First Family (2 page)

But talk by itself was not sufficient to explain their mutual attraction. The letters that began to flow back and forth between them late in 1761 contain some explicit expressions of powerful physical and sexual urges, so that the picture that emerges depicts two young lovers conversing about Shakespeare’s sonnets or Molière’s plays in between
long and multiple kisses, passionate embraces, and mutual caresses. Their grandson Charles Francis Adams, who published the first comprehensive edition of their correspondence nearly a century later, was either too embarrassed or too much a prisoner of Victorian mores to include any of their courtship correspondence. Here is a sample of what he chose to censor. John to Abigail, addressed to “Miss Adorable”: “By the same token that the bearer hereof [JA] satt up with you last night, I hereby order you to give him, as many kisses, and as many Hours of your company after nine o’clock as he pleases to demand, and charge them to my account.”
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Or John to Abigail, explaining that a sudden storm had prevented a trip to see her at Weymouth: “Yet perhaps blessed storm … for keeping one at my distance. For every experimental philosopher knows, that the steel and the magnet, or the glass and the feather will not fly together with more celerity … than somebody … when brought within striking distance—and Itches, Aches, Agues, and Repentance might be the consequences of contact in present circumstances.”
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Then Abigail to John, proclaiming that their mutual attraction was visceral as well as intellectual: “And there is a tye more binding than Humanity, and stronger than Friendship … unite these, and there is a threefold chord—and by this chord I am not ashamed to say that I am bound, nor do I [believe] that you are wholly free from it.”
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The inevitable “did they or didn’t they” question is impossible to answer conclusively, though their first child, named Abigail, was born eight and half months after their marriage, just barely within the bounds of propriety. But the fact that they were strongly tempted is beyond question, and a crucial indication that their affinity was not solely cerebral. For both of them, love entailed a level of intimacy that no conversation could completely capture and required a physical attraction. And they both felt it. If Abigail referred to it as “the third chord,” we might shift the metaphor and describe it as an emotional affinity that made unconditional trust between them a natural act.

One of the distinctive features of their extraordinary correspondence over a lifetime—more than twelve hundred letters—was also present from the start, namely, the tendency to banter playfully about serious subjects, thereby creating a certain ambiguity as to whether
the issue at stake was cause for concern or laughter. For example, in a note to Abigail’s sister Mary, John jokingly claimed that Abigail was rumored to have a crush on the recently coronated British monarch, George III, and that “altho my allegiance has been hitherto inviolate, I shall endeavor all in my Power, to foment Rebellion.” (Little did he know that his joke would become a prescient prophecy.) Or there is Abigail’s mock criticism of John that then concludes with a double-edged compliment:

Abigail was apparently more than half serious when, a few months before their wedding, she asked John to deliver on his promise “and tell me all my faults, both of omission and commission, and all the evil you either know or think of me.” John responded with a mock “catalogue of your Faults, Imperfections, Deficits, or whatever you please to call them.” She was, he observed, negligent at playing cards, could not sing a note, often hung her head like a bulrush, sat with her legs crossed, was pigeon-toed, and to cap it off, she read too much. Abigail responded that many of these defects were probably incurable, especially the reading, so he would have to learn to live with them. The leg-crossing charge struck her as awkward, since “a gentleman has no business to concern himself with the leggs of a lady.”
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The letters exchanged during their courtship (1761–64) provide the first and fullest window into the chemistry of their relationship, but it
would probably be wrong to presume that the correspondence accurately reflected the way they talked to each other when together. Letter writing in the eighteenth century was a more deliberative and self-consciously artful exercise than those of us in the present, with our cell phones, e-mail, and text messaging, can fully fathom. The letters, of course, are all we have to recover the texture of their overlapping personalities. While they constitute a long string of emotional and intellectual pearls unmatched in the literature of the era, they were also self-conscious performances, quasi-theatrical presentations that were more stylized and orchestrated than real conversations. There are some things, in short, that we can never know for sure about their deepest thoughts and feelings, even though they are among the most fully revealed couples in American history.

Two essential ingredients in their lifetime literary dialogue were clear from the start: first, Abigail, despite the lack of any formal education, could match John with a pen, which was saying quite a lot, since he proved to be one of the master letter writers in an age not lacking in serious contenders; second, there was a presumed sense of psychological equality between them that Abigail expected and John found intoxicating. She was marrying a man who loved the fact that she was, as he put it, “saucy,” and he was marrying a woman who was simultaneously capable of unconditional love and personal independence. They recognized from the beginning that they were a rare match. There were so many topics they could talk about easily and just as many things they did not have to talk about at all.

The wedding occurred on October 25, 1764, in the same parlor of her father’s house in Weymouth where they had initially found each other so uninteresting. In her last letter to John before the wedding, Abigail asked him to take all her belongings, which she was forwarding in a cart to their new home in Braintree. “And then Sir, if you please,” she concluded, “you may take me.”
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What did each of them bring to the marriage? Well, most basically, John brought sixty acres of land and a small house that he had inherited
from his father, who died in 1761. Abigail brought a cartload of furniture and a household servant, who was partially paid for by her father. By the standards of New England at that time, these assets, though hardly massive, were not meager. They were starting off with more material resources than most newlyweds.

What about their respective bloodlines? On this score Abigail brought more status than John. Her mother was a Quincy, a name that rested atop the Braintree elite; the family eventually had the town named after them. Their mansion at Mount Wollaston was the closest thing to a baronial estate outside of Boston. Her father was a Harvard-educated minister, while John’s was a farmer and shoemaker without a college education.

