Chapter Seven

London

An ambassador from America! Good heavens what a sound!

—London Public Advertiser

HIS MAJESTY THE KING of England and the new American minister to the Court of St. James's were not without common interests and notable similarities. Like John Adams, King George III was devoted to farming. Seldom was His Majesty happier than when inspecting his farms, or talking crops and Merino sheep with his farm workers at Windsor. Like Adams, the King had a passion for books. The difference, as with the farming, was mainly a matter of scale. His private library was one of the treasures of Britain. During Adams's earlier stay in London, the American painter Benjamin West had arranged a tour of the royal quarters at Buckingham House, and for Adams the high point had been seeing the King's library. He wished he could stay a week, Adams had said.

George III was to turn forty-seven on June 4, which made him two years younger than Adams, and though taller, he had a comparable inclination to corpulence.” Like Adams, he was an early riser, often out of bed before five. He, too, kept to a rigorous schedule and was an exuberant talker. Adams would later say George III was the greatest talker he had ever known. He was obstinate, affectionate, devoted to his wife and children, who numbered fifteen—again it was a matter of scale. He was deeply religious and, like Adams, sincerely patriotic.

Yet for all they had in common, the principal difference between the two was vast and paramount. One was the King of England, the other a Yankee farmer's son—John Yankee—who spoke now for an upstart nation the survival of which was anything but assured. Indeed, in England as in Europe it was generally thought that the experiment in democracy across the water had little chance of success.

With his appointment to the Court, Adams felt he had attained the pinnacle of his career, and, with the retirement of Franklin, he was now America's most experienced diplomat. But from Elbridge Gerry he had learned that the appointment had come only after rancorous dispute in Congress, and that the central issue, as Gerry reported with blunt candor, was Adams's vanity, his “weak passion.”

Gerry's letter had arrived in the last days at Auteuil. Deeply hurt, Adams had written an extraordinary reply, a dissertation on the subject of vanity set forth in his clearest, plainest hand, as if intended for posterity as much as for Gerry. There were all kinds of vanity, Adams wrote—of material possessions, of physical appearance, of ribbons and titles—but there was also that which came from years spent in the service of other men, without attention to oneself, in the face of exhausting toil and at risk of life. This latter kind was a vanity, a pride, he knew. He had experienced that “joy,” and for him to deny it or try to conceal it would be rank hypocrisy:

If at times I have betrayed in word or writing such a sentiment, I have only to say in excuse for it that I am not a hypocrite, nor a cunning man, nor at all times wise, and that although I may be more cautious for the future, I will never be so merely to obtain the reputation of a cunning politician, a character I neither admire nor esteem.

Apologizing for the length of the letter, Adams added finally in a small hand at the bottom of the page, “When a man is hurt he loves to talk of his wounds.” But after further thought—and possibly on the advice of Abigail—he put the letter aside. It was never sent.

The old charge of vanity, the character flaw that Adams so often chastised himself for, had been made again, and on the floor of Congress, just as he was to assume his most important role. So now more than ever he felt bound to do all in his power to serve honorably, succumbing neither to vanity nor political craftiness.

On arrival in London, he went promptly as instructed to confer with young Lord Carmarthen. Informed that his private audience with the King was arranged for June 1, he began preparing himself for what he knew would be an occasion of historic importance for his country and one of the great events of his life. Told that he must deliver a brief speech before the King, and that it be as complimentary as possible, he worked and reworked what he would say until he knew it by heart.

• • •

OF THE TIMES when Adams felt himself uncomfortably alone at center stage, there were few to compare to the afternoon in London, when at the end of a short ride through the rain with Lord Carmarthen in his carriage, they approached the arched gatehouse at St. James's Palace. Doors opened for them, Adams was led up a flight of stairs and down a hall to a room crowded with ministers of state, lords, bishops, and courtiers, all eyes on him as he and Carmarthen stood waiting outside the King's bedchamber, which was not where the King slept, but a formal reception room.

When the door opened, they proceeded, Adams, as instructed, making three bows, or “reverences,” one on entering, another halfway, a third before “the presence.”

“The United States of America have appointed me their minister plenipotentiary to Your Majesty,” Adams began, nearly overcome by emotion.

“I felt more than I did or could express,” he later wrote. Before him, in the flesh, was the “tyrant” who, in the language of the Declaration of Independence, had plundered American seas and burned American towns, the monarch “unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” while to the King, he himself, Adams knew, could only be a despised traitor fit for the hangman's noose.

“The appointment of a minister from the United States to Your Majesty's Court will form an epoch in the history of England and of America,” he continued.

I think myself more fortunate than all my fellow citizens, in having the distinguished honor to be the first to stand in your Majesty's royal presence in a diplomatic character; and I shall esteem my self the happiest of men if I can be instrumental in recommending my country more and more to your Majesty's royal benevolence, and of restoring an entire esteem, confidence, and affection, or, in better words, the old good nature and the old good humor between people who, though separated by an ocean and under different governments, have the same language, a similar religion, and kindred blood.

I beg your Majesty's permission to add that although I have some time before been intrusted by my country, it was never in my whole life in a manner so agreeable to myself.

Brief as it was, he got through the speech only with difficulty, his voice at times quaking, and the King, too, was greatly moved. “The King listened to every word I said, with dignity but with apparent emotion,” Adams would report to Foreign Secretary John Jay. “Whether it was in the nature of the interview, or whether it was my visible agitation, for I felt more than I did or could express, that touched him, I cannot say. But he was much affected, and answered me with more tremor than I had spoken with.

The circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper, and the feelings you have discovered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurance of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad that the choice has fallen upon you to be their minister. I wish you, sir, to believe, and that it be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do by the duty which I owed to my people. I will be very frank with you, I was the last to consent to separation; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.

He could not vouch that these were the exact words, Adams cautioned in his letter to Jay, for the King's manner of speaking had been so odd and strained. (It was Adams's first encounter with the famous stutter of George III.) “He hesitated some time between his periods, and between the members of the same period. He was indeed much affected.”

Smiling, the King changed the subject. “There is an opinion among some people that you are not the most attached of all your countrymen to the manners of France,” he said.

Adams, embarrassed, replied, “I must avow to your Majesty, I have no attachment but to my own country.”

“An honest man will never have any other,” the King said approvingly, and with a bow signaled that the interview was ended.

I retreated [Adams wrote], stepping backwards, as is the etiquette, and, making my last reverence at the door of the chamber, I went my way. The Master of Ceremonies joined me... and accompanied me through the apartments down to my carriage, several stages of servants, gentlemen-porters, and under-porters roaring out like thunder as I went along, “Mr. Adams' servants, Mr. Adams' carriage.”

It had all gone superbly. Adams's remarks had been graceful, dignified, appropriate, and, with the possible exception of his reference to “kindred blood,” altogether sincere. He had proven a diplomat of first rank, almost in spite of himself.

The King, too, had been the essence of courtesy and poise, as Adams later acknowledged. But any thought that the interview presaged an overall cordial welcome for the new minister was dashed soon enough by the London press, which dismissed the meeting as nothing more than a curious anecdote for future historians. “An ambassador from America! Good heavens what a sound!” scoffed the Public Advertiser. The London Gazette expressed rank indignation at the very appointment of such a “character” as Adams to the Court. To the Daily Universal Register it had been a notably cool reception, while the Morning and Daily Advertiser described Adams as so pitifully embarrassed as to be tongue-tied.

Beneath the polite English surface lay burning animosity, surmised Abigail, who, like John, felt she was taking part in an elaborate stage play.

• • •

UNTIL A SUITABLE HOUSE could be found, the three Adamses were residing in the Bath Hotel in Piccadilly, where, after the quiet of Auteuil, the noise of the streets seemed horrendous. Abigail hated the thought of having to hire servants again and making the necessary domestic arrangements on her own. “I cannot bear to trouble Mr. Adams with anything of a domestic kind, who from morning until evening has sufficient to occupy all his time,” she wrote to her sister Mary. Still, she delighted in being once more where her own language was spoken. A performance of Handel's Messiah at Westminster Abbey was “sublime beyond description,” she wrote to Jefferson. “I most sincerely wished for your presence, as your favorite passion would have received the highest gratification. I should have sometimes fancied myself amongst the higher order of beings.”

Three weeks after Adams's private audience with the King came the Queen's circle, or “drawing room.” This time all three of the family were to attend, as well as Colonel William Stephens Smith of New York, who had been appointed by Congress as secretary of the American legation and was also newly arrived in London. Smith had served with distinction in the Continental Army. At the battle of Long Island he had made the night withdrawal across the East River and later served on Washington's staff. He was a graduate of the college at Princeton and, with his soldierly carriage and dark good looks, made a handsome addition to the group.

Days were consumed in preparation. She must look “elegant but plain as I could possibly appear with decency,” Abigail instructed her dressmaker. The dress she wore was of white silk trimmed with white crepe and lilac ribbon, over an enormous hoop. “A very dress cap with long lace lappets, two white plumes and a blonde lace handkerchief; this is my rigging,” she informed Mary in high spirits. “I should have mentioned two pearl pins in my hair, earrings and necklace of the same kind.” Nabby's attire, too, was in white, only with a petticoat, “the most showy part,” and included a cap with three immense feathers.

Mother and daughter had seldom if ever looked so glorious. “Thus equipped we go in our own carriage,” wrote Abigail.” But I must quit my pen to put myself in order for the ceremony which begins at two o'clock.”

“Congratulate me, my dear sister, it is over,” she commenced the next installment, settling in to describe in detail and with wry humor all that had transpired, and leaving little doubt as to what she thought of such business overall, or whether she was capable of meeting the test, even if it meant four hours on her feet.

