Abstract
In the fall of 1788, John and Abigail Adams’s children corresponded guardedly about the sex scandal that then reigned near their childhood home. Abigail (“Nabby”) Adams Smith wrote from Jamaica (Queens), New York, to her younger brother John Quincy Adams, a recent Harvard graduate studying law in Newbury, MA, in response to gossip he had recently sent. A month earlier, 22-year-old Fanny Apthorp, a neighbor to their aunt and uncle, had poisoned herself, bringing to a climax a drawn-out set of scandals, including Fanny’s pregnancy by her much older brother-in-law, the prominent Boston lawyer Perez Morton: “the Tragical Story you relate has made much talk here as well as with you,” Smith wrote, omitting names. “[T]hat family seem to be devoted to misfortunes of every kind,—if there are any innocent—one cannot but regret that they should be doomed to suffer with those whose atrocity of Guilt is almost unparalleled—.” As quickly as she questioned the entire Apthorp clan’s innocence, she turned their “misfortunes” into a national allegory on economic and moral themes:
I hope our Countrymen will be Wise enough to take warning from those instances they have recently had of the pernicious affects of Such extravegance, dissipation, and folly;—as have been exhibited to view these late years;—the fatal Consequences which thousands of Innocent Persons experience from the downfall of thease airy fabricks—and visionary Castles of splendor—aught alone to deter others from pursueing So fallacious a Plan of Life—1
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Notes
Abigail Adams Smith to John Quincy Adams, September 28, 1788, in Adams Family Correspondence, 10 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1963–2011), 8: 299–300.
Hereafter AFC. The editors do not identify the family being discussed. Smith draws on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 4.1.148–56, a popular passage in contemporary economic discussions. See Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008), 248ff.
Smith also echoes Ambrose Philips, “Epistle to the Earl of Dorset” (1709), which itself draws on The Tempest. All quoted material in this essay retains original punctuation and spelling.
In the 1790s, Smith’s husband would lose a fortune to speculation, as would her younger brother, Charles. See Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (New York: Free Press, 2009), 295–96, 313–14, 331.
Abigail Adams Smith to Abigail Adams, October 5, 1788, in AFC, 8: 303.
Abigail Adams to John Thaxter, July 21, 1780, in AFC, 3: 377–79.
Rodney Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), ch. 1
Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Ruth H. Bloch, “Religion, Literary Sentimentalism, and Popular Revolutionary Ideology,” in Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), ch. 8
Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the Early American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Domesticating ‘Virtue’: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America,” in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)
Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1987)
Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 44, no. 4 (October 1987)
On seduction literature and economics, see Jennifer Baker, Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)
Karen Weyler, Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789–1814 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004).
Jennifer R. Mercieca, Founding Fictions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), ch. 3
John Adams to William Cunningham, March 15, 1804, quoted in Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 237.
Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); James Chandler, “Placing The Power of Sympathy: Transatlantic Sentiments and the ‘First American Novel,’” in The Atlantic Enlightenment, ed. Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008); Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
James Chandler, “Placing The Power of Sympathy: Transatlantic Sentiments and the ‘First American Novel,’” in The Atlantic Enlightenment, ed. Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008)
Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
On the significance of the local in early US writing see Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), ch. 5. Strangely, this “local” reading of The Power Sympathy ignores the Morton-Apthorp scandal. Prior studies of the novel’s reception include Davidson, Revolution and the Word, ch. 5
Richard Walser, “Boston’s Reception of the First American Novel,” Early American Literature 17, no. 1 (Spring 1982)
Emily Pendleton and Milton Ellis, Philenia: The Life and Works of Sarah Wentworth Morton, 1759–1846 (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1931), ch. 2.
Alan Rogers, “‘A Long Train of Hideous Consequences’: Boston, Capital Punishment, and the Transformation of Republicanism, 1780–1805,” in Boston’s Histories: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. O’Connor, ed. James M. O’Toole and David Quigley (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2004)
Leonard L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). See Rogers regarding a woman convicted of stealing from Morton who was eventually executed for highway robbery (23–24).
On Morton’s biography: Kamensky, The Exchange Artist, 39–45; T. A. Milford, “Boston’s Theater Controversy and Liberal Notions of Advantage,” New England Quarterly 72, no. 1 (March 1999), esp. 71–73
Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. 17 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1975), 555–61.
See Abigail Adams’s comment to John that “Colonel [James] Warren of Plymouth” had convinced “young Morton” to move there, causing great indignation, presumably because Boston would lose him (Abigail Adams to John Adams, August 15, 1774, AFC, 1: 140–41).
Perez Morton, An Oration; Delivered at the King’s-Chapel in Boston, April 8, 1776, on the Re-interment of the Remains of the Late Most Worshipful Grand-Master Joseph Warren, Esquire (Boston, 1776), 5.
