First Family_ Abigail And John Adams Part 3

It was clear from the start that John was emotionally incapable of sitting serenely beneath his proverbial vine and fig tree. Idyllic images failed to take account of his obsession with posterity's judgment of his role in America's founding, his brooding memories of the political shenanigans by both Jefferson and Hamilton that had denied him a second term as president, and, finally, his impulsive vivacity, which rendered a stoic posture virtually impossible.

This is not to mention the inevitable vicissitudes of aging, which had rendered him hairless and almost toothless-his speech had grown increasingly slurred-and the shaking of his palsied hands, which he referred to as "quiverations," a word he claimed to have "borrowed from an Irish boy [and] an improvement of our language worthy of a place in Webster's dictionary." These "quiverations" sometimes required him to grip his pen with both hands while writing letters. And his poor eyesight-he somewhat melodramatically claimed that he had been going blind for almost twenty years-meant that Abigail often read out loud to him at night. These physical ravages of time imposed the kind of daily burdens that Cicero's idealistic account of elderly bliss had somehow neglected to mention.9 Although nine years younger than John, Abigail was actually in worse physical shape. Her congenital rheumatism and a.s.sociated rheumatic fevers flared up more frequently. And when they did she was often confined to her bed for weeks at a time, which required the household staff to gather in her bedroom each morning to receive her instructions for the day. Even when the rheumatism was in remission, she seldom left the house and could only accompany John on his daily ride around the farms in a cushioned carriage. Her hair had turned completely white and, in conjunction with her deepening wrinkles, led her to observe that the woman depicted in Gilbert Stuart's portrait of 1800 was no longer recognizable a few years later.10 She was also, albeit in a different way than John, emotionally invested in the Adams legacy. For John, the concern about his place in the history books was painfully personal. For Abigail, on the other hand, the focus was on the family, her role as the matriarch who helped lay the foundation on which succeeding generations of Adams descendants could make future contributions to the unfolding American story.

Quite obviously, John was still her highest domestic priority. In retirement, that meant helping him to navigate past the sharp edges of his vanities and remaining calm when he was in mid-eruption, listening patiently to his pa.s.sionate denunciations of partisan politics, Jefferson's misguided foreign policy, or the suicidal tendencies of the New England Federalists. She had been performing this essential task for their entire life together, and it was even more essential that she continue to perform it now, since once John was removed from the public arena his ambitious energies had no outlet and simmered away inside him with greater ferocity.

The heir apparent, just as obviously, was John Quincy, who had been groomed for greatness almost from the moment he exited Abigail's womb. All prospects for an Adams dynasty now rested wholly on the eldest son, since Charles had already carried their hopes to a besotted early death, and Thomas had established a pattern of inexplicable inept.i.tude sufficiently severe that he was forced to move back to Quincy under the eye and within the orbit of his parents.

John Quincy's return from Berlin in 1801, most especially his return to Quincy in December, was a landmark event. For then Abigail met her "new daughter" for the first time. Louisa Catherine was an elegantly statuesque, delicately boned young woman who spoke with a slight British accent. Very much at home in the European salon set-she had been the sensation of the Berlin court-Louisa Catherine was up for inspection, since Abigail regarded her as the crucial partner that John Quincy would need by his side in the long march toward public triumph. She was also the biological fountainhead for the third generation of Adams descendants, heir apparent to Abigail's role as matriarch.

First impressions on both sides were not encouraging. Abigail was alarmed at her sickly condition, "which confined her almost the whole time she was here." More basically, Louisa Catherine struck her as precariously refined: "Her frame is so slender and her const.i.tution so delicate that I have many fears that she will be of short duration."11 For her part, Louisa Catherine remembered the Quincy introduction as an unmitigated catastrophe: "Had I stepped onto Noah's Ark I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished." She also sensed Abigail's disapproval, not that any wife of John Quincy would have pa.s.sed muster in Abigail's eyes. "Do what I would," Louisa Catherine recalled, "there was a conviction on the part of others that I could not suit, however well inclined."12 Abigail saw it differently. From that day until her final illness, she resolved to make Louisa Catherine her special project. She was not the woman Abigail would have chosen for John Quincy, but she was the woman he had chosen for himself, and therefore the essential link with future generations of Adams progeny who must be cultivated, encouraged, folded into the dynastic network.

Finally, it merits attention that the extended Adams family over which Abigail was supposed to exercise her legendary prowess bore no relationship at all to the idyllic domestic world described in the Latin cla.s.sics. Abigail was attempting to manage what, by any measure, qualified as a dysfunctional family: Nabby and her little brood were living on the edge of poverty in a marriage sustained only by her unconditional loyalty; Sally Adams, widow of Charles, had become a permanent casualty of life, frequently breaking down in tears for no apparent reason; Thomas, upon his return to Quincy, retreated into self-doubt, chronic dissipation, and eventually a losing battle with alcoholism. Although the magic between Abigail and John remained intact, they were in fact surrounded by the kind of human debris subsequently depicted in the plays of Eugene O'Neill.

VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS.

Though the Old House was Abigail's designated domain, she did her best to create a secluded s.p.a.ce for John, where he could do his daily reading and writing with a minimum of interruption. Given the sheer size of the resident population, and the fact that so many of them were infants and young children often running from room to room, this was not an easy task. It was rendered even more difficult by John's habit of plopping himself down at the parlor table after dinner, which was usually served between three and four o'clock, and commencing his work in what was, in effect, the center of the wind tunnel. John had developed impressive powers of concentration over the years, and Abigail made a point of reminding the grandchildren that the patriarch, often referred to as "the president," was not to be disturbed. But interruptions were inevitable, whether it was young George climbing onto his lap, or Susanna, the somewhat precocious daughter of Charles, asking him to read her a book.

John apparently welcomed the periodic interruptions as a relief from the burdensome thoughts about his problematic place in the history books that had become his all-consuming obsession. "How is it that I, poor, ignorant I, must stand before Posterity as differing from all the other great Men of the Age?" he asked. And why was it that even when his name was admitted onto the list with those of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, it was always accompanied by an asterisk describing him as "the most vain, conceited, imprudent, and arrogant Creature in the World?"13 He had begun his career as a young lawyer aiming for fame more than fortune. And then history had presented him with the chance to play a major role in leading a revolution and establishing a new nation, a truly remarkable opportunity that came around only once every few centuries. But now, with his work done, his achievement was being airbrushed out of the story, and others were being accorded prominent places in the American pantheon while he was required to languish in obscurity, or worse, being described as an erratic, slightly deranged curmudgeon who did not fit comfortably into the proper heroic mold.