But this discrepancy was a bit deceptive, because Deacon Adams, as he was called, was a respected local leader who, at one time or another, had held every office in the Braintree town government. Moreover, as John made a point of emphasizing in his autobiography, the Adams family could trace its lineage back to 1638, making it one of the most long-standing families in Massachusetts, a venerable if not particularly prominent line.
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That said, when John graduated from Harvard in 1755, he was ranked fourteenth out of twenty-five students, a ranking based solely on family status rather than academic achievement. (Academically, by the way, he was one of the top three students in his class, and the status-based system of ranking became a casualty of the American Revolution.) There is indirect evidence to believe that Abigail’s mother opposed the marriage, convinced that her daughter was marrying down and could do better. Such social calibrations were swept away by Abigail’s uncompromising insistence that she had found her man and was determined to have him.
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In terms of providing for a family, John’s prospects were excellent. He had that Harvard degree, had studied with some of the leading lawyers in the colony, had passed the equivalent of the bar exam in 1761, and had begun to develop a reputation as one of the up-and-coming attorneys in the Boston area. Indeed, he had chosen to delay marriage until he was twenty-nine, three or four years later than the
norm for males in New England at that time, in order to ensure that his income could provide for a wife and family.
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Abigail brought equivalently sturdy strengths. From early childhood she had been exposed to the mundane but essential duties of managing a household. Though the Smith family had four servants, two of them slaves, all the daughters were required to perform the cooking, cleaning, spinning, and gardening duties that were expected of a New England wife. She could manage servants, to be sure, but she could also perform the various tasks they were assigned alongside them, to include maintaining a permanent fire in the fireplace for cooking, scouring heavy kettles and pots, feeding and killing chickens, and performing elemental carpentry repairs of cabinets and cupboards. In a pinch, she could also split logs for the fire.
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Then there were the less tangible assets that both brought to the union—the ambitions, insecurities, obsessions, excesses—all the mental and emotional ingredients that had begun to congeal in their respective personalities. John had nine more years of experience to distill, and the fact that he began keeping a diary soon after graduating from college means that the record of his interior life as a young man is much fuller than anything we have for Abigail. Many New Englanders of the time kept diaries, but most of them are about the weather. When John recorded which way the wind was blowing, however, he was usually being metaphorical, referring to the gusts surging through his own soul.
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In one sense John’s early diary entries are reminiscent of an introspective tradition as old as New England Puritanism. He was forever making lists of daily tasks to perform, books to read, ways to discipline his day. But he invariably failed to meet his own standards. One day, for example, he vowed to rise before sunrise but then slept until seven o’clock and, as he put it, “Rambled about all Day, gaping and gazing.” He kept imposing moral tests on himself that he consistently failed. Instead of reading his law books one day, he spent all his time “in absolute idleness, or what’s worse, gallanting the Girls.” Like the classic Puritan diary, his was a record of imperfection.
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Unlike the aspiring Puritan saint, however, who was preoccupied
with the question “Am I saved?” John’s obsession was more secular: “What is my destiny?” In some respects this secularization of the Puritan ethic resembled the list of disciplined habits Benjamin Franklin made famous in his “The Way to Wealth,” which took for granted that worldly success, not eternal salvation, was the proper goal of life. But John’s introspective philosophy, if he had ever given it a title, would have been called “The Way to Virtue.” Mere worldly success in terms of wealth was never enough for him; indeed, it was actually dangerous, since wealth inevitably corrupted men and nations by undermining the disciplined habits that produced the wealth in the first place. Making wealth your primary goal, as he saw it, was symptomatic of a second-rate mind destined to die rich but unfulfilled.

John’s ambitions soared to a greater height, a place where fame rather than fortune was the ultimate reward. When he read Cicero’s orations against Catiline out loud in front of a mirror, he confided to himself that “it opens my pores, quickens the circulation,” as he imagined himself an American Cicero delivering an equivalently dramatic speech. Or when he read Shakespeare, he asked himself how he could replicate the bard’s genius at creating characters he had never experienced directly: “Why have I not genius, to start some new thought, something that will inspire the World, [and] raise me at once to fame?” For a country lawyer, he was aiming very high, looking to lash himself to a cause larger than himself.
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One of the most consequential decisions he ever made, second only to his decision to marry Abigail, was to become a lawyer rather than a minister. Though he tortured himself with guilt-driven questions for a full year after his graduation from college, knowing that his father hoped he would choose the pulpit, the outcome was never in doubt. Once the intellectual elite of New England, the ministry had drifted to the sidelines by the middle of the eighteenth century, caught up in increasingly pedantic theological quarrels and burdened by what John called “the whole cartloads of trumpery, that we find Religion incumbered with in these Days.” He had no desire to languish in obscurity, splitting theological distinctions at night and preaching harmless homilies to parishioners on Sunday. (Abigail’s father, it turns out, was a sterling example of what he did not wish to
become.) He was determined to become a major player in this world, not an erudite guide to the next one. Whether she knew it or not, Abigail was marrying one of the most ambitious men in New England.
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He spent three years (1755–58) teaching school and reading law in Worcester. During this formative phase he let all his friends know that his teaching job was a mere way station that allowed him to support himself while he prepared for grander things, that “keeping this school any length of time would make a base weed and ignoble shrub of me.” He recorded a daydream in his diary in which he imagined his classroom as a little commonwealth, casting himself in the role of dictator, a sort of Cromwell of the kindergarten: