Episode 2.12 The Second First Lady

[Transcript]

Hello, and welcome to America’s First Ladies. I’m your host, Risa Weaver-Enion

Episode 2.12 The Second First Lady

We left off last week in May 1797, as Abigail finally arrived in Philadelphia to take up her post as First Lady. I’m going to start off with a quote from Edith Gelles’s book Abigail Adams: A Writing Life so you can get a sense of what the Adamses were up against:

“What had worked for the Washingtons was not transferable to the Adamses, because such practices were based too strongly on the reputation and the style of the first president and lady. … Nor was it clear that the new experiment in government that had successfully worked for the Washingtons would survive after them. The efficacy of the new Constitution, in fact of the democratic experiment, would be demonstrated by their immediate successors.”

Abigail and John had a tough act to follow, and they knew it. Abigial actually wrote to Martha Washington, seeking advice on being First Lady. She wanted to know how she could emulate her “most amiable predecessor [who had been] exemplary and irreproachable.” Mrs. Washington replied with a pretty classic non-answer, “Within yourself, you posses a guide more certain than any I can give.”

Of having to follow George Washington into office, Abigail wrote to John Quincy that Washington had several advantages over John: “first a unanimous Choice. Secondly personally known to more people by having commanded their Armies than any other man. Thirdly possessed of a Large Landed Estate. Fourthly refusing all emoluments of office both in his military and civil capacity. Take his character all together, and we shall not look upon his like again.”

She believed that John was up to the task, writing “What is the expected Lot of a Successor? He must be armed as Washington was by integrity, by firmness, by intrepidity. These must be his shield, and his wall of Brass. And with Religion to, or he will never be able to stand sure and steadfast.”

As she had during her time abroad, Abigial provided a detailed and constant look at their life via her letters to her sister Mary. Shortly after arriving in Philadelphia, she wrote, “The task of the President is very arduous, very perplexing, and very hazardous. I do not wonder Washington wished to retire from it, or rejoiced in seeing an old oak in his place.”

She also relied on Mary to send regular shipments of John’s favorite New England cheese, bacon, white potatoes, and cider. They rose at 5 am and had breakfast at 8 am. Abigail spent the hours in between writing letters and dealing with other tasks. She and John usually didn’t see each other again after breakfast until dinner at 3 pm. Abigail devoted at least two hours every day to receiving company. She often went for a long carriage ride in the evenings until sunset.

In one letter to Mary she described a particularly busy day, “The day is past, and a fatiguing one it has been. The ladies of Foreign Ministers and the Ministers, with our own secretaries and ladies have visited me today, and add to them, the whole levée today of Senate and House. Strangers, etc. making near one hundred asked permission to visit me, so that from past 12 till near 4:00, I was rising up and sitting down.”

The one issue that would consume John’s entire term as president was the possibility of war with various European countries. Washington had used his farewell address to warn against foreign entanglements, and John intended to keep out of them. 

Arguably the biggest mistake John made as president was retaining Washington’s cabinet instead of choosing his own. All the original cabinet members had left before the end of Washington’s two terms, and when he departed the presidency, the cabinet consisted of Oliver Wollcot Jr. as Secretary of the Treasury, James McHenry as Secretary of War, Timothy Pickering as Secretary of State, and Charles Lee as Attorney General. To clarify, this is not the same Charles Lee who served as a general in the Revolutionary War and had a pack of dogs, one of whom had shaken paws with Abigail many years ago. This Charles Lee was part of the great Lee family of Virginia.

Wollcot and McHenry both owed their posts to the influence of Alexander Hamilton, and they, along with Pickering, were known as High Federalists. In addition to the division between the Federalists and the Republicans, within the Federalists was a further division. The High Federalists were rabidly anti-French and pro-British, and Hamilton was their leader. Their loyalty would never be to John Adams, but it took him way, way too long to realize that.

Toward the end of his term, Washington had sent Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to France as ambassador to the new government there, a five-man group known as the Directory. John wanted to send two more men and make a bipartisan committee of three. He would have preferred to send Jefferson, but he knew that made no sense. Jefferson wrote that “It did not seem justifiable for him to send away the person destined to take his place in case of an accident to himself, nor decent to remove from consideration one who was a rival for public favor.”

John’s next choices were Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, with whom he had been friends for many years, and James Madison of Virginia. Jefferson didn’t think Madison would go, and he was right, but it was a moot point anyway, because when he asked his Cabinet what they thought, they were appalled at the idea of sending a Republican to France. 

