From This Day Forward (9 page)

Mother and daughter amused themselves in London, writing wonderfully descriptive letters home, but by July 30, Abigail was getting anxious. Finally, almost five years after he had last seen his wife, John Adams arrived in London on August 7. For all their letter and diary writing over the years, neither one described the moment of reunion at the Adelphi Hotel. Abigail knew her sisters would be dying to know how it went, but she wrote to one of them, “poets and painters
wisely draw a veil over those scenes which surpass the pen of one and the pencil of the other.”

Abigail and John spent four years together in Europe, where she developed a close friendship with Thomas Jefferson, returning to Braintree in 1788 when it was clear Adams would become the first vice-president of the United States of America under the just-adopted Constitution. Though the couple was sometimes separated when Adams traveled to Philadelphia, Abigail often accompanied John, so their continual correspondence about their feelings and frustrations as a couple ended at their meeting in the Adelphi Hotel.

In the periods when they were apart, mainly because her health kept her home in Massachusetts, she sent him letters full of political advice, and he sent her congratulatory notes on her handling of the farm, along with secrets of state. They both wrote frankly about deteriorating relations with France, a nation they knew well and did not trust. After George Washington's two terms as president, Adams wanted to succeed him, but feared he would lose to Jefferson and be once again elected vice-president. Not if Abigail had anything to do with it: “Resign, retire. I would be second unto no man but Washington.” She had her own concerns about him running for president; she was afraid her outspokenness would get him in trouble. He replied, “A woman
can
be silent, when she will.” Once John won the election, she vowed to try: “I hope to acquire every requisite degree of taciturnity which my station calls for,” but she knew, “it will be putting a force upon nature.” In the end, it was a force she wasn't willing to exert.

Abigail missed John's inauguration. Her health didn't allow her to travel to Philadelphia for the event, but he couldn't be president without her: “I never wanted your advice and assistance more in my life.” Then, two weeks later: “I must have you here.” Her mother-in-law and niece were dying; she first tended to them, then arranged for the management
of their property, and then she joined him. It was a tumultuous presidency, with her smack in the middle of the controversies—the XYZ affair, possible war with France, and the Alien and Sedition Acts. Taciturnity had long since gone out the window, and Abigail was every bit as controversial in her day as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton have been in ours. While she was lobbying to declare war on France, Abigail also planned a surprise for her husband: she built an extensive addition to their home without telling him. When a friend accidentally spilled the beans, the president was thoroughly delighted and sorry her secret was spoiled; the house was comfortable and pleasant. Not so the new president's house in the not-yet-finished District of Columbia. When John and Abigail moved there in November 1800, it was an unfinished disaster, where she famously hung the family laundry in the East Room. But they didn't have to stay in the White House long; John was defeated for reelection by their old friend Thomas Jefferson.

Abigail had a harder time dealing with John's loss than he did; she was hurt by Jefferson's opposition and convinced the country would go to rack and ruin. Her husband would remain “the President” in her view, and Abigail referred to John that way for the rest of her life. But the couple lived in mostly contented retirement for another seventeen years, constantly surrounded by children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, and treated as dignitaries by the community. The death of their son Charles did not come as a surprise; he had become a miserable alcoholic, cut off by his father but still mourned by his mother. Abigail was also deeply touched when Jefferson's daughter Polly died, remembering her as a little girl in London. The former first lady took the occasion to renew their old friendship with Jefferson by starting a correspondence with him. John left the management of their properties to his wife; she had gotten good at it over the years. He started reading romance novels in his old age, enjoying them like “a
girl in her teens,” wrote the amazed Abigail. She kept up her campaign for women's education as long as she breathed. The great blot on their later years was the death of their daughter Nabby, who had married someone other than the “rake” her father opposed; still, she hadn't made much of a match. The great success among their children, John Quincy, served in Congress but spent most of his life as a diplomat, having been raised in the courts of Europe, then as secretary of state. His mother did not live to see him become president, but his father did, though John Adams died before seeing his son defeated after one term, just as he had been.

