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2. Dearest Friend

The Marriage of Abigail and John Adams

Edith B. Gelles

According to Adams family lore, when Abigail Smith married John Adams on October 25, 1764, her father, the Reverend William Smith, preached the sermon “For John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and Ye say, ‘He hath a devil.’” Charles Francis Adams recorded this story in his memoir of his grandmother, explaining that Reverend Smith chose this Biblical text as a response to his Weymouth congregation. The profession of law, as practiced by John Adams, had only recently emerged in colonial Massachusetts, and a deep prejudice existed against it. Moreover, Adams was the son of a modest farmer. Charles Francis justified the reverend's text in terms of community and social class. It was intended to admonish a “portion of the parishioners” who thought that “the son of a small farmer of the middle class in Braintree, was…scarcely good enough to match with the minister's daughter, descended from so many of the shining lights of the Colony.”^[1]

The Reverend Smith's cryptic message may have included his more personal reflections, which Charles Francis, in a typical Victorian manner, attributed to the community. For many reasons, the Reverend Smith and his wife, Elizabeth Quincy Smith, may have disapproved of the marriage of their middle daughter. Abigail was not yet twenty years old when she married, younger than average for the mid-eighteenth century,

Parts of this chapter appeared in Edith B. Gelles, Portia: A Life of Abigail Adams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

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and she appears not to have had suitors previous to John Adams, whom she met when she was sixteen.^[2] That Adams was a full ten years her senior might have weighed as an advantage, had he been other than a lawyer.^[3] But Abigail's roots went deep into the colonial elite. Her mother's family were Quincys, Nortons, and Sheppards, “the solid bedrock of Massachusetts society.”^[4] The Smiths, while more recently arrived, represented the other respectable strain of New England society, the merchant class. By these standards, Adams's family were commoners.

Given either parental or social disapproval of the match, it is clear that Abigail Smith acted upon her own will when it came to marriage. She chose to marry John Adams because she loved him and because she believed that they were compatible in spirit, intelligence, values, and energy. During their more than three years of courtship, she had measured his character and tested her own intuition, as he had in return, and in the end Abigail believed that she could live her lifetime in this partnership from which there was no escape.

The Adams marriage has become legendary in American history. Just the mention of “Abigail and John” calls forth an image of an ideal marriage, one founded upon love, loyalty, friendship, and courage, which in many respects it was. However, as is often the case with ideals, reality was more complex and gives credibility to the reservations Reverend Smith had expressed. The Adamses lived together as a married couple for only ten years before the events of the rebellion against Great Britain took John away from home. Then, for a full quarter of a century, he served his nation at distant posts. Sometimes Abigail joined him—for four years of the more than ten that he lived in Europe and for a few of the years that he served as vice president and then president at the nation's capital. For much of their married life before John's defeat for the presidency in 1800, the Adamses lived apart from one another. This separation accounts, after all, for their vast correspondence from which generations of historians have constructed the story of their ideal marriage. The ideal, as read into the letters of Abigail and John, overlooks that the letters survive as a testimony to an ideal correspondence if not an ideal marriage.

The Adams marriage is mythologized for other reasons.^[5] It appears modern; in fact, it possessed many of the attributes of modern marriage. It was a love match that endured. It produced at least one famous son and established a dynasty of great citizens. It overcame adversity intact. It was a match of equals; Abigail's intelligence, wit, wisdom, and

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strength flourished alongside that of her husband, lending legitimacy to the claim of woman's more equal status. Above all, the Adams marriage is idealized because Abigail is visible, probably the most visible first lady until the mid-twentieth century. That makes the Adams marriage appear more modern than it was.^[6]

