Abigail sent John Quincy her own approving evaluation of each of the “dear boys,” and the wish that his and Louisa Catherine's joy in seeing them again would equal the pain she felt at parting with them.
• • •
“DEATH is SWEEPING his scythe all around us, cutting down our old friends and brandishing it over us,” Adams wrote a year later, in the summer of 1816. Abigail's sister Elizabeth, the last of her family, had died. Robert Treat Paine and Vice President Elbridge Gerry were gone, Gerry dying of a heart attack while riding in his carriage to the Senate. The death of Cotton Tufts, in December 1815, was another heavy blow. “Winter in this country is still winter, and carries off a few hundred of our oldest people,” observed Adams, who had turned eighty.
Abigail prepared her will, parceling out among children, grandchildren, and her niece, Louisa Smith, her silk gowns and jewelry, a white lace shawl, beds, blankets, and some $4,000. In addition, to her two sons she left two equal parcels of land she had inherited.
Six months later, in June of 1816, came word that Colonel Smith, too, was no longer among the living.
Jefferson, in his continuing correspondence with Adams, had observed that old and worn as they were they must expect that “here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring will give way.” There was nothing to be done about it. Meanwhile, he wrote, “I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern.”
Their exchange of views remained a sustaining exercise for both men. Whatever the state of their physical “pinions and springs,” there was nothing whatever wrong with their minds, nor any decline in the respect each had for the other's talents and learning. Having run on for several pages about Cicero, Socrates, and the contradictions in Plato, Jefferson asked, “But why am I dosing you with these antediluvian topics? Because I am glad to have someone to whom they are familiar, and who will not receive them as if dropped from the moon.”
Jefferson had offered to sell his private library to the government in Washington to replace the collection of the Library of Congress destroyed by the British when they burned the Capitol. It was both a magnanimous gesture and something of a necessity, as he was hard-pressed to meet his mounting debts. After prolonged debate in Congress, a figure of $23,950 was agreed to, and in April 1815 ten wagons carrying 6,707 volumes packed in pine cases departed from Monticello. When Adams learned what Jefferson had done, he wrote, “I envy you that immortal honor.”
Jefferson immediately commenced to collect anew. He could “not live without books,” he told Adams, who understood perfectly. They remained two of the greatest book lovers of their bookish generation. Adams's library numbered 3,200 volumes. People sent him books, “overwhelm me with books from all quarters,” as he wrote to Jefferson. Yet he wished he had 100,000. He longed particularly, he said, for a work in Latin available only in Europe, titled Acta Sanctorum, in forty-seven volumes, on the lives of the saints compiled in the sixteenth century. “What would I give to possess in one immense mass, one stupendous draught, all the legends, true and false.”
Unable to sleep as long as Abigail, he would be out of bed and reading by candlelight at five in the morning, and later would read well into the night. When his eyes grew weary, she would read aloud to him.
Unlike Jefferson, who seldom ever marked a book, and then only faintly in pencil, Adams, pen in hand, loved to add his comments in the margins. It was part of the joy of reading for him, to have something to say himself, to talk back to, agree or take issue with, Rousseau, Condorcet, Turgot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, or Joseph Priestley. “There is no doubt that people are in the long run what the government make out of them...,” Adams read in Rousseau. “The government ought to be what the people make it,” he wrote in response.
At times his marginal observations nearly equaled what was printed on the page, as in Mary Wollstonecraft's French Revolution, which Adams read at least twice and with delight, since he disagreed with nearly everything she said. To her claim that government must be simple, for example, he answered, “The clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels... but it would not tell the time of day.” On a blank page beside the contents, he wrote, in part:
If [the] empire of superstition and hypocrisy should be overthrown, happy indeed will it be for the world; but if all religion and all morality should be over-thrown with it, what advantage will be gained? The doctrine of human equality is founded entirely in the Christian doctrine that we are all children of the same Father, all accountable to Him for our conduct to one another, all equally bound to respect each other's self love.
In all, in this one book, Adams's marginal notes and comments ran to some 12,000 words.
To the pronouncements of the French philosophes in particular, he would respond with an indignant “Nonsense” or “Fool! Fool!” But he could also scratch in an approving “Good” or “Very Good” or an emphatic “Excellent!”
“Your father's zeal for books will be one of the last desires which will quit him,” Abigail observed to John Quincy in the spring of 1816, as Adams eagerly embarked on a sixteen-volume French history.
• • •
TWO PORTRAITS of the Adamses by Gilbert Stuart, painted when Adams was President but never delivered, were added to the walls at Quincy after Adams decided to go himself to Stuart's Boston studio and bring them home. The portrait of Adams, Abigail thought quite admirable. But hers, she told John Quincy, would be recognizable only to those who had known her twenty years before. Her hair had since turned entirely white and she had so “fallen away” as to be “but a spectre” of what she once was.
At the July 4 celebration in Boston that summer of 1816, Adams looked about and realized he was nearly the last of the generation of 1776, and the only “signer” present.
