From This Day Forward (7 page)

Finally, on July 3, John delivered the news Abigail had been waiting to read: “Yesterday the greatest question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater perhaps, never was or will be decided among men.” The Declaration of Independence had been approved. But John's rejoicing soon gave way to fear about his family. He heard through the grapevine that Abigail had taken herself and the children off for the dangerous smallpox inoculations without asking or telling him. He frantically wondered why no one reported to him on their condition: “Do my friends think that I have been a politician so long as to have lost all feeling? Do they suppose I have forgotten my wife and children?” He assured Abigail that he didn't expect her to be in touch:
“Don't mistake me, I don't blame you. Your time and thoughts must have been wholly taken up, with your own and your family's situation and necessities. But twenty other persons might have informed me.” Abigail couldn't be kept down by the weakness caused by the inoculation. She rallied and sent off a stirring description of the reading of the Declaration from the statehouse in Boston: “the cry from the balcony was God Save our American States and then 3 cheers which rended the air, the bells rang, the privateers fired, the forts and batteries, the cannon were discharged, the platoons followed and every face appeared joyful.” While she stayed in Boston for the duration of the antismallpox regimen, Abigail attended public worship regularly: “I rejoice in a preacher who has some warmth, some energy, some feeling. Deliver me from your cold phlegmatic preachers, politicians, friends, lovers and husbands. I thank heaven I am not so constituted myself and so connected.” Ahem.

 

Independence had been declared; now what? “We daily see the necessity of a regular government,” Abigail fretted in August; particularly galling her was the neglect of education. Then she added another one of her shockers: “If you complain of neglect of education in sons, what shall I say with regard to daughters who every day experience the want of it?…If we mean to raise heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women. The world perhaps would laugh at me, and accuse me of vanity, but you I know have a mind too enlarged and liberal to disregard the sentiment.” Abigail herself had no formal education; she acquired her extensive literary and historical knowledge at home, where various friends of her father guided her reading and conversation. She was so determined that young girls not be deprived of schooling that she returned to the subject whenever she saw an opening.

It was late summer 1776, John Adams had spent most of
two years away from home, and Abigail missed him terribly. Now that independence had been declared, she was more than ready for him to return: “with the purest affection I have held you to my bosom till my whole soul has dissolved in tenderness and my pen fallen from my hand.” She tells him she knows he feels the same way and says of such pleasures, “tell me they are not inconsistent with the stern virtue of a senator and a patriot.” The senator and patriot was taking his time coming home, and by September, Abigail had had it: “I cannot consent to your tarrying much longer…whilst you are engaged in the senate your own domestic affairs require your presence at home…your wife and children are in danger of wanting bread…. I know the weight of public cares lie so heavy upon you that I have been loath to mention your private ones.” It was one thing to found a nation, but what about the family? Finally, in October, Adams left Philadelphia and headed home. But not for long. After only a couple of months, it was back to Congress. John's brief sojourn in Braintree made its mark, however: Abigail was pregnant.

Returning to an assembly of revolutionaries meant a perilous journey for Adams as he skirted British-occupied territory and made his way to Baltimore, where Congress had convened. He was not a happy man: “When I reflect upon the prospect before me of so long an absence from all that I hold dear in this world, I mean all that contributes to my private personal happiness, it makes me melancholy. When I think on your circumstances I am more so, and yet I rejoice at them in spite of all this melancholy.” Not only were Abigail's personal “circumstances” of pregnancy difficult, the political circumstances made for hazardous conditions everywhere. British ships blockaded New England, creating a flour shortage. Here's Abigail in March 1777: “There is such a cry for bread in the town of Boston as I suppose was never before heard, and the bakers deal out but a loaf a day to the largest families.” When a friend of hers died in childbirth in April,
Abigail grew apprehensive about her own condition: “Every thing of this kind naturally shocks a person in similar circumstances. How great the mind that can overcome the fear of death!” John, too, regretted his plight. Worried that the war was going badly and frustrated by Congress, he lamented, “Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.” What would he think about posterity now?

