THREE
An “Eaqual” Share of Curiosity
In April 1768, Abigail prepared to move the family from Braintree to Boston. For frequently mentioned but unspecified reasons of health, John was determined to “hazard the experiment” of leaving native ground. He declined election as one of Braintree’s selectmen and moved, with Abigail and their two children, into the rented White House, as it was called, in Brattle Square. John considered it a good omen that its former owner had lived there for many years. Unfortunately, the omen proved misleading.1
On October 1, 1768, in official obedience to His Majesty’s commands, regiments of redcoats had disembarked from the Long Wharf and from Wheelwright’s Wharf, which jutted out into Boston’s vulnerable harbor, to march their way uphill to King Street, and over to the once-innocent grassy Common. By December, their artillery was strategically focused on the Town House, where the courts met and the legislature held its sessions. With the awesome knowledge of additional troops no farther away than Castle William (on Castle Island in the Boston harbour), with the unquestionable presence of British men-of-war moored just beyond the wharves, there was only one way for the patriots to describe their beloved Boston: “Our town is now a perfect garrison.”2
As for Abigail and John, the serenity they so earnestly sought never materialized. Instead, the family was driven out of bed in early morning to the insistent beat of fife and drums. They were indignant beyond consolation at the intrusion. Just the sight of the redcoats was a flag of danger—strong proof, John said, that Great Britain’s determination to subjugate the colonists was “too deep and inveterate” ever to be altered. When John was named to the committee to prepare instructions for the Boston representatives to the General Court for the second time, in May 1769 (the first being June, 1768), concern was marked over the unfriendly presence of British troops, as well as the formidable power of the admiralty courts.3
A second daughter, Susanna, was born in the White House on December 28, 1768, and baptized on New Year’s Day by Dr. Samuel Cooper at the Brattle Street Church. The White House, however, was soon up for sale. Because John hadn’t sufficient confidence “in the Stability of any Thing,” he refused to buy it. This meant that he was obliged to relocate, and an exhausting, seesawing period was begun in terms of the family’s housing. The next move was to a home on Cole Lane, a street that ran northward from Hanover Street to the Mill Pond. By the next spring the family was back in Brattle Square.4
The months of February and March 1770 sealed Abigail and John’s decisive commitment to the cause of the colonists. Life was increasingly threatening, and already difficult enough for Abigail, pregnant again and mourning the death on February 4 of the fourteen-month-old Susanna, whom they had called Suky. Only fragmentary records of the infant remain for posterity, as a letter in which her father asks her mother “to kiss my little Suky for me.” John also mentions in his autobiography the loss of “a Child a Daughter, whose name was Susana.” Abigail was silent about this baby, with probably one exception. When she later attempted to comfort her daughter-in-law, Louisa Catherine, John Quincy’s wife, despairing the loss of an infant child, she admitted a similar loss.5
* * *
February’s military unrest did not come as a surprise. John had feared what Sam Adams called the “merry-andrew Tricks” of the troops of redcoats. Sunday was a day for worship, for family meetings, not for horseracing on the Common, not for military parades, Dr. Cooper complained. Other grievances went unheard, such as those of men, women, and children, uneasy at the sight of the redcoats and their sticks, clubs, and cutlasses, and resentful of the idle pokes of their bayonets.6
On February 22, the tense relationship between the British and the colonists blistered into tragedy. A group of boys demonstrated against a merchant who violated the non-importation agreement not to carry British goods until taxes were rescinded. They next marched on the home of Ebenezer Richardson, ridiculing the customs employee, who retaliated by shooting one of the demonstrators, Christopher Snider, who was about eleven years old. John reported to Abigail that he had never beheld such a funeral, such a procession as this one, which extended farther than one could have imagined. Reaction to the child’s death triggered further bloodshed two weeks later and proved to be a prelude to what would be known as the Boston Massacre.7
On March 5, 1770, Abigail, seven months pregnant, was at home with Nabby, Johnny, and the servants. John was at Henderson Inches’s house in the South End of Boston when he and his fellow club members heard bells ringing with such urgency—a sure signal of fire or friends in danger—that they snatched their hats and coats and raced outdoors to navigate the treacherous ice underfoot. The conflagration, they quickly realized, was a matter of personalities, not flames. In the swiftly crowding streets, they learned of bloodshed, of a captain taunted by a barber’s apprentice for not paying for the dressing of his hair, and of a sentinel answering back with a crashing blow that made the apprentice cry out.8
