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Pursuit of Happiness
A Review by Gordon S. Wood

All the many thousands of people who presumably have read David McCullough's best-selling biography of John Adams know what a wonderful marriage John and Abigail Adams had. Their marriage was different in almost every way from those of the other prominent Founders. To many historians it seems almost modern, and over the years it has been idealized as such. Unlike the marriages of most of the other Founders, the Adamses' union appeared to offer little financial advantage to either party. Although Abigail's father, Reverend William Smith, was the minister in Weymouth, and her mother was a Quincy (a wealthy and important Massachusetts family), John Adams did not seem to worry much about his wife's estate or dowry. If anything, it was the Reverend Smith who worried about his nineteen-year-old daughter's marrying beneath her social station by taking as her husband the son of a modest Braintree farmer and shoemaker.

The marriage was certainly not a hasty one. John courted Abigail for nearly five years, and so he came to know what an emotionally and intellectually compatible mate she would make. Theirs represented an emerging new kind of marriage -- what historians have called companionate marriage, in which husbands, in the genteel conventional wisdom expressed by Abigail, "willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend." Insofar as the unromantic eighteenth century allowed, theirs was a marriage of love.

The Adamses were not just spouses and lovers; they were also each other's best friend and intellectual partner. "Am I not your bosom friend?" Abigail asked her husband in 1775; and that was how she continued to think of their relationship. "My dearest friend," she called him. "How much is comprised in that short sentence? How fondly can I call you mine, bound by every tie which consecrates the most inviolable friendship, yet separated by a cruel destiny, I feel the pangs of absence sometimes too sensibly for my own repose." The Adamses needed each other, and for all the time they were apart -- between 1778 and 1784 they were together for only three months -- they never became used to being separated.

John needed someone to confide in, someone to salve his many wounds, someone who was as smart as he was, who had good judgment, and who could keep his exuberance and passion under control. "I must entreat you, my dear Partner," he said to her at the outset, "in all the Joys and Sorrows, Prosperity and Adversity of my Life, to take a Part with me in the Struggle." And she became his loyal comrade, supporting and encouraging him in all his challenges and crises. "I can do nothing without you," he told her over and over. For her part, Abigail needed someone she could respect and love at the same time. She told her "partner" and "dearest friend" time and again how much she missed him. She prayed for him and yearned "to fold to my fluttering heart the object of my warmest affections." She thought of him all the time: "I never close my eyes at night till I have been to Philadelphia, and my first visit in the morning is there."

Most of the other Revolutionary leaders still conceived of marriage in a traditional way, less as the coming together of two like minds and more as a means of property acquisition and social advancement. They tended to think of it in dynastic terms, as a manner of building alliances and establishing or consolidating their position in society. George Washington in 1758 was in debt and looking for a wealthy bride to help him become a gentleman planter and to finance the completion of Mount Vernon. The rich young widow Martha Custis brought the estate that he very much needed: £40,000 and 18,000 acres of land. Although their marriage seems to have been comfortable enough, it was, as Washington later explained to a lady friend, "more fraught with expressions of friendship than of enamoured love." While he was engaged to Martha in 1758, in fact, Washington was in love with another woman, Sally Fairfax, the wife of his friend and patron. But Washington, like most gentry in that practical age, was not about to let love get in the way of his ambitions and his needs.

Like Washington, Thomas Jefferson married a rich widow. From his union with Martha Wayles Skelton he received 135 slaves, including the Hemings family, and 11,000 acres of land that helped him in his construction of Monticello. Although Jefferson apparently had a romantic relationship with Martha, we do not know much about it. Her death in 1782 after a decade of marriage certainly devastated him. He was knocked out for weeks and, as he said, only slowly emerged from a "stupor of mind" that had rendered him "as dead to the world as she was whose loss occasioned it." Jefferson destroyed all their letters and thereafter deliberately refrained from writing anything about her. The little that we know suggests that their relationship was traditionally patriarchal, not like the Adamses'.

