First Family (36 page)

Although Abigail had actually led the assault on Warren, and in that sense made herself a full partner in the defense of the Adams legacy, she almost surely recognized that John’s outbursts only damaged his reputation by seeming to document the long-standing charge, first enshrined in the public record by Franklin, then amplified in Hamilton’s notorious pamphlet, that his thought process was a series of volcanic eruptions. Even John himself acknowledged that he was making a fool of himself, but he could not help it: “A man never looks so silly as when he is talking or writing about himself,” he admitted, “but Mrs. Warren’s severity has reduced me to the necessity of pouring out all myself.” Once he began pouring, however, his emotions flowed into an interior Adams zone where no one, not even Abigail, could reach him. She had learned from years of experience that when that happened, the only thing to do was to let him go until the flow subsided.
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From Abigail’s perspective, the only positive feature of the exchange with Warren was that no one knew about it beyond the two families, so that John’s embarrassing behavior remained a private affair. But once his sluices had opened, the surge of painful memories and score-settling accusations needed somewhere else to go, so in 1809 John decided to publish a series of weekly essays in the recently established
Boston Patriot
. He was obviously in full flight: “Let the jackasses bray or laugh at this, as they did at the finger of God,” he shouted at the start of the series. “I am in a fair way to give my critics
food enough to glut their appetites.” In one of the first
Patriot
pieces he compared himself to “an animal I have seen take hold of the end of a cord with his teeth, and be drawn slowly up by pulleys, through a storm of squils, crackers, and rockets, flashing and blazing around him every moment … and although the scorching flames made him groan, and mourn, and roar, he would not let go.”
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John did not let go for three years and more than a thousand pages, most of them directed at the defining decision of his presidency, sending a peace commission that avoided war with France. He went out of his way to describe the duplicitous behavior of Vice President Jefferson, the disloyalty of his cabinet, and most especially the grandiose scheming of Hamilton to wrest control of the Federalist Party for his own traitorous purposes. All this was, in fact, historically accurate, but it came off to readers as special pleading, and at times as the ranting of a sore loser afflicted by some combination of paranoia and dementia.

The tortured remembering that John was attempting to write about in his autobiography, then the prideful and almost pugilistic vindications of his historical significance spewed out to Warren and, more endlessly, to the
Boston Patriot
, could be construed as forms of therapy, if that term meant the effort to bring latent emotional anger that had been previously suppressed to the surface for more conscious and explicit scrutiny. But the conspicuously self-serving character of John’s version of therapy, plus the often incoherent and always frenzied form of its expression, only enhanced the charge that he was, as his critics had claimed, a one-man bonfire of vanities. This was not quite fair, as became clear in the freewheeling correspondence with Benjamin Rush in which his ghosts and goblins became the butt of jokes and, at least momentarily, he could laugh at himself.

Rush had been a friend for over thirty years, but they had drifted apart over the last decade, when Rush had sided with Jefferson. The correspondence, then, represented the recovery of a friendship rooted in a personal affinity that both men recognized as deeper than politics: a common instinct for a level of candor that bordered on irreverence; a mutual disregard for any kind of conventional wisdom that deterred
their rollicking, almost daredevil style; and their recognition that, at this late stage in their lives, they were like gamblers with nothing to lose.
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Quite coincidentally, Rush had recently decided to conclude his medical career by focusing his attention on mental illness, a decision that eventually earned him the title “father of American psychiatry.” As part of that project, he proposed that he and John engage in a high-stakes game of honesty in which they reported to each other on their respective dreams.