Converging from Murray’s Barracks, from Royal Exchange Lane, a mob clustered onto King Street, where a tearful boy pointed to the sentinel, who was now loading his gun. Sides were drawn, and snowballs, cheers, whistles, dares, and oaths filled the frosty air. The officer of the day, Captain Thomas Preston, shouted for the protection of more soldiers. A stick struck one of the crowd, bayonets wavered in the air, muskets fired. Suddenly five were dead, six more wounded. Drums droned, church bells crashed, word was out that “the troops had risen on the people.”9
John missed the initial physical conflict, but he did not misinterpret its threat. He rushed home to Abigail, apprehensive about her state. Once Abigail’s mind was at ease, at least about her husband’s safety, there was nothing more to be said or done—nothing, John said, but to recognize that “this was the Explosion.”10
By morning, the involvement of the British was no longer a matter of rumor. Asked to defend Captain Preston, John accepted the case, hazarding his popularity in the belief that “Council ought to be the very last thing that an accused Person should want in a free Country.” John won the case with the assistance of Abigail’s cousin, Josiah Quincy, on the basis of doubt as to whether Preston had given orders to kill. One year later, the Boston Massacre, termed the “horrid Massacre” would be celebrated “as a Solemn and perpetual Memorial of the Tyranny of the British Administration of Government.”11
On June 6, 1770, when John was elected a representative to the General Court from Boston, he once again had to face the fact that to serve in public office would entail sacrifice of personal ambition and fortune. He had, he calculated, more business than any man in the province, and he believed he would be trading in bright prospects for endless labor and anxiety—“if not infamy and death.” That evening he confided his doubts to Abigail. Flooded with tears, that “excellent Lady” who had always encouraged him said she was very sensible of all the danger to him, to her, and to their children. But he had done as he ought, she told him, adding that she was “very willing to share in all that was to come and place her trust in Providence.”12
In April of 1771, John complained of a pain in his breast and in his lungs, which he believed was life-threatening. He decided to maintain his office in Boston, but to return with his family to Braintree, where he spoke of being restored by the healing air—the fine breezes of the sea on one side and the rocky hills of pine and cedar on the other—as well as the daily rides on horseback, the amusements of agriculture, even a journey to drink the mineral waters at Stafford Springs in Connecticut. But with the most optimistic motives, John did not solve his problems. Again overwhelmed with work, he found the commute too much and decided to move back to Boston after roughly nineteen months in Braintree. On a late-summer day, August 21, 1772, he paid one Shrimpton Hunt £ 533 6s. 8d. for a brick house and lot in South Queen Street, opposite the courthouse and near his business.13
This transaction, at age thirty-seven, to his bitter regret, left him with only three hundred pounds in his pocket. He also felt his health as well as his funds exhausted, and made the “fixed Resolution” not to meddle with public affairs. He had already served his country and was determined to devote himself wholly to his law office and farm, and to laying a foundation for a better fortune for his children and a more serene life than had been his thus far.14
On Tuesday, November 24, 1772, Abigail arrived at the Queen Street house with Nabby, aged seven, John Quincy, five, Charles (born May 29, 1770), and the two-month-old infant, Thomas Boylston (born September 15, 1772), cradled in her arms. Abigail was twenty-eight years old and had been married for eight years. John was once again heard to say that he hoped to live in the house on Queen Street as long as he had any connections with Boston.15
* * *
Compared to that of her husband, who left behind a vivid and detailed map of his life, Abigail’s early record is parsimonious. By inference we learn about her; her correspondence, especially with her cousin Isaac, immediately before and after her marriage, mirrors her mental and intellectual state with prophetic accuracy. As did her sister Elizabeth, Abigail maintained a respectful and affectionate relationship with Isaac. Her letters, written in the “Spirit of real Friendship,” are full of purposeful advice on morals and integrity, and provide an invaluable record of her own aspirations. Impervious to John’s teasing about her “Instructions and Exhortations,” Abigail solemnly cautioned Isaac to be superior to temptation, warned him against vice and imprudence (too frequently the inseparable companions of youth), and passed on the excellent advice, twenty lines’ worth, of Polonius to his son, Laertes, ending:
