First Family Abigail and John Adams

295 Pages·2010·1.48 MB·English

by  Ellis Joseph J

ALSO BY JOSEPH J. ELLIS
AMERICAN CREATION:
Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic
George Washington
HIS EXCELLENCY:
The Revolutionary Generation
FOUNDING BROTHERS:
The Character of Thomas Jefferson
AMERICAN SPHINX:
The Character and Legacy of John Adams
PASSIONATE SAGE:
Profiles of Early American Culture
AFTER THE REVOLUTION:
SCHOOL FOR SOLDIERS:
West Point and the Profession of Arms (with Robert Moore)
THE NEW ENGLAND
MIND IN TRANSITION

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2010 by Joseph J. Ellis All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred
A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work originally appeared in American History magazine.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ellis, Joseph J.
First family : Abigail and John / Joseph J. Ellis.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-30759431-0
1. Adams, John, 1735–1826. 2. Adams, Abigail, 1744–1818. 3. Adams, John, 1735–1826—
Marriage. 4. Adams, Abigail, 1744–1818—Marriage. 5. Married people—United States—
Biography. 6. Presidents—United States—Biography. 7. Presidents’ spouses—United States—
Biography. I. Title.
E322.E484 2010
973.4′40922—dc22 2010016837
v3.1
For Ellen, my Abigail
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
CHAPTER ONE
1759–74
“And there is a tye more binding than Humanity, and stronger than
Friendship.”
CHAPTER TWO
1774–78
“My pen is always freer than my tongue, for I have written many things to
you that I suppose I never would have talked.”
CHAPTER THREE
1778–84
“When he is wounded, I bleed.”
CHAPTER FOUR
1784–89
“Every man of this nation [France] is an actor, and every woman an actress.”
CHAPTER FIVE
1789–96
“[The vice presidency is] the most insignificant office that ever the Invention
of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived.”
CHAPTER SIX
1796–1801
“I can do nothing without you.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
1801–18
“I wish I could lie down beside her and die too.”
EPILOGUE
1818–26
“Have mercy on me Posterity, if you should see any of my letters.”
Acknowledgments
Notes
A Note About the Author
PREFACE
My serious interest in the Adams family began twenty years ago, when I
wrote a book about John Adams in retirement, eventually published as
Passionate Sage. I had a keen sense that I was stepping into a long-
standing conversation between Abigail and John in its final phase. And I
had an equivalently clear sense that the conversation preserved in the
roughly twelve hundred letters between them constituted a treasure
trove of unexpected intimacy and candor, more revealing than any other
correspondence between a prominent American husband and wife in
American history.
I moved on to different historical topics over the ensuing years, but I
made a mental note to come back to the extraordinarily rich Adams
archive, then read all their letters and tell the full story of their
conversation within the context of America’s creation as a people and a
nation. The pages that follow represent my attempt to do just that.
The distinctive quality of their correspondence, apart from its sheer
volume and the dramatic character of the history that was happening
around them, is its unwavering emotional honesty. All of us who have
fallen in love, tried to raise children, suffered extended bouts of doubt
about the integrity of our ambitions, watched our once youthful bodies
betray us, harbored illusions about our impregnable principles, and done
all this with a partner traveling the same trail know what unconditional
commitment means, and why, especially today, it is the exception rather
than the rule.
Abigail and John traveled down that trail about two hundred years
before us, remained lovers and friends throughout, and together had a
hand in laying the foundation of what is now the oldest enduring
republic in world history. And they left a written record of all the
twitches, traumas, throbbings, and tribulations along the way. No one
else has ever done that.
To be sure, there were other prominent couples in the revolutionary
era—George and Martha Washington as well as James and Dolley
Madison come to mind. But no other couple left a documentary record of
their mutual thoughts and feelings even remotely comparable to Abigail
and John’s. (Martha Washington burned almost all the letters to and
from her husband.) And at the presidential level, it was not until
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt occupied the White House that a wife
exercised an influence over policy decisions equivalent to Abigail’s.
It is the interactive character of their private story and the larger
public story of the American founding that strikes me as special.
Recovering their experience as a couple quite literally forces a focus on
the fusion of intimate psychological and emotional experience with the
larger political narrative. Great events, such as the battle of Bunker Hill,
the debate over the Declaration of Independence, and the presidential
election of 1800, become palpable human experiences rather than
grandiose abstractions. They lived through a truly formative phase of
American history and left an unmatched record of what it was like to
shape it, and have it happen to them.
As I see it, then, Abigail and John have much to teach us about both
the reasons for that improbable success called the American Revolution
and the equally startling capacity for a man and woman—husband and
wife—to sustain their love over a lifetime filled with daunting
challenges. One of the reasons for writing this book was to figure out
how they did it.
CHAPTER ONE
1759–74
“And there is a tye more binding than Humanity, and stronger than
Friendship.”
K that John and Abigail Adams were destined to become the
NOWING AS WE DO
most famous and consequential couple in the revolutionary era, indeed
some would say the premier husband-and-wife team in all American
history, it is somewhat disconcerting to realize that when they first met
in the summer of 1759, neither one was particularly impressed by the
other. The encounter occurred in the parlor of the pastor’s house in
Weymouth, Massachusetts, which happened to be the home of Abigail
and her two sisters. Their father was the Reverend William Smith, whom
John described in his diary as “a crafty designing man,” a veteran public
speaker attuned to reading the eyes of his audience. “I caught him,
several times,” wrote John, “looking earnestly at my face.” Like most
successful pastors, he was accustomed to being the center of attention,
which apparently annoyed John, who described Reverend Smith
prancing across the room while gesturing ostentatiously, “clapping his
naked [?] sides and breasts with his hands before the girls.”1
Abigail, in fact, was still a girl, not quite fifteen years old to John’s
twenty-four. She was diminutive, barely five feet tall, with dark brown
hair, brown eyes, and a slender shape more attractive in our own time
than then, when women were preferred to be plump. John was quite
plump, or as men would have it, stout, already showing the signs that