TWO

Mountains Arise to Hinder Me

Abigail and John married on Thursday, October 25, 1764, the fourth anniversary of George III’s accession to the throne of England. Within a scant nine months their daughter, also named Abigail, and always called Nabby, was born, on July 14, 1765. The twenty-one-year-old bride’s life fell swiftly into place. She was quite settled on the Adamses’ family property, in the farmhouse built almost catercorner to her husband’s birthplace, on the road from Plymouth to Boston, framed by field and farmland. In a front room remodeled into a law office by replacing a window with a door, John went about expanding his law practice. He also continued to spend Thursday evenings at “Sodalitas, A Clubb of Friends,” lawyers dedicated to studying such authors as Cicero and Tully and debating on such subjects as feudal law. A third interest directly involved Abigail.1

Working the land was as much a matter of sustenance, survival, and pride for Abigail as for John; his enthusiasm and dedication were contagious. As though it were a calling, an art form, John thrived on the beauty and challenges of his land. By contrast, he despised crowded, noisy Boston, the “rattle gabble” of its chimney sweeps, wood carriers, merchants, priests, horses and carts, market men and women who crowded the narrow cobblestone streets carved into the hilly terrain. And though he had close to forty cases listed in the city in the year of 1764, he returned home to Braintree, to his orchards, pastures, and swamps as a soldier escaped from enemy territory. By far, he preferred to spend his time pruning his apple trees, digging stones, mending and building fences, or, depending on the season, ploughing the uplands with six yoke of oxen, sowing onions, planting crab and English grasses. Not a ginger bush, dogwood, elm, ash, oak, or birch escaped his eye or axe.2

No wonder that Abigail would be unable to spend Thanksgiving with her sister Mary’s family in Salem, what with court cases that came “so thick upon us,” and her deep involvement in farming. Abigail’s early concern for the Adams property was to be lasting, though its appeal probably differed from that of her husband’s. It was always the peach, pear, and “plomb” trees, the peas “to stick,” the maple sugar and asparagus on which she seemed to focus especially loving attention, as well as the daffodils of what she called the “renovating” season.3

John was an exhaustive teacher and Abigail his equal as a pupil. He even professed jealousy that her wise and prudent management might cause neighbors to think their affairs more discreetly conducted in his absence. For her part, Abigail was grateful for John’s approval. His praise, she said, spurred her on to discharge her duties as efficiently as possible in the absence of her dearest friend.4

Still another subject preoccupied Abigail and John with equal intensity. This was the “Contest” in which they were inexorably involved between America and England. It would be impossible to overstate John’s influence on Abigail’s evolution from housewife to patriot. In the early years of their marriage John was, undeniably, Abigail’s eyes and ears, her main witness and principal delegate and scribe in matters relating to the revolution. He was a charter member of radical groups such as the Sons of Liberty, founded in 1765 to oppose the Stamp Act, and of the Committees of Correspondence, the town meetings organized by his older cousin, Samuel Adams. He would call James Otis, Samuel Adams, and the merchant John Hancock the three “most essential characters,” in his opinion, of the whole revolution. He was entirely sympathetic to Abigail’s “ten thousand questions,” and such an informed participant that he would, though he teased Abigail, most studiously try to quench her “Eve-ship’s” thirst for “retailed Politicks.”5

As resourceful as she was inquisitive, when she herself turned home-front reporter during John’s absences, Abigail would fill the gaps in news by keeping contact with statesmen as well as relatives, friends, and her children’s tutors, at home and abroad. But even while John was nearby and Abigail on only a brief visit to her family in Weymouth, she was unable to stifle her curiosity. She wrote her husband: “If you have any news in Town, which the papers do not communicate, pray be so good as to Write it.”6

Abigail’s mention of newspapers as a source of information is not incidental. That she and John were habitual readers of the Boston Gazette (“Containing the Freshest Advices Foreign and Domestick”), published by Benjamin Edes and John Gill, next to the prison house on Queen Street, is evinced in the liberal quotations of this newspaper in letters. The moment her “good Man” arrived home with the Gazette, to which he contributed articles, Abigail would put an end to even her most avid correspondence. She could hardly have missed a column signed “Mentor” about “an unjust and too violent authority in Kings” or on how “Nothing threatens so fatal a fall, as an authority that is strained too high; it is like a bow too much bent.”7