John leapt at the offer, vowing to match Rush “dream for dream.” He dreamed that he was “mounted on a lofty scaffold in the center of the great plain in Versailles, surrounded by an innumerable congregation of five and twenty millions.” But then the crowd became a collection of animals—lions, elephants, rats, squirrels, even sharks and whales. When he attempted to lecture this weird menagerie on “the unadulterated principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity among all living creatures,” the menagerie became a violent mob, tearing one another to pieces, then forcing him to flee for his life “with my clothes torn from my back and my skin lacerated from head to foot.” This was simultaneously a joke about the naïveté of the French philosophes and a fable about his own fate at the hands of the American electorate.
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The mad-hatter character of the correspondence encouraged free association, and the Versailles scene made John remember a phrase used by a French barber in Boston, “a little crack,” meaning slightly crazy, which described the entire British ruling class and all the utopian thinkers of the French Revolution. “I must tell you,” he confided to Rush, “that my wife, who took a fancy to read this letter upon my table, bids me to tell you that she thinks my head too, a little cracked, and I am half of that mind too.”
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Apparently their wives were often sitting nearby while Adams and Rush wrote their letters, and periodically commented on their giddy tone. Rush reported to John that “my saucy wife says that you and I correspond like two young girls about their sweethearts.” And when Rush proposed, to John’s horror, that colleges eliminate the study of Latin and Greek for more practical subjects, it turned out, so John claimed, that Abigail agreed with him: “Mrs. Adams says she is willing
you should discredit Greek and Latin, because it will destroy all the pretensions of the gentlemen to superiority over the ladies and restore liberty, equality, and fraternity between the sexes.” Or when Rush described a special “tranquillizing chair” that he had designed for interviews with his mental patients, Abigail suggested in jest that John could benefit from such seating. John countered that he already had his own proper chair, for if Samuel Johnson pontificated from his tavern stool, John did the same from his “throne at my fireside.”
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With Rush, instead of engaging in endless lamentations about the scandalmongers who had vilified him, he claimed that he “would subscribe 100 guineas for a complete edition of all the scandal against me from 1789 to 1801, then have it bound in an expensive leather binder for preservation.” It was actually his own fault for failing to hire what he called “puffers” to answer the ridiculous accusations: “These puffers, Rush, are the only killers of scandal … and you and I have never employed them, and therefore scandal has prevailed against us.” When Rush reminded John that one such “puffer,” William Cobbett, had defended the Adams presidency, John countered with self-mockery: “Now I assure you upon my honor and the faith of the friendship between us,” he vowed, “that I never saw the face of Cobbett, and that I should not know him if I met him in my porridge dish.”
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And instead of bemoaning his failure to fit comfortably into the stoic mold that history seemed to require, he went on the offensive, mocking the presumption that stoic serenity was anything but a theatrical posture. The Virginians were especially good at such posing, Washington the best of the lot, but then “Virginian geese were all Swans.” Rather than make the point in a defensive way, he made his critique of the stoic style into a bawdy joke: “Deceive not thyself,” he told Rush. “There is not an old friar in France, not in all Europe, who looks on a blooming young virgin with
sang-froid.”
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The dream-driven correspondence with Rush drew on John’s lifelong habit of introspection, itself a secular version of the venerable New England tradition in which the aspiring Puritan saint searched his soul for signs of God’s grace. But as John himself seemed to be aware, the therapeutic technique that Rush brought to the conversation,
by insisting on dreams as the subject matter, permitted fresh emotional insights and connections by bypassing the defense mechanisms of the conscious mind. “Dream, you know, is a mighty Power,” he observed to Rush. “It is not shackled with any rules of Method in Arrangement of Thoughts … Time, Space and Place are annihilated; and the free independent Soul darts from Suns to Suns, from Planets to Planets … to all the Milky Way, quicker than rays of Light.” He was beginning to learn how to round up those “raging Bulls” that he felt stampeding inside him when he was a young man.
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At the same time that he was being tortured by his demons in his embarrassingly vain letters to Mercy Otis Warren and his hopelessly self-serving essays in the
Boston Patriot
, John was conquering those demons, or at least bringing them under a measure of control, in his correspondence with Rush. Only to Rush, and perhaps in conversations with Abigail that left no trace, could he acknowledge that the personal crusade on behalf of his rightful place in the history books was a fool’s errand: “There have been many times in my life when I have been so agitated in my own mind,” he confessed to Rush, “as to have no considerations at all of the light in which my words would be considered by others … The few traces of me that remain, I believe, must go down to posterity with much confusion.” Although Abigail had learned to cope with the childlike tantrums of the aggrieved seeker of fame, this less frantic creature was the man she loved. It was good to get him back.
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Abigail’s duties were her demons, at least in the sense that the extended family that flocked to Quincy in fits and starts in the early years of her alleged retirement put her prowess as the legendary matriarch of the Adams dynasty to a strenuous test. For, as we have seen, the Old House became either the final destination or the temporary depository for a sizable congregation of near and distant relatives, all bearing young children and most carrying heavy emotional baggage. As a result, she faced an even more sprawling set of domestic challenges in her retirement than she did as a young mother coping
with four children in John’s absence. She was the irrepressible center of gravity for the Adams family, and now all the accumulated loose ends floated into her domestic orbit.