In fact, recent scholarship in history and anthropology makes it clear that all human institutions are functions of their culture, marriage as much as any other, if not more.^[7] Eighteenth-century New England was no exception from the prevailing patriarchy of Western culture. The Adams marriage was predicated upon its existence within this patriarchy. If Abigail chose to marry John, it was the most spectacular act of will available to her for the remainder of her life.^[8] Never again would she make a decision of that magnitude to control the direction of her life. There existed no easy-exit clause from her decision once her vows were taken. She had little control over the kind of work she performed, over her reproductive life, or probably over her sex life, although that is not an area that can be discerned with the historian's skills.^[9] Marriage with its obligations became her destiny in that world that also prescribed very clear separation of male and female spheres that, certainly, were not equal but hierarchically organized. The lens through which Abigail viewed her world revealed a divinely prescribed patriarchy in which it was her destiny to live in the domestic sphere under the terms that John Adams's work and choices about place, manner, and style governed. Abigail accepted that world. “I believe nature has assigned to each sex its particular duties and sphere of action,” she once wrote, “and to act well your part, ‘there all the honor lies.’”^[10]

At the same time, Abigail was neither slave nor servant, and she knew that as well. She had leverage within the marriage bond, both because of her character and John's and because the patriarchy that existed in New England was flexible.^[11] The physical magnetism that charged their early companionship remained alive, mellowed into tender familiarity, and endured as a deep loving commitment. Moreover, both of them required intellectual parity in a mate, and Abigail's real education—her own recollections to the contrary—began with marriage to John, with access to his mind, his library, and his dependence upon dialogue with her.^[12] Rather than contracting under the weight of domestic drudgery, the scope of her knowledge developed over her lifetime, so that she became wise and erudite. Both the emotional and the intellectual aspects of the Adamses' companionship overflowed from life into letters once they were separated during the Revolutionary War.

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In the best sense, then, the Adamses represented what historians call the “companionate marriage,” meaning a love match in which there exists enduring friendship and respect.^[13] It is for that reason that the Adams marriage is, in the long run, idealized. At its best it presents an ideal accommodation of woman to man in Western culture. We know this because they wrote all of this to each other, and we can read quite intimate letters that provide insights into their private lives. The reason is that Abigail, whose eighteenth-century companionate marriage in fact was one of deep friendship and commitment, actually did project her marriage into letters when John was away. The letters were her way of continuing the companionship she had with him when he was at home.

Abigail Smith had grown up in the parsonage at Weymouth as the second of three daughters. Mary, three years older, was her closest childhood friend, and one brother, William, born in 1746, separated them from the youngest sister, Elizabeth. Abigail described a pleasant childhood—“wild and giddy days” —that she recalled to her own granddaughter. Among her reminiscences, not many of which were recorded in letters, her greatest regret was lack of a formal education, not unusual for young women in pre-Revolutionary America. Abigail and her sisters were taught at home by their mother, whose own intelligence and taste was reflected in her daughters' upbringing. They learned to read, write, and cipher, and they studied rudimentary French literature, which was considered appropriate for young women of their station. They also were given free access to their father's library, which included popular eighteenth-century literature such as volumes of Spectator. Primarily, they learned to cook, sew, spin, nurse, and manage a household, for that would be their occupation. They did not consider their immersion in religion, both biblical and ritual, as education in the sense of its being a discipline or a belief system that could be mastered and possibly examined, questioned, or discarded. Religion informed their apprehension of the world they lived in; it was reality, as much as nature and human existence represented reality, and it existed prior to nature and human existence.

Abigail and John became acquainted as result of Mary's courtship with Richard Cranch, a good friend of John's, and characteristic of two exceptionally literate and verbal people, some of their courting took place in letters. At first playful and flirtatious, they used the metaphor of magnetism to describe the immediate dynamic between them. “Miss Adoreable,” he addressed her, “By the same token that the bearer hereof

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sat up with you last night I hereby order you to give him as many Kisses and as many hours of your company after 9 O'clock as he shall please to demand…I have good right to draw upon you for the kisses as I have given two or three million at least when one has been received.”^[14] Six months later, John wrote to apologize because weather had prevented his visit the previous day: “Cruel for detaining me from so much friendly, social company, and perhaps blessed to you, or me, or both for keeping me at my distance. For every experimental phylosopher knows,” he continued, “that the steel and the magnet and the glass and the feather will not fly together with more celerity, than somebody and somebody, when brought within striking distance” (vol. 1, 3, Feb. 14, 1763).

