John Adams - SA (6 page)

Yet Adams often felt ill at ease, hopelessly awkward. He sensed people were laughing at him, as sometimes they were, and this was especially hurtful. He had a way of shrugging his shoulders and distorting his face that must be corrected, he knew. He berated himself for being too shy. “I should look bold, speak with more spirit.” In the presence of women—those he wished to impress above all—he was too susceptible to the least sign of approval. “Good treatment makes me think I am admired, beloved... So I dismiss my guard and grow weak, silly, vain, conceited, ostentatious.”

Determined to understand human nature, fascinated by nearly everyone he encountered, he devoted large portions of his diary to recording their stories, their views on life, how they stood, talked, their facial expressions, how their minds worked. In the way that his literary commonplace book served as a notebook on his reading, the diary became his notebook on people. “Let me search for the clue which led great Shakespeare into the labyrinth of human nature. Let me examine how men think.”

He made close study of the attorneys he most admired, the Boston giants of the profession, searching for clues to their success. Jeremiah Gridley's “grandeur” emanated from his great learning, his “lordly” manner. The strength of James Otis was his fiery eloquence. “I find myself imitating Otis,” wrote Adams.

His portraits of “original characters” in and about Braintree were extraordinary, detailed, full of life and color, and written obviously, like so much of the diary, out of the pure joy of writing. Possibly he knew what a gift he had as an observer of human nature. In another time, under different circumstances, he might have become a great novelist.

That so many disparate qualities could exist in one person was of never-ending fascination to him. He longed to understand this in others, as in himself. The good-natured, obliging landlady of a friend was also a “squaddy, masculine creature” with “a great staring, rolling eye,” “a rare collection of disagreeable qualities.” A tavern loafer of “low and ignoble countenance,” one Zab Hayward of Braintree, who had no conception of conventional grace in dancing or anything else, was nonetheless regarded as the best dancer in town. Adams sat one night in a local tavern observing from the sidelines. “Every room... crowded with people,” he recorded. “Negroes with a fiddle. Young fellows and girls dancing in the chamber as if they would kick the floor through.” When at first Zab “gathered a circle around him ... his behavior and speeches were softly silly, but as his blood grew warm by motion and liquor, he grew droll.

He caught a girl and danced a jig with her, and then led her to one side of the ring and said, “Stand there, I call for you by and by.” This was spoken comically enough, and raised a loud laugh. He caught another girl with light hair and a patch on her chin, and held her by the hand while he sung a song.... This tickled the girl's vanity, for the song which he applied to her described a very fine girl indeed.

Adams's new friend, Pastor Anthony Wibird, who had assumed the pulpit of Braintree's First Church during the time Adams was away at Worcester, also became the subject of some of his most vivid sketches.

Older than Adams by several years, Wibird was, as would be said in understatement, “somewhat eccentric,” yet warmly esteemed. His pastorate would be the longest in the annals of the parish, lasting forty-five years, and the friendship between Adams and Wibird, equally enduring. Privately, Adams wrote of him with the delight of a naturalist taking notes on some rare and exotic specimen:

P
[arson]
W
[ibird]
is crooked, his head bends forward.... His nose is a large Roman nose with a prodigious bunch protuberance upon the upper part of it. His mouth is large and irregular, his teeth black and foul and craggy.... His eyes are a little squinted, his visage is long and lank, his complexion wan, his cheeks are fallen, his chin is long, large, and lean.... When he prays at home, he raises one knee upon the chair, and throws one hand over the back of it. With the other he scratches his neck, pulls the hair of his wig.... When he walks, he heaves away, and swags one side, and steps almost twice as far with one foot as the other.... When he speaks, he cocks and rolls his eyes, shakes his head, and jerks his body about.

Wibird was “slovenly and lazy,” yet—and here was the wonder—he had great “delicacy” of mind, judgment, and humor. He was superb in the pulpit. “He is a genius,” Adams declared in summation.

