Hidden Treasures; Or, Why Some Succeed While Others Fail

by Harry A. Lewis

In this comfortable home, acquired by himself, he sought consolation for his troubled spirit in the cultivation of his lands, in books and in the bosom of his family. Mrs. Adams, to her capacities as a house-keeper, steward and farm manager, added a brightness and activity of mind and a range of reading, such as fully qualified her to sympathize with her husband in his public as well as his private career. She shared his tastes for books, and as his letters to her are unsurpassed by any American letters ever yet published, so hers to him, as well as to others, from which a selection has also been published, show her, though exhibiting less of nature and more of formality than he, yet worthy of admiration and respect as well as of the tenderness with which he always regarded her.

To affections strong enough to respond to his, a sympathy equal to his highest aspirations, a proud feeling and an enjoyment of it equal to his own, she added what is not always found in such company, a flexibility sufficient to yield to his stronger will without disturbance to her serenity or his, and without the least compromise of her own dignity or her husband's respect and deference for her. While she was not ignorant of the foibles of his character, and knew how to avail herself of them when a good purpose was to be served by it, yet her admiration of his abilities, her reliance upon his judgment, her confidence in his goodness, and her pride in his achievements, made her always ready to yield and to conform. His happiness and honor were always her leading object. This union was blessed with children well calculated to add to this happiness.

Just at the moment of his retirement from office private grief was added to political disappointment by the death of his second son Charles, who had grown to manhood, had been married and had settled in New York with flattering prospects, but had died under painful circumstances, which his father speaks of in a contemporary letter as the deepest affliction of his life, leaving a wife and two infant children dependent on him. Colonel Smith, an officer of the revolution, who had been Adams' secretary of legation at London and who had married his only daughter, did not prove in all respects such a son-in-law as he would have wished. Smith's pecuniary affairs becoming embarrassed, his father-in-law had provided for him by several public appointments, the last of which was that of the surveyor of New York, which position he was allowed to hold until 1807, when he was removed from it in consequence of his implication in Miranda's expedition. Nor did Thomas, the third son, though a person of accomplishments and talents, fully answer the hopes of his parents.

But all these disappointments were more than made good by the eldest son, John Quincy, who subsequently to his recall from the diplomatic service abroad, into which Washington had introduced him and in which his father, urged by Washington, had promoted him, was chosen one of the senators in congress from Massachusetts.

All consolations, domestic or otherwise, at Mr. Adam's command, were fully needed. Never did a statesman sink more suddenly,—at a time too when his powers of action and inclinations for it seemed unimpaired—from a leading position to more absolute political insignificance. His grandson tells us that while the letters addressed to him in the year prior to March 1st, 1801, may be counted by the thousands, those of the next year scarcely numbered a hundred, while he wrote even less than he received. Nor was mere neglect the worst of it. He sank, loaded with the jibes, the sneers, the execrations even, of both political parties into which the nation was divided. In his correspondence, which appears to have gradually increased and extended itself, Mr. Adams loved to re-explain his theoretical ideas of government, on some points of which he pushed Jefferson hard, and which the result of the French revolution so far as then developed seemed to confirm.

Another subject in which he continued to feel a great interest was theology. He had begun as an Arminian, and the more he had read and thought, and the older he grew to be, the freer views he took. Though clinging with tenacity to the religious institutions of New England, it would seem from his correspondence that he finally curtailed his theology to the ten commandments and the sermon on the mount. Of his views on this point, he gave evidence in his last public act, to which we now approach.

Mrs. Adams had died in 1818, but even that shock, severe as it was, did not loosen the firm grasp of the husband on life, its enjoyments and its duties. When, in consequence of the erection of the district of Maine into a State, a convention was to meet in 1820 to revise the constitution of Massachusetts, in the framing of which Mr. Adams had taken so leading a part, though in his eighty-sixth year, he was chosen a delegate by his townsmen. Upon his first appearance, with a form yet erect, though tremulous with age, in this Convention, which was composed of the very cream of the great minds with which the State abounded, Mr. Adams was received by members standing, and with every demonstration of affection and esteem; and a series of resolutions were forthwith passed, containing an enumeration and warm acknowledgement of some of his principal public services, and calling on him to preside. But this, while duly acknowledging the compliment, he declined, on the score of his age and infirmities. The same cause also prevented his taking any active part in the proceedings. Yet he labored to secure a modification of the third article of the bill of rights, on the subject of public worship and its support, an article which, when originally drafting the rest of that instrument, he had passed over to other hands.

But the time had not yet come for such changes as he wished. The old puritan feeling was still too great to acknowledge the equal rights, political and religious, of other than Christians. Yet, however it might be with his colleagues and fellow-citizens, Mr. Adams, in this movement, expressed his own ideas. One of his latest letters, written in 1825, and addressed to Jefferson, is a remarkable protest against the blasphemy laws, so-called, of Massachusetts, and the rest of the Union, as being utterly inconsistent with the right of free inquiry and private judgment. It is in the letters of Mr. Adams, of which but few have ever been published, that his genius as a writer and a thinker, and no less distinctly his character as a man, is displayed. Down even to the last year of his protracted life, his letters exhibit a wonderful degree of vitality, energy, playfulness, and command of language.

As a writer of English—and we may add as a speculative philosopher—little as he ever troubled himself with revision and correction, he must be placed first among Americans of all the several generations to which he belonged, excepting only Franklin; and if Franklin excelled him in humor and geniality, he far surpassed Franklin in compass and vivacity. Indeed, it is only by the recent publication of his letters that his gifts in these respects are becoming well known. The first installment of his private letters published during his lifetime, though not deficient in these characteristics, yet having been written under feelings of great aggravation, and in a spirit of extreme bitterness against his political opponents, was rather damaging to him than otherwise. In the interval from 1804 to 1812, Mr. Cunningham, a maternal relative, had drawn him into a private correspondence in which, still smarting under a sense of injury, he had expressed himself with perfect unreserve and entire freedom as to the chief events of his presidential administration and the character and motives of the parties concerned in them.

By a gross breach of confidence, of which Mr. Adams, like other impulsive and confiding persons, often had been the victim, those letters were sold by Cunningham's heir in 1824, while the writer and many of the parties referred to were still alive. They were published as a part of the electioneering machinery against John Quincy Adams. They called out a violent retort from Colonel Pickering, who had been secretary of State to Washington and Adams, till dismissed from office by the latter; but though Mr. Jefferson was also severely handled in them, they occasioned no interruption to the friendly relation which had been re-established between him and Mr. Adams.