Tag:

John Quincy Adams

Samuel Adams – The Last Puritan Fights the American Revolution Twice

Samuel Adams, the troublemaking firebrand who stirred the common rabble into supporting the American Revolution, became known as the last Puritan late in his life. He shook his head in dismay at how the country made use of its new freedom following the American Revolution.

Adam’s contemporaries credited him with bringing a passionate zeal to his support for the American Revolution. His critics on the English side accused him of underhandedness. They said he used smear tactics to incite the public to support his position.

But Adams’ zeal for a virtuous America was real, founded in a deeply religious upbringing in the Congregational Church. He was sadly disappointed by what he saw as moral decay following the Revolution. In particular, the last Puritan opposed the push to bring theatre to Boston, attacks on the city’s cherished public town meeting and the start of a libertine society that elevated flash over substance.

The Last Puritan

Sam Adams, the last Puritan

An early irritant to Adams emerged in 1784 when a group of young people decided Boston needed more entertainment. It needed to be more like New York and Philadelphia. They created the Sans Souci (Without Care) Club to bring merriment and mirth to the city.

The organization irked the more conservative members of society. Sam Adams hated the club and some of its more radical ideas, such as allowing women into gambling parlors. He viewed it as an invitation to bring European court society, with its lack of virtue and questionable values, into America. And that happened just at the moment when the country expelled them on the battlefield.

A play critical of the club circulated: Sans Souci, Alias Free and Easy: or an Evening’s Peep into a Polite Circle. The character Little Pert speaks for the supporters of the club:

Damn the old musty rules of decency and decorum – national characters – Spartan virtues – Republican principles – they are all calculated for rigid manners, and Cromwellian days; – they are as disgusting as old orthodoxy.

He continued:

Fashion and etiquette are more agreeable to my idea of life – this is the independence I aim at – the free and easy air which so distinguishes the man of fashion, from the self-formal republican – the court style – the je ne sais quoi – give me but this and way with all your buckram of Presbyterianism.

For all the anger the club caused, it had few outward impacts on the city. It was merely a private forum for club members to indulge themselves.

More public was the fight to bring theatre to Boston – an equally abhorrent idea to Adams.

Board Alley Sprouts a Theater

In 1792, a group of theatre advocates put up the money to launch the Board Alley Theatre, in defiance of the laws that forbid theatre in Boston.

As a venue for entertainment, the theatre, which could hold 500 people, was not much of a success. But as a statement of a mini cultural revolution at hand, it worked wonders. John Hancock, the pomp-loving peacock of a governor, was angered by the cheek of the theater supporters in openly defying the law.

He ordered his attorney general to break up the theater and arrest its managers in the midst of one performance. The stoppage of the play was cause for a mini riot. The case against the theater was thrown out of court on a technicality. But working class Bostonians would not let the matter drop. Why was their entertainment being banned when the wealthy and privileged could idle away their hours in private clubs and card games?

The message to the state’s legislature was loud and clear and the prohibition of theater was stricken from the books, clearing the way for Charles Bullfinch’s Federal Street Theatre to be constructed on the corner of Franklin and Federal Streets a year later, opening Boston to theater of all sorts.

Puritans in Decline

The arrival of theater in Boston highlighted the ways in which a new order was asserting itself, sweeping away the aging leadership that brought about the American Revolution. John Quincy Adams wrote to his father John and defended the theater.

For Sam Adams the theater was just another symptom of a society growing sick. His great worry was that the elites who ran the country, having summoned the rabble to do the dirty work of the Revolution, now wanted to put the farmers and working class on the back bench and elevate themselves as a new breed of royalty.

This fight between those who favored the old vs. those who wanted change manifested itself in the town vs. city fight that continuously enveloped Boston. As early as 1708 some had agitated for Boston to do away with its town meeting and establish a city form of government.

While other cities moved ahead with killing off direct democracies, Boston hung firm. In 1785 a proposal was put forward to do away with town meeting. Samuel Adams derided it at a public meeting at Faneuil Hall. Some of his countrymen, he noted, seemed to have “a hankering for the leeks and onions of Great Britain.”

And in a town meeting called to consider the issue, Adams warned against creating a political class: “A love of novelty and a desire for change has been an avenue through which aristocracy has entered.”

Overwhelmingly the town meeting voted down the change.

