Kindle Notes & Highlights
She often prefaced her comments on politics with an apology for meddling in men’s business. But the fact remained that she enjoyed being part of the “busy world,” as she liked to call it, and did everything she could to keep herself squarely in the midst of it.
John’s and Abigail’s attraction for each other—like the “steel and the Magnet or the Glass and feather”—never abated during their long life together. Understanding why they were so strongly attracted to each other is far more complicated than understanding why their initial reactions were negative. It seems that the qualities John scorned in fifteen-year-old Abigail were, in the long run, the qualities he admired.
Fish and lobster were cheap substitutes for meat; the coastal waters abounded with them. Because fresh meat and fish could not be preserved for long, large quantities of them were salted and smoked.
Abigail nursed her babies for about a year and then took care not to start them on too rich a diet too soon. A little cornmeal and water was their first solid food; meat came much later. Some mothers didn’t feed their children meat until they were three or four years old.
Years of marriage did not make periods of separation any easier for Abigail and John. The language of their letters to each other became more temperate in their mature years, but the emptiness of time spent apart remained. Abigail took solace in the company of her children when John was away, but occasionally visits to her family in Weymouth took her away from them too. “Alass! How many snow banks divide thee and me and my warmest wishes to see thee will not melt one of them,” she wrote John when a storm delayed her return home.
As a practical matter, John depended on Abigail’s political observations. Throughout the battles and skirmishes of 1775, he relied on her letters to provide the most complete and accurate information, no small consideration in days of limited communication. He not only appreciated her diligence in reporting events but admired her skill in characterizing people she met and, in general, her facility in expressing herself. “If I could write as well as you, my sorrows would be as eloquent as yours, but upon my Word I cannot,” he told her.
In consequence, they spent the better part of ten years living miserably apart. And there is absolutely no doubt that these separations made both of them miserable. It could never be said of John Adams, as it could of Benjamin Franklin, that he enjoyed Paris more for having left his wife behind. John and Abigail remained unquestionably devoted to each other and suffered severely from their prolonged separations.
But she tried to be tolerant and eventually learned not to be shocked at French manners. After several months she was no longer upset when a man sniffed the food at a dinner party before passing it to a lady; he was only making sure it was fit to eat. She even got over her distress at seeing women kiss men on both cheeks.
As always, her ideas and John’s were quite similar, although she continued to be more extreme and more strident in her language. He influenced her, to be sure, but she also had a great deal of time alone to develop her own thoughts. Often they came up with the same ideas at the same time and wrote them to each other in letters that crossed in the mail. Abigail called this “the Tellegraph of the mind.”
Gradually the degree of mutual influence became almost imperceptible. By the time John became President, they thought virtually as one person, and Abigail’s intellectual influence over John, always important, became absolutely critical. The
The Capitol, like the President’s House, was incomplete. Two wings had been constructed, but the middle section connecting them had not even been started. The whole area between the Capitol and the President’s House was a virtual swamp, as was much of the rest of the city. There were no paved roads.
The grounds of the President’s House were just as bad as the rest of the city. They were cluttered with workmen’s shanties, piles of bricks, old brick kilns, and pools of water, which were breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