Despite her discomfort, Abigail showed glimpses of her usual feistiness when describing how the currency had become so worthless that only by bartering could she supply the household, telling her lawmaker husband that the government should stop printing money; “I hope in favor you will not emit any more paper, till what we have at least becomes more valuable.” But she had trouble summoning her spirit: “I want a companion at nights, many of them are wakeful and lonesome…. Do you sigh for home? And would you willingly share with me what I have to pass through?…I wish the day past, yet dread its arrival.” Abigail's foreboding about the day of childbirth only grew worse. In July, when she sat down to write, she thought it might be for the last time: “I was last night taken with a shaking fit, and am very apprehensive that a life was lost. As I have no reason today to think otherways, what may be the consequences to me, heaven only knows.” John, too, was worried sick: “Oh that I could be near, to say a few kind words, or show a few kind looks, or do a few kind actions. Oh that I could take from my dearest a share of her distress, or relieve her of the whole. Before this shall reach you I hope you will be happy in the embraces of a daughter as fair, and good, and wise, and virtuous as the mother, or if it is a son I hope it will still resemble the mother in person, mind and heart.”

Remarkably, though she was certain she was carrying a
dead baby, Abigail managed to get off a newsy, chatty letter, apologizing for the somber one of the day before. But the next day, as she suspected, a baby girl was stillborn. A friend sent the news to John Adams. A few days later, Abigail took up her pen, thankful that she was still alive: “Join with me my dearest friend in gratitude to heaven, that a life I know you value, has been spared and carried through distress and danger although the dear infant is numbered with its ancestors…. My heart was much set upon a daughter….[I] feel myself weakened by this exertion, yet I could not refrain from the temptation of writing with my own hand to you.” John was deeply moved: “Never in my whole life was my heart affected with such emotions and sensations…. Devoutly do I return thanks to God, whose kind Providence has preserved to me a life that is dearer to me than all other blessings in this world.” Still, even in his relief that Abigail had made it through, he grieved for the baby daughter he would never know: “Is it not unaccountable that one should feel so strong an affection for an infant that one has never seen, nor shall see? Yet I must confess to you, the loss of this sweet little girl has most tenderly and sensibly affected me.”

Soon Abigail was her old self, trying to manage with few farmhands as more men were called to fight, leaving her with little help. “We can scarcely get a day's work done for money and if money is paid 'tis at such a rate that 'tis almost impossible to live. I live as I never did before, but I am not going to complain. Heaven has blessed us with fine crops.” She goes on to tell him about everything she's done on the farm, including paying off debts and setting up a cider press: “I should do exceeding well if we could but keep the money good, but at the rate we go on I know not what will become of us.” Or what would become of John, who, with the other instigators of independence, was a marked man. British troops moved on Philadelphia, the members of Congress scattered, eventually reconvening in York, Pennsylvania. Abigail kept
him apprised of the situation at home. The women of Boston suspected certain merchants of hoarding sugar and coffee to jack up the price. One wealthy-bachelor coffee supplier was particularly suspect. “A number of females, some say a hundred, some say more, assembled with a cart and trucks, marched down to the warehouse and demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver, upon which one of them seized him by his neck and tossed him into the cart. Upon his finding no quarter he delivered the keys, when they tipped up the cart and discharged him, then opened the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee themselves, put it into the trucks and drove off.” Score one for the ladies! And for the American troops, who were defeating the British in battle after battle. On their thirteenth wedding anniversary, October 25, 1777, Abigail was convinced it was the last they would spend apart, that the British would soon lose the war and John would be back in his law practice. She couldn't have been more wrong.