At Last, A City

In 1792, opponents of town meeting made a better organized attempt to change the government. By now the young bloods had grown in strength, but again the idea failed.

John Quincy Adams could barely contain his disdain for the town meeting supporters in writing about the defeat: “Seven hundred men, who looked as if they had been collected from all the jails on the continent, outvoted by their numbers all the combined weight and influence of wealth and abilities and integrity of the whole town.”

The town meeting would beat back proposals to change the charter in 1785, 1792, 1804 and 1815. Finally, in 1822, a city government was established. By then Samuel Adams was long dead. He had won election as governor for one term when John Hancock died, but his brand of politics was dying out. The last Puritan then failed in his bid for a U.S. Senate seat.

Adams died in 1803 after several years in political obscurity. Palsy had made it impossible for him to write and he slipped into retirement. Historian Edward Everett would note that with Adams’ death, “the last of the Puritans” was gone.

Thanks to: The Magic of the Many: Josiah Quincy and the Rise of Mass Politics in Boston by Matthew H. Crocker
The Gardiners of Massachusetts by T.A. Milford. This story about the last Puritan was updated in 2022.

1 comment 2.7K views

John Adams’ Seriously OCD Nephew Founds the Boston Athenaeum

The stately Boston Athenaeum at 10-1/2 Beacon St. owes its storied existence to William Smith Shaw, the obsessive, sickly, curmudgeonly, hard-drinking nephew of John Adams.

Today the Boston Athenaeum oozes elegance with its scarlet leather-bound doors, gilt-edged books and marble busts. But in 1807, it was little more than the obsession of the odd bibliomaniac who served as its first librarian.

William Smith Shaw, wrote a contemporary, ‘fastens on everything new, rare, and antique, with an earnestness which baffles all denial.’

Some called Shaw’s compulsive hoarding of books a ‘symptomatic disease of the upper class’ during the early, anxious years of the new American republic.

William Smith Shaw

William Smith Shaw was born in the chaos of the American Revolution on Aug. 12, 1778, in Haverhill, Mass. His father was village minister John Shaw; his mother, Elizabeth Smith, was Abigail Adams’ sister. He was sickly as a child, and at the age of eight he ran into a low-hanging clothesline, which injured his windpipe and wrenched his spine. At 12 he caught his ankle in a fencepost hole, which left him with a limp throughout his life.

Portrait of William Smith Shaw by Gilbert Stuart.

His portrait by Gilbert Stuart shows a hunched, pasty-faced gentleman with a book in front of him.

While Shaw studied at Harvard, his father died, leaving his family impoverished and forcing him to work for his tuition.

After he graduated in 1798, he worked as personal secretary for his uncle, President John Adams. When George Washington died, William Smith Shaw traveled to Mount Vernon to give Congress’s condolences to Martha Washington.

He keenly felt the political uncertainty of the age. After his uncle lost a brutal campaign for re-election, Shaw castigated President-elect Thomas Jefferson as ‘a man eternally wavering from one extreme to the other’ who headed an ‘unprincipled jacobinic faction.’

Shaw felt lonely and anxious in the raw, wet town of Washington. He wrote that he found friends in the society of books.

“[They] come at my call and return when I desire them–they are never out of humor and they answer all my questions with readiness.”

Anthology Society

The Boston Athenaeum today

William Smith Shaw moved to Boston and set up a law practice. He never married, despite his mother’s pleas, but formed intense friendships with several young gentlemen his age. They were all anglophiles, and they all yearned to be men of letters. They included Arthur Maynard Walter, Joseph Stevens Buckminster and Robert Hallowell Gardiner

In 1804, William Smith Shaw and his friends took over a floundering magazine and called it the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review. They used it as an excuse for a club they called the Anthology Society. The young men met to smoke cigars, drink and laugh, and meetings sometimes lasted into a ‘vulgar hour.’

The notes to one meeting read, “No other business was transacted, the members feeling rather wild in a strange room. The beef was good and the wine bad.”

Soon the Anthology Society received too many books to review, too many periodicals in exchange for subscriptions. The young men needed a place to put it all, so they rented a room on Congress Street. Shaw, Walter and Gardiner brought their books to put on a shelf.