Over time, their exchanges became more tender: “There is a tye more binding than Humanity and stronger than friendship, which makes us anxious for the happiness and welfare of those to whom it binds us. It makes their misfortunes, sorrows and afflictions our own.…By this cord I am not ashamed to own myself bound, nor do I believe that you are wholly free from it,” wrote Abigail, signing herself “Diana” (6, Aug. 11, 1763).^[15] He admitted, “Last night I dreamed I saw a lady…on the Weymouth shores, spreading light and beauty and glory all round her. At first I thought it was Aurora with her fair Complexion.…But soon I found it was Diana, a lady infinitely dearer to me” (8, Aug. 1763). If Abigail's parents objected to this match, they also recognized the determination of the young couple to marry.

After their marriage, Abigail and John moved to the Braintree house that John had inherited from his father, there to begin a lifelong expedition, they believed, along the same route of rural family life that both of their parents had journeyed. For ten years Abigail and John's family life did roughly follow a similar pattern, although in retrospect it is possible to see in their frequent moves and separations—the twin origins of later disruptions—the escalating pattern of the breach between the American colonies and Great Britain and John Adams's restlessness, born of his deep internal dissatisfaction with himself and his ambition for action on a more global scene than local law and politics.^[16]

“Your Diana become a Mamma—can you credit it?” wrote Abigail to a friend in July 1765, still using her youthful pen name. “Indeed, it is a sober truth. Bless'd with a charming Girl whose pretty Smiles already delight my Heart, who is the Dear Image of her still Dearer Pappa” (51, July 1765). Several months later, John Adams, after first berating himself

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for neglecting to maintain his diary, recorded that “The Year 1765 has been the most remarkable Year of my Life,” continuing then to account for his extravagant assertion: “That enormous Engine, fabricated by the British Parliament, for battering down all the Rights and Liberties of America, I mean the Stamp Act, has raised and spread thro the whole Continent, a Spirit that will be recorded to our Honour, with all future Generations.…Our Presses have groaned, our Pulpits have thundered, our Legislatures have resolved, our Towns have voted, The Crown Officers have every where trembled, and all their little Tools and Creatures, been afraid to Speak and ashamed to be seen.”^[17] So it was that each of the Adamses recorded the salient events that initiated the only uninterrupted decade of marriage that they would live in together until their old age.

On both fronts, at home and in the political arena, circumstances developed at a similar pace. Abigail gave birth five times in seven years. Her first child, a daughter also called Abigail, was born in 1765. John Quincy, named for his maternal grandfather who had just died, was born in July 1767, followed by Suzanna in 1769, who died after one year. Charles was born in 1770 and Thomas in 1772. Abigail did not become pregnant again until John visited briefly in 1777, and their infant daughter was stillborn. Her family of four children, one daughter and three sons who lived to become adults, was completed.

Meanwhile, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766. Abigail, who was “very ill of an hooping cough” was unable to attend the celebrations in Boston, where “Bells rung, Cannons were fired, Drums beaten”; the whole province, John exclaimed, “was in a Rapture for the Repeal of the Stamp Act.”^[18] John Quincy was born the year that Parliament passed the hated Townsend Acts that levied more taxes on the colonies, resulting in immediate acts of resistance. By the time Suzanna was born, the Townsend Acts had been repealed, except for one that was retained on tea.

The year 1770 marked a crescendo in both domestic and public affairs. The infant Suzanna died just months before Abigail gave birth to Charles. The Adamses, who had moved to Boston from Braintree two years previous, were forced to move to a new house on Cold Lane because of the sale of their rented house on Brattle Square. And it was the year of the Boston Massacre, when British soldiers fired into a mob, killing several patriots. This event, if it did not raise popular hostility to Great Britain to its highest pitch, marked a turning point in the career of John Adams by catapulting him into a wholly visible public role.