When the Adamses celebrated their golden anniversary, Abigail told the gathering that her only unhappiness in her time with John came from the long separation during the Revolutionary years. But what a window on a marriage that separation provided the generations following them. As much as all their other contributions to this nation's institutions, John and Abigail Adams gave us a picture of a partnership in the much older institution of marriage.

 

N
OTE
: Most of the Adams letters quoted in this chapter come from
The Book of Abigail and John,
edited by L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, and Mary-Jo Kline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Spelling and punctuation have been modernized and corrected.

SLAVE MARRIAGES

The very words “slave marriage” can start an argument. Since slaves had no legal rights, no rights to form contracts, they could not really get married in the eyes of the law. Masters could sanction or veto a union of slaves; owners could at any time sell a husband away from his wife, children away from their parents. None of the promises or protections that human beings in most societies expect from marriage applied to slaves. Still, the written records as well as the recorded memories of the centuries-long period of slaveholding in this country make it clear that marriage played a major role in slave society. Couples struggling to cleave together often risked great harm in order to hold on to their mates, to keep their families united. Some of those stories have been handed down in the narratives written by former slaves and in letters collected by later historians.

The ability of the human spirit to survive and even thrive in horrendous circumstances comes through strikingly in tales of slave marriages. Not only was the fundamental fact of existence—human bondage—one of constant humiliation and physical danger, every aspect of that life could be disrupted and degraded by a mean-spirited master. Slave men could not protect their wives from sexual abuse and beatings by their owners, slave women were forced to witness the emasculating brutality toward their husbands, slave parents knew that their hard labor would never lead to better lives for their children. Still, men and women fell in love and found ways to dignify their feelings for each other through ritual. In some areas of the country, the masters presided over the ceremony; in some areas, clergy pronounced the vows; in some areas, it was an elder in the slave community. The old stories of jumping over
a broomstick turn out to be true, though the custom varied in different places. Carolina Johnson Harrison, a slave in Virginia, gave this account of her own wedding: “Just go to Aunt Sue and tell her you want to get mated. She told us to think about it hard for two days because marrying is sacred in the eyes of Jesus. After two days, Mose and I went back and said we thought about it and still want to get married. Then she called all the slaves after tasks to pray for the union that God was going to make. Pray we stay together and have lots of children and none of them get sold away from the parents. Then she lays a broomstick across the sill of the house we're going to live in and joins our hands together. Before we step over it, she asks us once more if we were sure we wanted to get married. Of course we say yes. Then she says, ‘In the eyes of Jesus, step into the holy land of matrimony.' When we stepped across the broomstick, we were married.”

Often, particularly in the Chesapeake region, where there were fewer slaves per tobacco farm than on the large cotton, rice, and sugar plantations of the Deep South, men married women on another plantation. Husbands could only visit these “abroad” or “broad” wives over Saturday night, with a pass from the master. And some masters only grudgingly allowed that. Peter Smith, a runaway Tennessee slave interviewed by a newspaper in 1845, told of his master's decree that if he returned late from seeing his wife, he would receive one hundred lashes and be forbidden to visit her. When Smith realized he was late one morning, he ran away rather than face that punishment; he had nothing to lose, since he could never see his wife again. Breakup of marriage and family concerns inspired runaways, as men escaped to follow their wives who had been sold, or women fled to raise their children in freedom. Because they wanted to discourage bolting and encourage breeding, many slave owners promoted marriage and childbearing, particularly after the importation of slaves was
prohibited in 1807. On large plantations where slaves lived in their own area, or “quarters,” there was some small modicum of privacy that allowed for a semblance of “normal” family life.

But nothing could be truly normal for a human being who was not considered a human being. That's abundantly clear in the accounts that have come to be called “slave narratives,” the most famous written by former slaves in the period shortly before the Civil War. Intended to stir up abolitionist sentiments by revealing the evils of the institution of slavery, the narratives also reveal a good deal about their authors' experiences with marriage.

