Chapter Forty-Six
WASHINGTON CITY
District of Columbia
I coughed, eyes stinging. “So this is to be the president’s house . . .”
To more quickly dry the plaster in the newly constructed residence, fires burned in every chamber. John was wreathed in a
haze of smoke where he worked. A desk had not yet been located in these cavernous halls so John was making do with a table.
Rising to help remove my cloak, John asked, “What do you think?”
“I’m not sure yet. But from the carriage, the city looks quite a wilderness.”
“Yes, I’m afraid our Federal City is, at present, a city in name only, but that will change!”
I saw that a portrait of Washington hung upon the wall looking down on our enterprises and I wondered what he’d think of the
shambling state of the new capital, which bore his name. Washington City boasted of only a few houses scattered over a space
of ten miles. Tree stumps dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see, and enslaved men worked to haul the wood away.
In truth, the miserable effects of slavery were visible everywhere.
I thought about Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. We’d all been assured he was a kind and gentle master—but as Phoebe would
say, still, he was a master.
Yet people were casting votes for him, calling him The Man of the People!
No, that wasn’t quite true, was it? It wasn’t people who were casting votes. It was men. Propertied white men. They understood themselves to be free and equal in the eyes of God. But ask them to extend that principle . . .
Oh, I had little love for the French Revolution, but at least in France, women had been in the vanguard. Black people, too.
In our own revolution, the runaway slave Crispus Attucks had been one of the first to fall to a redcoat bullet at the Boston
Massacre. How might he feel, now, to walk around this city, seeing his brethren half fed, destitute of clothing, forced to
labor whilst the owner walked about idle and called himself a true republican?
As workers continued to plaster around me, I said, “Well, at least the president’s house is a proper castle with a lovely
view of the river.”
“Let me show you my favorite room,” John said, leading me upstairs to an oval-shaped chamber with red furniture.
“It will be handsome when completed,” I allowed.
“Yes,” John said, fingers on the windowpane, as if he could imagine the new city coming alive. “I pray heaven to bestow the
best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under
this roof.”
“Only men?” I asked.
John cracked an indulgent smile, which I took for my opening to say, “I pray that whoever lives in this house after us are good mothers and fathers over the nation, and to their own children, too.”
John’s smile gave way to a scowl because he knew the turn of my mind. “I don’t want to talk about Charles.”
“He’s sick. You must see him after the election. You must forgive him. He was always a soft boy, and perhaps you blamed him
for it—”
“To the contrary, I delighted in him as a boy. I loved him too much. It’s the man that disgusts me.”
“He’s a flawed man, but no man’s enemy but his own. That must count for something.”
John was quiet, staring out the window, and I sensed my words were reaching him.
But infuriatingly, at that very moment, John Marshall interrupted with a dispatch for the president. And off he went.
Later, when I was downstairs dusting our gilt-edged, floral porcelain dinner service for whatever occasion it might be needed in this still-unfinished house, I asked, “Is it France? Is there a peace treaty yet?”
“No,” John said, tossing aside a report from a friend about the election that had begun in October, stretching into December.
“It’s South Carolina. The votes aren’t going my way.”
To lose South Carolina would be a blow. It might be the nail in the coffin of my husband’s presidency. I did not know what
to say.
John explained, “Jefferson’s acolyte, Mr. Madison, is the political mastermind in the South.” Then he said, darkly, “I wonder
if that little man is behind the rumor that when we were in London, I asked Pinckney to procure four harlots for us to share
between us.”
I gasped. “No one could believe that.”
“Well, I swear on my honor, if it’s true, then Pinckney kept all four and cheated me of my two!”
“John,” I said, snapping the dusting cloth at him.
His dark mood grew darker still. “The Alien and Sedition Acts give my opponents much to complain of. But I’ve not deported
one foreigner. Not one!”
Yet there had been prosecutions for sedition. The most justified case was against the journalist James Callender, who had first exposed
Alexander Hamilton’s affair. More recently, Callender wrote that my husband was a deranged hermaphrodite who planned to crown
himself king. Callender was convicted and sentenced to nine months, every bit of which I believed he deserved.
I was less confident about the arrest of Congressman Matthew Lyon, who was charged for saying that my husband had a thirst
for ridiculous pomp.