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John recalled that his first consideration upon hearing news that evening of the “massacre” was for his wife, at home alone with servants. She was “in circumstances and I was apprehensive of the effect of the Surprise on her.…I went directly home to Cold Lane. My Wife having heard that the Town was still and likely to continue so, had recovered from her first Apprehensions, and We had nothing but our Reflections to interrupt our Repose.” He added: “These Reflections were to me, disquieting enough.”^[19] In that momentous and terrifying evening, the effects of the impending political rupture reverberated along many dimensions of their private lives, forecasting the intrusion of great public affairs upon the privacy of their home life. It signified as well the interwoven texture of John and Abigail's marriage, his concern for her wellbeing, and her sharing of his reflections.

The next day, John was asked to defend Captain Preston and the British soldiers, a call that he accepted, because, “Council ought to be the very last thing that an accused Person should want in a free Country.”^[20] After the three long trials in which John successfully defended Preston and the British soldiers—“the most exhausting and fatiguing Causes I ever tried,” he recalled—he suffered from a physical and emotional collapse that resulted in the Adamses' return to Braintree.^[21] For Abigail, who preferred rural life to the city and whose health flourished when she lived in the country, her “humble Cottage” represented freedom:

Where Contemplation P[l]umes her rufled Wings

And the free Soul look's down to pitty Kings.

She did choose an apt political metaphor to describe the pleasure that she experienced at home in the country (76, Apr. 20, 1771).^[22]

The Adamses returned to Boston after eighteen months in Braintree, where Thomas had been born. In another few months, the crisis over tea developed. “The tea that bainful weed is arrived,” Abigail wrote to her friend Mercy Otis Warren. “The flame is kindled and like Lightening it catches from Soul to Soul. Great will be the devastation if not timely quenched or allayed by some more Lenient Measures.” Abigail understood the temper of Boston. To John it meant the disruption of his business, for in the wake of the Tea Party, Boston's courts were closed, and he, who had risen to have “more Business at the Bar, than any Man in the Province,” had no business to conduct.^[23] Clearly, it would be a matter of time. “Altho the mind is shocked at the Thought of sheding Humane

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Blood, more Especially the Blood of our countrymen, and a civil War is of all Wars, the most dreadfull,” Abigail continued to Mercy, “Such is the present State 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 dye but once to save our Country’” (88, Dec. 5, 1773).

In late 1773, Abigail's eldest child was eight, and her youngest just one year. She had moved from Braintree to Boston and back again, changing houses three times on her first sojourn and twice this time before John purchased a house on Brattle Square. She did not write frequently; she did not have the time. But when she did, her letters resonated with the impact of her reading and her conversation with John and their friends. Her world had not yet separated from his.

In fact, Abigail and John had experienced many short separations during this period, due to the structure of the legal system. Whether John maintained his primary offices at home in Braintree or in Boston, he needed to travel the court circuit to obtain a sufficient living. During the second half of 1767, for instance, he attended the Plymouth Inferior Court in July and the Suffolk Superior Court in August; in September he tried cases in Worcester and Bristol, in October in Plymouth, Bristol, and Cambridge, and in December at Barnstable and Plymouth. He traveled as far north as Maine and as far south as Martha's Vineyard. His journeys ranged in length from a few days to some weeks.^[24]

During those periods Abigail remained at home or visited her parents in Weymouth, but she was always lonely. In late 1766, she had written to Mary, “He is such an itenerant…that I have but little of his company. He is now at Plymouth, and next week goes to Taunton” (56, Oct. 6, 1766). To John she wrote: “Sunday seems a more Lonesome Day to me than any other when you are absent” (62, Sept. 13, 1767). After eight years of marriage, she still wrote: “Alass! How many snow banks divide thee and me and my warmest wishes to see thee will not melt one of them. My daily thoughts and nightly Slumbers visit thee” (90, Dec. 30, 1773).