It is difficult for us today to appreciate how different that patriarchal eighteenth century was, not just in its general acceptance of slavery but also in its treatment of women. Women rarely had an independent existence, at least in law. In public records they were usually referred to as the "wife of," or the "daughter of," or the "sister of," a man. Before marriage, women legally belonged to their fathers, and after marriage they belonged to their husbands. A married woman was a femme covert: she could not sue or be sued, make contracts, draft wills, or buy and sell property. It went without saying that women could not hold political office or vote. They were considered to be dependent like children, and their husbands often treated them like children. A husband might address his wife as "dear Child" or by her Christian name, but he would be addressed in return as "Mr."

Jefferson called his wife "Patty," but he did not regard her, any more than he did his daughters, as his intellectual equal. Martha Jefferson was gentle and musical, befitting the role that Jefferson assumed for women. Whatever Martha was to him, she was not the kind of intellectual companion that Abigail was to John Adams. As Jefferson's biographer Dumas Malone pointed out, Jefferson "had no advanced ideas about women" and thought of childbearing as a woman's "trade." When the Marquis de Chastellux visited Monticello in 1782, he described everything about his host and the house in minute detail, but scarcely mentioned Martha. This was never true of Abigail: foreign visitors to the Adamses' household always felt her intellectual presence.

Alexander Hamilton also sought an advantageous marriage -- to Elizabeth Schuyler, a member of one of the most distinguished families of New York. Although Hamilton was certainly smitten with Eliza's black eyes, and warned her that her "future rank in life is a perfect lottery" in which she might have to "move in a very humble sphere," he was well aware that she was a daughter of a gentleman of "large fortune and no less personal and public consequences." As attractive as Eliza Schuyler was, and as much as she advanced Hamilton's career, she was never his intellectual partner. Although she had good sense, Hamilton admitted that she was "not a genius." In fact, Hamilton had much more in common with Eliza's witty and vivacious married older sister, so much so that many people assumed that they were lovers.

The strangest of the principal Founders' marriages was probably James Madison's late union with Dolley Payne Todd in 1794. Madison was an old bachelor who apparently had never been at ease with women. Although he could be quite congenial in small groups of men, where he liked to tell smutty stories, in large mixed groups he was shy, stiff, and awkward. Only women who were a good deal younger than he seemed approachable. In the winter of 1782-1783, when he was thirty-three, he lost his heart to Kitty Floyd, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a New York delegate serving with him in the Continental Congress. When Kitty accepted his quick proposal of marriage, Madison became as excited as he had ever been about anything and eagerly prepared for the wedding; but the young Miss Floyd changed her mind and in the summer of 1783 broke the engagement in a letter containing, as the crestfallen Madison told his friend Jefferson, the young woman's "profession of indifference."

After being jilted in this jarring manner, Madison waited ten years before approaching another woman. At the age of forty-three he became attracted to the twenty-six-year-old widow Dolley Payne Todd and asked Aaron Burr to introduce them. Since by 1794 Madison had become a major political figure and the leader of the emerging Republican Party, Dolley could not help being excited to meet "the great little Madison." Madison fell head over heels for her, so much so that Dolley's Virginia cousin, reporting Madison's feelings to her, said that "he thinks so much of you in the day that he has lost his Tongue; at Night he Dreames of you and starts in his sleep a Calling on you." Madison wasted no time in proposing, and he and Dolley were married that same year. As Dolley explained in a letter to a friend on her wedding day, she was marrying "a man who of all others I most admire." The marriage promised her "everything that is soothing and grateful," including giving her young son from her first marriage "a generous and tender protector." But on her part it was hardly a love match. After the wedding ceremony and before going to her husband's bed, she added a hurried postscript to the letter that she had earlier signed "Dolley Payne Todd": "Evening -- Dolley Madison! alas! alas!"

Although the Madisons' marriage was childless, it otherwise flourished, and Dolley grew to love her "beloved" and "dearest husband." The gregarious and good-tempered Mrs. Madison became the queen of hostesses. She may not have been Madison's intellectual companion -- an English diplomat described her as being of "an uncultivated mind and fond of gossiping" -- but she did solve the problem of Madison's awkwardness in large gatherings. When Madison became president and held official dinners, Dolley seated herself at the head of the table, with Madison's private secretary seated at the foot. Madison himself sat in the middle, and was thus relieved of having to look after his guests and control the flow of conversation. As a brilliant Washington hostess, Dolley Madison created a public persona that rivaled that of her illustrious husband.

