The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (27 page)

In northern New York, Colonel Smith amazed everyone by running for Congress as a Federalist and winning. He departed for Washington, leaving Nabby with little or no money, suffering bouts of excruciating pain that Smith offhandedly diagnosed as a familiar Adams illness, rheumatism. Little more than a year later, Smith’s sister, Nancy, told Abigail that Nabby was being consumed by cancer. A contrite Colonel Smith mournfully informed Abigail that Nabby wanted “to die in her father’s house.” The word “father’s” was not accidentally chosen.

In agonizing pain, Nabby endured three hundred miles in a jolting carriage over the primitive roads of northern New York to reach Peacefield on July 26, 1813. Abigail soon realized that she had nothing to offer her stoic daughter. She fled the dying woman’s sickroom and John Adams, revealing wellsprings of pity and love that his crusty exterior usually concealed, took charge of nursing Nabby for the next two weeks. At times the pain was so intense that she lay doubled up. Only opium gave her occasional relief. No one knows what the father and daughter said to each other during these horrendous hours. Silent tearful embraces were probably more meaningful than words.

On the morning of August 15, Nabby asked her father to bring her a hymn book. He helped her open it to her favorite song, “Longing for Heaven.” She invited her mother, her husband, and her son John and daughter Caroline to join her and her father in singing it:

Nabby died peacefully in her father’s arms a few hours later. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, with whom he had begun a correspondence, John Adams called her “a monument to suffering and patience.” Jefferson wrote Abigail a sympathetic letter and she responded with a fragment of a poem:

III

Besides Abigail and Nabby, the woman who played the largest role in John Adams’s old age was Louisa Catherine Johnson, John Quincy’s wife. Her first appearance in the family could not have been more unpromising. Abigail had been nurturing a dislike for her ever since her son became engaged to this “heiress,” ignoring his mother’s repeated warnings that she would make him miserable. The prediction acquired unexpected weight when Louisa’s merchant father went bankrupt and was unable to deliver the handsome dowry he had promised. John Quincy’s New England conscience—and Louisa’s delicate dark-haired beauty—persuaded him to marry her anyway.

The marriage was fraught with strains from the start. To the bridegroom’s financial disappointment Louisa added a highly independent spirit that constantly put her at odds with her short-tempered husband about everything from wearing makeup to raising children. John Quincy’s decades of listening to and reading Abigail’s lectures on virtue and accomplishment and whom he should not marry—with a special emphasis on Mary Frazier—had left him determined not to take a woman’s advice no matter how good it was. He even went so far as to tell Louisa that women should have “nothing to do with politics”—a startling statement from Abigail’s favorite son.
¹¹

Abigail was enraged when John Quincy did not even bother to tell her
the date of his wedding. “My son, you will see as I do by the papers, is married,” she acidly informed her younger sister, Elizabeth Shaw Peabody.
¹²
When John Quincy and Louisa returned to America in 1801 and she met her mother-in-law for the first time, everything seemed to go wrong. Louisa had an atrocious cold and was exhausted by the journey from Washington, D.C. Abigail studied her slim figure, listened to her croaking cough, and concluded that her stay on the planet would be of “short duration.” This did not distress her nearly as much as the way John Quincy’s anxiety about his wife had added “a weight to his brow.” Also in the mix was Abigail’s displeasure that the couple had named their first son George Washington Adams instead of John Adams. Abigail was sure this was Louisa’s doing.

Peacefield was soon crowded with Adams relatives, who came to ogle the exotic English creature whom John Quincy had found in his travels. In the small-town world of Quincy, Louisa was more than a new bride; she was a curiosity. Abigail had propagandized everyone in the family about her moneyed background. Too sick to enjoy the special dishes Abigail prepared for her, Louisa was soon labeled “proud.”

Louisa was equally unimpressed with her in-laws. Their nasal Boston accents, their old-fashioned clothes, and their strange hairstyles bewildered her. “Had I stepped into Noah’s Ark I do not think I could have been more astonished,” she recalled years later. Only one person seemed to receive her without suspicions or reservations: John Adams. She sensed the “old gentleman” was the only person in the family to whom “I was literally and without knowing it [more than] a fine lady.”
¹³

This rapport would grow stronger over the next twenty years, as John Quincy’s star rose in the American political firmament. Louisa played a crucial role in this ascension. She was more politically astute than Abigail, never hesitating to disagree with John Quincy, who was prone to the Adams habit of ignoring public opinion. When he became a U.S. senator, Louisa relentlessly criticized his carelessness about his appearance, even enlisting Abigail’s help to reform his tailoring, as well as his eating habits.