John's law practice thrived as he traveled the circuit; Abigail tended their home, and their children grew; and meanwhile the events that would lead to revolution escalated. “Such is the present Situation of affairs that I tremble when I think what may be the direfull concequences—and in this Town must the Scene of action lay,” Abigail wrote to Mercy from Boston. “My Heart beats at every Whistle I hear, and I

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dare not openly express half my fears.—Eternal Reproach and Ignominy be the portion of all those who have been instrumental in bringing these fears upon me” (89, Dec. 5, 1763).

She expressed fear once more when John was elected by the Massachusetts General Court to be one of three representatives to the Continental Congress that gathered in Philadelphia in 1774, but she did not prevent him from going. “You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you an Inactive Spectator, but if the sword be drawn, I bid adieu to all domestick felicity and look forward to that Country where there is neither wars nor rumors of War in a firm belief that thro the Mercy of its Kind we shall both rejoice there together” (172–73, Oct. 16, 1774). John departed on August 10 in the company of fellow delegates Samuel Adams, Thomas Cushing, and Robert Treat Paine. Five days later, Abigail wrote to him, and with that letter initiated the correspondence that would become a torrent in the years to follow. Inspired by loneliness, her writing became a substitute for speaking with him. She, of course, did not realize that war was imminent or that her separation from John would be so lengthy, any more than she understood the roles they would play in the course of the developing revolution. She only recognized that events impelled action and that John had been called to be an actor.

For some time both Abigail and John were sustained by the spirit of the growing rebellion. “There is in the Congress a collection of the greatest Men upon this continent,” John wrote with enthusiasm from Philadelphia (150, Sept. 8, 1774). “I think I enjoy better Health than I have done these 2 years,” Abigail responded from Braintree (151–54, Sept. 14–16, 1774). Time passed and John wrote: “The business of the Congress is tedious, beyond Expression. This assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every man in it is a great Man—an orator, a Critick, a statesman, and therefore every Man in every Question must show his oratory, his Criticism, and his political Abilities” (166, Oct. 9, 1774). At home Abigail became impatient: “I dare not express to you at 300 miles distance how ardently I long for your return. I have some very miserly Wishes; and cannot consent to your spending one hour in Town till at least I have had you 12. The idea plays about my Heart, unnerves my hand whilst I write, awakens all the tender sentiments that years have encreased and matured.…The whole collected stock of ten weeks absence knows not how to brook any longer restraint, but will break forth and flow thro my pen” (172, Oct. 16, 1774).^[25] Separated for two months, the practice of expressing their private conversations on paper had begun. John wrote about what affected him most—frustration or

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boredom; Abigail wrote about her loneliness. Of course, they wrote much more, but their moods, as well as the cast of the future were partly expressed by these intimate confessions to each other.

John returned by the end of October, but the forces that led to Lexington were set on course. Abigail wrote to Mercy in January 1775, “Is it not better to die the last of British freemen than live the first of British slaves?” (183, Feb. 3, 1775). Mercy, who was mother to five grown sons, wrote: “Which of us should have the Courage of an Aria or a Portia in a Day of trial like theirs” (182, Jan. 28, 1775). She referred to Portia, wife of Brutus, the Roman statesman. Abigail found the image appealing.

By the end of April 1775, John Adams traveled to Philadelphia, but no longer to mediate. The Battle of Lexington had occurred; the Revolution had begun. John returned to wage war, and so ended the first decade of the Adamses' marriage. “What a scene has opened upon us,” Abigail wrote Mercy. “Such a scene as we never before experienced, and could scarcely form an Idea of. If we look back we are amazed at what is past, if we look forward we must shudder at the view. Our only comfort lies in the justice of our cause.” She signed herself Portia (190, May 2, 1775; 193, May 4, 1775).

