At Utrecht they witnessed the swearing in of new magistrates of the city, as a result of major constitutional reforms enacted by the Patriot party. It was a ceremony conducted, as Adams wrote, “in the presence of the whole city,” and it moved him profoundly. To John Jay he would claim it to be the first bearing of fruit of the American Revolution in Europe.
• • •
THE AUTUMN OF 1786 produced no improvement in relations with the British, whose icy civility Adams found all the more galling after the respect and affection he had been shown in Holland. Yet his spirits were high, his health excellent. Besides, he and Abigail knew by then that they were to become grandparents. Nabby was pregnant, her baby expected in April. Not even the news from home of an uprising of aggrieved farmers in western Massachusetts seemed to distress Adams.
Shays's Rebellion, as it would come to be known, after one of its leaders, Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army, was in protest of rising taxes and court action against indebted farmers who, in many cases, were losing their land in the midst of hard times. The insurgents had prevented the sitting of the state supreme court at Springfield. But thus far there had been no violence.
“Don't be alarmed at the late turbulence in New England,” Adams counseled Jefferson. “The Massachusetts Assembly had, in its zeal to get the better of their debt, laid on a tax rather heavier than the people could bear.” He was confident all would be well and concluded prophetically, “This commotion will terminate in additional strength to the government.”
Inexplicably, correspondence from Jefferson had dwindled to a standstill. On returning from Holland, Abigail had found but one letter waiting, this only to say he did not understand her proposed trade of her son for his daughter, and to relate again his delight in the French. (“They have as much happiness in one year as an Englishman in ten.”) After that there had been no further word. A letter to Adams concerning whale oil, sent in late September, was written and signed for Jefferson by his aide, William Short. Then at the end of October came a brief note to Adams, awkwardly written by Jefferson with his left hand.
“An unfortunate dislocation of my right wrist has for three months deprived me of the honor of writing to you,” he at last explained to Abigail before Christmas. But his reason for writing was to tell her that his eight-year-old daughter Polly was on her way to London by ship from Virginia, in the care of a nurse, and that he had taken the liberty to tell those who arranged the voyage “that you will be so good as to take her under your wing till I can have notice to send for her.”
What Jefferson said nothing of was that he had been spending as much time as possible through August and September with a beautiful young woman named Maria Cosway. Born of English parents but raised in Italy, she was the wife of a wealthy, dandified English artist, Richard Cosway, and was herself an artist. She was fluent in several languages, musical, slim and delicate, with sparkling blue eyes and a mountain of fashionably dressed blond hair that made her several inches taller than her tiny, almost dwarf-like husband. The Cosways were a bright fixture in London society, and Abigail and Nabby are known to have met her on at least one social occasion.
Maria was twenty-six years old, Jefferson forty-three, and the attraction of each to the other was instantaneous. If not in love, Jefferson was wholly infatuated. Wishing only to be with her, he canceled every social engagement he could. As he would tell her, “Lying messengers were dispatched into every corner of the city with apologies.” He bought tickets to the theater, the opera; they rode through Paris in Jefferson's carriage behind a pair of fine new horses, and strolled the gardens at Marley, near Versailles. Sometimes, Richard Cosway was with them, more often they were alone.
Whether it was on a walk in the Cours-la-Reine, as commonly said later, that Jefferson dislocated his wrist, attempting to impress her by vaulting a fence, is not certain. But the accident put an end to their outings, and the pain of the injury was excruciating. For a month Jefferson was virtually confined to his house, and by early October the Cosways had returned to London.
Struggling to write with his left hand, he labored over a carefully composed letter to her in which he described a debate between “Head” and “Heart,” a conventional literary device of the day, and by the end of twelve pages it appeared “Head” was the winner. In any case, when Maria Cosway returned to Paris the next summer, Jefferson showed noticeably less interest in her.
To his friends the Adamses, he said nothing of any of this and possibly they never knew. But then, as the news of Shays's Rebellion grew more alarming, an exchange of views on the subject set Abigail and Jefferson sharply in opposition for the first time.
To many on both sides of the Atlantic, it seemed from reports of the “tumults” in Massachusetts that the new nation was already breaking apart. To the British, accounts in the newspapers only confirmed what they had been predicting all along, while to many Americans who little understood the suffering of the Massachusetts farmers, and this included Abigail, the situation was an outrage, intolerable. “For what have we been contending against the tyranny of Britain,” she asked, writing to Mary Cranch, “to become the sacrifice of a lawless banditti? ... Will my countrymen justify the maxim of tyrants, that mankind is not made for freedom?”
With the arrival of the new year, and still more sensational reports of mob violence in Massachusetts, she let Jefferson know her opinion in no uncertain terms. “Ignorant, restless desperadoes, without conscience or principles, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard under pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their imaginations.” She had no patience with mobs crying out for paper money or the equal distribution of wealth. She saw only the need for “the wisest and most vigorous measures to quell and suppress” the revolt.
It was almost as an afterthought that she told him she would be pleased to look after his daughter as requested.
