CHAPTER TWO

1774–78

“My pen is always freer than my tongue, for I have written many things to you that I suppose I never would have talked.”

THOUGH THERE WAS no way of knowing it at the time, John’s departure for Philadelphia launched a new chapter in the marriage that paralleled a new chapter in American history, soon to be called the American Revolution. For the next four years, Abigail and John would be apart much more than they were together. (And for the six following years, when John was in Paris, except for one brief return to Braintree, they were completely separated.) From a historian’s point of view, the geographic distance between them proved a godsend, for it reversed the paradox of proximity and created a flood of letters that provide unprecedented access to their private thoughts and feelings. From Abigail and John’s perspective, distance put their partnership to a new test, one that it eventually passed with flying colors, ironically exposing their most private intimacies in letters designed to close the distance.

Indeed, Abigail claimed that she was more forthcoming in her letters than she would have been in face-to-face conversations: “My pen is always freer than my tongue,” she wrote in 1775, “for I have written many things to you that I suppose I never would have talked.” John concurred. Sitting at his writing desk almost forced him to delve deeper into the murmurings of his mind and heart, but he was not as capable of expressing them. “If I could write as well as you,” he confessed, “it would be so, but, upon my word, I cannot.” This was high praise, and most scholarly commentators on the correspondence agree.¹

Context, as always, is crucial. From 1774 to 1778 John was mostly in Philadelphia, making himself into one of the most prominent and outspoken advocates of American independence in the Continental Congress and eventually the rough equivalent of secretary of defense during the first three years of the war. The rules established by the congress forbade him to write about the ongoing debates, and his daily schedule of full sessions with the entire congress, as well as multiple committee meetings in the evenings, left little time for personal matters. He was at the center of the proverbial wind tunnel during one of the most dramatic and consequential moments in American history. The extraordinary number of letters he managed to write to Abigail is testimony to his need for some sliver of private space where he could unburden himself to the person who knew him better than anyone else on the planet.

Abigail was up at Braintree, managing the farm with a few hired hands and raising four young children. She regarded her duties as a domestic version of John’s public service, a sacrifice justified by the political crisis through which they were all living. Abigail, in fact, was in much greater physical danger than John, in part from the proximity of the British army in Boston, in part from the smallpox epidemic that raged throughout eastern Massachusetts.

Like John’s, her days were crowded, not with crucial affairs of state but with the daily duties of a single parent attempting to hold a family together amid pitched battles (e.g., Bunker Hill) and rampant contagion. She, too, sought solace in a private space that she called “my closet.” She found such a space in her aunt’s home in Boston during a visit in 1776. “In this Closet are a number of Book Shelves,” as she described it to John, “and a pretty little desk or cabinet where I write all my Letters and keep my papers unmolested by any one.”

Her Braintree house lacked such a “closet,” so she had no place where she could escape the duties and demands of the day, read letters from John, and write her own in splendid isolation. Like Virginia Woolf over a century later, Abigail felt the urge for a room of her own, where her thoughts and feelings were not defined or confined by her dominant roles as a wife and mother. As she put it, “I always had a fancy for a closet with a window which I could peculiarly call my own.”²

LETTERS AND POSTERITY

It requires a truly imaginative leap for us to comprehend the more deliberative character of letter writing in the eighteenth century. It took two or three weeks for letters to travel between Braintree and Philadelphia, so they often crossed, meaning that the political or emotional crisis that prompted the letter had been resolved before the response arrived, like a message from the past. As a result, letters were less an ongoing conversation than a time-bound exchange of ruminations, more thoughtful and self-consciously composed than our Internet communications, but also less interactive.

John was more outspokenly frustrated by this intractable reality than Abigail: “Is there no way for two friendly souls to converse together although the bodies are four hundred miles off?” he asked. “Yes, by letter. But I want a better communication. I want to hear you think or to see your thoughts.” In his mind, letters could not replace the shared routines and rhythms of family life that he had come to depend upon as the foundation for his own emotional balance: “I want to take a walk with you in the garden, to go over to the common, the plain, the meadow. I want to take Charles in one hand and Tom in the other, and walk with you, Nabby on the right hand and John upon the left, to view the cornfields, the orchards, etc.” Letters were important, to be sure, but they were not an adequate substitute for the emotional ballast of daily domestic interaction.³

He tended to write in the early morning, before the congress met, she in the evening, after the children were put to bed. Since John was prohibited from writing about the political debates, his early letters focused on the sights and sounds of Philadelphia, which had surpassed Boston as the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the American colonies. Here, for example, is his colorful response after witnessing a Catholic Mass for the first time: “I have this day been to a Romish Chappell. My Inauguration is so full of holy Water, Crossings, Bowings, Kneelings and Genuflections, Images, Paintings, Crucifixes, Velvet, Gold, but above all Musick. I am amazed that Luther and Calvin were ever able to break the Charm, and dissolve the Spell.” There is a stream-of-consciousness character to many of John’s letters, where strings of nouns (and sometimes verbs) gushed onto the page in a kind of verbal explosion that was more a barrage than a coherent collection of sentences.⁴

Abigail’s letters tended to be longer and more self-consciously crafted. Initially, Abigail complained that John’s letters were too brief and read like hastily written memoranda: “All the letters I receive from you seem to be wrote in so much haste, that they scarcely leave room for a Social feeling,” she scolded. “They let me know you exist …, but I want some sentimental Effusions of the Heart.” He needed to know, she apprised him, that his letters arrived in Braintree like testimonials from the battlefront: “You would laugh to see them [the children] all run upon the sight of a letter—like chickens for a crumb, when the hen clucks. Charles says ‘Mar, what is it, any good news?’ ” All his letters were apparently read out loud at the dinner table.⁵

The main reason that so many of their letters survived from this time is that John, early on, decided that they should make copies. “I have now purchased a Folio Book,” he wrote in June 1776, “in the first page of which … I am writing this Letter, and intend to write [i.e., copy] all my Letters to you from this Time forward.” He urged Abigail to do the same thing, claiming that “I really think your Letters are much better worth preserving than mine.”⁶

Making copies of all their letters was a tedious chore. And their crowded schedules soon overwhelmed their best intentions. John’s insistence that they try to do it was rooted in his keen sense that they were living through a defining chapter of American history that subsequent generations of their descendants would find instructive. But beyond his own family, he realized that the preservation of their correspondence would document their role in resolving the imperial crisis, not just for the Adams family but for all posterity. He understood the historical significance of his moment. If the movement for American independence succeeded, and if a written record of his prominence in that movement was preserved, his place in the American pantheon was assured. These very private letters, then, were written with one eye on a very public audience, which John called posterity, and which ultimately means us.