This all happened in early March 1797, around the time of the inauguration. On March 13, John learned that the Directory had insulted Pinckney and America by refusing to accept his credentials and ordering him out of the country. To make matters worse, French ships were firing upon and seizing American ships on the high seas.

Pinckney retreated to Amsterdam to await further instructions. When word of this reached America, many were clamoring for war with France. John still wanted to send two additional men to France to join Pinckney. He wanted John Marshall, a Virginia lawyer, and Francis Dana, his former secretary from the years in the Netherlands and Paris. 

But Dana was too ill to travel, so John went back to his original idea of Elbridge Gerry. The Cabinet was opposed to Gerry because they thought he was too independent, but John insisted, because he and Gerry had been friends for many years, and he knew Gerry was someone he could trust implicitly, even though Gerry had not been in favor of the Constitution and was not part of the Federalist party.

All of this took up most of the spring of John’s first year as president. The Fourth of July was approaching, and they were required to host a grand celebration. One of the few times Abigail ever criticized George Washington was when she told her sister that he shouldn’t have imposed this costly precedent on his less wealthy successors. 

I should remind you here that John’s salary as president was close to $1 million in today’s money, and they owned at least five residences: a house in Boston, the mansion at Peacefield, the Veasey farmhouse, the house they had lived in when they were first married, and the house John had been born in. Plus they owned an untold amount of government securities and many hundreds of acres of land. Honestly, they probably had more wealth than George Washington at this point.

Just before the holiday, Abigail wrote to Mary, “Today will be the fifth great dinner I have had, about 36 gentlemen today, as many more next week, and I shall have to get through the whole of Congress, with their appendages. Then comes the 4th of July, which is a still more tedious day, as we must then have not only all Congress, but all the gentlemen of the city, the Governor and officers and companies.”

After the celebrations, she wrote, “my fatigue arose chiefly from being dressed at an early hour, and receiving the very numerous sets of company who were so polite as to pay their compliments to me in succession in my drawing room after visiting the President below, and partaking of cake, wine, and punch with him. To my company were added the ladies of foreign ministers and Home Secretaries with a few others. The parade lasted from 12 until four o’clock.”

With this official duty out of the way and Congress adjourned on July 10, the Adamses were finally able to leave Philadelphia on July 19 and head home to Quincy for a summer break. Although Abigail and John wouldn’t get this news for several months, John Quincy got married on July 26 in London. 

He had been courting a young lady named Louisa Catherine Johnson. She was the daughter of a wealthy American merchant from Maryland named Joshua Johnson and his English wife, Catherine Nuth. The Johnsons lived in London because Joshua was serving as the American consul there. John Quincy and Louisa were married in an Anglican church near the Tower of London.

Abigail and John left Quincy the first week of October, but along their journey they received word that yellow fever was raging in the capital city. So they went to East Chester to visit Nabby and wait out the epidemic. William Smith had once again left the family behind while he pursued money-making schemes, this time in the far western reaches of America.

The Adamses finally returned to Philadelphia in November and resumed their official duties. There had still been no word from the commission sent to France, but in February 1798 a report from them finally arrived, and it caused quite a ruckus.

The situation would come to be known as the XYZ Affair. I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible. The French Foreign Minister was a man named Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, known as Tallyrand, which I’m going to Americanize to the usual Tallyrand. Tallyrand sent three French representatives to meet with the three American commissioners. The three Frenchmen demanded a personal bribe of $250,000 for Tallyrand, plus a loan to France of $10-12 million just to begin discussions. The three men were not named in official dispatches, being labeled only as X, Y, and Z.

Rumors about what had happened with the commission in France were rife, and the newspapers were publishing their usual exaggerations and outright lies. The public did not yet know what the truth was, and it seemed that half the country was rabidly supporting the president and the other half was ready to put his head on a pike.

The Republicans in Congress were calling for the text of the dispatches to be released, not realizing how bad this would be for them. Some Federalists in Congress knew what was actually in the dispatches, so they joined with their opponents and the House voted 65 to 27 to release them. After the public realized just how damning the evidence was against France, Abigail gleefully reported to Mary that the Republicans were “struck dumb and opened not their mouths.”

In April 1798, Congress finally started making preparations for a potential war with France. They appropriated funds to arm merchant ships, fortify harbors, and start building ships for an actual Navy, which America still didn’t have. A bill for a provisional army of 10,000 men was passed, even though John hated the idea of a standing army. A new Cabinet level Department of the Navy was created, with Benjamin Stoddert of Maryland being appointed as the first Secretary of the Navy.