When Jefferson wrote to say he hoped the captured rebels would be pardoned, Abigail was appalled. “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive,” he lectured. “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”
How sincerely Jefferson meant what he had written, how much was hyperbole among friends, is difficult to gauge. He had a fondness for the imagery of storms. To Maria Cosway he had described how “sublime” it was high on his mountaintop at Monticello “to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!” Moreover, in the same letter to Abigail, he offered the thought that the only hope for change among the ever lighthearted French was not rebellion but to pray for good kings.
Abigail took his wish for “a little rebellion now and then” quite to heart and was not pleased. When Jefferson left Paris at the end of February for a long, leisurely tour of southern France and Italy, ostensibly to see if the mineral springs at Aix-en-Provence might help his still-painful wrist, John Adams kept on writing to him. But Abigail did not. It was the end of June before she could bring herself to write again, and then only to tell Jefferson his daughter had safely arrived.
Interestingly, only months afterward, Jefferson would write a letter to her new son-in-law, Colonel Smith, to say he hated the thought of America not having a rebellion such as had occurred in Massachusetts, every twenty years or so. What were a few lives lost? Jefferson asked. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is a natural manure.” But of this letter, Abigail apparently knew nothing.
• • •
ON APRIL 2, 1787, Nabby gave birth to “a fine boy,” William Steuben Smith, who was declared to have “the brow of his grandpapa.” “I feel already as fond of him as if he was my own son, nay, I can hardly persuade myself that he is not,” Abigail wrote to Lucy Cranch.
On June 26, life picked up still more with the arrival of little Polly Jefferson. She was escorted by the captain of
the ship she had sailed on, Andrew Ramsay, to whom she had become so attached that his parting was extremely upsetting for her.
“I show her your picture [the Mather Brown portrait],” Abigail wrote to Jefferson. “She says she cannot know it, how should she when she should not know you.”
The one surprise, she informed Jefferson, was the nurse who had accompanied the child. “The old nurse who you expected to have attended her was sick and unable to come. Instead she has a girl about 15 or 16 with her, the sister of the servant you have with you,” she said, tactfully avoiding the word slave.
For Abigail and John Adams it was their one encounter with Sally Hemings, who was actually fourteen, younger even than Abigail supposed, and who was to figure years afterward in a sensational scandal surrounding Jefferson's private life. She was also the only slave known ever to have lived under the Adamses' roof.
To Abigail, Sally seemed nearly as much a child as Polly. In the opinion of Captain Ramsay, as Abigail also related, she would be of “so little service” that he recommended taking her back to Virginia. Abigail told Jefferson he would have to be the judge. “She seems fond of the child and appears good natured.” On further acquaintance, however, Abigail concluded that the nurse might need more care than the child and that without supervision would be incapable of her responsibilities.
At first, Polly seemed a handful for anyone. Her weeks on board ship had made her “as rough as a little sailor.” Abigail warmed to her at once. She took her shopping for new clothes and books, kept her at her side as if she were her own. She was a “lovely child,” the favorite of everyone in the household, Abigail wrote. Adams, as he himself said, was entirely won over.
From Polly they learned her pitiful story. Having no memory of her mother, she had been living with an aunt, Jefferson's sister Elizabeth Eppes, whom she adored and had refused to leave when Jefferson sent for her. Deceived into believing that a visit with her cousins on board Captain Ramsay's ship in a Virginia harbor was only for a day or two, she had awakened to find her cousins gone, the ship under way. The deception had made her angry and suspicious, as was still readily evident.
Jefferson was at last heard from. Rather than come himself to fetch the child, he was sending his valet, Petit. Having only just returned to Paris from his travels in the South, Jefferson explained, he had “the arrearages of three or four months all crowded on me at once.” To the Adamses it must have seemed a lame excuse, knowing as they did how little there could be of a truly pressing nature to keep Jefferson in Paris and how competent William Short was to handle what business there was for a week or so, just as he had been doing for months.
Abigail was crestfallen. She and the child had both been expecting Jefferson to appear any day. She was distraught, too, at the prospect of sending Polly off with someone who spoke no English. “I am really loath to part with her,” she wrote to Jefferson on July 6, “and she, last evening upon Petit's arrival, was thrown into all her former distresses, and bursting into tears told me it would be as hard to leave me as it was her Aunt Eppes.”
The day of her departure, Polly clung to Abigail's neck weeping, “almost in a frenzy.” Abigail, too, was crying. To no one, she said, had she ever become so attached in so few days as this little girl, and as time would show, the love she felt for the child was to be her one enduring tie to Jefferson.
• • •
“POPULARITY WAS NEVER my mistress, nor was I ever, or shall I ever be a popular man,” Adams had written to James Warren at the start of the year, 1787, to say he had just completed a book that was almost certain to make him unpopular. “But one thing I know, a man must be sensible of the errors of the people, and upon his guard against them, and must run the risk of their displeasure sometimes, or he will never do them any good in the long run.”
It was, as Warren doubtless appreciated, about as concise a synopsis of Adams's course through public life as could be found.