Of the English novelists, Abigail was especially fond of Samuel Richardson, whose popular works, Pamela and Clarissa, were tales told through the device of extended letters. Richardson, “master of the human heart,” had “done more towards embellishing the present age, and teaching them the talent of letter-writing, than any other modern I can name.” That her own outpouring of letters was influenced by Richardson, Abigail would have readily agreed. In Richardson's hands events unfolded in letters written “to the moment,” as things happened. “My letters to you,” she would tell Mary, “are first thoughts, without correction.”

At the palace the Adamses were escorted to a large drawing room, where two hundred selected guests, including foreign diplomats and their wives, were arranged in a large circle. “The King enters the room and goes round to the right, the Queen and princesses to the left,” Abigail began her account for Mary.

Only think of the task the royal family have, to go round to every person and find small talk enough to speak to all of them. Though they very prudently speak in a whisper, so that only the person who stands next can hear what is said.... The Lord in Waiting presents you to the King and the Lady in Waiting does the same to Her Majesty. The King is a personable man, but my dear sister, he has a certain countenance which you and I have often remarked, a red face and white eyebrows.... When he came to me, Lord Onslow [Arthur Onslow, lord of the royal bedchamber] said, “Mrs. Adams,” upon which I drew off my right glove and His Majesty saluted my left cheek, then asked me if I had taken a walk today. I could have told His Majesty that I had been all morning preparing to wait upon him, but I replied, “No, Sire.” “Why, don't you love walking?” says he. I answered that I was rather indolent in that respect. He then bowed and passed on. It was more than two hours after this before it came my turn to be presented to the Queen. The circle was so large that the company were four hours standing. The Queen was evidently embarrassed when I was presented to her. I had disagreeable feelings, too. She, however, said, “Mrs. Adams, have you got your house? Pray how do you like the situation of it?” Whilst the Princess Royal[Charlotte Augusta Matilda, the oldest daughter of George III and Queen Charlotte] looked compassionate, and asked me if I was much fatigued, and observed that it was a very full drawing room. Her sister who came next, Princess Augusta, after having asked your niece if she was ever in England before, and her answering, “Yes,” inquired me how long ago, and supposed it was when she was very young. And all this is said with much affability and ease and freedom of old acquaintance.

The two princesses were quite pretty, “well shaped,” “heads full of diamonds.” Queen Charlotte, however, was neither pretty nor well shaped, and on the whole, Abigail told Mary, the ladies of the Court were “very plain, ill-shaped, and ugly, but don't tell anybody that I say so.”

All things considered, the royal family was surprisingly affable, but certainly the life they led was not to be envied. Nor should anyone imagine that Abigail remained anything other than herself: “I could not help reflecting with myself during the ceremony, what a fool I do look like to be thus accoutered and stand for four hours together, only to be spoken to by ‘royalty.’ ”

• • •

THE SUITABLE HOUSE was found and, their furniture having arrived from France, the family moved to the quiet of Grosvenor Square in the West End. The tree-shaded square with its neat gravel walks covered five acres—exactly the size of the garden at Auteuil—and was framed by elegant town houses belonging to a number of London's most eminent citizens, including Lord Carmarthen.

The house the Adamses rented—what became the first American legation in London—was No. 8, at the northeast corner. The front entrance opened onto a large hall. There was a dining room spacious enough for entertaining on the first floor and another ample room that Adams made his office for public business. Drawing room and library were on the floor above, bedrooms on the third floor. The kitchen was in the English basement, and a stable was to the rear. Once the servants were hired and in place “below stairs,” the staff consisted of Esther Field, now elevated to lady's maid, a butler, a housemaid, a cook, a kitchen maid, two footmen (one of whom was John Briesler), and a coachman. This made a total of eight, as at Auteuil, and again Abigail would have preferred fewer who worked harder. Adams, after several weeks in residence, allowed that after so long in France he was “not so pleased” with English cookery.

But these were quibbles. The house suited perfectly. For Adams the location was ideal. Abigail had a small room of her own with a view of the square, a place to write and be alone with her thoughts, and to Nabby, it was all a decided improvement over Auteuil. “We shall live more as if we were part of the world,” she wrote to John Quincy.

That “world”—London of the 1780s—was a city grown all out of proportion, with nearly a million souls. Though a city still of “smoke and damp,” in Adams's words, it was an appreciably cleaner, healthier, less violent place than it had been earlier in the century. It was both the political capital of Britain and the center of manufacturing, finance, and trade. The Thames, its foul, mud-colored main artery and portal to the world, carried more traffic than any river in Europe. One had only to stand on any London bridge, said a guidebook, to see fleets of ships “carrying away the manufactures of Britain and bringing back the produce of the whole earth,” a spectacle illustrating Adams's chief concern as ambassador, since none was American.

The great dome of St. Paul's Cathedral rose high above what seemed a forest of towers, turrets, and church spires, very unlike the skyline of Paris. A thousand hackneys plied the streets, and innumerable sedan chairs, each propelled by four strong men, usually Irish, who could shout and muscle their way through traffic faster than the hackneys. All was “tumult and hurry,” just as portrayed in English novels. Bond Street shops were thought superior to those of Paris. London coffeehouses, taverns, theaters, and concert halls surpassed anything of the kind elsewhere in the British empire, and for the young and aspiring, London remained the great magnet. Exhilaration of the kind voiced by young James Boswell of Edinburgh upon seeing the city for the first time in 1762 was felt still by thousands who kept coming from the hinterlands. In London was to be found the full tide of human existence, Boswell's hero, Samuel Johnson, had said, declaring famously, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

The extravagance of the ruling class was notorious. At such exclusive clubs as Brooks or Boodles on St. James's Street, fortunes were reputedly gambled away at the turn of a card, and, nightly, young men drank themselves into a stupor. This was not quite true, but the stories would never die, and the clothes, carriages, the sheer weight of gold braid on the livery of servants, left little doubt as to how vast was the wealth of the wealthiest. Yet, as the Adamses found, one could hardly go anywhere without encountering such spectacles of poverty and misery as to tear at the heart—people in tatters, hunger and suffering in their faces, as Abigail wrote. And who was to answer for the wretched victims “who are weekly sacrificed upon the gallows in numbers sufficient to astonish a civilized people?” Compounding her sorrow was the realization that every night and in all weather abandoned children by the hundreds slept beneath the bushes and trees of nearby Hyde Park.

The English historian and novelist Tobias Smollett had written of the inevitable distrust felt by every visitor to London, the underlying fear of being taken. For his part, Adams was determined to be neither stingy nor a fool. Approached by the representative of a group known as His Majesty's Royal Bell Ringers, who asked that he share some of his “honorable bounty” and said two guineas were customary, Adams gave the man one guinea and said he would look into what was customary.

James Boswell could still be seen on occasion holding forth at the Globe Tavern on Fleet Street; the novelist Fanny Burney was soon to become a lady in waiting to Queen Charlotte; Richard Brinsley Sheridan was still part owner and manager of the famous Drury Lane Theater. But the giants of London's literary world, authors to whom the Adamses were devoted—Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, Samuel Johnson—were all dead and gone. And so, too, was Hogarth. The reigning artists were the rivals Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds and the American Benjamin West, who did elegant portraits and historical scenes, rather than graphic renditions of the dark side of London life.

As much as anything, it was a city of entertainments, and this to Abigail was its saving grace. She joked about seeing a “learned pig, dancing dogs, and a little hare that beats a drum,” amusements fit for children; but she openly enjoyed them and with Nabby went more than once to Sadler's Wells music hall, to delight in the “wonderful feats” of a troupe of tumblers.

The three Adamses went often to the theater, and to Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea, where, in company with fashionable London society, they strolled garden paths, sipped imperial tea, listened to music, or gazed at paintings within an immense gilded rotunda. Smollett had described Ranelagh as looking like “the enchanted palace of a genie... crowded with the great, the rich, the gay, the happy and the fair.” To Abigail, the “fair” on display were more stunning by far than any to be seen at Court.

Pleased to be in a Protestant country once more, the family attended church regularly, riding to the village of Hackney to hear the celebrated liberal preacher and champion of America, Richard Price, who was to become a valued friend. Once, for no reason other than intellectual curiosity, Adams rode to Windsor to call on the famous English astronomer Sir William Herschel, whose crowning achievement had been the discovery of the planet Uranus. Greeting Adams affably, Herschel was delighted to talk of his work, and Adams returned to Grosvenor Square elated. Nabby recorded that she had never known her father so gratified by a visit of any kind.

But neither the Reverend Price's friendship nor William Herschel's reception was representative. With the exception of tradesmen and a few officials of the government, the British overall were decidedly cool toward the new American minister and his family—perfunctory, but no more. And they did stare as Adams had worried they would, and not in a friendly way. “The English may call the French starers,” wrote Nabby to John Quincy, “but I never saw so little civility and politeness in a stare in France as I have here.” To Jefferson, with whom she had commenced regular correspondence, Abigail described the atmosphere as “not the pleasantest in the world.” In truth, the American minister and his family were being pointedly ignored.

Their “society” was confined almost entirely to other Americans living in London, or to such openly avowed friends of America as Richard Price. A few of the Americans were acquaintances from Boston, like the aspiring young architect Charles Bulfinch. Jefferson's aide, William Short, came on errands from Paris, and the duplicitous Dr. Edward Bancroft showed up, affable as always. Whether Bancroft was serving still as a spy for the British government is not known, though in all likelihood he was.