IV

During these decades, Abigail remained the center of John’s emotional life. He struggled in vain to persuade her to slow down as her health
became increasingly fragile. In October 1818, she took to her bed with an unidentified malady. A visit from their family doctor revealed she was suffering from typhoid fever, which happened to be epidemic in and around Quincy at the time. When the bad news reached Louisa in Washington, where John Quincy was secretary of state in the cabinet of President James Monroe, she wrote to John, expressing her own concern as well as her husband’s. John Quincy was too incapacitated by a psychic clash between love and guilt to write a word.

The doctors struggled in vain to save Abigail. To conserve her dwindling strength, they even forbade her to speak or be spoken to. But the primitive medicine of the day could do nothing to help her. She died on Wednesday, October 28, 1818, at the age of seventy-four. Her eighty-three-year-old husband was the only person in the sickroom who remained calm. “I wish I could lay down beside her and die too,” he said.
¹⁴

Although John’s health remained remarkably good, and grandnieces and nephews and grandchildren and friends visited him, Peacefield seemed empty without Abigail. John told one friend it had become a “region of sorrow.” Into this void stepped Louisa Johnson Adams. She began sending John daily excerpts from her diary, filling him in on things political and social in Washington, D.C. John called the letters “a reviving cordial” and exulted over the way she was admitting him “into the characters of statesmen, politicians, philosophers, orators, poets, courtiers, convivialists, dancers, dandies and above all ladies of whom I should know nothing without your kind assistance.”
¹⁵

Next, Louisa enlisted him in a project to translate Plato from the original Greek into English. John told her the idea stirred “feelings of curiosity, astonishment and, excuse me, risibility.” He could not imagine or conceive “a subject more to my taste.” When she sent him a translation of Plato’s discussion of the Athenian general Alcibiades, John was all but overwhelmed. He wondered how it was possible “that a gay lady of Washington, amid all the ceremonies, frivolities and gravities of a court and a legislature, can write so many and so excellent letters to me…and at the same time translate Plato’s
Dialogues?
”
¹⁶

Month after month for the next six years, Louisa enchanted John with her diary excerpts and letters full of witty and wry observations on Washington politics. Sometimes she cautioned him that her reports were opinionated—she made no secret of her antagonism toward slavery during
the uproar that swirled around extending the peculiar institution into the territories—a dispute that foreshadowed the Civil War. John told her not to worry about letting her own opinions speak. “I am myself too much under the influence of prejudices to have ever reproached you seriously for yours,” he wrote—something he would never have admitted to another human being, even Abigail.

Often, John reminded Louisa that she was at the vital center of the political world while he was “in a part of the world where nothing happens but morning noon and night, new moons and full moons, spring, summer winter.” Without her he would “vegetate in solitude.” This fulsome appreciation grew more and more important to Louisa as she and John Quincy began to debate whether he should seek the presidency. John Adams’s approval gave her the self-confidence to urge her humorless workaholic husband to put aside his tormenting Adams conscience and demoralizing self-doubts and reach for the job. Louisa told him how they could do it. He would continue to excel as secretary of state, and she would put to political use her talents as a hostess.

Soon Mrs. Adams’s dinners and balls were the talk of Washington, and John Quincy was on his way to the White House. In Quincy, John Adams heartily approved of this partnership, which reminded him of the one that had sustained him throughout his life. “Two such industrious honey bees as John Quincy Adams and his wife were never connected before,” he declared.
¹⁷
It is not hard to imagine how much these words delighted Louisa. She was being told that she was the equal—and even the superior—of her formidable mother-in-law.