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The British dominion now reached from sea to sea. England had won Canada, Florida, Louisiana as far west as the Mississippi, and islands in the West Indies. It also owned Acadia, Cape Breton and its dependent islands, and fisheries in which France would retain some share. Louisiana west of the Mississippi, and the island of New Orleans were ceded to Spain by France. In Asia, the victories of Clive at Plassey, of Coote at the Andiwash, of Waton and Pococke on the Indian Seas gave England unquestioned ascendency in the East Indies and the promise “without end” of more conquests.8

Unfortunately, England’s bills were also without end. The national debt in 1764 rose to £140,000,000; to maintain 10,000 troops in America cost more than £300,000 per year. Thus far, expert smugglers and indifferent tax collectors had permitted a pittance, only £1,800 per year, to trickle into the British treasury. This seemed an outrageous inequity to Britain’s Secretary of the Treasury, the pragmatic George Grenville. His solution, an American Revenue Act, more widely known as the Sugar Act, was a more or less updated version of the thirty-year-old and useless Molasses Act. Though logical, it was catastrophic.9

Before long, according to Grenville’s proposition, the navy would patrol the Atlantic waters rigorously, and governors and agents were to report on smugglers relentlessly. The accused would be tried in admiralty courts without juries. The fact that British customs duties had been conceived to regulate the flow of trade, rather than to channel revenue into the British treasury, was to be ignored. Now, though duties on molasses were cut in half, those on refined sugar were raised. Fresh duties on Madeira (especially popular with the colonists) and Canary Island wines eradicated old and comfortable arrangements between Portugal and the colonies. The new duties on lumber prohibited delivery anywhere but to England; the purchase of British linens was mandatory.10

One year later, on March 22, 1765, the Stamp Tax, proposed by George Grenville, which required the stamping of fifteen classes of court documents, as well as college diplomas, real-estate certificates, newspapers, and even playing cards, was passed by royal assent by commission, the King being too ill to sign the fateful document himself. Even the mere hint of another tax incited Sam Adams to full and urgent voice. “There is no room for delay,” he cautioned fellow colonists. “Those unexpected proceedings may be preparatory to more extensive taxation; for, if our trade may be taxed, why not our lands and everything we possess?” To Sam Adams, taxes in any form, without legal representation, meant diminution of the individual from free subject to the miserable state of tributary slave, meant the annihilation of the charter right of colonists to govern and tax themselves. “We claim British rights, not by charter only; we are born to them,” he insisted.11

Predictably, James Otis rose to the challenge. Supreme power lay with the people, he said, and the people never “freely, nor can rightly, make an unlimited renunciation of this divine right.” Otis spoke twelve years before the Declaration of Independence was written, yet the heart of that superb document had begun to beat. The first principle and great end of government being to provide for the best good of all the people, Otis would not tolerate putting the powers of all into the hands of one or some few. Seeming to impart a succinct summary of the messages of both Sam Adams and James Otis, the Gazette predicted, with mordant accuracy, that the passage of the Stamp Act was likely to produce “very little more than disgust, trouble and oppression to the colonies.” But the fifty-nine-year-old Benjamin Franklin, already famous as a scientist and inventor, and now joint postmaster for the colonies (with William Hunter), seemed to think the Stamp Tax inevitable. “We might as well have hindered the sun’s setting,” he said.12

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The consequences of the Stamp Act gave John much to brood about. The courts were shut, business was at a standstill, his law practice halted. He and Abigail would have to cut down on their expenses, and their future seemed bleak just when he had gained, after thirty years of groping in “dark Obscurity” a “small degree of Reputation.” The Stamp Tax had been perpetrated the precise month he had been chosen as one of the surveyors of highways in Braintree, as well as a member of the committee to lay out the North Commons in lots for sale.13