For the first twelve years of his retirement John spent a portion of most days seated at the parlor table amid the buzz of grandchildren, and most nights by the fire alongside Abigail, who was often reading a book while he did battle with his emotions. First in his somewhat pathetic attempt at an autobiography, then in a caustic exchange with Mercy Otis Warren, then in a nearly interminable series of weekly essays for the Boston Patriot Boston Patriot, and throughout in an extraordinary correspondence with Benjamin Rush-easily the most candid and colorful letters he ever wrote-John released the pent-up energies of his tortured soul. These separate venues were really parts of a single project, namely, to claim his proper place in American history, or, if that proved problematic, to smash all the other statues currently being enshrined in the American pantheon. He was, to put it charitably, slightly out of control.

In November 1804 John Quincy, by then serving as the senator from Ma.s.sachusetts, encouraged his father to write his memoirs: "I have heretofore requested you, if you find it consistent with your leisure, to commit to writing an account of the principle incidents of your own life...It would afford a lasting and cordial gratification to your children, and I have no doubt, be ultimately a benefit to your Country. It might also amuse many hours which otherwise may pa.s.s heavily." John effectively threw up his hands at the suggestion: "You have recommended to me a Work, which...would engage my feelings and enflame my Pa.s.sions. In many Pa.s.sages it would set me on fire and I should have occasion for a Bucket of Water constantly by my side to put it out."14 He spoke from experience, since, unbeknownst to John Quincy, he had been working on his memoirs in fits and starts for more than two years. His self-defeating message was announced at the start: "As the lives of Philosophers, Statesmen or Historians written by themselves have generally been suspected of vanity, and therefore few People have been able to read them without disgust; there is no reason to expect that any sketches I may leave of my own Time would be received by the Public with any favour, or read by individuals with much interest."15 As the editors of the modern edition of the Adams Papers Adams Papers acknowledge, to call John's autobiography chaotic would be generous. Its disorderly and often incoherent shape was in part a function of the fitful, stop-and-start manner of its composition. Initially he worked solely from memory; then it occurred to him to consult his own diaries and letter books, then volumes he had in his library on sessions of the Continental Congress, which he began to quote verbatim for long stretches without commentary, thereby losing any semblance of narrative control. acknowledge, to call John's autobiography chaotic would be generous. Its disorderly and often incoherent shape was in part a function of the fitful, stop-and-start manner of its composition. Initially he worked solely from memory; then it occurred to him to consult his own diaries and letter books, then volumes he had in his library on sessions of the Continental Congress, which he began to quote verbatim for long stretches without commentary, thereby losing any semblance of narrative control.16 But another source of incoherence was the periodic explosions that went off throughout the text when John encountered a character who conjured up painful memories. Predictably, Hamilton produced a major detonation, even though he had recently died in a duel with Aaron Burr: "Nor am I obliged by any Principles of Morality or Religion to suffer my character to lie under infamous Calumnies," John argued, "because the Author of them, with a Pistol Bullet through his Spinal Marrow, died a Penitent." The venom poured out: "Born on a Speck more obscure than Corsica...with infinitely less courage and Capacity than Bonaparte, he would in my Opinion, if I had not controlled the fury of his Vanity...involved us in all the Bloodshed and distractions of foreign and Civil War at once." There was score-settling with Franklin, Paine, and Jefferson as well, all of whom ended up with Hamilton in the Adams rogues' gallery. One can almost see him hunched over the table, scribbling away despite his palsied hand, gleefully eviscerating his enemies into the night.17 In 1807 he shifted his guns to Mercy Otis Warren, who had recently published a three-volume History of the American Revolution History of the American Revolution (1805) in which, as John saw it, his own role in making independence happen was not sufficiently appreciated. Actually, Abigail had fired the first shot two years before Warren's (1805) in which, as John saw it, his own role in making independence happen was not sufficiently appreciated. Actually, Abigail had fired the first shot two years before Warren's History History was published, declaring to her old friend that "the sacred deposit of private confidence has been betrayed, and the bonds of Friendly intercourse swept asunder, to serve the most malicious purposes...I have been ready to exclaim with the poet [Shakespeare] 'What sin unknown dipt you in Ink.'" Abigail was apparently referring to critical remarks that Warren had made about John because he had refused to give her son a job in his administration. was published, declaring to her old friend that "the sacred deposit of private confidence has been betrayed, and the bonds of Friendly intercourse swept asunder, to serve the most malicious purposes...I have been ready to exclaim with the poet [Shakespeare] 'What sin unknown dipt you in Ink.'" Abigail was apparently referring to critical remarks that Warren had made about John because he had refused to give her son a job in his administration.18 The appearance of Warren's History History clinched the breakdown of communication between the families. The most offensive pa.s.sage echoed the charges of the Republican press that John was a closet monarchist, that during his eight-year tour of duty in Europe, "living long near the splendor of courts and courtiers" had caused him to become "beclouded by a partiality for monarchy [and] a lapse from his former republican principles." This was a long-standing accusation, not really true, but now enshrined in one of the first serious histories of the American Revolution by none other than a lifelong friend of the Adams family. Worse yet, it was sure to influence all subsequent histories, because it came at the start and because Warren herself possessed impeccable revolutionary credentials. clinched the breakdown of communication between the families. The most offensive pa.s.sage echoed the charges of the Republican press that John was a closet monarchist, that during his eight-year tour of duty in Europe, "living long near the splendor of courts and courtiers" had caused him to become "beclouded by a partiality for monarchy [and] a lapse from his former republican principles." This was a long-standing accusation, not really true, but now enshrined in one of the first serious histories of the American Revolution by none other than a lifelong friend of the Adams family. Worse yet, it was sure to influence all subsequent histories, because it came at the start and because Warren herself possessed impeccable revolutionary credentials.19 The initial salvo from Abigail, which effectively announced that her friendship with Warren was seriously compromised, was followed by ten letters from John that verged on hysteria. No one in the revolutionary generation, he claimed, had "done more labor, run through more and greater dangers, and made greater sacrifices." He had done more than "any man among my contemporaries living or dead, in the service of my country." In the Continental Congress he had been the singular voice insisting on American independence. In the peace negotiations in Paris he alone had insisted on a separate treaty with England despite instructions to the contrary. These were, in truth, plausible claims, but he was the last person to make them on his own behalf without sounding like an arrogant fool, which is pretty much what Warren called him: "What is Mrs. Warren to think of your comments?" she asked rhetorically. "I readily tell you she thinks them the most captious, malignant, irrelevant compositions that have ever been seen." All communication between the two families then ceased for several years.20 Although Abigail had actually led the a.s.sault on Warren, and in that sense made herself a full partner in the defense of the Adams legacy, she almost surely recognized that John's outbursts only damaged his reputation by seeming to doc.u.ment the long-standing charge, first enshrined in the public record by Franklin, then amplified in Hamilton's notorious pamphlet, that his thought process was a series of volcanic eruptions. Even John himself acknowledged that he was making a fool of himself, but he could not help it: "A man never looks so silly as when he is talking or writing about himself," he admitted, "but Mrs. Warren's severity has reduced me to the necessity of pouring out all myself." Once he began pouring, however, his emotions flowed into an interior Adams zone where no one, not even Abigail, could reach him. She had learned from years of experience that when that happened, the only thing to do was to let him go until the flow subsided.21 From Abigail's perspective, the only positive feature of the exchange with Warren was that no one knew about it beyond the two families, so that John's embarra.s.sing behavior remained a private affair. But once his sluices had opened, the surge of painful memories and score-settling accusations needed somewhere else to go, so in 1809 John decided to publish a series of weekly essays in the recently established Boston Patriot Boston Patriot. He was obviously in full flight: "Let the jacka.s.ses bray or laugh at this, as they did at the finger of G.o.d," he shouted at the start of the series. "I am in a fair way to give my critics food enough to glut their appet.i.tes." In one of the first Patriot Patriot pieces he compared himself to "an animal I have seen take hold of the end of a cord with his teeth, and be drawn slowly up by pulleys, through a storm of squils, crackers, and rockets, flashing and blazing around him every moment...and although the scorching flames made him groan, and mourn, and roar, he would not let go." pieces he compared himself to "an animal I have seen take hold of the end of a cord with his teeth, and be drawn slowly up by pulleys, through a storm of squils, crackers, and rockets, flashing and blazing around him every moment...and although the scorching flames made him groan, and mourn, and roar, he would not let go."22 John did not let go for three years and more than a thousand pages, most of them directed at the defining decision of his presidency, sending a peace commission that avoided war with France. He went out of his way to describe the duplicitous behavior of Vice President Jefferson, the disloyalty of his cabinet, and most especially the grandiose scheming of Hamilton to wrest control of the Federalist Party for his own traitorous purposes. All this was, in fact, historically accurate, but it came off to readers as special pleading, and at times as the ranting of a sore loser afflicted by some combination of paranoia and dementia.