He and Abigail lived for John Quincy's return, as they made plain. When during that autumn of 1816 it appeared that James Monroe was to be the next President and newspapers were reporting John Quincy the choice for Secretary of State, Adams sent off a letter to London saying he hoped it was true and that John Quincy would accept the office and come home. If not true, Adams hoped he would come home anyway. Later, with still no word from London, Abigail was more emphatic. “The voice of the nation calls you home,” she wrote. “The government calls you home—and your parents unite in the call. To this summons you must not, you cannot, refuse your assent.”
By the summer of 1817, when President Monroe, on a tour of New England, came to Quincy to dine with the Adamses on the evening of July 7, they entertained forty guests for dinner but could report nothing of their son's intentions, as there was still no word from him. It was not until July 15 that they learned from Richard Rush that the appointment had been accepted, and not until the second week of August that a letter arrived from John Quincy himself, saying he and his family were safely landed at New York.
“Yesterday was one of the most uniformly happy days of my whole long life,” Adams wrote his son. “A thousand occasions exalted delight ... a succession of warm showers all day, my threshers, my gardeners, and my farmers all behaved better than usual, and altogether kept me in a kind of trance of delight the whole day.”
“God be thanked,” Abigail wrote. “Come then all of you.”
• • •
IN THE HISTORY of the Adams family there was probably no more joyous homecoming than took place in the heat of midmorning on August 18, 1817, when John Quincy, Louisa Catherine, and their three sons came over the hill from Milton in a coach-and-four trailing a cloud of dust.
As Abigail recorded, Louisa Smith was the first to see them coming and begin shouting. Abigail hurried to the door. First out of the coach was young John, who ran to her, followed by George calling, “Oh, Grandmother, oh, Grandmother.” Ten-year-old Charles Francis, with no memory of his grandparents, approached with caution. “By this time father and mother were both out, and mutually rejoicing with us,” Abigail wrote. John Quincy had been away for eight years.
At a party
given by Abigail that evening, her long drawing room was crowded with neighbors and relatives, one of whom, young Eliza Susan Quincy, described John Quincy as the focus of attention, seated at the end of the room, everyone “rather in awe of him.” At age fifty, he had already served as minister to the Netherlands and Prussia, as United States senator, Harvard professor, minister to Russia and Great Britain, and was soon to assume the second-most-important office in the government. In view of the fact that the past three Presidents in a row—Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—had earlier served as Secretary of State, it was already being said that the presidency was his destiny, too.
• • •
THE MONTHS that followed, despite another severe winter and the increasing aggravations of old age, were as happy a time for the Adamses as any in their years of retirement. While John Quincy and Louisa Catherine had departed for Washington, the three grandsons remained nearby—George at Harvard, John and Charles Francis in school in Boston. After dining at Quincy in mid-January 1818, Benjamin Waterhouse reported to John Quincy that his parents seemed in splendid health, but his father in particular. “I never saw your father in better spirits. I really believe that your return to America with all its honorable consequences has not only brightened his chain of life, but added links to it.”
It was “very cold and the snow falling fast,” Abigail wrote to Louisa Catherine, delighted by the spectacle. “It is now a foot or more deep. Winter appears to have set in, with all its beauties.” No President, she was sure, had ever had such a fine or harder-working Secretary of State as her son, Abigail continued in another letter to Louisa Catherine, written in May as her plum trees were blooming and the first peas “looking up newly arrived to daylight.” His father lived for John Quincy's letters and to write to him in return, difficult as that had become for him.
Through the summer Abigail maintained strength and pleasure in life, by all accounts. John Quincy and Louisa Catherine returned for a much-needed vacation, and several of those who came to call at about this time would remember Abigail seated on a couch sorting a basket of laundry or shelling beans as she talked. “I found a freedom in conversation [with her].... She was possessed of the history of our country and the great occurrences in it,” wrote the noted Salem clergyman William Bently. “She had a distinct view of our public men and measures and had her own opinions.”
But in October, Abigail was taken seriously ill. The diagnosis was typhoid fever, and she was told to remain perfectly still and try not to speak.
“The dear partner of my life for fifty-four years as a wife, and for many years more as a lover, now lies in extremis, forbidden to speak or be spoken to,” Adams wrote in anguish to Jefferson on October 20. The day following, Benjamin Waterhouse sent off a letter to John Quincy advising him to be prepared for the worst. “She has recovered from a similar state once before, and she may again, but typhoid... at 74 years of age is enough to create alarm.”
Friends and neighbors took turns with Adams, son Thomas, and niece Louisa Smith at Abigail's bedside. She was dosed with quinine and Madeira by her physician, Amos Holbrook, and for a day or so she seemed to improve. “Your mother was pronounced so much better this morning that your father has resumed his book,” wrote a friend, Harriet Welsh, to John Quincy and Louisa Catherine. But in another day Abigail had taken a turn for the worse.
On Monday morning, October 26, as Adams sat with her, she spoke for the first time. She told him she was dying and that if it was the will of Heaven, she was ready. She had no wish to live except for his sake.