One historian of marriage points out that social groups tend to legitimate their practices by considering them “natural.”^[26] Abigail Adams entered into marriage with many expectations that she considered structurally “normal,” only to discover the corruption of her expectations over time both because of the—to her—unanticipated transformations caused by war, as well as the shift of her husband's career. Ideologically, Abigail described her accommodation to circumstances as a patriotic sacrifice. “Tis almost 14 years since we were united, but not more than half that time have we had the happiness of living together,” she complained in the summer of 1777. “The unfealing world may consider it in what light they please, I consider it as a sacrifice to my Country and one of my greatest misfortunes” (AFC, vol. 2, 301, Aug. 5, 1777). As a practical consideration, she began to replace John's presence by writing him letters that substituted for their conversations. This is illustrated by two episodes that developed during the early years of the Revolutionary War.

In the fall of 1775, soon after John's departure to serve as one of the three Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, an epidemic of dysentery swept through the Boston area. Abigail's entire household, herself included, was afflicted. Despite the weakening

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effects of her own illness, Abigail, assisted by her mother, functioned as the primary nurse and physician in the hospital that her household became. In that time of widespread sickness, when no outside help was available and her own servants were sick and dying of the disease, the major responsibility fell to Abigail.

“Since you left me I have passed thro great distress both Body and mind,” she wrote to John in early September, indicating that her hardships were emotional as well as physical. Isaac, her servant boy had been taken with a “voilent [sic] Dysentery” and “there was no resting place in the House for his terible Groans.” Abigail's descriptions to John would invoke sound and odor as well as image. After a week, Isaac recovered, but “two days after he was sick, I was seaz'd with the same disorder in a voilent [sic] manner.” Abigail recovered, but next her servant Susy was ill. “Our Little Tommy was the next, and he lies very ill now.…I hope he is not dangerous. Yesterday Patty (a servant girl) was seazd.…Our House is an hospital in every part and what with my own weakness and distress of mind for my family I have been unhappy enough” (vol. 1, 276, Sept. 8, 1775). Abigail wrote not just to keep John informed of conditions at home but to dispel her feelings.

One week later she described her mounting misery: “I set myself down to write with a Heart depressed with the Melancholy Scenes arround me…we live in daily Expectation that Patty will not continue many hours. A general putrefaction seems to have taken place, and we can not bear the House only as we are constantly clensing it with hot vinegar.” Abigail continued to cite the number of deaths among her neighbors and friends (vol. 1, 278–79, Sept. 17, 1775).^[27] Another week passed, and she wrote, “I set down with a heavy Heart to write to you. I have had no other since you left me. Woe follows Woe and one affliction treads upon the heal of an other” (284, Sept. 25, 1775).

One week later, grief overflowed into her letter to John: “Have pitty upon me, have pitty upon me o! thou my beloved for the hand of God presseth me soar,” she pleaded. Her mother had died. “How can I tell you (o my bursting Heart) that my Dear Mother has Left me, this day about 5 'clock she left this world for an infinitely better.” Abigail wrote this grief as she would have spoken it: “At times I almost am ready to faint under this sever and heavy Stroke, seperated from thee who used to be a comfortar towards me in affliction” (288, Oct. 1, 1775). Her grief was compounded, Abigail informed John. She grieved for her mother but also for her separation from John whose role it had been to comfort her. She did not reprimand him, but rather she emphasized the

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unnatural condition of their separation; he was supposed to be with her during this crisis. Her writing had become the substitute for his presence. She comforted herself by this means.

Another week passed, and Patty still lingered, “the most shocking object my Eyes ever beheld, and so loathsome that it was with the utmost difficulty we could bear the House…a most pityable object.” Then Patty died, and the epidemic had run its course (296, Oct. 9, 1775).