V

In 1820, when John Adams was eighty-five years old, another woman reappeared in his life after an absence of almost sixty years. The former Hannah Quincy was now a widow, almost as old as John. She persuaded her relative Josiah Quincy to take her to Peacefield for a visit with her old flame. When she walked into the Adams’s study unannounced, John gazed at her in astonishment. His face came aglow and he said, “What! Madam, shall we not go walk in Cupid’s Grove together?” This reference to the lovers’ lane where they had strolled so long ago pleased Hannah immensely. With a smile that was a reminder of her coquettish youth, she replied. “Ah sir,
it would not be the first time we have walked there!”
¹⁸

Josiah Quincy was awed by “this flash of old sentiment.” He was a frequent visitor to Peacefield and he found it totally unexpected. He was discovering that in the very old, the fires of youth are banked by time but by no means forgotten. Suddenly he glimpsed John Adams’s whole complex life, from the yearning bachelor to the tormented president to the ancient sage now confronting him.

VI

None of these other women ever replaced Abigail Smith in John Adams’s mind and heart. To the end of his life he constantly spoke of her “equal fortitude and firmness of character.” Thinking of the sorrows they had shared, he was equally praiseful of her “resignation to the will of heaven.” Above all, she had never “by a word or look” tried to dissuade John from “running all hazards” for the salvation of the American nation he had been among the first to envision and then helped to create. She was a unique combination of courage and forbearance, patience and pride. Without her, stumpy, potbellied, perpetually insecure John Adams would never have become a founding father.

When John died in the late afternoon of July 4, 1826, at the age of ninety, he inadvertently bore witness to this indubitable truth. Among his last words was a choked whisper: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” (In fact, Jefferson had died several hours earlier.) Honest John seemed to be uttering a final sigh of regret for the way those tall Virginians had outmatched him again in the contest for fame. Here, as so often before, he needed his Portia to tell him he was a great man in spite of his flaws.
¹⁹

M
arital turmoil seems to have been endemic in Alexander Hamilton’s family. His maternal grandmother, Mary Uppington Fawcett, separated from her dour, aging husband, Dr. John Fawcett, and moved from the West Indian island of Nevis to neighboring St. Kitts with her only surviving child, Rachel. Mary must have been extremely unhappy; she gave up her rights to Dr. Fawcett’s considerable estate in return for fifty-three pounds and four shillings in annual support. Rachel Fawcett matured into a beautiful and spirited woman and proceeded to replicate her mother’s history—and then some.

In 1745, Rachel and her mother moved to the Danish-owned island of St. Croix, where at age sixteen Rachel married twenty-eight-year-old John Michael Lavien, a merchant with a murky background and a fondness for splendid clothes. Lavien seemed rich. Apparently he thought Rachel, who had inherited some St. Croix property in her father’s will, was also rich. Both assumptions were wrong.

Like many other West Indian merchants, Lavien’s fortunes fluctuated as violently as the weather and the market for sugar, the island’s main crop. While living on a plantation named Contentment, he and Rachel had a son, Peter. As Lavien’s debts mounted, they descended to a far less genteel house called Beeston Hill, and husband and wife began quarreling. Soon Rachel was expressing her discontent in a highly visible way. She began sleeping with other men. Backed by eyewitness testimony, the
outraged Lavien had her arrested for being “twice guilty of adultery” and thrown into jail in the fort that guarded the harbor of the island’s main port, Christiansted.
¹

Hoping she had learned her lesson after several weeks in a narrow cell, Lavien petitioned the judge to grant Rachel’s release. She decamped to St. Kitts with her mother, abandoning Lavien and four-year-old Peter. On St. Kitts, Rachel began living with James Hamilton, the fourth son of Alexander Hamilton, laird of an estate called the Grange in Ayrshire, Scotland. These Hamiltons were a lesser branch of the dukes of Hamilton, a proud name in Scottish history. James was a handsome, charming loser who virtually specialized in going bankrupt.

Rachel and James Hamilton soon moved to nearby Nevis, the tiny island of her birth, and for the next fourteen or fifteen years lived a precarious existence punctuated by Hamilton’s various attempts to make money as a merchant, all of which ended in disaster. In keeping with the relaxed sexual mores of the West Indies, there is no record of a formal marriage. Rachel gave birth to two sons, James and Alexander. Alexander entered this world either on January 11, 1755 or 1757. Scholars have been arguing about the two dates for decades. Hamilton himself has been no help, giving various birth dates during his tumultuous life. Recent biographers have inclined toward 1755, making Alexander not quite as youthful a prodigy as others have claimed.
²

In 1759, John Lavien decided to remarry and obtained a divorce from Rachel in the St. Croix courts. It described her as “having shown herself to be shameless, rude and ungodly…and given herself up to whoring with everyone.” Lavien termed Alexander and his brother “whore-children” and persuaded the court to rule that they could never inherit his property. Rachel ignored the summons to defend herself and her sons, if it was ever delivered to Nevis. The court permanently severed Lavien from Rachel and forbade her to marry again.