“He came down,” wrote Harriet Welsh, who was waiting on the first floor, “and said in his energetic manner, ‘I wish I could lie down beside her and die, too.’ ” “The whole of her life has been filled up doing good,” Adams told the others who were gathered. “I cannot bear to see her in this state.”
Returning to her room later, Adams was trembling so much that he could not stand and had to take a chair, but then seeing that Louisa Smith was in worse distress, he got up and went to her side to tell her they must be strong.
Abigail died at approximately one o'clock in the afternoon, Wednesday, October 28, 1818. She was, according to her son Thomas, “seemingly conscious until her last breath.”
She was buried on November 1. Adams insisted on walking in the procession to the meetinghouse, and except for a momentary dizziness due to the unseasonable heat of the day, he went through “all the rest,” as Thomas wrote, “with great composure and serenity.”
• • •
BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE'S letter warning John Quincy to be prepared for the worst had not reached Washington until the day before his mother's death, and it was not until the day after her funeral that he learned she was gone, “the tenderest and most affectionate of mothers,” as he wrote to his father. “How shall I offer consolation for your loss, when I feel that my own is irreparable?”
“Gracious God! Support my father in this deep and irreparable affliction!” he wrote in his diary.
My mother... was a minister of blessing to all human beings within her sphere of action.... She had no feelings but of kindness and beneficence. Yet her mind was as firm as her temper was mild and gentle. She... has been to me more than a mother. She has been a spirit from above watching over me for good, and contributing by my mere consciousness of her existence, to the comfort of my life.... Never have I known another human being, the perpetual object of whose life, was so unremittingly to do good.
“My ever dear, ever affectionate, ever dutiful and deserving son,” Adams wrote, in the first letter he could manage:
The bitterness of death is past. The grim spider so terrible to human nature has no sting left for me.
My consolations are more than I can number. The separation cannot be so long as twenty separations heretofore. The pangs and the anguish have not been so great as when you and I embarked for France in 1778.
All Quincy was in mourning. “The tidings of her illness were heard with grief in every house, and her death is felt as a common loss,” the Reverend Peter Whitney had said without exaggeration at the funeral service.
Madame Adams possessed a mind elevated in its views and capable of attainments above the common order of intellects.... But though her attainments were great, and she had lived in the highest walks of society and was fitted for the lofty departments in which she acted, her elevation had never filled her soul with pride, or led her for a moment to forget the feelings and the claims of others.
The obituary notice in Boston's Columbian Centinel emphasized her importance to her husband's career in public service and thus to the nation:
Possessing at every period of life, the unlimited confidence, as well as affection of her husband, she was admitted at all times to share largely of his thoughts. While, on the one hand, the activity of her mind, and its thorough knowledge of all branches of domestic economy, enabled her almost wholly to relieve him from the cares incident to the concerns of private life; on the other, she was a friend whom it was his delight to consult in every perplexity of public affairs; and whose counsels never failed to partake of that happy harmony which prevailed in her character; in which intuitive judgment was blended with consummate prudence; the spirit of conciliation, with the spirit of her station, and the refinement of her sex. In the storm, as well as the smooth sea of life, her virtues were ever the object of his trust and veneration.
Letters of condolence arrived for Adams, including one from Jefferson, who had himself been gravely ill. Time and silence were the only medicines, he counseled Adams. “God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.”
“While you live,” Adams answered, “I seem to have a bank at Monticello on which I can draw for a letter of friendship and entertainment when I please.
I believe in God and in his wisdom and benevolence [he continued], and I cannot conceive that such a Being could make such a species as the human merely to live and die on this earth. If I did not believe in a future state, I shoul
d believe in no God. This universe, this all, this totalitas [“totality”] would appear with all its swelling pomp, a boyish firework.
That he had been blessed in a partnership with one of the most exceptional women of her time, Adams never doubted. Her letters, he was sure, would be read for generations to come, and with this others strongly agreed. Years later Louisa Catherine, who had not always enjoyed a close or easy relationship with her mother-in-law, would say that it was especially in the letters of Abigail Adams that “the full benevolence of an exceptional heart and the strength of her reasoning capacity” were to be found. “We see her ever as the guiding planet around which all revolved performing their separate duties only by the impulse of her magnetic power.”
To his granddaughter Caroline, Adams would write of Abigail's “virtues of the heart.” Never “by word or look” had she discouraged him from “running all hazards” for their country's liberties. Willingly, bravely, she had shared with him “in all the dangerous consequences we had to hazard.”
For years afterward, whenever complimented about John Quincy and his role in national life, and the part he had played as father, Adams would say with emphasis, “My son had a mother!”
• • •
Two WEEKS after Abigail's death, the painter John Trumbull, as well as several of the Quincy family, insisted that Adams go with them to Boston—“carried me off by storm,” he reported to John Quincy—to view Trumbull's enormous new painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Commissioned by Congress for the rotunda at the Capitol, it was on tour through several cities and was now on display at Faneuil Hall.