The Adamses were enjoying unprecedented popularity. People passing Abigail on the street would bow or tip their hats, which had never happened before, because Philadelphia was a notoriously Republican city, despite being the capital. Abigail told Mary, “People begin to see who have been their firm unshaken friends, steady to their interests and defenders of their rights and liberties.”

Abigail kept Mary informed throughout this crisis, telling her far too much, most of which was confidential and today would be considered classified. “I fear we shall be driven to War, but to defend ourselves is our duty. War the French have made upon us a long time.” She was referring to the fact that French ships had been attacking American ships for some months. The Americans were fighting back now, and winning, even though no war had been declared.

In another letter, referring to the coded dispatches Elbridge Gerry was sending from France, she wrote, “I cannot say what Congress mean to do. The dispatches are but just decypherd. Whether the President will think proper to make any further communications is more than he himself can yet determine.”

John had not asked Congress for a declaration of war, nor did he want to. His preference was to resolve the conflict through diplomacy. After all, he had served as a diplomat for years, and he believed negotiating and talking were the way forward. He wrote, “I should be happy in the friendship of France upon honorable condition, under any government she may choose to assume.”

The Republicans in Congress and the Republican press acted as though he actually had declared war against France. Jefferson thought the capital was under the spell of witches (not literally, I assume), and considered his former friend John to be of “the war party.” He thought a navy was a colossal waste of money.

Gangs wandered the streets, wearing the tri-color red, white, and blue cockade in their hats if they supported France, and black cockades if they supported America’s President. A cockade was a knot of ribbons or a circular colored piece of fabric that could be tucked into a hat to show one’s political affiliation. Washington’s troops had worn black ones during the Revolution, which is why black was the color that the government’s supporters wore. The fact that the French, British, and American flags all use the same colors probably necessitated the use of black by the Revolutionaries.

Fights broke out between supporters of different sides, and it became dangerous to walk at night. Jefferson wrote to his daughter Martha, “Politics and party hatreds destory the happiness of every being here.” A Frenchman in Philadelphia said it seemed like the Americans expected a French army to land at any moment, “Everybody was suspicious of everybody else; everywhere one saw murderous glances.”

Newspaper publishers’ houses were vandalized, and John even had to have a sentry stand guard outside the President’s House. In June, John received a stunning letter from William Vans Murray, who was America’s ambassador to the Netherlands, John Quincy having been named as ambassador to Prussia. Murray wrote that Pinckney and Marshall had left Paris because Tallyrand wanted to negotiate with Gerry alone.

Abigail conveyed all of this to Mary, “Can it be possible, can it be believed that Tallyrand has thus declared and fascinated Mr. Gerry? I cannot credit it, yet I know the sin which most easily besets him is obstinacy, and a mistaken policy. You may easily suppose how distressed the President is at this conduct, and the more so because he thought Gerry would certainly not go wrong, and he acted on his own judgment, against his counsellors. Gerry means the good of his country, but he should consider it must not be purchased by national disgrace and dishonor. If he stays behind he is a ruined man in the estimation of his country.”

Even Abigail seems to have realized that she really shouldn’t be putting all this in a personal letter to her sister, adding, “This is all between ourselves. You will be particularly reserved upon this subject.”

In June, John Marshall returned home to America, bringing with him more context surrounding the Gerry-Tallyrand situation. He told John that Gerry had remained behind only because Tallyrand had told him there would be war if he left. Gerry knew he would be excoriated at home for it, but he stayed for the good of his country.

This exactly fit with the Elbridge Gerry that John had known for decades, and immediately made him back away from any thoughts of asking for a declaration of war.

The country, including Abigail, was still clamoring for war, and if John had asked Congress for a declaration, he almost certainly would have gotten it. But instead, Congress passed, and John signed, some of the most infamous legislation in United States history, The Alien and Sedition Acts.

I’m going to let David McCullough give you the relevant context for these laws,

“There was rampant fear of the enemy within. French emigrés in America, according to the French consul in Philadelphia, by now numbered 25,000 or more. Many were aristocrats who had fled the Terror; but the majority were refugees from the slave uprisings on the Caribbean island of San Domingo. In Philadelphia a number of French newspapers had been established. There were French booksellers, French schools, French boardinghouses, and French restaurants. The French, it seemed, were everywhere, and who was to measure the threat they posed in the event of war with France?”

