[Transcript]
Hello, and welcome to America’s First Ladies. I’m your host, Risa Weaver-Enion.
Episode 2.6 Separated By an Ocean
We left off last week with John and John Quincy in France, and Abigail at home in Braintree with Nabby, Charley, and Tommy. France had signed an alliance with the new United States of America, but as we learned in season 1, that didn’t make an immediate difference in the war.
In the meantime, Abigail had a farm to run. Finding laborers to work the land was still a huge problem, because so many men continued to either join the army or sign up as privateers. Abigail was also having trouble keeping a farm manager for the same reasons. She couldn’t afford to pay the going rate for labor, so she took an alternate approach.
She fired all of her employees except for two servants and entered into what was essentially a sharecropping arrangement with two brothers. They would have the use of the land and livestock, and the harvest would be split, with half going to the brothers and half to Abigail as the landowner. (Again, technically John was the landowner. But he was 3000 miles away, and Abigail was making all these decisions on her own, so she was the de facto landowner at this point, even if not in the eyes of the law.)
Not only did this solve the immediate problem of who would work the land, but it also helped with taxation. As tenants, the brothers would be responsible for paying half the taxes, which dramatically reduced Abigail’s tax bill. As a bonus, not having to directly oversee the farm freed up some of her time, which she could now use to visit her sisters.
Even with the tenants paying half the taxes on the property, Abigail still had a tax problem. Woody Holton decribes the irony in his book Abigail Adams: A Life, “Congress and the state governments knew their only hope of shoring up the value of the tens of millions of dollars’ worth of paper currency they had distributed to soldiers and suppliers lay in aggressively taxing the money back into the treasury. Free Americans soon found themselves in the ironic position of having rebelled against parliamentary ‘taxation without representation’ only to elect representatives who levied taxes several times higher than those Parliament had tried to collect.”
Abigail wrote to John to let him know about the arrangements she had made, but mail was just as slow getting to Europe as it was getting to America, so her first letter didn’t reach John until the end of June, when he had already been in France for several months. She also wrote with a request that would help her address the tax bill problem.
Abigail had two uncles in Boston, Isaac Smith and Cotton Tufts. And yes, that’s his actual name. Uncle Smith was a businessman, and Uncle Tufts was a doctor, but his son, also named Cotton Tufts, had recently gone into trade. Abigail asked John to send her goods from Europe that she could then re-sell in Boston, via her relatives. These items were scarce in Massachusetts, but in high demand. They were things like tea, chocolate, fabrics, ribbons, handkerchiefs, and dishware.
John shipped her the requested goods via multiple ships, but later learned that two of the ships had been captured by the British. He wrote to Abigail, “I have been so unlucky, that I feel averse to meddling in this Way.” Abigail was not to be deterred. She wrote back that it was still worth the risk because the prices that could be gotten for the goods were so high. “If one in 3 arrives I should be a gainer. A ship of war is the safest conveyance.”
There are no surviving records to tell us whether Abigail’s side hustle was profitable, but we assume it was because she kept it up for a number of years. She even enlisted the help of James Lovell, to take charge of her orders that were delivered to Philadelphia. He would inspect the items for damage and then forward the acceptable ones to Abigail. At one point, John got tired of being the middleman, and connected Abigail with the French suppliers so she could place her orders directly with them.
Despite this businesslike correspondence between Abigail and John, letters were still few and far between. As winter approached, Abigail apparently started to resent John’s absence. This would be the first winter that Abigail would spend entirely without John, and she wasn’t happy about it. She complained to him that his letters were too infrequent, too short, too businesslike, too brisk. “I determine very soon to coppy and adopt the very concise method of my Friend, and as I wish to do every thing agreable to him, send him Billits containing not more than a dozen lines at the utmost.”
Taking the sarcasm further, she wrote that John “[must] have changed Hearts with some frozen Laplander or made a voyage to a region that had chilld every Drop of your Blood.” For John, who missed home and Abigail just as much as she missed him, this was a bridge too far. He wrote back, “This Moment I had, what shall I say? the Pleasure or the pain of your Letter of 25th of October. As a Letter from my dearest Friend it gave me a pleasure that it would be in vain to attempt to describe; but the Complaints in it gave me more pain than I can express. … What Course shall I take to convince you that my Heart is warm? I beg you would never more write to me in such a strain. [Otherwise] I shall leave of writing intirely.”