This above all, to thine own self be true
And it must follow as the Night the Day
Thou canst not then be falce to any man.16
Isaac could not have expected less from a disciplined, dutiful Abigail, but he might have been surprised by the breadth of her horizons. A worldly puritan, she did not disdain ambition or deny curiosity. She was a child of her father’s ministry, but also of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. She prized learning perhaps a shade less than morality; she was persuaded that “this passion of Ambition,” when centered in an honest mind, did service to the world.17
Thus she would wish Isaac to make improvements equal to his prudence; ultimately she expected that his contribution might be of global importance. She was ingenuous as she implored her cousin to report the “curious or remarkable” in the course of his travels. In the light of this last request, Abigail’s wistful words of approval of Isaac’s intended voyage to England are those of a prematurely burdened young woman:
Now is the best Season of Life for you to travel; Ere you have formed connection which would bind you to your own little Spot.18
Abigail enlarged on this theme subsequently. Isaac’s report of his travels in England—of that antique and curious object, Canterbury Cathedral; of that vast magnificence, St. Paul’s Cathedral; of visits to the opera, to theaters, to the Tower—evoked her candid thoughts on the distinct limitations imposed on women. “Bear with me Sir,” she pleaded. “From my Infancy I have always felt a great inclination to visit the Mother Country as tis call’d and had nature formed me of the other Sex, I should certainly have been a rover.” The obstacles to this course, however, seemed insurmountable.
Women you know Sir are considered as Domestick Beings, and altho they inherit an Eaquel Share of curiosity with the other Sex, yet but few are hardy eno’ to venture abroad, and explore the amaizing variety of distant Lands. The Natural tenderness and Delicacy of our Constitutions, added to the many Dangers we are subject too from your Sex, renders it almost impossible for a Single Lady to travel without injury to her character. And those who have a protector in an Husband, have generally speaking obstacles sufficient to prevent their Roving.19
Abigail’s analysis of travel, and women’s limited opportunities to do so, was without self-pity. Indeed, Abigail demonstrated much partisan interest in the achievement of her sex. The celebrated English historian Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, mentioned in Isaac’s letter, caught her attention. As Isaac had met her, Abigail hoped he could satisfy her great desire to be acquainted with Mrs. Macaulay’s history. One of her own sex, so eminent in a tract so uncommon, Abigail explained, raised her curiosity.20
It was revealing of Abigail’s intellectual gifts that at one of the most intensely domestic and transient periods of her life, she was able to reach beyond the nursery, kitchen, and field and sequester time to explore the outside world. Though she betrayed instances of frustration—having a protector begot “obstacles” that prevented her from being “a rover”—it was left to sister Elizabeth, as an unmarried observer of the Adams household, to speak of brains “all roiled,” of being “almost crazed” in coping with the “natural Blessings of Matrimony.”21
Abigail’s marked interest in the writings of exceptional women, or in sympathetic works by men on the subject of women, implies an acute sensitivity to the special condition of being born female. In this regard, she was fascinated by the work of the flamboyant Reverend James Fordyce, D.D., whose Sermons to Young Women were written out of an “unfeigned regard for the Female Sex.” The minister, an acquaintance of Samuel Johnson, wrote in this and a later work about the “softer sex,” who were not always treated with the charity and justice they deserved, or recognized for their virtues and talents. Abigail thought enough of the Sermons to forward a copy to her sister Mary.22
Another author who won Abigail’s attention, with his Letters on the English Nation, was supposedly a Jesuit named Batista Angeloni, shortly discovered to be the English political writer John Shebbeare. He wrote about the inhuman tyranny of barring women from the privileges of education. It was ignoble cowardice, he said, to disarm them and not allow them the same weapons men used, as their senses were generally as quick as men’s, their reason “as nervous,” their judgment as mature and solid. Abigail was intrigued not only by Shebbeare’s thoughts on women, but also on religion. Fearful that her own people considered religion a “negative virtue,” she learned from Shebbeare that the situation was far more crucial in London, where religion was periodical, like an “ague” that only returned once in seven days, and then attacked the inhabitants “with the cold fit only.”23
* * *