The tortured remembering that John was attempting to write about in his autobiography, then the prideful and almost pugilistic vindications of his historical significance spewed out to Warren and, more endlessly, to the Boston Patriot Boston Patriot, could be construed as forms of therapy, if that term meant the effort to bring latent emotional anger that had been previously suppressed to the surface for more conscious and explicit scrutiny. But the conspicuously self-serving character of John's version of therapy, plus the often incoherent and always frenzied form of its expression, only enhanced the charge that he was, as his critics had claimed, a one-man bonfire of vanities. This was not quite fair, as became clear in the freewheeling correspondence with Benjamin Rush in which his ghosts and goblins became the b.u.t.t of jokes and, at least momentarily, he could laugh at himself.

Rush had been a friend for over thirty years, but they had drifted apart over the last decade, when Rush had sided with Jefferson. The correspondence, then, represented the recovery of a friendship rooted in a personal affinity that both men recognized as deeper than politics: a common instinct for a level of candor that bordered on irreverence; a mutual disregard for any kind of conventional wisdom that deterred their rollicking, almost daredevil style; and their recognition that, at this late stage in their lives, they were like gamblers with nothing to lose.23 Quite coincidentally, Rush had recently decided to conclude his medical career by focusing his attention on mental illness, a decision that eventually earned him the t.i.tle "father of American psychiatry." As part of that project, he proposed that he and John engage in a high-stakes game of honesty in which they reported to each other on their respective dreams.

