The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (23 page)

Vice President Adams was not even slightly sympathetic. He curtly told Mercy that he had no patronage to dispense and if he had any, neither his own children nor close friends like the Warrens would get any of it. That would be a violation of his principles. Mrs. Warren retreated into aggrieved silence. In years to come, she would exact exquisite revenge.

Friends and relatives continued to bombard Adams with pleas for help. He kept saying no, no, no. But at home, John found himself forced to surrender his true whig principles to domestic pressure. Colonel William Smith wanted an appointment as U.S. marshal for the district of New York. Nabby and Abigail added their pleas, and the vice president asked President Washington to make the appointment. Washington did so without the slightest hesitation.

On another front, John decided to make his son Charles a lawyer. He dispatched him to Alexander Hamilton’s office with a note, asking the New Yorker to take him under his guidance. Hamilton was about to become secretary of the treasury in President Washington’s cabinet. Although it was evident to him and others that Charles had little or no enthusiasm for the profession, Hamilton arranged for him to study with another experienced New York attorney.

Although everyone had rejected his grandiose titles, John was determined to display a lifestyle worthy of the vice presidency. Each morning he rode from Richmond Hill in a handsome coach, often accompanied by Charles. Presiding in the Senate, John wore a powdered wig and the expensive clothes he had bought while serving as ambassador in Lon
don. Critics began calling him “The Duke of Braintree.” A Boston writer assailed him in a ferociously satiric poem that warned him not to “sully your fame” by “daubing patriot” with a “lacker’d name.”
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Abigail was deeply upset by this and similar assaults and did her best to defend John in numerous letters. She was inclined to agree with her husband’s preference for titles. In some letters she playfully referred to herself in the third person as “Her Ladyship.” At the same time she was anxious to retain her republican humility. She asked Mary Cranch to warn her if she (Abigail) showed any sign of treating her friends and acquaintances with arrogance or condescension. Abigail found it especially galling that no one criticized President Washington for his lifestyle. He had “powdered lackies” waiting at his door to announce visitors—and this scribbler accused John of aristocratic faults!

Typically, John Adams met his critics head on by writing another book,
Discourses on Davila
, which ran in newspapers in weekly installments. Among many topics, the book included a ferocious attack on the idea of equality. John took special aim at the French Revolution’s frequent proclamations on this subject, dismissing their faith in human perfectibility as a fable. Mankind was not going to improve anytime soon. The only way to achieve social happiness was to maintain a balanced government that took into consideration humanity’s inequalities and limitations.

The reaction to these ideas was so negative that Adams was forced to abandon newspaper publication. John and Abigail were especially dismayed when Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, with whom they had been friendly in France, referred to the book as a collection of “political heresies.”

IV

The Adamses entertained often and lavishly at Richmond Hill and sometimes dined with the Washingtons at their house on Cherry Street. Abigail’s fondness for Martha Washington grew pronounced. She was “dignified and feminine, not even the tincture of hauteur about her,” she told her sister, Mary Cranch. Abigail ruefully added that Martha, although somewhat plump, had “a much better figure” than she did.

Later in the year Abigail took Nabby and Charles to one of Martha’s weekly receptions, where she reported the president displayed “grace, dig
nity and ease” in chatting with his guests. She thought he was far better company than King George III at similar receptions in his London palace. Abigail was invariably invited to sit beside Martha Washington. In the shifting conversations, other ladies occasionally occupied this place of honor. The moment President Washington noticed that Abigail had been displaced, he would lead her back to the coveted position and explain that it belonged to Mrs. Adams. This small gesture of concern pleased Abigail enormously.

Much as she liked Richmond Hill, Abigail found it very expensive to maintain, especially in the winter, when the fireplaces devoured cord after cord of costly wood. She regularly gave dinner parties for as many as twenty-four people. Counting her relatives and servants, there were eighteen people in the house to be fed daily. John Adams’s salary was only $5,000 a year—perhaps $100,000 in modern money—and the farm at Braintree was producing little or no income. Abigail’s favorite relatives, her sister Mary Cranch and her husband, Richard, were getting old and frequently ran short of cash. Abigail loaned them modest sums without hesitation.

V

John and Abigail were dismayed by Congress’s decision to move the national capital to Philadelphia for ten years and thereafter settle themselves in Washington, D.C. The Adamses had to leave Nabby and William Smith in New York, along with Charles Adams, who was still studying to become a lawyer. Their son Thomas had joined them after graduating from Harvard, and John decided to take him along as his secretary. The duties of the job were minimal, and his parents began debating how he should make his living. In the end, the only solution that satisfied them was the law. John would find a Philadelphia lawyer under whom he might study.

Thomas began the three-year slog to the legal profession with as much good humor as he could muster. Like his brothers, he was dependent on his parents’ checkbook, and he hesitated to strike out on his own for fear of disappointing them. John Quincy summed up the prevailing psychology when he wrote that he feared he would make John and Abigail “lament as ineffectual the pains they have taken to render me worthy of them.”
The connection between their father’s fame and fear of failure burdened all three sons. Thomas soon found himself struggling with what he called “the blue devils”—depression.
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VI

John Quincy Adams was not much happier. He had completed his three years of study at Newburyport and had opened an office in the front room of an Adams-owned house on Court Street in Boston. His clients were few and he made a botch of his first case, discovering that he had no ability to speak extemporaneously before a jury. He was also passionately in love with Mary Frazier, a beautiful young woman he had met in Newburyport.

Throughout the first six months of 1790, John Quincy saw Mary constantly. He refrained from mentioning her to his mother and father. But he confessed his passion to his brother Thomas and a few other friends. Mary inspired him to write poems to her beauty, several of which were published in local newspapers, exciting a dream of becoming a writer in John Quincy’s troubled head. “All my hopes of future happiness in this life center in the possession of that girl,” he told his former Harvard roommate, James Bridge.