PHILADELPHIA STORY

Before arriving in Philadelphia, John had envisioned the Continental Congress quite grandly as “a School of Political Prophets …, a Nursery of American Statesmen.” He imagined an American equivalent of the Greek and Roman orators and hoped that he would fill the role of the American Cicero. His private ambitions were palpable and gargantuan. And so far providence had somehow shaped events to accommodate them. The British ministry had created a political crisis in its effort to reform the British Empire, thereby providing the script for an epic historical drama. The Massachusetts legislature had elected him as a delegate to the Continental Congress, thereby placing him on the great stage. Now all he needed to do was play his appointed role and ensure his secular immortality.⁷

From the outset, this uncharacteristically romantic vision encountered several formidable obstacles. The first hint of the clash between his expectations and political reality took the form of his realization that the delegates from the other colonies were not like Greek or Roman statesmen, but rather self-important provincials who lacked his understanding of the monumental issues at stake. Patrick Henry was the exception, but the other members of the Virginia delegation seemed determined to deliver endless soliloquies that floated above the fray like inflated balloons.⁸

His diary entries on fellow delegates were often highly critical. Roger Sherman of Connecticut was “Rigid as a starched Linen … Awkward as a junior Batchelor or Sophomore.” Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania, destined to become a lifelong friend, came across as “too much of a Talker to be a deep Thinker. Elegant, not great.” John was obviously measuring himself against the competition for prominence within the congress, so his personal assessments should be read as highly opinionated verdicts that shed more light on his own urge to become a dominant player than a detached appraisal of his colleagues. But beyond his own psychic twitchings, his frustration with the quality of debate within the congress had roots in a larger political problem: “Tedious, indeed, is our Business,” he complained to Abigail. “I have not been used to such ways.”⁹

What confounded John was the fact that political opinion in Massachusetts had moved much further toward the prospect of American independence than in the other colonies. This made eminent sense, since only Massachusetts had been placed under martial law and made to suffer the indignity of occupation by the British army. But what was a mainstream position in Boston was regarded as extremist in Philadelphia. The entire Massachusetts delegation, John included, were seen as dangerous radicals: “We have been obliged to act with great Delicacy and Caution,” he explained to Abigail, “to keep ourselves out of Sight, and to feel pulses, and Sound the Depths—to insinuate our Designs and Desires by means of other Persons.” For the main goal of the vast majority of delegates was not defiance, but reconciliation. And these moderates lived in constant fear that the same incendiaries who had tossed the tea in Boston Harbor might provoke an incident with the British troops that would escalate the crisis to a political point of no return.¹⁰

The ideological convictions that John brought to Philadelphia were fundamentally incompatible with the agenda of the moderates. From the start of his political participation as a critic of British policy, John had described England and New England as two separate political cultures with different histories and contradictory values that could never be wholly reconciled. In his published writings for the Boston Gazette and his correspondence with friends on both sides of the looming divide, he did not describe Britain’s efforts to consolidate its American empire as misguided blunders by uninformed policy makers in London and Whitehall. Instead, he viewed the legislative assault by Parliament as a conscious plot designed to deprive American colonists of their rights as British citizens, to transform them into abject subjects or, worse, slaves. His conspiratorial mentality meant that it was impossible for him to view a tragic figure like Thomas Hutchinson as anything but a vile sycophant. It also meant that he regarded any policy of reconciliation based on the belief that the British would come to see the error of their ways as a naive pipe dream.

Abigail’s perspective was equally, perhaps even more, nonnegotiable. Though she was surely influenced by her husband’s opinions, her experience as a woman gave her views on British policy a more floridly moralistic tone and an almost operatic voice. In addition to her conversations with John, her correspondence with two other women, Catharine Macauley and Mercy Otis Warren, who just happened to be the two most intellectually prominent female critics of British policy in the English-speaking world, gave her convictions a distinctive edge.

Macauley was an Englishwoman whose multivolume History of England became a kind of Bible for political dissenters in England and America. She depicted all of English history as a struggle between liberty and tyranny. The cause of the American colonies, then, should also be the cause of every liberty-loving Briton. It was the forces of light against the forces of darkness, with no ambiguous hues and shades to complicate the story—what came to be called “Whig history” in its purest form.¹¹

Mercy Otis Warren was an American version of Macauley, sister of John’s political hero, James Otis (who, unfortunately, was going mad), a resident of nearby Plymouth who became one of Abigail’s closest confidantes. Warren also saw the Anglo-American conflict in highly moralistic terms, wrote several propagandistic plays populated by British villains and virtuous Americans, and eventually wrote a three-volume History of the American Revolution that John found deficient because it failed to give him the leading role he thought he deserved.¹²

In her correspondence with Macauley and Warren, Abigail tended to defer to their superior status, imitating their melodramatic tone and bombastic categories. “The only alternative which every American thinks of is Liberty or Death,” she wrote to Macauley, “for we are invaded with fleets and Armies.” The letters to Warren mimicked the same hyperbolic style: “Our only comfort lies in the justice of our Cause … O Britain, Britain, how is thy glory vanished—how are the annals stained with the Blood of thy children.” Intricate constitutional questions were irrelevant within this framework, since the core issue at stake was a question of power, and the British were obviously prepared to exercise that power arbitrarily. If for John that meant slavery, for Abigail it meant physical violation, in short, rape. These were the ultimate ignominies for a man and a woman, so in that sense John and Abigail agreed that the British ministry was committed to a course that justified their most primal fears. The conversation John encountered at the Continental Congress—with its emphasis on accommodation, compromise, and reconciliation—lacked altogether the emotional dimension of his and Abigail’s deepest convictions.¹³

Abigail’s perspective never changed, and her location within striking distance of the British army in Boston gave her physical fears for herself and her family a palpable edge. Though John’s perspective never really changed either, his location in the Continental Congress forced a shift in tactics. The moderates seeking reconciliation dominated the dialogue there, and while he thought them misguided—as he told Abigail, they were “waiting for a Messiah who will never come”—he gradually and grudgingly realized that most of the colonies were politically unprepared to contemplate secession from the British Empire. “But America is a great, unwieldy Body,” he explained to Abigail. “Its Progress must be slow. It is like a large Fleet sailing under Convoy. The fleetest Sailors must await the dullest and the slowest.”¹⁴

He played no role whatsoever in the congress’s expression of solidarity with the plight of Massachusetts or the creation of a Continental Association to adopt nonimportation agreements until the Coercive Acts were revoked. His membership in the Massachusetts delegation required him to avoid any appearance of partisanship on these issues.

But he was a major player in drafting the Declaration of Rights and Grievances. It called for the restoration of the political status of the American colonies “at the end of the late war” (1763). This meant that the colonial assemblies, not Parliament, should legislate “in all cases of taxation and internal polity” but consent to Parliament’s regulation of trade “out of mutual interest to both countries.” While John believed that such an arrangement could work—over a century later it became known as the British Commonwealth—he also believed that the likelihood of the British ministry’s accepting this scheme was remote in the extreme. In that sense, he was drafting a document that was not designed to reach an accommodation with Great Britain, but rather to expose the futility of all such efforts.¹⁵

Whatever his motives, John’s mastery of the constitutional arguments made him a conspicuous presence in the Continental Congress. (He later claimed, somewhat defensively, that his political stature at that moment was never exceeded because of the enemies he made later on.) When the Continental Congress adjourned in January 1775, he returned to Braintree and immediately began work on a series of essays entitled Novanglus, which appeared in the Boston Gazette from January until April.

These were tedious, overburdened, excessive displays of legalistic learning that exposed John’s undisciplined, Vesuvian style, which seemed dedicated to overwhelming the opposition with a lava flow of words. But Novanglus was also the first publication to defend the position of the Continental Congress, which he had helped to draft, rejecting Parliament’s authority not just over taxation, but over all colonial domestic policy. It was not a novel constitutional position for John, but it was a significant clarification of the American argument. Despite his impulsive temperament, he had managed to make himself one of the most prominent leaders of the moderate American cause, even though he never believed that it had the remotest prospect of succeeding. He was now publicly recognized as a major player in the Continental Congress.¹⁶

FAMILY VALUES, AGAIN

In May 1775, when John returned to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress, he was effectively leaving his family in a war zone. A month earlier the incendiary incident that the moderates in congress had long feared occurred at Lexington and Concord. John believed that the casualty reports in the Boston press—295 British dead or wounded at the end of the day—were probably exaggerated. There was no doubt, however, that the political crisis had escalated to a military conflict, and its epicenter was the Boston area. “I am concerned for you and our dear babes,” he confided to Abigail. “In Case of real Danger, fly to the Woods with our children.”¹⁷

The sense of fear and guilt he felt—should he leave the congress to be with his wife and “babes”?—only intensified a month later when he read these words from Abigail: “The Battle began upon our intrenchments upon Bunker Hill, at Saturday morning about 3 o’clock and has not ceased yet and tis now 3 o’clock Sabbeth afternoon … How many have fallen we know not—the constant roar of the cannon are so distressing that we cannot Eat, Drink or Sleep.”¹⁸

Abigail had actually taken John Quincy, then eight years old, to view the battle from the top of Penn’s Hill. They witnessed from afar the Pyrrhic British victory, achieved at the cost of a thousand casualties, nearly half their attack force. (Back in London, one retired British officer observed that a few more triumphs like Bunker Hill would lead to the annihilation of the British army.) John’s public reaction was political, for the blood spilled reinforced his long-standing argument that reconciliation with Great Britain was highly unlikely. But his private reaction was emotional. What was he doing four hundred miles away in Philadelphia, safely ensconced, while his beloved Abigail and four young children were hunkered down within earshot of a major battle?