And besides all this, there were French spies operating in America, but as is usually the case with spies, one never knew who was a spy and who was just a French emigré looking for a better life.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were actually four different laws. There were three that together made up the Alien Acts:

The Naturalization Act increased the required period of residence to qualify for citizenship from five years to 14 years. The Alien Friends Act allowed the President to imprison and deport any foreigners he considered to be dangerous. The Alien Enemies Act gave the President additional powers to detain foreigners during times of war or invasion. 

As McCullough writes, “Jefferson and others imagined a tempestuous John Adams expelling foreigners by the shipload. As it was, they need not have worried. Adams never invoked the law and this despite the urging of Secretary of State Pickering, who did indeed favor massive deportations.”

The Sedition Act was a blatant infringement of the freedoms of speech and of the press enshrined in the First Amendment. It criminalized any “False, scandalous, and malicious” writing against the Government, Congress, or the President, or any attempt “to excite against them…the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition.” The punishment was a fine and imprisonment.

Federalists in Congress who supported the Sedition Act claimed that the infringement of the First Amendment was okay because it was a war measure. But if you read the First Amendment, you’ll see that it makes no exceptions, not even for war. And besides that, no war had been declared. The Sedition Act was unconstitutional on its face, and one thinks that Congress and President Adams had to know that.

Quite possibly the number one supporter of the Sedition Act was Abigail Adams. She had hated the press for a long time, primarily because they printed a LOT of lies, and many of those lies were about people she knew. Months before the Sedition Act passed, she was speaking out against the press. 

“Daringly do the vile incendiaries keep up in their papers the most wicked and base, violent and [calumnous] abuse. Nothing will have an Effect until Congress pass a Sedition Bill. The wrath of the public ought to fall upon their devoted Heads. This would contribute much to the Peace and harmony of our Country as any measure, and in times like the present, a more careful and attentive watch ought to be kept over foreigners. The greater part of the abuse leveld at the Government is from foreigners. Every Jacobin paper in the United States is Edited by a Foreigner. What a disgrace to our Country.”

Clearly she supported the Alien Acts too. Not a good look, Abigail, not good at all.

The other matter of importance that happened in the summer of 1798 in preparation for the possibility of war with France was that John asked George Washington to once again lead the army. We discussed this briefly in episode 1.11. Washington accepted, saying that he would only take the field if France actually invaded the United States, which it never did.

The Adamses left Philadelphia in July 1798 after Congress adjourned and just as another yellow fever epidemic was brewing. The epidemic of 1798 was second only to the epidemic of 1793 in its deadliness. On their way home, they stopped in East Chester to pick up Nabby and her children and bring them to Quincy for a visit.

Abigail was ill when they left Philadelphia, complaining that the extreme heat prevented her from eating, sleeping, reading, or writing. Just breathing was a chore. By the time they arrived at Peacefield on August 8, she was so sick and feverish, she was immediately confined to her bed. She stayed there for the next 11 weeks, and the doctors thought she might die. It’s likely that she had amoebic dysentery, complicated by an intermittent fever brought on by a recurrence of malaria. 

John stayed in Quincy longer than he ordinarily would have, until November, to be with Abigail until the worst of her illness was behind her and she had begun a slow road to recovery.

In October, while John was still in Quincy, Elbridge Gerry arrived into Boston. Three days later, he and John met for a debriefing. John accepted Gerry’s version of events, which comported with what he had heard from John Marshall back in June. John decided to send another ambassador to negotiate with Tallyrand, but only after receiving assurances that the Directory would receive his credentials and accept him as a representative of the United States.

On November 12, John went back to Philadelphia, leaving Abigail behind to finish her recovery. He took Abigail’s niece Louisa Smith with him to serve as hostess in Abigail’s absence. He also returned Nabby to East Chester, depriving Abigail of her two most valued companions. She celebrated a rather melancholy Thanksgiving with two neighbors and her old nursemaid Phoebe, who still lived in the house where she and John had lived when they were first married. 

She wrote to John, “This is our Thanksgiving day. It is usually a day of festivity when the Social Family circle meet together. No Husband dignifies my Board, no Children add gladness to it, no Smiling Grandchildren Eyes to sparkle for the plumb pudding. Solitary and alone I behold the day after a sleepless night, without a joyous feeling.”

When John arrived in Philadelphia on November 24, he was greeted with the very welcome news that Britain’s Admiral Horatio Nelson had defeated the French at the Battle of the Nile on August 1. A large portion of the French fleet had been destroyed, making a French invasion of the U.S. much less of a worry.