John did have the time, however, to write an essay that was published in four parts in the Gazette, over August and September of 1765, which heightened his recognition in the community. What he called a “speculation” or even a “rhapsody,” nameless at the start and later entitled A Dissertation on the Feudal and Canon Law, was his heartfelt exploration of the reasons the colonists had established themselves in America. John’s next written work that year was an official document, the “Instructions of the Town of Braintree to Their Representative.” At the town meeting on September 24, he read the “Instructions,” which would be adopted by forty towns without a dissenting voice. Its first paragraph summed up the dilemma of a loyal people who wished to be a free people who “In all the calamaties which have ever befallen this country” had never felt “so great a concern, or such alarming apprehensions, as on this occasion.”14

John, the reluctant, tormented patriot, spoke for Abigail and for countless others who insisted that their loyalty to the King, their “veneration” for both houses of Parliament, their “affection” for fellow subjects in Britain accounted for their extreme sensitivity concerning the late acts of Parliament. In the final paragraph of the “Instructions” reprinted in the Gazette that October 14, in brave and moving words, John Adams recommended “the most clear and explicit assertion and vindication of our rights and liberties to be entered on the public records, that the world may know, in the present and all future generations, that we have a clear knowledge and a just sense of them, and with submission to Divine Providence, that we never can be slaves.”15

Probably, in recognition of John’s “Instructions,” he learned on a clear winter day, Thursday, December 19, that he had been voted unanimously, along with two others, Jeremiah Gridley and James Otis, to appear before His Excellency the Governor in support of the petition that the law courts of the province be opened. John admired Otis and had much in common with Gridley, Harvard, class of 1725, a leading lawyer in Boston. He too taught school before studying the law, cared about words (he had edited the Weekly Rehearsal), and was interested in maritime affairs (he founded a club of shipmasters), as was John, who would help to initiate the American navy. John was pleased that the town of Boston had shown him such respect and friendship. He also wondered about the possibility that Braintree would elect him to the General Court the next May.16

On Christmas day of 1765, just before a snowfall, John and Abigail had tea with Abigail’s grandparents, the Quincys, and then dined home alone. The evening by the fireside found John “thinking, reading, searching, concerning Taxation without Consent, concerning the great Pause and Rest in Business.” He had reached an uneasy conclusion: “A person ought to be very cautious what kinds of fewell he throws into a fire.”17

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March 28, 1766, brought most welcome news from England. William Pitt, “The Genius, and Guardian Angel” of Britain and British America, had, in the House of Commons, declared himself in favor of repeal of the Stamp Act on principle. He had called it the “most impolitic, arbitrary, oppressive and unconstitutional Act” that was ever passed. The House of Commons granted taxes in its representative capacity, not in its legislative capacity, and therefore, he concluded, Parliament had no right to tax the colonies.18

On Monday, May 19, there were, at last, “Rejoicings” over the repeal of the Stamp Act, signaled by clanging bells, erupting cannon, drumbeats, and houses illuminated from attic to parlor windows—except, it seemed, in Braintree, where John could not remember a “duller” time. Abigail and the baby were ill with whooping cough, which ruined their plans to go to Boston to celebrate. Besides, John had to attend the Superior Court at Plymouth on the very day that the town of Braintree was “insensible to the Common Joy.”19

But, in truth, nothing could mar the satisfaction of having the era of the Stamp Act over and done with. Even when John learned that he had not been elected a representative to the General Court, but that the incumbent, Ebenezer Thayer, hardly a favorite, a tavern keeper who dabbled in politics, had been kept in office, he was not displeased. With courts of law open and business thriving, he could once more pursue the goal that was always at the nub of his ambition—to earn enough money to support his family, pay his bills, and give him peace of mind concerning his finances. By the end of June 1766 John confided to Richard Cranch that he was amazingly changed since the Stamp Act had been repealed. Now he was “at perfect Ease about Politicks.” He cared not a shilling who was in or out of office or favor. He insisted, “I have no Point, that I wish carried.”20

His self-portrait in this letter to his brother-in-law was charmingly inaccurate. John Adams, contented and relaxed citizen, devoted husband and father, could now plan a visit to the Cranches, who had moved to Salem after failing at business ventures in Weymouth and Germantown. He felt compelled, in order that the brushstrokes be consistent, to emphasize that his brother-in-law’s habit of rising at 4:00 A.M. was quite out of keeping with his own schedule. “Before I venture to Salem you must write me express Leave to lye abed till Eight o’clock in the morning absolutely, and till 9 upon Condition I shall find it necessary.” He complained about the lazy town of Boston and about how his “squeamish” wife, keeping the shutters closed, had put him in the vile habit of dozing in the morning. But all of this banter was, in fact, just that.21