Little John Quincy never forgot what he saw that day. And in his reminiscences many years later, as a very old man, he recalled the abiding sense of fear that his mother and siblings lived under for several weeks because of British foraging parties and various bands of marauders taking advantage of the lawless conditions. (When he attended the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument in 1843, he expressed only loathing for the main speaker, President John Tyler, a “slave monger” whose presence represented a desecration of the values that true patriots had died for.) Abigail played down the danger in her letters to John, but he recognized the risks she was running: “It gives me more Pleasure than I can express to learn that you sustain with such Fortitude, the Shocks and Terrors of the Times,” he wrote. “You are really brave, my dear, you are a heroine.” She responded with a verbal kiss: “Adieu my Dearest Friend, and always believe me unalterably yours.”¹⁹

It soon became clear to John that the greatest threat to his family was not the British army but disease, chiefly smallpox and dysentery. In addition to seven thousand British troops garrisoned in Boston, there were twelve thousand American militia, soon to become the Continental Army, encircling the city in what came to be called the Siege of Boston. The unsanitary conditions created by two army encampments exacerbated the preexistent smallpox epidemic, then added a particularly lethal version of dysentery to the toxic mix. “Our House is an hospital in every part,” wrote Abigail, “and such is the distress of the neighbourhood that I can scarcely find a well person to assist me in looking after the sick.” Within a two-week period, eighteen people died in Braintree. “A general putrefication seems to have taken place,” Abigail reported, “and we cannot bear the House only as we are constantly cleaning it with hot vinegar.”²⁰

Abigail’s primary posture toward her role as single parent was stoic acceptance: “Here I serve my partner, my family and myself, and enjoy the Satisfaction of your serving your Country.” But this convenient formulation—a neat division of labor between public and private duties—had never accurately described the way the Adams family actually worked. Abigail had strong political opinions about American policy, and John had domestic responsibilities, especially the education of the children, that played an important role in broadening and balancing his volatile personality. But now, as the threats of war and disease came at Abigail and her little brood in waves, she could not help but feel pangs of resentment at shouldering these burdens alone: “Our Country is as if it were a Secondary God,” she complained to Mercy Otis Warren. “It is to be preferred to parents, wives, children, Friends and all things, the Gods only excepted.” There were some dire occasions, and this happened to be one of them, when family responsibilities should trump public service. She needed John now more than did those delegates at the Continental Congress.²¹

John’s response was a combination of empathy and evasion: “My best wishes and most fervent Prayers attend our little Family,” he explained. “I have been banished from them, the greatest part of the last Eighteen Months, but I hope to be with them more, in Time to come.” The chances of that occurring, in truth, were remote in the extreme, in great part because those two armies perched near Braintree represented a dramatic escalation of the imperial crisis that made a recess of the Continental Congress impossible even to imagine. On another occasion he raised the possibility of moving his family to Philadelphia. This was a logistical impossibility for the foreseeable future, as John himself acknowledged: “Let me please myself with the Thought however.”²²

Though she never said it outright, and would have chastised herself afterward for doing so, Abigail felt that, given the circumstances, John’s highest duty was to his family, and to her, rather than his country. He saw it differently: “From my earliest entrance into Life, I have been engaged in the public Cause of America. And from first to last I have had upon my Mind, a strong Impression, that things would be wrought up to their present Crisis. I saw from the Beginning that the Controversy was of such a Nature, that it would never be settled, and every day convinces me more and more.” In short, now that his political prediction of an inevitable break with the British Empire was coming true, and now that the crisis was entering its climactic phase, history was calling him to play a major role in the final chapter of the story, and that call took precedence over all others. The combination of patriotism and ambition was seamless in his soul.²³

Abigail understood her man’s paradoxical urges better than anyone else alive, so instead of challenging his choices, she eventually endorsed them. If he could not join her, then he should carry the American colonies where they needed to go more effectively than any other member of the congress. “Let us separate, [for] they [the British] are unworthy to be our Brethren. Let us renounce them and instead of supplications … let us beseech the almighty to blast their counsels and bring to Naught all their devices.” This was exactly what John wanted to hear.²⁴

Whatever strains John’s prolonged absence put on the marriage, Abigail was an emotionally stable, psychologically sophisticated adult who understood the sacrifices that love required. Her four children, however, were going through formative stages of their own development. And the elemental fact was that their father was not present during most of that time. Though he frequently decried the situation himself, John’s public duties made him an absentee parent.

There is a reason, rendered available by hindsight, to notice this fact. For we know what happened to all the Adams children, and it is not an attractive story. Charles died young from alcoholism; Tommy also drank his way through a dreary life; Nabby married badly and was forced to leave her husband to live with her parents before succumbing to breast cancer. John Quincy, of course, the apple of John’s eye, was a huge success, arguably the greatest secretary of state in American history and the first son to follow his father as president. But even John Quincy, for all his intellectual sophistication and political achievement, was not a happy man, lacked the emotional spontaneity of his father, and seemed to regard laughter as an unnatural act. Given this prevailing pattern, which is truly heartbreaking to know as one reads John and Abigail’s parental observations as their children were growing up, the salient question is unavoidable: Did the absence of a father stunt their emotional growth?

This question is ultimately unanswerable because, as every parent can testify, you can never know. Your best efforts often fail, and some children flourish despite your worst efforts. In John’s case, effort was not the problem; distance was. He was physically and emotionally unavailable to his children. The correspondence that has survived suggests that John made a concerted effort to remain a reliable presence in his children’s lives, but they came to regard him as a quasi-mythical figure, a faraway father of bottomless virtue and rock-ribbed patriotism whose moral probity and political courage set a standard that they, especially the boys, could never match. If he had been living at home, they would have witnessed his human foibles and failures. But he was not.²⁵

One of the earliest letters from John Quincy, written when he was seven years old, documents the emotional problem: “I have been trying ever since you went away to learn to write you a letter,” the boy began. “I shall make poor work of it, but Sir, Mamma says you will accept my endeavors, and that my duty to you may be expressed in poor writing as well as good. I hope I grow a better Boy and that you will have no occasion to be ashamed of me.” For the very reasons alluded to in the letter, it was never sent. Abigail explained why: “Master John is very anxious to write …, but he begs me to make his excuse and say that he has wrote twice before, but it did not please him well enough to send it.” Given his father’s heroic stature at that moment in John Quincy’s mind, nothing he could write would suffice.²⁶

Throughout the remainder of John Quincy’s quite extraordinary career, his father embodied a combination of public and personal probity that verged on the superhuman. John made the matter worse by constantly reminding John Quincy that he was a gifted child who would disappoint him if he somehow squandered his talent, an appropriate warning to a young adult, but an emotional millstone for a ten-year-old.

