First Family (14 page)

But the magic of this moment ended just as he was putting the finishing touches on his draft. In early October he received official word from Philadelphia that he had been appointed minister plenipotentiary to the court of France, whose main task was to negotiate a treaty with Great Britain ending the war. Neither John nor Abigail had been expecting his appointment, and neither realized the highly contentious, almost comically chaotic, manner in which it had happened.

It represented the culmination of a long, bitter, often bizarre debate in the Continental Congress of several months’ duration. The debate had been triggered by Silas Deane’s published defense of his own highly suspicious conduct while serving on the American diplomatic commission in Paris. Deane exposed the multiple machinations within the American delegation, which in turn cast a shadow of suspicion over everyone else, John included. Deane’s sweeping allegations then touched off a chain reaction of highly partisan and extremely toxic debates within the congress, which are impossible to untangle because of the unrecorded backroom deals and relentless shiftings within the different camps. Henry Laurens, who presided over these debates in the congress, confessed that he himself was confounded by “the queerness of some of the queerest fellows that ever were invested with rays of sovereignty.”
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Clearly, John’s very integrity had been questioned, unfairly and quite preposterously as Laurens saw it, but with sufficient vigor that John’s future role in public life was at stake. (His lifelong lament that jealous and small-minded enemies were plotting against him often
has the distinct odor of paranoia, but in this particular instance they really were out to get him.) His appointment to the most significant and prestigious diplomatic post the country could offer was a clear indication that his friends in the Continental Congress had beaten back his enemies. But given the debate that had preceded that decision, so several friends warned him, it was imperative that John accept the assignment immediately and sail for France as soon as possible, lest his enemies, still lurking in the middle distance, overturn the decision.
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There was never even a remote possibility that John would decline. Domestic concerns, real though they were, could not compete with his craving for public distinction. As he saw it, he had played a major role in launching the war for independence, so it was only right that he should be accorded an equivalent role in ending it. On November 4 he officially accepted the appointment, promising to “devote myself, without Reserve, or loss of time, to discharge the duties of it.” He intended to sail for France in eight to ten days.
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The only real question, then, was whether Abigail and the children would join him. Given her multiple expressions of regret at not accompanying him on the previous trip, and given the anxiety she experienced—close to clinical depression—during their prolonged separation, it seems plausible to assume that she expressed a strong preference to come along. But there is no evidence that she did; in fact, there is no evidence whatsoever of their private conversations on this sensitive subject.

A letter from John, written on board the
Sensible
just before it sailed, suggests that those conversations had been difficult and John had made the final decision that Abigail remain behind despite her protestations to the contrary: “Let me intreat you, to keep up your spirits and throw off Cares, as much as possible,” he urged. “We shall yet be happy, I hope and pray, and I don’t doubt it. I shall have Vexations enough, as usual. You will have Anxiety and tenderness enough, as usual. Pray strive not to have too much. I will write, by every opportunity I can get.”
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She wrote him the same day, hoping the letter would arrive before he sailed: “My habitation, how disconsolate it looks! My table, I set
down to it but cannot swallow my food. O Why was I born with so much Sensibility and, why possessing it have I so often been called to struggle with it?” By “sensibility” she meant her overwhelming emotional reaction to John’s prolonged absence, a pent-up sense of sorrow that she had managed to control before his departure but that then came surging over her once he was gone.
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Clearly, they had exchanged mutual vows in the days before the voyage, he to write more frequently and expansively, she to avoid complaining when letters did not arrive in accord with his promises or her expectations. Clearly, at the parting this time, they were both brave. But most clearly of all, alone once again in the house, Abigail was miserable. If she had known that this separation would last for nearly five years, her misery might have been unbearable.

While Abigail attempted to reconcile herself to a life without love, John accepted the domestic sacrifice as the price, albeit a high one, that must be paid to earn a permanent place of prominence in American history. He attempted to reduce the domestic cost by bringing along Charles as well as John Quincy, who at ten and thirteen years of age respectively were deemed old enough to benefit from extended European exposure. His entourage also included two secretaries: Francis Dana, the senior staff member and former delegate to the Continental Congress; and James Thaxter, a Harvard graduate who had read law with John and tutored the Adams boys, the designated junior staffer.

While Abigail battled ennui in a stony, self-imposed silence, John and his entourage found themselves launched on an adventure. The
Sensible
sprang a leak two days out of Boston that forced them to limp across the Atlantic—if British frigates had discovered them, they would have been easy prey—and eventually landed on Spain’s northwestern coast, a full one thousand miles from Paris. They mounted mules to scale the Pyrenees and endured smoke-filled accommodations, ever-present bedbugs, and overbearing Catholic priests, whom John described as surviving relics of the Inquisition. The hardships convinced him that he had made the correct decision to leave Abigail
in Braintree. “What would we do,” he asked, “if you and all the family had been with me?” In an effort to demonstrate that she was always on his mind, he sent her a package from Bilbao that included green tea, several bolts of linen cloth, and eighteen dozen “Barcelona Hankuffs.”
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Once he established his extended family in Paris, John made an obvious effort to write Abigail regularly and to ensure that his letters contained the kind of personal thoughts and impressions she so craved. A tour of the Royal Gardens, for example, prompted a discourse on the double-edged character of Parisian splendor: “There is every Thing here that can inform the Understanding or refine the Taste,” he observed. “Yet it must be remembered that there is every thing here too, which can seduce, betray, deceive, corrupt and debauch it.” A subsequent tour of the art museums produced a meditation on the march of civilization across generations, which has since become justifiably famous: “I must study Politics and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Music, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelain.” This was the man Abigail knew and loved, sharing himself over the distance the way she wished.
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For several reasons, however, it could not last. The correspondence he felt compelled to maintain with the Continental Congress—he was at best assiduous, at worst obsessive, in reporting back to headquarters—soon began to nudge out the letters to Abigail. “I am so taken up with writing to Philadelphia that I don’t write to you as often as I wish,” he confessed somewhat guiltily. “I hope you won’t complain of me.” She did not, at one point claiming that she did not expect to receive more than a few letters a year. Even though she did not mean it, she felt obliged to say it.
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Her low expectations, in fact, proved realistic. In part because it often took six months for a letter to reach her, and in part because many of John’s letters were lost at sea, any kind of ongoing conversation became impossible. They suddenly found themselves in a virtually silent partnership.