The High Federalists, Hamilton chief among them, were still clamoring for war. Washington had chosen Hamilton as his second-in-command of the army, and since no one seriously expected the aging George Washington to engage in battle, Hamilton was widely expected to be leading the army if it came to war. 

On February 18, 1799, John pulled the rug out from under the High Federalists and Hamilton, sending a message to Congress that read, “Always disposed and ready to embrace every plausible appearance of probability of preserving or restoring tranquility, I nominate William Vans Murray, our minister at the Hague, to be minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the French republic.”

John had received back-channel information that the Directory would be amenable to receiving a new American ambassador. His untrustworthy Cabinet, who had been working with Hamilton behind his back to stoke the clamor for war, had not been consulted on this new diplomatic overture, and they were stunned. They proposed adding two more men to the diplomatic commission and delaying until fall, which John agreed to. Oliver Ellsworth, currently serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and William Davie, the Governor of North Carolina, were added to the commission.

This bombshell dropped, John left Philadelphia to return to Quincy in March, concluding that he could conduct the business of the presidency as easily from there as from Philadelphia. He stayed in Quincy until September, outraging his critics and unsettling the public. His friends warned that he could be doing a lot of damage to his reputation by staying away from the capital for so long.

John refused to budge, literally and figuratively. Congress wasn’t even in session through the summer and most of the fall, so he felt justified in staying away. On August 5 he received a dispatch from Secretary of State Pickering containing a letter from Tallyrand dated May 12. Tallyrand assured the president that the American envoys would be received and accorded the proper respect.

John instructed Pickering to take immediate action to send the commissioners to Paris, but it would still be November before they left. In September, John received multiple letters from Secretary of the Navy Stoddert that he really needed to get to Trenton, New Jersey, where the government had set up emergency headquarters to escape yet another yellow fever outbreak. Stoddert warned “that artful designing men might make such use of your absense [and] make your next election less honorable than it otherwise would be.”

John left soon after receiving this letter, but Abigail stayed behind to finalize some arrangements before re-joining him. She had regained much of her health and was ready to travel again. On his way to Trenton, John stopped in East Chester to see Nabby and her family. Charles’s wife Sally and their two young daughters were staying with Nabby. Little Susanna was now three, and in 1798 Sally had given birth to a second child named Abigail Louisa, called Abbe.  John was shocked to learn from Sally that Charles had disappeared, was bankrupt, and was an alcoholic. It was like an echo of Abigail’s black sheep brother, William.

He informed Abigail of these developments via letter, but as with most sensitive subjects, neither one of them wrote much about it. Abigail did mention it in some of her letters to her sister Mary, but never referred to Charles by name. “Any calamity inflicted by the hand of Providence, it would become me in silence to submit to, but when I behold misery and distress, disgrace and poverty brought upon a family by intemperance, my heart bleeds at every pore.”

For his part, John grumbled to Abigail that George Washington must be “Happy Washington! Happy to be Childless! My Children give me more pain than all my Enemies.” Abigail replied, “I do not consider GW at all a happier man because he has not children. If he has none to give him pain, he has none to give him pleasure.” If only John knew how much trouble Jack Custis had given George during his school years, he might have had a different appraisal of the situation.

Abigail was not far behind John, and she also stopped in East Chester on her way south. By November, she and John, along with the rest of the government, were back in Philadelphia. The commissioners to Paris sailed on November 15. The following month, on December 17, word reached Philadelphia that George Washington had died at home on the 14th. The city and the country went into mourning.

In a formal message to the Senate, John wrote that the nation had lost “her most esteemed, beloved, and admired citizen. … I feel myself alone, bereaved of my last brother.” Abigail wrote to Mary, “No Man ever lived, more deservedly beloved and Respected. History will not produce to us a Parallel. Heaven has seen fit to take him from us.”

A memorial service was held in Philadelphia, and thousands of mourners lined the streets. Abigail and John attended the service from 11 am until 4 pm and then opened the President’s House to visitors. 

Abigail wrote to Mary, “Last Fridays drawing room was the most crowded of any I ever had. The Ladies Grief did not deprive them of taste in ornamenting their white dresses; 2 yards of Black mode in length, of the narrow kind pleated upon one shoulder, crossed the Back in the form of a Military sash tyed at the side, crossed the petticoat and hung to the bottom of it.”

Washington’s death brought the 1700s to a close. With the fate of the negotiations in France hanging in the balance and with the looming election of 1800 on everyone’s minds, the next year would bring a lot of drama. And we’ll cover it all next week!

Thanks for listening to this episode. It was produced by me, and the music is by Matthew Dull.