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Abigail Adams Attacked Thomas Jefferson As No One Else Dared To Do

In 1804, Abigail Adams attacked Thomas Jefferson in an angry letter unlike any he had ever received.

No one else ever addressed Thomas Jefferson that way. Not even George Washington, and he had good reason to be angry with Jefferson.

abigail-adams-attacked-thomas-jefferson-portrait

Abigail Adams by Gilbert Stuart

Unlikely Friends

She was her husband’s closest political confidante, and both had considered Jefferson a dear friend. Party politics, something new in America, turned them into frenemies.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had made an unlikely pair. Adams was short, chubby, blunt, combative. Jefferson was tall, handsome, evasive and calm.

Jefferson lived in princely style in Monticello with slaves to do the work. Adams wielded his own scythe on his family farm in Braintree.

Despite their differences, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson ranked as the two most prominent revolutionaries in the United States after George Washington. Together in Philadelphia they had argued to cut ties with England and worked on the Declaration of Independence. Adams, the better thinker, deferred to Jefferson, the better writer, to pen the document.

Diplomatic Ties

When the revolutionary war ended, Adams and Jefferson both served as diplomats in Europe. The Adams and Jefferson households spent many friendly evenings together in Paris. They were so close that Adams commented his son John Quincy was as much Jefferson’s boy as his own.

The Adamses continued on to London, where Abigail took care of Jefferson’s young daughter Maria until she reunited with her father in Paris. Maria and Abigail grew close, further cementing the ties between the two families.

Thomas Jefferson in London, 1786, by Mather Brown.

When George Washington won election as the nation’s first president, Adams and Jefferson returned to the United States. Adams served as the great man’s vice president, Jefferson as his secretary of state.

But Jefferson grew wary of the Federalist Party, led by Washington, Adams and Alexander Hamilton. He feared a strong central government, and he especially didn’t like Washington’s friendly overtures to Britain.

The Jay Treaty

Washington had good reason to get along with his former enemy. Britain and France were still at war, and he wanted no part of it. He feared the fragile young United States couldn’t survive another conflict so soon after the last one. Adams agreed.

Jefferson, on the other hand, supported the French revolutionaries. So when Washington’s ambassador, John Jay, negotiated a peace treaty with Britain, Jefferson broke with his president. He didn’t do it openly, though. He did it by spreading rumors in Virginia. Washington was a washed-up soldier, he said, fronting for the power-mad money men of the Federalist Party.

Washington knew what Jefferson had said, and he called him on it. Their friendship effectively ended. They exchanged a few cordial letters between Monticello and Mount Vernon, but then they stopped.

Succeeding Washington

The next president, everyone knew, would have to have revolutionary credentials second only to George Washington. Only John Adams and Thomas Jefferson fit that bill. And neither could fill Washington’s shoes. He was, after all, America’s greatest hero.

So Adams and Jefferson ran against each other to succeed Washington as president. Politics were different then, and candidates didn’t campaign. Adams beat Jefferson by three electoral votes, and Jefferson accepted defeat graciously. He didn’t even want the job, he told Adams.

When Washington left office in March of 1797, he knew he had stuck Adams with difficult challenges. “Ay, I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be happiest!” he muttered to Adams after he’d taken the oath of office.

abigail-adams-attacked-thomas-jefferson-washington

George Washington,
Landsdowne Portrait, Brooklyn Museum of Art

France posed one of Adams’ biggest problems. The treaty with Britain had offended the French. So had the United States’ refusal to repay its war debt. Now French privateers were attacking U.S. shipping in the Caribbean.

Adams didn’t want war with France any more than Washington wanted war with Britain. So he asked his old friend Thomas Jefferson to join his cabinet and help negotiate a peace treaty with France.

Jefferson considered the offer, but then decided his job was to lead the Democratic-Republicans in opposition to the Federalists. Never mind that he was John Adams’ vice president.

Jefferson did his job and then some.

Alien and Sedition Acts

As Adams struggled to make peace with France, hostilities between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans grew intense inside the United States.

