthrop,” who was really Jonathan Sewall, one of his Harvard classmates and closest friends. (Sewall had once proposed that they undergo inoculation together so that their constant banter would prevent boredom.) Sewall’s specific goal was to defend the governor, Francis Bernard, for his endorsement of the Stamp Act. His larger goal was to warn that organized opposition to Parliament’s authority was treasonable, and would lead inexorably to a break with Great Britain that would produce only anarchy and ruin in the colonies. Despite the fact that John continued to treat Sewall as a friend, he vilified Philanthrop as an “old Trumpeter … spewing out venomous Baillingsgate.” And John countered the threats of social chaos by arguing that if it ever came to an open breach with Great Britain, the vast bulk of the Massachusetts citizenry would rally to the cause in a decidedly orderly fashion. The British, in short, had much more to lose than the Americans.
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John’s other major effort, a series of eight essays published in the
Boston Gazette
early in 1773, focused on what was to become a trademark issue for the remainder of his political career—the essential role of an independent judiciary. His specific target was a proposal to have the salaries of Massachusetts judges paid by the Crown. The larger target was the entire system of patronage emanating from the governor’s office, now occupied by Thomas Hutchinson, which made all judicial appointments a corrupt bargain with the devil.
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In two senses, this debate was intensely personal for John, at times obsessively so. First, Hutchinson became the chief embodiment of British corruption and condescension even though he was a native New Englander who had written the authoritative history of Massachusetts. “Mr. Hutchinson never drank a cup of tea in his life,” John observed
much later, “without Contemplating the Connection between that Tea, and his Promotion.” When a visitor once asked him what he thought of Hutchinson, John was even more hostile: “I told him I once thought that his Death in a natural Way would have been a Smile of Providence … and the most joyful News to me that I could ever have heard.” When John wanted to imagine the most tyrannical and corrupt features of the British Empire, the face he saw was Hutchinson’s. It was an early manifestation of what became a prevailing pattern throughout his political life, namely, to personalize the opposition by focusing his hostility on a single figure, who then became a wholly vile and contemptible creature worthy of permanent enshrinement in the Adams rogues’ gallery. Hutchinson was eventually joined there by Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton.
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Second, in 1768, soon after John moved Abigail and the family to a house on Brattle Square in Boston—the move proved temporary—he received a highly lucrative offer to become judge advocate in the Admiralty Court, one of those patronage plums that would set him up for life, but at the price of his subsequent silence on all the salient arguments about Parliament’s authority. The offer came from his old friend Jonathan Sewall, who had recently accepted the post of attorney general, an obvious sellout in John’s judgment. He rejected the offer immediately, but he began to realize that he was making life-altering decisions with huge consequences for his family on the basis of his political convictions, which, no matter how heartfelt, could very well lead to his professional and personal ruin. “I have a Zeal at my Heart for my country,” he confided to Abigail, “which I cannot smother or conceal … This Zeal will prove fatal to the fortune and Felicity of my Family, if it is not regulated more than mine has hitherto been.”
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There is no record of Abigail’s ever urging John to trim his political sails in order to protect the future of the family, or to accept a lucrative offer that would have compromised his political integrity. In fact, there is no evidence that she gave the matter any thought at all. Her husband had to do his duty as he saw it, and while she was an opinionated and independent-minded woman, her duty as a wife was to support him. “I must entreat you,” John pleaded with her, “my dear Partner in all the Joys and Sorrows, Prosperity and Adversity of my
Life, to take a Part with me in the Struggle.” The plea proved unnecessary. Abigail never entertained doing anything else.
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The most severe test, which she passed with flying colors, occurred in 1770, when John was asked to defend the British soldiers who had fired on and killed six members of a Boston mob that was harassing them with taunts and snowballs. John agreed to take the case for two reasons: first, he believed that it was important to demonstrate that even vilified “Lobsterbacks” could get fair treatment in Massachusetts, despite the highly politicized atmosphere; second, he thought that the so-called massacre had been manipulated by Samuel Adams and the leadership of the Sons of Liberty for political purposes. “Endeavors had been systematically pursued for many months, by certain busy characters,” he observed, “to excite Quarrells … between the Inhabitants of the lower class and the Soldiers, and at all risques to inkindle an immortal hatred between them.” Rather than a dramatic example of British tyranny, which he was on record of opposing so passionately, the Boston Massacre was, in truth, “planned by designing Men,” and the real victims were the British soldiers.
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This was obviously a politically unpopular posture, and John made a point of consulting with Abigail before going forward. She concurred that the mob had been instigated, so that John’s decision to defend the British troops was the virtuous course regardless of the political fallout. She was, at the time, recovering from the death of Susanna, her third child, and pregnant with Charles, her fourth. So she was emotionally immersed in some rather dramatic events of her own, but still fully capable and willing to accompany John on a dangerously unpopular course.
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Eventually Captain Thomas Preston, the British commanding officer at the scene, was found not guilty, along with all but two of the British soldiers, who had their thumbs imprinted as punishment for a lesser charge. John’s fear that his successful defense of the British soldiers would create implacable enemies proved wrong—the word “out of doors” was that John’s political credentials were beyond reproach and that his conduct had the approval of Sam Adams, the leader of the Sons of Liberty, who had probably orchestrated the events leading
up to the massacre in the first place. Indeed, John’s reputation soared, and he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature a few months later by a comfortable majority, the epitome of the passionate patriot, now with personal integrity to boot.

