Adams Family Correspondence, volume 13

ix

Descriptive List of Illustrations

1. HANNAH CARTER SMITH, BY NATHANIEL HANCOCK, CA.1796	17[unavailable]
“Heaven support you my dear Friends, and enable you to submit to its Sovereign will with that Christian fortitude and confidence, which can alone disarm death of its Sting.” Abigail Adams penned these words of condolence in a May 1798 letter to Hannah Carter Smith and her husband, William. The Smiths had been deeply afflicted by the deaths of their minister, Rev. John Clarke, and then Hannah’s father, Nathaniel Carter Sr., in April. Now, they had been “calld to endure a still more near, and painfull trial”—the death of their daughter Mary Carter (b. 1791) on 25 April. In reporting the news to Abigail on the 29th, her sister Mary Smith Cranch noted that Hannah in particular “appear’d really bow’d down with Such repeated Strokes of affliction” (vol. 12:538; AA to Hannah Carter Smith and William Smith, 3 May, MHi:Smith-Carter Family Papers).
Hannah Carter Smith (1764–1836) married Abigail’s cousin William Smith in 1787, and the couple had five other children at the time of Mary’s death: William, Elizabeth Storer, Isaac, Hannah, and Thomas. Hannah Carter “pined to Skin & bone” in the spring of 1798, but by the following spring there was cause for celebration. “I have the pleasure to inform you that your sister smith got well to Bed on fryday night last with a daughter, at which I rejoice, and hope her dear Marrys loss will be supplied to her,” Abigail wrote to Mary Smith Gray Otis on [1 April 1799] (below). The daughter, also named Mary Carter (d. 1806), was born on 29 March, prompting Abigail to write to William Smith, “May her Life be preserved, and with the rest of your amiable little ones, prove a blessings to you” (3 April, MHi:Smith-Townsend Family Papers).
This miniature portrait of Hannah Carter Smith, painted around 1796, measures 1 5/8 inches by 1 1/4 inches and is set in an oval gilt metal case. Smith wears a lavender dress with a sheer white fichu draped around her shoulders and has a lace inset on the low neckline of her dress. The reverse is engraved: “Hannah Carter. / Born, 1764. / Married Wm. Smith, / 1787. / Died, 1836.” The watercolor-on-ivory miniature was painted by Nathaniel Hancock (fl. 1785–1809). Based in Boston, Hancock traveled between Virginia and New Hampshire seeking commissions and teaching watercolor painting (vols. 7:423, 12:540; Boston Columbian Centinel, 12 Feb. x 1806; Carrie Rebora Barratt and Lori Zabar, American Portrait Miniatures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y., 2010, p. 62).
Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch and Alvin Deutsch, LL.B. 1958, in honor of Kathleen Luhrs.
2. “A PLAN OF FORT INDEPENDENCE,” BOSTON, BY LEWIS PECKHAM, 1 DECEMBER 1809	103[unavailable]
“I hope sir Castle William will be fortified by the state or cedeed to the Government, that it is necessary to put it in as perfect a State of Defence as possible, must be obvious to every one,” Abigail Adams wrote to William Smith on 9 June 1798 (below). A fort had first been erected on Castle Island in Boston Harbor in 1634. When the British evacuated Boston in 1776, however, they destroyed the fortifications. The following year Massachusetts assumed control of the island and became responsible for its refortification. Two decades later, in June 1798, the Massachusetts General Court ceded Castle Island to the federal government.
The Adamses attended the fort’s dedication on 31 July 1799. “We made a strong party I assure you the other day to visit the castle,” Abigail informed Thomas Boylston Adams on 4 August, “carrying from Quincy between 30 & 40 persons of Quincy Quality” (below). The local press recorded the events of the day: “Under a discharge of fifteen guns,” President John Adams “pronounced the name it is in future to bear, to be ‘Fort INDEPENDENT on Castle-Island.’” Following the ceremony, the Adamses were “escorted to the citadel, where an elegant dinner was provided.” Toasts were proposed by John to the army’s commander in chief, George Washington, the navy, and the future success of Fort Independence; Abigail offered a toast to Martha Washington. The events concluded that evening as “all the buildings in the island were handsomely illuminated; and a brilliant display of fire works exhibited.”
