From This Day Forward (8 page)

In February 1779, after a year abroad, Adams briefly thought he would be going home. He informed Abigail in a short noncommunicative letter, “I must not write a word to you about politics because you are a woman. What an offense have I committed?—a woman! I shall soon make it up. I think women better than men in general and I know that you can keep a secret as well as any man whatever. But the world doesn't know this. Therefore if I were to write any secrets to you and the letter should be caught, and hitched into a newspaper, the world would say I was not to be trusted with a secret.” She was right all along, he
was
worried about someone reading his mail. In the next letter he's even more explicit: “Let me entreat you to consider, if some of your letters had by any accident been taken, what a figure would they have made in a newspaper to be read by the whole world. Some of them it is true would have done honor to the most virtuous and most accomplished Roman matron, but others of them would have made you and me very ridiculous.” And today's public figures think it's new to report on private lives! Abigail's agonies finally came to an end when, with the war winding down, and her husband somewhat confused about his instructions from Congress, in June of 1779 John Adams went home.

Again, it was for a short but productive stay, since Adams took the time to write the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In November, Congress sent him back to Europe, this time as the sole minister responsible for
negotiating peace and commerce with Great Britain. Nine-year-old Charles went with his father to Paris this time, along with twelve-year-old John Quincy. And, though Abigail made it clear that she missed both him and the boys, the tone of her letters was much cheerier than that of the earlier ones to Europe. John must have done some fast talking while he was home.

To help make ends meet, he would send her European goods, which she would then sell in Massachusetts. Abigail would tell him in a no-nonsense way what sold and what didn't (the market was glutted with Barcelona handkerchiefs) and she casually mentioned her plans to buy property; she didn't ask him about it, she told him about it. What Adams really wanted was political news and Abigail was happy to oblige. She, correctly as it turned out, predicted that the man they wanted for governor of Massachusetts would lose the election to “the tinkling cymbal,” John Hancock: “What a politician you have made me. If I cannot be a voter upon this occasion, I will be a writer of votes.” She never let up on her lobbying for the ladies.

Instead of complaining about her abandoned state, this time Abigail used humor to get her point across. The wife of one of John's aides visited her and they talked of their “dear absents,” agreeing that the men were “so entirely satisfied with their American dames that we had not an apprehension of their roving. We mean not however to defy the charms of the Parisian ladies, but to admire the constancy and fidelity with which they are resisted—but enough of romance.” Then she told him she heard he was getting very fat. When, after he had been gone about a year, John wrote telling her that her letters were a great delight when they did not censure or complain, she took umbrage: “I am wholly unconscious of giving you pain in this way since your late absence.” Giving a hint of what must have been said while John was home, Abigail continued, “Did we not balance accounts though the
sum was rather in your favor?…In the most intimate of friendships there must not be any recrimination. If I complained, it was from the ardor of affection which could not endure the least apprehension of neglect.” She then reminds her husband that it all turned out all right: “We no sooner understood each other properly, but as the poet says, ‘The falling out of lovers is the renewal of love.'” She insists that “not a syllable of complaint has ever stained my paper” since he left this time, and continues, “You well know I never doubted your honor. Virtue and principle confirm the indissoluble bond which affection first began and my security depends not upon your passion, which other objects might more easily excite, but upon the sober and settled dictates of religion and honor. It is these that cement, at the same time that they ensure the affections.” How's that for a definition of long marriage?

Adams started running into problems with the French in the spring of 1781, when they objected to his assumption that the two nations should form an alliance of equals. The French minister in Philadelphia persuaded Congress to name other peace ministers to join Adams, depriving him of his exclusive role. Because the nascent nation could not afford to alienate its most important ally, the American delegation was directed to govern itself according to the advice and opinion of the French court. When Abigail heard the news, she was furious, and let her member of Congress know it. She tore off a letter to Elbridge Gerry excoriating Benjamin Franklin, who had led the plot to undo Adams, and imploring Gerry, “Will you suffer female influence so far to operate upon you as to step forth and lend your aid to rescue your country and your friend?” She then told John, “I will not comment upon this low, this dirty, this infamous, this diabolical piece of envy and malice as I have already done it where I thought I might be of service—to your two friends Lovell and Gerry.” So
much for the myth that political wives didn't interfere in their husbands' careers until modern times.