Needless to say, it’s hard to fight with your spouse via letters that take weeks or months to cross the ocean, and Abigail was sufficiently alarmed by John’s threat to stop writing altogether that she didn’t repeat her complaints in any future letters.
It didn’t help John’s mood that his long voyage to France and sacrifice of time with his family didn’t seem to have much of a point. He wrote in his diary that he had never had more to do with so little to show for his efforts. Relations between the other delegates in France, Arthur Lee and Benjamin Franklin, were strained, and John spent a good deal of time mediating between them.
John also wrote nonstop letters to Congress, not knowing when or whether they would be delivered. He was frustrated with Franklin’s deferential attitude toward Minister Vergennes. Franklin never asked for anything he wasn’t sure Vergennes would be willing to give, and was endlessly patient. John worried about the signal that sent. “There is a danger that the American people and their representatives in Congress may have too much timidity in their conduct towards this power, and that your ministers here may have too much diffidence of themselves and too much complainsance for the Court.” He wrote this in a letter to Congressman Roger Sherman, but he never sent it.
Meanwhile, Abigail continued to do her best to keep the family afloat financially. Thirteen-year-old Nabby was enrolled in an academy for young women in Boston, and Abigail also sent eight-year-old Charley to a private school. In addition to her resale business, she continued to invest by purchasing federal bond certificates with paper currency. She also expanded their land holdings, knowing that John’s preferred investment was land.
In September 1778, Congress decided to eliminate the three-man delegation to France. Franklin was named minister plenipotentiary, Arthur Lee was reassigned to Madrid, and John was not given a new assignment or any instructions at all. It was like Congress forgot he was even there.
The news didn’t reach the delegation in France until February 1779. John decided that in the absence of instructions, he would return home. He wrote Congress a letter, saying that he assumed they had “no further service for me on this side of the water, and that all my duties are on the other.” He took his leave of Minister Vergennes, who complimented “the wise conduct that you have held to throughout the tenure of your commission [and] the zeal with which you have constantly furthered the cause of your nation, while strengthening the alliance that ties it to his Majesty.”
He also wrote to Abigail to let her know that he would soon be home, but there was no way to know for sure when he would actually get there. On March 8, John and John Quincy left Paris for the coast of Brittany. They had booked passage on the American frigate Alliance. In late April they finally boarded Alliance, only to find out that the ship’s orders had changed and it was no longer sailing for America. Instead they booked onto a French frigate called La Sensible. Alliance took the Adamses down the coast to Lorient so they could meet up with La Sensible and the new French minister to the United States, Chevalier Anne-César de La Luzerne.
But the minister was delayed, and he didn’t arrive until June. Finally, on June 17, more than three months after leaving Paris, the two Adamses set sail for America. The trip was uneventful, and they arrived on the Massachusetts coast on August 2. They were rowed to shore near Braintree, but no one was there to greet them, because no one knew they were arriving that day. We can only imagine how surprised and happy Abigail must have been when her long-absent husband and son walked through the door.
John was soon elected to represent Braintree in the state constitutional convention, so he spent much of the next few months in Cambridge, returning home on weekends. He was named to the 30-person drafting committee, then to the 3-person drafting subcommittee, and then finally chosen as the sole drafter of the Massachusetts constitution. When he was finished, minor revisions were made by the sub-committee, committee, and convention as a whole, but the document was adopted in 1780 and remains in force today. It’s the oldest state constitution still in effect.
In this constitution, John created a government structure like the one he had outlined in his 1776 essay Thoughts on Government. There was a two-house legislature, a lower house to which every town would elect a representative, and a more exclusive upper house. Members of the upper house had to own at least three hundred pounds’ worth of property, but the threshold was only one hundred pounds for the lower house.
There was a separation of powers between the legislature, the judiciary, and the executive. Voting was limited to property-owning males over the age of 21, but the value of property required was low enough that most men qualified. Members of the judiciary were appointed for life; the governor served a term of one year and was given a veto power, which was quite controversial. You’ll note the similarities between the Massachusetts constitution and the U.S. Constitution, which would be written about a decade later.
In October, while John was busy writing the Massachusetts constitution and after he had been home for only two months, he received word that Congress had named him minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain. His mission was to negotiate a peace treaty with Britain while being based in Paris.