John leapt at the offer, vowing to match Rush "dream for dream." He dreamed that he was "mounted on a lofty scaffold in the center of the great plain in Versailles, surrounded by an innumerable congregation of five and twenty millions." But then the crowd became a collection of animals-lions, elephants, rats, squirrels, even sharks and whales. When he attempted to lecture this weird menagerie on "the unadulterated principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity among all living creatures," the menagerie became a violent mob, tearing one another to pieces, then forcing him to flee for his life "with my clothes torn from my back and my skin lacerated from head to foot." This was simultaneously a joke about the naivete of the French philosophes and a fable about his own fate at the hands of the American electorate.24 The mad-hatter character of the correspondence encouraged free a.s.sociation, and the Versailles scene made John remember a phrase used by a French barber in Boston, "a little crack," meaning slightly crazy, which described the entire British ruling cla.s.s and all the utopian thinkers of the French Revolution. "I must tell you," he confided to Rush, "that my wife, who took a fancy to read this letter upon my table, bids me to tell you that she thinks my head too, a little cracked, and I am half of that mind too."25 Apparently their wives were often sitting nearby while Adams and Rush wrote their letters, and periodically commented on their giddy tone. Rush reported to John that "my saucy wife says that you and I correspond like two young girls about their sweethearts." And when Rush proposed, to John's horror, that colleges eliminate the study of Latin and Greek for more practical subjects, it turned out, so John claimed, that Abigail agreed with him: "Mrs. Adams says she is willing you should discredit Greek and Latin, because it will destroy all the pretensions of the gentlemen to superiority over the ladies and restore liberty, equality, and fraternity between the s.e.xes." Or when Rush described a special "tranquillizing chair" that he had designed for interviews with his mental patients, Abigail suggested in jest that John could benefit from such seating. John countered that he already had his own proper chair, for if Samuel Johnson pontificated from his tavern stool, John did the same from his "throne at my fireside."26 With Rush, instead of engaging in endless lamentations about the scandalmongers who had vilified him, he claimed that he "would subscribe 100 guineas for a complete edition of all the scandal against me from 1789 to 1801, then have it bound in an expensive leather binder for preservation." It was actually his own fault for failing to hire what he called "puffers" to answer the ridiculous accusations: "These puffers, Rush, are the only killers of scandal...and you and I have never employed them, and therefore scandal has prevailed against us." When Rush reminded John that one such "puffer," William Cobbett, had defended the Adams presidency, John countered with self-mockery: "Now I a.s.sure you upon my honor and the faith of the friendship between us," he vowed, "that I never saw the face of Cobbett, and that I should not know him if I met him in my porridge dish."27 And instead of bemoaning his failure to fit comfortably into the stoic mold that history seemed to require, he went on the offensive, mocking the presumption that stoic serenity was anything but a theatrical posture. The Virginians were especially good at such posing, Washington the best of the lot, but then "Virginian geese were all Swans." Rather than make the point in a defensive way, he made his critique of the stoic style into a bawdy joke: "Deceive not thyself," he told Rush. "There is not an old friar in France, not in all Europe, who looks on a blooming young virgin with sang-froid." sang-froid."28 The dream-driven correspondence with Rush drew on John's lifelong habit of introspection, itself a secular version of the venerable New England tradition in which the aspiring Puritan saint searched his soul for signs of G.o.d's grace. But as John himself seemed to be aware, the therapeutic technique that Rush brought to the conversation, by insisting on dreams as the subject matter, permitted fresh emotional insights and connections by bypa.s.sing the defense mechanisms of the conscious mind. "Dream, you know, is a mighty Power," he observed to Rush. "It is not shackled with any rules of Method in Arrangement of Thoughts...Time, s.p.a.ce and Place are annihilated; and the free independent Soul darts from Suns to Suns, from Planets to Planets...to all the Milky Way, quicker than rays of Light." He was beginning to learn how to round up those "raging Bulls" that he felt stampeding inside him when he was a young man.29 At the same time that he was being tortured by his demons in his embarra.s.singly vain letters to Mercy Otis Warren and his hopelessly self-serving essays in the Boston Patriot Boston Patriot, John was conquering those demons, or at least bringing them under a measure of control, in his correspondence with Rush. Only to Rush, and perhaps in conversations with Abigail that left no trace, could he acknowledge that the personal crusade on behalf of his rightful place in the history books was a fool's errand: "There have been many times in my life when I have been so agitated in my own mind," he confessed to Rush, "as to have no considerations at all of the light in which my words would be considered by others...The few traces of me that remain, I believe, must go down to posterity with much confusion." Although Abigail had learned to cope with the childlike tantrums of the aggrieved seeker of fame, this less frantic creature was the man she loved. It was good to get him back.30 ABIGAIL'S AGENDA Abigail's duties were her demons, at least in the sense that the extended family that flocked to Quincy in fits and starts in the early years of her alleged retirement put her prowess as the legendary matriarch of the Adams dynasty to a strenuous test. For, as we have seen, the Old House became either the final destination or the temporary depository for a sizable congregation of near and distant relatives, all bearing young children and most carrying heavy emotional baggage. As a result, she faced an even more sprawling set of domestic challenges in her retirement than she did as a young mother coping with four children in John's absence. She was the irrepressible center of gravity for the Adams family, and now all the acc.u.mulated loose ends floated into her domestic orbit.

Ironically, it was her powerful domestic instinct that led her into an extraordinary exchange of letters with Jefferson, in which she became the most ardent and effective defender of John's political legacy. It began in May 1804, when she learned that Jefferson's younger daughter, Maria Jefferson Eppes, whom she had known and nurtured as Polly in London, had died of complications during childbirth. Her deep parental empathy-she had by then lost three of her own children-compelled her to offer consolation to Jefferson regardless of the political chasm that had opened up between them: "It has been some time I conceived of any event in this Life," she somewhat poignantly observed, "which would call forth feeling of mutual sympathy." But a daughter's death was just such a rare occasion.31 Jefferson normally had perfect pitch in such exchanges, but he misread Abigail's intentions, thinking she sought to use Maria's death as an opportunity to restore diplomatic relations between Monticello and Quincy. After thanking her for the gesture of empathy, he proceeded to minimize the Adams-Jefferson conflict, blaming it on partisan journalists, claiming that their quite real political differences had never threatened the personal friendship. This was revisionist history of the charitable sort, designed to recover the friendship by denying it had ever been lost.

But then Jefferson made a fatal blunder. He had but one personal criticism of John's behavior as president, he wrote, which was his appointment of John Marshall as chief justice during the latter weeks of his presidency, thereby burdening Jefferson with an entrenched and alien presence. Jefferson characterized this decision as "personally unkind," almost a slap in the face by John before departing. Over time, however, in an elegant turn of phrase, Jefferson concluded that the Marshall appointment "left something for friendship to forgive," so that "after brooding it over for some time, I forgave it cordially."32 Jefferson was extremely adept in verbal jousts of this sort, usually establishing a genteel tone that made any form of conflict or confrontation seem inappropriate. He should have known that his tactics would not work with Abigail, who had reprimanded him in no uncertain terms as a delinquent parent of the very child who had just died. "You have been pleased to enter upon some subjects which call for a reply," she ominously observed. "And now Sir, I freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former friendship and placed you in a Light very different from what I had viewed you in."

The notion that John's appointment of Marshall was a personal affront defied the obvious fact, so Abigail argued, that he was legally obliged to make the appointment. (She did not reveal that she had strongly supported the decision.) But the most preposterous and presumptive claim was Jefferson's a.s.sumption of the moral high ground-this from the same man who had "spread the blackest calumny and foulest falsehoods" against both her husband and her eldest son by paying James Callender to a.s.sault their integrity in the newspapers in order to ensure his own election, all the while denying that he had done so. "This, Sir, I considered as a personal injury," she wrote, "and the sword that cut the Gordion Knot." If there was any sin for friendship to forgive, all the forgiving rested on the Adams side of the ledger. The fact that Callender had subsequently turned on Jefferson and exposed his affair with the mulatto slave Sally Hemings was a delectable irony: "The serpent you cherished and warmed," she caustically observed, "bit the hand that nourished him." She closed with a quote from Proverbs: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend."33 Jefferson's response was both deft and duplicitous. He argued that partisans on both sides had engaged in wild distortions during the presidential campaign, and that scandalmongers on the Federalist side had vilified him beyond recognition. (This was true.) But he also claimed that "any person who knew either of us could not possibly believe that either meddled in the dirty work." In effect, he was contesting the claim that he had personally paid Callender to libel John. (This was a lie.)34 Abigail called his bluff. Jefferson's payments to Callender were well doc.u.mented, exposed by Callender himself after the election, when he complained about the meager level of compensation he had received and then went after Jefferson for his liaison with Sally Hemings. Jefferson's response to these revelations had been some subtle combination of silence and denial. Abigail was the only person on the historical record to confront Jefferson with the charge that he was a bald-faced liar. She did it with almost Jeffersonian deftness, recalling her previous respect for him, observing that "the Heart is long, very long in receiving the conviction that is forced upon it by reason." But there was no denying that he had mortgaged his honor to win an election against her husband. His critics had always accused him of being slippery, disingenuous, and dishonorable. "Pardon me, Sir," Abigail concluded, "that I fear you are." In the vast Jefferson correspondence, no one had ever put it to him so directly.