John was pleased to have Abigail intervene for him, and he used her as his informant on what Congress had in store. Though, on the subject of his enemies, he assures her, “they will never hurt your husband whose character is fortified with a shield of innocence and honor ten thousandfold stronger than brass or iron,” Adams in fact worried constantly that his honor was being besmirched. He had also decided it was foolish to try to take care of his little son Charles in Europe and sent the eleven-year-old home with a tutor, on what turned out to be a harrowing trip. Most of all, John was beginning to miss Abigail terribly: “what a fine affair it would be if we could flit across the Atlantic as they say the angels do from planet to planet. I would dart to Pens Hill and bring you over on my wings…. But one thing I am determined on. If God should please to restore me once more to your fireside, I will never again leave it without your ladyship's company.” With that encouragement, Abigail started figuring out how to join her husband in Europe.

By then he had been gone more than two years, and she ached for him: “the age of romance has long ago past, but the affection of almost infant years has matured and strengthened until it has become a vital principle, nor has the world any thing to bestow which could in the smallest degree compensate for the loss.” John, too, was more than ready for the years apart to end: “I must go to you or you must come to me,” he wrote. “I cannot live in this horrid solitude which it is to me amidst courts, camps and crowds.” Adams was ready to go home, but his mission was incomplete and he was concerned about what a return would mean for his career. He left France for the Netherlands, determined to show the Congress his value. There he negotiated a successful trade agreement and bought what amounted to the first American
embassy in Europe. But he was worried about the homefront, particularly about his own children.

Soon John had reason to worry about his daughter; seventeen-year-old “Nabby” was being courted by a suitor he found unacceptable. Abigail's description didn't help: “Losing his father young and having a very pretty patrimony left him, possessing a sprightly fancy, a warm imagination and an agreeable person, he was rather negligent in pursuing his business in the way of his profession, and dissipated two or three years of his life and too much of his fortune for to reflect upon with pleasure, all of which he now laments but cannot recall.” Even so, Abigail clearly likes him and thinks he's good for Nabby. The mother paints a remarkably clear-eyed picture of her daughter: “She is handsome, but not beautiful. No air of levity ever accompanies either her words or actions. Should she be caught by a tender passion, sufficient to remove a little of her natural reserve and soften her form and manners, she will be a still more pleasing character.” Her father was appalled. “My child is a model, as you represent her and as I know her, and is not to be the prize, I hope of any even reformed rake…. A youth who has been giddy enough to spend his fortune or even half his fortune in gaieties is not the youth for me.” He chastises his wife for her assessment of Nabby: “In the name of all that is tender don't criticize your daughter for those qualities which are her greatest glory, her reserve and her prudence which I am amazed to hear you call want of sensibility. The more silent she is in company the better for me in exact proportion and I would have this observed as a rule by the mother as well as the daughter.” It wasn't only Abigail who got off a shot across the bow from time to time.

John's mood was not improved by his work. He was in the midst of extremely delicate negotiations with the British about a final peace treaty, and the French were causing all kinds of trouble. As Adams and his fellow diplomats waited
for word on treaty ratification from Congress in the early months of 1783, the proper Bostonian father continued his tirades against his daughter's suitor, telling his wife, “I am so uneasy about this subject that I would come instantly home, if I could with decency. But my Dutch Treaty is not yet exchanged…. There are other subjects too about which I am not on a bed of roses.” Congress had revoked his commission to make a commercial treaty with Britain without saying why: “therefore I will come home, whether my resignation is accepted or not, unless my honor is restored.” Only a renewal of his commission could restore his honor—but that, of course, would mean yet more time abroad. If so, he finally tells the eager Abigail, “come to me, with your daughter if she is not too much engaged, and master Tommy.” He charges her with finding out what Congress is up to.

