John Quincy Adams (4 page)

A few days later, Abigail and John Quincy were still shaken by the slaughter at Bunker's Hill. “We live in continual expectation of hostilities,” she wrote to her husband. “Scarcely a day that does not produce some, but like good Nehemiah . . . we will say unto them, ‘Be not afraid. Remember the Lord who is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and your houses.'”
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Her sorrow over Warren's death soon turned into fury, however, and Abigail declared a personal war against the British. With John Quincy at her side, unwrapping each piece and handing it to her, she melted all her prized pewter spoons in molds to make musket balls for patriot soldiers.

In the days that followed, John Quincy lived “in unintermitted danger of being consumed with my family in a conflagration kindled by a torch in the same hands which . . . lighted the fires of Charlestown.”
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As dangerous as the threat of fire was that of disease. Eight neighbors died of dysentery, distemper, and other maladies that raged through Braintree and nearby hamlets. Hunger spared no one; soldiers and refugees alike plundered kitchen gardens and root cellars of whatever food they could find, often stealing into the Adams house and terrifying Abigail and the children as they searched.

“Does every member feel for us?” Abigail pleaded to her husband about his colleagues in Congress. “Can they realize what we suffer?”
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Despite the disorder, Abigail and John maintained their regular correspondence, each addressing the other as “My Dearest Friend,” with Abigail always conveying their children's love and “duty” to their father. Whenever his letters arrived, she told him, “You would laugh to see them run upon the sight of a letter—like chickens for a crumb when the hen clucks.”
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With schools closed and her husband absent, Abigail Adams took command of John Quincy's education, encouraging him to read ever more books from his father's library and calling in John Thaxter, a cousin who was studying law in John Adams's office, to tutor the boy in mathematics and science. When she discovered her son turning pages of some prose or poetry without reading, the resourceful mother complained aloud about her eyes and asked John Quincy to read to her. After writing to her husband about her ruse, John Adams replied that he was “charmed with your amusement with our little Johnny. Tell him I am glad to hear he is so good a boy as to read to his Mamma for her entertainment and to keep out of the company of rude children.”
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John Adams went on to provide a complete curriculum for “our little Johnny.”

Adams insisted that his son master Greek, “the most perfect of all languages,” and that he read the original text of Thucydides's
History of the Peloponnesian War.
Besides pressing him to meet his father's academic demands, Abigail constantly reminded John Quincy of his family heritage and his father's achievements as a scholar, lawyer, and legislator, as well as his courage in defying British rule and risking death by serving in the Continental Congress. John Quincy responded with bold displays of his own courage that added to his mother's pride.

“Master John,” Abigail reported to her husband, “cheerfully consented to become ‘post-rider,'” venturing alone on horseback past British troop encampments to carry family news between Braintree and Boston.

“As the distance was not less than eleven miles each way,” John Quincy boasted, “the undertaking was not an easy one for a boy barely nine years old.”
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Abigail's demands, discipline, expectations, and hectoring—along with fears generated by war—took a toll on the boy, however, often leaving him depressed and convinced he would never match the achievements of his “Pappa.” Abigail read and reread her husband's letters from Philadelphia exhorting his son to achieve “great and glorious deeds.” The letters insisted that scholarship be central to the boy's life to ensure his achieving his father's ambition to “become a wise and great man.”
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“At ten years of age,” John Quincy recalled later, “I read Shakespeare's
Tempest, As You Like It, Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing,
and
King Lear
.”

Following his success placing George Washington in command of the military, John Adams's erudition and quick legal mind raised him to leadership in Congress—perhaps higher than he wanted. By summer's end in 1775, he was sitting on ninety committees, serving as chairman of twenty-five, and by his own admission, he was “worn out”—and longed for his wife and children.

“My dearest friend,” he wrote to Abigail. “I have some thoughts of petitioning for leave to bring my family here. I am a lonely, forlorn creature. . . .”

Abigail longed for John as much as he longed for her. She too began her letters “My Dearest Friend.”