Congress voted John a salary of $2500 pounds, which would be about 573,000 pounds in today’s money, or roughly $765,000. He also would have an official secretary, Francis Dana, a Boston attorney and member of Congress whom John knew well. Chevalier de La Luzerne offered John and his party passage on La Sensible, which was being refitted in Boston Harbor and would be leaving in November.
Once again there was a discussion of Abigail and the family traveling with John, but the same hazards that existed in 1778 were still present in 1779. John wanted to take John Quincy with him again, but after crossing the ocean twice, John Quincy was reluctant to do it again. He wanted to stay home and prepare for Harvard, but he was convinced to go with his father. Also joining them this time would be nine-year-old Charley. Rounding out the party was John Thaxter, Jr., who would be John’s private secretary.
And so, Abigail said goodbye to her husband once again, after having him home for a mere three and a half months. They set sail on November 15, 1779, and Abigail wrote to a friend, “The tears my dear Charles shed at parting, have melted my Heart a thousand times. … My habitation, how disconsolate it looks! My table I sit down to it. But I cannot swallow my food. … My hopes and fears rise alternately. I cannot resign more than I do, unless life is called for.”
The Atlantic crossing was as dangerous as the first one had been, but in a different way. Two days out, after a storm, the ship sprang a leak. A pump was put to work removing water, but after another storm two weeks later, they had to set up a second pump, and all hands pitched in to man the pumps 24 hours a day. The leak got progressively worse, but they had no choice but to keep going until they could get to the nearest friendly port, which would be in Spain.
On December 8 they reached El Ferrol on the rocky northwestern tip of Spain. Once they anchored at the harbor and turned off the pumps, it took only an hour for seven feet of water to build up in the hold. John wrote that “One more storm would very probably [have] carried us to the bottom of the sea.”
They were more than a thousand miles from Paris by land, but the ship would take weeks, possibly months, to repair, and there were no other ships going to France. John was not a man to sit still, so he decided they would take the overland route, despite the fact that they would have to cross the Pyrenees mountains in the middle of winter. They set off on December 15, riding mules and with Spanish guides to get them to the border.
The journey was grueling. Their first night on the road, they stopped at something that could be called an inn, but only if you were insane. “We entered into the Kitchen, where [there] was no floor but the ground, and no Carpet but Straw trodden into mire, by Men, Hogs, Horses, and Mules. The Smoke filled every part of the Kitchen, Stable, and all other Part[s] of the House…so that it was very difficult to see or breath[e].” There was no chimney, hence all the smoke, and their “room” was a loft that was covered in straw and shared with a hog.
Things did not improve for the entirety of the journey. John was distressed at the level of poverty he saw in Spain, writing, “Nothing appeared rich but the churches, nobody fat but the clergy.” The weather was awful—one day after another of rain, fog, and snow. They all had colds and John wrote, “We go along barking and sneezing and coughing as if we were fitter for a hospital than for travelers on the road.”
The only bright side was the warm welcome they received from all the Spaniards they met along the way. In mid-January, after about four weeks of this terrible journey, they finally reached the border with France. They were across the mountains, and the roads improved greatly, so they were able to travel by coach. It took them several days to reach Bordeaux, and then finally Paris on February 9, almost three months after they had left Massachusetts.
The very next day, John enrolled both John Quincy and Charles in boarding school at Passy, and then he called on Franklin. The day after that, John and Francis Dana met with the Prime Minister of France, the Minister of Marine, and our friend, Minister Vergennes.
John had a difficult assignment in Europe. He was sent to negotiate peace, but Britain was nowhere near ready to make peace. He was stationed in Paris, and the alliance with France that had been negotiated previously stated that neither France nor the United States would make peace overtures to Britain without consulting the other. John consulted with Vergennes, but Vergennes essentially said no to opening a dialogue with Britain.
The political and diplomatic maneuvering gets really complicated, and I don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time on this, so I’ll try to summarize it concisely.
In a nutshell, France was very willing to help the United States, but not because it supported the cause of the Americans or that it believed in the republican ideals of the U.S. France simply wanted to undermine Britain any way it could, and for the time being, supporting the Americans was a great way to do that. As John wrote in one of his many, many letters to Congress, “[Vergennes] means…to keep his hand under our chin to prevent us from drowning, but not to lift our heads out of water.”
