Читать книгу Calling on the Presidents: Tales Their Houses Tell - Clark Beim-Esche - Страница 4

[This chapter is unusual in that it treats two Presidents instead of one. It does so because our second and sixth Presidents were father and son. Even more unusual is the fact that so many key events in the lives of both Presidents have taken place in the same three houses. John was the first Adams to own all three of them. He had been born in the first house; he and Abigail had celebrated the birth of their first son, John Quincy, in the second house; and he and Abigail lived the remainder of their lives in the third house, the so-called “Old House" at Peace field where he died on July 4, 1826. As early as 1803, John Adams's eldest son, John Quincy Adams, purchased the houses where he and his father had been born. After the death of his father, John Quincy and his wife, Louisa Catherine, came into possession of the third home as well, The Old House at Peace field. Here they would spend many of their remaining summers. It would be here at The Old House in 1840 that John Quincy would meet with Lewis Tappan, one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, to plan the defense of the Amistad prisoners before the Supreme Court of the United States. Add to all this, the fact that the furnishings at The Old House at Peace field are almost entirely original to the four generations of Adams families who lived there, and it becomes clear that attempting to separate the lives of the two Presidents as they relate to these homes would be an exercise in futility. Hence, the combination chapter. Also, I must note that, as our family's first trip to the Adams National Historical Park was, in some ways at least, the most memorable, I have combined incidents from our two later visits to this site into the narrative of that initial journey.]

In July of the summer of 2003, our family had just concluded an enjoyable vacation with relatives on Long Island near New York City. I had recently finished reading David McCullough's illuminating biography of John Adams, and I suggested to Carol and to our two children, Katie and Andy, that this trip to the east coast might also afford us the opportunity to drive up to Quincy, Massachusetts, in a leisurely fashion (the map suggested it would be quite possible to do so in a morning) and tour the three Adams homes there. We would arrive, I assured everyone, by midday, check in at our hotel, eat a quick lunch, and proceed to visit the historic sites. Carol, Katie, and Andy all knew about my interest in such side trips, and everyone was gratifyingly willing to go along with my plan. We set off soon after breakfast. Unfortunately, our travels didn't work out exactly as I thought they would.

First, there was a drizzling rain. Then, a heavy, pelting, relentless torrent, a “monsoon season in the tropics" kind of downpour that began as soon as we patiently wended our way from Long Island onto interstate 95 and headed north toward southern Connecticut. Finally the storm settled in in earnest, waves of water lashing our rental car's windshield until visibility was so limited that I felt the fear rise in the gorge of my throat.

After what seemed like hours, hazy, briefly discernible road signs suggested that we had passed through Connecticut and were headed into Rhode Island, but all I could see with any clarity was the gray wash of fog and the interminable spray of trucks and impassioned motorists, all more eager than I to hurdle themselves into eternity.

By the time we finally arrived in Quincy, all that any of us had the energy to do was check into our hotel, order some pizza to be delivered to the room, and collapse into a heavy slumber to rest our jangled nerves and taut muscles. Tomorrow, as Scarlett O'Hara would invariably observe, would be “another day."

And, happily enough, tomorrow came, still cloudy but dry, and, with it, our adventurous spirits returned as well. We called a cab and had it deliver us to the Adams National Historical Park. After purchasing our tickets and briefly perusing the interior of the small but well-appointed Park Center shop, we were called to board a trolley-car tram that would take us to our desired destinations: the three Adams homesteads.

The fact that these three homes are still in existence suggests the wonderful foresight of several generations of the Adams family. They must have realized that, in providing two of the first six Presidents of the United States, the family needed to be remembered, their world safeguarded for future generations to revere and savor. Perhaps the Adamses themselves, in taking special care to prosper as well as govern, had insured by their persistent efforts the longevity of their legacy.

As the Beim-Esches disembarked from the tram at its first stop, we found ourselves facing a triangular shaped section of land, itself surrounded by roadways and more modern buildings, but sitting comfortably within its boundaries, two large historical structures.

The further building of the two, but the one toward which our guide first led us, was a two story, simple, brown, weathered, saltbox home with a central door and two ground floor windows, one on either side, surmounted by a second story with three windows, two placed directly above the ground floor windows, and a third positioned over the front door.

This home, the oldest of the three sites we would see today, was the “John Adams Birthplace" house. Owned by his father, Deacon John Adams, it was the home where the future second President had been born in 1735.