Throughout this time, while she wrote about her woes, Abigail worried as well about the effect of her letters on John. “I know I wound your heart,” she wrote. “Ought I give relief to my own by paining yours?” (310, Sept. 22, 1775). Another time she wrote, “Forgive me, then, for thus dwelling upon a subject…I fear painful. O how I have long'd for your Bosom to pour forth my sorrows there, and find a healing Balm” (296, Oct. 9, 1775). With these words she described her continued expectations of the relationship between a wife and husband, to describe what their relationship had been when they were together.

John's responses were as consistent as they were immediate. “I feel—I tremble for you,” he admitted when her troubles began. “Surely if I were with you, it would be my Study to allay your griefs, to mitigate your Pains and to divert your melancholly thoughts” (303, Oct. 19, 1775). Later he wrote to relieve her concern about troubling him: “If I could write as well as you, my sorrows would be as eloquent as yours. but upon my Word I cannot” (312, Oct. 23, 1775). John consoled Abigail, but also by letter—he did not return. If there was an undercurrent of requesting his presence in her letters, if John felt great tension between his country and his family, his greater loyalty was expressed by his behavior. He wrote comforting letters to her from Philadelphia.

A different episode developed less than two years later. John finally had returned from Philadelphia for a visit in the winter of 1776, and Abigail became pregnant. They knew about the pregnancy before John's return to Congress, and he wrote shortly after his departure: “I am anxious to hear how you do. I have in my Mind a Source of Anxiety, which I never had before.” Because of eighteenth-century reticence about pregnancy and also because mail was often intercepted by the British, John continued cryptically: “You know what it is. Cant you convey to me, in Hieroplyphicks, which no other Person can comprehend, Information which will relieve me. Tell me you are as well as can be expected,” he wrote, demanding good news as a means of relieving his conscience for leaving her (vol. 2, 159, Feb. 10, 1777).

“I had it in my heart to disswade him from going and I know I could

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have prevaild,” Abigail admitted to Mercy Otis Warren, “but our publick affairs at that time wore so gloomy an aspect that I thought if ever his assistance was wanted it must be at such a time. I therefore resignd my self to suffer much anxiety and many Melancholy hours for this year to come” (150, Jan. 1777). Abigail had not abandoned her expectations for marriage, but she certainly had suspended them. To Mercy she cited patriotism, probably even as she rationalized John's departure to herself. Once more she used reason to suppress her desire to dissuade John from leaving her. Partly that reason may have incorporated her understanding of John's now driven need to participate, which was reshaped in her own mind to a vision of patriotic service by her uniquely qualified husband. Her representations included as well a transformation of a spiritual into a secular calling, and she resigned herself to carrying on her marriage in letters.

Using “hieroplyphicks,” she wrote to John in March, “I think upon the whole I have enjoyed as much Health as I ever did in the like situation—a situation I do not repine at, tis a constant remembrancer of an absent Friend, and excites sensations of tenderness which are better felt than expressd” (173, Mar. 9, 1777). Writing in code, Abigail expressed the intimacy that pregnancy represented to her, a different dimension of the “companionate marriage” in which children were the consequence of a loving relationship rather than the purpose of marriage.^[28]

One month later, Abigail wrote in a different vein as a friend of hers had died in childbirth: “Everything of this kind naturally shocks a person in similar circumstances,” she admitted. “How great the mind that can overcome the fear of Death!” (212, May 17, 1777).^[29] Eighteenth-century women were vividly aware of the risks of childbirth under normal circumstances. During a war, the fears multiplied. By May she was reporting, “I cannot say that I am so well as I have been” (232, May 6, 1777).^[30] And within weeks she wrote explicitly about fear. Troops were passing her house day and night, and she believed more fighting might take place. “I should not dare to tarry here in my present situation, nor yet know where to flee for safety,” she wrote John with mounting concern over the rumors she was hearing: “The recital of the inhumane and Brutal Treatment of those poor creatures who have fallen into their Hands Freazes me with Horrour. My apprehensions are greatly increasd; should they come this way again I know not what course I should take” (241, May 18, 1777). Pregnancy had weakened Abigail's resolve, made her vulnerable, indecisive, and afraid. Soon her fear turned to anger.