In 1806, Shaw was appointed clerk of the federal court, which freed him up to act as the reading room’s librarian. A $10 membership fee allowed subscribers to visit the reading room from 9 am to 9 pm.

The Boston Athenaeum in 1855

The next year they formally established the Boston Athenaeum, with trustees, subscribers and William Smith Shaw as librarian. Sometimes he was the only trustee who came to the bimonthly meetings, and one year the trustees managed a quorum only once.

Devastating Loss

The deaths of two close friends may have exacerbated his OCD tendencies. He was devastated when Arthur Maynard Walter and Joseph Stevens Buckminster died before they turned 30.

Shaw became so obsessed with his collecting that he designed his clothing with large pockets in which to hold pamphlets and periodicals during the day. People nicknamed him Athenaeum Smith.

His letters reveal a growing desperation to acquire books: “I cannot urge upon you too strongly to spare no pains to send me the interesting books published in NYork as soon as possible,” he wrote.

Perhaps he was beginning to invest in books and pamphlets what he could no longer invest in human relationships.

Judge William Tudor observed of him:

…that dog Shaw goes everywhere. He knows everybody. Everybody knows him. If he sees a book, pamphlet, or manuscript –– Oh! Sir! the Athenæum must have this. Well, have it he will and have it he must, and have it he does, for he seldom goes out of a house without having something under his arm; and his large pockets, made on purpose, are crammed. Now, he never refuses anything whatever.

Eccentric and Gauche

William Smith Shaw’s obsession with the Boston Athenaeum bordered on lunacy.

He made a list of his responsibilities as librarian: “Every morning, Sweep News-rooms/dust the tables, chairs &c and the Library-room–After breakfast, clean the Lamps & Lamp-room, see that the books are in their places ad even with the shelves.”

1876 painting of the Athenaeum’s picture gallery

He gloried in the institution. It was ‘one of the greatest strides toward intellectual advancement this country has ever witnessed,” wrote Smith.

The trustees grew frustrated by his possessiveness. Though they asked him to do it repeatedly, he refused to separate his own books and periodicals from the Athenaeum’s.

It didn’t help that he was eccentric and gauche. He was uncouth in mind and body, wrote his friend Robert Hallowell Gardiner, but indefatigable in his labours for promoting the success of the work in which we were engaged.

In the end, booze got the better of him. In 1823, the Boston Athenaeum fired William Smith Shaw from his job as librarian. Gardiner explained why: ”…Intemperance made him incapable of attending to the decencies of life.”

He only lived a few more years, dying at 48 in 1826.

10-1/2 Beacon St.

After Shaw’s departure, the Boston Athenaeum began thriving. In 1847, the cornerstone was laid for the current Neoclassical building at 10-1/2 Beacon Street, next to the Old Granary Burying Ground.

Its illustrious members included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, both Oliver Wendell Holmeses, John Quincy Adams, Amy Lowell and John F. Kennedy. It also held an art collection that became the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Today the Boston Athenaeum is open all day Monday through Friday and part of the day over the weekend.

Images: Boston Athenaeum exterior by CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=722802.

With thanks to Culture Club: The Curious History of the Boston Athenaeum By Katherine Wolff. This story about the Boston Athenaeum was updated in 20212

4 comments 2.1K views

7 Strange Things New Englanders Did During the Dog Days of Summer

Dogs were said to go mad during the dog days of summer, and New Englanders have certainly done strange things in the hot, humid weeks of July and August.

The ancient Greeks were said to have named dog days after Sirius, the dog star, when it rises ahead of the dawn. The Old Farmer’s Almanac reports they happen from July 3-August 11. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer considers them to run from July 6 to August 17.

Scholar Eleanor Long concluded the term ‘dog days’ arose because people associated hot, sultry days with sickness and madness.

A Rhode Island study showed that early belief had some truth in it. Among the state’s 1 million residents, there are 300 extra emergency department visits and 13 more deaths on days with a heat index of 95 degrees or more.

Here are some strange things New Englanders have done during the long, hot days of summer.

