First Family (6 page)

1774–78

T
HOUGH 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

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. Charles 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.

Before arriving in Philadelphia, John had envisioned the Continental Congress quite grandly as “a School of Political Prophets …, a Nursery of American Statesmen.” He imagined an American equivalent of the Greek and Roman orators and hoped that he would fill the role of the American Cicero. His private ambitions were palpable and gargantuan. And so far providence had somehow shaped events to accommodate them. The British ministry had created a political crisis in its effort to reform the British Empire, thereby providing the script for an epic historical drama. The Massachusetts legislature had elected him as a delegate to the Continental Congress, thereby placing him on the great stage. Now all he needed to do was play his appointed role and ensure his secular immortality.
⁷

From the outset, this uncharacteristically romantic vision encountered several formidable obstacles. The first hint of the clash between his expectations and political reality took the form of his realization that the delegates from the other colonies were not like Greek or Roman statesmen, but rather self-important provincials who lacked his understanding of the monumental issues at stake. Patrick Henry was the exception, but the other members of the Virginia delegation seemed determined to deliver endless soliloquies that floated above the fray like inflated balloons.
⁸

His diary entries on fellow delegates were often highly critical. Roger Sherman of Connecticut was “Rigid as a starched Linen … Awkward as a junior Batchelor or Sophomore.” Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania, destined to become a lifelong friend, came across as “too much of a Talker to be a deep Thinker. Elegant, not great.” John was obviously measuring himself against the competition for prominence
within the congress, so his personal assessments should be read as highly opinionated verdicts that shed more light on his own urge to become a dominant player than a detached appraisal of his colleagues. But beyond his own psychic twitchings, his frustration with the quality of debate within the congress had roots in a larger political problem: “Tedious, indeed, is our Business,” he complained to Abigail. “I have not been used to such ways.”
⁹

What confounded John was the fact that political opinion in Massachusetts had moved much further toward the prospect of American independence than in the other colonies. This made eminent sense, since only Massachusetts had been placed under martial law and made to suffer the indignity of occupation by the British army. But what was a mainstream position in Boston was regarded as extremist in Philadelphia. The entire Massachusetts delegation, John included, were seen as dangerous radicals: “We have been obliged to act with great Delicacy and Caution,” he explained to Abigail, “to keep ourselves out of Sight, and to feel pulses, and Sound the Depths—to insinuate our Designs and Desires by means of other Persons.” For the main goal of the vast majority of delegates was not defiance, but reconciliation. And these moderates lived in constant fear that the same incendiaries who had tossed the tea in Boston Harbor might provoke an incident with the British troops that would escalate the crisis to a political point of no return.
¹⁰

The ideological convictions that John brought to Philadelphia were fundamentally incompatible with the agenda of the moderates. From the start of his political participation as a critic of British policy, John had described England and New England as two separate political cultures with different histories and contradictory values that could never be wholly reconciled. In his published writings for the
Boston Gazette
and his correspondence with friends on both sides of the looming divide, he did not describe Britain’s efforts to consolidate its American empire as misguided blunders by uninformed policy makers in London and Whitehall. Instead, he viewed the legislative assault by Parliament as a conscious plot designed to deprive American colonists of their rights as British citizens, to transform them into
abject subjects or, worse, slaves. His conspiratorial mentality meant that it was impossible for him to view a tragic figure like Thomas Hutchinson as anything but a vile sycophant. It also meant that he regarded any policy of reconciliation based on the belief that the British would come to see the error of their ways as a naive pipe dream.

Abigail’s perspective was equally, perhaps even more, nonnegotiable. Though she was surely influenced by her husband’s opinions, her experience as a woman gave her views on British policy a more floridly moralistic tone and an almost operatic voice. In addition to her conversations with John, her correspondence with two other women, Catharine Macauley and Mercy Otis Warren, who just happened to be the two most intellectually prominent female critics of British policy in the English-speaking world, gave her convictions a distinctive edge.