Lewis Peckham (1788–1822) created this pen-and-ink and watercolor map of Fort Independence in 1809 while serving as an officer at the fort. Peckham also painted miniatures of his fellow officers and befriended the artist Gilbert Stuart, who provided him with art supplies and “all the information in the art of Painting Gratis” (AA to JQA, 20 July 1798, and note 5, below; Boston Columbian Centinel, 3 Aug. 1799; William J. Reid, Castle Island and Fort Independence, Boston, 1995, p. 8, 33, 39–40; George C. Groce and David H. Wallace, The New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564–1860, New Haven, 1957, p. 496; Francis B. Heitman, Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army, 2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1903, 1:780; Clara L. Davis, “Lewis Peckham’s Choice,” Rhode Island History, 24:12–13 [Jan. 1965]).
Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
3. “DER NEUMARKT ZU DRESDEN,” BY CHRISTIAN GOTTFRIED MORASCH, CA. 1790	231[unavailable]
“The sky was clear and we skimmed the surface with much pleasure & gratification,” Thomas Boylston Adams reported to John Quincy xi Adams on 24 August 1798 after viewing sunlit paintings of European masters in Dresden’s Royal Picture Gallery. On a seventeen-day tour of the city and surrounding area, Thomas Boylston encouraged his brother to visit the gallery, telling him, “I believe you would be highly entertained” (below). Indeed, John Quincy described the gallery in a 21 September 1799 letter to Abigail Adams as “one of the finest collections of pictures, extant” (below). When he and Louisa Catherine Adams traveled to Saxony that summer, John Quincy visited the museum on fourteen of the thirty days they spent in the city. He first viewed paintings in the Flemish school, with works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Vermeer, before taking in the Italian school, represented by Correggio, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. For John Quincy, however, Raphael’s “The Sistine Madonna” (1512–1513) was “undoubtedly the first picture in the collection.”
From 1746 to the mid-nineteenth century, the Royal Picture Gallery was located in Dresden’s Stallgebäude (later Johanneum). The gallery’s imposing facade and sweeping staircase are pictured in the left foreground of this engraving of Dresden’s Neumarkt Square. Completed around 1790 by Christian Gottfried Morasch (1749–1815), a lifelong Dresden resident, the image also depicts the Frauenkirche with its towering cupola (TBA, Journal, 1798 , p. 25–30; D/JQA/24, 12–28 Sept. 1799, APM Reel 27; Mariana Starke, Letters from Italy, between the Years 1792 and 1798, 2 vols., London, 1800, 2:238–245; Karl Woermann, Catalogue of the Royal Picture Gallery in Dresden, transl. B. S. Ward, Dresden, 1887, p. 8; Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century, New Haven, 1996, p. 69, 107; Oxford Art Online).
Courtesy of © Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, A 131819, photo: Andreas Diesend.
4. JOEL BARLOW, BY JOHN VANDERLYN, 1798	285[unavailable]
“Have you seen the Letter said to be written by Barlow to Baldwin?” Abigail Adams asked John Adams on 25 November 1798. When John replied to Abigail on 4 December, he noted, “I have seen and despise the Letter as much as I have for some Years scorned the Man” (both below).
