Epistolary Marriage
Achorn, Edward
Epistolary Marriage An intimate glimpse of the Adams household. BY EDWARD ACHORN As their letters make clear even to the most cynical of readers, John and Abigail Adams tenderly loved...
...All the same, Adams’s writings— particularly the letters—have preserved his greatness, perhaps better than any statue or solemn tome could do...
...Still, even the general reader cannot fail to be intrigued by the Adamses and their complicated lives...
...Many of their letters are suffused with a darker mood...
...He knew full well that he was too short and round, too vain, too quick to anger, and too eager to speak out—incurable bluntness was his besetting political weakness— to seem very impressive in marble or bronze...
...A Lawyer would be my Choice, but it must be a Lawyer who spends his Midnights as well as Evenings at his Age over his Books not at any Ladys Fire side...
...Stern Winter is making hasty strides towards me,” Abigail writes, “and chills the warm fountain of my Blood by the Gloomy prospect of passing it alone, for what is the rest of the World to me...
...You can almost hear the top of Adams’s head explode in response, posted from Paris where a preliminary peace agreement has just been signed...
...In our day, some historians have just as aggressively used Adams’s heartfelt prose against him, mining the letters for evidence of his fl aws...
...They lived with the dread that British soldiers might apprehend Abigail and the children, or crush the rebellion and hang John as a rebel...
...John responds: “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems...
...May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof...
...Maybe...
...Their grandson Charles Francis Adams, Henry Adams’s father and Lincoln’s ambassador in London during the Civil War, produced a bowdlerized edition in 1876, leaving out some of the more mundane and unpleasant facts about their lives...
...They left behind marvelously detailed, literate, and loving letters to each other—1,016 survive— that add immeasurably to our understanding of this remarkable couple and their tumultuous times...
...I wonder if Adams, looking down on the America of 2008, ever does “repent . . . the Pains” that he and his dearest friend took...
...With all his foibles there in full view, he seems more like us, angry and selfpitying and confused, than any of his fellow Founders...
...But this nonspecialist could have used a little more hand-holding during the long journey...
...For a number of years, they were separated by an ocean...
...That alone makes them invaluable...
...We dare not exert our Power in full Latitude...
...Spelling and punctuation are left as they were, and the editors generally eschew footnotes and do little to help the reader identify exactly what and whom John and Abigail are talking about...
...The loneliness and boredom, particularly in Abigail’s life, seem palpable: With almost animal intensity, she craves John’s letters and writes of them as “a feast to me” that “cheerd me in my most painfull Moments...
...His contemporaries, who seemed to display godlike restraint by comparison, had the good sense to neglect to record their failings for posterity with such incredible persistence...
...Yet poor John can never quite shake the tendency to come off as rather ridiculous...
...In helping to found a country where their children (and ours) could grow up free, John and Abigail Adams bestowed an extraordinary blessing on all of us...
...As John sets about crafting new laws, Abigail famously advises him to “Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors...
...As great as he is, Abigail is easily his match...
...Statues and monuments will never be erected to me, nor fl attering orations spoken, to transmit me to posterity in brilliant colors,” he lamented...
...He and Abigail took to writing under assumed names...
...One of the great comic moments comes in 1783 after Abigail, treading on tiptoe, informs John as gingerly as possible about one Royall Tyler, a potential suitor for their daughter Nabby’s hand...
...But it was immense...
...Poor Abigail, too, comes under fi re: “I dont like this Method of Courting Mothers,” John grumbles...
...As the fi rst president to stay in the White House, still unfi nished in November 1800, he writes: “I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it...
...I wish you well through the remainder of your political journey...
...It is one of the keen ironies of history that they were apart for most of the 27 years of John’s public service: from August 1774, when he set off to serve in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, to 1801, when he returned to Quincy from Washington, after one tempestuous term as president that ended with a painful defeat for reelection...
...She notes that he has lost much of his fortune in a dissolute youth, but has worked hard to reform, is studying law, and loves poetry...
...Sickness and death are always lurking, ready to strike a family member without warning...
...And for most of the past two centuries, his glum prediction held true...
...I am not looking for a Poet, nor a Professor of belle Letters...