By the early 1770s John had reached the conclusion that the likelihood of a political reconciliation with Great Britain was remote in the extreme. The British ministry was committed to a strategy of American subjugation to Parliament’s authority, and he could find no realistic reasons to believe that it would come to its senses before producing a permanent rupture in the British Empire. “I see that there is not Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation in the Mother Country,” he observed to Isaac Smith Jr. in 1771, “to desist voluntarily from such Attempts to make inroads against us.” But if American independence in some form was inevitable, he did not believe it to be imminent. It was probably several decades away: “You and I shall be saints in Heaven,” he predicted to Smith, “before the Times we dream of. But our grandsons may perhaps think this a canonical Prophecy.”
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The events between 1770 and 1774 caused John to accelerate his sense of the historical schedule. In a somewhat overclever move, the British ministry removed import duties on all other commodities but retained the duty on tea at a very low rate, making it less expensive to purchase tea from Great Britain while simultaneously reasserting the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. Instead of co-opting the colonists, this provoked the Boston Tea Party (1773), a festival of raucous destruction organized by the Sons of Liberty in which a Boston mob, somewhat frivolously disguised as Indians, boarded three British ships anchored in Massachusetts Bay and tossed about £15,000 worth of tea overboard. (John was of two minds about mobs, finding the more impulsive version at the Boston Massacre disreputable but the highly organized effort that destroyed the tea wholly justifiable.) The British ministry responded by escalating the stakes, closing the Boston port to all trade, shutting down all the Massachusetts courts,
and imposing martial law on the city. Massachusetts was to be made into an object lesson of what happens when colonists brazenly defy the authority of the British government.

Predictably, but interestingly, John and Abigail responded to these harsh measures in the same dramatic (one might even say melodramatic) way: “We live my dear Soul,” he wrote to her, “in an Age of Tryal. What will be the consequences I know not. The town of Boston, for ought I can see, must suffer martyrdom. It must expire and our principal consolation is, that it dies in a Noble Cause.” This hyperbolic tone reflected John’s sense that a line had been crossed that could never be retraced. But he wanted Abigail to know that he was not despondent or depressed: “Don’t imagine from all this that I am in the Dumps,” he wrote her. “I can truly say, that I have felt more Spirits and Activity since the arrival of this News than I had done before for years.”
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In John’s view, the Coercive Acts had exposed the latent agenda of the British ministry for all to see. Intricate constitutional arguments about long-standing colonial rights, debates in which John had been a major player, now paled in comparison to the total and wholly arbitrary revocations of colonial rights within the empire. From the British perspective, the colonists really had none, it was now clear. John had been saying that this was the unspoken assumption of the British ministry for ten years. The Coercive Acts proved that he had been right. Abigail concurred completely.
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This placed them on the cutting edge of radical thinking within Massachusetts, and much further ahead of public opinion in the rest of the colonies, which remained wedded to the hope for a peaceful reconciliation. Both of them had come to see the imperial crisis as an all-or-nothing choice between American independence and slavery, with all efforts at a split-the-difference compromise nothing more than a seductive illusion. As John put it to Abigail: “And the Question seems to be, whether the American Colonies are to be considered as a distinct Community so far as to have a Right to judge for themselves, when the Fundamentals of their Government are destroyed or invaded?” This was a defiant, even treasonable, position, which was one reason he asked her to “keep these letters chiefly to yourself.” He also asked her
to “put them up safe, and preserve them,” for they provided “a kind of picture of the Manners, Opinions, and Principles of these Times of Perplexity, Danger, and Distress.” One of the reasons that so many of their letters have survived is that they both recognized, early on, that they were living through a truly propitious moment likely to find a prominent place in the history books.
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In June 1774 they were apprised that John had been selected as one of four Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress. Accepting that appointment constituted a major public statement about his political loyalties, and Jonathan Sewall pleaded with him to refuse the offer, warning that attending the Continental Congress would brand him as a traitor and destroy his legal career. Remembering the poignancy of that moment many years later, John recalled his response: “I answered that I knew Great Britain was determined on her systems, and that very determination determined me on mine; that he [Sewall] knew I had been constant and uniform in opposition to all her measures; that the die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon; swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.”
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Abigail was equally resolute. There was no question that John had to go to Philadelphia. Their minds were so perfectly aligned on that score that no discussion was necessary. There was also no question that she was perfectly competent to manage the farm and four young children, aged two to nine years, while he was away. The conversations were about details: What clothing should he pack? What horse should he take? Before he left, they needed to purchase more fertilizer for their fields, John insisting on “Mud Flatts or Creek Mud … mixed with Dust and Dung.” It was the kind of privileged conversation that could occur only between two soul mates knowing they were entering a new chapter in their lives and their marriage, tending together to the details because the larger issues required only nods and glances.
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John departed from Boston on August 10, 1774. An aspiring novelist could work wonders with the scene. The four Massachusetts delegates boarded a well-appointed coach in full view of five British regiments encamped on Boston Common. They were preceded by
two white servants, well mounted and armed, followed by four black slaves dressed in livery, two on horseback and two footmen. It was a motley mix of royal splendor, military power, social deference, and racial inferiority, all traveling together on a mission to oppose British tyranny. Though there were no women in the picture, Abigail was lurking in the background, cheering, worrying, and praying for John’s safe return.
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CHAPTER TWO