Jefferson presumed that this volley of letters with Abigail had occurred with John's knowledge and consent. In fact, Abigail had conducted the correspondence on her own, never informing John of the exchange until several months later, when she showed all the letters to him. "The whole of this correspondence was begun and conducted without my Knowledge or Suspicion," John wrote in the margins of the last letter. "I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place." Always his most ardent advocate, Abigail had delivered a decisive blow to his most elusive enemy, done with a level of controlled anger that John himself could never have mustered. All communication between Quincy and Monticello subsequently ceased for the next eight years.35 The blow delivered to Jefferson, no matter how satisfying, was a wholly private triumph, invisible to the public. It was also an exception to the main pattern of Abigail's focus during the retirement years, which was more domestic than political. If John's chief ambition was to live forever in the memory of future generations, Abigail's was to create the hard nucleus of a family that would do the same. Her immortality was more derivative; she would live on in the memories and genes of her children, her grandchildren, and their progeny. It was also more maternal, frequently taking the form of a personal campaign to gather as many members of the extended family as possible to her Quincy haven, where they would come under her direct supervision and matriarchal gaze.

Her major projects were Louisa Catherine and Nabby. Quincy was probably the last place where Louisa Catherine wished to reside, since she was temperamentally incapable of matching Abigail's domestic competence, and in her presence felt like a hummingbird to Abigail's eagle. But Abigail made a heroic effort to cultivate her trust, writing her on nearly a weekly basis and insisting that she regarded the wife of John Quincy as her own daughter. Her efforts to be helpful, however, frequently backfired, in part because of her own commanding style, in part because Louisa Catherine was predisposed to collapse into heaps of sobbing insecurity whenever Abigail's advice seemed to question her own effectiveness as a wife and mother.

Soon after John Quincy, in keeping with his destiny, was elected to the Senate, for example, Abigail began a bombardment of maternal wisdom that Louisa Catherine, somewhat understandably, deeply resented: "I regret to hear that my dear son's health is not good," Abigail began. "I wish you would not let him go to Congress without a cracker in his pocket. The s.p.a.ce between Breakfast and dinner is so long, that the stomach gets filled with flatuencies, and his food when he takes it neither digests or nourishes him." Some newspaper reports had called attention to his careless and even slovenly attire, which Abigail found embarra.s.sing, prompting her to urge Louisa Catherine "to prevail upon him to pay more attention to his personal appearance." By almost any standard, this was maternal overkill and intrusive, no matter how well-intentioned.36 On the other hand, even a harmless suggestion by Abigail could send Louisa Catherine into a tearful collapse. For example, when Abigail mentioned that a relative living in Washington had expressed regret at not hearing from the wife of the newly elected senator, Louisa Catherine interpreted the remark as a personal affront "that gave me pain as it obliquely insinuated a reflection on my family," meaning that she had not been raised properly and was obviously ill-equipped to fulfill the social obligations of her station. Abigail had said no such thing, but that is what the precariously perched and always vulnerable Louisa Catherine heard. Emotionally and temperamentally, the two women were worlds apart.37 Yet they were also inextricably connected, not only by the link with John Quincy but also by two young grandchildren, George and John, who did much of their growing up under Abigail's care at Quincy, where they were deposited for most of John Quincy's term in the Senate and then again when he was appointed amba.s.sador to Russia. Louisa Catherine frequently fretted about her role as absentee mother, and Abigail did due diligence as a hovering grandmother who tried to rea.s.sure her that the boys had her fullest attention: "I told him [John, then two years old] that I was writing to you," she wrote Louisa Catherine, "and asked him what I should say. Shall I say John is good? No. Shall I say John is Naughty? No. He stood a moment and his little Eyes glistened. Say John has got a Beauty new Hat."38 Abigail's only concern was that grandparenting was almost by nature a more permissive and indulgent role than parenting, which might bode badly for the boys down the line. John apparently gave the matter no thought whatsoever. He encouraged the boys to crawl into bed with him, "disarrange all the Papers on my writing Table," and whenever they said they were hungry, "devour all my Strawberries, Cherries, Currants, Plumbs, Peaches, Pears and Apples." The children of John Quincy, it seems safe to say, were not raised in the same superdisciplined way as their father and pretty much had the run of the house. Although both boys eventually attended Harvard, neither lived long enough to make a contribution to the Adams line, and George committed suicide at twenty-nine.39 Nabby was Abigail's other priority, more a rescue operation like Thomas, designed to limit losses in the current generation rather than cultivate prospects for the future. She wrote to Nabby more than anyone else, most often pleading with her to leave her hopelessly insolvent and dissolute husband and bring her three children back to the safe haven at Quincy: "I am writing by candle-light, whilst all around me are fast bound in sleep...Even faithful Juno lies snoring beside me...You must come to live with us." It was a difficult command for Nabby to hear, since it contradicted all her previous education about a wife's obligations to her husband. Nabby adopted a compromise position, which fit her core disposition to please all parties, by spending three or four months a year at Quincy and the remainder of the time in Lebanon, New York, with her husband, at one point even joining him in jail, where he was detained for his complicity in a wild-eyed scheme-his specialty-to invade and liberate Venezuela.40 This prevailing pattern changed dramatically in the fall of 1811. Nabby was in residence at Quincy with her daughter, Caroline, a spirited girl who reminded Abigail of herself at the same age, when she detected a tumor in her breast. John immediately wrote to Rush for advice, and he provided an unequivocal diagnosis: "From her account the remedy is the knife...I repeat again, let there be no delay in flying to the knife...It may be too late." In November, three physicians performed a full mastectomy of her right breast in the parlor of the Old House, without anesthesia, while Abigail and John held each other in an adjoining room.41 "My own bosom has been lacerated by wound upon wound," Abigail wrote to John Quincy. "I can scarcely trust my pen to describe them." She was primarily referring to Nabby's surgery, but her sister, Mary Cranch, and Mary's husband, Richard, had died a day apart at almost the same time. Sally Adams seemed on the verge of death with pleurisy, and John had seriously gashed his shin while attempting to view the transit of a comet a few nights earlier. Her Quincy haven had become a hospital.42 Nabby remained in Quincy for six months to recover from the surgery, then returned to her husband. But, as Rush feared, the cancer had spread. Two years later, in July 1813, she arrived back at Quincy to die, emaciated, almost unrecognizable: "She is indeed a very sick woman," Abigail reported to John Quincy. "Cannot take food...How she got here is a marvel to me." Three weeks later Nabby died in her father's arms with Abigail sobbing at the bedside.43 While resilience was a trademark Abigail trait, she never fully recovered: "To me the loss is irreparable," she confided to John Quincy. "The wound...cannot be healed." She had used similar words at the death of Charles, but Nabby's death clinched a new level of prevailing sorrow that she could never completely dispel. Her grief poured out in gushes in her letters for a full year after Nabby's pa.s.sing, which Abigail described as the sudden departure of "my closest companion." She had conceived of her matriarchal role as the preparation of future generations for greatness. But now it seemed that her primary task was to watch her own children die or, in Thomas's case, slide gradually into alcoholism.44 NORTH AND SOUTH POLES.