In August, John Adams learned that his thirty-four-year-old brother, Elihu, had died of dysentery at his army camp, and reports from Boston about troop outrages left him worried about his family's safety. He pleaded with Abigail to “fly to the woods with our children” in the face of danger.
John Quincy tried assuaging his father's fears with a pledge to defend the family and the family home.

“John writes like a hero,” Adams wrote back to Abigail, “glowing with ardor for his country and burning with indignation against her enemies.”
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Adams surprised his wife in December by appearing at the farm unexpectedly—only to surprise her even more, four days later, by leaving for Watertown, Massachusetts, to report to the Provincial Congress. He returned home three weeks after that—then left for Philadelphia almost immediately, with hardly a moment for John Quincy and the other children.

By then, Abigail was so lonely for her husband that she grew angry, asking bluntly, “Shall I expect you or do you determine to stay out the year?” After he left, she decided to cease writing him after one last message. “I miss my partner,” she admitted. “I have not felt in a humor to entertain you with letters. If I had taken up my pen perhaps some unbecoming invective might have fallen from it. . . . Our little ones whom you so often recommend to my care and instruction shall not be deficient in virtue or probity if the precepts of a mother have their desired effect, but they would be doubly enforced could they be indulged with the example of a father constantly before them.”
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“I cannot leave Congress, without causing injury to the public,” her husband snapped,
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but then reiterated his loneliness for her and his family. “I never will come again without you if I can persuade you to come with me,” he promised. “Whom God has joined together ought not to be put asunder so long with their own consent. We will bring master Johnny with us.”
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In the spring of 1776, Adams and the Continental Congress learned that George Washington's Continental Army had forced the British to evacuate Boston on March 17. Adams and the others cheered as Virginia's Richard Henry Lee then resolved that the United Colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” Congress postponed voting on the resolution until July 1 to permit Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman to prepare a formal Declaration of Independence. Congress approved it without dissent on July 4.

Adams subsequently achieved still greater prominence by writing a document he called
Thoughts on Government
, which, by the end of the year, had served as the basis for constitutions in nine states. Adams's
Thoughts on Government
called for establishment of republican governments, each with an executive and a bicameral legislature with separate, clearly defined powers.

In June 1777, a month before his tenth birthday, John Quincy wrote to his father, whose long absence and exalted position had transformed him into a distant, godlike fantasy in the boy's imagination. Although he was ahead of most students twice his age, his mother's hectoring convinced him he was falling short of his father's expectations.

John Quincy pledged to devote more time to reading and promised to write again in a week “and give a better account of myself.”

Early in winter 1778, the French government became the first foreign nation to recognize the United States' independence. By then, John Adams was chairman of Congress's Board of War and Ordnance—in effect, the nation's secretary of war. Shortly thereafter, he wrote to Abigail of his intention to retire from government and return home “to my practice at the
bar.” After four years in Congress, he realized, he had left too many debts unpaid, and, with money depreciating, “I was daily losing the fruits of seventeen years' industry.”

With her husband gone for all but four of the previous twenty-four months, Abigail had taken a dominant role in the Adams household. When a smallpox epidemic swept into Boston, she confronted the dreaded disease by taking her children and sixteen relatives to Boston to submit to inoculation with live infected serum. Although she and John Quincy emerged unscathed, the vaccine left eleven-year-old Nabby ill for several days and six-year-old Charles so sick he needed weeks to recover. She also oversaw the farm, farmhands, and household servants, as well as the buying and selling of lands.

“I have supported the family!” she complained to her husband.

Late in 1777, John Adams arrived home before Christmas to what he called “a blissful fireside, surrounded by a wife and a parcel of chattering boys and girls”—and a stack of letters from potential clients promising lucrative fees to take their cases. After he had left for Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to take one such case, a letter from Congress staggered Abigail: Congress had appointed her husband a commissioner to France to replace Connecticut's Silas Deane and to join Benjamin Franklin and Virginia's Arthur Lee in soliciting financial aid from the French government.

“Dr. Franklin's age alarms us,” explained Massachusetts congressman James Lovell, and because they suspected Arthur Lee of spying for England, “We want one man of inflexible integrity on that embassy.”
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As for
Deane, Congress had recalled him after receiving an accusation that he had embezzled congressional funds intended for arms purchases.