Enemas and Sherry

On July 26, 1788, Maine midwife Martha Ballard noted in her diary: “Dog Days begin this day.” Ballard linked the dog days with increased illness. She certainly seemed to visit more patients during them. Shortly after they began in 1788, she gave an enema of English mallow and chamomile to a dying child.
In 1915, a Boston doctor named John Bryant advised a cure for headache during the dog days, but only for thin, meat-eating patients. He wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine, noting that “the [thin] carnivore who perspires little or not at all suffers from headaches and prostration, while the herbivore sits placidly amid steams and puddles of perspiration…the carnivore must be induced to perspire.” He recommended judicious amounts of alcohol, not more than a sherry glass of claret, madeira, or other similar beverage, taken at the oftenest not more than once in every four hours.” If that doesn’t work, he wrote, the patient can take a shower.

Pine Cones and Witch Hazel

John Quincy Adams, the radical who wore trousers on his inauguration, actually took off his cravat during a hot August in Washington, D.C. In 1822, Adams complained of the dog days in a letter to his wife. “As the weather is subsiding from fever heat I have resumed my cravat; but you know there is always room, summer and winter, for ironical wags to make merry with my dress.”
Henry David Thoreau wrote that the dog days occurred during September 1859 in Concord, Mass. He spent the time watching pine cones ripen. “It is really a rich and interesting sight. How little observed are the fruits which we do not use! How few attend to the ripening and dispersion of the pine seed!” he wrote in his journal on Sept. 18, 1859.
Penobscot Indian women refused to gather medicinal herbs, roots and bark during the hot summer. Instead, they gathered witch hazel, sarsaparilla and sweet flag roots immediately before it got hot and pounded them into powder.
In 1889, the New England Medical Gazette recommended breast-feeding infants to lessen ‘the double peril of teething and dog days.’
Henry Bowditch, prominent Massachusetts physician, followed the Greek physician Galen’s practice of bleeding patients. But Galen advised against bleeding during the dog days.

This story was updated in 2022.

1 comment 2.7K views

7 Fun Facts About John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams swam naked in the Potomac, kept an alligator in the White House and won freedom for Africans who mutinied on the slave ship Amistad.

So, yes, he was principled but quirky, qualities that can get you a single term in the White House. Which is what happened to John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States.

John Quincy Adams

Born on July 11, 1767, John Quincy Adams was one of the smartest and best educated presidents the United States ever had. He traveled widely in Europe with his father as a boy and ardently opposed slavery throughout his long career. He also lost a brutal reelection campaign for president, after which he served as a U.S. congressman from Massachusetts.

John Quincy Adams

But here are a few things about John Quincy Adams you may not have gleaned from the history books.

1. John Quincy Adams had strong feelings about kissing, not necessarily positive.

As a 20-year-old Harvard graduate studying law in Newburyport, Mass., he attended a New Year’s Party. He did not have fun. Some people started singing, and they wouldn’t stop though they weren’t very good. When that stupid ceremony ended, he wrote in his diary, an equally stupid kissing game started. He called it a ‘profanation.’

2. He liked to dance.

Perhaps because his father was such a bad dancer, John Quincy Adams had to study dance as a boy in Europe. He liked it, though, and called dancing ‘one of the most innocent and rational amusements that was ever invented.’ He attended dances from college through his 80^th birthday. As a mark of his character he thought it petty to make fun of bad dancers. And when his son John got married in the White House, he surprised everyone by dancing a Virginia Reel.

3. His wanton niece seduced all three of his sons.

Like his father, John Quincy Adams had three sons, two disappointments and one success. He and his wife Louisa took into their household Louisa’s orphaned niece, a flirtatious girl named Mary Hellen. She slept with all three sons, dumping Charles Francis and George for John. She wisely rejected George, an alcoholic wastrel who committed suicide. But she should have stuck with Charles Francis, who grew into a renowned historian, statesman and author. John seemed promising enough at the time of their wedding, but failed at business, fell into debt and despair and died of alcoholism at 31.

John Quincy Adams by George Peter Alexander Healy

4. He wore pants and his own hair to his presidential inauguration.

As a politician, John Quincy Adams came across as aloof and lacked the charm of many of his contemporaries. Though he was widely traveled, sophisticated and intelligent, he had simple tastes. He often dined on crackers in a city teeming with bon vivants. During his inauguration ceremony he wore a black, homespun suit with full-length pants rather than knee breeches – and no powdered wig.