It was Mercy Otis Warren who initiated the correspondence with Abigail. Abigail sincerely welcomed the arrangement: “Thus imbolden’d I venture to stretch my pinions,” she thanked Mercy on July 16, 1773. Mercy, with her vigilant eyes, set jaw, and pursed mouth, was sixteen years older than Abigail, and though their literary styles differed measurably—Mercy’s was baroque, prickly, guarded; Abigail’s was reportorial, poetic, guileless—they shared brilliant intellects and almost identical concerns about female circumstances. It was with Mercy that Abigail revealed her most feminine and feminist thoughts. Together they were able to “visit” about writers, politics, children, and fashion—they regularly bartered yards of ribbons, laces, and fabrics—as well as the roles thrust upon their husbands.24
The body of letters they produced during their lifelong, though flawed, friendship established Abigail as the equal of the older and acknowledgedly more learned woman, but Abigail always deferred to Mercy. Not even in old age would Abigail make any pretentions to the character of an educated woman. There were so few women who really could be called learned, she said, that she did not wonder they were considered “black swans.” To be one required such talents and such devotion of time and study as to exclude the performance of most domestic cares and duties, which fell exclusively, in her opinion, to the lot of most females. Her lot, apparently, would always exclude her from this prestigious membership. Yet Mercy, who attempted poetry as well as writing plays and history, respected Abigail’s own literary gifts, urging her to write “very long letters” giving all the intelligence she could, “and dont be ceremonious.” In turn, Abigail told her “Worthy Friend”: “I love characters drawn by your pen.”25
Early letters between the two women regarding the worth of Molière, for example, were characteristic. Abigail admitted immediately that she could not be brought to like that author. There was a general “Want of Spirit” about his work that caused disappointment with the closing of each story. Further, his characters appeared unfinished, and he seemed to ridicule vice without engaging his readers in virtue. Molière might have drawn many pictures of real life, yet all pictures of life, Abigail said, “are not fit to be exhibited upon the State.”26
Mercy’s response was candid, her arch style marking the dramatic difference in the personalities of the two women:
As I am Called upon both by Mr. and Mrs. Adams to give my opinion of a Celebrated Comic Writer: silence in me would be inexcusable; tho, otherways my sentiments are of little Consequence.… The solemn strains of the tragic Muse Have been generally more to my taste than the lighter Representations of the Drama. Yet I think the Follies and Absurdities of Human Nature Exposed to Ridicule in the Masterly Manner it is done by Molière may often have a greater tendency to reform Mankind than some graver Lessons of Morality.27
But the subject of Molière was only a peripheral distraction from the subject of tea, “that bainful weed” lingering in the harbor, the subject of escalating negotiations. Abigail referred Mercy to the Gazette for details. The November 29, 1773, edition reported:
Yesterday morning, Captain Hall, in the ship Dartmouth, came to anchor near the castle, in about eight weeks from London. On board it is said, are one hundred and fourteen chests of the so-much-detested East-India Company’s tea, the expected arrival of which pernicious article has for some time past put all these northern colonies in a very great ferment. Friends! Brethren! Countrymen! that worst of Plagues the detested Tea shipped for this Port by the East-India Co. is now arrived—the Hour of Destruction or manly opposition to the Machination of Tyranny stares you in the face.28
With the arrival of the tea in port, members of the Committees of Correspondence resolved to pitch all the chests overboard. Bells tolled day and night. The evening of the twenty-ninth, in the Old South Meeting House, thousands of colonists from Dorchester, Roxbury, Brookline, Cambridge, and Charleston, as well as Boston, denounced the tea commissioners as more obnoxious to their countrymen than even the stamp masters. Facing up to the “last, worst, and most destructive measure of the administration,” they extracted a promise from the owner of the Dartmouth, anchored at Griffin’s Wharf, not to dock in the harbor until Tuesday. They hoped that by then the owner, Francis Rotch, would obtain permission from the customs collector to return his goods to Britain, thereby avoiding a disastrous confrontation.29
Negotiations were unsuccessful. Abigail was in anguish. She wrote to Mercy on December 5: “The flame is kindled and like Lightning it catches from Soul to Soul. Great will be the devastation if not timely quenched or allayed by some more lenient Measures.” She was prepared, however, to face the ultimate, tragic challenge:
Altho the mind is shocked at the Thought of sheding Humane Blood, more Especially the Blood of our Countrymen, and a civil War is of all Wars, the most dreadful Such is the present Spirit that prevails, that if once they are made desperate Many, very Many of our Heroes will spend their lives in the cause, With the Speach of Cato in their Mouths, “What a pitty it is, that we can die but once to save our Country.”30