Friendliest and most helpful were the American painters Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, who introduced the family to their proteges, young Mather Brown of Boston and John Trumbull of Connecticut, a veteran of the Revolution. A rage for painters and painting had seized the household, Nabby reported excitedly to John Quincy, after Mather Brown set up his easel at Grosvenor Square to do portraits of all three of the Adamses. Her delight was extreme. (The young man was so striking-looking as to be commonly spoken of as “handsome young Brown,” as though that were his name.) Brown's portrait of her was quite “tasty,” she thought. Wearing a wide-brimmed hat with ribbons and feather, she sat with her hands in her lap, looking directly ahead, a lovely, poised, somewhat wistful young woman at the threshold of adulthood. Her father was charmed, it was “her exactly,” he said.

For his own portrait Adams posed at his writing desk, with quill and paper in hand, and Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia prominently displayed to one side. Adams believed his strongest attributes were, as he said, “candor, probity, and decision,” but these he failed to find in the face that looked back from the finished canvas, and he expressed disappointment. In Brown's portrait, he appeared composed, leaner than Copley had portrayed him, and reflective. It was a fine study of an eighteenth-century gentleman of consequence, but nothing about the pose or the expression gave any suggestion of his characteristic alertness and vitality, or sense of humor—let alone “candor, probity, and decision.”

Brown's rendering of Abigail was thought “a good likeness,” but the painting would ultimately disappear.

Meantime, West and Copley in particular opened doors for Adams in London as did no one else. “I did not ask favors or receive anything but cold formalities from ministers of state or ambassadors,” he would explain. “I found that our American painters had more influence at Court to produce all the favors I wanted.”

“Economies” remained a constant concern. The cost of living in London was higher even than in Paris, and to make matters worse, Congress had cut Adams's salary by a fifth, from 2,500 to 2,000 pounds. A dinner guest from Scotland would describe a meal with the Adamses as “good” but “plain,” while Jefferson, visiting later, would be astonished by how “very plain” they lived. Writing to Mercy Warren after the first year in London, Adams would confide, “I am driven to my wits' end for means.”

Lavish entertainment of the kind expected of an ambassador to the Court was out of the question. But then neither did the Adamses have any great desire for London society. She was too old-fashioned, Abigail said, for keeping company with “midnight gamblers and titled gamesters,” whose way of life she had seen something of and may have enjoyed more than she was willing to admit. At a party given by the Swedish ambassador, pressed to fill an empty place at one of the card tables, she won four games straight.

Worst of all was being patronized by the British. One of the few British women to call on Abigail since the move to Grosvenor Square, the wife of a member of Parliament remarked, in an effort to make conversation, “But surely you prefer this country to America?” British prejudice toward the French struck Abigail as ludicrous, now that she had lived in France, and made her realize how greatly she disliked prejudice in any form. But then unexpectedly, she was brought up short to find it in herself.

Having read and loved the plays of Shakespeare since childhood, she was thrilled by the chance to see an actual stage production. The great English tragedienne Sarah Siddons, who had come out of retirement the year before, appeared in Macbeth for the first time and was acclaimed a triumph. That Mrs. Siddons then appeared in Othello, making the transition from Lady Macbeth to Desdemona, was declared the mark of genius, and the Adamses were among the glittering audiences that filled the Drury Lane for both productions. To Abigail, Mrs. Siddons was brilliant but miscast as Lady Macbeth. It was in Othello, as Desdemona, that she was “interesting beyond any actress I had ever seen.”

Yet to read of Desdemona in the arms of a black man was, Abigail found, not the same as seeing it before her eyes. “Othello [played by John Kemble] was represented blacker than any African,” she wrote. Whether it was from “the prejudices of education” or from a “natural antipathy,” she knew not, “but my whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.” Othello was “manly, generous, noble” in character, so much that was admirable. Still she could not separate the color from the man. Filled with self-reproach, she affirmed that there was “something estimable” in everyone, “and the liberal mind regards not what nation or climate it springs up in, nor what color or complexion the man is of.”

Attacks on Adams in the press continued. He was called a nobody, ridiculed for having insufficient means to conduct himself in proper fashion. The Public Advertiser reminded its readers that all so-called American patriots were cowards, murderers, and traitors, and described Adams as looking “pretty fat and flourishing” considering “the low estate he is reduced to.” In letters to the editor he was decried as a “pharisee of liberty,” an “imposter.” Every hireling scribbler was set to vilify them, wrote Abigail, who in her time in London acquired a dislike of the press that would last a lifetime.

From Paris, where he was well supplied with London papers, Jefferson expressed astonishment at such slanders, as well as admiration for Adams's fortitude. “Indeed a man must be of rock who can stand all this,” he wrote to Abigail. “To Mr. Adams it will be but one victory the more.” Then, in a rare revelation of inner feeling, a confession of weakness such as he seldom made to anyone, Jefferson told her:

It would have ill suited me. I do not love difficulties. I am fond of quiet, willing to do my duty, but [made] irritable by slander and apt to be forced by it to abandon my post. These are weaknesses from which reason and your counsels will preserve Mr. Adams.

Possibly, he postulated, it was “the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character unsusceptible of civilization.”

He had been taken up by the Paris “literati,” he reported happily, and acquired a larger, more expensive house for himself. Located at the corner of the Champs-Elysées and the Rue de Berri, the newly built Hôtel de Langeac had twenty-four rooms, an indoor toilet, and a “clever garden.”

Not satisfied with it as it was, Jefferson proceeded to redesign and reconstruct much of the house to suit his fancy, thus adding further to the expense and despite grave concern over his own private finances.

To his brother-in-law, Francis Eppes, who was managing his affairs at home, Jefferson wrote, “The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall owe not a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value.” But what could he do? He could not sell any more of his land, he wrote: he had sold too much as it was, and land was his only provision for his children. “Nor,” he added, “would I willingly sell the slaves as long as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with their labors.”

Had Jefferson been as forthcoming with Adams as with his brother-in-law, Adams, the farmer's son, would have had no argument with Jefferson's faith in land as the only true wealth. But that Jefferson could so matter-of-factly consider selling off his slaves—not freeing them—and so readily transfer the burdens of his own extravagances to the backs of those he held in bondage, would have struck Adams as unconscionable, and would no doubt have been a serious test of his respect, if not affection, for the man. But such matters as these Jefferson never mentioned or discussed with Adams.

Meanwhile, he and Abigail exchanged shopping requests. Jefferson purchased French shoes and lace for her, and hunted down French dessert platters of a kind she had her heart set on for her dining table. For her part, Abigail was to pick out a dozen English shirts for him, a tablecloth and napkins sufficient for a seating of twenty. “But when writing to you,” he declared at the close of one letter, “I fancy myself at Auteuil and chatter on till the last page of my paper awakes me from my reverie.”

• • •

OCCASIONS AT COURT grew increasingly tedious and strained for Adams and his family. “Do you go out much for a walk,” the King kept inquiring of Abigail and Nabby at each and every reception, though the King, they thought, at least dissembled better than the Queen, whose countenance, said Nabby, was “as hard and unfeeling as if carved out of an oak knot.”

Particularly grating to Adams was the oft-spoken assumption among many of the British that sooner or later America would “of course” return to the British fold.

There is a strong propensity in this people [he wrote to Richard Henry Lee] to believe that America is weary of her independence; that she wishes to come back; that the states are in confusion; Congress has lost its authority; the governments of the states have no influence; no laws, no order, poverty, distress, ruin, and wretchedness; that no navigation acts we can make will be obeyed; no duties we lay on can be collected... that smuggling will defeat all our prohibitions, imposts and revenues.... This they love to believe.

There was indeed “a new order of things arisen in the world,” Adams emphasized to another correspondent at home, but British statesmen refused to comprehend this. Overall, the attitude toward America, he had come to realize, was hardly less hostile than it had been during the war. “They hate us,” he wrote to a friend. One Englishman had declared in his presence, “I had rather America had been annihilated, than that she should have carried her point.”

Much of this he and Abigail attributed to “venom” spread by American Loyalists in London. One vehement figure, Harrison Gray, once the treasurer of Massachusetts, said in a letter to the press that if it were left to him, he would have John Adams hanged.

Adams remained remarkably calm, nonetheless, conducting himself with model composure, and refusing to have any contact with Loyalists, with one exception. Taking the initiative, he hunted up his old friend Jonathan Sewall, whom he had not seen since the day they bid farewell at Casco Bay in what seemed a lifetime before. Adams rode to Sewall's London lodgings, and as Sewall wrote afterward, it was a memorable reunion. “When Mr. Adams came in, he took my hand in both his, and with a hearty squeeze, accosted me in these words, ‘How do you do, my dear old friend?’ Our conversation was just such as might be expected at the meeting of two old sincere friends after a long separation.”

They talked for two hours. Neither had changed his views on the Revolution, nor his enmity for the side the other had chosen, though apparently nothing of this was said. Through the years of the war Sewall had taken heart from every American defeat, every report of dissension in the American army, and from the news of Benedict Arnold's return to his proper allegiances. Like many Loyalists living in exile in England, Sewall had had a difficult time getting by. Exiled from their homeland, unappreciated in their adopted country, most Loyalists had a hard life.

Sewall had grown bitter and resentful. His hatred of New England patriots was worse than ever: “those sanctified hypocrites,” he called them, those “rebellious, ungenerous, ungrateful sons of bitches.” Suffering bouts of melancholia, he had largely withdrawn from life, seldom leaving his rooms. Noticeably aged, he lived only for his two sons, he confessed to Adams, and for their sakes planned to remove to Canada.

Adams urged Sewall and his wife, Esther Quincy, to come and take a family dinner at Grosvenor Square, and “in a way so friendly and hearty,” wrote Sewall, that he almost complied, but could not, would not.

“Adams has a heart formed for friendship, and susceptible to its finest feelings,” Sewall continued in his account of the reunion. “He is humane, generous and open, warm in his friendly attachments, though perhaps rather implacable to those he thinks his enemies.” Clearly, Adams did not regard Sewall as his enemy.