...Intensely curious about politics, she clamors for details and advises her husband about what steps to take...
...British newspapers published some of Adams’s intercepted letters, including information about his feelings and family, causing him great embarrassment...
...But they are also fun reading, bubbling with the charm, intelligence, pungency, and passion of these two, who were compelling and entertaining writers, one as good as the other...
...I hope you will make good use of it,” John Adams wrote in April 1777, adding wryly, “If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it...
...It is clear from these letters that, in addition to keeping the family’s farm going in his absence (a diffi cult task calling for hard-headed business savvy), she often shows shrewder political instincts...
...You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom...
...They suffered this way because they wanted to preserve freedom, something that can only be earned through sacrifi ce...
...I don’t like your Word ‘Dissipation’ at all,” he sputters, working himself into an Adams lather...
...It is our belief that Abigail and John said it best,” the editors write...
...Still, the letters also reveal a man who, for all his fl aws, showed stupendous courage, creativity, stubborn devotion to duty, and keen insight into the nature of power...
...They faced, without the sustaining presence of a partner nearby, loneliness, constant fi nancial worry, political backstabbing, hard work, illnesses, and the diffi cult tasks of raising their young...
...This is the third edition of the letters of John and Abigail transcribed from the original manuscripts...
...Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory...
...BY EDWARD ACHORN As their letters make clear even to the most cynical of readers, John and Abigail Adams tenderly loved and needed each other, and yearned to be together...
...In the earliest surviving letter to Abigail, two years before their marriage, John playfully submits to her a “bill” requiring “as many Kisses, and as many Hours of your Company after 9 OClock as he shall please to Demand...
...Many of the passages are well known...
...In 1975 The Book of John and Abigail appeared, a fi ne edition of 201 letters with modernized spelling and punctuation...
...Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could...
...Yet one of their greatest legacies was an unintended one, a consequence of their long separation and constant need for one another...
...The cannon blasts, bloody wounds, and frostbitten feet that we associate with the Revolution make it easy to overlook the sacrifi ce that the Adamses made to the cause...
...A fl avor of that can be found in her very last surviving letter to him, as he mulls over judicial appointments before leaving offi ce as president: “Adieu my dear Friend...
...Some 289 of them have been gathered into this new and fascinating collection, compiled by the editors of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society...
...Abigail writes about getting seaweed hauled up from the beach after storms to fertilize the fi elds...
...Critics have variously compared the actor Paul Giamatti, playing a grouchy Adams with shaved head and powdered wig, to Shrek and Ebenezer Scrooge...
...of history...
...In recent years, though, Adams’s star has risen prodigiously, thanks largely to the prose of David McCullough, author of the celebrated biography John Adams (2001), recently given the lavish treatment of a seven-part television series...
...Adams, an ambitious man with an eggshell ego, fretted that history would give him short shrift...
...A Youth who has been giddy enough to Spend his Fortune or half his Fortune in Gaieties, is not the Youth for me, Let his Person Family, Connections and Taste for Poetry be what they will...
...We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in Practice you know we are the subjects...
...My Child . . . is not to be the Prise, I hope of any, even reformed Rake...
...The search for an ideal manure was an obsession with John Adams...
...I want to see the list of judges...
...When those austere and iconic men wrote letters, not unlike most educated people of the 18th century, they tended to keep their emotions well under wraps...
...The letters remind us that these were two people who were groping in the darkness, unsure what would become of their lives and their new country...
...We learn of the dangers and headaches of travel, in jostling carriages over rutted roads or in ships prone to sink and drown all aboard...
...Their letters open a window to their age like few other documents...
...As he put it himself, she was his ballast, steadying the ship and keeping him moving forward, and he would not have become the great man he did without her...
...This new, lengthier edition leaves the reader mostly on his own, for better or worse...
...The crude stuff of life is here, illuminated with the lightning flashes Edward Achorn is deputy editor of the editorial pages at the Providence Journal...
...Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands...
...John and Abigail were entirely different: They pour their hearts onto the page, revealing awkward details that proved costly to him, both in their day and ours...
...Posterity...
...They write back and forth about letters they have and have not received, thanks to the vagaries of war and 18th-century communications...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 36
