From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  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 frozen 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.”

  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.