The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (18 page)

Their wedding was set for October 25, 1764. As the date approached and Abigail vanished in a whirl of shopping and visits to friends and relations, John’s yearning spilled out in his letters, along with his growing sense that he had found a woman who would gave him the inner balance he needed. “My soul and body have both been thrown into turmoil by your absence,” he told her. “A month or two more [of bachelorhood] would make me the most insufferable cynic in the world—I see nothing but faults, follies, frailties and defects in anybody lately…But you who have always softened and warmed my heart shall restore my benevolence as well as my health and tranquility of mind.”
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Perhaps this daunting task caused Abigail to recoil. As the date loomed, she took to her bed under doctor’s orders. She was “extremely weak…low spirited…hardly myself,” she told John. He was not much better, reporting from Braintree a catalogue of hypochondriacal complaints. But they both underwent miraculous cures, and the wedding took place on schedule in the Reverend Smith’s parsonage in Weymouth.
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V

Without Abigail to listen to his explosions of self-pity, one shudders at what might have happened to John Adams. By 1775, the couple had abandoned the nicknames of their courtship days, Diana and Lysander. Abigail had begun signing her letters “Portia”—a name John had chosen, in tribute to her similarity to the heroine of Shakespeare’s
Merchant of Venice
. Abigail wrote to John as “My Dearest Friend.” There is little doubt that both partners knew the significance of the word “friend” as proof of ultimate intimacy between a man and wife.

No other founding father was as tormented by a hunger for fame as John Adams. It was a subject he never stopped discussing with himself in his diary and in his letters to Abigail. At one point, he pondered the dilemma of this desire and the high standards he inflicted on himself in pursuit of it. “If virtue was to be rewarded with wealth,” he wrote, “it would not be virtue. If virtue were to be rewarded with fame, it would not be virtue of the sublimist kind.”

Adams was in the grip of an ideology that often drove George Washington and other realists to near distraction and frequently complicated the struggle for independence. There were, according to this doctrine, many kinds of revolutionary patriotism. But the only men that deserved admiration were the “True Whigs”—those who were patriots without a smidgen of self-interest in their motivation. Almost everything John Adams said and did had to meet this impossibly exalted standard. As a result, he was in a constant state of inner turmoil. Without Portia to assure him that he was an admirable but unappreciated man, he would have inevitably slipped into permanent depression and despair.
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VI

There was much more to Abigail’s role in their marriage than psychological nursemaid. Thanks to John’s encouragement, she soon emerged as a thinking woman in her own right. Her most remarkable moment came in 1776, the year when John’s leadership in Congress won him his chief claim to fame. Portia wrote to her dearest friend soon after General Washington drove the British army from Boston, restoring a sense of safety and tran
quility to Massachusetts. She began by telling him how lighthearted she felt but swiftly moved to a subject that troubled her almost as much as the departed redcoats.

Abigail’s letter is justly famous today. John’s reply two weeks later is much less well known. Basically, he told her:
Equality for women? Forget about it:

Abigail was less than pleased with this reply. She wrote to her friend Mercy Otis Warren, whose protofeminist views were even more advanced, and told her about John’s flippant dismissal. “I will tell him I have only been making trial of the disinterestedness of his virtue, and when weigh’d in the balance have found it wanting,” she vowed.
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If Abigail embarked on such an exchange of verbal barbs, we have no record of it. The larger drama of whether “independency” would be declared in spite of stubborn resistance among the congressional delegates of several colonies, notably New York and Pennsylvania, soon absorbed both letter writers. John was at the center of the struggle but even here, in the midst of the greatest achievement of his life, he found time to let Abigail know how important she was to him. On May 22, while others were orating on the floor of Congress, John told Portia he was seated “in the midst of forty people, some of whom are talking, and others whispering.” He told her that the news from England made it look as though all-out war would erupt this summer, which meant there was no hope of him getting home.

He was thinking of asking permission to bring her and their four children (Abigail, called “Nabby,” John Quincy, Charles, and Thomas) to Philadelphia, saying, “I am a lonely forlorn creature here.” He yearned to see her and “those babes, whose education and welfare lies so near my heart.” But he could not let anything divert him from “superior duties.” In a previous letter, Portia had told him how much she yearned for him. But “all domestick pleasures and injoyments are absorbed in the great and important duty you owe your country.”

Those words drew from John another confession of the central role Abigail played in his life: “Among all the disappointments and perplexities, which have fallen to my share…nothing has contributed so much to support my mind, as the choice blessing of a wife whose capacity enabled her to comprehend and whose pure virtue obliged her to approve the views of her husband. This has been the cheering consolation of my heart, in my most solitary and most disconsolate hours.”
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What could Portia—or any other woman—say in response to such a
compliment? Abigail reduced her planned assault on Honest John’s disinterested virtue to a mild rebuke. She wondered why he and his cohorts were “proclaiming peace and good will to men [and] emancipating all nations, [but] you insist on retaining an absolute power over wives.”