The cloud of despair that descended upon Abigail after Nabby's death coincided, ironically, with the lifting of the cloud that had been shadowing John since his retirement. Perhaps the deuces-wild correspondence with Rush had helped him to exorcise his demons. Or perhaps the interminable rantings in the Boston Patriot Boston Patriot had served as a catharsis that purged his tortured soul of anxieties about posterity's judgment. Whatever the cause, starting in 1812, and growing steadily thereafter, his letters reflect an emerging recognition of his own foibles and follies, a flair for self-deprecating humor, a capacity to laugh at his own eccentricities. had served as a catharsis that purged his tortured soul of anxieties about posterity's judgment. Whatever the cause, starting in 1812, and growing steadily thereafter, his letters reflect an emerging recognition of his own foibles and follies, a flair for self-deprecating humor, a capacity to laugh at his own eccentricities.

Inquiries about his physical and mental condition, for example, became occasions to make fun of himself: "I have one head, four limbs and five senses," he told one curious stranger. "My temper in general has been tranquil except when any Instance of extraordinary Madness, Deceit, Hypocrisy, Ingrat.i.tude, Treachery or Perfidy has suddenly struck me. Then I have been irascible enough, and in three or four Instances too much so." His expanding girth, he explained, had forced him to adopt a strict diet: "No veal cutlets, no old hock, no old or young madeira, no meat, no spirits, nothing but Indian porridge, water gruel...and five and twenty cigars." There was no question, however, that time had taken its toll: "My const.i.tution is a gla.s.s bubble or a hollow icicle...A slight irregularity or one intemperate dinner might finish the catastrophe of the play."45 What did he think of Jefferson's decision to mothball the ships-of-the-line that he, as president, had built up into a respectable American navy? Well, Jefferson would live to regret that decision, John observed, since war with Great Britain was probably inevitable, despite Jefferson's futile policy of an embargo. (This was in 1811.) And when war began we would quickly discover that the American navy "was so Lilliputian that Hercules after a hasty dinner would sink it by setting his foot on it." Or, even more irreverently: "I had like to say that Gulliver might bury it in the deep by making water on it."46 How did it feel to be an American icon? Well, somewhat strange: "It is become fashionable to call me 'The Venerable.' It makes me think of the venerable Bede...or the venerable Savannarola," icons of the past whom John thought undeserving. He considered all efforts to mythologize him or the founding generation as a whole misguidedly reverential: "But to tell you the truth," he wrote one young admirer, "as far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I have no reason to believe we were better than you are."47 Did he have any serious reservations about the Christian doctrine of life after death? Well, such questions were inherently unanswerable, but he had presumed that G.o.d would afford him the opportunity to debate Franklin in heaven. On the other hand: "If it should be revealed or demonstrated that there is no future state, my advice to every man, woman, and child would be...to take opium."48 These flashes of self-possessed irreverence suggested that the great volcano of American politics was at last in remission. The clinching evidence came in 1812, when he allowed Rush to manipulate him into a correspondence with Jefferson: "I perceive plainly enough, Rush," he observed, "that you have been teasing Jefferson to write to me, as you did me to write to him." Abigail's earlier exchange with Jefferson had appeared to deliver the coup de grace to any resumption of the old friendship. But Rush was relentless in his efforts to bargain a breakthrough: "I consider you and him," he told John, "as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all." Moreover, Rush reported that he had a dream in which the two great patriarchs resolved their differences, restored their famous friendship, and then "sunk into the grave nearly at the same time." As it turned out, Rush's dream proved eerily prophetic.49 Over the course of fourteen years, from 1812 to 1826, Adams and Jefferson exchanged 158 letters, with the flow from Quincy more than double the output from Monticello. Since John had made no secret of his animus against Jefferson during the past decade, several friends expressed surprise that he would agree to a reconciliation with that man from Monticello. But John claimed that he could no longer remember what disagreements he had with Jefferson, except that they had once argued about the proper length of a man's hair: "It was only as if one sailor had met a brother sailor after twenty-five years absence," he joked, "and had accosted him, 'how fare you, Jack?'"50 His more revealing, and more honest, explanation came a few years later: I do not believe that Mr. Jefferson ever hated me. On the contrary, I believe that he always liked me, but he detested Hamilton and my whole administration. Then, he wished to be President of the United States, and I stood in his way. So he did everything he could to pull me down. But if I should quarrel with him for that, I might quarrel with every man I have had anything to do with in my life. This is human nature.