Of the major Founders, only Benjamin Franklin, in attaching himself to the lowly Deborah Read in a common-law marriage, seems to have married neither for love nor to better himself. He had in fact first proposed to another woman, but when he asked her parents for a £100 dowry, he was rebuffed. Only then did he turn to Deborah Read. Of course, as a struggling young printer Franklin may have sensed that Deborah could help him economically; she certainly turned out to be as shrewd and frugal as he was, and she never ceased working to bring money into the household. But the real reason that Franklin married her may have been the fact that he came to the marriage with a new son born of another woman, whom Deborah would have to raise. Given these circumstances, Deborah Read may have been the only woman in Philadelphia who would have accepted him and his illegitimate son.

What sets off the Adamses' marriage from those of the other Founders is the quantity and the quality of their correspondence. Since John was so much away from home -- at first riding the circuit courts as a young attorney, then attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and later as minister in Europe -- he and Abigail exchanged more than a thousand letters, only half of which have ever been published. This new edition of 284 of their letters between 1774 and 1783 offers no new correspondence. It is actually an updated version of an edition of 1876 titled Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams, During the Revolution, edited by their grandson Charles Francis Adams. In his edition Charles Francis suppressed passages and changed spelling, grammar, and punctuation, especially in Abigail's letters. Frank Shuffelton, the editor of this volume, has restored the suppressed passages but has generally left the spelling and punctuation as they were in the 1876 edition. (He does retain Abigail's reports of the children asking "mar" when "par" would return, thus showing that the New Englanders' peculiar manner of adding and dropping r's was already present in the late eighteenth century.) This is a book for general readers only. Since it does not contain all the letters between the two Adamses during this period, scholars and others desiring the full correspondence need to consult the volumes of the Adams Family Correspondence published by Harvard University Press.

For some of the Founders and their wives, we have virtually no letters at all. After Washington's death, Martha destroyed nearly all the correspondence between her and George, and Jefferson did likewise with the letters between himself and his wife. Even if we had such letters, it is hard to imagine that they would resemble those between John and Abigail Adams. Their correspondence has an openness and a candor and a thoughtful character that could come only from two people who regarded each other as intellectual comrades. Their correspondence, as John pointed out, was a conversation between "two friendly souls."

In their many letters they exchanged views on everything from the politics of the Continental Congress to the price of clover seed. "I want to sit down and converse with you, every evening," wrote Abigail, and she did. She told her husband about the local news of Braintree, her dinner guests, the local rumors, the weather, the state of their farm. Although Abigail had no formal education, she read widely and quoted from an extraordinary array of writers, often from memory: Dryden, Pope, William Collins, Edward Young, Shakespeare, Polybius, the Bible, and Charles Rollin's ancient history, among others. No issue was too small or too large for her comment. She had strong views about everything, including politics; indeed, she was, as the Federalist Fisher Ames once observed, "as complete a politician as any lady in the old French Court."

Benjamin Franklin and his wife Deborah were also separated for long periods of time; indeed, they were apart for fifteen of the last seventeen years of their marriage. They wrote to each other, but not at all as often as John and Abigail Adams did, and their correspondence was very different. Franklin's letters from London to Deborah in Philadelphia increasingly resemble those of a businessman to his overseas agent. They are rather cold and perfunctory, and contrast markedly with the warm and chatty letters that he exchanged with his sister Jane Mecom. Deborah was never Franklin's intellectual partner, and at the end he scarcely thought of her as his wife. She tried her best to accommodate her celebrated husband. She usually signed herself as his "a feck shonet wife," and she continued to supply him with long, rambling, chaotically misspelled, and unpunctuated streams of thought about the everyday routines of her life in Philadelphia. Like many wives in that patriarchal age, Deborah's love of her husband was mingled with respect and even awe, doubly so because of Franklin's international fame. She hesitated to say "anything to you that will give you aney uneseynes" and feared constantly to do the smallest thing, "leste it shold not be write." Abigail Adams also respected her husband, but she never expressed this sort of obsequiousness.

