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Thomas, who had been quite taken with Louisa Catherine, wrote to his mother of her “sprightliness and vivacity.” Even when “in only tolerable health,” Thomas said, “her spirits are abundant.” But she was not in tolerable health at Quincy, and her spirits were far from abundant. As she herself recalled, she was “cold and reserved, and seldom spoke which was deemed pride.” Everyone wanted to please her and at meals particularly, but the more she was fussed over, the more she resented it.
I had a separate dish set by me of which no one was to partake; and every delicate preserve was brought out to treat me with in the kindest manner... and though I felt very grateful, it appeared so strongly to stamp me with unfitness that often I would not eat my delicacy, and thus gave offense. Mrs. Adams was too kind.... Louisa Smith was jealous to excess, and the first day that I arrived, left the table crying and sobbing, and could not be induced to eat any dinner.
Abigail's impressions, written at the time, express concern rather than disapproval. The young woman seemed so terribly frail and suffered such a racking cough that Abigail feared for her life. “Her frame is so slender and her constitution so delicate that I have many fears that she will be of short duration.”
Except for “the old gentleman's” obvious approval of Louisa Catherine, it was not an auspicious beginning. Abigail found it impossible to ignore the “weight of worry” that had been added to John Quincy's brow.
Louisa Catherine was twenty-six years old, John Quincy thirty-four. In the time he had been away, his hair had greatly thinned, which made him look older, and he did indeed have a serious expression most of the time. With age he was looking more like his father than he had, and there was no mistaking his extraordinary intelligence. But he was less ardent, less spontaneous than his father. He had little of Adams's passion for life or his humor.
By Christmas the young family had moved into their new home in Boston. John Quincy worried over expenses, worried that his parents might find themselves with too little money. Finding it difficult to get started again in the law, feeling like a stranger, and bored with what work he had, he toyed with the thought of giving it up and striking out for a life of “rustic independence” in the wilds of upstate New York, an idea encouraged by his brother-in-law Colonel Smith and that appealed at once to brother Thomas. “I am your man for a new country,” Thomas affirmed, convinced that his own legal career in Philadelphia was going nowhere. That neither of them was the least prepared or suited for such a venture seems not to have occurred to them.
But the impulse passed as John Quincy began to feel more at home in Boston and acquired a circle of friends. And whatever prior aversion to politics he had had, or that his parents may have expressed, he was very soon involved. “Walked in the mall just before night,” he recorded in his diary on January 28, 1802. “I feel a strong temptation and have great provocation to plunge into political controversy.” Then he wrote, “A politician in this country must be the man of a party. I would fain be the man of my whole country.”
In April 1802, less than four months after settling in the city, John Quincy was elected to the Massachusetts Senate. The following November, he ran as a Federalist candidate for Congress and lost, but by less than 100 votes. He had become a rising star. In February 1803, at age thirty-five, John Quincy Adams was elected a United States senator, a victory made all the sweeter by the fact that his opponent was Timothy Pickering.
In the meantime, he could not have been a more dutiful son, riding out to Quincy to be with his parents nearly every weekend. He kept his father supplied with books and encouraged him to undertake an autobiography, which Adams, with some reluctance, began in October 1802, with Part I, titled “John Adams.”
But it was the following spring, in 1803, just after he had been elected to the Senate, that John Quincy came to the rescue of his father and mother as no one else could have.
Partly on his advice, most of what John and Abigail had managed to save over the years—some $13,000—had been invested with the London banking house of Bird, Savage & Bird, bankers for the United States Treasury. It had seemed an entirely prudent step. But in 1803, the house of Bird, Savage & Bird collapsed, leaving the Adamses on the brink of ruin.
At once, John Quincy stepped in to save them. “The error of judgment was mine,” he wrote, “and therefore I shall not refuse to share in the suffering.” By selling his house in Boston, drawing on his own savings, and borrowing, he was able to proceed slowly to buy up his parents' property, ultimately paying them what they had lost, while they retained title to the land for life.
To their joy, he also announced that he would move to Quincy with his family, which by the summer of 1803 included a newborn second son, this one named John Adams. The plan was to live in the house where John Quincy had been born. But by September he and his family were off to Washington.
• • •
TO THE GREAT SURPRISE of those who had predicted nothing but dire consequences should Thomas Jefferson ever rise to the presidency, the advent of Jefferson in the President's House turned out to be far from a radical upheaval, or a second Revolution, as he claimed.
Not surprisingly, Jefferson made Madison the Secretary of State and chose Albert Gallatin as Secretary of the Treasury. He did away with presidential levees, something Adams had wanted to do but felt obliged to continue. Under the new system, Jefferson received the public only twice a year at the President's House, New Year's Day and the Fourth of July. He entertained frequently, but preferred small, elegant dinners, which were part of his way of carrying on the process of government. Rather than going to the Capitol to speak before Congress, he submitted his annual message in writing.