Abigail confided to Mercy that she trembled at the thought of the “firefull concequences” right there in Boston. Her heart beat at every whistle she heard; she did not dare openly express half her fears. She wished “Eternal Reproach and Ignominy be the portion of all those who have been instrumental in bringing fears” upon her.31
The letter, explaining that she was only partially recovered (enough to leave her room some of each day) from a fever and illness more severe than she had known in years, verged on hysteria. Mercy’s reply was discerning: “By the stile and spirit of yours of the 5th December one would judge you was quite as much affected by the shocks of the political as the Natural Constitution.”32
After almost a week of somewhat eerie quiet, Abigail would call the rainy December 16, “the most momentous” in Boston’s annals, a day she seemed to both dread and welcome. By ten o’clock in the morning, two thousand people had gathered in the Old South Meeting House; by evening the crowd seemed more like seven thousand. “Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?” someone asked. Sam Adams’s oblique answer assured the gathering that “this meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” The cause was desperate, the measures radical.33
Shouts and war whoops signaled the rush of men into the moonlight (the figure in history books varies from thirty to sixty, the Dartmouth log says one thousand). The strange group, with Indian headdresses and painted faces, swathed in blankets and brandishing hatchets, had emerged from a room in the rear of Edes and Gill’s printing office. Throngs joined them as they passed by the Old South, marching directly to Griffin’s Wharf, where the three ships lay that contained the tea. A guard of twenty-five men boarded the Dartmouth. They warned the ship and customs-house officers out of the way and methodically tended their quarry. They undid the hatches, went down to the hold, hoisted to deck 340 chests of tea and in less than three hours had cut them up, and systematically and quietly (except for an occasional supposedly Indian sound) tossed the pieces overboard into the bay.
Afterward, it was “as if it had been a holy time.” John, so moved by the event, readily recognized the destruction of the tea as “so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible” and its consequences “so lasting” that he wrote on December 17 to James Warren, Mercy’s husband: “The die is cast. The people have passed the river and cut away the bridge … The sublimity of it charms me.”34
For all his pride in the daring of his countrymen, John’s lawyerly instincts provoked questions. As the destruction of the tea was “but an Attack upon Property,” another, similar “Exertion” of popular power might effect the event he feared mightily, the destruction of lives. But then the risk seemed inevitable when he thought about the “malicious Pleasure” of Governor Thomas Hutchinson, and the customs officers who stood by as the colonists struggled to return the tea to London before deciding to destroy it. “Amazing,” he found, that there were “Persons so hardened and abandoned” and, he might have added, so lacking understanding. Hutchinson’s earlier delivery of “general instructions” to end “irregularities” and “introduce tranquillity,” had only unnerved the colonists further.35
Governments established in the “Plantations,” Hutchinson had said, which, due to their separate and remote situations required more general and extensive powers of legislation, were subject to all such laws of the kingdom as “immediately respect them or are designed to extend to them.” Also, those who claimed exemption from acts of Parliament by virtue of their rights as Englishmen should consider that it was impossible that the rights of English subjects should be the same “in every respect” in all parts of the Dominions.36
Hutchinson, attempting to be as conciliatory as possible, succeeded only in being provocative as he reached the last of his arguments on behalf of the Crown. “Without its protection,” he asked, “should we not become the prey of one of the Powers of Europe,” and further, was there “anything which we have more reason to dread then Independence?”37
Hutchinson’s interpretation of the state of government affairs only multiplied Abigail’s fears of imminent war. Yet by late February she was collected enough to apologize to Mercy for her last letter, which “abounded with so many terrors.” She explained that she was not naturally of a gloomy temper, or disposed to view objects “upon the dark Side only.” She even found she could rejoice that no blood had been spilled in the tea incident. Despite her efforts to be cheerful, the remainder of the letter was the effort of a troubled woman.38