John Adams

The thin-skinned Adams began silencing his critics by sending them to jail. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 gave him the power to do so. Two prominent Vermonters, U.S. Rep. Mathew Lyon and publisher Anthony Haswell, went to prison for their attacks on Adams. That did not endear him to the American people.

By the end of his first term, President Adams had managed to win peace with France. But he had lost popularity as he sought reelection. Thomas Jefferson decided to run against his old friend for president — again.

This time, Jefferson hired a scandalmonger named James Callendar to write a hit piece on Adams. Callendar wrote The Prospect before Us, calling Adams a half-mad warmonger who intended to crown himself king. Adams had him prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts, and James Callendar went to prison.

But Callendar’s diatribe against Adams worked, and Thomas Jefferson won election to the presidency. President Jefferson pardoned Callendar on his first day in office, but Callendar wanted more – a job as postmaster in Richmond, Va. Jefferson refused, so Callendar went after Jefferson.

He revealed not only that Jefferson had paid for the libelous screed against John Adams, but that he’d fathered five or six children with his mixed-race slave Sally Hemings.

Abigail Adams Attacked Thomas Jefferson

In 1804, Jefferson’s daughter Maria died in childbirth. Only an event as sad and tragic as Maria’s death could have moved Abigail to write Jefferson. In her consolation letter, she hinted she hadn’t forgiven him for the way he treated her husband. In her last line, she described herself as one “who once took pleasure in subscribing Herself your Friend.”

Jefferson didn’t take the hint. Instead, he replied by bringing up a personal grudge. In the last days of his presidency, Adams had appointed John Marshall, a strong Federalist, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Jefferson thought Adams should have let him fill the judgeship and called the Marshall appointment “personally unkind.”

She furiously picked up her pen. Abigail Adams attacked Thomas Jefferson in a letter unlike any he had ever received before or would ever receive again.

She seemed to build up a head of steam as she wrote.

She now viewed him, she wrote, in a much different light than she had previously.

Her husband had a duty under the Constitution to fill vacant offices, she wrote. George Washington had done the same thing.

Then she went on the attack. Jefferson’s campaign for president had her “utter abhorrence and detestation, for they were the blackest calumny and foulest falshoods.”

Jefferson’s pardon of Callendar set a bad moral example for the nation, she continued. He allowed a private resentment to influence his public conduct, and he endorsed a “base calumniater.”

At first she didn’t even believe he could have done such a horrible thing.

“Untill I read Callenders 7th Letter containing your compliment to him as a writer and your reward of 50 dollars, I could not be made to believe, that such measures could have been resorted to,” she wrote.

Like an Asp

And then she let loose about Callendar’s disclosure of his affair with Sally Hemings. “The Serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you Sufficient Specimins of his talents, his gratitude, his justice and his truth.”

Jefferson, no doubt stung, replied that he knew nothing of Callendar’s activities. She wrote back that she didn’t believe him. And she added to his list of sins: He had used his position as Adams’ vice president to undermine his policies.

Abigail’s letter to Jefferson has gone down in history as the bluntest, angriest missive he ever received. And Jefferson received more than 26,000 letters in his lifetime.

The USS Constellation attacks the French frigate L’Insurgente during the Quasi-War.

John Adams

John Adams did not know that Abigail Adams attacked Thomas Jefferson. He didn’t see their letters until months later. He wrote for the record that the entire correspondence had gone on without his knowledge.

“I have no remarks to make on it at this time and in this place,” he wrote.

The two men hadn’t spoken for four years and wouldn’t correspond for another eight. But on Jan. 1, 1812, John Adams would make the initial overture. They would renew their friendship, and die on the same day — exactly 50 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.

With thanks to Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis. This story was updated in 2022.

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Royall Tyler, the Man Nabby Adams Wanted To Marry

John Adams’ daughter in 1785 dumped the charming rake Royall Tyler to marry a dashing military hero. She may well have regretted her choice, but her secretive nature prevents us from knowing.

Abigail, or ‘Nabby,’ was the only daughter of John and Abigail Adams who lived to adulthood. She was handsome, not beautiful, and reserved. When she was 16 years old, Royall Tyler came to Braintree to practice law. He won, then lost, her heart.