Was this merely bravado? Or did he mean what he said, that he genuinely had forgiven Jefferson for his multiple duplicities?51 The clearest answer came more than a year into the correspondence, when Abigail appended a note to one of John's letters: "I have been looking for some time for a s.p.a.ce in my good Husband's Letters to add the regards of an old Friend," she jotted at the bottom of the page, "which are still cherished and preserved through all the changes and vicissitudes which have taken place...and will I trust remain as long as, A. Adams." As Jefferson surely knew, Abigail was the ultimate protector of her husband's reputation, as the volleys she had fired at Monticello a decade earlier made abundantly and painfully clear. Her endors.e.m.e.nt meant that the wounds Jefferson had inflicted on the Adams family had healed, or at least been forgiven. His chief sin had been to place political interest above friendship. Abigail, speaking for the Adams family, had made the recovery of friendship their highest priority. They were the ones making the magnanimous gesture.52 Unlike the correspondence with Rush, which resembled free verse, John's letters to Jefferson, especially at the beginning, were more self-consciously cla.s.sical occasions in which both men a.s.sumed the role of philosopher-king in the Ciceronian mode: "But wither is senile garrulity leading me?" Jefferson asked rhetorically. "Into politics, of which I have taken final leave. I think little of them and say less. I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much happier." John responded in the same elegiac manner: "I have read Thucydides and Tacitus, so often, and at such distant periods of my life," he observed, "that elegant, profound and enchanting is their style, I am weary of them." Fully aware that their letters would eventually become part of the historical record, both men were posing for posterity.53 Posing was a natural act for Jefferson, who regarded argument as a dissonant noise that created static instead of his preferred harmonies. For John, on the other hand, argument was the ideal conversation. He could no more stay on script in his dialogue with Jefferson than he could impersonate Franklin-like diplomacy with Vergennes. Such etiquette was not in him, since all his instincts were argumentative: "You and I ought not to die," he proposed to Jefferson, "before We have explained ourselves to each other." A graphic depiction of the correspondence, then, would have Jefferson standing erectly in a stately pose with arms folded across his chest while John paced back and forth, periodically pausing to pull on Jefferson's lapels or poke a finger into his chest. It was the closest thing that history allowed for the two sides of the American Revolution to engage in a dialogue.54 There were several safe subjects on which both sages could easily agree and in the process display their patriarchal wisdom. For example, here is Jefferson on aging: "But our machines have now been running for 70 or 80 years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way. And however we may tinker them up for a while, all will at last surcease motion." John retorted that he was "sometimes afraid that my 'Machine' will not 'surcease motion' soon enough; for I dread nothing so much as 'dying at the top,' and thereby becoming a weeping helpless object of compa.s.sion for years." He had seen this happen to Sam Adams, and feared dementia more than death.55 After a year of polite foreplay, John began to raise more controversial issues. He chided Jefferson for failing to prepare the nation for the War of 1812, most especially in dismantling the American navy, which had always been John's hobbyhorse. Jefferson never responded directly but instead parried the thrust by noting recent American victories against the British fleet on the Great Lakes, graciously observing that "these must be more gratifying to you than most men, as having been an early and constant advocate of wooden walls."56 Jefferson was even more conciliatory when it came to their differences over the French Revolution: "Your prophecies...proved truer than mine," he acknowledged, "and yet fell short of the fact, for instead of a million, the destruction of 8 or 10 millions of human beings has probably been the effect of the convulsions. I did not, in 89 believe they would have lasted so long, nor have cost so much blood." What's more, John had predicted that Great Britain would eventually win the compet.i.tion for European supremacy with France, and the recent defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo had proved him right.57 This was a huge concession. For Jefferson was not only admitting that his optimistic estimate of events in revolutionary France had proved misguided. He was also acknowledging that on the dominant foreign policy issue of John's presidency, the insistence on neutrality toward France, which Jefferson and the Republicans had used as a political club to beat him out of office, history had vindicated John's policy. John recognized the implications of Jefferson's admission immediately: "I know not what to say of your Letter," he wrote, "but that it is one of the most consolatory I have ever received."58 On two equivalently seminal disagreements, however, Jefferson stood his ground, and the exchange exposed the underlying reasons for the political chasm that had opened between them in the 1790s. Because the correspondence was more like a conversation that bounced off one topic after another without a moderator to reel in extraneous diversions, core differences between the two patriarchs remained somewhat blurry and elliptical. However, with the advantage of hindsight (the historian's only advantage), two elemental differences emerged more clearly than ever before.

First, in an exchange in the summer of 1813 prompted by Jefferson's insistence that the distinction between "the few and the many" was an eternal political division, it became clear that the two founders disagreed about what had, in fact, been founded. John believed that the creation of a nation-state at the Const.i.tutional Convention was the culmination and political fulfillment of "the spirit of '76." Jefferson believed that it was a betrayal of that spirit and had created a central government with powers akin to the despotic Parliament and king that he and John together had so eloquently and effectively opposed. There were, in effect, two founding moments. John regarded both as essential; Jefferson regarded only the first as legitimate.59 Second, in a nearly simultaneous exchange over the role of "the aristoi" (aristocracies or elites) throughout history, Jefferson argued that the American Revolution had "laid the axe to the root of the Pseudo-aristocracy...founded on wealth and birth without either virtue or talents." In that sense, the American Revolution represented a clean break with the vestiges of European feudalism and had thereby cleared the ground for a new kind of egalitarian society in the United States based on merit and equality of opportunity.

John disagreed, arguing that the problem was not European feudalism but human nature itself, which had not undergone any magical transformation in crossing the Atlantic. Jefferson's vision of a cla.s.sless American society was, therefore, a romantic pipe dream. "After all," John observed, "as long as property exists, it will acc.u.mulate in Individuals and Families and...the Snow ball will grow as it rolls." Pretending that the new American republic would be immune to the social inequalities of Europe was Jefferson's seductive version of the grand illusion. And at the political level, elites would always exist here as well as in Europe, and exercise disproportionate influence unless managed by government.60 Again, with hindsight as the guide, one could argue that John's position on the first disagreement was vindicated by the Civil War; his position on the second, by the New Deal. But in the crucible of the moment, such prescience was unavailable, and Jefferson's more optimistic forecast enjoyed a decided rhetorical advantage. The more historically correct conclusion would be that the Adams-Jefferson correspondence had exposed the two conflicting versions of America's original intentions, each pa.s.sionately embraced by founders with unmatched revolutionary credentials.

INDIAN SUMMER.