Rachel and her sons followed James Hamilton to Dutch-owned St. Eus-tatius in the course of his business peregrinations. In 1765 they returned to the scene of Rachel’s early disgrace, St. Croix, to collect a debt due James’s employer on Nevis. Exactly what happened next remains undocumented. But it seems likely that Rachel emulated her mother and told James Hamilton that she no longer had any desire to see him in her bedroom—or anywhere else in the house.

Some biographers have described the breakup as a desertion on James Hamilton’s part. But all his life, Alexander spoke of his father with great sympathy, describing him as a man whose early failures never gave him a chance. In a letter to his brother at the close of the Revolution, Hamilton asked, “What has become of our dear father?…My heart bleeds at the recollection of his misfortunes and embarrassments.” Equally significant is the dolorous fact that in the tens of thousands of words Hamilton wrote in his hyperactive life, he never mentioned his mother with affection. On the contrary, when he was about to marry, he felt compelled to ask his fiancée if she would share “every kind of fortune with him.” He attributed his anxiety to his experience with “a female heart” who declined to tolerate a husband’s failure.
³

It seems probable that Rachel, still beautiful at thirty-six, decided she could prosper on bustling St. Croix without an albatross like James Hamilton around her neck. He meekly departed to spend the rest of his life drifting through the islands, eking out a living as a clerk or some other equally menial job in the counting houses or on the sugar plantations. When he left, Alexander was eight years old. He never saw his father again.

II

Rachel opened a small store in Christiansted and joined the local Anglican church. She apparently tried to regain a modicum of respectability in the teeth of the divorce decree that Lavien had procured against her in 1759. She got the goods for her store from two American merchants, David Beckman and Nicholas Cruger, who had offices just down the street. Rachel had also inherited nine slaves from her mother. She rented them out to various households on the island, augmenting her business income. Three years later, Rachel and Alexander were stricken with one of those nameless fevers so rampant in the islands—possibly typhoid. After a week of agony, Rachel died. Alexander and his brother James inherited her modest estate, including the nine slaves—until John Lavien appeared with a lawyer and declared that his son, Peter, was Rachel’s only legal heir, and the “bastard children” of her whoring days had no right to a cent. The St. Croix court found his argument legally irresistible. The half brother, Peter, twenty-three, soon arrived from South Carolina and claimed the estate.

What did the thirteen-year-old Alexander Hamilton think and feel, to hear his mother once more branded a whore and himself a bastard? It could only have further complicated his conflicted feelings about Rachel and about marriage in general. In this crisis, there is no mention of James Hamilton. No one seems to have considered summoning him to collect his sons. Bankruptcy and repeated failure had eliminated him as an option.

Fortunately, the two orphaned boys had relatives on St. Croix. Rachel’s aunt, Ann, had married into the well-to-do Lytton family. Her son appeared in court on behalf of James and Alexander and managed to salvage part of the estate by claiming that Rachel had given two of the slaves to the boys. The Lyttons were in the process of going broke and had no money to give the Hamiltons. But at least they let them know there was someone in the world who cared about them.

Another friend was merchant Thomas Stevens, who invited Alexander into his home—and conspicuously ignored his brother James. Not a few biographers have wondered whether Stevens was Hamilton’s real father—a complication that might be an added explanation for the way Rachel’s marriage to James Hamilton expired. The older brother was apprenticed to an aging carpenter, and Nicholas Cruger took Alexander into his counting house as a clerk. The Crugers had a network of stores throughout the islands, in New York, and in Bristol, England.

III

Alexander Hamilton seems to have demonstrated an aptitude for buying and selling from the start. But he had ambitions beyond the Cruger counting house and the island of St. Croix. At the age of fourteen he wrote a letter that summed up much of his past and future life. He sent it to Thomas Stevens’s son, Edward, who was a year older. The two young men looked so much alike that many people wondered if they were brothers. “Ned,” Hamilton wrote, “My ambition is so prevalent that I contemn the groveling condition of a clerk or the like to which my fortune, etc condemns me, and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. I’m confident, Ned, that my youth excludes me from any hopes of immediate preferment, nor do I desire it, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity.”