What Nabby couldn’t have known was that her husband-to-be, William Stephens Smith, was a has-been at 30, and Royall Tyler would become a successful politician, professor and literary celebrity.

Royall Tyler

The dashing Royall Tyler

Royall Tyler was born June 18, 1757 in Boston, the son of a wealthy merchant. His father died when he was young. He studied at Harvard, where he squandered half his inheritance on drinking, partying and gambling. He also fathered a child with a cleaning woman.

After college, he studied law under Francis Dana, for whom a young John Quincy Adams had worked when he served as minister to Russia. Tyler then moved to Braintree, where he lodged with Abigail Adams’ sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Richard Cranch.

He soon grew friendly with John Quincy Adams and his sister Nabby, who at 16 was eight years younger than he.

Tyler cut a dashing figure. He was handsome, well-mannered and dressed stylishly.

Abigail Adams found Royall Tyler charming, and believed him when he told her he had reformed. She wrote to her husband, then in Europe. The young man had ‘a sprightly fancy, a warm imagination and an agreeable person,’ she wrote, though she admitted Tyler was ‘rather negligent in pursueing (sic) his business … and dissipated two or 3 more years of his Life and too much of his fortune to reflect upon with pleasure; all of which he now laments but cannot recall.’

She also told John Adams that Royall Tyler was courting his daughter.

Reformed Rake

John Adams exploded in writing at the news. He wrote Abigail a letter in January 1783:

I confess I dont like the Subject at all. . . . My Child is a Model, as you represent her and as I know her, and is not to be the Prize, I hope of any, even reformed Rake. . . .

But Tyler persisted and John Adams eventually relented. By the spring of 1784 he won Nabby’s heart and the approval of her parents. The Adams family expected them to marry.

Nabby’s letters are lost, and she never mentioned Royall Tyler in her letters. Still, it’s possible from her mother’s writing to glean what happened.

Stories about Tyler’s college days resurfaced in Braintree, and the Adamses came to think of him as an insincere flatterer.

Nabby Adams

In 1784, Nabby sailed for Europe with her mother to join her father and oldest brother, John Quincy.

Nabby wrote letter after letter to Royal Tyler. Ships from America kept arriving without letters from him. She kept to herself her ‘fear, suspicion, doubt, dread and apprehension.’

Finally, her mother broached the subject with her. Nabby asked Abigail whether she thought someone they knew was a man of honor. Abigail responded:

I replied yes a Man of strict honour, and I wisht I could say that of all her acquaintance. As she could not mistake my meaning, instead of being affected as I apprehended she said, a breach of honour in one party would not justify a want of it in the other. I thought this the very time to speak. I said if she was conscious of any want of honour on the part of the Gentleman, I and every Friend she had in the world, would rejoice if she could liberate herself.

Nabby decided to dump Royall Tyler.

In the summer of 1785, Nabby told her mother about the break-, up, asking that ‘neither the Name or subject may ever be mentiond to her.’ She sent Tyler a Dear John letter in September that year.

Consolation

Nabby’s letter devastated Royall Tyler. He took lodgings with the Palmer family in Boston, where he was consoled by Betsey Palmer. He took so much consolation from Betsey he fathered a child with her – and possibly two — while her husband was away.

Tyler then married Betsey Palmer’s daughter Mary, and they had 11 children. He took part in suppressing Shay’s rebellion, which took him to Vermont. There he became chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Vermont.

Royall Tyler became a literary celebrity as well. He wrote a comedy, The Contrast, performed in New York City before George Washington and members of the first Congress. He wrote a satirical newspaper column, published a novel, the Algerine Captive, authored legal tracts, plays, a musical, two long poems, essays and a travel narrative.

Tyler later said he only regretted his youthful profligacy to the extent it hampered his ambition later in life.

William Stephens Smith

When Nabby Adams broke up with Royall Tyler, she had her eye on someone else: Col. William Stephens Smith, secretary to the American delegation to London.

Smith was the son of a wealthy New York merchant, a Princeton graduate and a veteran of the Revolution where he had served on George Washington’s staff. When she married him, Nabby had on idea of the downward spiral his career would take.

They married in 1786 and returned to New York, where they had four children.