Abigail did not, though she wished she might, respond positively to Mercy’s suggestion that there was hope that they might both see the colony’s “Beautiful Fabrick” repaired and reestablished so firmly that the “Venal and narrow hearted on Either side of the Atlantic,” would be powerless “to break down its barriers.” Instead, Abigail was obsessed by the ravages of “that restless ambition” that had “broken this people”—herself included, of course—into factions. In itself, ambition in a person of honest mind and great ability might lead, and had led, to eminent service to the world, she readily conceded. But ambition could also pervert a person to “very base purposes,” to eradicate every principal of humanity and benevolence.39
“Every day more and more” Abigail felt that she had further cause to deprecate the “growing Evil” that threatened all the precepts she lived by. “This party Spirit ruins good Neighbourhood, eradicates all the Seeds of good nature and humanity,” Abigail told Mercy. “It sours the temper and has a fatal tendancy,” she continued, “upon the Morals and understanding and is contrary to that precept of christianity thou shallt Love thy Neighbour as they self.” Abigail was obviously thinking of the English King George when she mentioned Alexander, the Greek conqueror who would certainly have achieved much greater glory, in her opinion, by a wise government of his conquered kingdoms than by “childishly blubering” after new worlds.40
* * *
A bill to regulate the government of the province of Massachusetts Bay, regarded by John Adams as the “last Effort of Lord North’s Despair,” was presented to Parliament on March 14, signed March 31, and printed in Boston papers on May 10, effective June 1. The Boston Port Bill was initiated to punish Boston by closing its port to all commerce until the East India Company was repaid for the destruction of the tea. There would be no landing or shipping of merchandise within the Boston harbor. An army was on its way; British ships would soon blockade the town.41
Not unexpectedly, reaction was instant and dramatic. The seat of government was moved to Salem. The Committees of Correspondence, led by Dr. Joseph Warren, Mercy’s brother-in-law, invited eight neighboring towns to a conference on the critical state of public affairs. Agreement was unanimous that the bill was one of injustice and cruelty, repugnant to law, religion, and common sense. The outcome was a joint resolution by the colonists to stop all trade, both importation and exportation, with Great Britain and the West Indies, until the Port Act was repealed.42
Another bill read before the House of Commons, on April 15, compounding the colonists’ misery, appeared to be designed to alter the charter of the province of Massachusetts and thereby its government. Without warning, town meetings were to be abolished, the Crown was to be in charge of appointing and removing sheriffs (formerly chosen at a convention), and trial by jury was to become trial by Crown-appointed sheriffs. Should any of the Crown appointees, magistrates, revenue officers, or soldiers be brought up for charges, their trials would be held in Nova Scotia or Great Britain.43
Another measure legalized the quartering of troops within the town of Boston. Another abolished the writ of habeus corpus. Still another shattered charters and rights not only of Massachusetts, but of Connecticut, New York, and Virginia, by spreading the new boundaries of Quebec to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and over the region that encompassed, besides Canada, what would be the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin.44
To students of colonial justice it was emphatically apparent that all power was to stem from the royal government. The rights and liberties of colonists, renewed in charter from the time of William and Mary, and observed by the people of Massachusetts for the past eighty years, were abolished. Benjamin Franklin shrewdly observed that “the Army of Boston cannot answer any good purpose, and may be infinitely mischievous.” The French, appraising conditions in America, thought it “plain enough the King of England is puzzled between his desire of reducing the colonies and his dread of driving them to separation.”45
The arrival of General Thomas Gage on May 13, to enforce the “Coercive Acts” and the closing of the port pending on June 1—Governor Hutchinson having sailed for England—dramatized the realities of the new era. John could find no peace when he thought of its prospects. Besides, he and Abigail were both in poor health. Abigail was visiting in Weymouth, and her father’s reports on her “Disorder” worried John. He suspected she had taken cold; he also wrote from Boston of efforts to subdue his own cold, the most obstinate and threatening one he could remember. Besides walks in the fresh air, he constantly plied himself with teas and Abigail’s “Specific,” about which there are no further details.46
Gage’s arrival, Abigail’s infirmities and his own, and the public news all at once challenged John’s “Utmost Phylosophy.”
We live my dear Soul, in an Age of Tryal. What will be the Consequence I know not. The Town of Boston, for ought I can see, must suffer Martyrdom: It must expire: And our principal Consolation is, that it dies in a noble Cause. The Cause of Truth, of Virtue, of Liberty and of Humanity: and that it will probably have a glorious Reformation, to greater Wealth, Splendor and Power than ever.