His enraged constituents re-elected him from prison.
Now John complained, “I didn’t ask for these prosecutions, but I’m paying for them.”
“If the Federalists remain united, you can defeat Jefferson easily.”
But John was now very grim about his chances. “Well, to be relieved of this office will be a respite for me. I’m old, old,
very old. And never shall be very well—certainly not while in this office. For the drudgery of it is too much for my years
and strength. Perhaps it’s best to let Jefferson try.”
“We cannot know the outcome yet.”
John snorted. “I will make my peace with it. I can be content with no other inscription on my gravestone than ‘Here lies John Adams who took upon himself the Responsibility of the Peace with France in the Year 1800.’”
I did not believe that would content him. It would not be enough for him, even if he achieved it. Not for my proud, talented
husband, who had dedicated the better part of his adult life to his country. But on the day the electors were to meet, we
already knew that we’d lost.
Hamilton had split the Federalist vote. The Democratic-Republicans would be victorious.
John was crushed. We both were. And yet, the pain of losing the presidency was positively eclipsed for me by the most tragic
letter of my life.
Charles has died, Nabby wrote.
He hadn’t lived a fortnight since I left him. My boy, my little cherub . . .
John and I both stood thunderstruck by the news, as if a gorgon had turned us to stone. My husband cracked first, grabbing
the letter from my stiff hands to read again, as if it simply could not be true.
I went cold all over, breathless, a stranger in my own skin. But then came a storm of John’s rage and tears, all of which
lashed against my stony silence.
I just stood there, unmoving, as my husband sobbed into the crumpled letter in his hands.
I remained silent. Terribly silent. Silent as a distant star.
John took this for rebuke, and perhaps it was.
“Abigail,” he said, clasping my rigid arms, gripping me too hard. “If I’d known he was dying . . .”
I only stiffened in his grasp.
John swore, “I’d have done all I could to help him!”
I said nothing.
John gave me a little shake. “You know I loved him. Despite all. I would’ve forgiven him. I vow it.”
Still I was silent.
“Say something,” John finally pleaded. “Say something, anything, my dearest friend.”
I knew I was frightening him. I was frightening myself. I’d never been silent a day in my life, but now I understood the retreat
into the mind that so often called to my daughter. Silence was my only refuge from this agony of grief. And so, despite my husband’s tempest of emotion, I simply turned and walked away.
I roamed the presidential mansion from unfinished room to unfinished room, like a ghost. Why had I left Charles? Hadn’t I
feared his death was imminent?
I should’ve listened to my mother’s instinct. Now my child was dead, and I’d never see his dimpled smile again. Never caress
his beloved face. Never hold him in my arms again. It was too much to bear.
John finally found me in some unfinished room—I know not which. “Is there something I can do for you?”
Staring out at the rain, I didn’t reply.
“Abigail, however hard you think my heart might be, I wish you could remember that Charles was once the delight of my eyes
and a darling of my heart.”
I shook my head to deny it, and John forced me to look at him. “I would’ve died for him if that would’ve relieved him from
his faults as well as his disease. I would’ve willingly laid down my life to save him. As I would lay my life down now to
spare you the pain I see in your eyes.”
I believed him. Or at least, I chose to believe him, because if I didn’t, I’d go mad. But I still had little to say. “I’m
afflicted with a loss of voice,” I claimed, my throat tight and raw with such an immense torment of spirit that I couldn’t
swallow it down. “A cough from the plaster dust, as everything is under construction.”
He knew it was a lie but let me be.
I didn’t come to bed that night.
I did not sleep. Instead, I donned a black dress of mourning, realizing that what funeral arrangements must be made, Nabby
would make. We would get to New York too late to see Charles buried.
“Rest,” everyone advised.
But I would rather dash my head against the newly plastered walls of this place.
Instead, stumbling with exhaustion, I busied myself with marketing, which could only be done in Georgetown, the filthiest hole one ever did see.
There was nowhere clean to dry the laundry, so I hung it up in the East Room by myself, refusing assistance.
I wanted to work myself to the bone. To make myself so weary that I could, in desperation, consent to lie down beside my husband.
The next day, John looked encouraged to see me emerge where he labored with his writing. Like a man testing the ice, he asked,
“Do you wish to advise me on this speech?”