The letter in question was from poet Joel Barlow to his brother-in-law Abraham Baldwin (1754–1807), a Democratic-Republican congressman from Georgia. In the March 1798 letter, which was published as Copy of a Letter from an American Diplomatic Character in France, to a Member of Congress in Philadelphia, [Fairhaven, Vt.], 1798, Barlow lamented the deterioration of Franco-American relations since the start of the French Revolution, believing, “the French have many reasons for being offended with the American government” (p. 15) and attributing the decline to diplomatic missteps during the presidential administrations of George Washington and John Adams. Barlow further criticized Adams as a “reputed Royalist, and enemy to France,” and he claimed that following Adams’ 23 November 1797 address to Congress, for which see vol. 12:309, Congress should have passed “an order to send him to a mad house” (p. 8, 11). After reading the letter in the Philadelphia xii Porcupine’s Gazette, 10 November 1798, Abigail was resolute: “If he was really & truly the writer I hope he will instantly be stripd of all diplomatic power—a disgrace to his Country a reproach and a scandle,” she reported to John (25 Nov., below).
John’s reappraisal of Barlow stands in marked contrast to his opinion a decade earlier, when he patronized and disseminated Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus in England and described the poet and Connecticut Wit as a “young Gentleman of amiable manners and most excellent Character.” Barlow’s residence in Paris during the early years of the French Revolution, his acceptance of French citizenship, and his association with several British radicals led him to align himself with the Democratic-Republicans and Thomas Jefferson. In August 1798 Barlow socialized with Dr. George Logan during his unauthorized mission. Barlow did not return to the United States until mid-1805.
This charcoal and pencil portrait was drawn by John Vanderlyn in 1798. Vanderlyn (1775–1852) was a New York native then training in Paris under the patronage of Aaron Burr ( Biog. Dir. Cong. ; Richard Buel Jr., Joel Barlow: American Citizen in a Revolutionary World, Baltimore, 2011, p. 224–226, 275; JA, Papers , 18:19, 225–227; JA to Comte Simon Romanovich Woronzow, 4 Sept. 1787, LbC, APM Reel 112; Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution, Charlottesville, Va., 2010, p. 67–68, 128–129; Oxford Art Online).
Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joel Barlow.
5. DANIEL GREENLEAF’S BORROWING RECORD, BOSTON LIBRARY SOCIETY, 1798–1801	325[unavailable]
Abigail Adams endured a lengthy illness throughout the summer and fall of 1798, one which precluded her traveling to Philadelphia for the 3d session of the 5th Congress. Separated from John and away from the seat of action, Abigail’s interest in domestic and international affairs did not waver. On the contrary, as she reported in a letter to John of 28 December, she was then reading the translated edition of François René Jean, Baron de Pommereul’s Campaign of General Buonaparte in Italy. She was particularly interested in the translator, John Davis. Davis (1775–1854) was an Englishman who had sailed with the East India Company and the Royal Navy and traveled to America in 1797 to pursue his “love of literature.” Through “a concurrence of circumstances,” Davis had been given “the Campaign of General BUONAPARTE in Italy” for translation (p. iii), which gained him a reputation as a translator in the United States. Abigail, however, was unimpressed with his translation, describing Davis’ preface as “the most conceited Bombastical thing I ever read” (below).
“You will wonder how I came by it,” she posited to John, reporting that the book belonged to Nathaniel Austin, who “for the good of the publick” placed it in the “circulating Library in Boston.” She was referring to the Boston Library Society, a proprietary lending xiii library founded in 1792 and incorporated by the commonwealth in 1794. The page from the library’s borrowing records presented here shows that on the same day that Abigail wrote to John to say she was reading the work, Quincy resident and Library Society member Daniel Greenleaf borrowed “Bounapartes Campaign.” Greenleaf then loaned the work to Abigail, in apparent violation of the library’s rules. As the log shows, Pommereul’s Campaign was returned to the Boston Library Society without a penalty on 10 January 1799 (vol. 12:540; Jennie Holton Fant, ed., The Travelers’ Charleston: Accounts of Charleston and Lowcountry, South Carolina, 1666–1861, Columbia, S.C., 2016, p. 57; Michael Wentworth and Elizabeth Lamb Clark, The Boston Library Society, 1794–1994, Boston, 1995, p. 8, 10; MBAt:Archives of the Boston Library Society, 1792–1939, Circulation Department Records, 1793–1940; Rules of the Boston Library Society, [Boston, 1796?], Evans, No. 50059).