A parent who is present only in the form of letters was almost destined, despite his best efforts, to be misunderstood. When John took time from his crowded schedule to write letters of personal encouragement to John Quincy, Charles, and Nabby, he felt that he had done his domestic duty. He had not written Tommy because, at age five, he did not think Tommy could read. But Tommy did not see it, or feel it, that way. As Abigail explained: “It would have grieved you if you had seen your youngest son stand by his Mamma and when she delivered out to the others their letter, … he stood in silent Grief with the Tears running down his face … Pappa does not love him he says so well as he does his Brothers, and many comparisons were made to see whose Letters were the longest.”²⁷

As soon as John learned of this episode he wrote Tommy a long letter, reiterating his love and apologizing for his failure to recognize that his mother read all letters out loud to all the children. But this episode illustrates the difficulty of sustaining a close emotional relationship with his children from a distance. Abigail periodically dropped her stoic mask and expressed her frustration with his prolonged absences: “Our little ones, whom you so often recommend to my care and instruction, shall not be [in]sufficient in virtue or probity if the precepts of a mother have their desired Effect,” she observed somewhat testily, “but they would be doubly enforced could they be indulged with the example of a Father constantly before them.”²⁸

For his part, John acknowledged an abiding sense of guilt about his inability to perform his fatherly duties. “It is a cruel Reflection, which often comes across me,” he admitted, “that I should be separated so far, from those Babes, whose Education and Welfare lies so near my Heart.” His only compensation was to imagine the scene—he repeated the same mental picture in several letters—of all his children walking with him across the fields of Braintree, hand in hand. But the scene took place only in his imagination.²⁹

Most of the time, John explained his separation from the day-to-day life of the family as a patriotic sacrifice rendered necessary, and therefore justified, by his public duties in the Continental Congress. (Abigail frequently closed her letters with the line “All the children send duty”) On one occasion, however, he wondered out loud if the patriotic rationale might be an excuse that masked his deeper motive, which was a quest for personal fame and a prominent place in the history books. If so, he lectured himself, he needed to conquer such impulses: “Let the Cymballs of Popularity tincle still. Let the Butterflies of Fame glitter with their Wings. I shall envy neither their Musick nor their Colours.”

Such unequivocal assertions were often a sign that John could cope with conflicting commitments only by denying their existence. Moreover, he tended to worry more about the effect his separation from family had on his own life, lamenting to Abigail that “the loss of our Company and that of my dear Babes for so long a time, I consider as a Loss of so much solid Happiness.” Abigail, on the other hand, tended to worry about the effect the absence had on the children. There is at least some reason to believe that she had cause for concern.³⁰

REVOLUTIONS AND EVOLUTIONS

Looking back thirty years later on his role in the Second Continental Congress, John sounded quite vain: “I was incessantly employed through the Whole Fall, Winter, and Spring of 1775 and 1776 during their Sittings and on Committees on mornings and evenings … and unquestionably did more business than any other Member of that House.” This claim sounds excessive to our ears, but it was historically correct. In what would prove to be a long and illustrious political career, his leadership role in the Continental Congress would be his most defining and shining moment. He really was, as one of his fellow delegates described him, “the colossus of independence.”³¹

One reason for his growing prominence in the Second Continental Congress was that, more than any other delegate, he seemed to know where history was headed. As we have seen, from the beginning he had predicted that the underlying dispute with Great Britain was inherently irreconcilable. “We shall be convinced that the Cancer is too deeply rooted,” he warned, “and too far spread to be cured by anything short of cutting it out entirely.” And events kept aligning themselves with his prophecies. The bloodshed at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill undermined the argument of the moderate faction in congress that an open break with Great Britain must be avoided at all costs. John could now claim that it had, in fact, already occurred.³²

The valiant stand of the Massachusetts militia units at Bunker Hill, and the ruinous losses suffered by the British, also undermined the moderates’ argument that war with Great Britain was unthinkable because the British army was invincible. After Bunker Hill, John liked to quote a comment by the Reverend John J. Zubly, the Swiss-born delegate from Georgia. During the Reformation, Zubly observed, the Catholics enjoyed the support of the pope and all the monarchs of Europe: “But as to them Poor Devils the Protestants, they had nothing on their Side but God almighty.”³³

George Washington was not quite God, though Abigail’s first impression suggested that, at least as a physical specimen, he was the closest approximation she had ever seen. John had nominated Washington to assume command of the American forces outside Boston, soon to be called the Continental Army. “You had prepared me to entertain a favorable opinion of him,” Abigail wrote, “but I thought the one half was not told me.” John’s choice of Washington to head the Continental Army was the first in a series of three selections destined to have enormous consequences for American history. (The other two were Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence and John Marshall to head the Supreme Court.) Given his own pulsing ambitions, it is ironic to note that three of his greatest contributions were decisions to cede power to others.³⁴

Sitting as she was within cannon range of the battle raging around Boston, it was difficult for Abigail to understand the reluctance of the Continental Congress to recognize that the war for American independence, though not officially declared, had already begun. The decision of the congress to refer to the British army in Boston as “ministerial troops” instead of “royal troops,” meaning George III did not really know the battle was occurring, struck her as a preposterous illusion. John concurred, adding that the moderate desire to cling to the prospect of reconciliation was “as Arrant an Illusion as ever was hatched in the Brain of an Enthusiast, a Politician, or a Maniac.” But, he told Abigail, “though I have laugh’d at it—scolded at it—griev’d at it—even ripp’d at it—it is vain to Reason against such Delusions.”³⁵

Eventually the hope of the moderate faction in the congress for conciliation was exposed as a complete fantasy by no one less than George III himself. In February 1776 John received reports that the British ministry was conferring with several Germanic principalities to provide mercenaries for the looming invasion of North America, designed to crush the American rebellion in the bud. “By Intelligence hourly arriving from abroad,” John joked, “we are more and more confirmed that a kind of Confederation will be formed among the Crowned Skulls, and numbskulls of Europe, against Human Nature.” News of the Prohibitory Act arrived at about the same time, revealing that the king had declared the colonists beyond his protection, outlawed them as rebels without any rights, and confiscated all their property in Great Britain. It would take another five months for the Americans to declare their own independence, but George III had already declared his independence from them. This is why, years later, when John was asked if he had done more than any other person to foster American independence, he declined the honor in favor of the British monarch himself.³⁶

On the question of American independence, then, in terms of both its inevitability and desirability, John and Abigail were perfectly synchronized, and several steps ahead of popular opinion. But they disagreed about what American independence, once achieved, should actually look like. Abigail launched the debate with a series of pointed questions: “If we separate from Britain, what Code of Laws will be established? How shall we be governed to retain our Liberties? Can any government be free which is not administered by general stated Laws? Who shall frame these Laws? Who will give them force and energy?”

At the end of this political barrage, she dropped her inquisitory tone and recovered her voice as a wife and mother: “Our Little ones send duty to pappa and want much to see him. Tom says he wont come home till the Battle is over—some strange notion he has got into his head.” In her mind and in her letters, the public affairs of state and the private family imperatives blended seamlessly.³⁷

Abigail’s questions rather presciently framed the debate that would dominate the deliberations of American statesmen throughout the postwar years. The seminal issue was whether separation from the British Empire would lead to the creation of a viable nation-state empowered to make laws for all the former colonies-cum-states. The Continental Congress was currently functioning as a provisional national government. But these were emergency wartime conditions. What happened after the war was won? (If it was lost, well, no answers were necessary or relevant.) Would secession from the British Empire be followed by American nationhood, or by some loose confederation of sovereign states destined to go their separate ways after tossing off British rule?

