If ever there was a “royal” American family, it was that of John and Abigail Adams: John, Founding Father, signer of the Declaration of Independence and president; his son John Quincy, president; and his grandson Charles Francis, Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to England, who played a key role in keeping the British from siding with the South during the Civil War. Yet the Adamses were deeply mired in tragedy. Charles Francis Adams described his family as “one of great triumphs in the world but of deep groans within, one of extraordinary brilliancy and deep corroding mortification.”

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin said, “Always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, he is absolutely out of his senses.” Certainly historians have indicated this was often true of Adams as a father. John and Abigail Adams had three sons and two daughters, one of whom, Susanna, died in infancy. One son became president of the United States. The other two died alcoholics. The surviving daughter, named for her mother but called Nabby, wed a man of her father’s choosing, Colonel

William Stephens Smith, but the marriage was such a disaster that Adams eventually wished that adventurer and reprobate dead — and said so to him in writing. Nabby had wanted to marry Royall Tyler, who went on to become chief justice of Vermont and one of America’s first leading playwrights.

The Adams offspring received, in the words of family biographer Paul C. Nagel, “a baptism at home in the waters of self-doubt.” Within that atmosphere of chronic pessimism, John and Abigail were often hectoring, overbearing parents. When young John Quincy expressed a wish for a quiet life as an attorney, his father wrote: “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your success is mediocre. And if you do not rise to the head not only of your profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.”

Abigail Adams was no different, always underscoring what a disappointment her children would be if they fell into sin and lost virtue. Among the long list of sins and vices the young children had to guard against were sloppy penmanship, slovenly dress and wasted time. In and of themselves these admonitions were not bad, but to the Adamses human frailty was to be countered with New England puritanical principles, and pitiless self-criticism was to be encouraged at the earliest age possible.

John once wrote Abigail of their children, “I studied and labored to procure a free Constitution of Government for them to solace themselves under, and if they do not prefer this to ample Fortune, to Ease and Elegance, they are not my children, and I care not what becomes of them.” In wholehearted agreement, Abigail one day wrote to her young children after a long sea voyage that if they had fallen into vice she would have preferred they drowned. Nagel called the Adamses’ parenting skills “a bewildering mixture of affectionate support and cruel distrust, striking even for an age when Christian virtues were still stressed.”

By all accounts John and Abigail’s three sons were sensitive children. Yet as an adult John Quincy called himself “a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners; I do not have the pliability to reform it.” One saving grace for John Quincy was that in 1778 he accompanied his father on one of his many long European missions. Their shared adventures, including their leaking ship’s outrunning both a British warship and a storm, led to a bond between father and son virtually unheard of in the Adams family for generations. That bond gave John Quincy self-confidence that was rare among the other Adams children.

Tragedy and plain bad luck befell John Quincy’s younger brother Charles, however. John Adams sought to duplicate his success with John Quincy by taking Charles on a similar long mission to Europe in 1779. But Charles was only 9, younger and less robust than John Quincy was when he first went abroad, and this time the ship was in far worse shape. A series of leaks was so serious that it forced the captain to take the ship off course to reach the nearest port. But the repairs could not be made quickly, so the party endured a 1,000-mile trip by donkey to their destination in Paris. John Adams called that the worst experience of his life.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to