John Adams - SA (7 page)

One wonders how a more gifted artist might have rendered Abigail. Long years afterward, Gilbert Stuart, while working on her portrait, would exclaim to a friend that he wished to God he could have painted Mrs. Adams when she was young; she would have made “a perfect Venus,” to which her husband, on hearing the story, expressed emphatic agreement.

Year after year through the long courtship John trotted his horse up and over Penn's Hill by the coast road five miles to Weymouth at every chance and in all seasons. She was his Diana, after the Roman goddess of the moon. He was her Lysander, the Spartan hero. In the privacy of correspondence, he would address her as “Ever Dear Diana” or “Miss Adorable.” She nearly always began her letters then, as later, “My Dearest Friend.” She saw what latent abilities and strengths were in her ardent suitor and was deeply in love. Where others might see a stout, bluff little man, she saw a giant of great heart, and so it was ever to be.

Only once before their marriage, when the diary was still active, did Adams dare mention her in its pages, and then almost in code:

Di was a constant feast. Tender, feeling, sensible, friendly. A friend. Not an imprudent, not an indelicate, not a disagreeable word of action. Prudent, soft, sensible, obliging, active.

She, too, was an avid reader and attributed her “taste for letters” to Richard Cranch, who, she later wrote, “taught me to love the poets and put into my hands, Milton, Pope, and Thompson, and Shakespeare.” She could quote poetry more readily than could John Adams, and over a lifetime would quote her favorites again and again in correspondence, often making small, inconsequential mistakes, an indication that rather than looking passages up, she was quoting from memory.

Intelligence and wit shined in her. She was consistently cheerful. She, too, loved to talk quite as much as her suitor, and as time would tell, she was no less strong-minded.

Considered too frail for school, she had been taught at home by her mother and had access to the library of several hundred books accumulated by her father. A graduate of Harvard, the Reverend Smith was adoring of all his children, who, in addition to the three daughters, included one son, William. They must never speak unkindly of anyone, Abigail remembered her father saying repeatedly. They must say only “handsome things,” and make topics rather than persons their subjects—sensible policy for a parson's family. But Abigail had views on nearly everything and persons no less than topics. Nor was she ever to be particularly hesitant about expressing what she thought.

Open in their affections for one another, she and John were also open in their criticisms. “Candor is my characteristic,” he told her, as though she might not have noticed. He thought she could improve her singing voice. He faulted her for her “parrot-toed” way of walking and for sitting cross-legged. She told him he was too severe in his judgments of people and that to others often appeared haughty. Besides, she chided him, “a gentleman has no business to concern himself about the legs of a lady.”

During the terrible smallpox epidemic of 1764, when Boston became “one great hospital,” he went to the city to be inoculated, an often harrowing, potentially fatal ordeal extending over many days. Though he sailed through with little discomfort, she worried excessively and they corresponded nearly every day, Adams reminding her to be sure to have his letters “smoked,” on the chance they carried contamination.

The rambling, old-fashioned parsonage at Weymouth and its furnishings were a step removed from the plain farmer's cottage of John's boyhood or the house Abigail would move to once they were married. Also, two black slaves were part of the Smith household.

According to traditional family accounts, the match was strongly opposed by Abigail's mother. She was a Quincy, the daughter of old John Quincy, whose big hilltop homestead, known as Mount Wollaston, was a Braintree landmark. Abigail, it was thought, would be marrying beneath her. But the determination of both Abigail and John, in combination with their obvious attraction to each other—like steel to a magnet, John said—were more than enough to carry the day.

A month before the wedding, during a spell of several weeks when they were unable to see one another because of illness, Adams wrote to her:

Oh, my dear girl, I thank heaven that another fortnight will restore you to me—after so long a separation. My soul and body have both been thrown into disorder by your absence, and a month or two more would make me the most insufferable cynic in the world. I see nothing but faults, follies, frailties and defects in anybody lately. People have lost all their good properties or I my justice or discernment.

But you who have always softened and warmed my heart, shall restore my benevolence as well as my health and tranquility of mind. You shall polish and refine my sentiments of life and manners, banish all the unsocial and ill natured particles in my composition, and form me to that happy temper that can reconcile a quick discernment with a perfect candor.

Believe me, now and ever your faithful

Lysander

*   *   *

HIS MARRIAGE to Abigail Smith was the most important decision of John Adams's life, as would become apparent with time. She was in all respects his equal and the part she was to play would be greater than he could possibly have imagined, for all his love for her and what appreciation he already had of her beneficial, steadying influence.

Bride and groom moved to Braintree the evening of the wedding. There was a servant to wait on them—the same Judah who had been the cause of the family row years before—who was temporarily on loan from John's mother. But as the days and weeks passed, Abigail did her own cooking by the open hearth, and while John busied himself with his law books and the farm, she spun and wove clothes for their everyday use.

Her more sheltered, bookish upbringing notwithstanding, she was to prove every bit as hardworking as he and no less conscientious about whatever she undertook. She was and would remain a thoroughgoing New England woman who rose at five in the morning and was seldom idle. She did everything that needed doing. All her life she would do her own sewing, baking, feed her own ducks and chickens, churn her own butter (both because that was what was expected, and because she knew her butter to be superior). And for all her reading, her remarkable knowledge of English poetry and literature, she was never to lose certain countrified Yankee patterns of speech, saying “Canady” for Canada, as an example, using “set” for sit, or the old New England “aya,” for yes.

