First Family (17 page)

Abigail, who should have known better, was predisposed to take these protestations at face value: “Few persons who so well Love domestic Life, as my Friend,” she wrote, “have been called for so long a period to relinquish the enjoyment of it. Yet like the needle to the Pole, you invariably turn toward it, as the only point where you have fixed your happiness.”
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This was naive. To be sure, John was utterly sincere about his desire for blissful retirement to Abigail’s arms in Braintree. But the dominant “needle to the Pole,” as she described his motivations, almost always pointed toward the next challenge in the public arena. Indeed, the very passion of his protestations about the London post was a clear sign that John’s ambitions were vibrating so violently that he felt obliged to deny their very existence.

Throughout the spring of 1783, in addition to demonstrating a powerful penchant for denial, he started to swing between extreme expressions of his diplomatic achievements and equally extreme, indeed quasi-paranoid, statements about an invisible army of enemies plotting to do him in. On the former score, he wrote Abigail that his diplomatic successes in the Netherlands and Paris were unprecedented, claiming to have rendered “Such Services as were never rendered by any other minister in Europe, the most critical, important and decisive services.” In the journal he submitted to the Continental Congress to document his diplomatic doings, he included a gratuitous compliment by Vergennes to the effect that John Adams had become the George Washington of European statecraft. When read aloud in the congress, this embarrassing piece of puffery produced gales of laughter, most especially from those delegates already predisposed to believe that Franklins conclusion was correct, namely, that his diplomatic colleague on occasion seemed slightly out of his mind.
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Swollen thoughts about his own significance then led to exaggerated fears that unseen enemies were plotting to belittle his achievements. “Millions of Contrivances,” he complained to Abigail, “by some invisible spirit” had made him the target of “Arrows shot in darkness designed to render an honest man’s Life uncomfortable.” And the more he thought about it, the more he concluded that his “french and franklinite” enemies were behind the scheme to make him minister to England, where he would encounter perpetual persecution in what was, in effect, a diplomatic graveyard.
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Though Abigail was the most astute student of John’s psyche on the planet, and the only person capable of exorcising his demons when they rose up with such frightening force, she was an ocean away, dealing with demons of her own. One was her fear of the Atlantic crossing that, try as she might, she could not conquer. Another was the apprehension that she would embarrass her husband and herself by cutting an awkward figure in Paris or London society. “I have not a wish to join you in a scene of life so different from that in which I have been educated,” she exclaimed. “I have so little of the Ape about me, that I have refused every publick invitation to figure in the Gay
World, and sequestered myself in this Humble cottage.” While they both agreed that their separation had to end, which meant that either she had to go to him or he had to come to her, Abigail’s preference was clear: “I have considered your invitation to me, the arguments for and against it, with all the deliberations I am mistress of,” she told him, “and upon the whole, your return here, is the object my Heart pants for.”
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She had already made a more pointed argument. His recent letter had revealed a man worn down by his duties, fatigued to an extent that gave her cause for worry about his physical and mental health. He himself had recognized, she noted, that “the enveyed embassy to a certain Island, is surrounded with so many thorns, that the Beauty and fragrance of the Rose, would be but a small compensation for the wounds which might be felt in the gathering and wearing of it.” Why lust after an appointment so obviously destined for disappointment? After all, lingering on the European stage could only dilute the glory he had already achieved. “The Golden Fleese is won,” she observed, so his legacy would be best served by putting a decisive end to his diplomatic career and coming home.
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This was excellent advice, but John could not hear it. What Abigail described as the “Golden Fleese” was for him more like the Holy Grail, which by definition kept receding beyond his grasp. His own insatiable ambitions were masked behind an equally bottomless sense of duty, which obliged him to remain poised to answer whatever call—be it in Paris or London—that the congress made. He persuaded himself that he really had no choice in the matter, which in turn meant that Abigail had no choice but to abandon her preference: “Come to Europe with Nabby as soon as possible,” he urged. “I am in earnest. I cannot be happy or tolerable without you.” Abigail responded with somewhat reluctant acceptance: “My present determination is to tarry at home this winter,” she wrote in November 1783, “and if I cannot prevail upon you to return to me in the Spring—you well know that I may be drawn to you.” She was simultaneously honoring her husband’s wishes and keeping her options open.
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Once she realized that John’s political agenda was nonnegotiable,
that he would never resign as long as the possibility of a new diplomatic assignment in Europe existed, she decided to discover whether such an assignment was likely. She wrote to Elbridge Gerry, the old family friend currently serving in the Continental Congress, to find out if John was under consideration for the London appointment. Gerry informed her that the London job was still problematic for John, but that it was virtually certain that he would be appointed, along with Franklin and Jefferson, as minister plenipotentiary in Europe for three years. Despite opposition from certain southern delegates, there was little chance that he would be recalled.
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This information made her decision, if not easy, at least foreordained. In January 1784, she made arrangements to send Charles and Tommy to live with her sister in Haverhill. “I shall immediately set about putting all our affairs in such a train,” she apprised John, “as that I may be able to leave them in the spring.” She still felt terrified about the voyage, and still believed that John’s decision to linger in Europe was misguided, but her duty as a wife now needed to be aligned with his duty as a diplomat. She vowed to banish all “Idle Specters” and embrace the fact that “the desires and requests of my Friend are a Law to me.” At forty years of age, she had never before ventured beyond the Boston area.
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Last-minute complications regarding care of the farm, along with shifting weather patterns on the Atlantic, delayed the departure until the summer. (Interestingly, she left the household in the hands of Phoebe Abdee, a former slave, who had become a dependable member of the household staff.) On June 20, 1784, Abigail and Nabby at last boarded the
Active
, bound for London. For the first time in her life, Abigail kept a diary. “Our ship dirty, our selves sick,” it began, and she then proceeded to document her conviction that the conditions on board any oceangoing vessel were incompatible with a woman’s integrity, chiefly because of the prevalence of dirt and the absence of privacy. A cow she had brought along for milk was injured during a storm and “was accordingly consigned to a watery grave.” But despite her protestations—“the ship itself is a partial prison”—the voyage proved blessedly uneventful and uncommonly short. She and Nabby disembarked on July 21. John Quincy, just back from St. Petersburg,
joined them in London a week later. It required another week for John to arrive from The Hague. He claimed to feel “twenty years younger than I was yesterday.” She described him being “as happy as a lord!” After a separation that had put the partnership to the severest test it would ever face, they were, at long last, together again.
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CHAPTER FOUR

