Friday, May 17, 2013

Abigail Adams : Union of Love and Patriotism

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Among the many powerful forces that drove American liberty stands the union of John and Abigail Adams, America’s best known and perhaps most powerful marriage. Their union paralleled the rise of American independence. The long separations they endured in their sacrifice for American freedom produced voluminous correspondence totaling 1200 letters between two people who were best friends, intellectual equals, and stalwart patriots.
 
Abigail, 9 years John’s junior, stood barely 5 feet tall. John, balding and tending to roundness, stood five feet six inches—near average for colonial America. They married in her family parlor in 1774, the year America’s move for independence began. Abigail’s independent, well-formed opinions made her John’s perfect match to become deeply committed friends and marriage partners. She and John forged a partnership so united that she said of him, “When he is wounded, I bleed”, and he said of her, “I can do nothing without you.”
 
John was an ambitious country lawyer seeking to invest his erratic, excitable passions in the affairs of history. Abigail was his greatest asset; steady and supportive—an anchor for his aspirations; his ballast in the storm.
 
As the children came, John accepted ever-increasing responsibilities as a leading colonial activist. Their home in Braintree, Massachusetts was near Boston, epicenter of the American revolutionary movement. They were apart for years at a time in the cause of freedom. Geography and a lumbering mail system became boundaries to their communication.
 
Abigail managed their four children (a fifth died in infancy) and the family farm, shepherding them through the horrendous smallpox epidemic of 1775, which ravaged the nearby British and Continental armies during the siege of Boston. Busy mothers can feel her need for privacy during those harried years, as she said, ”I always had a fancy for a closet with a window which I could peculiarly call my own.” She wanted John at home, but accepted and shared the patriotic sympathies that trumped her pleas.
 
John and Abigail spent only four months together in a six year period, as John moved the American Revolution forward. They loved and conversed through letters—rich treasures, which open a window to their marriage and the emerging nation to which they gave themselves. During their four months together, Abigail became pregnant. She gave birth to a stillborn daughter, and bore the grief alone as the news travelled slowly to John, three hundred miles away in Philadelphia.
 
John’s role in history took its toll on their family. In 1778 he was appointed an American diplomat to Paris, leaving 10 days after accepting the appointment. He took their two oldest sons, 10 year old Charles and 13 year old John Quincy, but left Abigail, their youngest son and only daughter at home. Abigail was melancholy. She poured out her pain at his leaving in a letter to him the day he left, “My habitation, how disconsolate it looks! My table, I set down to it but I cannot swallow my food.” John and John Quincy would be gone 5 long years; Charles would return to his mother, sailing across the Atlantic alone at age 11, less than two years later. When Abigail next saw her firstborn she could recognize him only by looking into his eyes.
 
Letters sometimes took six months to reach their destination. Often they were lost at sea, as mail pouches containing sensitive diplomatic contents were thrown overboard if an American ship risked capture. John’s skilled diplomatic efforts produced advantageous treaties with the Dutch and the British, to end the war. Harried, he seldom wrote home, and Abigail went for over a year with no news whatever from John.
 
When John’s diplomatic skills carried him directly from France to Britain as ambassador, Abigail could bear the separation no longer. She trusted John implicitly, but knew their extended separations would inevitably weaken their deep commitment to each other. They had had enough separation. Sending her two youngest children to live with her sister, she brushed aside her chilling fears of the long ocean voyage and sailed for Paris, then London, with their daughter, Nabby (and the family cow, which died on the sea voyage). It would be four years before she saw her younger sons again. She played the diplomatic role so foreign to her personal tastes, re-knit the fabric of their committed relationship despite John’s distractedness, and rejoiced when they finally sailed for home.
 
John’s embattled four years as the second U.S. president, pummeled by the press and undermined by ambitious, previously trusted associates hungry for power, took their toll on both John and Abigail. They retired to Braintree for their last years together. While their somber son, John Quincy, established a solid political career and became our sixth president, the remaining Adams children had not fared well. Nabby married poorly and came to live with her children at her parents’ home before she died of breast cancer. Charles and Tommy became alcoholics; charismatic, charming Charles drank himself to death as a young man. Modern research on the extra burdens of children in fatherless homes raises the inevitable question: what were the effects of John’s protracted absences on his children? History provides no answer.
 
Abigail died in the 54th year of their marriage, leaving John alone for the last 8 years of his life. She had been the “ guiding planet around which all revolved”. In the dearth created by Abigail’s absence, John Quincy’s wife, Louisa Catherine, began a correspondence satisfying to them both.  Commiserating with his old friend, Thomas Jefferson, they mused about the life to come after death. Each believed in a certain reunion with loved ones gone beyond, and John waited for the day when he and Abigail could be together again.
 
John Adams died on July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the birth certificate of the United States of America. He and Abigail left a legacy of sacrifice for the national good and perseverance in the face of opposition that is woven into our national character.   
 
- Pam

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