On Masonic fraternity and social mobility see Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), ch. 4.
Bullock discusses Morton’s oration on 110–111. Sandra Gustafson reads Morton’s oration as revealing the “hierarchical meanings invested in male bodies” such as Warren’s Christ-like corpse (Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000], 197–98).
For another recent reading see Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 156. Morton quotes the familiar lines from The Tempest, though he targets Britain rather than speculation (10, 13).
Abigail Adams to John Adams, April 7, 1776, in AFC, 1: 374–75.
Perez Morton, “To the Public,” Boston Gazette, and Country Journal, April 27, 1778, 3.
Henry Howell Williams, “To the Public,” Boston Gazette, and Country Journal, May 11, 1778, 2. The same page contains several affidavits against Morton.
Abigail Adams to John Thaxter, July 21, 1780, in AFC, 3: 377–79. The editors speculate that the couple mentioned is Perez Morton and Sarah Apthorp, though they worry that the timing seems off, given that Fanny’s death is still years off. They don’t recognize Adams’s mention of the slight on “the whole Sex” as a reference to Morton’s Masonic oration, which would seal the attribution.
On Chesterfield’s popularity in America see Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 40–43. For a famous American denunciation of Chesterfield, see Mercy Otis Warren’s anonymous letter to her son in the Independent Chronicle, January 18, 1781, 2.
Jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 65. Davidson cites Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 203–204. See also Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 174–83.
Davidson cites Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 203–204.
See also Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 174–83.
Instances of the word “seduction” in American newspapers increase from fewer than six per decade in the 1760s and 1770s to over two dozen in the 1780s. Though some seduction stories begin to appear in the mid-1780s, the sharpest spike follows the Apthorp-Morton scandal and that of Elizabeth Whitman in 1788. On the Whitman scandal see Bryan Waterman, “Elizabeth Whitman’s Disappearance and her ‘Disappointment,’” William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 2 (April 2009). The revival in the 1780s of Samuel Richardson’s novels — especially in pamphlet-sized redactions—also speaks to the renewed fascination with seduction stories. See Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English, ch. 3; Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, ch. 3.
See Kate Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 5
Charles Warren, “Samuel Adams and the Sans Souci Club in 1785,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 60 (May 1927).
Like Morton, Jarvis had bought up loyalist estates and supported Governor John Hancock (John Tyler Hassam, The Confiscated Estates of Boston Loyalists [Boston, 1895], 14). He would later be satirized with Morton in Occurrences of the Times.
Sans Souci, Alias Free and Easy: or An Evening’s Peep into a Polite Social Circle (Boston, 1785), 18–19. The reference to modern religion indicts Morton’s role in bringing Unitarianism and lay ordination to King’s Chapel, where he was a vestryman from 1783–88. Opponents of liturgical reform saw it as another sign of liberty become licentiousness. See Milford, The Gardiners of Massachusetts: Provincial Ambition and the British-American Career (Portsmouth: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005), 102–107
Walter Muir Whitehill, “Perez Morton’s Daughter Revisits Boston in 1825,” Publications of the Massachusetts Historical Society 82 (1970), esp. 25.
On the theater controversy of the 1790s, in which Morton supported legalization, see Milford, “Boston’s Theater Controversy”; Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 65–68.
In an August 16, 1788, diary account by the Apthorps’ neighbor and Adamses’ relation Betsy Cranch, Fanny is described as “very unwell,” a common euphemism for pregnancy. Subsequent entries describe the arrival of news from Boston on Fanny’s suicide. See Elizabeth Cranch Norton, Diary, August 16, 1788, through September 3, 1788, MHS. The New-Haven Gazette, September 25, 1788, includes a unique explanatory note with its reprinting of the suicide letters: “It is further said that Miss A. was again pregnat [sic] when she put an end to her life by poison” (7).
Cotton Tufts to Abigail Adams, April 13, 1786, in AFC, 7: 142–43.
Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry, for instance, saw citizens as being “daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men,” language that echoes seduction fiction (quoted in Mercieca, Founding Fictions, 96).
See Angela Vietto, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 111–13. Morton dedicated her first volume of poetry to James Bowdoin.
Nancy Isenberg suggests that such scandals rarely had permanent effects. See Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Viking, 2007), 97.
Her earlier work on representations of Burr’s sexuality, however, suggests that these tactics gained traction over time. See Isenberg, “The ‘Little Emperor’: Aaron Burr, Dandyism, and the Sexual Politics of Treason,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 17, 1794, in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Francis Adams, vol. 1 (Boston, 1856), 474.
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© 2012 Toni Bowers and Tita Chico
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Waterman, B. (2012). “Heaven defend us from such fathers”: Perez Morton and the Politics of Seduction. In: Bowers, T., Chico, T. (eds) Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014610_4
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