The last paragraph held out hope, however. “Don’t imagine from all this that I am in the Dumps.” Far otherwise. He would no more be defeated by the oncoming events, he promised, than he had been in “The Project of the Tea.”47
* * *
On June 17, John, with four other men, was elected by the General Court in Salem to be a delegate to America’s first Continental Congress. Besides John, the other delegates included Thomas Cushing, Sam Adams, and Robert Treat Paine. James Bowdoin was “indisposed” due to family problems. John wrote with pride and awe three days later, on Monday, June 20:
This will be an assembly of the wisest Men upon the Continent, who are Americans in Principle, i.e. against the Taxation of Americans, by Authority of Parliament.… I feel myself unequal to this Business. A more extensive Knowledge of the Realm, the Colonies, and of Commerce, as well as of Law and Policy, is necessary, than I am Master of.48
John’s election to Congress marked the beginning of a new era for Abigail as well. John was absent from Braintree, touring the Eastern Court circuit in Maine for the tenth and last time, and in the course of his fifteen letters written in less than a month’s time, from June 23 to July 9, 1774, before leaving for Philadelphia, he set out the principal roles Abigail would assume for the next ten years of her life.49
In order for him to serve his country—“Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country, is my unalterable determination”—John created a partnership with Abigail. His letter from York, Maine, written on July 1, might be regarded as a directive couched as an invitation, begging Abigail to dedicate herself to a joint endeavor. It would prove to be a masterful summation of her life’s work:
I must entreat you, my dear Partner in all the Joys and Sorrows, Prosperity and Adversity of my Life, to take a Part with me in the Struggle. I pray God for your Health—intreat you to rouse your whole attention to the Family, the stock, the Farm, the Dairy. Let every Article of Expense which can possibly be spared be retrench’d. Keep the Hands attentive to their Business, and [let] the most prudent Measures of every kind be adopted and pursued with Alacrity and Spirit.50
John was already nostalgic for the present, let alone the past. In Maine, in the heat, with little work to do, he was aware that this was no ordinary interval of absence from his family but rather the prelude to his first lengthy physical separation from them. But it was not only the imminent parting that John found painful. He was suffering “unutterable anxiety” about forthcoming duties, “too grand, and multifarious” for his comprehension. “We have not Men, fit for the Times, We are deficient in Genius, in Education, in Travel, in Fortune—in every Thing,” he complained. Overcome with a sense of inadequacy, his own mostly, but his friends’ as well, he prayed: “God grant us Wisdom, and Fortitude!”51
By the time of the last of his letters to Abigail before his return to Braintree, John seemed to have resolved his reasons for making the costly choice of serving his growing nation.
I have a Zeal at my Heart, for my Country and her Friends, which I cannot smother or conceal: it will burn out at Times and in Companies where it ought to be latent in my Breast. This Zeal will prove fatal to the Fortune and Felicity of my Family, if it is not regulated by a cooler Judgment than mine has hitherto been.52
On Wednesday, August 10, a hot, dry, dusty day, Abigail and her four children—Nabby was nine, Johnny seven, Charles four, Tommy two—waved good-bye to John, who had promised to meet the three other delegates to the first Continental Congress at Thomas Cushing’s by eleven o’clock in the morning. Abigail would be thirty on her next birthday. Aware that uncertainty and expectation left the mind great scope, she could not have known that her farewell wave to the “very respectable parade” of the passing coach-and-four, bound for Philadelphia, also signaled the start of a turbulent decade in which the family would grow increasingly fragmented and their lives as separate as Braintree was from St. Petersburg, Russia, let alone Philadelphia.53
Whatever else Abigail sensed, she already knew loneliness and seems to have been born with an acute sense of time lost—past, present, future. She had yet to learn that the pending political and intellectual revolution would drastically and intimately affect her entire family’s moods, personalities, fortunes. Still, horrified as she was to think about the possibility of bloodshed, she was wholehearted in her decision to join John as partner on behalf of their country. She would shoulder her responsibilities; she was quite ready for John to assume his. On August 19, when a twelve-hour rain had greatly revived the parched garden as well as her spirits, she told John:
I long impatiently to have you upon the Stage of action. The first of the month of September, perhaps may be of as much importance to Great Britain as the Ides of March were to Caesar. I wish you every Publick as well, as private blessing, and that wisdom which is profitable both for instruction and edification to conduct you in this difficult day.54