There is no record of Abigail’s ever urging John to trim his political sails in order to protect the future of the family, or to accept a lucrative offer that would have compromised his political integrity. In fact, there is no evidence that she gave the matter any thought at all. Her husband had to do his duty as he saw it, and while she was an opinionated and independent-minded woman, her duty as a wife was to support him. “I must entreat you,” John pleaded with her, “my dear Partner in all the Joys and Sorrows, Prosperity and Adversity of my Life, to take a Part with me in the Struggle.” The plea proved unnecessary. Abigail never entertained doing anything else.44
The most severe test, which she passed with flying colors, occurred in 1770, when John was asked to defend the British soldiers who had fired on and killed six members of a Boston mob that was harassing them with taunts and snowballs. John agreed to take the case for two reasons: first, he believed that it was important to demonstrate that even vilified “Lobsterbacks” could get fair treatment in Massachusetts, despite the highly politicized atmosphere; second, he thought that the so-called massacre had been manipulated by Samuel Adams and the leadership of the Sons of Liberty for political purposes. “Endeavors had been systematically pursued for many months, by certain busy characters,” he observed, “to excite Quarrells … between the Inhabitants of the lower class and the Soldiers, and at all risques to inkindle an immortal hatred between them.” Rather than a dramatic example of British tyranny, which he was on record of opposing so passionately, the Boston Massacre was, in truth, “planned by designing Men,” and the real victims were the British soldiers.45
This was obviously a politically unpopular posture, and John made a point of consulting with Abigail before going forward. She concurred that the mob had been instigated, so that John’s decision to defend the British troops was the virtuous course regardless of the political fallout. She was, at the time, recovering from the death of Susanna, her third child, and pregnant with Charles, her fourth. So she was emotionally immersed in some rather dramatic events of her own, but still fully capable and willing to accompany John on a dangerously unpopular course.46
Eventually Captain Thomas Preston, the British commanding officer at the scene, was found not guilty, along with all but two of the British soldiers, who had their thumbs imprinted as punishment for a lesser charge. John’s fear that his successful defense of the British soldiers would create implacable enemies proved wrong—the word “out of doors” was that John’s political credentials were beyond reproach and that his conduct had the approval of Sam Adams, the leader of the Sons of Liberty, who had probably orchestrated the events leading up to the massacre in the first place. Indeed, John’s reputation soared, and he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature a few months later by a comfortable majority, the epitome of the passionate patriot, now with personal integrity to boot.
CROSSING THE RUBICON TOGETHER
By the early 1770s John had reached the conclusion that the likelihood of a political reconciliation with Great Britain was remote in the extreme. The British ministry was committed to a strategy of American subjugation to Parliament’s authority, and he could find no realistic reasons to believe that it would come to its senses before producing a permanent rupture in the British Empire. “I see that there is not Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation in the Mother Country,” he observed to Isaac Smith Jr. in 1771, “to desist voluntarily from such Attempts to make inroads against us.” But if American independence in some form was inevitable, he did not believe it to be imminent. It was probably several decades away: “You and I shall be saints in Heaven,” he predicted to Smith, “before the Times we dream of. But our grandsons may perhaps think this a canonical Prophecy.”47
The events between 1770 and 1774 caused John to accelerate his sense of the historical schedule. In a somewhat overclever move, the British ministry removed import duties on all other commodities but retained the duty on tea at a very low rate, making it less expensive to purchase tea from Great Britain while simultaneously reasserting the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. Instead of co-opting the colonists, this provoked the Boston Tea Party (1773), a festival of raucous destruction organized by the Sons of Liberty in which a Boston mob, somewhat frivolously disguised as Indians, boarded three British ships anchored in Massachusetts Bay and tossed about £15,000 worth of tea overboard. (John was of two minds about mobs, finding the more impulsive version at the Boston Massacre disreputable but the highly organized effort that destroyed the tea wholly justifiable.) The British ministry responded by escalating the stakes, closing the Boston port to all trade, shutting down all the Massachusetts courts, and imposing martial law on the city. Massachusetts was to be made into an object lesson of what happens when colonists brazenly defy the authority of the British government.