Alexander admitted he had a propensity for building “castles in the air”
but noted that “such schemes” were sometimes successful “when their projector is constant.” He closed with a fervent hope for an event that would accelerate his rise to fame and fortune: “I wish there was a war.”
⁴

At sixteen, Hamilton was put in charge of the St. Croix office while Cruger was away on a voyage to New York. The self-confident teenager bought and sold everything from slaves to flour to mules and managed to make a steady profit, even though the flour was moldy and the mules half dead when they arrived from the American mainland.

On the side, he wrote poetry that he published in
The Royal Danish American Gazette
, the local English-language paper. He saw it more as a way to improve his chances of moving up in the world than an attempt to launch a literary career. One poem was particularly noteworthy in the light of his mother’s reputation. It described how he found a lovely young woman sleeping beside a brook and stole a kiss from her. She awoke and there were more kisses, until

Instead of instant bliss, however, the poet took his beloved to church where “hymen join’d our hands.” The happy rhymer ended his love story with a brief sermon:

Another poem revealed the sexual sophistication of this ambitious teenager:

IV

On August 31, 1772, St. Croix was struck by a ferocious hurricane. It killed over thirty people and leveled most of the buildings on the island, causing an estimated one million pounds in damage. Hamilton wrote an account of the storm in a letter to his father that demonstrated the young man had a gift for vivid language:

The letter continued for several more pages, in which Hamilton reflected on the impermanence of life and ended with a plea for help to heal the island’s grievous wounds. He even threw in a lecture to the white masters of St. Croix who “revel in affluence,” urging them to bestow some of their “superfluity” on the afflicted, a majority of whom were the island’s twenty thousand black slaves. Their ramshackle cabins undoubtedly vanished in the first five minutes of the storm.
⁶

Hamilton showed a copy of his letter to the Reverend Hugh Knox, a Presbyterian minister from the College of New Jersey who had recently begun preaching on St. Croix. Knox thought it was good enough to warrant publication in
The Royal Danish American Gazette
—and he praised the young author extravagantly to everyone he met. An idealistic man, Knox had already noticed Hamilton and pitied his harsh fate. On the strength of the letter, he launched a campaign to send the young man to America to get an education.

Armed with introductions from Knox and Cruger and the encouragement of his grandaunt, Ann Lytton, Hamilton arrived in New York in June 1773. For a year he lived across the harbor in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, attending a school run by a talented teacher, Francis Barber. His recommendation from Knox gave him entrée to the homes of two leading Presbyterians, Elias Boudinot and William Livingston. Hamilton’s boyish good looks and effervescent personality charmed both men. They set about turning Hamilton into a Presbyterian and a student at the College of New Jersey in Princeton.

Hamilton lived for a while in the Livingston home, Liberty Hall, in Elizabethtown, and hugely enjoyed the company of their four beautiful daughters. Gertrude Atherton, whose novel
The Conqueror
launched a Hamilton revival in 1902, was convinced that twenty-two-year-old Kitty Livingston introduced the eighteen-year-old Hamilton to “the fascination of her sex”—a notion that seems almost ludicrous in the light of Alexander’s island upbringing in Rachel Lavien’s ménage. He was attracted to Kitty for another reason. Her father was one of the leading political controversialists of the day, constantly attacking the Anglican church’s attempts to create a clerical establishment in America and fiercely defending American rights. Kitty was equally fascinated by politics and presented a very different creature to Hamilton’s attention—the thinking woman.

In their correspondence, Hamilton admitted that he liked the way she was “content with being a mere mortal” and required “no other incense than is justly due you.” He therefore resolved to talk to her “like one (in) his sober senses.” In spite of “amorous transports” whenever he thought of her, he would pay her “all the rational tribute applicable to a fine girl.”
⁷

For the time being, Hamilton was more preoccupied with getting into college. Pleasing his Presbyterian mentors, he applied to the College of New Jersey in Princeton. According to President John Witherspoon, his request to dash through the curriculum as fast as possible was rejected by the board of trustees. Since no trustee ever said or did anything without the imperious Witherspoon’s approval, this was a polite way of saying no. Hamilton switched to King’s College, the future Columbia, an Anglican school in New York City, which had given him permission to set up his own course of study.