Each felt he knew the other as well as he knew any man, and privately Adams thought Sewall, in 1774, had tragically sacrificed principle for position, while Sewall, as he wrote, thought Adams's own “unbounded ambition” was at fault; this and “an enthusiastic zeal for the imagined or real glory and welfare of his country” had overcome Adams's better self, “his every good and virtuous social and friendly principle.” With some understandable resentment perhaps, Sewall concluded that Adams had gone as far as his ambition would take him, and further that he was ill suited for his present role.

He is not qualified by nature or education to shine in courts. His abilities are undoubtedly equal to the mechanical parts of his business as ambassador; but this is not enough. He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen, and small talk and flirt with the ladies; in short, he has none of the essential arts or ornaments which constitute a courtier. There are thousands who, with a tenth of his understanding and without a spark of his honesty, would distance him infinitely in any court in Europe.

For all the warmth of the reunion, the expressions of brotherhood, the two hours were difficult. Adams came away deeply saddened. He would forever think of Sewall as one of the casualties of the war. According to Adams, when Sewall died in New Brunswick a number of years later, it was of a broken heart.

• • •

OF THE MULTIPLE ISSUES in contention between Britain and the new United States of America, and that John Adams had to address as minister, nearly all were holdovers from the Treaty of Paris, agreements made but not resolved, concerning debts, the treatment of Loyalists, compensation for slaves and property confiscated by the British, and the continued presence of British troops in America. All seemed insoluble. With its paper money nearly worthless, its economy in shambles, the United States was desperate for trade, yet without the power or prestige to make demands, or even, it seemed, to qualify for respect. British complacency was massive. The British saw no cause for haste in fulfilling any of the agreements with their poor, weak, former adversary. Nor were they the least inclined to lessen or jeopardize in any way their primacy at sea. British reluctance to be accommodating was quite as great as the American need for equitable resolutions. The British continued to exclude American vessels from both Canada and the West Indies, as well as from Britain. Further, no American products could be shipped anywhere within the British Empire except in British vessels.

To Adams the first priority must be to open British ports to American ships. But his efforts came to nothing, while at home, under the Articles of Confederation enacted in 1781, Congress was without power to regulate commerce. It was thus a sad and humiliating situation.

Adams went repeatedly to Whitehall to meet with Lord Carmarthen. He called at 10 Downing Street for an exchange with the Prime Minister, William Pitt, the younger, who was all of twenty-four years old, who never stopped talking and impressed Adams not at all. Whatever Adams proposed, whatever inquiries he made to the Ministry, he received no answers. Long days and nights were spent reporting to Foreign Secretary Jay and composing memorials to Carmarthen. One particularly important memorial, calling for the withdrawal of British garrisons from the Northwest, as agreed in the Treaty of Paris, went unanswered for three months. When at last Carmarthen replied, it was to say only that this violation of the treaty was no different from the failure of Americans to pay the debts due British creditors.

Adams was hardly surprised. From his first meeting with Pitt, he had been convinced that Britain would never willingly give up the forts, any more than they would open the way to American trade with the West Indies.

When Adams talked of “commercial reciprocity,” the British thought him naive. Like Jefferson, Adams believed in free trade in theory, but faced with British intransigence, he began losing hope of ever attaining such an agreement and cautioned Jefferson, “We must not, my friend, be the bubbles of our own liberal sentiments.” Presently, the picture no brighter, he told Jefferson that if the British Court refused to act a reasonable and equitable part, the United States should enter into “still closer and stronger connections with France.”

Commercial relations with France, however, were no more promising than with Britain. Jefferson, who was as dedicated to close ties with the French as ever Franklin had been, had thus far succeeded in attaining a single agreement, one whereby American whale oil would be admitted to French markets, and this for a limited time only. Since the end of the war, the French, for their part, had attained nothing like the flourishing American trade that Vergennes had imagined. The demand for French goods in America was low and not likely to improve. When in a meeting with Lord Carmarthen, Adams summoned all his old intensity to warn that the attitude of the British, if continued, would inevitably strengthen commercial ties between the United States and France, it had no effect whatever. He saw no hope, Adams reported to Jefferson.

Correspondence between Grosvenor Square and Paris remained steady and candid. In eight months' time, from late May 1785, when Adams first assumed his post in London, until February 1786, he wrote twenty-eight letters to Jefferson, and Jefferson wrote a nearly equal number in return. Entirely trusting of one another, the two ministers exchanged news, opinions on issues, speculations on potential markets for American tobacco in Europe. One long letter from Adams was devoted to Portugal's need for American timber, tar, turpentine, and salt fish, as well as the corresponding future market in America for Portuguese wine and olive oil. When Jefferson asked Adams to inquire about insuring the life of the sculptor Houdon, who was sailing for America to do the statue of Washington, discussion of the matter went back and forth in several letters before Adams had things arranged.

A small but noteworthy difference in the letters was that Jefferson regularly signed himself in conventional fashion, “Your obedient and humble servant,” or “Your friend and servant,” while Adams wrote, “Yours most affectionately,” or “With great and sincere esteem,” or “My dear friend adieu.”

Increasingly their time and correspondence was taken up by concerns over American shipping in the Mediterranean and demands for tribute made by the Barbary States of North Africa—Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco. To insure their Mediterranean trade against attacks by the “Barbary pirates,” the nations of Europe customarily made huge cash payments. It was extortion and an accepted part of the cost of commerce in that part of the world. France paid $200,000 a year to Algiers alone; Britain paid even more, as much as $280,000 annually. In past years, before the war, when American trade in the Mediterranean flourished, American ships had come under the protection paid for by the British. But after 1776, such protection no longer pertained. Nor would France now foot the cost of guaranteeing respect for the American flag off the shores of North Africa. Tribute (bribes) would have to be paid and it would cost the United States dearly, Vergennes had advised Adams earlier; otherwise, there would be no peace with the Barbary States.

Just weeks after Adams arrived in London, in July 1785, two American ships were seized by Algerian pirates. Twenty-one American sailors were taken captive and forced into slave labor. News spread that Benjamin Franklin, en route from France to Philadelphia, had been captured by Barbary pirates, and though untrue, the story caused a sensation.

From Philadelphia, John Jay sent instructions to negotiate with the Barbary States. Funds were made available by Congress up to $80,000. But Adams and Jefferson had no money at hand. When Jefferson inquired whether Adams might borrow again from the Dutch, and reported that French officers in Paris were angry over not having been paid what they were due for services in the Revolution, Adams was helpless to do anything. It was not at all certain, he answered, that there would be funds sufficient even to cover “your subsistence and mine.”

On a chill evening in February came what Adams took to be an opening. At the end of a round of ambassadorial “visits,” he stopped to pay his respects to a new member of the diplomatic corps in London, His Excellency Abdrahaman, envoy of the Sultan of Tripoli. It was apparently a spur-of-the-moment decision on Adams's part and resulted in an amazing, smoke-filled exchange that Adams, delighted by the humor of the scene, happily recounted for Jefferson.

Adams and his host settled into two large chairs before a great fire, while a pair of factotums stood by at attention. As His Excellency Abdrahaman spoke no English, they got by on scraps of Italian and French. His Excellency wished to know about American tobacco. That grown in Tripoli was far too strong, the American much better, he said, as two immensely long pipes were brought in, ceremoniously filled, and lighted.

It is long since I took a pipe, but [Adams wrote]... with great complacency, [I] placed the bowl upon the carpet... and smoked in awful pomp, reciprocating whiff for whiff... until coffee was brought in. His Excellency took a cup, after I had taken one, and alternately sipped at his coffee and whiffed at his tobacco... and I followed the example with such exactness and solemnity that [one of] the two secretaries... cried out in ecstasy, “Monsieur, vous etes un Turk!”

The conversation turned to business. America was a great nation, declared His Excellency, but unfortunately a state of war existed between America and Tripoli. Adams questioned how that could be, given there had been no injury, insult, or provocation on either side. The Barbary States were the sovereigns of the Mediterranean all the same, he was told, and without a treaty of peace there could be no peace between Tripoli and America. His Excellency was prepared to arrange such a treaty.

Two days later, at the stroke of noon, His Excellency appeared at Grosvenor Square, flanked by servants in orange robes and turbans. Time was critical, Adams was informed. The sooner peace was made between America and the Barbary States the better. Were a treaty delayed, it would be more difficult to make. A war between Christian and Christian was mild, prisoners were treated with humanity; but, warned His Excellency, a war between Muslim and Christian could be horrible.

The man was either a consummate politician or truly benevolent and wise—Adams could not tell which—and though apprehensive that the sums demanded would be exorbitant, he felt there was no time to lose. He dispatched Colonel Smith to Paris with a letter urging Jefferson to come as quickly as possible. His visit, Adams suggested, could be attributed to his desire to see England and pay his respects at Court.

• • •

JEFFERSON ARRIVED on March 11, 1786, to find London brightened by a light dusting of snow. He settled into rooms on Golden Square for a stay, as it turned out, of nearly two months, during which the ties of friendship with John and Abigail became stronger than ever.

Since they had last seen him, Jefferson had become noticeably more elegant in attire. He had taken to powdering his hair and acquired a French valet de chambre, Adrien Petit, who had earlier worked for the Adamses. He looked every inch the polished courtier and, with his height and slim good looks, drew attention everywhere they went.

At a meeting with Ambassador Abdrahaman, Adams and Jefferson were told that peace with Tripoli would cost 30,000 guineas for his employers, as His Excellency put it, plus 3,000 pounds sterling for himself. Payments were to be in cash on delivery of the treaty signed by his sovereign. The two Americans protested that the figure was too high. His Excellency assured them it was his lowest price and allowed that peace with all Barbary states might cost from 200,000 to 300,000 guineas. They could only refer the matter to Congress, Adams and Jefferson replied, and the meeting ended.