5. John Quincy Adams nearly drowned as president.

In the summer of 1825, he and his manservant tried to paddle a canoe across the Tiber Creek, which once flowed through Washington, D.C., near the National Archives. President Adams thought he’d take off his clothes on shore and swim back. His son John, who joined them, warned them about the dangerous boat. He was right; the canoe sprung a leak and the wind kicked up. Adams and the servant jumped overboard and swam to the opposite shore. Adams took off his waterlogged clothes and lay gasping on the bank of the river until his rescue.

6. He was the first president to be interviewed by a female reporter.

Anne Royall, a travel writer and publisher, had a simple formula for success. She charged $5 for subscriptions and treated customers gently, while heaping invective on nonsubscribers. Fortunately for John Quincy Adams, he paid her $5 when he met her. He also told her to call on his wife and promised to get her a pension. According to an apocryphal story, she cornered him while skinny-dipping in the Potomac – something he did every day. She supposedly asked him about sound money and the Bank of the United States (he supported it). He later called her ‘the virago errant in enchanted armour.’

U.S. Rep. John Quincy Adams

7. The color of his head gave the index of his feelings.

After he lost the presidency, John Quincy Adams returned to Washington as a congressman. He fought slavery with blunt and vehement oratory. He could barely speak after suffering a stroke that partially paralyzed him at 78. Another congressman, John Wentworth, wrote, “It was understood in the galleries, as well as in the house, that the color of his head was the index of his feelings, it often becoming as red, under the violent declamations of Southern men, as living coals of fire.” Once his head turned bright red as a Southerner denounced Northern abolitionists. “Some waggish member exclaimed to the orator: “He says you are lying.” The speaker at once dropped the line of his speech, assumed a belligerent attitude, and exclaimed: “Who says I am lying?” “Adams,” “Adams,” replied several members. The laughter which followed was greatly increased when Mr. Adams, putting his hand upon his head, gave a significant nod, as much as to say: “I do say he was lying.”

* * *

Available in paperback and ebook. Click here to order your copy.

This story updated in 2024.

7 comments 9.4K views

Joseph Warren, The Patriot Who Might Have Made Us Forget George Washington

Joseph Warren, say some today, would have been the first president of the United States had he not been killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Joseph Warren about 1765, by John Singleton Copley

Had Warren lived, said Loyalist Peter Oliver in 1782, George Washington would have been ‘an obscurity.’

British Gen. Thomas Gage said the death of Joseph Warren was ‘worth the death of 500 men.’

Counties in 14 states bear the name of Joseph Warren, as do four towns in New England (New Hampshire and Rhode Island each have a Warren named after Sir Peter). Five ships were named after him, four statues bearing his likeness are on display and a street in Detroit is named ‘Warren Avenue.’

So what was so special about Joseph Warren?

Joseph Warren

Unlike John Hancock, Joseph Warren didn’t have a wealthy uncle who took him under his wing when his father died. But Joseph Warren was ambitious, both for wealth and for glory.

He had taken to heart the words of his father: “I would rather a son of mine were dead than a coward.”

Joseph Warren was just 14 and about to enter Harvard in 1755 when his father was killed falling off a ladder while picking apples. His mother, Mary Stevens Warren, mortgaged the farm to send him to Harvard, though she probably could have used more of his help to run it.

After graduating from Harvard, he married a 17-year-old heiress, Elizabeth Hooten, in 1764. She died eight years later, leaving him with two young sons and two young daughters.

Joseph Warren became the youngest doctor in Boston and one of the best, with a stellar list of clients including Sam Adams, John Hancock, John Adams and his family. He saved 7-year-old John Quincy Adams’ finger from amputation.

Paul Revere

Warren also had Loyalist patients: the children of Thomas Hutchinson, British Gen. Thomas Gage and his wife Margaret. After his wife died, Joseph Warren is believed by some to have had an affair with Margaret Gage. She may have tipped him off about the British plans to raid Concord and arrest Hancock and Adams.

It was Joseph Warren who enlisted Paul Revere and William Dawes to spread the alarm on April 19, 1775.

Most Influential Patriot

Of Joseph Warren, military historian Ethan Rafuse wrote, “No man, with the possible exception of Samuel Adams, did so much to bring about the rise of a movement powerful enough to lead the people of Massachusetts to revolution.”