Once, in 1776, writing to Abigail about Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Adams had said of Paine that he was “a better hand at pulling down than building.” Now again he observed to Warren, “It is much easier to pull down a government, in such a conjuncture of affairs as we have seen, than to build up at such season as present.” It was Adams's intention to turn to building again.
For months after the journey to Holland he had remained in “a state of philosophic solitude,” at work in his library on a consideration of comparative government based on “reading and reason.” When, the week of Christmas, Abigail went off with the Smiths for a sojourn at Bath, Adams kept steadily at his labors. “Don't be solicitous of me. I shall do very well,” he wrote to her Christmas Day. If cold in the night, he would take a “Virgin” to bed—that, he explained, being the English term for a hot water bottle.
He felt an urgency like that of 1776. Great events were taking place at home. Support for a stronger central government was gaining ground—and largely in reaction to Shays's Rebellion, as Adams had foreseen. A constitutional convention was in the offing, and as he had been impelled in 1776 to write his Thoughts on Government, so Adams plunged ahead now, books piled about him, his pen scratching away until all hours. “He is so much swallowed up in the pursuit of his subject that you must not wonder if you do not receive a line from him,” Abigail explained to John Quincy. But having read what he was writing, she worried. “I tell him they will think in America that he is setting up a king.”
By early January, 1787, Adams had rushed the first installment of his effort to a London printer. Titled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, it was, in finished production, more a pamphlet than a book, in octavo form, and included on the title page a line from Pope: “All nature's difference keeps all nature's peace.” Copies were sent off at once to the United States and to Jefferson in Paris.
Adams conceded that the writing suffered from too great haste. He called it a “strange book,” which in many ways it was, much of it a hodgepodge overloaded with historical references and extended borrowings from other writers and usually without benefit of quotation marks. Yet in all he had achieved something quite out of the ordinary, thoughtful, high-minded, and timely. To a considerable extent the book was an expanded, more erudite rendition of the case for checks and balances in government that he had championed in his Thoughts on Government, and later put into operation in his draft of the Massachusetts constitution. The people of America now had “the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands” that Providence ever ordained to so small a number since Adam and Eve. There must be three parts to government—executive, legislative, and judicial—and to achieve balance it was essential that it be a strong executive, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary. On the role of the executive Adams was emphatic:
If there is one central truth to be collected from the history of all ages, it is this: that the people's rights and liberties, and the democratical mixture in a constitution, can never be preserved without a strong executive, or, in other words, without separating the executive from the legislative power. If the executive power, or any considerable part of it, is left in the hands of an aristocratical or democratical assembly, it will corrupt the legislature as necessarily as rust corrupts iron, or as arsenic poisons the human body; and when the legislature is corrupted, the people are undone.
Nonetheless, the legislative power was “naturally and necessarily sovereign and supreme” over the executive.
In all history, he declared, there was no greater statesman and philosopher than Cicero, whose authority should ever carry great weight, and Cicero's decided opinion in favor of the three branches of government was founded on a reason that was timeless, unchangeable. Were Cicero to return to earth, he would see that the English nation had brought “the great idea” nearly to perfection. The English constitution, Adams declared—and knowing he would be taken to task for it—was the ideal. Indeed, “both for the adjustment of the balance and the prevention of its vibration
s,” it was “the most stupendous fabric of human invention” in all history. Americans should be applauded for imitating it as far as had been done, but also, he stressed, for making certain improvements in the original, especially in rejecting all hereditary positions.
A hereditary monarchy could be a republic, Adams held, as England demonstrated, and hereditary aristocracies could be usefully employed in balanced governments, as in the House of Lords. But Adams adamantly opposed hereditary monarchy and hereditary aristocracy in America, as well as all hereditary titles, honors, or distinctions of any kind—it was why he, like Jefferson and Franklin, strongly opposed the Society of the Cincinnati, the association restricted to Continental Army officers, which had a hereditary clause in its rules whereby membership was passed on to eldest sons.
As he explained to Jefferson, much of what he wrote was in response to the dangers of radical French thought. Specifically he had written in defence (hence the title) against the theories of the philosophe Turgot, who espoused perfect democracy and a single legislature, or as he wrote, “collecting all authority into one center, that of the nation.” To Adams this was patent nonsense. A simple, perfect democracy had never yet existed. The whole people were incapable of deciding much of anything, even on the small scale of a village. He had had enough experience with town meetings at home to know that in order for anything to be done certain powers and responsibilities had to be delegated to a moderator, a town clerk, a constable, and, at times, to special committees.
Reliance on a single legislature was a certain road to disaster, for the same reason reliance on a single executive—king, potentate, president—was bound to bring ruin and despotism. As the planets were held in their orbits by centripetal and centrifugal forces, “instead of rushing to the sun or flying off in tangents” among the stars, there must, in a just and enduring government, be a balance of forces. Balance, counterpoise, and equilibrium were ideals that he turned to repeatedly. If all power were to be vested in a single legislature, “What was there to restrain it from making tyrannical laws, in order to execute them in a tyrannical manner?”