Mercy Leroux

Your delicate Charles is as hardy as a flynt. He sustains every thing better than any of Us, even than the hardy Sailor his Brother. He is a delightful little fellow. I love him too much.

-John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1780

Charles Adams was the second son and fourth child of John and Abigail Adams. His elder brother, John Quincy, would go on to become president in his own right. Charles, however, appears to have had something of a wild streak.

Charles traveled to Europe with his father and John Quincy during the war, and their ship nearly sank on the way there. As a result, they didn’t land where they were supposed to, and the Adams boys embarked on a long journey over mountainous terrain to reach their destination.

John Adams promptly enrolled Charles and John Quincy in school. However, John Quincy started deliberately getting into trouble in hopes of getting kicked out. When summoned to deal with his son (who was apparently influencing Charles to go along with his schemes), it came out that the school was apparently abusive beyond the norm for these days. John Adams did the right thing and immediately withdrew the boys, sending them to another school instead.

Charles eventually was sent back to Massachusetts. The reason given is generally that he was homesick, but it’s also worth noting that since he was sent back in December 1781, that puts the timing right after John Adams’ 1781 nervous breakdown, which was physical as well as mental. He possibly had malaria and ended up delirious, describing the experience as being a:

nervous fever of a very malignant kind, and so violent as to deprive me of almost all sensibility for four or five days.”

When he eventually regained his faculties, John Adams was too weak to even write for weeks on end. It’s hard not to imagine this traumatizing a kid, regardless of whether he was at school.

However, a family reunion wasn’t to be. Abigail and Nabby, Charles’ mother and sister, then went to join John Adams in London at the end of the war. There’s actually a report that Charles was presumed lost at sea when his ship got sidetracked for five months, but I can’t corroborate that through contemporary sources, and there’s fair reason to think that claim may have been mixed up with the complicated voyage Adams and both his boys took over to Europe. If someone has better sources, please let me know!

Anyways, Charles and his brother, Thomas, were then raised by relatives. Thomas had a strong resentment at the time towards his father, who had been absent for much of his life, and would refuse to read the letters his father wrote to him.

As a young man, Charles attended Harvard to become a lawyer like his father. However, John Adams noted that he wasn’t so certain Charles was suited for this path. While at Harvard, Charles routinely got into disciplinary trouble, mostly for minor infractions like missing prayer, and occasionally for more serious things like vandalism. One incident started the Primal Scream, a tradition where students get drunk and streak naked through Harvard Yard. Primal Scream goes on even today! However, despite this often being attributed to Charles, it was actually not him but a friend of his.

In 1789, Charles’ brother John Quincy visited him and, according to a letter, became extremely concerned. Why exactly isn’t specified, but others have speculated it may have been something about his sexuality, while others assume it was his well-documented excessive drinking. Whatever it was, John Quincy mused that it was important that their father not discover this secret of Charles’s:

I depend much more upon the alteration which is soon to take place in his situation, than upon any advice or counsel, that I can ever give him. I am well convinced that if any thing can keep him within the limits of regularity, it will be his knowlege of my fathers being [near him and the?] fear of being discovered by him.

After graduating, Charles was supposed to clerk for Alexander Hamilton in New York, but Hamilton had other political duties (like being appointed Secretary of Treasury), so despite moving to New York, Charles didn’t really work very closely with Hamilton.

Still, it was in New York that, in 1791, Charles Adams met John Mulligan, the son of American spy Hercules Mulligan (and friend of, again, Alexander Hamilton). Their friendship grew extremely close, and that’s where rumors have started that they were in a romantic relationship. As you’ll see below, I don’t think the evidence is as clear as it’s often reported to be, but I do think there’s a fair bit of smoke here, so it’s reasonable to ask.

Several sources claim that the two boys’ closeness upset John and Abigail Adams. And by upset, we mean to the point where they explicitly told Charles they would disown him and cut him off if he didn’t stop being “friends” with Mulligan. However, I cannot find a primary source for this. As best I can tell, it appears derived from an interpretation of a letter sent from Baron Steuben, a Revolutionary War hero fairly well known for having been gay, to Mulligan, in which Steuben offers to take care of both Mulligan and Charles in the aftermath of some kind of difficulty.

Steuben had, in fact, offered to take the boys in, and for a time they did live with him. Mulligan would stay with Steuben until Steuben’s death in 1794. However, the letters were written after they’d already moved in with Steuben.

The next year, Charles created a bit of a scandal in his family when he married Sally Smith. Sally was the sister of the (alcoholic, and also former housemate of Steuben’s) husband of Charles’ elder sister, Nabby. Their marriage wasn’t with the approval of their families, but they were accepted. Nabby wrote to John Quincy:

when this reaches you it will I dare say be no news to you to be informed of Charles Marriage after all the Hair Breadth scrapes and iminent dangers he has run, He is at last Safe Landed—and I beleive [sic] is very happy

People have read into this, and I can see why. Whether Nabby was just expressing a naive optimism that her brother had his happy ending now that he was married (odd considering her own marriage was very much troubled), or whether she was expressing relief he married a woman and was thus leaving other proclivities behind, we cannot know.

All the while, Charles’ letters to his father contain interesting tidbits, including an anecdote about a dinner he had with Hamilton and others, during which someone teased Hamilton about being attracted to men as well as to women.

This modest speech was addressed to Church whose reply was you have find weaknesses not confined to the female sex: which produced a laugh and perhaps was not thought of by any person but myself afterwards.