Parson Wibird was one of the half dozen or so bachelors in Adams's social circle. The two closest friends were Jonathan Sewall, a bright, witty fellow Harvard man and struggling attorney from Middlesex County, and Richard Cranch, a good-natured, English-born clockmaker who knew French, loved poetry, and delighted in discussing theological questions with Adams. Bela Lincoln was a physician from nearby Hingham. Robert Treat Paine was another lawyer and Harvard graduate, whom Adams thought conceited but who, like Wibird and Sewall, had a quick wit, which for Adams was usually enough to justify nearly any failing.

The preferred gathering place was the large, bustling Josiah Quincy household at the center of town, where a great part of the appeal was the Quincy family. Colonel Quincy, as an officer in the militia and possibly the wealthiest man in Braintree, was its leading citizen, but also someone Adams greatly admired for his polish and eloquence. (Nothing so helped one gain command of the language, Quincy advised the young man, as the frequent reading and imitation of Swift and Pope.) In addition to the lawyer son Samuel, there were sons Edmund and Josiah, who was also a lawyer, as well as a daughter, Hannah, and a cousin, Esther, who, for Adams and his friends, were the prime attractions. Esther was “pert, sprightly, and gay.” Hannah was all of that and an outrageous flirt besides.

While Jonathan Sewall fell almost immediately in love with Esther, whom he would eventually marry, Adams, Richard Cranch, and Bela Lincoln were all in eager pursuit of the high-spirited Hannah. Sensing he was the favorite, Adams was soon devoting every possible hour to her, and when not, dreaming of her. Nothing like this had happened to him before. His pleasure and distress were extreme, as he confided to his friend and rival Cranch:

If I look upon a law book my eyes it is true are on the book, but imagination is at a tea table seeing that hair, those eyes, that shape, that familiar friendly look... I go to bed and ruminate half the night, then fall asleep and dream the same enchanting scenes.

All this was transpiring when the amorous spirits of the whole group appear to have been at a pitch. Adams recorded how one evening several couples slipped off to a side room and “there laughed and screamed and kissed and hussled,” and afterward emerged “glowing like furnaces.”

After an evening stroll with Hannah through Braintree—through “Cupid's Grove”—Adams spent a long night and most of the next day with Parson Wibird, talking and reading aloud from Benjamin Franklin's Reflections on Courtship and Marriage.

“Let no trifling diversion or amusement or company decoy you from your books,” he lectured himself in his diary, “i.e., let no girl, no gun, no cards, no flutes, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness decoy you from your books.” Besides, he had moments of doubt when he thought Hannah less than sincere. “Her face and heart have no correspondence,” he wrote.

Then came the spring night he would remember ever after. Alone with Hannah at the Quincy house, he was about to propose when cousin Esther and Jonathan Sewall suddenly burst into the room and the moment passed, never to be recovered. As it was, Bela Lincoln, the Hingham physician, increased his attentions and in a year he and Hannah Quincy would marry.

Seeing what a narrow escape he had had, Adams solemnly determined to rededicate himself. Only by a turn of fate had he been delivered from “dangerous shackles.” “Let love and vanity be extinguished and the great passions of ambition, patriotism, break out and burn,” he wrote.

Yet, when he met Abigail Smith for the first time later that same summer of 1759, he would not be greatly impressed, not when he compared her to Hannah. Abigail and her sisters Mary and Elizabeth were the daughters of Reverend William Smith of Weymouth, the small seaport town farther along the coast road. Adams's friend Cranch had lately begun calling on Mary, the oldest and prettiest of the three. On the evening he invited Adams to go along with him to meet Abigail, the middle sister, it was for Adams anything but love at first sight. In contrast to his loving, tender Hannah, these Smith sisters were, he wrote, neither “fond, nor frank, nor candid.” Nor did Adams much like the father, who seemed a “crafty, designing man.” Adams's first impressions were almost entirely bad and, as he would come to realize, quite mistaken.

*   *   *

THE HEAVIEST BLOW of his young life befell John Adams on May 25, 1761, when his father, Deacon John, died at age seventy, the victim of epidemic influenza that took a heavy toll in eastern Massachusetts and on older people especially. In Braintree, seventeen elderly men and women died. Adams's mother was also stricken, and though she survived—as she was to survive one epidemic after another down the years—she was too ill to leave her bed when her husband was buried.