That turned out to be a tough assignment, as the end of the war brought chaos in the former colonies, and uncertainty about what powers Congress actually possessed. It seemed that John Adams would, in fact, finally go home. Abigail had managed to break up the romance between Nabby and her young man to please her father, though the mother still found the suitor a fine fellow. The breakup should make John even more ready to come home, in Abigail's view. “I do not wish you to accept an embassy to England, should you be appointed. This little cottage has more heartfelt satisfaction for you than the most brilliant court can afford, the pure and undiminished tenderness of wedded love, the filial affection of a daughter who will never act contrary to the advice of a father or give pain to the maternal heart.” In July, Adams's fate was still uncertain. Congress did not want to accept his resignation until the peace treaties were finalized, but he desperately wanted to return. “I cannot live much longer without my wife and daughter and I will not,” he insisted, but he was having second thoughts about them joining him abroad.
“If you and your daughter come to Europe you will get into your female imaginations fantastical ideas that will never wear out and will spoil you both…. The question is whether it is possible for a lady to be once accustomed to the dress, show, etc. of Europe, without having her head turned by it? This is an awful problem.” This from the man who had been urging frugality all those years, to a woman who had bravely been making ends meet.

The question seemed settled when Adams was appointed to a commission to negotiate trade relations with Britain, a job that might only last a few months: “I am so unhappy without you that I wish you would come at all events…. I must however leave it with your judgment, you know better than I the real intentions of Philadelphia.” One of the major players in government conceded that his wife knew more about Congress than he did: “You gave me more public intelligence than anybody. The only hint in Europe of this commission was from you.” By October, when Adams had been gone from home almost exactly four years, his tone grew more urgent: “I have only to repeat my earnest request that you and our daughter would come to me as soon as possible.”

But Abigail started to get cold feet; she wanted him to turn down the job; she also warned her husband that though Nabby's romance had broken off, she could tell the couple were still enamored of each other. By the time John received the letter, in January of 1784, he was so desperate to see Abigail that he was ready to say yes to Nabby's young man. “I must entreat you to come to me, for I assure you, my happiness depends so much upon it that I am determined if you decline coming to me, to come to you. If Miss Nabby is attached to Braintree and you think, upon advising with your friends, her object worthy, marry her if you will and leave her with her companion in your own house, office, furniture, farm and all.”

Poor Abigail was torn: “You invite me to you, you call me
to follow you, the most earnest wish of my soul is to be with you—but you can scarcely form an idea of the conflict of my mind.” She didn't want to leave her children and friends without her husband to console her: “But on the other hand I console myself with the idea of being joyfully and tenderly received by the best of husbands and friends, and of meeting a dear and long absent son. But the difference is my fears and anxieties are present, my hopes and expectations distant.” How's that for self-awareness, late-eighteenth-century style?

Not surprisingly, her hopes, and John's wishes, won out and Abigail set off for Europe with Nabby in June 1784, “without any male friend, connection or acquaintance.” As it happened, Thomas Jefferson, another member of the commission, tried to accompany her across the Atlantic but missed her by a day. She had already left when he arrived in Boston. The sometimes rough trip took exactly a month, Abigail's ship landing on the British coast on July 20. It took another three days for the women to reach London, where they hoped to be met by their husband and father. But, much to his dismay, Adams was in The Hague conducting business—“I am twenty years younger than I was yesterday,” he wrote when he learned the women had arrived safely—so he sent John Quincy to greet his mother and sister. John dispatched a letter via his son, explaining that John Quincy would purchase a coach for travel to Paris, and that the ladies should buy clothes, “let the expense be what it will.” “The happiest man on earth,” signed off, “Yours with more ardor than ever.”