First Family (8 page)

One of the earliest letters from John Quincy, written when he was seven years old, documents the emotional problem: “I have been trying ever since you went away to learn to write you a letter,” the boy began. “I shall make poor work of it, but Sir, Mamma says you will accept my
endeavors, and that my duty to you may be expressed in poor writing as well as good. I hope I grow a better Boy and that you will have no occasion to be ashamed of me.” For the very reasons alluded to in the letter, it was never sent. Abigail explained why: “Master John is very anxious to write …, but he begs me to make his excuse and say that he has wrote twice before, but it did not please him well enough to send it.” Given his father’s heroic stature at that moment in John Quincy’s mind, nothing he could write would suffice.
²⁶

Throughout the remainder of John Quincy’s quite extraordinary career, his father embodied a combination of public and personal probity that verged on the superhuman. John made the matter worse by constantly reminding John Quincy that he was a gifted child who would disappoint him if he somehow squandered his talent, an appropriate warning to a young adult, but an emotional millstone for a ten-year-old.

A parent who is present only in the form of letters was almost destined, despite his best efforts, to be misunderstood. When John took time from his crowded schedule to write letters of personal encouragement to John Quincy, Charles, and Nabby, he felt that he had done his domestic duty. He had not written Tommy because, at age five, he did not think Tommy could read. But Tommy did not see it, or feel it, that way. As Abigail explained: “It would have grieved you if you had seen your youngest son stand by his Mamma and when she delivered out to the others their letter, … he stood in silent Grief with the Tears running down his face … Pappa does not love him he says so well as he does his Brothers, and many comparisons were made to see whose Letters were the longest.”
²⁷

As soon as John learned of this episode he wrote Tommy a long letter, reiterating his love and apologizing for his failure to recognize that his mother read all letters out loud to all the children. But this episode illustrates the difficulty of sustaining a close emotional relationship with his children from a distance. Abigail periodically dropped her stoic mask and expressed her frustration with his prolonged absences: “Our little ones, whom you so often recommend to my care and instruction, shall not be [in]sufficient in virtue or probity if the precepts
of a mother have their desired Effect,” she observed somewhat testily, “but they would be doubly enforced could they be indulged with the example of a Father constantly before them.”
²⁸

For his part, John acknowledged an abiding sense of guilt about his inability to perform his fatherly duties. “It is a cruel Reflection, which often comes across me,” he admitted, “that I should be separated so far, from those Babes, whose Education and Welfare lies so near my Heart.” His only compensation was to imagine the scene—he repeated the same mental picture in several letters—of all his children walking with him across the fields of Braintree, hand in hand. But the scene took place only in his imagination.
²⁹

Most of the time, John explained his separation from the day-to-day life of the family as a patriotic sacrifice rendered necessary, and therefore justified, by his public duties in the Continental Congress. (Abigail frequently closed her letters with the line “All the children send duty”) On one occasion, however, he wondered out loud if the patriotic rationale might be an excuse that masked his deeper motive, which was a quest for personal fame and a prominent place in the history books. If so, he lectured himself, he needed to conquer such impulses: “Let the Cymballs of Popularity tincle still. Let the Butterflies of Fame glitter with their Wings. I shall envy neither their Musick nor their Colours.”

Such unequivocal assertions were often a sign that John could cope with conflicting commitments only by denying their existence. Moreover, he tended to worry more about the effect his separation from family had on his own life, lamenting to Abigail that “the loss of our Company and that of my dear Babes for so long a time, I consider as a Loss of so much solid Happiness.” Abigail, on the other hand, tended to worry about the effect the absence had on the children. There is at least some reason to believe that she had cause for concern.
³⁰

Looking back thirty years later on his role in the Second Continental Congress, John sounded quite vain: “I was incessantly employed
through the Whole Fall, Winter, and Spring of 1775 and 1776 during their Sittings and on Committees on mornings and evenings … and unquestionably did more business than any other Member of that House.” This claim sounds excessive to our ears, but it was historically correct. In what would prove to be a long and illustrious political career, his leadership role in the Continental Congress would be his most defining and shining moment. He really was, as one of his fellow delegates described him, “the colossus of independence.”
³¹

One reason for his growing prominence in the Second Continental Congress was that, more than any other delegate, he seemed to know where history was headed. As we have seen, from the beginning he had predicted that the underlying dispute with Great Britain was inherently irreconcilable. “We shall be convinced that the Cancer is too deeply rooted,” he warned, “and too far spread to be cured by anything short of cutting it out entirely.” And events kept aligning themselves with his prophecies. The bloodshed at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill undermined the argument of the moderate faction in congress that an open break with Great Britain must be avoided at all costs. John could now claim that it had, in fact, already occurred.
³²

The valiant stand of the Massachusetts militia units at Bunker Hill, and the ruinous losses suffered by the British, also undermined the moderates’ argument that war with Great Britain was unthinkable because the British army was invincible. After Bunker Hill, John liked to quote a comment by the Reverend John J. Zubly, the Swiss-born delegate from Georgia. During the Reformation, Zubly observed, the Catholics enjoyed the support of the pope and all the monarchs of Europe: “But as to them Poor Devils the Protestants, they had nothing on their Side but God almighty.”
³³

George Washington was not quite God, though Abigail’s first impression suggested that, at least as a physical specimen, he was the closest approximation she had ever seen. John had nominated Washington to assume command of the American forces outside Boston, soon to be called the Continental Army. “You had prepared me to entertain a favorable opinion of him,” Abigail wrote, “but I thought the one half was not told me.” John’s choice of Washington to head the Continental Army was the first in a series of three selections destined
to have enormous consequences for American history. (The other two were Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence and John Marshall to head the Supreme Court.) Given his own pulsing ambitions, it is ironic to note that three of his greatest contributions were decisions to cede power to others.
³⁴