On the back of the office copy of his father's will, Adams wrote in his own hand the only known obituary of Deacon John:

The testator had a good education, though not at college, and was a very capable and useful man. In his early life he was an officer of the militia, afterwards a deacon of the church, and a selectman of the town; almost all the business of the town being managed by him in that department for twenty years together; a man of strict piety, and great integrity; much esteemed and beloved wherever he was known, which was not far, his sphere of life being not extensive.

With his father gone, Adams experienced a “want of strength
[and]
courage” such as he had never known. Still, as expected of him, he stepped in as head of the family, and as time passed, those expressions of self-doubt, the fits of despair and self-consciousness that had so characterized the outpourings in his diary, grew fewer.

With his inheritance, he became a man of substantial property by the measure of Braintree. He received the house immediately beside that of his father's, as well as forty acres—ten of adjoining land, plus thirty of orchard, pasture, woodland, and swamp—and slightly less than a third of his father's personal estate, since alone of the three sons he had been provided a college education.

Adams was a freeholder now and his thoughts took a decided “turn to husbandry.” He was soon absorbed in all manner of projects and improvements, working with several hired men—“the help,” as New Englanders said—building stone walls, digging up stumps, carting manure, plowing with six yoke of oxen, planting corn and potatoes. He loved the farm as never before, even the swamp, “my swamp,” as he wrote.

His love of the law, too, grew greater. He felt privileged, blessed in his profession, he told Jonathan Sewall:

Now to what higher object, to what greater character, can any mortal aspire than to be possessed of all this knowledge, well digested and ready at command, to assist the feeble and friendless, to discountenance the haughty and lawless, to procure redress to wrongs, the advancement of right, to assert and maintain liberty and virtue, to discourage and abolish tyranny and vice?

In the house that was now his own, in what had once been the kitchen, before a lean-to enlargement was added at back, he established his first proper law office. The room was bright and sunny and in winter warmed by what had been the old kitchen fireplace. In the corner nearest the road, he had an outside door cut so that clients might directly come and go.

His practice picked up. He was going to Boston now once or twice a week. Soon he was riding the circuit with the royal judges. “I grow more expert... I feel my own strength.”

In November 1762 his friend Richard Cranch and Mary Smith were married, a high occasion for Adams that he hugely enjoyed, including the customary round of “matrimonial stories” shared among the men “to raise the spirits,” one of which he happily included in his journal:

The story of B. Bicknal's wife is a very clever one. She said, when she was married she was very anxious, she feared, she trembled, she could not go to bed. But she recollected she had put her hand to the plow and could not look back, so she mustered up her spirits, committed her soul to God and her body to B. Bicknal and into bed she leaped—and in the morning she was amazed, she could not think for her life what it was that had so scared her.

In the company of Richard Cranch, Adams had been seeing more and more of the Smith family, about whom he had had a change of heart. That his interest, at first informal, then ardent, was centered on Abigail was obvious to all. As an aspiring lawyer, he must not marry early, Jeremiah Gridley had warned. So it was not until October 25, 1764, after a courtship of nearly five years and just short of his twenty-ninth birthday, that John Adams's life changed as never before, when at the Weymouth parsonage, in a small service conducted by her father, he and Abigail Smith became husband and wife.

*   *   *

OF THE COURTSHIP Adams had said not a word in his diary. Indeed, for the entire year of 1764 there were no diary entries, a sure sign of how preoccupied he was.

At their first meeting, in the summer of 1759, Abigail had been a shy, frail fifteen-year-old. Often ill during childhood and still subject to recurring headaches and insomnia, she appeared more delicate and vulnerable than her sisters. By the time of her wedding, she was not quite twenty, little more than five feet tall, with dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a fine, pale complexion. For a rather stiff pastel portrait, one of a pair that she and John sat for in Salem a few years after their marriage, she posed with just a hint of a smile, three strands of pearls at the neck, her hair pulled back with a blue ribbon. But where the flat, oval face in her husband's portrait conveyed nothing of his bristling intelligence and appetite for life in hers there was a strong, unmistakable look of good sense and character. He could have been almost any well-fed, untested young man with dark, arched brows and a grey wig, while she was distinctly attractive, readily identifiable, her intent dark eyes clearly focused on the world.