Since Martha Washington burned nearly all the letters between her and her legendary husband, we do not know much about the intimacy of their relationship. As genial and practical as Martha was reported to be, she was certainly not intellectually sophisticated. Indeed, many of her letters written in her official capacity as Washington's wife were either dictated or actually written by someone else over her signature. It is questionable whether Martha ever fully shared her illustrious husband's goals and ambitions. She seems to have preferred that Washington stay home and manage Mount Vernon and provide for his family rather than engage in his public activities. Washington did not always confide his plans to her. He knew she did not favor his becoming commander of the Continental Army, and he was very reluctant to tell her that he had accepted the presidency of the United States. In his will he freed his slaves effective upon Martha's death, though she and her family bitterly opposed it; during his final retirement the couple apparently had even stopped talking to each other about slavery, so sensitive had the subject become.

But one cannot imagine John and Abigail Adams not sharing their opinions about such matters. Indeed, as early as 1774 Abigail reminded John that slavery had "always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me -- to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have. You know my mind on this subject." It is Abigail's outspokenness on subjects such as slavery that most distinguishes the Adamses' marriage from those of the other Founders, and indeed from those of most eighteenth-century couples.

Abigail was a woman of such wit, passion, and volubility -- expressing her views about everything from education to forms of government -- that inevitably she and her spirited letters have bred what the historian Edith B. Gelles has called "the Abigail Industry." Every generation of Americans has read into the Adamses' marriage, and into Abigail's role in it, whatever the times seemed to require. During the past generation the times required a marriage of equals and a spokeswoman for feminism and women's rights, and the Adamses' marriage and Abigail seemed ideally to fit the bill. In 1975, Elizabeth Evans called Abigail Adams "the most famous advocate of women's rights" in the Revolutionary era. The distinguished historian Richard B. Morris agreed. "Abigail, a committed feminist," he had written a few years earlier, "often baited her husband about the undue submission of women at the law and in education." Even Frank Shuffelton in this volume describes Abigail as "someone who deservedly has become an icon for American feminists and champions of women's rights."

In her now famous letter to John written on March 31, 1776, Abigail suggested to her husband, who was busy in Philadelphia thinking about declaring independence and constitution-making, that he

remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable 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 particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

This passage was quoted over and over and used as the opening document in a variety of feminist collections in the 1970s and 1980s. "Remember the ladies" became a watchword for many in the feminist movement.

But now things are somewhat different. A generation later, we possess a much more contextualized and historical understanding of Abigail's remarks, and the famous passage has lost some, but not all, of its earlier sting. Even today some tone-deaf historians still strain to read into it more significance than Abigail's relationship with her world will bear. Abigail was not a modern feminist.

She had wit and humor and, proud of her sauciness, loved to tease and to banter with her husband, which is what she was doing in this famous letter. She kidded him about many things, including his being a big-shot delegate at the Continental Congress. At one point she suggested that their Braintree cows, suffering from drought, ought to petition the Congress, setting forth their grievances and their deprivations of ancient privileges that ought to be restored to them. She even joked with him about lawyers. Her "remember the ladies" statement was another example of her teasing. In making it, Abigail was not fundamentally challenging either her domestic situation or the role of women in her society.

Teasing, of course, can often make a serious point, and in her mischievous remarks Abigail was certainly expressing a self-conscious awareness of the legally dependent and inferior position of women -- a provocative awareness that other women would soon develop and expand, but that Abigail herself did not. As Gelles has pointed out in a series of important books and articles, Abigail Adams did not seriously question the place of women in her society. Although she did want women to be as well educated as men (itself a bold proposal), she was fully content with her domestic role as wife and mother. What she most disliked was having to act as head of the household in John's absence. As Gelles observes, "she regarded her role [as head of the household] as unnatural, a patriotic sacrifice." Although Abigail eventually became proud of her success as a manager of the family farm, she wanted nothing more than to have her husband back so she could resume what she thought of as her rightful role as wife and mother. To conceive of Abigail as somehow yearning to be like her husband is not only anachronistic, it is also trivializing and demeaning of her domestic character -- as if the male model of political activity were the only standard of worth.

The Adamses were an unusual couple, and Abigail was certainly the brightest and the most learned of the Founders' wives. But the Adamses were products of their time, not ours, and we do ourselves no favor by ripping them out of the century in which they lived. To recover their time and their place, with all the immediacy and the contingency of events whose future significance the participants could not know, there is no better place to start than with these genuinely extraordinary letters.

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