Sitting as she was within cannon range of the battle raging around Boston, it was difficult for Abigail to understand the reluctance of the Continental Congress to recognize that the war for American independence, though not officially declared, had already begun. The decision of the congress to refer to the British army in Boston as “ministerial troops” instead of “royal troops,” meaning George III did not really know the battle was occurring, struck her as a preposterous illusion. John concurred, adding that the moderate desire to cling to the prospect of reconciliation was “as Arrant an Illusion as ever was hatched in the Brain of an Enthusiast, a Politician, or a Maniac.” But, he told Abigail, “though I have laugh’d at it—scolded at it—griev’d at it—even ripp’d at it—it is vain to Reason against such Delusions.”
³⁵

Eventually the hope of the moderate faction in the congress for conciliation was exposed as a complete fantasy by no one less than George III himself. In February 1776 John received reports that the British ministry was conferring with several Germanic principalities to provide mercenaries for the looming invasion of North America, designed to crush the American rebellion in the bud. “By Intelligence hourly arriving from abroad,” John joked, “we are more and more confirmed that a kind of Confederation will be formed among the Crowned Skulls, and numbskulls of Europe, against Human Nature.” News of the Prohibitory Act arrived at about the same time, revealing that the king had declared the colonists beyond his protection, outlawed them as rebels without any rights, and confiscated all their property in Great Britain. It would take another five months for the Americans to declare their own independence, but George III had already declared his independence from them. This is why, years later, when John was asked if he had done more than any other person to foster American independence, he declined the honor in favor of the British monarch himself.
³⁶

On the question of American independence, then, in terms of both its inevitability and desirability, John and Abigail were perfectly synchronized, and several steps ahead of popular opinion. But they disagreed about what American independence, once achieved, should actually look like. Abigail launched the debate with a series of pointed questions: “If we separate from Britain, what Code of Laws will be established? How shall we be governed to retain our Liberties? Can any government be free which is not administered by general stated Laws? Who shall frame these Laws? Who will give them force and energy?”

At the end of this political barrage, she dropped her inquisitory tone and recovered her voice as a wife and mother: “Our Little ones send duty to pappa and want much to see him. Tom says he wont come home till the Battle is over—some strange notion he has got into his head.” In her mind and in her letters, the public affairs of state and the private family imperatives blended seamlessly.
³⁷

Abigail’s questions rather presciently framed the debate that would dominate the deliberations of American statesmen throughout the postwar years. The seminal issue was whether separation from the British Empire would lead to the creation of a viable nation-state empowered to make laws for all the former colonies-cum-states. The Continental Congress was currently functioning as a provisional national government. But these were emergency wartime conditions. What happened after the war was won? (If it was lost, well, no answers were necessary or relevant.) Would secession from the British Empire be followed by American nationhood, or by some loose confederation of sovereign states destined to go their separate ways after tossing off British rule?

John’s answers to these questions were never delivered in person to Abigail, but published for all to see as
Thoughts on Government
in April 1776. Despite being regarded as a radical on the independence issue, John was a staunch conservative when it came to designing the framework for an indigenous American government.

In
Thoughts
he recommended that each state adopt a constitutional blueprint creating three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—in which the principles of separation of powers,
a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary were the most distinctive features.
³⁸

Although these features became hallowed ingredients in the federal Constitution eleven years later, it is important to recognize that John was proposing an outline for republican government at the state, not the national, level. Abigail’s questions about a prospective national identity surely made logical sense, but to raise them at this time, he warned, was politically suicidal, because the controversies they were certain to provoke would destroy the fragile consensus for independence slowly emerging in the Continental Congress.

The same pattern held in another exchange between Abigail and John in the spring of 1776, initiated by what is probably the most famous letter Abigail ever wrote. This time the letter began rather than ended with domestic news: the British army had just evacuated Boston, removing the most palpable threat to the family; but smallpox was still virulent, and she needed to decide about inoculation. Then came this: “And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, desire you will remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
³⁹

John responded on the assumption that Abigail was being playful, which she was, but also on the mistaken assumption that she was not serious. All men knew that women were the real tyrants within the household, he joked, and he had no intention of exchanging the tyranny of George III for what he called “the despotism of the petticoat.” As for Abigail’s “extraordinary Code of Laws,” he concluded, “I cannot but laugh.”
⁴⁰

Yet Abigail was not laughing. She apprised Mercy Otis Warren of her recent letter to John, reporting that “he is very saucy to me in return for a list of Female Grievances which I transmitted to him.” After John bantered back with some colorful testimonials to his wife’s own “sauciness,” she had the last word. “But you must remember that
arbitrary power is like most other things that are very hard,” she concluded defiantly, “and notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and, without violence, throw your natural and legal authority at your feet.”
⁴¹

While Abigail’s argument about women’s rights proved to be a couple of centuries ahead of its time, her recognition that the very arguments her husband was hurling at Parliament and the British ministry had latent implications that undermined all coercive or nonvoluntary systems of arbitrary power called attention to the Pandora’s box that John and his colleagues in the Continental Congress had opened. (Probably in jest, Abigail suggested to Mercy Otis Warren that they jointly file a petition to the congress that they were being governed without their consent.) If one took seriously the argument of the American opposition, the belief in natural rights and popular consent spread like a virus to all parts of the body politic. In addition to the rights of women, clearly slavery, as well as the property qualification to vote, must be ended if America’s revolutionary agenda was to be applied consistently.