Smith received appointments to several federal posts, but he dabbled in Latin American coups and speculated recklessly in land. By 1809, the family lived on a small farm in western New York State. The rest of the Adams family viewed him as hopelessly improvident.

Nabby discovered a small lump on her breast, which turned out to be an aggressive form of breast cancer. In 1811 she returned to Boston and had a mastectomy without anesthetic.

She survived the operation and returned to New York. The cancer returned, though, and she told her husband she wanted to die in her father’s house. Her wish was granted on Aug. 15, 1813.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Young John Adams Struggles With School, Vexes His Parents

Young John Adams frustrated his pious father and vexed his hot-tempered mother with his dislike of school and love of the outdoors.

Birthplace of the young John Adams

Not until a teacher inspired him did young Adams apply himself to his books.

He was born Oct. 30 (New Style), 1735, in Braintree (now Quincy) in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. He would have two younger brothers, Peter, with whom he was close, and Elihu, who died of disease in the American Revolution.

His great-great-grandfather Henry Adams had come to Massachusetts in 1630 as part of the Great Migration of Puritans from England.

Young John’s father, Deacon John Adams, was a pious, well-respected farmer who made shoes in the winter and never owned more than 200 acres of land.

Deacon Adams was 15 years older than and socially inferior to his wife, Susanna Boylston. She belonged to a wealthier Brookline family, grandniece of the doctor who pioneered the treatment of smallpox.

Young John Adams

A young John Adams. Well, youngish.

One week after his birth, John Adams received baptism by the Rev. John Hancock, father of the John Hancock who signed the Declaration of Independence.

His father saw that his oldest son was extremely smart, and decided he would go to Harvard to become a minister.

Young John Adams had no interest in the ministry.

“I thought that the Study of Theology…would involve me in endless Altercations and make my life miserable,” he wrote as an adult.

Deacon Adams sent his son to grammar school to learn Latin so he could enter Harvard. Adams remembered his teacher, Joseph Cleverly, as a ‘tolerable Schollar and a Gentleman,’ but so lazy he didn’t teach arithmetic.

As a result, young John Adams got a copy of the 1703 edition of Cocker’s Decimal Arithmetick and taught himself.

He sometimes skipped school to hunt and fish. He later wrote,

I spent my time as idle Children do in making and sailing boats and Ships upon the Ponds and Brooks, in making and flying Kites, in driving hoops, playing marbles, playing Quoits, Wrestling, Swimming, Skating, and above all in shooting, to which Diversion I was addicted.

He liked girls — a lot — and spent many evenings in the society of young ladies.

He also loved hunting, so much he brought his gun to school so he could begin shooting game as soon as classes ended. Cleverly scolded him for it. Adams then left the gun at the home of an elderly neighbor near the school. On the way home he killed crows and squirrels.

Farmer John

At the age of 10 he told his father he didn’t care for learning and wanted to take up farming. His father took him out of school for a day and put him to work cutting thatch, a dirty, miserable job.

At the end of the day, young John Adams returned home tired and sore.

“Well, John, are you satisfied with being a farmer?” Deacon Adams asked.

“I like it very well, Sir,” he replied.

Nevertheless, he went to school the next day.

Finally at 14 he told his father he didn’t hate learning, he just didn’t like his teacher.

The very next day his father sent him to a private school down the road. Joseph Marsh, a better teacher than Cleverly, ran the school. John Adams abandoned his wayward youth, and he began to study in earnest.

He gave up his interest in sports, and “even … the Society of the Ladies.”

Harvard

In a little over a year, Marsh declared 15-year-old John Adams ready for Harvard. He agreed to take the boy to Cambridge for his entrance examinations. However, on the day they planned to leave, Marsh took sick and told Adams he had to go alone.

Colonial engraving, Harvard College

Adams’ biographer David McCullough described what happened next:

The boy was thunderstruck, terrified; but picturing his father’s grief and the disappointment of both father and teacher, he “collected resolution enough to proceed,” and on his father’s horse rode off down the road alone, suffering “a very melancholy journey.”

Harvard not only admitted young John Adams, the school awarded him a partial scholarship.