Although John's recovered friendship with Jefferson eventually became famous, even legendary, for its symbolic significance, his all-time dearest friend-no one else came close-was Abigail. And the feeling was mutual. When her sister somewhat mischievously asked her if she would marry John if she could live her life over, Abigail responded with an unambiguous declaration: "Yet after half a century, I can say my first choice would be the same if I again had my youth and opportunity to make it." This was in February 1814, when she was still recovering from Nabby's death, another bout with rheumatism had confined her to bed, and her sister Mary and the ever-faithful Juno had just pa.s.sed away. But the dominant Adams pattern, for Abigail as well as for John, was to rally in the face of adversity. "I bend to disease, totter under it," she explained, "but rise again...feel grateful for the reprieve and wish so to number my days as to apply my mind to wisdom." She and John had not only lived so much life together, they had also suffered so much pain together that it was impossible to imagine doing it with anyone else.61 Unlike the renewed friendship with Jefferson, which was recorded in letters, no correspondence between Abigail and John was necessary because they were together all the time. And, in fact, the routine intimacies that did not make it into the historical record were the most emotionally important moments: John reading a recent letter from Jefferson by the fireside while Abigail sorted laundry; Abigail reading to John from Shakespeare, her favorite writer, late at night, when the candles could not compensate for John's failing eyesight; John fulminating over Mary Wollstonecraft's romantic delusions about the French Revolution while Abigail silently sh.e.l.led beans and eventually announced it was time for bed.62 As their friends, close relatives, even their own children died around them, as the irrevocable aging process and accompanying physical failures made each look into the mirror a moment of horror, as the extended family that surrounded them at Quincy came to resemble a menagerie of wounded animals, Abigail and John remained resolute, infinitely resilient, the invulnerable center that would always hold. If love, like leadership, could never be defined, only recognized when it presented itself in its most ideal form, they embodied it. The long melody played on.

Their mutual obsession was John Quincy, who now single-handedly carried the prospects of the Adams family for the next generation. For this reason, they wanted him to have a brilliant political career, presumably culminating in the presidency. Yet the more they aged, the more dependent they became on his proximity. And so his appointment as American amba.s.sador to Russia in 1809, which should have been greeted as another step toward his appointment with destiny, became a bittersweet occasion: "I find it very difficult to reconcile my mind to it," Abigail lamented. "At the advanced years both of his father and myself, we can have very little expectation of meeting again upon this mortal theatre...Both his father and I have looked to him as the prop and support of our advanced and declining years." For the next seven years, Abigail claimed to be clinging to life until her eldest son returned home.63 John Quincy was gone so long because history seemed to have a larger claim on him than his family obligations. (Louisa Catherine also opposed the Russian posting, deeply resenting that George and John had to be left behind with their grandparents at Quincy.) His presence lent stature to the American mission at St. Petersburg, where the British minister observed that "he sat among us like a bulldog among spaniels." In 1815 he was ordered from St. Petersburg to Ghent, where he negotiated the treaty with Great Britain that ended the War of 1812, repeating his father's triumph thirty years earlier in the Treaty of Paris. Then, again like his father, he was dispatched to London as America's first postwar amba.s.sador to the Court of St. James's. Then his star rose even higher in 1816, when President James Monroe tapped him to serve as secretary of state, which had become the acknowledged stepping-stone to the presidency.64 One would expect Abigail and John to be thrilled that their child prodigy was fulfilling his promise, and at some level they obviously were. But they also wanted him nearby during their own last chapter, as John forcefully apprised him in 1816: "One thing is clear in my mind, and that is you ought to be home...My sphere is reduced to my Garden and so must yours be. The wandering life that you have lived, as I have done before you is not compatible with human nature. It was not made for it." As if John Quincy had not gotten the point, John wrote him again two weeks later: "You must return to Montezillo, renounce all public employment forever, and lay down your bones here with your Ancestors."65 This was not going to happen, as John surely realized, since John Quincy had been programmed for success on the public stage from early childhood, and the same l.u.s.t for fame that had propelled his father to answer every call also consumed the son. While John's request-almost an order-had a somewhat selfish sound, his primary motive was protective. He saw John Quincy following in his own footsteps, and he worried that his son would suffer the same bitter disappointment in the end.

On August 10, 1817, John declared that "Yesterday was one of the most uniformly happy days of my whole life." He had just learned that John Quincy, Louisa Catherine, and their three boys had landed at New York and the whole entourage would be arriving at Quincy in about a week. The joyous homecoming on August 18 was the highlight of their retirement years, a festive occasion to which Abigail invited a host of local dignitaries. She put on one of her best dresses and insisted that her famous son sit at the head of the table for dinner. The minister from Salem described her as the model of competence, seated on the sofa, sorting laundry while answering questions about Madison's conduct of the recent war: "She had a distinct view of our public men and measures," he reported, "and had her own opinions."66 She also had her own property, or at least property that she regarded as her own. According to Ma.s.sachusetts law, all family property was legally owned by the male head of household. But in January 1816 Abigail prepared a will, parceling out to her children, grandchildren, and niece, Louisa Smith, her silk gowns, jewelry, a lace shawl, beds, blankets, and $4,000, which was the nest egg that resulted from war bonds purchased during the 1770s. She also distributed to John Quincy and Thomas two parcels of land she had inherited from her family. Though a clear violation of the law, neither Abigail nor John regarded her will as an especially defiant act. It simply reflected the underlying a.s.sumption of Abigail's personal independence that had been the basis of their life together for over fifty years. John endorsed the terms of her will as a statement by the saucy woman he loved, but who never belonged to him or anyone else. No legal official in the commonwealth dared to challenge her claims in court.67 The will also reflected Abigail's looming sense that the end was near, that her nearly miraculous ability to recover from each bout with debilitating illness, almost to reclaim her life by sheer act of will, would eventually run its course. Blessedly, for the year following John Quincy's triumphant return she enjoyed excellent health, which permitted her to join John in carriage rides over the Quincy hills to visit friends and relatives. She even made two trips to Boston, where they were feted and fussed over as New England's most venerable couple and one of the last surviving links to a glorious but bygone era.

It was a kind of Indian summer for the now legendary partnership, a final fling celebrating their central satisfaction of being together. John's only complaint was that Abigail's overly a.s.siduous devotion to her domestic duties sometimes prevented them from spending more time together. He lamented her "uncontrollable attachment to the superintendence of every part of her household," despite the obvious reality of "how few minutes either of us have to live." For almost a full year, however, they recovered the old rhythms, walking the gardens, riding the fields, reading aloud to each other at night-Abigail was particularly intrigued by a biography of an emerging American hero named Andrew Jackson-relishing together the seasoned quality of their ongoing conversation.68 It all came to a sudden end in October 1818. Abigail collapsed with typhoid and probably suffered an accompanying stroke that made it difficult for her to speak. Interestingly, John first reached out to Jefferson, who had lost his own wife many years earlier: "The dear partner of my life for fifty-four years and for many years more as a lover, now lies in extremis, forbid