John’s answers to these questions were never delivered in person to Abigail, but published for all to see as Thoughts on Government in April 1776. Despite being regarded as a radical on the independence issue, John was a staunch conservative when it came to designing the framework for an indigenous American government.

In Thoughts he recommended that each state adopt a constitutional blueprint creating three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—in which the principles of separation of powers, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary were the most distinctive features.³⁸

Although these features became hallowed ingredients in the federal Constitution eleven years later, it is important to recognize that John was proposing an outline for republican government at the state, not the national, level. Abigail’s questions about a prospective national identity surely made logical sense, but to raise them at this time, he warned, was politically suicidal, because the controversies they were certain to provoke would destroy the fragile consensus for independence slowly emerging in the Continental Congress.

The same pattern held in another exchange between Abigail and John in the spring of 1776, initiated by what is probably the most famous letter Abigail ever wrote. This time the letter began rather than ended with domestic news: the British army had just evacuated Boston, removing the most palpable threat to the family; but smallpox was still virulent, and she needed to decide about inoculation. Then came this: “And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, desire you will remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”³⁹

John responded on the assumption that Abigail was being playful, which she was, but also on the mistaken assumption that she was not serious. All men knew that women were the real tyrants within the household, he joked, and he had no intention of exchanging the tyranny of George III for what he called “the despotism of the petticoat.” As for Abigail’s “extraordinary Code of Laws,” he concluded, “I cannot but laugh.”⁴⁰

Yet Abigail was not laughing. She apprised Mercy Otis Warren of her recent letter to John, reporting that “he is very saucy to me in return for a list of Female Grievances which I transmitted to him.” After John bantered back with some colorful testimonials to his wife’s own “sauciness,” she had the last word. “But you must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things that are very hard,” she concluded defiantly, “and notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and, without violence, throw your natural and legal authority at your feet.”⁴¹

While Abigail’s argument about women’s rights proved to be a couple of centuries ahead of its time, her recognition that the very arguments her husband was hurling at Parliament and the British ministry had latent implications that undermined all coercive or nonvoluntary systems of arbitrary power called attention to the Pandora’s box that John and his colleagues in the Continental Congress had opened. (Probably in jest, Abigail suggested to Mercy Otis Warren that they jointly file a petition to the congress that they were being governed without their consent.) If one took seriously the argument of the American opposition, the belief in natural rights and popular consent spread like a virus to all parts of the body politic. In addition to the rights of women, clearly slavery, as well as the property qualification to vote, must be ended if America’s revolutionary agenda was to be applied consistently.

In subsequent correspondence Abigail continued to press for expanded rights for women: “If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers,” she insisted, “we should have learned women,” because mothers would be most responsible for educating the rising generation. And that, in turn, meant that women should enjoy the same educational advantages as men. “The world, perhaps, would laugh at me,” she told John, “but you know I have a mind too enlarged and liberal to disregard the Sentiment.” Belatedly grasping that his wife meant business, John scrambled to find common ground. “Your Sentiments of the Importance of Education in Women,” he wrote, “are exactly agreeable to my own.” That conclusion followed naturally from being married to a woman like Abigail.⁴²

But once he went beyond the private parameters of his own outspoken wife, John thought the implementation of a wholly egalitarian political agenda in one fell swoop a catastrophic political mistake: “There will be no end to it,” he warned. “New claims will rise. Women will demand a vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State.”⁴³

The conservative cast of John’s mind caused him to regard the full promise of the American Revolution as a set of latent implications that must seep out slowly over a long stretch of time. For her part, Abigail also relished the opportunities to remind him of the political and social consequences of his own arguments. While he conceded that Abigail’s arguments made intellectual sense, and he was prepared to entertain them in their private correspondence, John’s highest priority at the public level was to create a consensus for American independence. That effort needed to take precedence, because if it failed, all the other reforms would prove meaningless. Abigail’s silence on this score indicated that she agreed, or at least deferred to the political wisdom of her husband.

CRESCENDO

The spring and summer of 1776 was a crowded moment, both for the still-divided American colonists and for the Adams family. At the public level, the decision by George III to reject all proposals for reconciliation and to mount a military assault—the largest amphibious force ever to cross the Atlantic to date—exposed the moderate agenda in the Continental Congress as wishful thinking. And the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which depicted George III as a ruffian and political criminal, enjoyed an unprecedented level of popularity, making it arguably the most influential piece of journalism in American history. As Paine put it in his electric style, “an island cannot rule a continent.” Events were now moving in the direction that John had always predicted they would.⁴⁴

The decisive moment, at least as John saw it, occurred on May 15, 1776. For on that day he proposed a resolution that all the former British colonies now regard themselves not as colonies within the British Empire, but as sovereign states within the American republic. This was not just a negative act, denouncing the authority of the British Empire, but also a positive act, announcing the arrival of an autonomous set of states, each of which should now draft a new constitution.⁴⁵

John regarded this decision as “the most important Resolution that ever was taken in America,” a de facto declaration of independence. He confided to Abigail that it was the culmination of his campaign to get the Continental Congress on the right side of history, and he was extremely proud of his role in making it happen: “When I consider the great Events which are passed, and the greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may have been instrumental in touching some springs and turning some small wheels, which have had and will have such effects, I feel an Awe upon my Mind which is not easily described.” He had entered the Continental Congress hoping to make history, and now he had actually done it.⁴⁶

If John was making history, Abigail was witnessing it firsthand. She climbed up Penn’s Hill again to view the artillery bombardment of Boston by American cannons perched on Dorchester Heights. “The sound I think is one of the grandest in Nature,” she exulted, for it signaled the end of the British occupation. (Her eyewitness report to John included a humorous story circulating in and around the city that the infamous John Adams, who had been such a prominent advocate for American independence, had at last seen the light, defected to the British side, and boarded a ship for England.) A few weeks later she was atop Penn’s Hill once more to witness the British evacuation of Boston: “We have a view of the largest Fleet ever seen in America. You may count upwards of 100 & 70 Sail. They look like a Forrest.”⁴⁷

John recorded a third triumphant moment in two letters to Abigail written on July 3, 1776. “Yesterday the greatest Question was decided which ever was debated in America,” he declared, “and a greater perhaps never was or will be decided among Men.” He was referring to the formal vote on the resolution, proposed by the Virginia delegation, advocating American independence from all forms of British authority. It had taken a long time to reach this climactic conclusion, longer than John had wished. But now even the ever-impatient and fidgety John Adams found a measure of virtue in the delay. “Time has been given for the whole People, maturely to consider the great Question of Independence and to ripen their judgments.” Now that he had won, he could afford to be magnanimous.⁴⁸

In subsequent recollections of this historic occasion, John tended to play down the significance of this formal vote and even the approval of the Declaration of Independence two days later. As he recalled it, the big decision had already been made on May 15, when his resolution to require each colony to regard itself as an independent state and to draft a new constitution accordingly had passed unanimously. That was the moment the lightning struck, and the formal vote on July 2 was merely the thunderous afterthought.⁴⁹

But that latter-day recollection does not quite square with the second letter he wrote to Abigail on July 3. For there he joyously described the vote on independence as the truly culminating moment, the date that deserved to be celebrated as America’s birthday:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance … It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shows, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

John got everything right, including the fireworks displays, but he got the date wrong because he thought the vote on independence more symbolically significant than the vote on the Declaration two days later.⁵⁰