“I was as light when I came home, as I had been heavy when I went,” Adams later wrote.

Photo of John Adams’ birthplace: By Daderot at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2438038. This story was updated in 2020.

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The 1965 Drought, New England’s Worst Ever

It will probably be several centuries before the Northeast United States again suffers anything like the 1965 drought. It was the driest year of a 10-year dry spell that devastated farms and sent municipal leaders into a panic over the drinking supply.

There were actually two droughts: The agricultural drought, and the water-supply drought. Farmers tried to save their crops and fed their livestock in barns, while suburbanites were told not to wash their cars or take long showers.

There was a high pollen count, high fire danger and high prices for produce. Wells dried up. Rivers, ponds and reservoirs became stinking mud holes. The air was so dry foggy mornings disappeared along the coast.

According to climatologist W.C. Palmer, the 1965 drought was “such a rare event that we should ordinarily expect it to occur in this region only about once in a couple of centuries.”

The 1965 Drought

The 1965 drought actually occurred during 1961-69, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It began in 1960 in western Massachusetts, where precipitation was below average. Then in 1962 eastern Massachusetts dried up. The rest of the Northeast got little rain or snow.

From 1962 to 1966, 34 out of 46 months had below-average precipitation. The summer of 1964 was very dry. Overdrawn reservoirs weren’t replenished.

Then 1965 was the driest year on record since the late 19th century. The 1965 drought was most severe in northeastern Pennsylvania and southeastern New York. That year, Connecticut got only 29.45 inches of precipitation, far below the average of 46.15 inches. Maine was drier than in 1947, when fires destroyed nine communities and a quarter-million parched acres.

By July, communities were declaring water emergencies. Towns banned water use outside, but police and water departments were besieged by people calling to report neighbors who watered their lawns or washed their cars.

Sahara

Golf courses dug wells and dredged ponds. Fairways burnt up as watering was restricted to greens and tees. Brae Burn in Newton, Mass., “may as well be on the Sahara,” reported the Boston Globe. Brae Burn dug 20 test holes to find water. All were dry.

Part of the reservoir in Cambridge, Mass., oozed muck. In Norfolk, Mass., the 20-acre Kingsbury Pond was a stinking sea of mud. Commuters from the western suburbs in Boston rolled up their windows in summer to avoid smelling the stench of the Charles River. Usually water was discharged into the river to dampen the smell of the raw sewage that flowed into it. Not during the drought.

Herring couldn’t swim from the sea to fresh water to spawn. The Town of Pembroke, Mass., banned herring fishing and helped the fish upstream by carrying them in barrels. By fall, millions of herring spawned in fresh water couldn’t make it back to the sea in the dried-up streams. Trapped in ponds, the seagulls feasted on them.

Pastures, hayfields and cornfields were burned out by the 1965 drought. Dairy farms in Fairfield County, Conn., lost most of their pasture grass, and wells went dry for a third of them.

The honey crop in Vermont was smaller than usual. So was the blueberry crop in Maine. Shade trees, such as the Norway and sugar maple, were damaged. Along Rte. 2 between Concord and Cambridge, Mass., Red Pine needles turned brown.

Emergency

In July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered a study to find out what the federal government could do to help New England. Cities and towns got loans of pumps and pipes to access the deepest arts of reservoirs. Some Massachusetts towns borrowed vintage World War II pipes from Fort Devens and Romulus Air Force Base to reach water beyond normal sources. It didn’t work. The pipe was too expensive to transport.

President Johnson

Rockport, Mass., got approval to use water from a quarry, so long as it was treated twice with chlorine. Also in Massachusetts, Randolph, Holbrook and Braintree banded together to get water from a gravel pit. Fitchburg hired a rainmaker.

The next month, 11 Massachusetts counties were declared drought disaster areas. More than a hundred Massachusetts towns restricted water. Hanover considered a moratorium on building permits. Sandy Pond beach was closed in Ayer after hundreds of dead fish floated to the surface, deprived of oxygen.

Scattered Relief

By September, some parts of New England got rain. In western Massachusetts, rain changed brown pastures to green and grass and alfalfa returning to some farms. Cranberry growers were skating by. Some reservoirs filled to capacity.

