Of the overwhelming convulsion soon to come in France, of the violent end in the offing for the whole European world Adams had come to know, he appears to have had few if any premonitions, no more than anyone else.
What changes had taken place at home in his absence he could only imagine, but clearly, with the advent of the new Constitution, a new epoch had opened in the history of his country.
For her part, Abigail speculated privately that any further role in politics might be “a little like getting out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
* * *
Part III
Independence Forever
Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.
—John Adams
* * *
Chapter Eight
Heir Apparent
Gentlemen, I feel a great difficulty how to act. I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.
—John Adams
ON THE CRYSTAL-CLEAR MORNING of Tuesday, June 17, 1788, the keeper of the Boston lighthouse, Thomas Knox, sighted the Lucretia making good speed on the northeast horizon, and by prearranged plan he set in motion a welcome home such as John Adams had never imagined.
The landmark lighthouse, the first built in America, stood ten miles out from Boston on a tiny rock island at the head of the harbor. For more than half a century, since before Adams was born, it had taken the brunt of the open Atlantic, only to be blown up by the British in 1776. Rebuilt since the war, it stood again as before, and for those on board the inbound ship, after a rough crossing of fifty-eight days, its granite tower gleaming in the sunshine of a perfect morning was a thrilling sight.
At the signal from lightkeeper Knox, cannon boomed at the fort on Castle Island, to alert the town. Losing no time, Knox then set sail by pilot boat to meet the Lucretia and deliver an official welcome to Minister Adams and his lady from Governor John Hancock.
“My coach will be at the end of Long Wharf,” Hancock had written. The Adamses were to proceed to a reception in their honor at his Beacon Hill home, where he hoped they would “tarry till you have fixed upon your place of abode.”
As the ship cleared the lighthouse and swept into the harbor, the green hills of Braintree stood forth on the port side, while ahead rose Boston's multiple church steeples. Again cannon thundered from Castle Island, in official salute, and in little time the ship was tying up at dockside, where a crowd of several thousand was gathered.
People were cheering, church bells ringing, as the Adamses came ashore. Along the route to Beacon Hill, more throngs lined the streets. “The bells in the several churches rang during the remainder of the day—every countenance wore the expressions of joy,” reported the Massachusetts Centinel.
For John and Abigail, who in their long absence had often felt unappreciated or forgotten, such an outpouring was inexpressibly gratifying, but also difficult to take in. Hancock, who adored ceremony and show, was so delighted by the excitement, he insisted the next day that he escort them to Braintree in his coach, and that they go accompanied by cavalry. But the Adamses had had enough fanfare and departed Boston on their own. At Braintree they moved in quietly with the Cranches until their furniture could be delivered from the ship.
• • •
THE FIRST DAYS at Braintree were a continuing round of emotional reunions—with the Cranches, sons Charles and Thomas, and John's astonishingly spry mother, now seventy-nine; John's brother Peter, Cotton Tufts, and Parson Wibird; plus a score of Quincys, Basses, and other old friends and neighbors. John Quincy arrived by horseback from Newburyport, where he was reading law.
Adams rejoiced in the sight of his sons. Charles, eighteen, and Thomas, fifteen, both Harvard scholars now and inches taller than their mother, had been small boys when he last saw them. John Quincy, soon to turn twenty-one, was clearly a grown man, and his father's pride and joy were no less than ever.
The oldest has given decided proofs of great talents, and there is not a youth his age whose reputation is higher for abilities, or whose character is fairer in point of morals of conduct [he wrote to Nabby]. The youngest is as fine a youth as either of the three, if a spice of fun in his composition should not lead him astray. Charles wins the heart, as usual, and is the most a gentleman of them all.
“Busy unpacking during the whole day,” recorded John Quincy, once the furniture and belongings arrived and the move to the new house began. Another day was devoted to unpacking his father's books, “yet [we] did not get half enough.”
The Shaws arrived from Haverhill. There were teas and dinners at the Cranches. At church on Sunday the combined family filled several pews. “Parson Wibird preached in his usual dull, unanimated strain,” fumed John Quincy, who had never understood his father's admiration for the eccentric preacher.
To Abigail's great disappointment, the new house, the “old Vassall-Borland place,” once thought an elegant country seat, was found to be in poor repair and distressingly small and cramped after what she had known in Europe. Her sense of scale had changed more than she knew. The white clapboard house was handsome enough and stood by itself, uncrowded by the side of a main road, with farmland stretching before and behind. But there were just six rooms and ceilings were low. “In height and breadth, it feels like a wren's house,” she wrote.
For days house and grounds were overrun with carpenters, masons, and farmhands. Some of her furniture had been badly damaged at sea. “But you know there is no saying nay,” she added gamely.
Adams could not have been more pleased with his new “estate,” as he wrote to an English friend. “It is not large, in the first place. It is but the farm of a patriot.”
Spirits high, he plunged into the farmer's life, tramping his fields and pastures, inspecting walls, appraising livestock, hiring help, discussing weather and crops, and delegating projects. A French writer, J. P. Brissot de Warville, stopping at Braintree on a tour of America “to examine the effects of liberty upon men, society, and government,” described farmer Adams as “like one of the generals and ambassadors of the golden ages of Rome and Greece... forgetful of his books and royal courts.” (After a visit to Mount Vernon, Brissot would write much the same of George Washington.)
