The Adamses Retire

Thomas Boylston Adams was not sanguine when he wrote to his mother Abigail from Philadelphia on July 19, 1800. "I have little doubt but your information regarding the little cock sparrow Genl is correct," he observed, and he agreed with the local pundit who had quipped: "If Jefferson gets in, it will be the federalists who put him there."¹ The "little cock sparrow Genl," of course, refers to Alexander Hamilton.

With the election pending, the Adamses were closing ranks to defend the sitting president in what would be the first real contest in America's short history of the country's ability to conduct a partisan election and constitutionally select a new administration. Thomas Boylston, then twenty-three years old, though already a seasoned politician, had become a skeptic. "I perceive great Electioneering zeal in the Boston newspapers, and . . . I see so much mischief done by writing falsehood and so little good done by writing truth, that I hardly think I shall draw the pen in the present contest."²

As Thomas grimly perceived in that summer before the election, his father was on his way out of office, due primarily to the machinations from within his own party. Thomas did not countenance such behavior philosophically. From his perch within the family preserve, he passed judgment not only on the unscrupulous campaign that was in progress, but on the entire system it supported:

I think the present Constitution & laws of this Country, so inadequate to the purpose of Government that I am ashamed to appear as a writer in support of it. What is there in such a Government to attach people to it—to create and sustain a wish for its duration—There is in my mind, nothing but the fear of something worse. . . . Has it any adequate reward for those who embark in its service? . . . Does it afford that protection to property and reputation, which those who submit to it have a right to expect. . . . It seems to me, that no body cares for the Constitution;—the framers of it apparently, in many instances, disgusted with it—And all its original enemies—the Livingstons, the Clintons-Burr's and all the Virginian tribe as also the small folks here & in other parts of the Union . . . will assuredly try to set up something else—³

Four months and thirty-six electoral ballots in the House of Representatives later—demonstrating that the system would work and contradicting her son's dire predictions—Abigail wrote to Thomas Boylston Adams: "Well, my dear son, South Carolina has behaved as your father always said she would," she continued with resignation. "The consequence to us, personally, is that we retire from public life." The operative phrase here is "retire from public life." "For myself and family I have few regrets. At my age and with my bodily infirmities, I shall be happier at Quincy," but she fretted, "I wish your father's circumstances weren't so limited and circumscribed."⁴ She feared that John's disengagement from politics and diplomacy would leave him bereft of activities.

Abigail's sage observation, furthermore, tells a truth that still resonates more than two hundred years later. Retirement implies a different significance for women and men. In a gendered world, where women and men function primarily in separate spheres, it appears that the lines between the spheres are fixed.⁵ Women never retire from their fundamental responsibilities in the domestic life, while men lose much of their basic engagement in the business of living. John acknowledged as much, writing to Abigail's uncle, Cotton Tufts, shortly before leaving office: "The only question remaining