Henry Bibb: Family Versus Freedom

When Henry Bibb told his life story, a group of Detroit abolitionists formed a truth commission to check out his hair-raising history. Buttressed by letters from his former owner, and a slave trader who hated him, as well as friends and protectors along the way, the Detroit Liberty Association endorsed Bibb's harrowing account, which was published in 1849.

Born in Kentucky in 1815, Bibb learned from his mother, who was a slave, that his father was a white man named James Bibb. Though he was put to work at a young age, Henry never accepted his treatment, and started his long career as a runaway at about age twenty. He actually succeeded several times in making it to the North, where he could enjoy his freedom, but he repeatedly went back home to Kentucky to try to rescue his wife and child. As he told the story years later, it was with some degree of irony: “To think that after I had determined to carry out the great idea which is so universally and practically acknowledged among all the civilized nations of the earth, that I would be free or die, I suffered myself to be turned aside by the fascinating charms of a female,
who gradually won my attention from an object so high as that of liberty.”

When he was eighteen, Bibb met a girl named Malinda who lived about four miles away. He started visiting her, with no intention of marrying her, because he knew marriage would hinder his quest for freedom, “but in spite of myself, before I was aware of it, I was deeply in love.” He proposed to Malinda on the condition that she understand two things: he was deeply religious and determined to be free. She was sympathetic on both counts and, after a couple of weeks' reflection, accepted his proposal. They decided they would marry a year later if they hadn't changed their minds and that they would run away to Canada as soon as they could. Everyone was against the marriage—his mother thought he was too young, her mother thought she could do better, his master worried that he would steal food from the farm for Malinda. But in the end the owner gave his consent and the couple had a “jolly time” at their wedding party, held over the Christmas holidays: “Notwithstanding our marriage was without license or sanction of law, we believed it to be honorable before God.”

Bibb's owner moved away and eventually Henry was sold to Malinda's master, a situation not at all to his liking, “to live where I must be eye witness to her insults, scourgings and abuses…was more than I could bear.” When a daughter, Mary Frances, was born, Bibb became even more restive. While her mother and father worked in the field, the baby stayed with the owner's wife, who treated her roughly. It was too much for Bibb—to see his family abused and to be powerless to do anything about it; he decided he must break free. First he would go, then he would find a way to rescue his wife and child. Lucky for him, the Ohio River wasn't far from home. He was able to accumulate a little money by doing some work on the side, and he hopped a steamship and counted on his almost white skin to camouflage him through
the night until landing the next morning in Cincinnati. Though Ohio was a free state, the fear of slave hunters was real, so Bibb moved carefully until he found a black man who hooked him up with the Underground Railroad. Moving to a safer spot north, Bibb spent the spring working in Perrysburg, Ohio, then, against the advice of his protectors, went back to Kentucky to collect his family. Think of it: he was free and could have lived out the rest of his life in freedom, but the matrimonial ties pulled him back to the dangers of a slave state.

Wearing a disguise, Bibb crept back into Kentucky, gave his wife money, and quickly stole away again, telling her to meet him in Cincinnati the next Sunday. Once again he successfully made his way to Ohio, but this time he was tricked by some slave catchers, who went quickly down the river to his master and collected a three-hundred-dollar reward for revealing Bibb's whereabouts. The owner and some neighbors arrived in Cincinnati, hired a small mob, and captured Bibb, who later lamented, “All my flattering prospects of enjoying my own fire side, with my little family, were then blasted and gone; and I must bid farewell to friends and freedom together.” Taking no chances, the owner immediately took Bibb across the river and put him in jail overnight in Kentucky until a steamship arrived to take him to Louisville. Bibb's owner wanted to get rid of the troublemaker, to sell him down the river to New Orleans. But once the ship docked in Louisville, Bibb bolted again and once again made the perilous trip to see his wife. “We met under the most fearful apprehensions,” he later wrote, because all the slaveholders in the region wanted to make an example of him. Of course, they kept a watch on Malinda day and night: “they well knew that my little family was the only object of attraction that ever had or ever would induce me to come back and risk my liberty over the threshold of slavery.” It would be impossible for the couple to escape together.