First Family (3 page)

Finally, he began what was to become a lifelong conversation with his internal demons. “Vanity I am sensible, is my cardinal folly,” he lectured himself, “and I am in constant Danger, when in company, of being led an ignus fatuus by it without the strictest caution and watchfulness over my self.” He was too candid, too conspicuous in his ambition, too talkative. He would come home after an evening of conversation with the local elite at Worcester and pour out his lamentations, especially his irresistible urge “to shew my own importance or superiority, by remarking the Foibles, Vices, or Inferiority of others,” which invariably alienated the very people he sought to impress.
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More ominously, he often felt overwhelmed by his own passions—
be they vanities, ambitions, or envies—acknowledging that in those moments he was wholly out of control, like an erupting volcano. On one occasion he described his emotions as “Lawless Bulls that roar and bluster, defy all Control, and sometimes murder their proper owner.” On another occasion they became thunderstorms: “I can as easily still the fierce Tempests or stop the rapid thunderbolts,” he chided himself, “as command the motions and operations of my own mind.”
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Eventually John’s dialogue with his own boisterous passions informed his understanding of all politics, gradually projecting onto the world his incessant emotional turmoil and thereby envisioning all societies as cauldrons of swirling, inherently irrational drives that it was the chief business of government to control. For the time being, however, his internal eruptions, raging bulls, or violent thunderstorms, whatever one wished to call them, defied his best efforts at control. And he knew it. (His own sense of being unbalanced was one reason he made balance the beau ideal of his political philosophy.) As he saw himself, he was a gifted young man with appropriately lofty ambitions, all of which could be ambushed by his erratic, overly excitable, at times explosive instincts. “Ballast is what I want,” he lectured himself; “I totter with every breeze”—though the breezes were all blowing inside himself. Whether the source of John’s periodic bursts of vanity, insecurity, and sheer explosiveness was mental or physical—there is some scholarly speculation that he had a thyroid imbalance—remains a mystery. There is no question, however, that he was susceptible to swoonish emotional swings, especially when under extreme stress, and he would struggle with this problem throughout his life.
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Whether she knew it or not, and there is some evidence she did, Abigail’s chief role as John’s wife was to become his ballast. She needed to create a secure domestic environment in which he felt completely comfortable, a calm space where his harangues and mood swings were treated as lovable eccentricities, the butt of jokes that would allow him to laugh at himself. He needed to be bathed in love, to be regarded not as an emotional liability but as a passionate asset. This was obviously a huge order. As it turned out, it came naturally to Abigail.

Why that was so is difficult to document, since Abigail did not keep a diary, and few letters before her courtship with John have survived. We are therefore forced to tease out of the scattered evidence some kind of plausible glimpse of her personality at the threshold of her marriage, inevitably influenced by the much more plentiful evidence from her more mature years, then connect the dots backward to her youth.

On the one hand, we know she was raised to be a conventional New England woman, and groomed to live the life of a traditional New England wife: marry at around twenty and produce children every two years until her fertility faded, which meant that she expected to spend her twenties and thirties either pregnant or recovering from delivering a child. She presumed that she would run the household, educate the children at least to a level of literacy, and subsume her own ambitions within the life and work of her husband. These traditional expectations were always unquestioned presumptions for Abigail, and taken together, they constitute the primary reason that she does not fit comfortably into a modern feminist paradigm.
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On the other hand, while her mother encouraged her to adopt the traditional female virtues of the day, her father and grandmother encouraged her instincts to be opinionated. Reading was the chief form of rebellion. Her father owned an impressive library containing most of the classics in literature, history, and religion. Her interest in Milton, Pope, Dryden, and Shakespeare became a source of pride rather than a worrisome concern. (If she had been raised in Virginia, her reading habits would have been considered slightly scandalous and her tart tongue a liability that required correction.) Although she never received any formal schooling, she was “homeschooled” more like a boy than a girl. And while she was never exposed to Latin and Greek, she was learning to read French when she met John. Her later letters, even more than John’s, are littered with literary references that reflect the habit of reading acquired in her youth.

There are also frequent references to her obstinacy and stubbornness, which her father and grandmother Quincy found endearing. She preferred her hair to be done this way, not that, or to wear this
dress rather than that one. She had strong views about how to manage the servants and whether the congregation responded properly to her father’s weekly sermon. And, in the end, she knew her own mind well enough to reject her mother’s advice that John was not her ideal mate. This independent streak was not the result of her reading; indeed, her passion for reading was its consequence. Like a beautiful woman’s beauty, it was simply there, something she came by naturally and that no one tried to stamp out. On the contrary, as Grandmother Quincy once told her, “wild colts make good horses.”
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Logically, Abigail should have felt torn between her two sides as a traditional New England woman and a fiercely independent personality. But she did not. The apparent contradiction felt to her like a seamless continuity. She could mend a hem while engaging you in a discussion of Macbeth’s fatal flaw. If that caused trouble for some people, that was their problem. One of the reasons she felt so confident about her marriage to John was that he loved the edgy combination and took great delight at the literary allusions sprinkled throughout her letters. She was simultaneously a dutiful wife and an intellectual equal, a lover and a friend, a heart and a mind.