The 1965 drought eased in Northern New England except for coastal Maine. In Grand Isle County, Vermont, too much rain left standing water in fields.

Then temperatures dropped.

The water problem worsened in November because the cold locked precipitation above ground. In southeastern Massachusetts, a cold snap destroyed a quarter of the cranberry crop. Cranberry growers didn’t have enough water to flood their bogs and prevent the berries from freezing.

Test wells throughout New England reached record lows and nearly a dozen towns along the coast had to draw down their emergency supplies. On Nov. 1, 1965, the Quabbin Reservoir fell to 59 percent of capacity, a drop of 17 percent in 12 months.

Car washes, service stations and ski areas couldn’t get water.

The 1965 Drought Continues

Quabbin Reservoir after the 1965 drought

By April 1966, the rainfall shortage increased to nearly 37 inches since the drought started in 1963, reported the Boston Globe. That almost equaled a year’s supply of rain.

People thought the drought ended with heavy rain in July and persistent fog along the coast. A dry August ended that hope.

A Boston College scientist suggested detonating dynamite, creating tiny earthquakes, could end the 1965 drought. The disturbed soils would the presence of water and suggest areas for drilling, he said.

By October 1966, farmers said the drought had ended. But the water-supply drought had not. There wasn’t enough water in wells, water tables and reservoirs.

A wet spring in 1967 ended the drought. Above normal rain and snow from February to May filled the reservoirs. On April 25, 1967, Malcolm E. Graf, Massachusetts Water Resources Commissioner, stated the four-year drought, worst in New England history, was over.

Photo: Quabbin Reservoir By Solarapex at en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11535183. Cracked mud By Rosser1954 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90076337. This story about the 1965 drought was updated in 2022.

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When Abigail Adams Vented to Mercy Otis Warren About John

In the spring of 1776, Mercy Otis Warren received a letter from her good friend Abigail Adams vented about her husband John.

Though she loved John, Abigail resented her subordinate position to him. She had included her now-famous reminder, “Remember the ladies,” in a letter to him. Perhaps she expected a sympathetic response. Instead, John Adams made fun of her.

Mercy Otis Warren by John Singleton Copley. Courtesy Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Abigail shared her hurt with her friend Mercy Otis Warren.

Though 16 years younger than Mercy, she had much in common with her. Both witnessed and recorded the American Revolution. They both made passionate commitments to the cause. And both lived on the South Shore of Massachusetts: Abigail in Braintree, Mercy in Plymouth.

Abigail Adams Vented to Mercy Warren

Mercy Otis Warren was born Sept. 25, 1728 in Barnstable, Mass., where a statue of her now stands in front of the Barnstable County Courthouse. Her parents educated her with her Harvard-bound brother James Otis. When she married James Warren, her brother and her husband encouraged her to write poetry and essays satirizing the colonial government. That she then did.

The Warren home frequently attracted such patriot leaders as Sam Adams, his cousin John and Mercy’s brother-in-law, Joseph Warren.

Abigail Adams met Mercy Otis Warren in the spring of 1773, when she accompanied John to a court session in Plymouth. Like Abigail, the elegant and erudite Mercy had five children. Abigail and Mercy hit it off, and the Adamses and Warrens would meet often in the coming years.

Abigail Adams

At that first meeting, Abigail was 28 and Mercy was 44. Mercy then wrote to Abigail afterward, which flattered her and began a long friendship and correspondence.

Correspondence

In 1776, John Adams represented Massachusetts in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Abigail wrote to him on March 31, eager to hear about the new code of laws she presumed he worked on. She then urged him to remember the ladies.

I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

“That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute,” she wrote. But, she added, those of you who wish to be happy can give up the “harsh title of Master” for the “more tender and endearing one of Friend.”

“‘Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams’ most famous comment, didn’t impress her husband. Not one little bit.

‘I Cannot But Laugh’

In his reply on April 14, 1776, he mocked her plea for women’s rights:

As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient — that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent — that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.–This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy, I won’t blot it out.