To John's great satisfaction, Abigail also got along splendidly with his very unbookish mother. For a year or more, until Susanna Adams was remarried to an older Braintree man named John Hall, she continued to live with her son Peter in the family homestead next door, and the two women grew extremely fond of one another. To Abigail her mother-in-law was a cheerful, open-minded person of “exemplary benevolence,” dedicated heart and soul to the welfare of her family, which was more than her eldest son ever committed to paper, even if he concurred.

John and Abigail's own first child followed not quite nine months after their marriage, a baby girl, Abigail or “Nabby,” who arrived July 14, 1765, and was, her mother recorded, “the dear image of her still dearer Papa.”

A second baby, John Quincy, was born two years later, and again in mid-July, 1767, and Adams began worrying about college for Johnny, fine clothes for Nabby, dancing schools, “and all that.” To Abigail, after nearly three years of marriage, her John was still “the tenderest of husbands,” his affections “unabated.”

For Adams, life had been made infinitely fuller. All the ties he felt to the old farm were stronger now with Abigail in partnership. She was the ballast he had wanted, the vital center of a new and better life. The time he spent away from home, riding the court circuit, apart from her and the “little ones,” became increasingly difficult. “God preserve you and all our family,” he would write.

But in 1765, the same year little Abigail was born and Adams found himself chosen surveyor of highways in Braintree, he was swept by events into sudden public prominence. His marriage and family life were barely under way when he began the rise to the fame he had so long desired. “I never shall shine 'til some animating occasion calls forth all my powers,” he had written, and here now was the moment.

“I am... under all obligations of interest and ambition, as well as honor, gratitude and duty, to exert the utmost of abilities in this important cause,” he wrote, and with characteristic honesty he had not left ambition out.

*   *   *

THE FIRST NEWS of the Stamp Act reached the American colonies during the last week of May 1765 and produced an immediate uproar, and in Massachusetts especially. Starting in November, nearly everything written or printed on paper other than private correspondence and books—all pamphlets, newspapers, advertisements, deeds, diplomas, bills, bonds, all legal documents, ship's papers, even playing cards—were required to carry revenue stamps, some costing as much as ten pounds. The new law, the first British attempt to tax Americans directly, had been passed by Parliament to help pay for the cost of the French and Indian War and to meet the expense of maintaining a colonial military force to prevent Indian wars. Everyone was affected. The Boston Gazette reported Virginia in a state of “utmost consternation.” In August, Boston mobs, “like devils let loose,” stoned the residence of Andrew Oliver, secretary of the province, who had been appointed distributor of the stamps, then attacked and destroyed the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, wrongly suspecting him of having sponsored the detested tax.

Adams, who had earlier joined a new law club in Boston started by Jeremiah Gridley, had, at Gridley's suggestion, been working on an essay that would become
A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law
. It was his first extended political work and one of the most salient of his life, written at the age of thirty. Now, at the height of the furor, he arranged for its publication as an unsigned, untitled essay in the Gazette. (It would be published in England later, in a volume titled
The True Sentiments of America
.) It was not a call to arms or mob action—with his countryman's dislike of the Boston “rabble,” Adams was repelled by such an “atrocious violation of the peace.” The Stamp Act was hardly mentioned. Rather, it was a statement of his own fervent patriotism and the taproot conviction that American freedoms were not ideals still to be obtained, but rights long and firmly established by British law and by the courage and sacrifices of generations of Americans. Years later Adams would say the Revolution began in the minds of Americans long before any shots were fired or blood shed.

“Be it remembered,” he wrote in his Dissertation, “that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we have not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.

And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings and a desire to know. But besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

He was calling on his readers for independence of thought, to use their own minds. It was the same theme he had struck in his diary at Worcester a decade before, in his turmoil over what to do with his life, writing, “The point is now determined, and I shall have the liberty to think for myself.”

Government is a plain, simple, intelligent thing, founded in nature and reason, quite comprehensible by common sense
[the Dissertation continued]
.... The true source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think.... Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.... Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments... that many of our rights are inherent and essential, agreed on as maxims and established as preliminaries, even before Parliament existed.... Let us read and recollect and impress upon our souls the views and ends of our more immediate forefathers, in exchanging their native country for a dreary, inhospitable wilderness.... Recollect their amazing fortitude, their bitter sufferings—the hunger, the nakedness, the cold, which they patiently endured—the severe labors of clearing their grounds, building their houses, raising their provisions, amidst dangers from wild beasts and savage men, before they had time or money or materials for commerce. Recollect the civil and religious principles and hopes and expectations which constantly supported and carried them through all hardships with patience and resignation. Let us recollect it was liberty, the hope of liberty, for themselves and us and ours, which conquered all discouragements, dangers, and trials.

The essay began appearing in the Gazette on August 12, 1765, and it struck an immediate chord. “The author is a young man, not above 33 or 34, but of incomparable sense,” wrote Boston's senior pastor, Charles Chauncey, to the learned Rhode Island clergyman and future president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles. “I esteem that piece one of the best that has been written. It has done honor to its author; and it is a pity but he should be known.”

Soon afterward Adams drafted what became known as the Braintree Instructions—instructions from the freeholders of the town to their delegate to the General Court, the legislative body of Massachusetts—which, when printed in October in the Gazette, “rang” through the colony. “We have always understood it to be a grand and fundamental principle of the
[English]
constitution that no freeman should be subject to any tax to which he has not given his own consent.” There must be “no taxation without representation”—a phrase that had been used in Ireland for more than a generation. And in rejecting the rule of the juryless Admiralty Court in enforcing this law, the instructions declared that there must be a trial by jury and an independent judiciary.