Adams did return home that fall, but only a month after he went back on the court circuit, a letter arrived from James Lovell, a fellow Massachusetts delegate to Congress. It was to inform John Adams of his election as a commissioner to France, where he would join Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee. It was important to keep France on the side of the United States during the Revolutionary War, and to make sure key diplomats were there negotiating all eventualities. With her husband off arguing a court case, Abigail received the letter and took it upon herself to fire off an answer. “O Sir, you who are possessed of sensibility, and a tender heart, how could you contrive to rob me of all my happiness?” she challenged Lovell. “My life will be one continued scene of anxiety and apprehension, and must I cheerfully comply with the demand of my country?” Try to imagine a political wife writing a letter like that today! It must have been infinitely more shocking then. If John was to go, Abigail wanted to take the children and go with him. She was soon persuaded that this
would be a hazardous course, with the British gunning for her husband, and she relented. In February 1778, judging that a stay in Europe would provide an invaluable education for their son, John took the ten-year-old John Quincy and sailed to Paris for what was to be the most trying period of his and Abigail's marriage.

Adams was quite taken with the French, “stern and haughty Republican as I am,” and he made the mistake of writing his long-suffering wife: “To tell you the truth, I admire the ladies here. Don't be jealous. They are handsome, and very well educated. Their accomplishments are exceedingly brilliant.” What was he thinking? Well, no one ever claimed John Adams was a good politician. Abigail used his reveries about Frenchwomen to push home one of her pet points: “I regret the trifling narrow contracted education of females of my own country…. You need not be told how much female education is neglected, nor how fashionable it has been to ridicule female learning.” She kept complaining about the lack of education for women for the rest of her days.

But Abigail's much more serious complaint was John's neglect. She scolds him that she hasn't heard much from him, that his letters are short and cold. So what, she asks, if the enemy intercepts them? “Friendship and affection will suggest a thousand things to say to an intimate friend which if ridiculed by an enemy will only be another proof among the thousands we already have of savage barbarity.” John's reaction was one of exasperation, claiming to have written her many more letters than he actually had. (He kept a ledger with copies of all his letters to her, so they were well documented.) Abigail was truly distraught: “I have scarcely ever taken my pen to write but the tears have flowed faster than the ink.” Soon she moves, however, from sorrow to anger. Another “very short letter” from John brings on her fury: “By heaven if you could you have changed hearts with some fro
zen Laplander or made a voyage to a region that has chilled every drop of your blood. But I will restrain a pen already I fear too rash, nor shall it tell you how much I have suffered from this appearance of—inattention.”

He would not be moved, closing one letter, “It is not possible for me to express more tenderness and affection to you than will be suggested by the name of…John Adams.” Some of the letters did get lost at sea, and it took months for the others to arrive. After John had been gone nine months and Abigail had received only three short letters, her pen was white-hot: “I have never let an opportunity slip without writing to you since we parted, though you make no mention of having received a line from me; if they are become of so little importance as not to be worth noticing with your own hand, be so kind as to direct your secretary.” She immediately regretted those words: “I will not finish the sentence, my heart denies the justice of the accusation, nor does it believe your affection in the least diminished by distance or absence.” Still, she wanted desperately to hear it from him: “The affection I feel for my friend is of the tenderest kind, matured by years, sanctified by choice and approved by heaven. Angels can witness to its purity, what care I then for the ridicule of Britains should this testimony of it fall into their hands.” The message was clear: he had more to fear from her than the British.

If she hoped for an outpouring of apologies and testaments of undying affection, Abigail must have been sorely disappointed. John's first, somewhat tepid, response: “For heaven's sake, my dear don't indulge a thought that it is possible for me to neglect, or forget all that I hold dear to me in this world.” And then, a couple of weeks later, after another letter from her had made its way across the Atlantic: “This is the third letter I have received in this complaining style…. If you write me in this style I shall leave off writing entirely, it kills me…. What course shall I take to convince you that
my heart is warm? You doubt, it seems—shall I declare it? Shall I swear to it?…I beg you would never more write to me in such a strain for it really makes me unhappy.” He sternly adds, “I write to you so often as my duty will permit.” And then, in the face of ever-more-complicated relations with France, a few months later: “The character and situation in which I am here, and the situation of public affairs absolutely forbid my writing freely.”