Episode 2.2 A Happy Marriage

[Transcript]

Hello, and welcome to America’s First Ladies. I’m your host, Risa Weaver-Enion.

Episode 2.2 A Happy Marriage

We left off last week just as Abigail Smith married John Adams and moved from Weymouth, Massachusetts to Braintree, Massachusetts, to live in the house that John inherited from his father. A house that happened to be next-door to the home where John grew up and where his mother and brother still lived.

The house was built in a style known as a “saltbox.” It was two stories in the front, but only one story in the back, and it had a steep roof to prevent snow from accumulating. The upstairs rooms were the bedrooms, and there was a room at the front of the house that served as a parlor or “best room.” It was used for formal entertaining. John also used that room for reading in the mornings and evenings, and Abigail kept her tea table there.

The kitchen was at the back of the house, in the one-story section. It had a huge fireplace that took up most of one wall. The kitchen was a social hub as well as being used for cooking. Adults congregated here and children played or studied. There was a long plank table with long benches on either side that could accommodate an entire family.

In addition to the house, John had also inherited 40 acres of land when his father died in 1761. Ten acres surrounded the house and the other thirty acres were orchard, pasture, woodland, and swamp. John joyously immersed himself in the land, while also maintaining his law practice.

On the farm side of things, he worked with several hired men to build stone walls, dig up tree stumps, plow the fields, and plant corn and potatoes. He turned one room at the front of the house into a law office and added a new entrance so that clients could come and go without having to pass through the house.

John’s law practice was flourishing, and he had all the cases he could handle. In addition to riding the court circuit, he was traveling to Boston once or twice a week on business. Abigail often visited her sister Mary Cranch, who also lived in Braintree with her husband Richard. Weymouth and Braintree were several hours apart by carriage, so Mary was the only family Abigail had nearby.

Abigail was also immediately pregnant, and quite possibly had already been pregnant on the wedding day. Gasp! Abigail and John were married on October 25, 1764, and their first child was born on July 14, 1765, which is only 34 weeks later. We all know human gestation is typically 40 weeks, so either this child was six weeks premature, which is VERY premature, or Abigail was pregnant before the wedding.

The biographers are a little coy about this. David McCullough says the baby was born “not quite nine months after their marriage.” Charles Akers says Abigail was “undoubtedly a virgin” at marriage, but that seems questionable, given the math. Pat McCarthy says, “Abigail had become pregnant almost immediately after the wedding.” Hmm. Only Woody Holton addresses this discrepancy head-on. He writes, 

“[Abigail] went into labor only eight and a half months after her wedding day, which raises the possibility that [the child] had been conceived that very night. Or even sooner, for the reality of “Puritan” New England was that one-third of brides, including Paul Revere’s first wife, Sarah, and Mary Adams, John’s brother’s wife, were pregnant on the day they married.”

I have no idea how historians have come up with that one-third statistic, but it’s interesting. Given the lack of medical knowledge and infrastructure in the 1700s, I think it’s doubtful that a baby born six weeks early would have survived, and there’s no indication that this child suffered the kind of life-long health problems that usually result from being born prematurely. So I think it’s safe for us to assume that Abigail was already pregnant when she married John. No judgment!

Their first child was a girl. They named her Abigail, but her nickname was Nabby, and that’s what she was called her entire life. I don’t know why Nabby was such a popular nickname for Abigail. There’s not a single N in the root name! Abigail senior had also been nicknamed Nabby as a child, but she’s always referred to as Abigail by every biographer.

Abigail gave birth at home with a midwife, her mother, and at least one of her sisters present to assist her. John was downstairs in the parlor, working on a political essay to keep his mind off the danger of the ordeal his wife was going through upstairs.

After the birth, Abigail wrote to one of her friends, “Your Diana became a Mamma—can you credit it? [I am] Bless’d with a charming Girl whose pretty Smiles already delight my Heart, who is the Dear Image of her still Dearer Pappa. You my Friend are well acquainted with all the tender feelings of a parent, therefore I need not apologize for the present overflow.”