But another French traveler would be astonished to find a man of such consequence as Adams living in a house so small that, as he wrote, “no Paris lawyer of the lowest rank would choose [it] for a country seat.”
Speculation on Adams's political future was rampant. He was talked of as governor, senator, Vice President, everything but President.
According to the Centinel, it was already certain he would become Vice President, and if not that, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. “And who can object to Mr. Adams?” asked the paper which, after enumerating his many abilities and attainments, observed that he happened also to be “providentially” unemployed.
Henry Knox and Benjamin Lincoln, two stalwarts of 1776 and now of formidable political importance, came to talk. Benjamin Rush wrote from Philadelphia, warmly endorsing the prospect of his old friend as Vice President. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, in a letter informing Adams that he had received an honorary degree from Yale, said he rejoiced at the thought of Adams for Vice President.
In keeping with the unwritten rule of the time that any display of ambition would be unseemly, Adams kept silent. But, in fact, he had decided from the time he arrived home that he would accept the vice presidency, and that role only, any other being “beneath him,” as Abigail put it confidentially in a letter to Nabby.
The makeup of political leadership in the country had greatly changed in Adams's absence. Many with whom he had served in the Continental Congress had passed from the scene—some, like Benjamin Rush, were retired from public life; others deceased. Fourteen of those who had signed the Declaration of Independence were dead, including Stephen Hopkins and Caesar Rodney, and much about politics was now in the hands of “new men,” “smart young men,” known to Adams only by reputation.
Madison of Virginia was still in his thirties. Hamilton of New York and Fisher Ames of Massachusetts were younger still.
Because Washington, a Virginian, was certain to become President, it was widely agreed that the vice presidency should go to a northerner, and Adams was the leading choice. That Adams could be blunt, stubborn, opinionated, vain, and given to jealousy was understood. Further, some of the “new men,” notably Hamilton and Madison, questioned how willingly and loyally Adams might serve in second place to Washington, in view of the difficulties he was said to have had with Franklin in Paris.
The one visitor known to have recorded a firsthand impression of Adams that fall of 1788 found him quite at peace with life and surprisingly approachable. Judith Sargent Murray, a young woman from Gloucester traveling with her husband on their honeymoon, stopped at Braintree in October and saw in “the countenance of Mr. Adams” a “most pleasing benevolence” she had not anticipated, as well as the marks of “deep thinking” customarily associated with “the sage, the philosopher,” and “unbending integrity.” Here was a man who had “stood before kings upon an equal level,” she wrote. “I expected to be inspired with a painful awe, but strange to tell, every idea of distance was immediately banished.” Of Abigail she observed: “It is evident the domestic as well as the more brilliant virtues are all her own. We were soon grouped in familiar chat. It was with [difficulty] I remembered they were not friends of ancient date.”
Winter approached, and still Adams remained silent on politics. Abigail left for New York to be with Nabby for the arrival of another baby, a second son, John Adams Smith, leaving Adams alone with his ruminations. “I think of my poor dear and pity him,” Abigail wrote from New York to Mary Cranch. But Adams wanted no one to feel sorry for him. Whatever the outcome—whether he was denied the vice presidency or whether the honor was to be his—he would be the winner either way, he insisted. “If they mortify my vanity, they give me comfort. They cannot deprive me of comfort without gratifying my vanity.”
To Jefferson in Paris he wrote, “The new government has my best wishes and most fervent prayers for its success and prosperity; but whether I shall have anything more to do with it, besides praying for it, depends on the future suffrage of freemen.”
• • •
BY PROCEDURE established in the new Constitution, the President was to be chosen by “electors” named by the state legislatures. Each elector was to cast one ballot with the names of two choices for President. The person with the most votes in the final tally was to become President, the runner-up, Vice President. In the event of a tie, the decision would go to the House of Representatives, a prospect so disturbing to Alexander Hamilton that he “deemed [it] an essential point of caution” to see that John Adams did not wind up with such a strong showing in the electoral count as to embarrass Washington. He was not against Adams, Hamilton explained privately. “Mr. A, to a sound understanding, has always appeared to me to add an ardent love for the public good.” But Hamilton was taking no chances. Working quietly through the winter, he did what he could to convince leading politicians in several states to withhold votes from Adams.
The scheme succeeded. When the electors met in February 1789, Washington was chosen President unanimously with 69 votes, while Adams, though well ahead of ten others, had 34 votes, or less than half. Adams was humiliated by the news, his pride deeply hurt, but of Hamilton's part, he knew nothing.
Yet the fact remained that at age fifty-three, he, John Adams, the farmer's son from Braintree, had been chosen to serve as the first Vice President of the United States, the second-highest office in the land.
Abigail was to remain at home until he found a suitable place for them to live in New York. And thus the morning of his departure there was much that was reminiscent of other days as he bid goodbye, heading off again with a single servant, John Briesler. The difference this time was that Adams went accompanied by cavalry, a sight such as had never been seen in Braintree. It was April 13, 1789, one of the signal days of Adams's life and also, as it happened, Thomas Jefferson's forty-sixth birthday.