He was historically correct in his opinion, but he did not take into account the fact that the rest of America and the world first learned about the momentous decisions by the Continental Congress with the publication of the Declaration of Independence on July 4. (By the way, the delegates did not sign the document on that day, as most history books and the popular play 1776 claim. Most signed in early August, but delegates were coming and going and signing throughout the fall.) John was actually at center stage on July 3–4, for he had selected Thomas Jefferson to draft the document and then had single-handedly defended Jefferson’s draft before the congress, which eventually deleted or revised about 20 percent of the text. But once July 4 became the acknowledged date for America’s birth, credit shifted from Adams to Jefferson.⁵¹

This shift annoyed him for the rest of his life. He could claim, with the lion’s share of the evidence on his side, that he had been the most vociferous advocate of American independence in the Continental Congress, consistently at the cutting edge of the radical camp, willing to risk unpopularity by dragging the moderate faction in the congress to a place they did not wish to go. For a man whose primal ambition was to achieve fame, the secular equivalent of immortality, the ascendance of Jefferson’s reputation over his own proved too much to bear. In his old age he asked, “Was there ever a Coup de Theatre, that has so great an effect as Jefferson’s penmanship of the Declaration of Independence?” The real business of American independence was a long-term struggle within the Continental Congress that John, more than anyone else, had orchestrated. By focusing exclusively on the Declaration, “Jefferson ran away with the stage effect … and all the glory of it.”⁵²

But in the summer of 1776 John was so pleased with the ultimate verdict itself, and so confident that his own role in the revolutionary process was beyond question, that none of his later laments over who would have the starring role in the history books seemed necessary. Moreover, as we try to recover his mood at this crowded moment, two other events intervened to complicate his thinking, and, it turns out, his feelings, in ways that made resting on his laurels impossible.

The first event was the arrival of the forward edge of the British expeditionary force on Staten Island. John had been appointed chair of the Committee on War and Ordnance on June 13, a position that made him responsible for all the large and small policy decisions governing the Continental Army. (Strategically, should we oppose the British invasion at New York? Logistically, where do we get muskets and powder?) Washington was coming down from Boston with a smallpox-infested army of twelve thousand men. The British force was conservatively estimated at thirty thousand, assisted by a naval squadron of several hundred ships perfectly suited to New York’s coastal exposure and navigable rivers.⁵³

All the recently vented patriotic sentiments made the defense of New York mandatory. But any detached assessment of the military situation made a stand at New York suicidal. And if the Continental Army made such a stand and was virtually destroyed in the process, all the uplifting arguments in the Declaration of Independence would be essentially meaningless and all the prominent revolutionaries, John included, could expect to be hanged as traitors.

Abigail later tried to comfort John with the suggestion that even if the Continental Army suffered a catastrophic defeat, he need not worry, because “a race of Amazons” would rise up to replace the fallen men. John spent most of July and August attempting to negotiate the gap between his own convictions about the worthiness of the American cause and the gathering strength of the British army and navy, which were poised to crush that cause with overwhelming force.⁵⁴

The second event concerned Abigail and the children. On July 16 John learned that Abigail had taken the family to Boston for inoculation against smallpox. “It is not possible for me to describe,” he told her, “nor for you to conceive my feelings upon this Occasion. Nothing but the critical State of our Affairs should prevent me from flying to Boston, to your assistance.” He said he felt like “a savage to be here, while my whole Family is sick at Boston.”⁵⁵

As a result, July and August 1776 were two of the most politically dramatic and psychologically congested months in the history of the Adams family, mixing glory, foreboding, and trepidation in overlapping waves of emotion. In John’s mind’s eye he could simultaneously envision patriotic celebrations throughout the land, the largest fleet ever to cross the Atlantic gathering in Long Island Sound, and his entire family confined in quarantine amid a raging smallpox epidemic that, according to Abigail, had infected seven thousand people in and around Boston. On the latter score, the first reports were quite alarming: “Nabby has enough of the small pox for all the family beside,” wrote Abigail. “She is pretty well coverd, not a spot but what is so soar that she can neither walk, stand, or lay with any comfort … She has above a thousand pussels as large as a great Green Pea.”⁵⁶

Subsequent reports from Abigail only got worse: “Little Charles in delirium for 48 hours. Has caught the pox in the natural way.” That meant that he was at much greater risk, and Abigail warned John that he must prepare himself for the worst. “I would not have alarmed you,” she confided, “but we cannot tell the Event.” While this letter was in transit, John learned that Washington’s army had carried the contagion down from Boston and only about half his troops were fit for duty, this on the eve of what promised to be the defining battle of the war. “The Small Pox has done Us more harm than British armies, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Hannoverians, Hessians, and all the rest,” he lamented to Abigail. And now it was threatening to carry off “my little Babes.”⁵⁷

If his correspondence is an accurate measure, John’s primary concern was not the ongoing debates in Philadelphia, or the two armies gathering at New York, but rather his wife and children under quarantine in Boston. Or perhaps it is safer to say that he rocked back and forth between his draining public responsibilities and his emotional concern for the family. At any rate, he wrote Abigail almost every day, most frequently asking about “my sweet Babe, Charles, [who] is never out of my Thoughts—Gracious Heaven preserve him.”⁵⁸

Abigail was thrilled to receive such a steady stream of letters: “I know not how you find the time amidst such a multitude of cares as surround you,” she exclaimed, “but I feel myself more obliged by the frequent tokens of your remembrance.” Abigail described one scene in which John Quincy, whose inoculation had taken and was now perfectly healthy, returned from the post office, “and pulling one [letter] from under his Gown gave it to me, the young Rogue smiling and watching Mammas countenance, draws out another, and then an other, highly gratified that he had so many presents to bestow.” In the same letter she also described Charles, “who lay upon the couch coverd over with small Pox, lifted up his head and says ‘Mamma, take my Dollar and get a Horse for Pappa,’ ” so he could come home.⁵⁹

By late August the two dramas seemed to be playing out along parallel lines. As the two armies faced off on Long Island, Charles’s life hung in the balance: “Amidst all my Concern for the Army,” John remarked, “my dear Charles is continually present to my Mind. I don’t know what to think.” Early reports from New York were not optimistic. “I fear,” he worried to Abigail, “that we have suffered a great deal.” The truly bad news arrived a few days later. The Continental Army had suffered a devastating defeat, and the surviving remnant was retreating up the Manhattan peninsula in order to avoid being trapped there and face total annihilation. “In general,” he explained to Abigail, “our generals were out generalled.”⁶⁰

But good news arrived at the same time. “Little Charles stands by me and sends Duty to Pappa,” Abigail was pleased to report. His fever had broken and his recovery was now assured. John had almost lost an army, but he had not lost a son. Abigail advised him to leave family concerns to her and focus his attention on an investigation of the reasons for the American debacle at New York. She herself wanted to know what had gone so terribly wrong, adding that “if all America are to be ruined and undone by a pack of Cowards and Knaves, I wish to know it too.”⁶¹

John desperately wanted to return home, but did not feel he could leave his post with the Continental Army in such disarray. He had been working eighteen- to twenty-hour days for over two months, his eyes were permanently bloodshot, and his sight was strained, making it difficult to read, especially at night. The emotional toll of witnessing a colossal blow to the American cause was high, and he knew better than most that Washington’s army had gone through a near-death experience. The celebratory mood of early July was now replaced by the somber recognition that it was going to be a long war.