Courtesy of the Boston Athenæum.
6. THOMAS TRUXTUN, BY CHARLES BALTHAZAR JULIEN FÉVRET DE SAINT MÉMIN, 1799	430[unavailable]
“Truxton has indeed taken the Insurgent,” John Adams informed Abigail on 11 March 1799 (below). One of the earliest American victories of the Quasi-War occurred on 9 February when the U.S. frigate Constellation, commanded by Capt. Thomas Truxtun, engaged the French frigate L’Insurgente, Capt. Michel Pierre Barreaut, near St. Kitts. After a short battle Truxtun captured the vessel, reputed to be the fastest in the French Navy, and celebration of “Truxtun’s Victory” quickly spread, serving to strengthen the American position in reopening negotiations with the French Directory.
Truxtun (1755–1822) was born on Long Island, N.Y. He was a successful privateer during the American Revolution before entering the East India trade, where he acquired a reputation as a skilled sailor. Despite the fame the capture of the L’Insurgente brought him, however, Truxtun nearly left naval service in the summer of 1799. A dispute over his rank relative to other naval captains, namely Silas Talbot and Richard Dale, led to a web of correspondence among the captains, Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Stoddert, and President John Adams. Talbot and Dale, whose initial 1794 commissions ranked ahead of Truxtun’s, were recommissioned during the Quasi-War after delays in building the frigates interrupted their service. They insisted on retaining rank ahead of Truxtun, who believed that his continued active service ought to advance him ahead of the other captains. Stoddert sided with Truxtun, but Talbot personally appealed to John in letters of 3, 9, and 13 July 1799 (all Adams Papers), arguing that his service record exceeded that of Truxtun’s and refusing any commission ranked below him. John agreed, and the decision in Talbot’s favor prompted Truxtun to resign his commission and then complain about his ill-treatment in the press. Thomas Boylston Adams acknowledged Truxtun’s right to resign but believed he was “preparing chagrin discontent & torment for himself during his life, by the obstinate exercise of it.” Abigail concurred; xiv Truxtun was “a brave man, but vain.” Ultimately, the dispute was resolved when the president and naval secretary agreed to an accommodation by which the issue of rank would be left unstated and the captains would be assigned to separate theaters of operation (JA to Stoddert, 23 July, LbC, APM Reel 120; TBA to William Smith Shaw, 23 Aug., below; AA to TBA, 8 Sept., Adams Papers).
This portrait of Truxtun in right profile was completed by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint Mémin in 1799. Saint Mémin (1770–1852) was a prominent portrait engraver in Philadelphia in the late 1790s. Using a physiognotrace, he was able to create realistic, life-sized profile portraits, which were then used as the basis for engravings. Neoclassical profiles were a popular form of portraiture in the late eighteenth century, and a large number of distinguished Americans sat for Saint Mémin, including John Adams around 1800 (Eugene S. Ferguson, Truxtun of the Constellation: The Life of Commodore Thomas Truxtun, U.S. Navy 1755–1822, Baltimore, 1956, p. 160–172, 178–187; ANB; Philadelphia Gazette, 12, 19, 29 Aug. 1799; Ellen G. Miles, Saint-Mémin and the Neoclassical Profile Portrait in America, [Washington, D.C.], 1994, p. 27; Oliver, Portraits of JA and AA , p. 119–120).