Abigail’s sister Mary had a daughter named Elizabeth (nicknamed Betsy) who was around the same age as Nabby. They could have grown up together in Braintree, but in early 1766, the Cranch family moved to Salem, which was 14 miles north of Boston. With the sisters now living about 25 miles apart, which was at least a two-day carriage ride, visits were infrequent. Abigail and John made two trips to Salem to visit the Cranches, in August and November 1766, and it was on one of those visits that the early portraits I described in episode 2.1 were painted.

Between these two visits, Abigail wrote to Mary that she missed little Betsy Cranch already. “What would I give to hear her prattle to her Cousin Nabby, to see them put their little arms round one an others necks, and hug each other.” Abigail also asked Mary if she could borrow what she called a “quilted contrivance” that Mary had hand-crafted for Betsy. It seems to have been some sort of padded helmet because Abigail said that Nabby was “fat as a porpouse…falls heavey…[and] Bruses her forehead.”

Abigail also knew she was in danger of becoming one of those parents who talks of nothing but their children, writing to Mary, “How vex’d have I felt before now, upon hearing parents relate the chitt chat of little Miss, and Master said or did such and such a queer thing. [I] now more easily forgive [this, but hope that] in company I shall not fall into the same error.”

The Adamses enjoyed a quiet country life. They took walks in good weather and sleigh rides in cold winter weather. Most evenings were spent reading by the fire. They had chickens, cows, sheep, and a fruit and vegetable garden. Braintree had no shops, so they got fish, meat, flour, sugar, and tea from Boston.

Abigail spent a lot of her time either gardening or cooking. She cooked over an open fire and baked in an oven heated by coals. She also made most of their clothes from fabric ordered from Boston.

On July 11, 1767, three days before Nabby’s second birthday, Abigail gave birth to her second child, a boy. At the same time, Abigail’s maternal grandfather, John Quincy, was on his deathbed. The day after the baby was born, Abigail and John decided to name him John Quincy Adams, and the day after that, the elder John Quincy died.

Spoiler alert: we’re going to hear a lot more about John Quincy Adams and his wife Louisa in season six. Abigail is one of only two women to be both the wife and the mother of a U.S. President. The other is Barbara Bush.

With two children and a wife, John now became a little worried about finances. In a letter to his friend Richard Cranch, who also now had two children, John wrote, “ What shall we do with this young Fry? Johnny must go to Colledge, and Nabby must have fine Cloaths, aye…And there must be dancing Schools and Boarding Schools and all that, or else, you know, we shall not give them polite Educations, and they will better not have been born you know than not have polite Educations—These Inticipations are not very charming to me.”

All in all, Abigail was enjoying married life and young motherhood. She was happy to be away from her mother’s overly cautious watchfulness, writing to Mary, “I desire to be very thankful that I can do as I please now!!!” That sentence ends with three exclamation points, that’s how happy she was to be on her own.

She wasn’t technically on her own, because as we discussed in season 1, married women in 18th century America essentially had no legal existence. They were completely subject to their husbands. But Abigail actually was on her own quite a bit, because her husband was busy traveling and working. 

Her only complaint about these early years of marriage was how frequently John was away from home, either riding the court circuit or in Boston on business. She had a few servants in the house, and John’s mother lived next-door until she remarried in 1766, but no one was an intellectual match for Abigail the way John was, and she missed his company. In the fall of 1767 she wrote, “I may be compared to those climates which are deprived of the Sun half the Year.”

John was also busy with political events. You may recall from season 1 that the 1760s were a fraught decade in colonial America. All the Acts of Taxation that Parliament was imposing on the colonies and then repealing stirred up a great deal of patriotic sentiment, and possibly nowhere more potently than in Boston.

The essay that John had been working on while Abigail was giving birth to Nabby in 1765 was titled A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law. Sounds super interesting, I know. It was published anonymously in the Boston Gazette newspaper, and it was in a sense a response to the Stamp Act, even though the Act itself was hardly mentioned in the essay. I’ll quote just a few lines from it to give you a sense of where patriotic sentiment was in the mid-1760s.