In fact, on the heart side of the equation, Abigail was John’s superior. Together with his gargantuan ambitions and overlapping vanities, he brought massive insecurities to the relationship: a nervous, excitable, at times irritable temperament rooted not so much in self-doubt—he was completely confident of his abilities—but rather in uncertainty that the world would allow him to display his talents. To be sure, John was hoping to play a bigger game on a much larger public stage, while Abigail’s focus was the much smaller arena of the family. But within that orbit she was supremely and serenely confident, totally immune to the demons that bedeviled him, the even keel to his wild swings, the safety net that would catch him when he fell. In psychological terms, he was neurotic and she was uncommonly sane. His inevitable eruptions would not threaten the marriage, because she was the center who would always hold.
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Abigail’s bottomless devotion was put on display in April 1764, seven months before their marriage, when John decided to undergo inoculation against smallpox. An epidemic was raging in Boston, and
John correctly calculated that inoculation, though risky, was much less so than catching the smallpox in “the natural way.” (In March 1764 Boston reported 699 cases of smallpox acquired in “the natural way,” causing 124 deaths.) John’s letters while he was quarantined were models of bravado—he was “as Happy as a Monk in his cloister or an Hermit in his Cell.”
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Abigail had wanted to join him so they could undergo the inoculation process together. But John reasoned that as long as she remained in Weymouth or Braintree, the epidemic in Boston would not threaten her, so the risk of inoculation was greater than the risk of exposure. She sent him several parcels of tobacco so that he could “smoke” the daily letters she expected him to write, thereby removing any contamination. “I don’t imagine you will use it all for that purpose,” she joked, given his preference for a cigar as a companion to take her place.
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Though they were only engaged, Abigail already thought of herself as his wife. “I am very fearful that you will not, when left to your own management, follow their directions,” she cautioned, “but let her who tenderly cares for you both in Sickness and Health interest you to be careful.” She felt guilty at not being there to take care of him. Even though she could not visit him in quarantine, she said she wanted to go to Boston anyway so she could just “look at him through the window.” She was completely smitten.
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Most histories of colonial America for the decade between 1764 and 1774 are framed around several pieces of parliamentary legislation that led directly to the American Revolution. The key items are the Sugar Act (1764), the Stamp Act (1765), the Townshend Acts (1767), and the Coercive Acts (1774). Taken together, they represented a policy change by the British government designed to consolidate its control over a vast North American empire acquired in the French and Indian War. Imposing a higher degree of imperial control, and expecting American colonists to help pay for it, made perfect sense from the perspective of London and Whitehall, but it was regarded by most colonists
as a dramatic change in the rules of the game, most especially in its presumption that Parliament possessed the authority to tax them without their consent. What seemed so sensible to George III and his ministers was seen as tyrannical, arbitrary, and imperious by most colonists, who believed that their status in the British Empire had shifted from being equal members of the imperial family to abject subjects. And because this British legislative initiative led to the loss of its North American empire south of Canada, historians have tended to assess the effort harshly, as probably the most fatal blunder in the history of British statecraft.
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Abigail was hardly oblivious to these legislative benchmarks of British imperial policy, but her own benchmarks were pregnancies and births: Abigail, called Nabby, arrived in July 1765; John Quincy almost exactly two years later; Susanna, a sickly infant who lived only fourteen months, in December 1768; Charles in May 1770; and Thomas Boylston in September 1772. In effect, she was pregnant or recovering from childbirth for most of the decade. Beyond much doubt she was reading the newspapers and pamphlets that defined the terms of the emerging constitutional crisis. And as John became more and more involved in the protest movement in Braintree and Boston, we can presume that they talked together about the political issues at stake. But her primary focus, what defined her daily life, was the growing brood of children and the demanding domestic duties they created for a young mother.

John’s primary focus, on the other hand, was his legal career and his gradually expanding role as an outspoken opponent of British policy. He was almost surely involved in the family chores as well—putting the children to bed, reading to them, conferring with Abigail about disciplinary decisions and the educational program appropriate for each child. On this score we cannot be absolutely sure, however, because of what we might call “the paradox of proximity,” which is to say that we know most about the intimate lives of Abigail and John when they were apart and could converse only by corresponding. When they were together, the historical record of their family life is at best sketchy.

They did exchange a few letters during the first decade of their marriage, when John was on the road, handling cases from southern Maine to Cape Cod. These letters provide some slivers of evidence that John was very much an involved father. “I know from the tender affection you bear me,” Abigail wrote in September 1767, “that you will rejoice to hear that we are well, and that our daughter rocks him [John Quincy] to Sleep, with the Song of ‘Come pappa come home to Brother Johnny.’ ” When John was trying a case in Plymouth in May 1772, he expressed frustration at being absent from the family routine: “I wish myself at Braintree. This wandering itinerating life grows more and more disagreeable with me. I want to see my Wife and children every day.” He claimed that whenever he was on the road, his imagination carried him back to Braintree and “our lovely Babes”: “My Fancy runs about you perpetually. It is continually with you and in the Neighborhood of you—frequently takes a walk with you, and our little prattling Nabby, Johnny, Charley, and Tommy. We walk all together up Penn’s Hill, over the bridge to the Plain, down to the Garden, & c every Day.” When he was home—his office was in the house—John did not have to imagine such outings, so it seems safe to conclude that interacting with the family was an integral part of his day.
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The division of labor within the marriage, then, was clear but not absolute. Abigail was primarily a wife and mother who focused on the household. John was primarily the breadwinner pursuing a legal career. But she was also a political confidante, and he was an active father and husband. In that sense they were both androgynous, not for any deeply ideological reasons but because neither one was comfortable denying any important dimension of their respective personalities. And the more they interacted, the more they defied rigid gender categories and completed each other.