John was frustrated with Vergennes, and despite his outward politeness, Vergennes was no fan of John’s. He felt that John was too provincial, didn’t know what he was doing, was in over his head, and didn’t understand the niceties of diplomacy the way Franklin did. And Vergennes was correct about all those things.
Vergennes eventually became so fed up with John that he told Franklin he would no longer deal with both of them, only with Franklin. Franklin then informed Congress of this in a letter that was highly critical of John.
John decided to leave Paris and go to the Netherlands to see if he could negotiate a loan from the Dutch, despite having no official commission to do this. He took John Quincy and Charles out of their boarding school, and they set off on July 27, 1780. Unlike their terrible journey from El Ferrol to Bordeaux and then Paris the previous winter, this journey was made by comfortable coach, traveling over good roads. They traveled through Brussels, Antwerp, Rotterdam, and The Hague before ending up in Amsterdam.
I want to insert a quick side note here, because The Hague is going to be mentioned many more times, and I want to make sure everyone understands what that means. The Hague (capital T capital H) is a city, even though it sounds like a building. It’s located in the South Holland province of the Netherlands.
It began as a palace in the 1200s, but as the village around the palace grew larger and eventually became a city, the city was also referred to as The Hague. In 1588, The Hague became the permanent seat of government for the States of Holland and the Dutch Republic. Today, The Hague is still the central seat of government, even though technically Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands. All foreign embassies are located in The Hague. So from now on, when I say The Hague, think “city” even though it weirdly starts with “The.” Okay, tangent over.
Amsterdam was the commercial center of Europe, and the Netherlands had grown rich over the past hundred years. The Dutch were known as Europe’s money lenders, and Amsterdam was a cosmopolitan city full of foreigners, commercial agents, sea captains, journalists, tourists, and spies.
At this time, the Netherlands were usually called either the Low Countries, because their elevation was at or below sea level, or Holland. Their official title was the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and there were seven provinces in total. Holland was the wealthiest province, which is why the unit as a whole was often referred to simply as Holland as a form of shorthand. And, of course, the people who lived there were called the Dutch.
The Netherlands had been supporting the Americans since the beginning of the revolution, smuggling large quantities of weapons and ammunition to America. But the Protestant Netherlands also had a treaty of mutual defense with the Protestant British, and were historically opposed to the great Catholic nations of France and Spain. Despite this, the Dutch were disposed favorably toward the Americans because the Dutch had fought for independence from Spain, had set up a republic, and were always looking for new trading partners.
In June, Congress actually had decided to appoint John to the Netherlands to negotiate a loan, but the commission was only temporary, until the official minister to the Netherlands, Henry Laurens, could arrive from America. But John was unaware of all of this when he left Paris in July. On September 16, Francis Dana joined John in the Netherlands, bearing the news of his commission from Congress. John then sent for John Thaxter, Jr. to join them, as he had also remained behind when John left with the boys.
As for John Quincy and Charles, John enrolled them in the well-regarded Latin School in Amsterdam. The main problem with this was that although both of them spoke French now, neither of them spoke any Dutch. So 13-year-old John Quincy was placed in an elementary level class with 10-year-old Charles. It did not go well, and John Quincy was so bored and exasperated by the situation, that he acted out, resulting in his dismissal from the school. John removed both boys from the Latin School and eventually sent them to the university at Leyden where they had private tutors and could sit in on university lectures.
John wasn’t having much success in negotiating a loan. He traveled between Amsterdam, Leyden, Rotterdam, and The Hague trying to meet with various bankers and government officials. Some bankers met with him, but promised nothing. None of the government officials were permitted to meet with him, because the Netherlands had not recognized the United States as a country.
John pressed Congress in letters to appoint him minister to the Netherlands, which they became willing to do after Henry Laurens was captured at sea trying to reach Europe. Laurens was languishing in prison in the Tower of London, so Congress appointed John minister plenipotentiary to the Netherlands, and he received his commission in the winter of 1780.
You might wonder what Abigail was doing all this time that John was attempting without success to do the work he was sent to Europe to do. She was mostly doing the same things she had done the first time John had gone to France. She continued to send John requests for items she could use or re-sell at home. John had sent her a first cargo before he even got to France, during a stop in Bilboa, Spain during their long journey.