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
7. “ORDER OF PROCESSION FOR THE FUNERAL OF THE LATE GOVERNOR SUMNER,” BOSTON, 1799	479[unavailable]
Massachusetts governor Increase Sumner died on 7 June 1799. The following day John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Boylston Adams: “In this Gentleman were united an Assemblage of Qualities, which is not to be found again in the State of Massachusetts. His Education, Fortune Temper, his masterly Understanding extensive Information and Uprightness of heart: his Attachment to the Union and Fidelity to the national Government: his Independence of little Circles and partial Combinations: the Candor of his heart and serenity of his disposition, fitted him for his Station beyond any other Man who can succeed him” (below). Sumner had been reelected to his third term on 1 April, a “favorable circumstance,” Abigail Adams reported to Thomas Boylston, because it put “out of Question, who is to be the successor for the present year” by allowing Moses Gill, the lieutenant governor, to serve as acting governor in Sumner’s place (2 June, and note 3, below).
On learning of the governor’s death, the Massachusetts General Court appointed a committee to “arrange and direct the order and ceremonies of the funeral of His late Excellency” and resolved on 8 June that Sumner would be “intered with military Honors” with “the expence thereof … paid out of the publick treasury.” Sumner’s interment thus became a state funeral, presided over by Rev. Simeon Howard of Boston’s West Church and attended by members of the General Court with “a military Escort.” President Adams also joined in the lengthy and well-attended procession, during which the escort traveled from Sumner’s home in Roxbury to various locations in Boston before the governor’s remains were laid to xv rest at the Granary Burying Ground. Although Abigail’s health precluded her attendance, she reported to John Quincy Adams on 12 June, “Whilst I am writing I hear the constant discharge of minut Guns, the Military tribute whilst honour, affection and gratitude flow from the hearts of his fellow citiziens” (below).
Thomas Minns (1773–1836) and Alexander Young (1768–1834), publishers of the Massachusetts Mercury and printers for the Massachusetts General Court, printed this broadside documenting the order of the funeral procession, which an estimated 30,000 attended (vols. 7:466, 12:157; Massachusetts Mercury, 11 June; Mass., Acts and Laws , 1798–1799, p. 513; Boston Russell’s Gazette, 13 June; Benjamin Franklin, ed., Boston Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers: 1640–1800, Boston, 1980, p. 493).
Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
8. “T. B. A.,” BY SARAH WISTER, 1799	524[unavailable]
In the summer of 1799 Thomas Boylston Adams teased his mother, Abigail Adams, with a story of a flirtation, explaining in his letter of 29 July that when he went to Germantown, Penn., to escape yellow fever in Philadelphia he encountered a Quaker woman. “Aye & a very intelligent one too, whose mind is as chaste as her person and whose understanding has been cultivated by an intimacy with the choicest books,” he wrote (below).
Thomas Boylston was referring to Sarah “Sally” Wister (1761–1804), whom he had met more than six years earlier while boarding with Wister’s aunt, Hannah Jones Foulke. At that time Wister wrote poems under the pen name Laura, including a 1793 birthday ode to “Lucius”—undoubtedly Thomas Boylston—that described starlit evenings when he put aside his law books and conversed with her at the family table. Earlier in life Wister had documented the British occupation of Philadelphia in a journal she kept as a teenager in Germantown from 1777 to 1778.
Thomas Boylston continued to be Wister’s muse in 1799. In a letter to Abigail of 12 August, he enclosed the poem entitled “T. B. A.” pictured here, which he had copied from an anonymous note “attached by a drab colored ribband to a tree” in a grove he used for study (below). The poem extolled the “genius” of its subject and expressed hope that he would find fruitful contemplation in his “calm retreat.” In her reply of 17 August, Abigail suggested that Thomas Boylston not attempt to respond in poetry, as “a poor attempt would be worse than none.” Writing again on 4 September (both below), she enclosed a gift for Wister, a book of poetry recently dedicated to herself, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton’s Virtues of Society, A Tale, Founded on Fact, for which see Morton to Abigail, [ca. 11 June], and note 1, below (TBA to AA, 29 July, and note 3, below; Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, ed., The Journal and Occasional Writings of Sarah Wister, Madison, N.J., 1987, p. 112–114, 135–136).
From the original in the Adams Family Papers. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.