The American Spirit Page 6

  The First to Reside Here

  CEREMONY OF THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WHITE HOUSE

  Washington, D.C.

  2000

  Mr. President, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. The first president to move into what was then known as the President’s House, John Adams, of Quincy, Massachusetts, arrived here at this entrance at midday, Saturday, November 1, 1800, at just about this time. Very little looked as we now see it. The new federal city of Washington was no city at all. The Capitol was only half finished. Except for a few nondescript stores and hotels in the vicinity of the Capitol, the rest was mostly tree stumps and swamp.

  The house itself was still quite unfinished. Fires had to be kept burning in all the fireplaces to help dry the wet plaster. Only a few rooms were ready. Only one twisting back stairway connected the floors. Though the president’s furniture had arrived, shipped from Philadelphia, it looked lost in these enormous rooms. The only picture hanging was Gilbert Stuart’s full-length portrait of George Washington, which still hangs in the East Room.

  These beautiful grounds did not exist. It was a different setting; it was a different country; and it was a different time. And in that age, no one ever knew when anyone was going to arrive anywhere for certain, including the President of the United States. So on that historic morning, two district commissioners were inside inspecting the work when they happened to look out the window and commented, “There is the President of the United States.” He had just rolled up in his carriage.

  With him was his secretary, Billy Shaw, and one servant on horseback, John Brisling, who became the first steward of the White House. There was nobody else. No honor guard, no band playing, no entourage of any kind. But who was that man that walked through these doors, the first of forty presidents who have lived here thus far?

  Adams had just celebrated his sixty-first birthday two days before, en route from Philadelphia. He was about five foot seven, about middle size in that day, and stout, but physically very strong. He stood erect, shoulders back. He was accustomed to building stone walls and bringing in the hay. He was a farmer’s son, descended from four generations of plain, God-fearing New England farmers, and proud of it.

  On missions to Europe in the midst of war, Adams traveled farther and under more adverse conditions in the service of his country than any American of the time, by far. It was John Adams who secured the desperately needed loans from the Dutch to help finance the war. He was a signer of the Paris peace treaty that ended the war, and the first American to appear before King George III, as a minister for the new United States of America.

  Between times he also drafted the oldest written constitution still in use in the world today—the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, written ten years before our own Constitution, and had great influence on the national Constitution. He was our first vice president, under George Washington, and elected president in 1796, defeating his old friend Thomas Jefferson.

  John Adams could be proud, vain, irritable, short-tempered. He was also brilliant, warmhearted, humorous, a devoted husband and father, and a lifelong talker—an all-out, full-time talker. He loved Don Quixote. He loved the English poets. He carried a book with him everywhere he traveled.

  He never had any money to speak of, and he is the only presidential Founding Father who, as a matter of principle, never owned a slave. Further, John Adams had the immense good fortune to be married to Abigail Smith Adams, one of the most extraordinary Americans of that extraordinary era. And their letters to one another constitute a national treasure.

  John Adams was a great man and a highly principled president in tumultuous times. Though gravely mistaken when he signed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, he had the good sense and determination and courage to keep America from going to war with France, which was a very great accomplishment, indeed, with far-reaching consequences.

  But let us not forget, too, that it was John Adams who nominated George Washington to be commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. It was John Adams who insisted that Jefferson be the one to write the Declaration of Independence. And it was President John Adams who made John Marshall chief justice of the Supreme Court. As a casting director alone, he was brilliant.

  Abigail Adams did not arrive here to join her husband until two weeks later, in that long-ago November. She could never get over the size of the house. She called it the castle, and hung her laundry out to dry in the then unfinished East Room. The Adamses lived in the house less than four months, and it was not a happy time for them. Adams learned of his defeat for reelection by Jefferson in what was perhaps the most vicious presidential campaign in our history. Then, within days he and Abigail received the word—devastating word—that their second son, Charles, had died in New York of alcoholism.

  There were men and women in that day, in their time, who would have refused to have lived in the White House in the condition it was in. But the Adamses made do without complaint. On January 1, 1801, they held the first New Year’s Day reception here ever—an open house.

  On his first evening in this house, following a light supper, John Adams retired early for the night. We may picture him with a single candle climbing that twisting back stairway. Early the next morning he went to his desk on the second floor and addressed a now famous letter to Abigail. Franklin Roosevelt thought so highly of the letter, and of two sentences in it, that he had it carved into the wooden mantelpiece in the State Dining Room. And when Harry Truman supervised the rebuilding of the White House, he insisted that that inscription remain where it is today.

  When John F. Kennedy was president, he had the inscription carved into the mantelpiece in marble. “I pray heaven,” Adams wrote, “to bestow the best of blessings on this house, and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”

  John Adams’s inscription on the White House mantelpiece

  John Adams lived another twenty-five years, to age ninety.