Compared to such demands, the sum Congress had authorized them to spend was, as they reported to John Jay, “but a drop in the bucket.”

Several meetings with Lord Carmarthen were no more encouraging with Jefferson present than they had been for Adams for months past. Jefferson felt insulted by Carmarthen's seeming “aversion to have anything to do with us.”

When Adams presented Jefferson at the King's levee at St. James's on March 15, George III could not have been “more ungracious” in his “notice of Mr. Adams and myself,” according to an account later provided by Jefferson. Later still a grandson of Adams's would take this to mean the King had turned his back on them, and the story would become rooted in history. But almost certainly no such incident occurred. Jefferson said nothing to the effect at the time. Nor did any of the numerous ministers, courtiers, members of Parliament, and other diplomats present who were ever watchful for the slightest sign of royal disapproval or anything the least out of the ordinary. Nothing untoward was reported or hinted at in the newspapers, and importantly, nothing was ever said or written by John Adams, who, of all men, would have been enraged by any disrespect shown a minister of the United States being presented under his sponsorship.

Whatever the truth of the situation, Jefferson's sensitivity to British hauteur was real, his dislike of the British sufficient to last a lifetime. “They require to be kicked into common good manners,” he told Colonel Smith. The fact that his debts were largely to English creditors may well have had something to do with such feelings.

Of London, he thought only the shops worthy of attention, and devoted ample time to them, spending lavishly on shoes, boots, a flintlock rifle, a reading lamp, plated harness and stirrups, and a set of chessmen. His major, most costly purchases were British-made scientific instruments, which, he conceded, were the finest available. Possibly at the urging of Abigail, he also paid a shilling to see the “learned pig.”

As at Auteuil, Jefferson was a frequent presence at the house on Grosvenor Square, delighting all with his sparkling conversation and fund of information. Abigail gave several dinners in his honor. John arranged a tour of the King's library. There were repeated evenings at the theater—Jefferson would see three performances by Mrs. Siddons in three different roles—and a late night at the French ambassador's ball, in the splendorous Hôtel de France on Hyde Park, an occasion marked by the presence of many “very brilliant ladies of the first distinction,” as. Abigail noted.

Appraising the figure she herself cut in such gatherings, Abigail was good-naturedly realistic. She had grown as large as her two sisters combined, she claimed to Mary Cranch, and John was keeping pace with her. Pity the poor horse that would ever have to carry both of them, she wrote.

Recording in his diary the names of the few specimens of the British aristocracy who “ventured” conversation with him at the French ambassador's ball, Adams noted, “This people cannot look me in the face: there is a conscious guilt and shame in their countenances when they look at me. They feel they have behaved ill, and that I am sensible of it.”

When, after weeks of waiting, there was still no more word from Lord Carmarthen, and the ambassador from Portugal, the one European minister to have shown any interest in opening trade negotiations, was reported too ill to see them, Adams and Jefferson decided to take a break from London and go off on a tour of English gardens, what Abigail called “their little journey into the country.”

She and John had not been apart since they were reunited in London the summer of 1784, not for a year and eight months, which, she noted, was the longest time they had had together since they were married. Time away in Jefferson's company would, she was sure, do John great good.

• • •

THEY SET OFF on April 4, traveling by hired coach, sharing expenses, and accompanied by their two servants, John Briesler and Adrien Petit. They moved rapidly and covered a great deal of ground in just six days, relying on Jefferson's copy of Observations on Modern Gardening by Thomas Whately as their guide, the last word on English gardens.

Their direction was west along the Thames where the English countryside was in its April glory. Mornings were often cool, but with hazy sunshine breaking through by midday. Willow trees were in leaf. There were cherry blossoms and an abundance of daffodils in bloom, and the more miles that passed, the more the landscape opened up, with broad green hillsides covered with sheep and scampering newborn lambs by the hundreds.

In the long, eventful lives of Adams and Jefferson, it was an excursion of no importance to history. But it was the one and only time they ever spent off on their own together, free of work and responsibility, and at heart both were countrymen, farmers, with an avid interest in soils, tillage, climate, and “improvements.” “There is not a sprig of grass that grows uninteresting to me,” Jefferson was fond of saying, and Adams, in the spirit of eighteenth-century hyperbole, might well have agreed. Each kept occasional notes on the journey, and while Jefferson showed more interest in “practical things,” where Adams was inclined to remark on the historical or literary associations of the places they saw, this does not necessarily preclude a comparable interest in most everything encountered. Adams was quite as interested in proper land management as Jefferson; Jefferson possibly cared as much for Shakespeare as did Adams.

The first stops were two that Jefferson had already made a few days earlier on his own, but was happy to repeat. Both—Alexander Pope's garden beside the Thames at Twickenham and Woburn Farm—were prime examples of the “modern,” or “new-style” English landscape gardening that was so radically different from the highly symmetrical gardens made fashionable by the French, and particularly by the work of Andre LaNotre at Versailles in the time of Louis XIV. In the new style, there was no “regularity.” Instead, a seemingly natural arrangement of open grasslands, winding paths, clumps and groves of trees, in combination with an abundant presence of water in the form of serpentine lakes, streams, and artificial cataracts, was intended to evoke the look of an idealized English landscape. It was all to appear to be the work of the hand of God, but was in fact the doing of the “master-hand” of the landscape gardener or architect. Everything was chosen for effect. The “disposition” of trees was of particular importance, and among the trees and lakes were nearly always arranged a variety of classic temples or pavilions, a faux ruin or grotto, all very romantic in spirit, their size and number depending on the wealth or fancy of the client.

Such gardens could extend over hundreds of acres. They were not flower gardens, but private parks. Architects, gardeners, and clients thought of themselves as working like landscape painters, only on a vast scale and with scores of laborers at their bidding. Whole valleys were carved out, hilltops removed, streams rerouted, thousands of trees planted to achieve the desired look. The colossal expense seemed of no concern.

“Gardening, in the perfection to which it has been lately brought in England, is entitled to a place of considerable rank among the liberal arts,” declared the ultimate authority, Thomas Whately. While Adams noted Woburn's beauty, Jefferson concentrated on the distribution of labor. “Four people to the farm, four to the pleasure garden, four to the kitchen garden,” he recorded.

Another day, April 6, they toured the ultimate expression of the new style. Stowe, a true eighteenth-century marvel, was the largest, grandest, most famous landscape garden in England. It had been praised in poetry by Pope, acclaimed by Rousseau, and was the work, in part, of the most famous English landscape gardener of the day, Lancelot Brown, “Capability” Brown, as he was known, for his habit of extolling to clients the “capabilities” of their property. But it was also the design of architect William Kent and of its late owner and guiding spirit, Richard Grenville-Temple, Lord Cobham.

Set in a rolling sweep of land that lent a feeling of even grander scale, the estate comprised approximately 400 acres and was approached through a tremendous Corinthian arch. In addition to a columned manor house commanding one ridge, there were all the requisite lakes and waterfalls, bridges and architectural niceties—a Temple of Victory, Temple of Venus, Temple of Bacchus, a faux Gothic temple—everything romantic in spirit. For a panoramic view, said to take in five counties, Adams climbed a circular stairway to the top of a 115-foot observation tower built in His Lordship's memory. “I mounted... with pleasure,” Adams wrote, “as Lord Cobham's name was familiar to me from Pope's works.”

Whether Jefferson made the climb is not clear, as he recorded nothing of it, but then neither did he say a word in his notes about a beautiful bridge done in the manner of his adored Palladio, or the Temple of Victory, the honey-colored showpiece of the garden, which was very like the Maison Carree, the Roman temple at Nimes, which Jefferson was later to see on his travels in southern France and take as the model for his design for the capitol of Virginia. What he did record was that thirty-three men and boys were required to tend the grounds, and that he considered the huge Corinthian arch useless, inasmuch as it had “no pretension to direction.”

Adams found the total effect greatly to his liking, but thought temples to Venus and Bacchus unnecessary, as mankind had “no need of artificial incitements to such amusements.”

If Stowe was the ultimate in fashionable private splendor, the Shakespeare house in Stratford-on-Avon, the next stop, was as humble as could be imagined. Told that an old wooden chair in a corner by the chimney was where the bard himself had sat, the two American tourists cut off souvenir chips, this “according to the custom,” as Adams was quick to note. But he was distressed by how little evidence remained of Shakespeare, either of the man or the miracle of his mind. “There is nothing preserved of this great genius... which might inform us what education, what company, what accident turned his mind to letters and drama,” Adams lamented. Jefferson noted only that he paid a shilling to see the house and Shakespeare's grave. But years afterward Adams would claim that Jefferson, on arriving at Stratford-on-Avon, had actually gotten down on his knees and kissed the ground.

At Edgehill, scene of the first great battle of the English civil war, and later at Worcester, the setting of Cromwell's final victory over Charles II in the year 1651, it was Adams's turn to be deeply moved. This was history he knew in detail. Here were “scenes where freemen had fought for their rights,” he wrote in his diary. Finding some of the local residents sadly ignorant of the subject, he gave them an impromptu lecture.

“And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for?” he asked. “Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground.... All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.”

To Adams it appeared his exhortation had “animated” and “pleased” his audience. What the expression may have been on Jefferson's face, there is no telling. Nor regrettably did either man write of what passed between them along the way—what they talked about mile after mile in their rocking coach, or in the evenings as they dined together, what questions were asked, what observations made on life, politics, the law, the books they loved, their families, the future of their country. It was the closest time they ever spent in each other's company and neither recorded a word about the other. But then neither wrote very much about anything, as if they had both declared a holiday from “pen work,” in Jefferson's expression.