“Be it remembered that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it. … Let it be known that … liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments … that many of our rights are inherent and essential, agreed on as maxims and established as preliminaries, even before Parliament existed.”

The essay was very well received, and John next worked on a document called the Braintree Instructions. It was a set of directions from the freeholders of the town (meaning, the landowners) to the Braintree delegate to the colonial legislative body of Massachusetts, which was called the General Court. You’ll recognize the concept here: “We have always understood it to be a grand and fundamental principle of the [English] constitution that no freeman should be subject to any tax to which he had not given his own consent.” In short, no taxation without representation.

In December 1765, John wrote in his diary, “The year 1765 has been the most remarkable year of my life. The enormous engine fabricated by the British Parliament for battering down all the rights and liberties of America, I mean the Stamp Act, has raised and spread through the whole continent a spirit that will be recorded to our honor, with all future generations.” I do wonder if 1765 was also notable for, you know, the birth of his first child.

By the winter of 1767-68, John was spending so much time working in Boston that it made sense for the entire family to move there. They rented a house on Brattle Square, and because houses weren’t numbered, it was common to give people directions by describing the place they were headed. Their house was known as “the white house” on Brattle Square. It’s a funny little coincidence, much like Martha Washington’s home with her first husband being known as “White House.”

At this time, the population of Boston was around 16,000 and it was quite a bit smaller than America’s two largest cities, Philadelphia and New York. Not a single point in town was more than half a mile from Boston Harbor. Woody Holton gives a vivid and somewhat amusing description of Boston, 

“Boston did not have an orderly street grid, and it would have been difficult to impose one on those hills. Legend had it that most of the roads followed old cow paths, but it is hard to imagine any sensible bovine devising such circuitous routes. Like nearly every city of that era, Boston was noisy from dawn to dusk, as horseshoes and carriage wheels clattered across cobblestones and peddlers cried their wares. It stank with garbage, offal, and dung. Cattle and sheep grazed freely on Boston Common, and many families kept chickens and pigs.”

John didn’t think the city was healthy for his family, but Abigail was looking forward to being close to her aunt and uncle and to having John at home much more often.

When the family relocated to Boston, Abigail was pregnant with her third child. She gave birth on December 28, 1768, to a girl they named Susanna in honor of John’s mother. Little Suky, as she was nicknamed, was a sickly child, so in the spring of 1769, Abigail reluctantly took the baby to Braintree and left her in the care of someone they trusted, but it’s not quite clear who. It might have been servants, or it could have been John’s mother, who was remarried but still living in Braintree. The hope was that getting the baby out of the foul air of Boston would improve her health.

Sometime later that year, John, Abigail, Nabby, and Johnny moved to a different rental house in Boston because the Brattle Square house was sold. They were not ready to commit to buying a home in Boston. The new location on Cole Lane had the advantage of not being the site of British army drills.

Around the same time that the Adamses had moved to Boston, British Army General Thomas Gage and 10,000 Redcoats had taken up residence in and around Boston. The British government portrayed this as a cost-cutting move, because it was much cheaper to keep their troops supplied from cities than it was when they were stationed all over the place in frontier forts. But the colonists suspected the real reason for the troops was to quell any unrest. The Stamp Act had provoked a number of unruly mobs, and Britain was trying to avoid the same reaction to its latest imposition of taxes.

The year 1770 began with tragedy for Abigail and John. On February 4, little Susanna died at the age of 13 months. Neither one of them wrote about this loss, but we can imagine their grief. One month later, a tragedy of more national importance took place: the Boston Massacre.

We talked briefly about the Boston Massacre in episode 1.5, but we’re going to cover it again now because not only were the Adamses living in Boston when it happened, but John defended the British soldiers at their trials.

On the evening of March 5, 1770, John was out at a meeting of a club of lawyers he belonged to. Abigail was home with the children and servants. I’m going to read the full description of the events of that evening from Edith Gelles’s book Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage, because it’s quite vivid.

