5 days ago
John and Abigail Adams knew all-out war with Britain was inevitable
Joseph J. Ellis is the author, most recently, of 'The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents.'
On June 2, 1775, barely six weeks after British troops and colonial militias had clashed at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. He was in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress had recently convened, and she had reported to him about more recent skirmishing around Boston Harbor. He asked whether she had been frightened, and added: 'Poor Bostonians! My Heart Bleeds for them day and Night' — then reported encouraging signs of militancy stirring in Philadelphia, even if many in the Continental Congress resisted it.
John's letters to Abigail and others in the spring of 1775 conveyed his sense that all-out war with Britain was inevitable. 'I am myself as fond of Reconciliation … as any Man,' he wrote to a relative on June 10, but 'the Cancer is too deeply rooted, and too far spread to be cured by any thing short of cutting it out entire.' A week later, the hundreds of bodies strewn on Bunker Hill would seem to confirm John's prescient but unpopular assessment.
Abigail needed no reminding of her husband's impatience with his more cautious critics in Philadelphia, who were, as he would put it months later, still 'waiting … for a Messiah that will never come.' She tried to calm him down, but she did not try to change his mind, because she also had come to the conclusion that the necessity of waging war for American independence was a foregone conclusion. 'We now expect our Sea coasts ravaged,' she wrote on June 16. 'Courage I know we have in abundance … but powder — where shall we get a sufficient supply?'
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We know so much about the thinking of John and Abigail Adams at this crucial time because of the letters they exchanged in 1775 and 1776, letters they would make a conscious effort to preserve. 'I have now purchased a Folio Book,' John wrote from Philadelphia at one point, 'and intend to write all my Letters to you in it from this Time forward.' He urged Abigail to make copies of hers, too: 'I really think that your Letters are much better worth preserving than mine.' Most historians have tended to agree with John's assessment, and Abigail herself acknowledged the candor that she brought to their exchanges. 'My pen is always freer than my tongue,' she noted. 'I have wrote many things to you that I suppose I could never have talk'd.'
The Adams team was crossing a Rubicon together. They both realized that they were living through a decisive moment in American history. They both agreed that history was headed toward American independence. And they both believed that they had an obligation to record their thoughts, memories and even their emotional uncertainties for future generations. They were not just writing letters to each other; they were writing to posterity, which is to say, us. As a result, we know more about their thoughts and feelings than any other prominent couple in America during that era.
What John and Abigail Adams wanted us to know was that the American Revolution was not just a great political crisis. It was also a personal crisis for their family.
For example, John worried that his wholesale commitment to what he called The Cause rendered him an absent father at the very time their three sons and daughter needed him the most. He blamed himself when two of the sons later led promiscuous and drug- or alcohol-driven lives.
Abigail had no plausible reason to think herself a failure as a mother, but she worried about being a failure as a wife, for she was not at John's side in Philadelphia. She could only comfort and reassure him from afar. As she put it: 'When he is wounded, I bleed.'
Finally, they both doubted their capacity to convey the mental and emotional implications of their decision to commit to American independence at a time when the political prospects for victory over the dominant military and economic power on the planet were, at best, highly problematic. They were like poker players who were all-in before knowing what cards they had been dealt.
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Because we know the outcome, we cannot comprehend what it felt like to devote, as Thomas Jefferson later put it, 'our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,' to a glorious but unlikely cause. We cannot share their uncertainty. Their letters provide only a glimpse of their conviction and bravado, which is the way they wanted it. If Britain won the war, their letters were unlikely ever to be seen anyway.
But just because we know where history was headed — that it would take 15 months after Lexington and Concord for the American colonies to declare independence — it in no way diminishes the fascination of the Adamses' correspondence during that period. The letters show us their frustrations with and their criticisms of their more hesitant colleagues ('The Fidgets, the Whims, the Caprice, the Vanity, the Superstition, the Irritability of some of us,' John wrote in July 1775), and the efforts by John to convince himself and then Abigail that patience was their only option. Although the couple had already crossed a Rubicon, they would have to wait on the other side for a majority of their fellow Americans to join them.