The Old South Meeting House in 1898

Joseph Warren was gregarious, charming and a powerful speaker who enlisted in the patriot cause. He became Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge of St. Andrew when Paul Revere was the secretary. He was also a member of the Sons of Liberty, and he tried to save Christopher Seider, the young boy killed in 1770 by British soldiers.

To commemorate the second anniversary of the Boston Massacre, he delivered a speech at the Old South Meeting House while wearing a toga.

In the fall of 1774, Joseph Warren wrote the Suffolk Resolves, which supported a boycott of British goods and urged armed resistance to the British.

By the first months of 1775 he was the most influential patriot leader in Massachusetts. Hancock and the Adamses were in Philadelphia attending the Second Continental Congress, and Warren, just 33, was the president of the Provincial Congress – Massachusetts’ shadow government.

Bunker Hill

The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill by John Trumbull.

Joseph Warren belonged to the Committee of Safety. He had made sure powder and arms were stored in towns throughout Massachusetts. He also tried to organize Massachusetts’ fighting forces into an ‘army of observation,’ and he propagandized so they’d be willing to fight.

On the day of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, he sneaked out of Boston and led militia in harassing the British returning to the city. He then returned to Boston, where he organized soldiers for the siege of Boston and negotiated with Gage.

Joseph Warren Dies in the Battle of Bunker Hill

On June 13, colonial leaders learned the British planned to send troops to take the unoccupied hills surrounding the besieged city. That night, 1,200 colonial troops stealthily occupied Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill and built an earthworks.

Warren had been commissioned a major general in the Massachusetts militia. However, he insisted on fighting as a private in the thick of the battle. He asked Gen. Israel Putnam where the heaviest fighting would be.

Joseph Warren conferring with Israel Putnam before the Battle of Bunker Hill.

During the battle he fought behind the earthworks until the patriots exhausted their ammunition. He stayed there to give the militia time to escape while the British made their final assault. A British officer then recognized him and shot him in the head. He died instantly, six days after his 34^th birthday.

The British stripped his body and stabbed it beyond recognition, then threw him into a shallow grave with another patriot killed in the battle. Paul Revere later identified his body.

The day after the battle, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband:

I have just heard that our dear Friend Dr. Warren is no more but fell gloriously fighting for his Country-saying better to die honourably in the field than ignominiously hang upon the Gallows. Great is our Loss. He has distinguished himself in every engagement, by his courage and fortitude, by animating the Soldiers & leading them on by his own example.

More on that Battle

Interested in the Battle of Bunker Hill? You might want to read what it was like for Abigail Adams and her young son to watch it from 10 miles away.

Many others watched the battle from hills and rooftops, including this 10-year-old Loyalist who told her granddaughter what it was like.

Or you might want to read about the printer’s apprentice who spent 107 days in a British prison for cheering the patriot side while watching the battle.

The most detailed account of the battle came from someone who fought in it: a private named Peter Brown who enlisted after he heard the news of Lexington and Concord. The British, he wrote, got a ‘choaky mouthful.’

The news about the Battle of Bunker Hill threw the surrounding towns into a panic. Read the first-person account of a Salem doctor who thought the British had reached the next town.

Here is a more detailed description of the death of Joseph Warren.

Paul Revere was a man of many talents. He became the first odontologist when he identified the Warren’s body nine months after the battle ended.

This story was updated in 2023.

5 comments 4.1K views

Royall Tyler, the Man Nabby Adams Wanted To Marry

John Adams’ daughter in 1785 dumped the charming rake Royall Tyler to marry a dashing military hero. She may well have regretted her choice, but her secretive nature prevents us from knowing.

Abigail, or ‘Nabby,’ was the only daughter of John and Abigail Adams who lived to adulthood. She was handsome, not beautiful, and reserved. When she was 16 years old, Royall Tyler came to Braintree to practice law. He won, then lost, her heart.

What Nabby couldn’t have known was that her husband-to-be, William Stephens Smith, was a has-been at 30, and Royall Tyler would become a successful politician, professor and literary celebrity.

Royall Tyler

The dashing Royall Tyler

Royall Tyler was born June 18, 1757 in Boston, the son of a wealthy merchant. His father died when he was young. He studied at Harvard, where he squandered half his inheritance on drinking, partying and gambling. He also fathered a child with a cleaning woman.

