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.”
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.
NOTE: 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.”
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