“The ubiquitous presence of soldiers in Boston, not only performing their drills but on guard at public venues, became increasingly offensive to the natives. For several evenings in early March 1770, marauding groups of young men taunted the soldiers. On the evening of March 5, a crowd of four hundred gathered, mostly young men, apprentices and laborers, according to reports. It was a chilly night, lit only by a first-quarter moon, reflecting off the foot of icy snow that remained on the ground. A lone British sentry stood guard next to his box at the corner of King Street and Royal Exchange Lane. He greeted several familiar men when a hostile youth approached to hurl an insult. Private Hugh White, the sentry, responded in kind, then quickly found himself surrounded. The angry crowd, carrying clubs and sticks, shouted further abuse, daring him to fire at them. Church bells began to peal, summoning more people into the streets.

A few blocks away, Captain Thomas Preston, the commander of the Twenty-ninth Regiment, struggled with his dilemma. He needed to rescue White. With an equally angry crowd surrounding his barracks, how could he send a rescue mission to the courthouse where Private White had retreated? Every option that he considered had risks. Finally, he called out eight of his largest grenadiers and arranged them by twos, ‘muskets shouldered with fixed bayonets,’ and with himself as leader, he marched them through the crowd to the courthouse.

There, lined up with their backs to the building for protection, stood the grenadiers, pelted by jeers—’fire you bastards, fire’—snow, ice, and sticks. One stick struck Private Hugh Montgomery, knocking him ‘onto his backside.’ A gun went off. Within a few seconds an entire volley of shots were fired, and the crowd dispersed. Lying there before the courthouse were five bodies, three of them already dead and two more who would die the next day. … Everyone was shocked by what had happened, none more so than Captain Preston.”

Abigail and John had both heard the church bells, which usually meant there was a fire. Abigail sent a servant to run and see what was happening. They lived only a few blocks from the scene of the melee. He brought back word that there was no fire, but it’s not clear if he knew what had actually happened or relayed that information to her. 

John hurried out of his meeting, also worried about the possibility of a fire. He rushed past the scene and tried not to attract any notice. He and Abigail spent the rest of the night discussing the incident.

The next day, a prominent Boston merchant named James Forrest came to John’s office and asked him to defend Captain Preston and the grenadiers. According to Forrest, “He wishes for Council, and can get none.” John believed that no man should be denied the right to counsel and a fair trial, and he also thought that the mob had been in the wrong, so he agreed to take the case. There’s no record of Abigail’s thoughts on the incident, but she supported John’s decision to defend the soldiers, even though it was controversial.

1770 finally took a turn for the better when Abigail gave birth to her fourth child and second son on May 29. They named him Charles. In June, John was elected as a representative to the Massachusetts legislature. He and Abigail both knew it would mean more time away from the family, but that old Puritan ideal of duty ran strong in them. John wrote that Abigail had at first burst into tears, but then said “she thought I had done as I ought, she was very willing to share in all that was to come.”

In the fall, John mostly successfully defended Captain Preston and the soldiers at their trials. Captain Preston was tried separately and acquitted. The soldiers were tried as a group. Six of them were acquitted and the other two were found guilty of manslaughter. John primarily argued that they had acted in self-defense. He asked the jury whether the soldiers should have been expected to behave like Stoic philosophers in the face of being shrieked at, pelted with “every species of rubbish,” and threatened with death by an enormous mob. In John’s view, the tragedy was the result of the mob, not the soldiers. And apparently the jury agreed.

By the spring of 1771, the family was exhausted by Boston. John was suffering ill health, and Abigail had three young children to deal with. So they moved back to their home in Braintree. John still had lots of work in Boston, so he went back to essentially commuting on horseback to manage his business in town.

During this time period Abigail was corresponding with her cousin Isaac Smith, Jr., who was traveling abroad in Europe. She wrote that she had “always felt a great inclination to visit the Mother Country” but the fact that she was a woman made it highly unlikely that she ever would. Women did not have the same freedom of movement that men had. It was improper for an unmarried woman to travel extensively, and once married, most women were busy giving birth, recovering from giving birth, and taking care of children.

Abigail was always very aware of, and willing to discuss with anyone who would listen, the unfair differences between how boys were raised and how girls were raised. She was a lifelong advocate of more schooling for girls. Little did she know at the time of her letter to Isaac that she would eventually not only visit England, but live there for a time. But we’ll get there.