  A few days before his death, a delegation of his Quincy neighbors came to call on him. The old president sat in an armchair in his library as they asked if he could give them a toast that they might read aloud at the town’s 4th of July celebration. “I will give you,” said Adams, “independence forever.” Asked if he would like to add something more to that, he said, “Not a word.”

  That was the man who first occupied the White House. I think how pleased he and Abigail would be if they were here to see how we’ve gathered today. To see the country they so loved still independent, still united and thriving, still strong, still free, and this grand old house looking so magnificent. But then, maybe they are here with us today.

  History Lost and Found

  NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION CONFERENCE

  Providence, Rhode Island

  2001

  Carpenters’ Hall sits out of the way of the flow of traffic between Third and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia, back maybe two hundred feet in what’s called Carpenters’ Court. To me it’s one of the most eloquent buildings in all of America.

  It’s very close to Independence Hall and Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. But many people walk right by and don’t see it, which is a shame. It was finished before construction began of this church [the First Baptist Church, Providence, Rhode Island]. They are contemporaries and express the same sense of balance and light, balance and light being two of the great themes of the Enlightenment.

  Carpenters’ Hall, Philadelphia

  Carpenters’ Hall was built by the Philadelphia Carpenters’ Company, which was dedicated to fine workmanship and integrity in building. The Philadelphia Carpenters’ Company still owns Carpenters’ Hall. It was the place where, upstairs, Benjamin Franklin established his Library Company, which evolved into the first public library in America. And certainly along with freedom of religion, access to books, to learning, free to the people, is one of the greatest of our institutions.

  Carpenters
’ Hall, much more importantly, was the gathering place for the First Continental Congress in the summer of 1774. It is a place of a great, immeasurably important beginning and what is so eloquent about it is that it is so very small. It’s only fifty by fifty feet square. You could put it inside this meetinghouse where we are today with room to spare.

  And when you stand there, in that very real, authentic place, you feel the presence of that other time, that history in a way that would be impossible did it not exist.

  John Adams was one of the fifty-six delegates who gathered in Carpenters’ Hall in 1774, and as he wrote to his wife, Abigail, back in Massachusetts, he thought he had come to one of the greatest conclaves of the greatest minds of all time. He was amazed by the range and variety of talents on display. “The art and address of ambassadors from a dozen belligerent powers of Europe, nay, of a conclave of cardinals at the election of a Pope . . . would not exceed the specimens we have seen.” Here were eloquence and acuteness equal to any. “Every question is discussed with moderation, and an acuteness and a minuteness equal to that of Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council,” he wrote. (Hyperbole was a great part of the fun of living in the eighteenth century.)

  But after being subjected to a month of such “acuteness and minuteness” over each and every issue at hand, irrespective of importance, Adams was weary to death, as he said. The business of Congress had become tedious beyond expression. “This assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every man in it is a great man—an orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism, and his political abilities.

  “The consequence of this is that business is drawn and spun out to immeasurable length. I believe if it was moved and seconded that we should come to a resolution that three and two make five, we should be entertained with logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics, and mathematics concerning the subject for two whole days, and then we would pass the resolution unanimously in the affirmative.”

  To hold such a letter in your hands at about the same distance from your eyes as it would have been from Abigail Adams’s eyes, or to read what she wrote to him holding her letters in hand, is to make a physical, tactile contact with those distant human beings. There’s nothing quite like it. You feel their mortality. You feel a common bond with them as fellow human beings.

  The Adams letters are nearly all in the Massachusetts Historical Society. They’re written on rag paper and so they will last forever, if properly taken care of. And the importance of that experience to students, to scholars, to all of us, any of us, is irreplaceable—just as is the tactile connection we make in a space like Carpenters’ Hall or this church.

  These buildings, those people, it might be said, aren’t aspects of the past at all. One might indeed surmise there’s no such thing as the past. Adams, Jefferson, George Washington, they didn’t walk about saying, “Isn’t this fascinating, living in the past? Aren’t we picturesque?” It was the present, their present. Not our present, their present. And we have to understand that.

  Nor were they just like we are. Their present was part of a different time, and because of that, they were different from us. We have to take into consideration, for example, all they had to contend with that we don’t even have to think about—all the inconveniences, discomforts, and fears. And the hard, hard work.

  There are more than one thousand letters just between Abigail and John Adams. Abigail herself has left over two thousand letters. Think of that. And when you consider all she had to do just to get through a day—up at 5:00 in the morning, waking the hired girl, starting breakfast, tending the fire, feeding stock, running the farm in her husband ‘s absence, which in the aggregate came to ten years.

  These were two of the most devoted patriots of their time, sacrificing for their country. “I wonder if future generations will ever know what we have suffered in their behalf,” Abigail wrote.