But time was running out for the lovers. Although his law office was still virtually bare of clients, John Quincy told his sister Nabby that he was thinking of marrying Mary. Nabby apparently told Thomas, who told Charles—and Abigail. Charles, in typical younger-brother style, mocked Mary’s charms: “Nothing so like perfection in human shape, [has] appeared since the world began.”
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Abigail Adams was not amused. Nor was her mind changed by warm letters from her sisters, Eliza Shaw and Mary Cranch, urging her to bless the match. Abigail unleashed a barrage of letters on her oldest son, telling him that his romance was unacceptable and must be abandoned without even momentary hesitation on his part. John Quincy promised to obey, but he found it emotionally impossible. In desperation, he tried to persuade Mary Frazier to agree to an informal engagement. But her family intervened, warning her that a woman who remained linked to a man in that way soon endangered her reputation and hopes of marrying anyone else.

After months of agonizing, John informed his mother she could stop wor
rying about Mary Frazier. He was “perfectly free” and there was no need to fret about any future entanglement that might “give you pain.” But to Eliza Shaw, he poured out his bitterness. He predicted that he would never be able to love anyone again. This tender-hearted woman wrote him a wise, consoling letter that he kept among his papers for the rest of his life.

VII

In spite of his personal woes, John Quincy retained a lively interest in politics—hardly surprising after his heady exposure to the subject at the age of eleven. Writing under pen names such as Publicola, Columbus, Marcellus, and Barnveld, he argued with skill and fervor for a strong central government and attacked, often ferociously, the anti-federalists who were coalescing into a political party led by Thomas Jefferson. John Quincy sided emphatically with Washington’s commitment to a strong presidency and backed him when he issued a proclamation of neutrality in the war between England and France. His parents were delighted by his forays. The vice president said there was more “mother wit” in these essays than he had heard in the Senate “in a whole week.”
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On June 3, 1794, a letter from the vice president informed John Quincy that he had been named American ambassador to the Netherlands at a salary of $4,500 a year. Along with the glorious news came a pious claim that John Adams had had nothing to do with the appointment. President Washington was rewarding John Quincy for his vigorous support of the Federalist Party in the newspapers—and was aware, thanks to his youthful years in Europe, that he had the background and experience to handle the job. Unmentioned were the vice president’s several conversations with Edmund Randolph, who had succeeded Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state, in which John had not too subtly urged his son’s appointment.

John Quincy’s first reaction was nausea. He took to his bed for the better part or two weeks, apparently wrestling with the inescapable fact that he had to accept this offer—and simultaneously loathing the idea that he was once more obeying the parents who had destroyed his hope of happiness with Mary Frazier. But he finally rose and packed his trunk for the trip to Philadelphia to get his instructions for the job. He told one of his friends that his father “was more gratified than myself at my appointment.” But he admitted the bright side of it to another friend—he was “my own man again.”
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VIII

Not a little of John and Abigail’s determination to manage the careers of John Quincy and their younger sons may have flowed from the continued woes of Abigail Adams Smith. Four months after Nabby gave birth to a daughter—her third child in four years—Colonel Smith quit his job as U.S. marshal and headed for England—only a few days before Christmas. Abigail found his timing almost as hard to take as his decision to leave the government payroll. Smith told Nabby and his numerous friends that he was going to make a fortune from collecting debts owed to his merchant father in England.

Nabby was left alone once more, with barely enough money to feed her family. Abigail could do nothing but write frantic letters from Philadelphia. The Adamses’ vice-presidential expenses were so high in the city of brotherly love that they had little or no cash to send Nabby. Then came news of a woebegone letter from Colonel Smith, telling a New York friend from whom he had already borrowed money that he could not leave England unless the friend sent him more cash to pay his debts.

Once more, salvation came from George Washington. Whether John Adams intervened or Smith’s friends appealed to the president for help remains unclear. At any rate, the vice president urgently informed the colonel that he had been appointed supervisor of revenue for New York State. His chief responsibility would be the collection of money from the federal liquor tax. The job paid $800 a year and a percentage of the money he took in. John urged him to return to America without delay. Abigail, underscoring their joint anxiety, wrote another letter, calling the salary “handsome” and all but begging him to accept the job “as soon as possible.”
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This gift of the political gods soon proved to be no more than a temporary solution to the fortunes of Nabby and her wayward spouse. A year later, Smith abandoned his handsome salary and took his entire family to England, this time certain he would make an immense fortune. He was deep in a speculative bubble that would entrance him and many other Americans for the rest of the decade. All these gamblers were certain that mountains of money could be made selling millions of acres of American land to gullible European investors. Robert Morris of Philadelphia led the way, making immense sums on his first two speculations.

The defects of land speculation soon became apparent. The money was never paid in full. The seller was obligated to obtain a clear title to the land from resident Indians and other local claimants, including state governments. The seller had to survey the tract and divide it into salable parcels. Then he and the purchasers had to hope some settlers would show up, because the buyers left themselves numerous loopholes to escape from the deal if the golden promises turned to dross. This started to happen because of the appearance of that frequent historical intruder, the unexpected. War broke out between England and Revolutionary France early in 1793, indefinitely postponing large-scale immigration to America. Colonel Smith got into this game just as the land bubble was beginning to deflate.

Operating on little but nerve and faith in his luck, Smith returned to New York exuding affluence. He had reportedly bought five townships in northern New York and had sold thousands of acres to eager British investors. In New York, he bought twenty-three acres of land along the East River and began building a mansion that he dubbed Mount Vernon. On paper, it was to be a replica of President Washington’s home. But his creditors were closing in, and the colonel never managed to complete more than the frame before he was forced to sell it to stay out of debtors’ prison.