On September 15, 1772, Abigail gave birth to her third son, Thomas Boylston Adams. Shortly before Thomas’s birth, John decided to purchase a home in Boston because his business was still brisk, and after 18 months back in Braintree, he apparently felt ready to once again face the difficulties of living in Boston. Abigail and the children joined him at this house on Queen Street in November, after Abigail had sufficiently recovered from Thomas’s birth.

The year 1773 brought a momentous event that we covered in episode 1.5 but that we’re going to cover again because now the geographical focus of our story is the same city where that event took place. I’m speaking, of course, about the Destruction of the Tea, better known as the Boston Tea Party.

Woody Holton provides some excellent background on why the tea was such a problem and why the Patriots wanted to prevent it from making its way into America. “The British East India Company was near bankruptcy. Parliament decided in May 1773 to shore up the company’s finances by removing an earlier requirement that its tea be sold only in the British Isles. Now, for the first time, the firm would be permitted to ship its product directly from India to the colonies. This concession was expected not only to refill the East India Company’s coffers but to make British tea cheaper than the Dutch leaf that had been routinely smuggled into North America. Bargain-hunting colonists would feel compelled to switch to British tea—and to pay the parliamentary tax. Many Patriots believed their only chance to keep their countrymen from buying the tea, establishing a precedent of consumer consent to British taxation, was to prevent it from being landed.”

Abigail was firmly in favor of this patriotic embargo of British tea. On December 5, 1773, she wrote to Mercy Otis Warren, “The Tea, that bainfull weed is arrived. Great and I hope Effectual opposition has been made to the landing of it. …The proceedings of our Citizens have been United, Spirited and firm. … The flame is kindled and like Lightning it catches from Soul to Soul. … Great will be the devastation if not timely quenched or allayed by some more Lenient Measures. Altho the mind is shocked at the Thought of shedding Human Blood, more Especially the Blood of our countrymen, and a civil War is of all Wars, the most dreadfull, Such is the present Spirit that prevails, that if once they are made desperate, Many, very Many of our Heroes will spend their lives in the cause.”

Abigail didn’t know how prophetic these words would turn out to be. And as we know, on the night of December 16, members of the Sons of Liberty dressed themselves as Mohawk Indians, boarded the ships of the East India Company sitting in Boston Harbor, and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor. The tea was worth 10,000 pounds sterling in 1773. That’s 1,952,806 pounds sterling in 2025, which is more than $2.6 million at current exchange rates. That’s a lot of tea. You can understand why the British were so upset.

John celebrated the event, writing in his diary the next morning, “This is the most magnificent Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I Greatly admire. The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered—something notable And Striking. This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I can’t but consider it as an Epoch in History.”

Those Adamses were nothing if not dialed into the direction the colonies were headed! If only Parliament had had the same foresight. 

In response to the Destruction of the Tea, the government imposed punitive measures, the most serious of which was the complete closure of Boston Harbor, which would have the effect of crippling Boston’s economy. Parliament also passed the Massachusetts Government Act, under which the colonial government was overhauled in a way favorable to London. Among other changes, town meetings, a bedrock principle of New England governance, would only be allowed once a year.

Bostonians were outraged, but they were not united in how to respond. In the end, the faction that wanted to consult with the other colonies before proceeding won the argument. Massachusetts decided to send delegates to the Continental Congress that would be held in Philadelphia in September 1774.

On June 17, John was selected by the Massachusetts legislature as one of the delegates. This would require him to be away from Abigail and the family for much longer than any previous separation. Even when riding the court circuit, John was still close enough that they could exchange letters over a period of days. But 300 miles separated Philadelphia and Boston. It was going to be an adjustment for everyone.

Next week, we’ll join John in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress and see how Abigail fares with the farm and the children on her own in Braintree.

Thanks for listening to this episode! It was produced by me, and the music is by Matthew Dull. If you’ve been enjoying this podcast, I would really appreciate it if you could leave a rating or review. Thanks!