Among his first decisions after taking office was to release from jail those sentenced for violating the Sedition Act, and with the avid support of the Republican majority in Congress, he did away with Adams's Judiciary Act and the new circuit courts. Further, Jefferson abolished the old whiskey tax and began cutting back on the navy, halting shipbuilding and selling off ships already built, while at the same time, ironically, starting to deal effectively with the Barbary pirates.
Yet the first year and more passed with surprisingly little commotion or sensation, until the first weeks of September 1802, shortly before John Quincy declared himself a candidate for Congress. It was then, in the second year of Jefferson's new administration, that the rumor hitherto only whispered, of a liaison between Jefferson and a slave woman, broke into print. What made it especially sensational was that the source of the allegation was his own former ally and unrelenting scourge of John Adams, the notorious James Callender. As Abigail would later tell Jefferson bluntly, it was as though the serpent he had “cherished and warmed” had turned and “bit the hand that nourished him.”
The slave woman, as the Adamses and the country learned, was Sally Hemings, who fifteen years before, at age fourteen, had arrived with little Polly Jefferson at the house on Grosvenor Square in London, and Abigail had judged her too immature to look after the child.
Callender, having served his sentence for violating the Sedition Act, was out of jail by the time Jefferson took office. But unable to pay the fine imposed by the court, he had appealed to Jefferson for help, asking also that he be made postmaster in Richmond. Feeling that Jefferson owed him as much and more, Callender went to Washington to see Madison and in the course of the meeting implied that if denied his requests he might have things to say. Madison warned Jefferson, who immediately, on May 28, 1801, had his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, give Callender $50.
Furious at Jefferson's parsimony, Callender switched sides to become the editor of a new Federalist paper, in Richmond, the Recorder. In the summer that followed, writing in the Recorder, Callender revealed that Jefferson, while Vice President, had secretly subsidized and encouraged him as he broke the Hamilton-Reynolds scandal and did all he could to defame John Adams. For proof Callender quoted several of Jefferson's letters to him.
“I am really mortified at the b
ase ingratitude of Callender,” Jefferson wrote to James Monroe on July 14. His concern, Jefferson said, was that his own “mere motives of charity” might be misunderstood.
When the Republican press attacked Callender for his “apostasy, ingratitude, cowardice, lies, venality, and constitutional malignity,” Callender struck back in the Recorder on September 1, 1802, under the title “The President Again”:
It is well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, a concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally....
By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it... The AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.
In subsequent articles Callender reported that Sally Hemings had five children, that she had been in France with Jefferson, and claimed that now, with the truth out, Jefferson could expect certain defeat in the next election. The stories spread rapidly, appearing in the Federalist press—the New York Evening Post, the Washington Federalist, the Gazette of the United States, and in Boston in the Gazette and the Columbian Centinel, papers read by the Adamses. A cartoon published at Newburyport, titled “A Philosophic Cock,” pictured Jefferson as a rooster strutting with his dark hen Sally. In October the Boston Gazette ran the words to a song of several stanzas, supposed to have been written by the sage of Monticello to be sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”:
Of all the damsels on the green
On mountain, or in valley
A lass so luscious ne'er was seen,
As Monticellian Sally.
Yankee Doodle, who's the noodle?
What wife were half so handy?
To breed a flock of slaves for stock,
A blackamoor's a dandy.
The Aurora and the rest of the Republican press remained conspicuously silent on the subject, taking their lead from the President. Jefferson, who made it a “rule of life” not to respond to newspaper attacks, neither denounced Callender nor denied or admitted a connection with Sally Hemings.
That Callender was a malicious scoundrel was undeniable and more than enough for many people to dismiss his charges out of hand. There was no evidence, and further, the story seemed preposterously out of character for a man of such refinement and intellect, not to say for the President of the United States. To Republicans it was but one more act of Federalist villainy.
What was actually known of “Monticellian Sally” amounted to little, and for all the rumors, all that was written then and later, relatively little would ever be known. She was the daughter of a slave woman named Betty Hemings, who had belonged to Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, who reputedly was Sally's father. If true, this made her the half-sister of Jefferson's wife Martha, and it was said that she resembled Martha Jefferson and was fair-skinned and “decidedly good looking.” An aged former Monticello slave, Isaac Jefferson, would later remember Sally as “very handsome, long straight hair down her back.” To what degree she had benefited from her years in France, whether she could read or write, or anything about her disposition or abilities are matters of speculation.
It was true, as Callender reported, that by 1802 Sally had given birth to five children, but two had died in infancy. According to surviving records, she had seven children, all born at Monticello, two of whom came later, Madison in 1805 and Easton in 1808. From Jefferson's own records, it is clear that he was at home at Monticello at least nine months before the birth of each of her children, and that she never conceived when he was not there. Her children were all light-skinned and several, as gossiped then, looked astonishingly like Jefferson.