Birmingham, where they stopped at the Swann Inn, was the most distant point of the excursion, and the famous nearby farm known as Leasowes, once the home of the poet William Shenstone, was for Jefferson the most anticipated stop of the entire journey. Jefferson had long admired Shenstone's pastoral verse, but of greater importance had been the influence of Shenstone's own highly romantic description of Leasowes on Jefferson's plans for Monticello.

Leasowes, one of the earliest of all the new-style gardens, was considerably smaller than the others, set in gentle farmland, with a view of low hills to the south and west. But Leasowes had fallen into neglect since the poet's death, and Jefferson was greatly saddened and disappointed. It was nothing like what he had imagined. “This is not even an ornamental farm,” he wrote. “It is only a grazing farm with a path around it, here and there, a seat of a board, rarely anything better. Architecture has contributed nothing.” Let Leasowes be an object lesson, he concluded. Shenstone had ruined himself financially with all he had spent on the farm, and so “died of the heartaches which debt occasioned him.” It was a lesson that Jefferson, alas, would not heed.

To Adams, on the other hand, Leasowes was preferable to anything they had seen. The small scale of the place was more to a New Englander's liking. It was “the simplest and plainest,” the “most rural of all,” and thus particularly appealing, Adams thought. “I saw no spot so small that exhibited such a variety of beauties.”

From Leasowes the travelers turned and headed south again, in the direction of London, stopping in the course of the next few days at Hagley Hall, a Palladian great house on a hill with a sweeping view somewhat like that of Monticello, Blenheim Palace at Woodstock, and then nearby Oxford, where they visited the university's botanical garden beside the river Cherwell. By nightfall, April 9, they were back in London.

According to Adams's count, they had toured twenty country places in all and he thought them high entertainment. Later, after a visit with Abigail to Pains Hill on the outskirts of London, at Surrey, where an immense ornamental park with lakes, grottoes, hermit's hut, even a facsimile tent of an Arab prince, had been created from a “heap of sand,” Adams declared it “the most striking piece of art” of any. Yet he hoped it would be a long time before such gardens ever became the fashion at home, where nature had done greater things on a nobler scale. How anyone could improve on Penn's Hill, Adams could not imagine.

• • •

IN LONDON, Jefferson resumed his shopping spree, buying, among other things, another microscope and a pair of satin “Florentine” breeches. With the three Adamses and Colonel Smith, he toured the British Museum and, at Adams's urging, sat for Mather Brown.

Commissioned by Adams, it was Jefferson's first portrait and quite unlike anything done of him thereafter. A bust by Houdon, for example, sculpted in Paris a few years later, would be Jefferson in the heroic mode, chin lifted, eyes on a distant horizon—Jefferson as frontiersman. In this by Brown he might have been the perfect European dandy, magnificent in ruffled shirt, hair dressed and powdered. He had a wistful, almost mournful expression and there were dark circles under his eyes. It was Jefferson as courtier and romantic, and while some who saw it thought it a poor likeness, the Adamses appear to have been quite pleased.

As requested, Brown would do a copy of the Jefferson portrait for them, as well as a copy of the Adams portrait for Jefferson. The original painting of Jefferson would ultimately disappear. The copy, which was hung prominently in the house on Grosvenor Square, would remain a proud possession in the Adams family for generations.

On April 26, he and Adams having accomplished nothing in the way of diplomatic progress, and with no reason to expect a change in their prospects, Jefferson said his goodbyes and departed for Paris. Officially his mission had been “fruitless.” But of Adams, Jefferson had more to say, writing from Paris to his friend Madison as he had before on the subject. The difference this time was that Jefferson seemed to go out of his way, almost apologetically, to explain how Adams, with all his faults, had won his heart.

You know the opinion I formerly entertained of my friend Mr. Adams. Yourself and the governor were the first who shook that opinion. I afterwards saw proofs which convicted him of a degree of vanity and of blindness to it, of which no germ had appeared in Congress. A 7-months' intimacy with him here and as many weeks in London have given me opportunities of studying him closely. He is vain, irritable and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can be said of him. He is as disinterested as the Being which made him: he is profound in his views, and accurate in his judgment except where knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment. He is so amiable that I pronounce you will love him if ever you become acquainted with him.

• • •

FROM THE TIME of his arrival in their lives the previous year, Colonel William Smith had impressed John and Abigail as entirely deserving of his reputation as an admirable young man of great promise. “He possesses a high sense of honor and as independent a spirit as any man I ever knew, and ... we have every reason to believe that his character will bear the strictest scrutiny,” Abigail had written earlier to Cotton Tufts. “His character is not only fair and unblemished,” she informed John Quincy, “[but] at age 21 he commanded a regiment, and through the whole war conducted with prudence and bravery and intrepidity, when armed against the foe.” She wished John Quincy to know this, because Colonel Smith was “like to become your brother.”

William Smith's interest in Nabby, and hers in him, had been apparent for months, but only after Nabby had formally broken her engagement to Royall Tyler would Abigail permit any mention of the new “connection.”

The contrast between the character of Smith and Tyler was clear enough, she stressed to John Quincy, in an effort to explain his sister's decision. Besides, had not Shakespeare observed that “a heart agitated with the remains of a former passion is most susceptible to a new one”?

Having concluded from day-to-day observation that his young secretary possessed all the qualifications necessary to make a “faithful and agreeable” companion for Nabby, John Adams left it to her to determine her own future. But Abigail spent hours with Nabby in close conversation. “I begged her to satisfy herself that she had no prepossession left in her mind and heart, and she answered me she never could be more determined!”

Abigail, however, as she confided to her sister Mary, had begun to find life increasingly empty and pointless. Her health was uneven; she was bothered by recurring rheumatism and severe headaches. She was tired of London and longed for home. When Mary apologized for filling her letters with too many Braintree “particulars,” Abigail replied, “Everything however trivial on that side of water interests me. Nothing here.” “Can there be any pleasure in mixing company where you care for no one and nobody cares for you?”

She dwelled increasingly on the fate of their brother, William, whose drinking and errant ways had been a secret worry for years and who by now, after abandoning his wife and children, had more or less disappeared. In correspondence among themselves the three sisters never referred to William by name, only as “this unhappy connection,” the “poor man,” or “our dearest relative.”

Who was looking after him, Abigail wondered. What had been different about his childhood in the Weymouth parsonage? What might be in store for her own children?

“I cannot, however, upon a retrospect of his education, refrain from thinking that some very capital mistakes were very indesignedly made,” she would tell Mary. “I say this to you who will not consider it as any reflection upon the memory of our dear parents, but only as a proof how much of the best and worthiest may err, and as some mitigation for the conduct of our deceased relatives.”

• • •

IN THE FINAL DAYS of May 1786, John Adams was called on to hurry to Amsterdam once again, to secure still another desperately needed Dutch loan for the United States.

On June 12, Adams having returned, Nabby and Colonel William Smith were married in the house on Grosvenor Square, in a small ceremony with only a few friends present—the Copleys, among others. In another few weeks bride and groom moved to a new address on Wimpole Street.

“The young couple appear to be very happy,” was all that Adams had to say, in a letter to James Warren, while to Mary Cranch, Abigail described the ceremony as too solemn and important an event for her not to have experienced “an agitation” equal to what she had felt at her own wedding. The night before the wedding, she further confided, she had dreamed of Royall Tyler, and strangely found herself feeling sorry for him.

Abigail and Nabby had been faithful companions for years, through all of John's endless absences. They had been virtually inseparable and the change now was difficult for Abigail. She had made the young couple promise to dine at Grosvenor Square every day; still, she was as “lonesome” as she had ever been. To boost her spirits she imagined a marriage between John Quincy and Patsy Jefferson, and to Jefferson playfully proposed the idea. While it was true, she wrote, that in losing her daughter she had gained a son, she already had three sons. What she needed was another daughter. “Suppose you give me Miss Jefferson and in some [fu]ture day take a son in lieu of her. I am for strengthening [the] federal union.”

At home in Massachusetts, meantime, John Quincy had been denied admission to Harvard until he completed several months of tutoring in Greek with the Reverend Shaw at Haverhill. But then in March 1786, John Quincy, too, had become a “son of Harvard.”

He must not study too hard, Adams cautioned kindly. “The smell of the midnight lamp is very unwholesome. Never defraud yourself of sleep, nor your walk. You need not now be in a hurry.” What was essential, Adams advised, was an inquisitive mind. John Quincy must get to know the most exceptional scholars and question them closely. “Ask them about their tutors; manner of teaching. Observe what books lie on their tables.... Ask them about the late war ... or fall into questions of literature, science, or what you will.”

The more Adams thought about the future of his country, the more convinced he became that it rested on education. Before any great things are accomplished, he wrote to a correspondent, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.

That his own exceptional, eldest son, with the advantages he had, could one day play a part in bringing about such a “memorable change,” he had every confidence.

When Elizabeth Shaw wrote that as agreeable as John Quincy might be in company, he could be in private conversation “a little too decisive and tenacious” in his opinions, Abigail responded with a strong letter of motherly advice to the young man. “Watchfulness over yourself was called for, lest his knowledge make him arrogant.

If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world, and obtaining a knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book but it has been supplied to you, that your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have been a blockhead.

By now Charles, too, had entered Harvard, at age fifteen. More outgoing than his older brother, Charles was thought to be too easily distracted from his studies. Where John Quincy required a warning against the perils of the midnight lamp, Charles needed reminding that such a lamp existed.

Remembering so much that went on in his own days at Harvard other than classwork and studies, Adams wrote affectionately to his second son, “You have in your nature a sociability, Charles, which is amiable, but may mislead you. A scholar is always made alone. Studies can only be pursued to good purpose by yourself. Don't let your companions then, nor your amusements, take up too much of your time.”