That Charles brought this up to his father in a letter, noting that no one except him seemed to dwell on this joke, seems rather interesting, and potentially poignant. While this is pure speculation, I do wonder if he was testing the waters.

Despite having two daughters, Charles’ drinking spiraled during this period. Within a few months of writing the above letter about Hamilton, he abandoned Sally, who moved in with Nabby, and it was at this point that John Adams officially disowned his son, forgetting that he’d once “love[d] him too much.” John Adams wrote to Abigail:

Sally opened her Mind to me for the first time. I pitied her, I grieved, I mourned but could do no more. a Madman possessed of the Devil can alone express or represent.— I renounce him.— K. Davids Absalom had some Ambition and some Enterprize. Mine is a mere Rake, Buck, Blood & Beast.

Of note, Absalom is a son of King David’s in the Bible. If you want to read more about that story, see here, but note that Adams appears to have misinterpreted that the main flaw that leads to David and Absalom’s tragedy… because it is prioritizing politics over being a father, a flaw I’d say Adams was demonstrating and had demonstrated.

Tragically, John Adams was determined to treat his son with anger instead of compassion. He wrote to Abigail that “The Reprobate shall be punished.” He never reconciled with Charles, who died just over a year after this break from his family. Charles’ mother, Abigail, did see him again, writing to her sister about ten days before his death:

at N york I found my poor unhappy Son, for so I Must still call him, laid upon a Bed of sickness destitute of a home, the kindness of a friend afforded him an assylum. a distressing cough, an affection of the liver and a Dropsy will soon terminate a Life, which might have been Ma[de] valuable to himself and others. you will easily suppose that this Scene was too powerfull and distressing to me: Sally was with him but his Physician Says, he is past recovery—

While it’s often reported Charles died from alcoholism, and indeed Abigail reports him having a liver issue and dropsy, it’s unclear if that’s actually medically accurate, and of course, we’ll never know for sure. Abigail also notes that Charles didn’t look like an “intemperate man,” (and, as we’ll discuss below, she had seen others die of the disease in her family). So while I see why scholars have drawn that conclusion that he died from alcoholism, I also think that’s simply not definitive based on the descriptions we have. Drinking probably didn’t help him, and he certainly had a problem with alcohol, but there is enough described of his medical issues that make me uncertain to say unequivocally that he died of alcoholism.

Abigail also concluded that “he was no Mans Enemy but his own— he was beloved, in spight of his errors.” And, indeed he was, because John Adams did grieve Charles. Adams wrote to his other son: “Oh! that I had died for him if that would (have relieved him of his faults and of his disease).” To Thomas Jefferson, he wrote:

Had you read the Papers inclosed they might have given you a moment of Melancholly or at least of Sympathy with a mourning Father. They relate wholly to the Funeral of a Son who was once the delight of my Eyes and a darling of my heart, cutt off in the flower of his days, amidst very flattering Prospects by causes which have been the greatest Grief of my heart and the deepest affliction of my Life.

The whole story is just heartbreaking for Charles and for their family. I wish John Adams had meditated a bit more about the Prodigal Son and less on Absalom… and if he did meditate on Absalom, considered the father (David)’s role in creating the tragedy of losing a son, and how David’s grief tore him apart. It’s understandable to want our children to achieve great “Prospects” and fulfill their potential, but they deserve love and pride just for existing.

Of note, alcoholism does have somewhat of a genetic link, and certain recurs throughout Abigail’s family, and also through their descendants. Her brother died from complications due to it. Charles and his younger brother, Thomas, were both afflicted, as were John Quincy’s two eldest sons, George Washington Adams and John Adams (yes, both sons were named for the first two presidents of the United States).

There is a curious discrepancy between how John Adams (the father/president) responded to Thomas’s worsening alcoholism versus Charles’s. Some have suggested that this indicates a potential shift in John Adams’ perspective–that having lost one son, he was not willing to lose another so cruelly. In fact, Thomas and his family lived with John Adams in their later years.

Of course, others have pointed out that there are other potential reasons for the difference: firstly, that Charles’ alcoholism might have been entwined with a not-straight sexuality, while Thomas’ was not. Secondly, Thomas didn’t abandon his family (though John Quincy’s son later noted that Thomas was verbally abusive, which isn’t any better). None of these potential reasons are mutually exclusive of each other, either.

Of note, that son of John Quincy’s mentioned above was born in 1809, almost a decade after Charles’ death, and would be John Quincy’s youngest son. John Quincy and his wife, Louisa, named that youngest boy Charles, after the uncle he’d never met. And he had a son name Charles. And so did that Charles. And that Charles. And that Charles the V, who died in 2010. As for Charles Adams’ daughters, they still have descendants alive today as well.

Was Charles Adams queer? We can’t say. There is never going to be an explicit note saying as much, and people who were would likely be talked about through coded words and less specifics in writing–which admittedly does seem to be the case in terms of how Charles’ family discussed his vices. However, whether they were only discussing alcoholism or his sexuality or something else entirely is unclear and deliberately so. There’s certainly smoke, though, and far more so than in other cases where people have speculated about whether a historical person may have been queer. I think it is fair to have such discussions, as we’ve said before.

Next week, we’ll start to shift into the stories of the people and events that are more directly tied to On Holy Ground’s New York in 1776, varying from the military exploits and historical figures to what life was like in the ironically named “Holy Ground” red light district… which isn’t to say we won’t jump back and forth from time to time, though!