Like Adams himself, the house was unpretentious and direct, yet even in its advanced years, unmistakably sturdy and useful. There was no front hall to speak of, only a small landing at the foot of a narrow wooden spiral stairway leading to the upstairs bedchambers. Immediately to the right was the “Great Room," or “Winter Kitchen," including a fireplace at least seven feet wide. Beyond this room lay the largest space in the house, the “Summer Kitchen," an addition created by Deacon John. It provided an area where he could hold political meetings as well as oversee the ecclesiastical councils that were an important part of his duties as a Deacon of the church. The space included a long table that still stood, drawn up against the wall of that room, where, we were informed, the young John Adams would have listened to the wranglings and disputations regarding the politics of his father's age. The head spokesman of any such political meeting was denominated the chairman of “the board" that we saw literalized before us.

Our guide, Rick, informed us, however, that it would be a meeting of the ecclesiastical council held in this room, more than any political gathering that had taken place here, that would forever change the direction of John Adams's young life.

Lemuel Briant, a young minister in the nearby Quincy church, had embraced the liberal religious ideals of the Great Awakening. In doing so, he had angered many in his more conservative congregation. An ecclesiastical council meeting had been called to examine his worthiness to continue in his position. As Adams had listened to the acrimonious give and take, he quickly realized that his own temperament would never be suited to having to amend his ideals to please the opinions of a church congregation. Very soon thereafter, he had altered the course of his studies toward the law rather than theology, and, upon passing the bar, he set up his first law office in the second front room of the home, his mother's parlor or “Best Room" as she had called it.

I find it both meaningful and illuminating that John Adams, even after his parents had passed on, had chosen to keep this original house intact as a part of his estate. There is a powerful reverence for one's roots implicit in that decision. Also an impressive humility. This very plain structure with its rudimental floors and unornamented utilitarian rooms bespoke a modest origin and a rather obscure heritage that many successful people might have wished to have put behind them rather than retain. John Adams, an admired lawyer and defender of rights, even those of the British soldiers involved in the so-called “Boston Massacre"; John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; John Adams, a key member of the Second Continental Congress, a minister to three foreign governments (France, Holland, and Great Britain), a Vice President to George Washington, and himself the second President of the United States after Washington's two terms of office had been completed; this remarkable man, John Adams, appears to have been completely at peace in acknowledging his connection to his humble roots.

Our next stop was just a few steps away: the home where, in 1764, John and Abigail had begun their married life together. Here they would ultimately have five children including, in 1767, their first son, John Quincy. And here Abigail and her young family would weather the storm of the Revolution as her husband labored to gain the essential European aid that would help insure a victory for the colonies.

Of the three homes we would visit here, this one seemed the most tinkered with and, as a result, in a strange way, the least genuine. We entered to the rear of the house into a distinctly lighter and airier room than any we had seen in the John Adams Birthplace house. The interior rooms had been quite consciously cleared to make room for tourists, and the pristine, newly—it felt—plastered walls gave this home a sense of having been emptied of its Adams memorabilia (which, of course, it HAD been when the Adams themselves had moved to “The Old House" at Peace field). Its lack of decoration made it hard to conceive of John and Abigail living and working here while their family and their country grew noisier and more aggressively active around them. This house's proximity to the road, however, was a most apt development for John Adams. It would have been impossible to feel very isolated here, as the bustle of wagons and passersby occurred literally just outside the front windows and doors of this pleasant home. Although this structure, in terms of space and size, was very similar to the John Adams Birthplace house, it was significantly newer and, for the Adams family I'm sure, was invested with the additional happiness of being theirs alone.

The one key alteration in this second home's saltbox design, aside from the cream-colored siding that made this structure visibly more attractive from the outside than had been the John Adams Birthplace house, was an exterior door cut in the side wall of the bottom left front room. I had read about this structural decision as Adams had established his law practice and had used this front room as his office. This door, so convenient to any street traffic, had enabled him to consult with clients who could enter and exit the home without disturbing the family. Clearly Adams had desired to keep his home—and the activities that characterized it—separate from the necessities of his active legal practice. This additional street side door had been his solution to the dual demands of career and home life. It was a simple and practical answer. Very Adams-like, I thought.

It also deserves mention that, in addition to being his law office, this front room had been the setting for one of John Adams's most lasting political legacies. Here, having been delegated to the task by his firebrand cousin, Samuel Adams, and James Bowdoin, President of the state constitutional convention, John had drafted the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, “the oldest functioning written constitution in the world," David McCullough notes in his definitive biography (225).

After our brief tour, we boarded another tram that had pulled up outside the second Adams home and were shuttled off for a somewhat longer drive toward our final destination: the Old House at Peace field. This last Adams home, however, had the extraordinary advantage of having been kept in precisely the same state and condition the Adams family had left it in when they ceded the property to the National Park Service in 1946. Included in this munificent gift were all the home's original furnishings. And this would be the setting where the reality of this extraordinary family, including two of our nation's Presidents, would come most thrillingly to life.