More than half a century later, Jefferson's grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the son of Jefferson's daughter Martha, would declare that the real father of Sally Hemings's children was Jefferson's nephew, Peter Carr, which was said to explain the striking Jefferson resemblance in the Hemings children.
Sally Hemings's son Madison would say his mother told him that his father was Jefferson. According to Madison's account, given long afterward, her relationship with Jefferson began in Paris, and she was pregnant with her first child when she returned to Monticello.
How the Adamses felt about the Callender accusations would not come to light until much later and in private correspondence only. Of the two, Adams would have less to say, and unlike Abigail, he did not confront Jefferson with his ire.
Considering all that Adams had suffered at the hand of Callender, it would have been quite understandable had he lashed out at Jefferson for his hypocrisy and immorality. Adams could well have gloated over the spectacle of Jefferson under fire. But he did not.
It was not until 1810—not until Jefferson's presidency was over—that Adams, in a letter to a friend, took up the subject of Callender, Jefferson, and Sally Hemings, privately offering several opinions and suggesting at the close of the letter, “You may burn it if you please.”
For Callender, Adams had no use whatever. “I believe nothing that Callender said any more than if it had been said by an infernal spirit. I would not convict a dog of killing a sheep upon the testimony of two such witnesses,” Adams wrote with characteristic verve, indicating that he did not believe Callender's accusations about Jefferson. Jefferson's “charities” to Callender, however, were a “disgrace.” “I give him up to censure for this and I have a better right to do so, because my conscience bears me witness that I never wrote a line against my enemies nor contributed one farthing to any writer for vindicating me or accusing my enemies.” But continuing on, Adams clearly implied that, in fact, he did believe Callender. An unnamed “great lady” who knew the South, he wrote, had said “she did not believe there was a planter in Virginia who could not reckon among his slaves a number of children.”
Then Adams put the issue squarely where it belonged, saying, in essence, that all such stories of slave masters and their slave women were metaphors for the overriding sin of slavery itself.
Callender and Sally will be remembered as long as Jefferson as blots on his character. The story of the latter is a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery.
Abigail, to judge by her correspondence, had no wish to say anything on the subject, or to have any contact with Jefferson. She did not consider him a great man, she had told Thomas earlier. She pitied his “weakness” and took much that he professed to be “hollow.” Still, she wrote, there was “a little corner of my heart where once he sat... [and] from whence I find it hard wholly to discard him.”
But in the spring of 1804, nearly two years after the Callender accusations, Abigail learned of the death of Jefferson's daughter, Mary Jefferson Eppes, the Polly for whom she had felt such affection during the child's stay with her in London. Deeply touched, Abigail wrote Jefferson to express her heartache and sympathy. Until then, she had not written a word to him in seventeen years, not since London. Reasons of “various kinds” had withheld her pen, she explained, “until the powerful feelings of my heart have burst through the restraint.... The attachment which I formed for her, when you committed her to my care, has remained with me to this hour.” Yet she signed herself not in friendship, or as his friend, but as one “who once took pleasure in subscribing herself your friend.”
Her letter profoundly moved him, Jefferson wrote from the President's House. He would ever remember her kindness to Polly, he said, at the same time expressing regret that “circumstances should have arisen which seemed to draw a line between us.” He wished to be friends still:
The friendship with which you honored me has ever been valued and fully reciprocated; and although events have been passing which might be trying to some minds, I never believed yours to be of that kind, nor felt that my own was. Neither my estimate of your character, nor the esteem founded in that, have ever been lessened for a single moment.
Reflecting on his friendship with
Adams, he recalled how it had accompanied them “through long and important scenes,” and that while their differences of opinion, resulting from “honest conviction,” might make them seem rivals in the minds of their fellow citizens, they were not in their own minds. “We never stood in one another's way.”
There Jefferson might well have ended the letter, and the extraordinary exchange that followed with Abigail would never have happened. But he had a wound to air.
I can say with truth that one act of Mr. Adams's life, and only one ever gave me a moment's personal displeasure. I did consider his last appointments to office as personally unkind... It seemed but common justice to leave a successor free to act by instruments of his own choice.
Affirming his “high respect” for her husband, he closed saying, “I have thus, my dear madam, opened myself to you without reserve, which I have long wished an opportunity of doing; and, without knowing how it will be received, I feel relief from being unbosomed.”
Abigail left little doubt of her anger in what she wrote in reply. He had no right to complain of his predecessor's appointments, she lectured Jefferson. The Constitution empowered the president to fill offices when they were vacant and “Mr. Adams” had chosen well. Besides, she argued inaccurately, he made his choices before it was known whether he, Jefferson, or Burr would be President, and so Jefferson had no cause to take personal offense.
Then, mincing no words, she got to what for her was the heart of the matter. However smoothly he wrote of past differences being only those resulting from “honest conviction,” she refused to let him slide by. “And now, sir, I will freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former friendship and placed you in a light very different from what I once viewed you in.”