V

Soon, Abigail had the immense pleasure of reading John’s July 3, 1776, letter which has become one of the most famous documents in the nation’s history. “Yesterday the greatest question was decided, which ever was decided in America, and a greater perhaps never was or will be decided among men.” A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony “that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.” A full-fledged “Declaration of Independency” would be forthcoming in a few days.

John thought July second, when independence was voted, would be the day everyone would remember. But Thomas Jefferson’s blazing prose made July fourth, when the Declaration was approved, the nation’s birthday. Nonetheless, John’s letter should be read as a companion piece to the great document. No other founding father had his special blend of wary hope and stubborn faith. It was a philosophy he shared wholeheartedly with Abigail. Flowing from their New England heritage, with its pessimistic view of human nature, it has a surprising relevance in twenty-first-century America:

VI

Throughout these letters that chart the nation’s zigzag progress toward independence are heart-wrenching cries of endearment. “I read and read
again your charming letters, and they serve me in some faint degree as a substitute for the company and comfort of the writer,” John wrote. “I want to take a walk with you in the garden…I want to take Tom in one hand and Charles in the other and walk with you, Nabby on your right hand and John [Quincy] on your left, to view the cornfields, the orchards…”

From Abigail came: “I long earnestly for a Saturday evening and experience a similar pleasure to that which I used to find in the return of my friend upon that day after a week’s absence.” She told John she was doing her best with “our little ones whom you so often recommend to my care.” But the “precepts” of virtue and probity she preached to them would be “doubly inforced” if there was “a father constantly before them.”
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In spite of these endearing sentiments, John Adams stayed in Congress for thirteen months after independence was declared, with only one visit home in the fall of 1776. In August 1777, Abigail was wistfully telling him it was “eight months since you left me.” She reported a dream in which John returned but treated her “so coldly that my heart ackd [ached] for a half hour after I awoke.” Portia was revealing that she had begun to wonder about her dearest friend’s perpetual absence. Was there some less noble motive besides patriotism involved? Even if patriotism was his motive, why was he bearing so much of the burden? Other lawyers in Boston were making fortunes while he debated in Congress about how to win—or to not lose—the war. Why didn’t he ask them to spend some time in Congress?

John’s salary fell laughably short of meeting his expenses, and the money issued by Congress was depreciating rapidly, sending prices soaring. Abigail had to deal with no less than six tenants on the Adams farm, all of whom owed John money when he went to Congress in 1774. He huffed and puffed about forcing them to pay up, but he left the job of collecting the cash to Abigail. She coped—and then some. She was soon telling John: “I hope in time to have the reputation of being as good a farmeress as my partner has of being a good statesman.”

As the months passed, however, the multiplicity of details and the recalcitrance of some of her tenants drained Abigail’s patience and pride. She needed to hire laborers, but there were none to be found. Many young men were being lured into the army with $100 enlistment bounties and others into privateering by the hope of bigger but far more risky money. She finally hired one of her tenants, named Belcher, because he was a hard worker, even if he might occasionally “purloin a little.”
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VI

Complicating matters for the first seven months of 1777 was Abigail’s pregnancy. The child had been conceived during John’s visit, and his almost immediate return to Congress had left her feeling doubly bereft and morose. All her pregnancies had been difficult, but this one proved to be especially traumatic. “I am cut off,” she wrote with uncharacteristic gloom, “from the privilege which some of the brute creation enjoy, that of having their mate sit beside them with anxious care during their…confinement.” She was tormented by premonitions of death for herself or the baby in her womb. Political quarrels in Massachusetts added to her discouragement. The countryside had rediscovered its longstanding animosity to Boston, and people were insulting and accusing each other of every fault imaginable. “Avarice, venality, pride, dissipation” prevail, she told her absent friend.

In Philadelphia, John grew almost frantic as Abigail’s time approached. “Oh that I could be near to say a few kind words, or show a few anxious 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.” These heartfelt phrases were too frail to withstand Abigail’s mounting anxiety. In July, she was seized with paroxysms; her heart pounded wildly, her whole body trembled. Soon she was convinced that the baby was dead, in spite of her doctor’s reassurance.

Her labor pains began as she was writing a letter to John. She told him that she had to lay down her pen “to bear what I cannot fly from.” When the pangs ceased for a few minutes, she wrote, “I have endured it and resume my pen.” She proceeded to give John a detailed account of the condition of the farm—the promising wheat and corn crops, the need for manure, the exorbitant cost of hiring a man to do some mowing. After another twenty-four hours of sporadic labor, Abigail gave birth to a baby girl, stillborn—to the doctor’s great chagrin. Abigail’s dark intuition had been correct. John’s former law clerk, John Thaxter, a Braintree neighbor, told the congressman it was “an exceeding fine looking child.”
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