Boston provided a hero's send-off, with cannon salutes and exuberant crowds. The grand cavalcade that escorted Adams out of the city included more than forty carriages.
Merit must be conspicuously great when it can thus call forth the voluntary honors of a free and enlightened people [wrote the Massachusetts Centinel]. But the attentions shown on this occasion were not merely honorary—they were the tribute of gratitude due to a man who after retirement from trials and services which were of 18 years unremitted continuance, hath again stepped forth to endeavor to establish and perpetuate that independence... and which his exertions have so greatly contributed to produce.
All through Massachusetts and Connecticut people lined the road to cheer Adams as one of their own, a New England man. At Hartford he was presented a bolt of locally manufactured brown broadcloth considered worthy for an inaugural suit. New Haven gave him the “Freedom of the City.” That ideal weather accompanied the procession day after day was taken as auspicious.
At four o'clock the afternoon of April 20, after a week on the road, Adams arrived at the bridge at Spuyten Duyvil Creek, at the northern tip of Manhattan Island. A troop of New York cavalry and a “numerous concourse of citizens” led by John Jay and several members of Congress were waiting to escort him south to the city and Jay's palatial home on Broadway.
• • •
ONCE, IN THE MIDST of negotiations for the Paris Peace Treaty, John Adams had predicted that thirteen United States would one day “form the greatest empire in the world.” It was a faith he had first expressed at age nineteen, when a fledgling schoolmaster at Worcester, writing to his kinsman Nathan Webb; and it remained a faith no less in 1789, for all the skepticism and derision he had heard expressed abroad, and despite the many obstacles confronting the new nation.
Much about the state of things, much that Adams had seen or heard since his return, was heartening. On a visit to Harvard, he had crossed a magnificent new bridge over the Charles River, said to be the finest bridge in America. New England shipping and ocean trade were reviving after a slump that followed the war. A Salem vessel, Grand Turk, had been to China and back and was the talk of Massachusetts.
There was a rise in demand for American farm products. In Virginia, work had started on canals for both the James and Potomac Rivers. At Philadelphia an inventor named John Fitch had demonstrated a steamboat on the Delaware River. But as striking as any sign of the country's burgeoning energy and productivity was the “Grand Federal Procession” held in Philadelphia that July 4 of 1788, in which many hundreds of tradesmen marched, grouped by guilds: shipbuilders, rope-makers, instrument-makers, blacksmiths, tin-plate workers, cabinetmakers, printers, bookbinders, coppersmiths, gunsmiths, saddlers, and stonecutters, some fifty different groups carrying banners and the tools of their trade.
As a result of the Paris Peace Treaty, the size of the nation was double what it had been, greater in area than the British Isles, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined, and if the American population was small by the standards of Europe, it was expanding rapidly, which to Adams was the most promising sign of all. From 2 million or so in 1776, the population had grown to nearly 4 million by 1789, and this despite seven years of violent war, the departure of perhaps 100,000 Loyalists, and comparatively little immigration during the war years. Philadelphia, still the largest city, had increased to a population of 40,000. New York counted 18,000 and, like Philadelphia, surged with growth. Of the thirteen states, Virginia remained the richest and most populous, and thereby maintained the greatest political influence.
But wages were still low everywhere, and money was scarce. There was no standard American coinage or currency. British, Spanish, French, and German coins were all still in use, along with the coins of the different states, their value varying appreciably from one state to another. In New England, for example, six shillings made a dollar, while in New York eight shilling
s made a dollar. In the entire country there were only three banks.
Travel was slow and arduous everywhere, the roads appallingly bad and worst in the South. Largely because of bad roads, the new Congress, scheduled to convene in New York on the first Wednesday in March 1789, would not have a sufficient number present to make a quorum in either house until weeks afterward.
The nation had no army to speak of—about 700 officers and men. The Continental Navy had disappeared. The sea power that Adams had envisioned and worked so hard to attain was nonexistent.
The great majority of Americans lived and worked on farms, and fully two-thirds of the population was concentrated in a narrow band along the eastern seaboard from Maine to Spanish Florida. Nearly everything else was wilderness. The whole country, concluded one visitor, was “a vast wood.” In Massachusetts it was thought that less than a third of the land had been cleared, and it was the same in New York and Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, at the end of the rough-hewn wagon road over the Allegheny Mountains, was the westernmost town of any consequence in the country and had fewer than 500 souls.
Approximately half the territory of the United States in 1789 was still occupied by American Indians, most of whom lived west of the Appalachians, and though no one knew how many there were, they probably numbered 100,000.
That a new America was steadily taking form beyond the Appalachians was one of the clearest signs of the times. Down the same road Adams traveled that spring to New York came small caravans from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut—families with children and household belongings piled onto heavy wagons, bound for Ohio, a journey of more than 700 miles. At the same time, settlers from Virginia and the Carolinas were crossing into Kentucky and Tennessee. George Washington himself, known to have great confidence in the future of the West, had landholdings in the Ohio River country of more than 20,000 acres.