• • •

ADAMS WAS HIMSELF spending increasing amounts of time alone, working intently and seldom to good purpose, he felt. The impasse over the withdrawal of British troops from the American Northwest and the payment of American debts to British creditors continued. Lord Carmarthen readily agreed that by the Paris Treaty His Majesty's armed forces were to depart from the United States “with all convenient speed,” but, as he liked also to point out, the same treaty stipulated that creditors on either side “shall meet with no lawful impediment to the recovery of the full value in sterling of all bonafide debts.” “I flatter myself, however, sir,” Carmarthen told Adams, “that whenever America shall manifest a real determination to fulfill her part of the treaty, Great Britain will not hesitate to prove her sincerity.”

For Adams, who had argued emphatically at Paris for full repayment of American debt and had never deviated from that view, American reluctance, or inability, to make good on its obligations was a disgrace and politically a great mistake. When word reached London that some states, including Massachusetts, had passed laws against compliance with the treaty, Adams was appalled. Any such suspension of British debts, however colored or disguised, was a direct breach of the treaty, he wrote in a fury to Cotton Tufts, who had become a member of the Massachusetts Senate. “Our countrymen have too long trifled with public and private credit.” He would make good on all outstanding debt to British creditors, and if the British posts in America were not then immediately evacuated, he would declare war.

But he had written this when “wroth and fretted.” War was the last thing he wanted. Any war now would be calamitous for the United States and must be avoided at almost any cost, he wrote another day.

What was implicit in all “oratorical utterance” from Whitehall, Adams knew, was that to the British there was as yet no proper American government and so it would be pointless to undertake serious transactions until such existed. To Adams it was particularly offensive that the British thus far had not thought it necessary even to appoint an ambassador to the United States.

In an exchange of letters between London and Paris, meantime, he and Jefferson considered the question of whether to pay tribute to the Barbary pirates or wage war with them. Jefferson recommended war as more honorable and proposed that an American fleet be built. Adams agreed in principle and promised, “I will go all lengths with you in promoting a navy.” Like Jefferson, he detested the prospect of paying bribes. But given that there was no American navy at present and that it would be years most likely before Congress voted such a resolution, Adams thought it sensible to pay the money. “We ought not fight them at all, unless we determine to fight them forever,” he told Jefferson, who willingly deferred to Adams's judgment. Later in January 1787, they would sign a pact with Morocco, whereby the United States, like France and Britain, agreed to pay for protection.

• • •

EAGER FOR A BREAK from the doldrums of summer in London, with Parliament in recess and “everyone fled from the city,” the Adamses decided to see some of the English countryside. With Nabby and Colonel Smith, they set off for a weeklong excursion to Essex. Adams had expressed interest in visiting the village of Braintree, expecting they might find some connection with their own Braintree, but poking about in the village graveyard, he found no familiar names and the village itself was sadly disappointing, poor and “miserable.” Still, the trip was a welcome departure—and for Abigail especially—and even more welcome was the wholly unexpected journey that followed immediately afterward.

Adams was needed at The Hague to exchange ratification of the treaty with Prussia, the one European trade agreement that he and Jefferson, for all their efforts, had succeeded in accomplishing. The treaty, signed in July 1785, had been ratified only that May of 1786, so late that unless it were signed within a matter of weeks, it would expire. Since Prussia had no minister in London or Paris, but only at The Hague, Adams was needed there without delay or the treaty would come to nothing. Jefferson excused himself from attending, saying it was on too short notice.

“As this presents a good opportunity for seeing the country [Holland],” Abigail wrote happily, “I shall accompany him.” In fact, they were both extremely pleased to be going. Little could have delighted Adams more than the chance to show her the country that meant so much to him, where success had been his, where, as they both appreciated, he had helped change the course of history, and where he was still the accredited American minister, Congress having never bothered to replace him.

They were gone five weeks, stopping first at The Hague for the signing ceremony on August 8, then moving on at a pace sufficient to see just about everything—Rotterdam, Delft, Leyden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Utrecht—with Abigail supplying colorful comment in her letters. “Not a hill to be seen,” she wrote, incredulous. The people were “well-fed, well-clothed, contented,” the women notable for their beautiful complexions. (“Rouge is confined to the stage here,” she reported approvingly to Nabby.) She saw no poverty such as in Paris and London. The cities were amazingly clean and orderly. “It is very unusual to see a single square of glass broken, or a brick out of place.” Leyden was the cleanest city she had ever seen in her life; and if Braintree in Essex had failed to evoke feelings of ancestral ties, the church of the Pilgrims at Leyden more than made up for it. In its stillness, she felt the same wave of emotion that had moved Adams to tears on his first visit. At the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, by contrast, the “buzz” of business being transacted reminded her of nothing so much as “the swarming of bees.”

The reception they were given by the Dutch was warm and heartening, “striking proof, not only of their personal esteem,” Abigail wrote, “but of the ideas they entertain with respect to the Revolution which gave birth to their connection with us... The spirit of liberty appears to be all alive with them.”

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 vibrations,” 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?”

At home every state but Pennsylvania and Georgia had a bicameral legislature, and because of the obvious shortcomings of the one-house Congress under the Articles of Confederation, agreement on the need for a bicameral Congress was widespread. So to a considerable degree Adams was preaching what had become accepted doctrine at home.

Drawing on history and literature, some fifty books altogether, he examined what he called the modern democratic republics (the little Italian commonwealth of San Marino, Biscay in the Basque region of Spain, the Swiss cantons), modern aristocratic republics (Venice, the Netherlands), and the modern monarchical and regal republics (England, Poland); as well as the ancient democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical republics including Carthage, Athens, Sparta, and Rome. There were frequent citations in Latin, Greek, and French, extended use of Swift, Franklin, Dr. Price, Machiavelli, Guicciardini's Historia d'italia, Montesquieu, Plato, Milton, and Hume, in addition to scattered mentions of Aristotle, Thucydides, Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld, and Rousseau, as well as Joseph Priestley, whom Adams had lately come to know in London.

But for all this it remained at heart a lawyer's brief for what he had said in his Thoughts on Government, and what he had helped establish in practice in the Massachusetts constitution. Where it departed most notably from what he had written before was in its pronouncements on human nature.

To Adams nothing had changed about human nature since the time of the ancients. Inequities within society were inevitable, no matter the political order. Human beings were capable of great good, but also great evil. Thus it had always been and thus it would ever be. He quoted Rousseau's description of “that hideous sight, the human heart,” and recounted that even Dr. Priestley had said that such were the weaknesses and folly of men, “their love of domination, selfishness, and depravity,” that none could be elevated above others without risk of danger.

How he wished it were not so, Adams wrote. Thucydides had said the source of all evils was “a thirst of power, from rapacious and ambitious passions,” and Adams agreed. “Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power.”

As to the ideal of a nation of equals, such was impossible. “Was there, or will there ever be a nation whose individuals were all equal, in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches? The answer in all mankind must be in the negative.”

Even in America where there was “a moral and political equality of rights and duties,” there were nonetheless inequalities of wealth, education, family position, and such differences were true of all people in all times. There was inevitably a “natural aristocracy among mankind,” those people of virtue and ability who were “the brightest ornaments and the glory” of a nation, “and may always be made the greatest blessing of society, if it be judiciously managed in the constitution.” These were the people who had the capacity to acquire great wealth and make use of political power, and for all they contributed to society, they could thus become the most dangerous element in society, unless they and their interests were consigned to one branch of the legislature, the Senate, and given no executive power. Above all, the executive magistrate must have sufficient power to defend himself, and thus the people, from all the “enterprises” of the natural aristocracy.

Adams believed in a “government of laws not of men,” as he had written in his Thoughts on Government and in the Massachusetts constitution but, as he stressed now in conclusion, “The executive power is properly the government; the laws are a dead letter until an administration begins to carry them into execution.”

Through the months of work on the Defence, Adams knew it was time to wind things up in London. He had achieved nothing in his diplomatic role and could expect no improvement in his prospects. Within weeks after the first copies of his Defence were ready at the printer, he had written to John Jay to ask that he be recalled. So while noble in intent, the Defence may also have been partly intended as a way of reintroducing himself to his countrymen and influencing the debate on the Constitution. And however apprehensive he may have been over what the reaction might be, he moved ahead without pause, working on two more installments.

In February came warm praise from Paris. “I have read your book with infinite satisfaction and improvement,” wrote Jefferson. It would do “great good,” he predicted. “Its learning and its good sense will I hope make it an institute for our politicians, old as well as young.”

Such approbation was “vast consolation,” Adams responded, conceding that it had been a “hazardous” and “hasty” enterprise, and that he was pursuing it further. There were just two aspects of life in Europe that he regretted leaving. One was access to books, the other was “intimate correspondence with you, which is one of the most agreeable events in my life.”

In time came more praise and approval. From Philadelphia, where the Constitutional Convention had assembled, Benjamin Rush, a member of the Convention, wrote that the Defence had “diffused such excellent principles among us, that there is little doubt of our adopting a vigorous and compound federal legislature.” James Madison, who had taken the lead in drafting the so-called Virginia Plan, providing for three equal branches in the new government, and who had seldom ever had anything complimentary to say about Adams, declared in a letter to Jefferson that while men of learning would find nothing new in the book, it was certain to be “a powerful engine in forming public opinion,” and, in fact, had “merit.”

But as both John and Abigail had anticipated, there were others who perceived dark intent in what he had written. Cotton Tufts warned that there were people sowing discord, claiming Adams was all for monarchy and planned to put an English prince on a throne in America. In Virginia, the president of the College of William and Mary, a cousin of Madison's, the Reverend James Madison, saw a “secret design” in the book—that Adams, under the influence of a foreign Court, was “plotting” to overturn the American government.