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She complained: “I loose my rest a nights…I look forward to the midle of july with more anxiety than I can describe.” Rising to an emotional crescendo, she exclaimed, “I am cut of from the privilidge which some of the Brute creation enjoy, that of having their mate sit by them with anxious care during all the Solitary confinement” (250, June 1, 1777). In late-eighteenth-century terms, hers was a bold wifely indictment, perhaps a transference into letters of a confrontation that could have occurred between them. Or perhaps, the letter form allowed her more distance to complain, to express her autonomous feelings of indignation at a world that was violating her expectations—a world that appeared brutal and uncivilized to her.

Further signs of physical complications developed on the eve of childbirth: “I sit down to write you this post, and from my present feelings tis the last I shall be able to write for some time if I should do well,” she wrote mildly, this time understating her anxiety. “I was last night taken with a shaking fit, and am very apprehensive that a life was lost. As I have no reason to day to think otherways; what may be the consequences to me, Heaven only knows” (277, July 9, 1777).

Abigail did not describe her household during this crisis. It is not clear which children were present, whether her sisters were with her, or even a midwife. Her entire concentration in her letters of this period was upon John, upon telling him what was happening to her, of recording the events and her feelings. She brought him into her chamber during childbirth by writing her ordeal, and she closed out the rest of the world.

“I received a Letter from my Friend,” she wrote, “begining in his manner ‘my dearest Friend.’ That one single expression dwelt upon my mind and playd about my Heart.” This time she allowed both her mind and her heart to experience her affections. “It was because my heart was softened and my mind enervated by my sufferings, and I wanted the personal and tender soothings of my dearest Friend,” she wrote explicitly. Then she shifted to her topic: “Tis now 48 Hours since I can say I really enjoyed any Ease…Slow, lingering and troublesome is the present situation.” She was in labor. “The Dr. encourages me to Hope that my apprehensions are groundless…tho I cannot say I have had any reason to allter my mind…I pray Heaven that it may be soon or it seems to me I shall be worn out.” By “it” she meant the birth of her child. Then she wrote the most astonishing statement: “I must lay my pen down this moment, to bear what I cannot fly from—and now I have endured it I reassume my pen.” Abigail wrote to John through her labor (278–79, July 10, 1777).

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The child, a girl, was stillborn, but Abigail survived the birth. Within a week she was writing to John: “Join with me my dearest Friend in Gratitude to Heaven, that a life I know you value, has been spaired… although the dear Infant is numberd with its ancestors” (282, July 16, 1777). Abigail revived physically and in spirit, and her life continued. As in the earlier episode of the dysentery epidemic, Abigail had written to John during her pregnancy and childbirth in order to recreate in her fantasy the conditions of marriage that fulfilled her expectations for wife and husband. During the time that she wrote she was able to retreat from the reality of their interrupted companionship and sense that they were together.

Because of these experiences, and others, Abigail learned about letter writing as a means of dispelling her emotions, and in time her writing became abstracted from John, serving its own end. She began to write with the intensity of one who enjoyed the process itself. She discovered that writing allowed her the satisfactions of recreating her world in letters as well as the therapy that came from this method of confession. Abigail also began to redefine her vision of her marriage from that of normal companionship to separate living. She accepted John's participation as their patriotic sacrifice in wartime and further justified his repeated choice to serve as mandated by conditions that required his unique genius.

In 1777 the Revolutionary War was not yet at mid-point, nor had John departed yet for Europe, and while a few of her worst experiences had passed, many were yet to come. In time circumstances like the dysentery epidemic and pregnancy compounded her self-confidence, and she began to trust her ability to function alone. She even learned how to survive economically as the major source of support for her household during wartime. However, her experience and accomplishments to the contrary, she never considered herself an independent unit, but always as the subordinate partner in marriage. To do otherwise would deviate from the socially prescribed form of marriage in the late eighteenth century. Abigail never considered such an option.

NOTES

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