“When the 1731 front door to the Old House opens, one is immediately immersed in the world of the Adamses," reads the Adams National Historical Park guidebook on sale at the Visitor's Center. That is an understatement. I found myself reminded of the moment when, as a freshman in high school, I had first stood before Westminster Abbey in London, thinking, “William Shakespeare could have stood on the very spot where I'm standing, looking at the same cathedral." The Old House at Peace field is like that: history is everywhere.

Even the rather ornate knocker on the entryway door, our site docent, Bob, informed us, was a historic relic, dating from John Adams's days in Philadelphia when he was serving as Vice President in the Washington administration. During one of his daily walks around town Adams had noticed the distinctive design of this doorknocker. He had stopped to inquire of the owner if the knocker was for sale and, learning that it was, he had purchased it and brought it here to his home in Quincy. Pausing a moment to gaze at it, we then moved into the original hallway of the Old House. It was like entering a treasure trove of American history.

Once inside, our tour's first stop was the famous “Paneled Room." This elegantly wood-paneled chamber, looking like a scholar's study, had been John and Abigail's whitewashed dining room. Here President James Monroe, Commodore Perry, and General Lafayette had, on separate occasions, dined with John and Abigail Adams. And here, years later, in the room then serving as a parlor, John Quincy Adams would meet with Ellis Gray Loring and Lewis Tappan of the Amistad committee as they urged the ex-President to use his considerable legal skills to argue for the defense in the case of the imprisoned Mendi people who were facing extradition to Cuba and from there into slavery.

The dining room (although it had originally served as John and Abigail's living room) was our next stop. This area felt low and rather dark, though the Edward Savage portraits of George and Martha Washington on the west wall and the Gilbert Stuart portrait of the aged John Adams on the east wall gave this setting a special importance.

Passing through the dining area, we stepped carefully down into the first major addition the Adamses had commissioned here at the Old House and crossed a hallway into the Long Room. Once again, we were to be presented with a cornucopia of historical moments.

This room, creating the only large gathering place on the first floor, had been added at Abigail's request, as she knew such an expansive area would serve an important function in the public lives she and her husband would be leading here. And how right she had been. In this room General Lafayette would stand before the fireplace, “saluting the ladies" of Quincy. Here, John and Abigail would entertain both President Monroe and the famous Transcendentalist writer and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, each of whom had come to congratulate the ex-President on the election of John Quincy to the nation's highest office.

Throughout the room are to be found furnishings which had been placed in the White House when John and Abigail lived there. Several Louis XV chairs and a matching settee, among other pieces, date from John's ministerial years in the Netherlands when he had had to decorate the new American embassy in The Hague. He had brought these pieces back with him when he had returned to America and had carried them to the presidential mansion when he had been elected to the Presidency. Thereafter, as was then the custom in Washington, he had returned with them to Quincy at the end of his term. These possessions lent a marked air of elegance, grace, and historical pedigree to the Long Room.

Passing back into the hall, Bob then led us up the straight staircase to what, for me, would be the most meaningful room in the house: the upstairs study. This was the room where both Presidents, John and John Quincy, had spent the most time, reading their beloved books and writing the letters that would come to form some of the most famous of American literary correspondences. Here, John Adams, seated in the floral wing chair which remains placed in the corner where he loved to sit, had uttered his last public pronouncement to a small delegation of town leaders who had asked him to give them a Fourth of July message that they might read to the citizens of Quincy. “I will give you … Independence forever!" he had spoken (McCullough 645). Sitting right there in that corner. In that very chair.

Elsewhere in the room could be seen John Quincy Adams's W. Bardin terrestrial globe, a fitting possession for the most well-traveled diplomat in American history to that date. And then, almost nestled in the northeast corner of the study, stood John Adams's secretary desk, the spot where he had written the 158 letters that constituted his side of the indispensable correspondence with Thomas Jefferson that had reunited the old friends and past adversaries. And everything was still here, still placed as the Adamses had seen fit. Remarkable, simply remarkable.

As we left the study and proceeded down the passage that John Quincy had added to the house in order to make the study more directly accessible from the President's bedroom, I was reminded of this second Adams President's most noteworthy characteristic: his passionate love of reading. The passageway is literally lined with shelves, each groaning under the weight of an astonishing assortment of books. No wonder that John Quincy had asked his son Charles Francis to build a library on the grounds as his contribution to the homestead. The Adams family's voluminous collection of tomes had begun to outstrip the capacity of the house to hold them.

