John Adams

by David McCullough

His “venerable colleague” Franklin, he noted, had the enviable privilege, because of his advanced age, to embrace the ladies as much as he pleased and to be “perpetually” embraced by them in return.

“I am left kicking and sprawling in the mire. . . . It is hardly a state of disgrace that I am in but rather of total neglect and contempt.”

this is always happening to Swamp Thing too

When Adams confided that he hoped to keep Hamilton at a safe distance, she provided a withering farsighted assessment. “Beware that spare Cassius has always occurred to me when I have seen that cock sparrow,” she wrote. “Oh, I have read his heart in his wicked eyes. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.”

In days the city had become a bake house again, as Abigail wrote. “The hot weather of July has weakened us all. Complaints of the bowels are very frequent and troublesome.” Strangely, cats were dying all over the city. The streets were filled with dead cats. No one had an explanation, and no one in Congress wished to delay departure an hour longer than necessary.

We have had wonderful proofs that the public mind cannot be held in a state of suspense. The public opinion, it seems, must always be a decided one, whether in the right or not. . . .

When it was rumored, for example, that Adams might deliver a valedictory to Congress, the Aurora had questioned how possibly the “Duke of Braintree” could ever consider appearing before “a body in which his former friends are his enemies, and his former opponents the only persons who pity him.” Adams, said the Aurora, was a man who had been cast out by God like “polluted water out at the back door.” “May he return in safety to Braintree, that Mrs. Adams may wash his befuddled brains clear.”

rude

And the threats he saw to the country: “The internal intrigues of our monied and landed and slaved aristocracies are and will be our ruin.”

yup

Dabbling in medical theory, Adams suggested that all Hamilton’s overheated ambitions and impulses might be attributed to “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off!”

hahahahahaha

His appetite strong, he delighted in the plain, substantial fare of the family table. As he wrote to Louisa Catherine, “We go on . . . eating fat turkeys, roast beef—and Indian pudding—and more than that, mince pies and plum pudding in abundance, besides cranberry tarts.”

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