After college, he studied law under Francis Dana, for whom a young John Quincy Adams had worked when he served as minister to Russia. Tyler then moved to Braintree, where he lodged with Abigail Adams’ sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Richard Cranch.

He soon grew friendly with John Quincy Adams and his sister Nabby, who at 16 was eight years younger than he.

Tyler cut a dashing figure. He was handsome, well-mannered and dressed stylishly.

Abigail Adams found Royall Tyler charming, and believed him when he told her he had reformed. She wrote to her husband, then in Europe. The young man had ‘a sprightly fancy, a warm imagination and an agreeable person,’ she wrote, though she admitted Tyler was ‘rather negligent in pursueing (sic) his business … and dissipated two or 3 more years of his Life and too much of his fortune to reflect upon with pleasure; all of which he now laments but cannot recall.’

She also told John Adams that Royall Tyler was courting his daughter.

Reformed Rake

John Adams exploded in writing at the news. He wrote Abigail a letter in January 1783:

I confess I dont like the Subject at all. . . . My Child is a Model, as you represent her and as I know her, and is not to be the Prize, I hope of any, even reformed Rake. . . .

But Tyler persisted and John Adams eventually relented. By the spring of 1784 he won Nabby’s heart and the approval of her parents. The Adams family expected them to marry.

Nabby’s letters are lost, and she never mentioned Royall Tyler in her letters. Still, it’s possible from her mother’s writing to glean what happened.

Stories about Tyler’s college days resurfaced in Braintree, and the Adamses came to think of him as an insincere flatterer.

Nabby Adams

In 1784, Nabby sailed for Europe with her mother to join her father and oldest brother, John Quincy.

Nabby wrote letter after letter to Royal Tyler. Ships from America kept arriving without letters from him. She kept to herself her ‘fear, suspicion, doubt, dread and apprehension.’

Finally, her mother broached the subject with her. Nabby asked Abigail whether she thought someone they knew was a man of honor. Abigail responded:

I replied yes a Man of strict honour, and I wisht I could say that of all her acquaintance. As she could not mistake my meaning, instead of being affected as I apprehended she said, a breach of honour in one party would not justify a want of it in the other. I thought this the very time to speak. I said if she was conscious of any want of honour on the part of the Gentleman, I and every Friend she had in the world, would rejoice if she could liberate herself.

Nabby decided to dump Royall Tyler.

In the summer of 1785, Nabby told her mother about the break-, up, asking that ‘neither the Name or subject may ever be mentiond to her.’ She sent Tyler a Dear John letter in September that year.

Consolation

Nabby’s letter devastated Royall Tyler. He took lodgings with the Palmer family in Boston, where he was consoled by Betsey Palmer. He took so much consolation from Betsey he fathered a child with her – and possibly two — while her husband was away.

Tyler then married Betsey Palmer’s daughter Mary, and they had 11 children. He took part in suppressing Shay’s rebellion, which took him to Vermont. There he became chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Vermont.

Royall Tyler became a literary celebrity as well. He wrote a comedy, The Contrast, performed in New York City before George Washington and members of the first Congress. He wrote a satirical newspaper column, published a novel, the Algerine Captive, authored legal tracts, plays, a musical, two long poems, essays and a travel narrative.

Tyler later said he only regretted his youthful profligacy to the extent it hampered his ambition later in life.

William Stephens Smith

When Nabby Adams broke up with Royall Tyler, she had her eye on someone else: Col. William Stephens Smith, secretary to the American delegation to London.

Smith was the son of a wealthy New York merchant, a Princeton graduate and a veteran of the Revolution where he had served on George Washington’s staff. When she married him, Nabby had on idea of the downward spiral his career would take.

They married in 1786 and returned to New York, where they had four children.

Smith received appointments to several federal posts, but he dabbled in Latin American coups and speculated recklessly in land. By 1809, the family lived on a small farm in western New York State. The rest of the Adams family viewed him as hopelessly improvident.

Nabby discovered a small lump on her breast, which turned out to be an aggressive form of breast cancer. In 1811 she returned to Boston and had a mastectomy without anesthetic.

She survived the operation and returned to New York. The cancer returned, though, and she told her husband she wanted to die in her father’s house. Her wish was granted on Aug. 15, 1813.

This story was updated in 2022.

2 comments 1.8K views

Newer Posts

Older Posts