Abigail’s life might now have swerved in an opposite path had she married a man who could close the shutters not only on early-morning light but on the politics of the day. The portrait John had painted for his brother-in-law was the essence of wishful thinking. In truth, John, for better or for worse, was a slightly more mature version of the younger, vainer, more ambitious, learned, affectionate, and dedicated John of courtship days. Even as he protested lack of interest in any political point, he was writing constantly on facets of that very subject for publication under signatures such as “Clarendon” and “Misanthrop” and “Humphrey Ploughjogger.”22

John’s portrait of his squeamish wife was just as fanciful as his self-description. His squeamish wife was consumingly in charge of their daughter, whom everyone called Nabby, “fat as a porpouse,” coughing and cutting teeth. As the farm expanded, so also did Abigail’s responsibilities. The farm now included two horses, three cows, two yearlings, twenty sheep, and one cock. Besides feeding her animals, it seemed to her that she was feeding half, if not all, of the influential colonists who came to call.23

Fortunately, Abigail and John’s hospitality was reciprocated and perhaps, for the last time until their retirement, they enjoyed the semblance of an ordinary couple’s social pastime. They were able to savor wild goose and cranberry sauce with Abigail’s uncle, Dr. Cotton Tufts, and his wife, the former Lucy Quincy, and to visit John’s cousins, the Nicholas Boylstons, said to have the richest furnishings in North America. Abigail and John were awed by the Boylston establishment. With its spacious gardens, Turkey carpets, painted hangings, marble tables, crimson damask curtains, and magnificent clock, theirs was a seat for a “noble Man,” for a prince. Abigail and John probably spent their carriage ride home counting up its cost, said to be a thousand pounds sterling just for the furniture.24

Finally, on July 15, 1766, Abigail was able to write her sister Mary that the week after the Superior Court sat, and after the Inferiour Court was adjourned, she hoped she could plan a visit to Salem—that no longer would “Mountains arise to hinder me. Mole hills,” she told her sister, “I always Expect to find, but them I can easily surmount.” She also warned Mary that the weather would be so hot she could not think of bringing Nabby with her. The poor “Rogue” had been very poorly the past three or four days, cutting teeth. Her cough, too, was bad again.25

Abigail and John did manage two visits to the Cranch family in Salem in 1766. In mid-August, on their outing from Salem to Marblehead, John rode a single horse while the sisters went in a chaise. On their second visit, the first week that November, John was content to sit and hear “the Ladies talk about Ribbon, Catgut and Paris net, Riding hoods, Cloth, Silk and Lace.” Then Cranch, presumably tending his watch-and-clock business, returned and the two couples enjoyed “a very happy Evening.”26

Abigail’s reaction to her first visit was almost to seem sadder than happier for having made it. She was broadly sentimental about Mary’s daughter Betsy:

… what would I give to hear her prattle to her Cousin Nabby, to see them put their little arms around one an others necks, and hug each other, it would really be a very pleasing Sight, to me.

But, she added, to leave those charmers for a moment, she wished to speak further of Mary’s Salem acquaintances, in whom she found “a very odd kind of politness.” By what she heard of them, they had well learned the lesson of Iago to Roderigo, to “put money in thy purse.” It was in the character of the whole people that she found fault, in their attitude of “get what you can, and keep what you have got.” As a result, Abigail told Mary, “My advice to you is among the Romans, do as the romans do.” Nor had Abigail finished. She reflected with startling cynicism:

This is a selfish world you know. Interest governs it, there are but very few, who are moved by any other Spring. They are Generous, Benevolent and Friendly when it is for their interest, when any thing is to be got by it, but touch the tender part, their Interest, and you will immediately find the reverse, the greater half the World are mere Janases.27

In June of 1767, just fourteen months after the repeal of the Stamp Act, Parliament passed a set of duties, alerting the colonists to the presence of a new political villain. His name was Charles Townshend, the ambitious Chancellor of the Exchequer, a rousing orator (especially under the influence of champagne), also known as “the Weathercock” because of his fickle politics. Duties on glass, painter’s oils and colors, tea and wine, known as the Townshend Acts, followed by the establishment of a board of customs and the legalization of general writs of assistance, plunged the colonists into a fresh siege of soul-searching.28