1784–89

A
BIGAIL ACTUALLY SAW
John in a painting before she saw him in the flesh. While waiting for him to join her in London from The Hague, she visited the studio of John Singleton Copley, after Benjamin West the reigning American artist in England. Copley had depicted John at the apparent zenith of his diplomatic career, holding a scroll—presumably the Treaty of Paris—while standing before a table covered with maps of the newly acquired American empire east of the Mississippi. A globe stood off to the side, suggesting that the emergence of an independent America had international implications. It was a picture that glorified the stunning American arrival into the world of nations, and it made John Adams the preferred face of that glory.

Abigail’s only recorded comment—namely, that it struck her as “a good likeness”—was less innocuous than it sounded, since John had warned her that his crushing workload and prolonged illness in Holland had extracted such a physical toll that she might not recognize him. Now that seemed unlikely. But the portrait was not just a physical rendering of her long-absent husband; it was also a visual endorsement of his epochal triumph. Copley seemed to confirm that all of John’s fondest dreams and deepest ambitions had been fulfilled at last. In that sense, Abigail was looking at a painting that declared all of her own personal sacrifices through more than four years of loneliness and isolation had paid a public dividend, both for her
country and for her fame-seeking husband. No one was going to paint her in equivalently brilliant colors, but in the privacy of her soul she could feel that her domestic version of patriotism had proved justified.
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The justification, however, had come at a price. Because of John’s diplomatic duties, they had been together less than four months over the past six years. During that time, John’s periodic failures as a correspondent struck Abigail as a violation of their covenant as a couple. And his refusal to leave his European post, despite her pleadings to do so, constituted a clear statement that his ambitions were more potent urges than his obligations as a husband. John could counter that if Abigail had insisted that he return to her, he would have done so. In truth, she had come pretty close to doing just that, but he was too distracted by his duties to hear her. And she was too proud to couch her requests in the form of demands that exposed her personal desperation.

From Abigail’s perspective, then, damage had been done to their previously impregnable bond. Her major reason for joining him abroad was to repair that damage by recovering their lost rhythms in the form of those mutual touches, glances, and banterings only possible when together. All the evidence suggests that John was completely oblivious to Abigail’s emotional agenda. He was so confident of her bottomless strength and devotion that it never even occurred to him that she harbored vulnerabilities that needed his attention. He presumed that they would simply pick up where they had left off.

In the end, that is precisely what happened. Perhaps the best way to put it is that Abigail and John spent the next four years, first in Paris and then more enduringly in London, being together in a constant and unrelenting way that seemed almost designed to compensate for the previous separation. It helped that a diplomat’s wife was expected to accompany her husband on all ceremonial and social occasions, so they were effectively regarded as a political team, which gave Abigail a public role she did not have when John was laboring in the Continental Congress. Her unofficial status as an advisor and confidante was now the norm rather than the exception, so she was
actually expected to stay abreast of ongoing diplomatic issues and controversies. She did not need to conceal her intelligence.

For several overlapping reasons, virtually all the outstanding foreign policy problems that John hoped to resolve soon showed themselves to be inherently intractable. Franklin, whose sense of timing was a version of perfect pitch, announced that there was nothing more for him to do in Paris, then sailed home in 1785, in plenty of time to become available as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and make some more history. John, on the other hand, found himself trapped in the European sideshow, attending endless ceremonies at court and lavish but pointless dinner parties, all with Abigail at his side, while the truly significant debates that would shape the future of the American republic were occurring across the Atlantic.