Remaining in Philadelphia, it turned out, allowed him to launch his diplomatic career. Soon after his decisive victory, the commander of the British army, General William Howe, apprised the Continental Congress that he was prepared to offer new and more acceptable terms of reconciliation that would put an end, once and for all, to the bloodletting. John made it known that he regarded such a promise as disingenuous and wanted no part of a parlay with Howe. Because of his stature in the congress, he was nonetheless selected to join Benjamin Franklin and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina to meet with Howe and hear him out. John’s assessment proved to be correct. Howe had no authority to negotiate a realistic political compromise, only to grant pardons, and as John was delighted to inform him, the Americans had no need for pardons, because they had done nothing wrong.⁶²

While this little episode marked John’s first appearance as an American ambassador, it subsequently enjoyed considerable prominence in the history books, first for John’s matter-of-fact defiance of General Howe’s authority, and second for his colorful version of the story in his autobiography. As he told it, he and Franklin were forced to sleep in the same bed at a tavern in Perth Amboy, where they engaged in a spirited conversation about the window, whether it should be open or closed. Franklin insisted on the former, John on the latter, the first indication that these two giants of American independence represented two wholly distinct temperaments, as subsequent events in Paris were soon to expose.

This was one of the few occasions in his long relationship with Franklin when John had the last word, for in his old age he liked to point out that Franklin died with a bad cold, caught because he slept with the window open. He never told Abigail or anyone else about the window argument at the time, which suggests that it was one of those latter-day embellishments that Franklin, if he were alive and able to tell his own story, would have remembered differently.⁶³

More substantially, John was the primary author of the Plan of Treaties, adopted by the congress in September. At the most immediate level it recognized that some kind of alliance with France, Great Britain’s long-standing rival for European supremacy, should be a goal of American diplomacy. (For several months John had been urging Abigail, who knew the rudiments of French, to teach the language to all the children.) But John also insisted on inserting a paragraph that denied France any permanent holdings in North America as a reward for its prospective alliance. More strategically, the Plan of Treaties urged commercial relations with all European nations, but no binding diplomatic commitments to any foreign power. John did not know it at the time, but he had almost offhandedly defined the abiding goals of American foreign policy for the next century.⁶⁴

By the beginning of October many of the other delegates had departed, making it difficult to achieve a quorum. But John regarded his duties as head of the Committee on War and Ordnance as compelling reasons to linger, especially with the fate of the Continental Army still unclear. About the same time, unbeknownst to John or anyone else on the American side, General Howe was deciding not to pursue Washington’s remnant of an army into New Jersey, without much question the biggest British tactical blunder of the war. For if Howe had chosen to pursue Washington, the consensus among military historians is that the Continental Army was in no condition to defend itself. The destruction of the Continental Army would most probably have meant the end of the war, and American history would have flowed in a different direction.⁶⁵

As the days passed, even John began to think that he was like the last sentry maintaining his post on a deserted battlefield. “I have been here,” he complained to Abigail, “until I am stupefied.” Worn down like the nub of an overused eraser, he eventually decided that he could accomplish little by hanging on: “I suppose your Ladyship has been in the Twitters, for some Time past,” he chided Abigail, “because you have not received a Letter by every Post, as you used to do. But I am coming to make my Apology in Person.” He cautioned her not to expect him for two or three weeks because of British patrols in New Jersey that he would have to evade. But he was coming home.⁶⁶

STILLBORN

Because of the paradox of proximity, we know very little about what happened within the Adams family for the next three months. We can presume with some confidence that John encouraged Nabby to press on with her French, that he told John Quincy, now called Master John, that his destiny depended upon an austere devotion to his study of the classics, though mere academic learning was less important than a virtuous character, which could not be learned, only lived. As for Tommy and Charles, aged five and seven, they were too young for such injunctions. Their experience of inoculation had introduced them to hardship, the ultimate schoolroom, but for now they just needed to be good boys who listened to their mother.

But these are mere presumptions, deduced from letters John wrote later. As for Abigail, for similar reasons, we can presume she talked about John’s prominent role in the Continental Congress, the fragile condition of the Continental Army, the vulnerability of the revolutionary cause, the need to remain strong at this difficult moment. These, however, are also only educated guesses based on what they wrote to each other before and afterward. The one thing we know with complete confidence is that Abigail was pregnant.

Because the etiquette of the era forbade any direct mention of Abigail’s condition, John’s letters back home after he returned to the congress require some interpretation: “I am anxious to hear how you do,” he wrote from the new location in Baltimore. “I have in my Mind a Source of anxiety which I never had before, Since I became such a Wanderer. You know what it is. Cant you convey to me, in Hieroglyphicks which no other person can comprehend, Information which will relieve me? Tell me you are as well as can be expected.” Leaving behind a pregnant wife made him feel guilty and joyful at the same time. “When I think of your Circumstances,” he explained, “I rejoice in them in spight of all this Melancholy.”⁶⁷

Abigail wrote Mercy Otis Warren that she had considered asking John to stay with her, “and I know I could have prevailed, but our public affairs at the time were so gloomy an aspect that I thought if ever his assistance was wanted, it must be at such a time.” A ray of sunshine broke through the gloom on Christmas night, 1776, when Washington crossed the ice-choked Delaware River despite horrible weather conditions and surprised the British garrison at Trenton, which surrendered after a spirited fight. A week later he struck again at Princeton, a somewhat larger engagement in which Washington himself led the final charge that broke the British line. Neither Trenton nor Princeton were major battles, but taken together they signaled an important psychological shift, rescuing the American cause from what had seemed like certain death. As John settled into his new quarters in Baltimore—Philadelphia was deemed too vulnerable to British attack—he could tell himself that a new life was stirring in his beloved wife and in America’s prospects.⁶⁸

“I feel you have gone to a foreign Country,” Abigail complained after not hearing from John for over a month. The gossip mills were churning out all kinds of outlandish stories. Was it true that Washington had won a great victory at New Brunswick, capturing fifteen thousand British troops? (No, it was Trenton, and six hundred British prisoners.) She presumed that reports of Washington’s death and John’s death by poisoning were just British or Tory propaganda. But she needed to hear from him to be sure, most especially about the latter story.⁶⁹

When his first letter arrived on March 9, 1777, it was full of distress about not hearing from her, especially because of her “delicate condition.” All was fine, she assured him, and the movements inside her were “a constant remembrance of an absent friend, and excites sensations of tenderness which are better felt than expressed.” Master John had told her that he had never seen anyone so fat.⁷⁰

John explained that he was buried under paperwork, some of it grisly reports on the standard practice of Hessian troops to bayonet all American soldiers who surrendered in battle. But his biggest headache was the bizarre pettiness of so many officers in the Continental Army, who were “scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts.” Mention of the military turned his mind to a lamentation that he was too old to serve; then that thought ricocheted to the regret that his boys were too young: “I wish my lads were old enough. I would send every one of them into the Army, in some Capacity or other.”⁷¹

All his children were old enough to read, save perhaps Tommy, and John made a vow to write them all in March. He urged John Quincy to read history, the seminal source of “solid instruction” about human nature, beginning with Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War, eventually in the original Greek, but for now in translation, available in the family library. For poetry, he should begin with Milton’s Paradise Lost. Nabby also received educational advice, mostly to recognize that she was expected to follow her mother’s path beyond what was considered appropriate for women and should make French a special focus. Charles was not pushed as hard as John Quincy. He had the most engaging personality of them all, John told him, but what calling best fitted him remained a mystery. The military was not an option, since the war would be over before he came of age. Tommy, who was only five years old, was encouraged to consider a medical career, perhaps to do research on better ways to stamp out smallpox.⁷²

Smallpox was very much on John’s mind. His own family, now inoculated, was safe from the scourge, but John correctly believed that the disease was an even greater threat to the Continental Army than the British. After the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia in March, he went to a cemetery where two thousand fallen American soldiers were buried, the vast majority of them victims of smallpox and dysentery. “Disease has destroyed Ten Men for Us,” he estimated, “where the Sword of the Enemy has killed one.” Fortunately, Washington agreed with John’s assessment, so it became mandatory for all new enlistees in the Continental Army to undergo inoculation before reporting for duty. It was one of the most important strategic decisions of the war.⁷³

John went into confessional mode with Abigail, suggesting that he had reached a high level of authority within the patriot camp that he could never fulfill: “I begin to suspect that I have not much of the Grand in my Compositions,” he wrote. “I long for rural and domestic scenes, for the warbling of Birds and the Prattle of my Children—Don’t you think I am somewhat poetical this morning?” If poetical, he was also misleading, as John himself acknowledged by adding: “is not the Heart Deceitful above all things?”