John Adams, evaluating the consequences of Townshend’s measures, predicted they would excite a “great fermentation.” The Gazette published numerous editorials on the issues at stake. It went to the length of reprinting the content of the Bill of Rights, acutely relevant at this time: “No taxage or aid shall be laid or levied by the King or his heirs in this realm, without the good will and assent of the archbishops, bishops, earls, knights, burgesses, and other than the freemen of the commonalty of this realm.” Further, the Gazette called attention to the “precedent” of 1688 that gave the crown to William and Mary, and with it the charter and birthright entitling all Englishmen, mainland and colonial, to certain rights and customs.29

In view of mounting rejection of British authority by the colonies, Governor Francis Bernard reported to the Crown that there never were people “more divided in opinions, hopes and fears, than those of Boston now are.” In his estimation, the minds of the common people had been poisoned to a great degree. It was his melancholy consideration that the rich and populous town was disgraced by a set of “desperadoes (perhaps even a dozen), whose own ruined or insignificant fortunes make the distruction of the country a matter of indifference to them.”30

After just a few years of marriage, both Abigail and John seemed already to cherish their brief past, as though the elements of happiness it had afforded them were forever beyond reach. John reminded Cranch of the “still pleasanter Times of courtship at Weymouth.” Abigail, even at twenty-two, seemed sadly aged when she said that a letter from Mary gave “new Spring to my nerves and a brisker circulation to my Blood.” Resigned, desolate, she told affectionately of her “Good Man” who was such an “itinerant” that she had but little of his company. Summing up her life after two years of marriage, she wrote: “We do pretty much as We used to of old. Marry and give in Marriage, encrease and multiply all in the old fashioned way.”31

Abigail’s consolation over John’s absences was undoubtedly rooted in her understanding of their economic necessity. John traveled in heat and cold, from town to town and court to court, for the reason he repeated constantly: “Nothing but the Hope of acquiring some little Matter for my dear Family, could carry me, thro these tedious Excursions.” In one instance, traveling from Martha’s Vineyard to Boston to Taunton to Barnstable to Concord to Salem to Cambridge to Worcester, he seriously questioned his life apart from his family, his life of “Here and everywhere” to use the expression, he said, that Desdemona’s father applied to Othello.32

A poignant view of Abigail on a Sunday evening in Weymouth, September 1767, during a two-day visit with her parents, is prophetic of times to come. Nabby is rocking the cradle of her two-month-old brother, John Quincy, born that July 11 (and named after his great-grandfather who died two days later). She is singing, “Come pappa come home to Brother Johnny.” The song reinforces Abigail’s sense that Sunday seems a more “Lonesome Day” than any other day on which John is absent. “For tho I may be compared to those climates which are deprived of the Sun half the Year,” she writes, “yet upon a Sunday you commonly afforded us your benign influence.” On her return home from visits like this one, she is pathetically grateful to be gladly received “even by one’s Servants,” in the absence of her “Dearest of Friends and the Tenderest of Husbands.”33

Whatever the depths of her loneliness, Abigail wryly admitted to the surprising pleasure to be found in the company of one’s own children. She who had always felt “vex’d” hearing parents relate their children’s “chit-chat”—regarding this as a weakness in people whose good sense in other instances she had not doubted—was astonished at how every word and action of her own children “twines round ones heart.” Still, she hoped that in company she would not be guilty of the error of repetition.34

Snow blocked the roads by the second week of January 1767. This meant that Abigail was more or less housebound, cut off from visits to her parents in Weymouth, to her sister in Salem. It would be May before she saw Mary again. She scanned the public papers for political news, but learned nothing conclusive. With the future unpredictable, she tended to look back on the past with “painful pleasure.” Those relatively uncomplicated days that afforded moments for gossip and tea, “alas where are they?” she asked. She knew the answer too well: fled “in the Dark backward, and abyss of time.” The era of Diana the moon goddess and her Spartan general, Lysander, was eclipsed forever.35