Abigail received this shipment of 216 handkerchiefs and seven pieces of Holland linen in March 1780. The proceeds of this haul were so great that Abigail was able to contribute $200 to the purchase of a new carriage, which she and John had been wanting to buy for several years. The total cost of the carriage was $300, so she personally contributed two-thirds of the money, which must have made her very proud.
In order to profit from this business, Abigail had to spend a fair bit of time paying attention to what was in fashion and what would fetch the highest prices. And considering the amount of time it could take for Abigail’s requests to reach John, and then the articles he sent to reach Abigail, she had to be forward-looking.
As Woody Holton explains, quoting internally from some of Abigail’s letters, “‘Small articles,’ she had learned by the end of 1781, ‘have the best profit, Gauze, ribbons, feathers and flowers to make the Ladies Gay, have the best advance [markup].’ In this trade, shortages gave way to gluts with astonishing rapidity. Although linen was ‘in great demand’ in Massachusetts in mid-April 1780, ten weeks later Abigail was ‘well supplied’ with that article. Linen handkerchiefs were unpopular in May 1780 but would ‘answer well’ the following November. By contrast, the silken Barcelona handkerchiefs that Adams received from Bilboa in the spring of 1780 initially earned her lush profits, but by July her commercial rivals had also received shipments, and that market was glutted.”
Abigail also continued her correspondence with James Lovell, who was still in Congress and could keep her up to date on developments with the war and with John’s negotiations. She also could use her friendship with Lovell to remind Congress to pay John’s salary and reimburse his expenses.
Abigail kept a close watch on local politics as well. In the summer of 1780 Massachusetts was holding its first representative elections, under the state constitution that John had written when he was home in the fall of 1779. It was widely expected that John Hancock would become the first elected governor of Massachusetts, a prospect that did not thrill either of the Adamses.
They had never been fans of Hancock’s, considering him a buffoon and a demagogue. Abigail wished she could vote in the election, not because she believed in women’s suffrage in general, but because she wanted to cast her ballot against Hancock. Instead she had to settle for trying to persuade others not to vote for him. It didn’t work, by the way. Hancock was elected governor with 90% of the vote, and he served as governor until 1785, and then again from 1787 until his death in 1793.
In January 1781 Abigail had her first experience with publication, although it was anonymous. She had written an introduction to an essay by Mercy Otis Warren and then sent it to the editors of a Boston newspaper, where it was published.
Abigail continued to keep John informed about family matters at home, despite the fact that the news was often months out of date by the time he received it. His brother Peter’s wife died, as did his mother’s second husband, John Hall. Abigail told John that his mother “desires her tenderest regards to you, though she fears she shall not live to see your return.”
She also wrote many letters to her sons, giving advice and worrying about them, especially after she learned they had relocated to Holland, a country known for its damp air and tendency to provoke illness.
She also continued to expand the Adams family’s land holdings, informing John at one point that she had purchased a wooded lot that previously belonged to John’s uncle Ebenezer Adams. She paid $200 for seven acres, and John replied, “Your Purchase of Land gives me more Pleasure than you are aware. [I suppose it] to be that fine Grove which I have loved and admired from my Cradle. If it is, I would not part with it, for Gold. Pray don’t let a Single Tree be cutt upon that Spot. I expect, very soon, to be a private Man, and to have no other Resource for my Family but my farm.”
Side note: that letter was written in August 1783, when John was five years away from returning to America, and 17 years away from becoming a “private man.” He always dreamed of returning to the simple life of a farmer, but he never could resist serving his country in whatever capacity it needed.
Abigail supported his service, and her country, with all her heart. In one of her letters to John, she wrote, “I know America capable of anything she undertakes with spirit and vigor. My whole soul is absorbed in the idea. The honor of my dearest friend, the welfare and happiness of this wide, extended country, ages yet unknown, depend for their happiness and security upon the able and skillful, the honest and upright discharge of the important trust committed to him. It would not become me to write the full flow of my heart upon this occasion.”
Next week, Abigail’s heart will be tested further when John Quincy joins a diplomatic assignment to far-flung Russia, and 11-year-old Charles embarks on a voyage across the Atlantic by himself.
Thanks for listening to this episode. It was produced by me, and the music is by Matthew Dull. Don’t forget to leave a rating or review so I can reach more people. Thanks!