  Because schools were closed, she had to educate the children at home. She had to cope with constant shortages and runaway inflation, and somehow hold her own, keep her equilibrium, in the face of the frequent horrors of rampant epidemics, dysentery and smallpox.

  At one point she took all of her children, plus a number of her relatives and neighbors, some seventeen people, into Boston to be inoculated for smallpox. This was a very dangerous, brave decision, for even if one survived such an ordeal, the misery, the wretched illness that went with it was something nobody would ever wish to experience. And because communication with her husband was so difficult and slow, she had no choice but to make such decisions on her own.

  Abigail Adams by Gilbert Stuart

  And yet at the close of her long days there on the farm in Braintree, at maybe 10:00 or 11:00 at night, Abigail Adams would sit by the fire at her kitchen table, take up a quill pen, and write some of the most thoughtful, telling letters by any American of the time.

  The house is still there. It is the house she lived in as a bride and through all the years of the Revolution when John Adams was off serving the country. Their first son, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was born there. And when you go there, you will be moved by how small it is. And how sturdy. Next door is the very similar house where John Adams was born. There they stand, two plain, solid New England saltboxes by the side of the road. The third Adams house, the much larger Old House, as it’s called, is the house John and Abigail moved into after their return from diplomatic service in Europe in 1788.

  And then there’s the magnificent house they lived in in Paris. There is the house where Adams lived in Amsterdam and in which he very nearly died of fever while securing vitally needed loans from the Dutch during the Revolution.

  The house where he and Abigail lived in London, when Adams was our first ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, also still stands: the last eighteenth-century house on Grosvenor Square. Talk about buildings redolent with history! Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Bulfinch, Benjamin West, John Trumbull all came and went.

  We can find Adams and Jefferson in Philadelphia still. We can find Adams, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Paul Revere in Carpenters’ Hall and in Independence Hall, the Powell House, and old Christ Church. And we can find the Adamses in the White House—they were the first to occupy the White House. All these buildings, these American places, all are tangible, real, evocative expressions of those distant times and those extraordinary people. And those people are here, with us, in a way they would not be if those structures were gone.

  Imagine if there were no historic buildings, if there were few or no historic places. Imagine how it would be if there were no Gettysburg battlefield, no Brooklyn Bridge, no Faneuil Hall, no Panama Canal, no Kitty Hawk. The list could be very long. Each and every one could have been swept away, destroyed, heedlessly like so much else.

  We Americans say, “What’s new?” Nobody ever greets you saying, “What’s old?” (Well, maybe preservationists do!)

  We think we live in difficult uncertain times. We think we have worries. We think our leaders face difficult decisions. But so it has nearly always been.

  When John Adams went off to Philadelphia in 1774, he knew, as the other delegates knew, that only the previous year more than three hundred people had died in the city of smallpox.

  Nor was there any certainty of success, or any groundswell of popular support. Had they taken a poll in Philadelphia in 1776, they would have scrapped the whole idea of independence. A third of the country was for it, a third of the country was against it, and the remaining third, in the old human way, was waiting to see who came out on top.

  We live in a world where there are twenty cities with populations over ten million people. The entire population of the American colonies was 2,500,000. Philadelphia, the largest American city, had all of thirty thousand people, a small town by our standards.

  The same week the Continental Congress voted for independence, the British landed 32,000 troops on Staten Island. In other words, they landed a
military force larger than the entire population of our largest city. When the delegates signed their names to that Declaration, pledging “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” those weren’t just words. Each was signing his own death warrant. They were declaring themselves traitors.

  One of my favorite of all moments occurred when old Stephen Hopkins, a delegate from Rhode Island, who suffered from palsy, after fixing his spidery signature to the Declaration, remarked, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.”

  We’ve just been through an experience none of us will ever forget. The heartache, the sadness, the grief of September 11 will stay with us as long as we live. I’m sure we all experience that sensation of waking up in the morning, and there’s about thirty seconds, maybe a minute, minute and a half, when it’s not in our minds. And then suddenly it comes back, and we remember.

  Stephen Hopkins’s signature on the Declaration of Independence

  Because of the magnitude of it, the magnitude of the crime, the magnitude of those buildings coming down before our eyes, dust to dust in an instant, on our own home ground in what we had taken to be peacetime, we will never forget.

  It’s said that everything has changed. But everything has not changed. This is plain truth. We are still the strongest, most productive, wealthiest, the most creative, the most ingenious, the most generous nation in the world, with the greatest freedoms of any nation in the world, of any nation in all time.

  We have resources beyond imagining, and the greatest of these is our brainpower. So far we’ve not only kept our heads, we’re using our heads. And we have much to be proud of since September 11. We have seen a revival of real, genuine patriotism such as we’ve not seen in our lifetime, or for maybe at least fifty years.