Bronze sculpture of Mercy Otis Warren in front of the Barnstable County Courthouse

Sausy John

Abigail didn’t think much of her husband’s reply. On April 27, 1776, Abigail vented her frustration about John to Mercy Otis Warren.

“He is very sausy to me,” she wrote. “I think I will get you to join me in a petition to Congress.”

She indignantly repeated his comments, then wrote,

I will tell him I have only been making trial of the Disintersstedness of his Virtue, and when weigh’d in the balance have found it wanting.

Her friend’s reply — if she did reply — disappeared.

Abigail waited 10 days after she wrote to Mercy Otis Warren to compose her reply to her husband:

I can not say that I think you very generous to all the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining and absolute power over Wives.

And then she reminded him that arbitrary power, like most other very hard things, can be broken.

…notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet –

This story about Mercy Otis Warren and Abigail Adams was updated in 2023. Image of Mercy Otis Warren statue By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32733257.

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When John Adams Fled Philadelphia in the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

In the early hours of Sept. 19, 1777, James Lovell woke John Adams from his bed in Philadelphia. He told Adams the British would soon capture the city. He had not a moment to lose. Adams fled with his friend Henry Marchant. They rode off to Trenton, N.J., after the other members of the Second Continental Congress.

John Adams some years after he fled Philadelphia

Adams’ departure was premature, but expected. The redcoats under Gen. William Howe didn’t enter Philadelphia until a week later. But the patriots knew Howe’s designs on Philadelphia in advance, even in Braintree, Mass.

John Adams Writes

In a letter to Abigail dated Sept. 1777, John Adams wrote,

How much longer Congress will stay is uncertain. I hope we shall not move until the last necessity, that is, until it shall be rendered certain that Mr. Howe will get the city. If we should move, it will be to Reading, Lancaster, York, Easton, or Bethlehem, some town in this state. It is the determination not to leave this State. Don’t be anxious about me, nor about our great and sacred cause. It is the cause of truth and will prevail. If Howe gets the city, it will cost him all his force to keep it, and so he can get nothing else.

Abigail Adams was more anxious than John about the coming events. James Lovell, the member of the Second Continental Congress who woke Adams, sent her a letter that she feared contained the news that John Adams was sick or dead.

The letter actually included a plan of the part of the country where the next phase of the war was likely to be fought.

Abigail Writes Her ‘Dearest of Friends’

On Sept. 17, 1777, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband describing her feelings upon receiving Lovell’s letter:

…there is no reward this side the grave that would be a temptation to me to undergo the agitation and distress I was thrown into by receiving a letter in his handwriting, franked by him. It seems almost impossible that the human mind could take in, in so small a space of time, so many ideas as rushed upon mine in the space of a moment. I cannot describe to you what I felt.

Abigail Adams

The sickness or death of the dearest of friends, with ten thousand horrors, seized my imagination. I took up the letter, then laid it down, then gave it out of my hand unable to open it, then collected resolution enough to unseal it but dared not read it; began at the bottom, — read a line,–then attempted to begin it, but could not. A paper was inclosed; I ventured upon that, and finding it a plan, recovered enough to read the letter; but I pray Heaven I may never realize such another moment of distress.

John Adams Fled on a False Alarm

Two days later, John Adams described in his diary how he rushed out of Philadelphia, not yet knowing it was a false alarm:

1777. SEPTR. 19. FRYDAY.

At 3 this Morning was waked by Mr. Lovell, and told that the Members of Congress were gone, some of them, a little after Midnight. That there was a Letter from Mr. Hamilton Aid de Camp to the General, informing that the Enemy were in Possn. of the Ford and the Boats, and had it in their Power to be in Philadelphia, before Morning, and that if Congress was not removed they had not a Moment to loose.

Mr. Merchant and myself arose, sent for our Horses, and, after collecting our Things, rode off after the others. Breakfasted at Bristol, where were many Members, determined to go the Newtown Road to Reading. We rode to Trenton where We dined. Coll. Harrison, Dr. Witherspoon, all the Delegates from N.Y. and N.E. except Gerry and Lovell. Drank Tea at Mr. Spencers, lodged at Mr. S. Tuckers, at his kind Invitation.

This story last updated in 2022.

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