Ironically, it was her powerful domestic instinct that led her into an extraordinary exchange of letters with Jefferson, in which she became the most ardent and effective defender of John’s political legacy. It began in May 1804, when she learned that Jefferson’s younger daughter, Maria Jefferson Eppes, whom she had known and nurtured as Polly in London, had died of complications during childbirth. Her deep parental empathy—she had by then lost three of her own children—compelled her to offer consolation to Jefferson regardless of the political chasm that had opened up between them: “It has been some time I conceived of any event in this Life,” she somewhat poignantly observed, “which would call forth feeling of mutual sympathy.” But a daughter’s death was just such a rare occasion.
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Jefferson normally had perfect pitch in such exchanges, but he misread Abigail’s intentions, thinking she sought to use Maria’s death as an opportunity to restore diplomatic relations between Monticello and Quincy. After thanking her for the gesture of empathy, he proceeded to minimize the Adams-Jefferson conflict, blaming it on partisan journalists, claiming that their quite real political differences had never threatened the personal friendship. This was revisionist history of the charitable sort, designed to recover the friendship by denying it had ever been lost.

But then Jefferson made a fatal blunder. He had but one personal criticism of John’s behavior as president, he wrote, which was his appointment of John Marshall as chief justice during the latter weeks of his presidency, thereby burdening Jefferson with an entrenched and alien presence. Jefferson characterized this decision as “personally unkind,” almost a slap in the face by John before departing. Over time, however, in an elegant turn of phrase, Jefferson concluded that the Marshall appointment “left something for friendship to forgive,” so that “after brooding it over for some time, I forgave it cordially.”
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Jefferson was extremely adept in verbal jousts of this sort, usually establishing a genteel tone that made any form of conflict or confrontation seem inappropriate. He should have known that his tactics
would not work with Abigail, who had reprimanded him in no uncertain terms as a delinquent parent of the very child who had just died. “You have been pleased to enter upon some subjects which call for a reply,” she ominously observed. “And now Sir, I freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former friendship and placed you in a Light very different from what I had viewed you in.”

The notion that John’s appointment of Marshall was a personal affront defied the obvious fact, so Abigail argued, that he was legally obliged to make the appointment. (She did not reveal that she had strongly supported the decision.) But the most preposterous and presumptive claim was Jefferson’s assumption of the moral high ground—this from the same man who had “spread the blackest calumny and foulest falsehoods” against both her husband and her eldest son by paying James Callender to assault their integrity in the newspapers in order to ensure his own election, all the while denying that he had done so. “This, Sir, I considered as a personal injury,” she wrote, “and the sword that cut the Gordion Knot.” If there was any sin for friendship to forgive, all the forgiving rested on the Adams side of the ledger. The fact that Callender had subsequently turned on Jefferson and exposed his affair with the mulatto slave Sally Hemings was a delectable irony: “The serpent you cherished and warmed,” she caustically observed, “bit the hand that nourished him.” She closed with a quote from Proverbs: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.”
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