Our guide, Bob, then led us to the presidential bedroom. A decorative touch that I thought particularly apt was the addition of the Sadler tiles surrounding the fireplace grate. John Quincy had purchased them in Liverpool, England, in 1801, toward the end of his stint as Minister to Prussia, and he had sent them home to his mother. The tiles had then been installed in the presidential bedroom. Surely their blue and white distinctly Dutch design must have brought to mind John Adams's courageous efforts in Amsterdam during the Revolution, when he had labored so tirelessly to negotiate a loan from the Netherlands that would help pay for the munitions and supplies necessary to support the American armies fighting the British. In light of his father's recent defeat in seeking a second term as President, John Quincy's gift must have been seen as a most thoughtful and appreciative reminder of this earlier, crucially important success.

Bob now led our group back downstairs, and we ended up in the Long Hall. Taking note of the portraits of Charles Francis Adams, as well as of First Lady Louisa Catherine, he drew our attention to a framed and beautifully preserved floral wreath, hanging between portrait busts of George Washington and John Adams.

“This wreath was sent to Louisa Catherine Adams in 1826," Bob told us, “at the time of John Adams's death. Of course Abigail had already passed on by this time, so the women of the Seminary for Female Education in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had sent it to the current First Lady, Louisa Catherine Adams. They had wished to express their gratitude for President Adams's support for female education, evidenced in his visit to their school during the Revolution." The wreath was a perfect reminder of the sentiment that Abigail had written to her husband in Philadelphia during the long, hot days of the debate concerning Independence, “Remember the ladies." Clearly he had done so, and the wreath bore beautiful evidence that the ladies, too, had remembered him.

As we left the Old House, I thought that the tour was over. Happily I was mistaken, for we had one more stop to make: Charles Francis Adams's Stone Library.

It had been the wish of John Quincy that his son, Charles Francis, would construct a library on the property at Peace field to house the now over 12,000 volumes the two Presidents had accumulated over the years. Charles Francis had been unable to comply with his father's wishes during his lifetime, due to the demands of his extremely active scholarly pursuits and the vital ministerial service he had performed in England during the Civil War. Yet in 1870 he finally succeeded in creating the quintessential memorial to his father and grandfather here at Peace field, the Stone Library.

Our new docent led us to the door of this wisteria covered, chapel-like structure, and then she invited us to enter into the library's cordoned-off space to view its interior. Once inside we were immediately surrounded by two stories of shelves filled with thousands of books. I remember feeling distinctly that Professor Higgins from My Fair Lady might appear at any moment to lecture us on correct diction.

“You have come on a special day," our docent informed us. “Today, July 11, is John Quincy Adams's birthday, and this is the day when we show this particularly interesting book to our visitors." She moved to the large table in the middle of the room, opened a closed box, picked up out of it a folio sized volume, and brought it over to us.

“This is the Mendi Bible. It was given to John Quincy Adams by the Mendi prisoners who had been taken off the ship Amistad. It was their expression of gratitude for his successful defense of their right to return to their homes in Africa, argued in the Supreme Court of the United States. Look here," she continued, holding up a laminated piece of paper, "Inside the front cover of the book, each one of the Mendi people made his mark. This is a photocopy of that page. Here is the mark of their leader, Cinque."

I believe my goosebumps had goosebumps of their own. I was standing here, not two feet away from the gift of the Amistad people to their liberator, ex-President John Quincy Adams. I felt that I was in the very presence of history.

And the rest of the room would only deepen the feeling. In the southwest corner of the room stood John Adams's law desk, upon which he had drafted the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Standing before the library's north window could be seen John Quincy Adams's desk from the U.S. House of Representatives, from which, from 1831 until the day of his death in 1848, he had earned the name “Old Man Eloquent" because of his continuous, vociferous, and strident attacks on the presence of slavery within the United States. Everywhere here in the Stone Library there were to be seen crown jewels of early American history. It was a dazzling, unforgettable experience.

Since this first visit, Carol and I have returned here twice. With each succeeding tour we have noted and appreciated objects and aspects of the homes that we had missed in earlier years. But I will never forget that moment of wonder when the Mendi Bible was brought before me. It truly established for me the reality of this place, the reality of this father, and of his son, and of this indispensable family. I saw, as I had never seen before, the importance of visiting the homes of the Presidents, not simply as side trips stemming from a dutiful sense of patriotism, but as a means of discovering and appreciating the essence of the men who had molded and directed the United States. Their history was also my history. Their legacy has created my present, the America of today. I realized that understanding these men and the worlds they had inhabited could, in a very special way, open a door for every American to better understand both his country and himself. Taking the time and making the effort to do so has become a fascinating journey that has never ceased to inspire and enlighten me.