Chapter One
The Presidency of John and Abigail Adams
1797-1801
For the first time, Americans mourned as one. Again and
again over the centuries the country would come together
in grief or shock-the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln
and John F. Kennedy, the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the
World Trade Center, the death of Franklin Roosevelt. The
first of those nation-binding tragedies rocked the
public in the last days of the eighteenth century. On
December 14, 1799, George Washington died.
Of course on that day no stentorian-voiced anchormen
broke into regular programming to announce the sudden
and unexpected death; no dramatic stop-the-presses
moment marked the passing of the “Father of the
Country.” It took some time for the news from Mount
Vernon, where Martha Washington had been keeping watch
over her husband of almost forty-one years, to reach the
rest of the world. First family and friends nearby, then
the Congress, still meeting over Christmas in the
temporary capital of Philadelphia, received the report
of the sudden loss of the sixty-seven-year-old man who
had been leader since soon after the first shots of the
Revolution were fired almost twenty-five years earlier.
Congress set the official memorial service for the day
after Christmas. A Philadelphia woman the next day
estimated that four thousand people attended that
service-led by President John Adams and “his Lady,” the
indomitable Abigail Adams. Her husband’s chief adviser,
the First Lady knew that this public display would help
John Adams politically, and she was nothing if not
politically savvy. An important election was in the
offing, or as Abigail Adams put it, “a time for intrigue
is approaching,” and it couldn’t hurt the embattled
incumbent president to remind the voters of his ties to
the Federalist “fallen hero”-of the fact that Adams had
served loyally as vice president to President George
Washington-going into a tough campaign against his own
vice president, Republican Thomas Jefferson. Abigail,
always on the lookout for what she saw as her husband’s
best interests, would get out front on this tragedy to
milk it for all it was worth politically.
And it soon became clear that the political impact could
be huge. The demise of Washington seemed to hold the
country spellbound; especially affected were the women
who documented the death in dire accounts. During the
Adams presidency, women were beginning to bring their
private political views into the public sphere and to
publish under their own names. One of them, Judith
Sargent Murray, described the scene when the news of the
death reached Boston. “The calamitous tidings reached us
this morning,” the feminist writer informed her sister
on December 23. “The bells commenced their agonizing
peels, the theatre, and museum were shut, balls, festive
assemblies and amusements of every description are
suspended, ships in the harbor display the insignia of
mourning, and a day of solemn humiliation, and prayer,
in every place of public worship in this Town is
contemplated.”
Instead of huddling around the television, saddened
citizens congregated in churches, paraded in
processions, printed poems, offered orations, sought
mementos, and fashioned souvenirs of the man who seemed
to symbolize the young country. No one was sure that the
nation would survive the loss of its first leader. With
the perspective of a foreign observer, Henrietta Liston,
the wife of the British ambassador, pondered the
political repercussions: “It is difficult to say what
may be the consequences of his death to this country,”
she wrote to her uncle. “He stood the barrier betwixt
the northernmost and southernmost states, he was the
unenvied Head of the Army, and such was the magic of his
name that his opinion was a sanction equal to law.”
As Henrietta Liston suspected, and as Abigail Adams
quickly learned, America found Washington’s death
unsettling. One of New York’s great social reformers,
Isabella Graham, chronicled the impact to her brother
abroad: “The city, indeed the United States, have been
swallowed up in the loss of Washington,” Graham wrote
soon after the official day of mourning, February 22,
Washington’s birthday. By then in hundreds of cities the
general had been praised in speech and song at
ceremonies and commemorations. Nothing was too
outlandish, too over-the-top for a country steeped in
public shows of sorrow. Famed novelist Susanna Rowson,
always ready to draw attention to herself, composed one
of many dirges droned out at the mock funerals:
For him the afflicted melts in woe,
For him the widow’s tears will flow,
For him the orphan’s prayer shall rise,
And waft his spirit to the skies.
Since no one had ever mourned an American head of state
before, everyone was making up the rituals as they went
along, with Federalist politicians determined that they
last as long as possible. One of those Federalists,
Congressman Harrison Gray Otis, knowing that his wife
Sally, home in Boston, would be dying to know every
detail of what was happening in Philadelphia, described
the official memorial service in a letter written from
the chamber of the House of Representatives: “Before my
eyes and in front of the speaker’s chair lies a coffin
covered with a black pall, bearing a military hat and
sword,” he told her. “In about one hour we shall march
attended by the military in grand procession to the
German Lutheran Church.”
Years later John Adams admitted that there was more than
a little politics underpinning the paeans: “Orations,
prayers, sermons, mock funerals” were used by the
extremists in Adams’s own party, to promote Federalist
issues and to “cast into the background and the shade
all others who had been concerned in the service of
their country in the Revolution.” The hoopla might have
gotten out of hand in Adams’s view, but in fact he and
his wife had set the tone for the marathon of mourning.
As soon as the news reached the temporary capital and
Abigail Adams saw the response: “All business in
Congress has been suspended in great measure and a
universal melancholy has pervaded all classes of
people,” she told her nephew …
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Ladies of Liberty
by Cokie Roberts
Copyright © 2008 by Cokie Roberts.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
William Morrow
Copyright © 2008
Cokie Roberts
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-078234-4