• • •

LATE THAT SUMMER of 1787, in Philadelphia, the Constitutional Convention was nearing the completion of its efforts. In Paris parading mobs and incidents of public disrespect for the royal family had caught many by surprise, including the American ambassador. Suddenly all tongues had been let loose in Paris, Jefferson reported excitedly to Adams. There were placards all over the city, and though the mobs had ceased, the Queen had received a “general hiss” while attending the theater. “The King, long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, plunges deeper and deeper; the Queen cries out, but sins on.”

• • •

WHEN COPIES of the new Constitution of the United States, signed at Philadelphia on September 17, reached London that autumn, Adams read it “with great satisfaction.” He would have preferred more power in the presidency than provided—particularly the authority to make presidential appointments without Senate approval. But of greater concern was the absence of a bill of rights, in the spirit of what he had written for the constitution of Massachusetts.

“What think you of a Declaration of Rights? Should not such a thing have preceded the model?” Adams wrote straight off to Jefferson.

Writing from Paris a few days later, before receiving Adams's letter, Jefferson said nothing about a bill of rights, only that there were “things” in the Constitution that “stagger all my dispositions to subscribe” to it.

His great concern was the office of the President, which, as conceived, struck him as “a bad edition of a Polish king.

He may be reelected from four years to four years for life.... Once in office, and possessing the military force of the union, without either the aid or check of a council, he would not be easily dethroned, even if the people could be induced to withdraw their votes from him. I wish that at the end of the four years, they made him ever ineligible a second time.

Here was the difference between them, Adams replied prophetically. “You are afraid of the one, I, the few. We agree perfectly that the many should have full, fair, and perfect representation [in the House]. You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.”

He was not so concerned about a President staying long in office, Adams said, as he was about too frequent elections, which often brought out the worst in people and increased the chances of foreign influence.

While Jefferson would have much to say about the Constitution and the need for a bill of rights in subsequent private correspondence with Madison, he made no public statement for the time being, whereas Adams sent off a strong endorsement to John Jay that was to be widely quoted at home. As once he had seen the Declaration of Independence uniting the different and often disputatious states in common cause, Adams now saw the Constitution as the best means possible “to cement all America in affection and interest as one great nation.” Indeed, if there was a consistent theme in all that Adams wrote and strived for, it was the need for a binding American union.

The public mind cannot be occupied about a nobler object than the proposed plan of government. It appears to be admirably calculated to cement all America in affection and interest as one great nation. A result of accommodation and compromise cannot be supposed perfectly to coincide with any one's ideas of perfection. But as all the great principles necessary to order, liberty, and safety are respected in it, and provision is made for corrections and amendments as they may be found necessary, I confess I hope to hear of its adoption by all the states.

On December 6, writing to Jefferson, Adams reported that at last his recall had been approved by Congress, “and how we say at sea, ‘Huzza for the new world and farewell to the old one.’ ”

• • •

FOR THE SECOND and, she hoped, the last time in her life, Abigail was making arrangements to cross the North Atlantic, and with hardly less apprehension than the time before.

There was a great accumulation of clothes, books, china, and furniture to pack, a York rosebush she was determined to take. The furniture included pieces purchased originally for the houses at Amsterdam and The Hague. There was a four-post Dutch bed, a great Dutch chest with heavy brass pulls and claw feet, tables of different sizes, a set of six cushioned Louis XV chairs and a settee, these with delicate floral carvings. Adams's desk, a beautiful French escritoire of veneered satinwood and ebony, which he had bought in Paris after the war, was his particular pride and joy.

All were considerably finer, more elegant pieces than the Adamses had ever owned in years past and would have looked quite out of place in the farmhouse at Braintree. But, as they now knew, they were not to reside in the old homestead. Through Cotton Tufts, Adams had arranged the purchase of what was known as “the Vassall-Borland place,” which Adams had had his eye on for years and which, in memory, seemed quite grand. Built more than fifty years before, about 1731, as the summer villa of a wealthy sugar planter from the West Indies, Leonard Vassall, the house had stood empty through much of the war, after Vassall's daughter, the widow Borland, a Loyalist, fled to England. When Adams heard the place was available, he made his decision. Located on the coast road, on the north side of town, the property included house, farm buildings, and some eighty acres at a purchase price of 600 pounds. Adams envisioned it as the ideal setting for his retirement.

There were friends in London for Abigail to say goodbye to, last letters to get off to her sisters, and to John Quincy, who, having finished Harvard, was now studying law and not very pleased about it. When Mary Cranch wrote to report that their brother William had died, Abigail was devastated.

Reflection on such bad news was too painful for her, she wrote in reply. Nor was there time for reflection. Her maid, Esther Field, had discovered with an astonishment equal nearly to Abigail's own, that she was pregnant with the child of the ever-faithful footman, John Briesler, and both wished to be married before sailing for home.

The first week in February, Adams paid a final call at Whitehall. On February 20, he had his “audience of leave” with George III, who in parting said, “Mr. Adams, you may with great truth, assure the United States that whenever they shall fulfill the treaty on their part, I, on my part, will fulfill it in all its particulars.” More than this, however, Adams was to remember the King's graciousness toward him.

Then, out of the blue and to his utter dismay, Adams was called on to make one last emergency trip to Holland, and in the worst possible season to cross the North Sea. It was essential that he take formal leave of his ambassadorial post there, he was informed, and to secure yet another loan, this to enable the United States to make its payments on earlier loans from the Dutch.

To Adams the journey was punishment for sins unknown. The single consolation was that Jefferson was to meet him at Amsterdam. Together they succeeded with the Dutch bankers and in high spirits agreed that when the time came that Adams was at last on his way to heaven, he would surely have first to negotiate another Dutch loan. It was the last time they ever collaborated in a public matter.

To Abigail, Jefferson had written, “I have considered you while in London as my neighbor, and look forward to the moment of your departure from thence as to an epoch of much regret and concern to me.... My daughters join me in affectionate adieus. Polly does not cease to speak of you with warmth and gratitude. Heaven send you, Madam, a pleasant and safe passage.”

It was a charming letter of the kind at which Jefferson excelled and that by now he was writing to a number of women within his Paris circle who, in addition to Maria Cosway, included Anne Bingham and another equally striking American, Angelica Church, as well as several Frenchwomen of note, all of whom, interestingly, were married.

Writing to Jefferson “in the midst of the bustle and fatigue of packing,” Abigail said simply and sincerely that she could not leave without sending “a few lines to my much esteemed friend, to thank him for all his kindness and friendship towards myself and family.”

• • •

THE AMERICAN MINISTER, his wife, and two American servants departed London for the last time on Sunday, March 30, 1788, by coach for Portsmouth, where they were to sail on the American ship Lucretia, bound for Boston. The Smiths, with their infant son, were to sail on another ship for New York, the temporary federal capital, where Colonel Smith planned to pursue his career.

“Mr. Adams, the late envoy from the American states, set off for Portsmouth on Sunday last, to embark for his return,” read a small item in the Whitehall Evening Post. “That gentleman settled all his concerns with great honor; and whatever his political tenets may have been, he was much respected and esteemed in this country.”

Because of bad weather, it was another three weeks before the Adamses were truly under way.

As Abigail fervently wished, she and John were never to see England or Europe again. Henceforth, she wrote on board in her diary, she would be quite content to learn what more there was to know of the world from the pages of books.

Adams is not known to have recorded any of his thoughts during the voyage home, but earlier he had said his great desire was “to lay fast of the town of Braintree and embrace it with both arms and all my might. There live, there to die, there to lay my bones, and there to plant one of my sons in the profession of law and the practices of agriculture, like his father.”

Only Nabby, it seems, strongly objected. Their father had still more to do for his country, she had written to John Quincy.

By his opinions, advice, and recommendations, he has, I believe, in his power to do as much, perhaps the most, towards establishing her character as a respectable nation of any man in America—and shall he retire from the world and bury himself amongst his books, and live only for himself? No—I wish it not.... The Americans in Europe say he will be elected Vice President. Besides, my brother, independent of other considerations, he would not, I am well convinced, be happy in private life.

John Adams was fifty-two. Except for the few months he had spent in Massachusetts in 1778, he had been away for ten years. In that time he had traveled thousands of miles in France, Spain, the Netherlands, and England; he had repeatedly crossed the English Channel and the North Sea; and his voyage home now marked his fourth crossing of the Atlantic. Altogether by land and sea he journeyed more than 29,000 miles, farther than any leading American of his time in the service of his country, never once refusing to go because of difficulties or unseasonable conditions, or something else that he would have preferred to do.

He had first sailed for Europe in the midst of war. He was returning now after more than five years of peace. For him personally, the homeward passage marked as clear an end to one chapter of his life, and the beginning of another, as had his initial voyage out. The intervening years in Europe had been as memorable and important, he felt, as any in his life.

Through the first years in France, for all his troubles with Franklin, he had worked steadily with the old patriot and often with telling effect. That he had pressed doggedly for a greater part in the war by the French navy would stand as one of his own proudest efforts, and with reason, given what happened at Yorktown.

With his success obtaining Dutch loans at the critical hour of the Revolution, he felt, as did others, that he had truly saved his country. That he had embarked on such an unprecedented mission on his own initiative, that he had undertaken his own one-man diplomatic campaign knowing nothing initially of the country, its language, and with no prior contacts or friendships to call upon, and yet carried through to his goal, were simply extraordinary and a measure of his almost superhuman devotion to the American cause.

His part in the Paris Peace Treaty would stand the test of time, Adams believed, as much as anything he had ever done. If the years and effort at London had come to naught, he at least knew he had given devoted service, conducting himself with consistent aplomb and dedication. No one could fault him for a false step. Nor could it be imagined that another of his countrymen in the same role could have done better.

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.”