Predictably, but interestingly, John and Abigail responded to these harsh measures in the same dramatic (one might even say melodramatic) way: “We live my dear Soul,” he wrote to her, “in an Age of Tryal. What will be the consequences I know not. The town of Boston, for ought I can see, must suffer martyrdom. It must expire and our principal consolation is, that it dies in a Noble Cause.” This hyperbolic tone reflected John’s sense that a line had been crossed that could never be retraced. But he wanted Abigail to know that he was not despondent or depressed: “Don’t imagine from all this that I am in the Dumps,” he wrote her. “I can truly say, that I have felt more Spirits and Activity since the arrival of this News than I had done before for years.”48
In John’s view, the Coercive Acts had exposed the latent agenda of the British ministry for all to see. Intricate constitutional arguments about long-standing colonial rights, debates in which John had been a major player, now paled in comparison to the total and wholly arbitrary revocations of colonial rights within the empire. From the British perspective, the colonists really had none, it was now clear. John had been saying that this was the unspoken assumption of the British ministry for ten years. The Coercive Acts proved that he had been right. Abigail concurred completely.49
This placed them on the cutting edge of radical thinking within Massachusetts, and much further ahead of public opinion in the rest of the colonies, which remained wedded to the hope for a peaceful reconciliation. Both of them had come to see the imperial crisis as an all-or-nothing choice between American independence and slavery, with all efforts at a split-the-difference compromise nothing more than a seductive illusion. As John put it to Abigail: “And the Question seems to be, whether the American Colonies are to be considered as a distinct Community so far as to have a Right to judge for themselves, when the Fundamentals of their Government are destroyed or invaded?” This was a defiant, even treasonable, position, which was one reason he asked her to “keep these letters chiefly to yourself.” He also asked her to “put them up safe, and preserve them,” for they provided “a kind of picture of the Manners, Opinions, and Principles of these Times of Perplexity, Danger, and Distress.” One of the reasons that so many of their letters have survived is that they both recognized, early on, that they were living through a truly propitious moment likely to find a prominent place in the history books.50
In June 1774 they were apprised that John had been selected as one of four Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress. Accepting that appointment constituted a major public statement about his political loyalties, and Jonathan Sewall pleaded with him to refuse the offer, warning that attending the Continental Congress would brand him as a traitor and destroy his legal career. Remembering the poignancy of that moment many years later, John recalled his response: “I answered that I knew Great Britain was determined on her systems, and that very determination determined me on mine; that he [Sewall] knew I had been constant and uniform in opposition to all her measures; that the die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon; swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.”51
Abigail was equally resolute. There was no question that
John had to go to Philadelphia. Their minds were so perfectly aligned on that score that no discussion was necessary. There was also no question that she was perfectly competent to manage the farm and four young children, aged two to nine years, while he was away. The conversations were about details: What clothing should he pack? What horse should he take? Before he left, they needed to purchase more fertilizer for their fields, John insisting on “Mud Flatts or Creek Mud … mixed with Dust and Dung.” It was the kind of privileged conversation that could occur only between two soul mates knowing they were entering a new chapter in their lives and their marriage, tending together to the details because the larger issues required only nods and glances.52
John departed from Boston on August 10, 1774. An aspiring novelist could work wonders with the scene. The four Massachusetts delegates boarded a well-appointed coach in full view of five British regiments encamped on Boston Common. They were preceded by two white servants, well mounted and armed, followed by four black slaves dressed in livery, two on horseback and two footmen. It was a motley mix of royal splendor, military power, social deference, and racial inferiority, all traveling together on a mission to oppose British tyranny. Though there were no women in the picture, Abigail was lurking in the background, cheering, worrying, and praying for John’s safe return.53
CHAPTER TWO
1774–78
“My pen is always freer than my tongue, for I have written many things to you that I suppose I never would have talked.”
THOUGH THERE WAS no way of knowing it at the time, John’s departure for Philadelphia launched a new chapter in the marriage that paralleled a new chapter in American history, soon to be called the American Revolution. For the next four years, Abigail and John would be apart much more than they were together. (And for the six following years, when John was in Paris, except for one brief return to Braintree, they were completely separated.) From a historian’s point of view, the geographic distance between them proved a godsend, for it reversed the paradox of proximity and created a flood of letters that provide unprecedented access to their private thoughts and feelings. From Abigail and John’s perspective, distance put their partnership to a new test, one that it eventually passed with flying colors, ironically exposing their most private intimacies in letters designed to close the distance.
Indeed, Abigail claimed that she was more forthcoming in her letters than she would have been in face-to-face conversations: “My pen is always freer than my tongue,” she wrote in 1775, “for I have written many things to you that I suppose I never would have talked.” John concurred. Sitting at his writing desk almost forced him to delve deeper into the murmurings of his mind and heart, but he was not as capable of expressing them. “If I could write as well as you,” he confessed, “it would be so, but, upon my word, I cannot.” This was high praise, and most scholarly commentators on the correspondence agree.1
Context, as always, is crucial. From 1774 to 1778 John was mostly in Philadelphia, making himself into one of the most prominent and outspoken advocates of American independence in the Continental Congress and eventually the rough equivalent of secretary of defense during the first three years of the war. The rules established by the congress forbade him to write about the ongoing debates, and his daily schedule of full sessions with the entire congress, as well as multiple committee meetings in the evenings, left little time for personal matters. He was at the center of the proverbial wind tunnel during one of the most dramatic and consequential moments in American history. The extraordinary number of letters he managed to write to Abigail is testimony to his need for some sliver of private space where he could unburden himself to the person who knew him better than anyone else on the planet.