Once again, this time for a much longer stretch, Abigail felt that
she was a widow. On occasion she summoned up the bravado to joke about the nonnegotiable powers of the Atlantic Ocean. “Several packets have been sent to Neptune,” she quipped, “and I Query whether, having found his mistake, he has complaisance enough to forward them to you.” But her more abiding mood was depression and despair, describing her situation as “a cruel destiny” and herself “sitting in my solitary chamber, the representative of the lonely love.” One night she woke up from a dream in which John and both boys had returned to her, only to realize that it was merely a dream. “Cruel that I should wake,” she reported, “only to experience a renewal of my daily solicitude,” too disconcerted to write “solitude.” John concurred that they could only come together in a dream: “What a fine Affair it would be if We could flit across the Atlantic as they say the Angels do from Planet to Planet. I would dart to Penn’s Hill and bring you over on my Wings.”
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She began to question whether her capacity to love was a blessing or a curse, given the relentless sorrow it produced when the outlet was an ocean away. She even attributed her own miserable condition—John did not strike her as similarly affected—to the biblical curse imposed on all women. “Desire and Sorrow were denounced upon our Sex,” she speculated, “as a punishment for the transgression of Eve. I have sometimes thought that we are formed to experience more exquisite sensations than is the Lot of your Sex. More tender and susceptible by Nature of … happiness or misery, we Suffer and enjoy in a higher degree.” Given the current downward spiral on her own emotional scale, she had discovered a new appreciation of “the philosopher who thanked the Gods that he was created a Man rather than a Woman.”
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If Abigail’s problems were primarily emotional, John’s were chiefly diplomatic. In effect, he had been appointed minister plenipotentiary to negotiate an end of the war with Great Britain more than a year before the British ministry was prepared to give serious consideration to such negotiations. During the spring and summer of 1780, in fact,
British strategy called for a major campaign in the Carolinas and Georgia designed to deliver a blow that would demonstrate the futility of continued American resistance. Until the British came to recognize the futility of their own war policy, John could only wait.

Patience never came naturally to John, so in the summer of 1780 he began to question what he regarded as Franklin’s overly solicitous posture toward the French government, thereby inserting himself into a conversation between Franklin and the French foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes. Both Franklin and Vergennes regarded this intrusion as unwelcome and potentially harmful to the Franco-American alliance, a landmark achievement that they, quite correctly, viewed as their joint triumph.

Vergennes took an immediate dislike toward this American interloper, who seemed to possess all the diplomatic grace of a cannonball and to regard stubbornness as a major virtue. “His obstinacy,” Vergennes noted caustically, “will cause to foment a thousand unfortunate incidents.” Eventually, on July 29, 1780, he announced the end of any and all communication with John Adams. From now on, he would deal only with Franklin when it came to American affairs. He also fired off an angry letter to La Luzerne, the French minister to the United States, urging him to use all his influence to have Adams recalled.
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What had John done to provoke such exasperation? His major offense was to insist that the United States be treated as an equal partner in the Franco-American alliance, a point that Franklin preferred to finesse. Lurking behind that insistence was the conviction that French and American interests, though temporarily aligned, were not enduringly identical. As he put it in his diary, French policy was to “keep us weak. Make us feel our obligations. Impress our minds with a sense of gratitude.” Once the war with Great Britain was won—an outcome that John acknowledged to be quite dependent on French assistance—French and American goals were likely to diverge. France would probably seek to recover some portion of its lost empire in North America, for example, and hold American interests hostage to its larger European agenda in the global conflict with Great Britain. The time might very well come, in short, when America’s gratitude
toward the French became a major obstacle in negotiating favorable terms with the British.

However obstinate and ungrateful such convictions seemed to Vergennes and Franklin at the time, they were rooted in a highly realistic assessment of America’s long-term interests that proved prescient as events unfolded pretty much as John predicted. He was, as Vergennes described him, temperamentally unsuited for the diplomatic refinements of the French court, irritatingly irreverent toward French appraisals of the size of the naval force required to subdue British prowess off the American coast, apparently deaf to all of Franklin’s advice in favor of silence and deference. But on every strategic score, history proved him right.

History had not yet happened by the late summer of 1780, and back in Philadelphia, the delegates at the Continental Congress could know only that their minister plenipotentiary had become a political liability in Paris. The most damaging testimony came from Franklin, who chose to align himself with Vergennes: “Mr. Adams has given offence to the Court here … He thinks, as he tells me himself, that America has been too free in Expressions of Gratitude towards France … I apprehend, that he mistakes his Ground, and that this Court is to be treated with Decency and Delicacy.” This was the diplomatic equivalent of a stab in the back, and the first formulation of Franklin’s most famous evisceration, rendered three years later: “He means well for his Country, is always an honest man, often a Wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his Senses.”
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