Table Of ContentALSO 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: 978-0-307-59431-0
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 most
NOWING AS WE DO
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 would one day allow his enemies to
describe him as “His Rotundity.” At five feet five or six, he was slightly shorter
than the average American male of the day, and his already receding hairline
promised premature baldness. Neither one of them, at first glance, had the
obvious glow of greatness.
John’s verdict, recorded in his diary, was that he had wasted an evening. He
was courting Hannah Quincy at the time—some say that she was actually
courting him—and his first reaction was that neither Abigail nor her sisters could
measure up to Hannah. They seemed to lack the conversational skills and just sat
there, “not fond, nor frank, not candid.” Since Abigail eventually proved to be
all these things, we can only conclude that this first meeting was an awkward
occasion on which the abiding qualities of her mind and heart were obscured
beneath the frozen etiquette of a pastor’s parlor. And besides, she was only a
teenager, nine years his junior, not even a legitimate candidate for his roving
interest in a prospective wife.2
To say that “something happened” to change their respective opinions of each
other over the next three years is obviously inadequate, but the absence of
documentary evidence makes it the best we can do. John had legal business in
Weymouth that involved the status of the pastoral house occupied by the Smith
family, which meant that he was literally forced to interact with Abigail. And he
accompanied his then best friend, Richard Cranch, who was courting (and
eventually married) Mary Smith, Abigail’s older sister. This, too, prompted
interactions. And his flirtatious relationship with Hannah Quincy ended in a
mutually declared romantic truce, which made John, once again, eligible.
Time was also a factor. The difference between a fifteen-year-old girl and a
twenty-four-year-old man seemed a chasm; the difference between eighteen and
twenty-seven was much more negotiable. Though it seems too easy to say,
chance and circumstance provided them with the opportunity to talk with each
other, to move past the awkwardness of a stuffy Weymouth parlor, thereby
initiating a conversation that lasted for almost sixty years.
But talk by itself was not sufficient to explain their mutual attraction. The
letters that began to flow back and forth between them late in 1761 contain some
explicit expressions of powerful physical and sexual urges, so that the picture
that emerges depicts two young lovers conversing about Shakespeare’s sonnets
or Molière’s plays in between long and multiple kisses, passionate embraces,
and mutual caresses. Their grandson Charles Francis Adams, who published the
first comprehensive edition of their correspondence nearly a century later, was
either too embarrassed or too much a prisoner of Victorian mores to include any
of their courtship correspondence. Here is a sample of what he chose to censor.
John to Abigail, addressed to “Miss Adorable”: “By the same token that the
bearer hereof [JA] satt up with you last night, I hereby order you to give him, as
many kisses, and as many Hours of your company after nine o’clock as he
pleases to demand, and charge them to my account.”3