Abigail was up at Braintree, managing the farm with a few hired hands and raising four young children. She regarded her duties as a domestic version of John’s public service, a sacrifice justified by the political crisis through which they were all living. Abigail, in fact, was in much greater physical danger than John, in part from the proximity of the British army in Boston, in part from the smallpox epidemic that raged throughout eastern Massachusetts.
Like John’s, her days were crowded, not with crucial affairs of state but with the daily duties of a single parent attempting to hold a family together amid pitched battles (e.g., Bunker Hill) and rampant contagion. She, too, sought solace in a private space that she called “my closet.” She found such a space in her aunt’s home in Boston during a visit in 1776. “In this Closet are a number of Book Shelves,” as she described it to John, “and a pretty little desk or cabinet where I write all my Letters and keep my papers unmolested by any one.”
Her Braintree house lacked such a “closet,” so she had no place where she could escape the duties and demands of the day, read letters from John, and write her own in splendid isolation. Like Virginia Woolf over a century later, Abigail felt the urge for a room of her own, where her thoughts and feelings were not defined or confined by her dominant roles as a wife and mother. As she put it, “I always had a fancy for a closet with a window which I could peculiarly call my own.”2
LETTERS AND POSTERITY
It requires a truly imaginative leap for us to comprehend the more deliberative character of letter writing in the eighteenth century. It took two or three weeks for letters to travel between Braintree and Philadelphia, so they often crossed, meaning that the political or emotional crisis that prompted the letter had been resolved before the response arrived, like a message from the past. As a result, letters were less an ongoing conversation than a time-bound exchange of ruminations, more thoughtful and self-consciously composed than our Internet communications, but also less interactive.
John was more outspokenly frustrated by this intractable reality than Abigail: “Is there no way for two friendly souls to converse together although the bodies are four hundred miles off?” he asked. “Yes, by letter. But I want a better communication. I want to hear you think or to see your thoughts.” In his mind, letters could not replace the shared routines and rhythms of family life that he had come to depend upon as the foundation for his own emotional balance: “I want to take a walk with you in the garden, to go over to the common, the plain, the meadow. I want to take Charles in one hand and Tom in the other, and walk with you, Nabby on the right hand and John upon the left, to view the cornfields, the orchards, etc.” Letters were important, to be sure, but they were not an adequate substitute for the emotional ballast of daily domestic interaction.3
He tended to write in the early morning, before the congress met, she in the evening, after the children were put to bed. Since John was prohibited from writing about the political debates, his early letters focused on the sights and sounds of Philadelphia, which had surpassed Boston as the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the American colonies. Here, for example, is his colorful response after witnessing a Catholic Mass for the first time: “I have this day been to a Romish Chappell. My Inauguration is so full of holy Water, Crossings, Bowings, Kneelings and Genuflections, Images, Paintings, Crucifixes, Velvet, Gold, but above all Musick. I am amazed that Luther and Calvin were ever able to break the Charm, and dissolve the Spell.” There is a stream-of-consciousness character to many of John’s letters, where strings of nouns (and sometimes verbs) gushed onto the page in a kind of verbal explosion that was more a barrage than a coherent collection of sentences.4
Abigail’s letters tended to be longer and more self-consciously crafted. Initially, Abigail complained that John’s letters were too brief and read like hastily written memoranda: “All the letters I receive from you seem to be wrote in so much haste, that they scarcely leave room for a Social feeling,” she scolded. “They let me know you exist …, but I want some sentimental Effusions of the Heart.” He needed to know, she apprised him, that his letters arrived in Braintree like testimonials from the battlefront: “You would laugh to see them [the children] all run upon the sight of a letter—like chickens for a crumb, when the hen clucks. Charl
es says ‘Mar, what is it, any good news?’ ” All his letters were apparently read out loud at the dinner table.5
The main reason that so many of their letters survived from this time is that John, early on, decided that they should make copies. “I have now purchased a Folio Book,” he wrote in June 1776, “in the first page of which … I am writing this Letter, and intend to write [i.e., copy] all my Letters to you from this Time forward.” He urged Abigail to do the same thing, claiming that “I really think your Letters are much better worth preserving than mine.”6
Making copies of all their letters was a tedious chore. And their crowded schedules soon overwhelmed their best intentions. John’s insistence that they try to do it was rooted in his keen sense that they were living through a defining chapter of American history that subsequent generations of their descendants would find instructive. But beyond his own family, he realized that the preservation of their correspondence would document their role in resolving the imperial crisis, not just for the Adams family but for all posterity. He understood the historical significance of his moment. If the movement for American independence succeeded, and if a written record of his prominence in that movement was preserved, his place in the American pantheon was assured. These very private letters, then, were written with one eye on a very public audience, which John called posterity, and which ultimately means us.
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