What he meant was psychologically complicated. By remaining in Philadelphia rather than with his children and pregnant wife, John worried that he was acting selfishly, allowing his political ambition to dominate his domestic responsibilities. He recognized that he was a deeply ambitious man. But he needed to convince himself, and Abigail, that “Ambition which has Power for its Object, I don’t believe I have a Spark in my Heart … But there are other forms of Ambition of which I have a great deal.”⁷⁴

By “other forms” he meant the desire to live forever in the memory of succeeding generations, rather than the desire to accrue power and wealth in his lifetime. He was so anxious to press the point, however, because he recognized that the distinction invited suspicion. And no matter how sincere he felt about it, he was also trying to assure himself. There was therefore a constant refrain about abandoning the “infinite Noise, Hurry, and Bustle” of the Congress, the urge to escape the “lonely melancholy Life, mourning for all the Charms of Life … for all the Amusements that I ever had, which is my farm.”⁷⁵

John was being sincere, but Abigail knew he would never leave his post. Both of them adopted a sacrificial perspective: he would suffer pangs of guilt to serve his country; she would suffer the pain produced by the absence of her husband. Her resolve had its fleeting moments as her pregnancy progressed. She complained that she was denied the pleasure enjoyed by others, “of having their mate sit by them with anxious care during all their Solitary confinement.” She wanted him home before the birth of the child in July, but she never asked or ordered him to return, because she knew that he would find it impossible to refuse, and she did not want to impose such choices.⁷⁶

One less elliptical issue that they could agree upon without lingering ambiguity or conceit was the profiteering by merchants who hoarded goods and exploited wartime conditions. John delivered several jeremiads on this score, but Abigail was even more incensed, because she had to deal with such insufferable creatures on a daily basis to purchase provisions for her family. She was pleased to report one impromptu rebellion by the women of Boston against a particularly notorious profiteer:

It was rumored that an eminent, stingy, wealthy merchant had a hogshead of coffee in his store which he refused to sell for under six shillings per pound. A number of females, some say a hundred, some say more, assembled with a cart and trucks, marched down to the warehouse, demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver, upon which one of them seized him by his neck, and tossed him into the cart. Upon his finding no quarter, he delivered the keys, they tipped up the cart and discharged him, then opened the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee themselves, put it into the trucks and drove off.⁷⁷

By late spring of 1777 John was writing two letters to one of hers, trying to sustain an ongoing conversation as her pregnancy progressed. He would rise at four o’clock, write letters until six, then ride for an hour before going to his office. One morning he apparently had nothing new to say, so he copied a huge selection, over four thousand words, from a recent book by Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, for Abigail’s edification. Mostly, and as the delivery date neared even more so, he expressed the desire to be with her: “Oh that I could be near, to say a few kind Words, or shew a few Kind Looks … Oh that I could take from my dearest, a share of her Distress, or relieve her of the whole.”⁷⁸

The day before he wrote these words, Abigail had written him with some ominous news: “I was last night taken with a shaking fit, and am very apprehensive that a life was lost. As I have no reason today to think otherwise, what may be the consequences to me Heaven only knows.” The following day, July 10, the contractions began, and she wrote him in between them over the next thirty-six hours: “The Doctor encourages me to Hope that my apprehensions are groundless respecting what I wrote you yesterday … and I almost wish I had not let that letter go.” She mixed reports of the looming birth with remarks about the inflated cost of sugar, the need to get more seaweed as fertilizer, and the rumor—true, it turned out—that Ticonderoga had fallen to the British.⁷⁹

John wrote her a newsy letter on July 11, the day of the birth, unaware of her precarious condition and full of speculation about the intentions of General Howe, who had just sailed out into the Atlantic with his entire army, his destination a mystery: “A Faculty of penetrating into the Designs of an Enemy is said to be the first Quality of a General,” John observed. “But it is impossible to discover the Designs of an Enemy who has no Design at all.” As it turned out, Howe did have a design, though an odd one. He intended to sail south to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, then march his troops overland through Delaware to attack Philadelphia. Fixated on the military crisis rather than Abigail’s, John expressed bewilderment: “But they might as well imagine them gone round Cape Horn into the South Seas to land at California, and march across the Continent to attack our back settlements.”⁸⁰

It took two weeks for a letter to reach him with the news that Abigail had delivered a daughter, “an exceedingly fine looking Child” named Elizabeth, but that she was stillborn. A letter from Abigail herself arrived a few days later, describing the child as “a very fine Babe, and as it never opened its Eyes in this world it looked as tho they were closed for sleep.” The cause of death was apparent, probably strangulation by the umbilical cord, but Abigail preferred not to put such details in a letter. After she was fully recovered, she was better able to express her sense of disappointment. Addressing John in the third person, she said that “I had pleasd myself with the Idea of presenting him a fine son or daughter upon his return … but those dreams are buried in the Grave, transitory as the morning Cloud, short lived as Dew Drops.”⁸¹

The two- to three-week delay between sending and receiving a letter created awkward disjunctions. In this case, John had posted five letters to Abigail since her ordeal, and in all of them he was obsessed with Howe’s weird maneuverings and the equally worrisome movement of General John Burgoyne’s huge army, seven thousand strong, south from Lake Champlain into the Hudson River Valley. He was completely oblivious to, or at least said nothing about, the movements occurring inside Abigail.

When a series of letters finally arrived informing him of the stillborn Elizabeth, he felt both devastated and guilty. “Never in my whole Life,” he claimed, “was my Heart affected with such Emotions and Sensations … Is it not unaccountable, that one should feel so strong an Affection for an Infant, that one has never seen, nor shall see?” His guilt resulted from the realization that his personal attention, which should have been fixed on the love of his life, was instead focused on British strategy. The tension between his public and private duties had never been so stark, and if this was some kind of providential test, he believed that he had failed it.⁸²

Abigail used the incident to speculate on the injustice of living through historic times that imposed impossible obligations on both of them. “ ’Tis almost fourteen years since we were united,” she recalled, “but not more than half that time we had the happiness of living together.” Nor was that all: “I consider it as a sacrifice to my Country and one of my greatest misfortunes [for my husband] to be separated from my children at a time of life when the joint instructions and admonitions of parents sink deeper than in maturer years.” John heartily concurred: “I am wearied with the Life I lead, and long for the Joys of my Family … If I live much longer in Banishment, I shall scarcely know my own Children.”⁸³

In late September a young aide to Washington by the name of Alexander Hamilton arrived in time to warn the Continental Congress of the approach of Howe’s army outside Philadelphia. John told Abigail not to worry, that the delegates knew how to run away almost as deftly as the American militia, and Howe’s occupation of Philadelphia would only increase the drain on his resources.⁸⁴

At last, as both armies moved into their winter quarters, John wrote from the temporary congressional headquarters at York to announce he was coming home. Abigail told him she had dreamed that, upon his return, their lengthy separation produced a cool reception from him: “Your Dream will never come to pass,” he assured her. “You can never be coolly received by me while my Heart beats and my senses remain.”⁸⁵

John had been gone from Abigail and the children for ten months, and both of them looked forward to a prolonged reunion during which they could recover their physical and emotional rhythms. But it was not meant to be.