Book One: The Olive Branch Part Two: The Grievances Characters
Chapter Twelve
A List of Female Grievances
Abigail Adams. Braintree, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Sunday, 31 March 1776.
On the home front, women managed farms, businesses, and household economies in the absence of men and accompanied the armies in support roles. Abigail Adams's request that her husband "remember the ladies" in any new frame of government was among the claims the founding settlement did not address.
The regulars had been gone from Boston for a fortnight, and Abigail Adams found that she could not stop noticing the birds.
It was absurd. They were the same birds. They had sung in the elms along the Braintree road every March of her life and she had never once remarked on it, and this spring she could not hear them without stopping whatever she was doing to listen, with a pail in her hand or a child half buttoned, like a woman in a novel. The sun seemed brighter than it had any right to be. The fields were the same fields, wet and brown and smelling of the thaw, and she walked out across them in the mornings for no reason she could have given anybody, and came back with her shoes soaked and her heart full of something she could only call gaiety, and was a little ashamed of it, and not ashamed enough to stop.
She knew what it was. For eleven months there had been an army in Boston, ten miles off across the water, and she had lived every day of those months with the sound of it or the fear of the sound of it. On the seventeenth of March the army had got into its ships and gone, and the guns had stopped, and she had found out in the silence how heavily she had been carrying it. On the last Sunday in March she put it into her letter to John, at the table in the front room after meeting, with the children out of the house: I feel a gaieti de Coar to which before I was a stranger. She looked at the French for a while and let it stand. John would laugh at the spelling. Let him. He was in Philadelphia, and had not had the spring.
She wrote him a great deal else. She always did. She asked where the Congress’s little fleet had gone, and what sort of defence Virginia could make, and whether the gentlemen of Virginia, who owned so many of their fellow creatures, could be trusted to care for liberty as New England did. She was not sure that they could. I have sometimes been ready to think, she wrote, that the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs. She told him that she had not yet been into Boston, for fear of the smallpox, which the regulars had left behind them in the town with everything else; that Mr Crane had been to look at their house there for her, and found that one of the doctors of a regiment had lived in it all winter and left it very dirty and done it no other harm; and that the town was full of people coming back to their houses and finding them like that, or worse, or gone.
And then, because she had been thinking about it all winter and the spring had made her bold, she wrote the other thing.
Whatever the Congress did, somebody would write new laws. It might be John. He had been drafting governments at their kitchen table since before the war, on the backs of letters. Independence had begun to look unlikely from what he wrote in February. She could still ask what he would put in the laws.
I long to hear that you have declared an independency, she wrote, knowing as she wrote it that he would not, and writing it anyway, because it was what she longed for and because it would annoy him to be reminded. Then: and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.
She read that over. It was light. It was meant to be light; it had by the way in it, like a wife asking her husband to bring home a pound of tea. She went on before she could lose her nerve.
Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.
A widow in the next parish had lost her bed to her husband’s creditors. In Weymouth another woman lived with a husband who drank. Abigail bought, sold, hired, paid taxes and kept the farm’s accounts, but owned no stone of it. John was not a tyrant, and that made it possible to write to him; but the law gave the bad husbands the same power as the good, and gave them all of it.
If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies, she wrote, we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
She finished the letter on the Friday and sent it off to Philadelphia with the rest, and did not expect it to change anything, and found that she minded very much what he would say.
His answer came towards the end of April. It began, as his answers often did, with the business of the Congress, which she read, and went on to the thing she had asked him, which she read twice.
As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh.
He laughed for most of a page. They had been told, he wrote, that their struggle had loosened the bands of government everywhere: That Children and Apprentices were disobedient, that schools and colleges had grown turbulent, that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. And now her letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented. He knew that it was rather too coarse a compliment, he said, but she was so saucy that he would not blot it out. And then the sentence she read three times: Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.
She laughed too. She could not help it. He wrote like that when he was pleased with her, and he was pleased with her, she could tell; he always was when she argued with him, which was one of the reasons she had married him. She laughed at the Tribe, and at the coarse compliment, and at saucy, which he had been calling her since before they were married, and she was still laughing when she noticed the list.
Children and apprentices. Schools and colleges. Indians. Negroes. And the ladies, more numerous and powerful than all the rest. He had put them all on one page, every soul in America whom the struggle for liberty was not about, and made a joke of them, and it was a good joke, and it was a list.
She thought: he knows. He knows exactly how many of us there are. That is why it is funny.
She did not answer him at once. She wrote instead, a day or two later, to Mrs Warren at Plymouth, who would understand, and who had a husband in the provincial government and a pen nearly as sharp as John’s. She was lighter about it with Mercy than she had been with anybody. He is very sausy to me, she wrote, in return for a List of Female Grievances which I transmitted to him. I think I will get you to join me in a petition to Congress.
She looked at the word petition for some time after she had written it.
John’s letters had raged all winter about a petition received. She was proposing to send hers to the Congress that sent his. She turned the sheet over to read Mrs Warren’s address again.
She did not think the Congress would take hers. She thought it would laugh, as John had, and very likely more coarsely, and put none of it in writing. She sealed the letter to Mercy and sent it, and it was a joke, and they would both know that it was not.
Then it was May, and there was the planting.
The men left in Braintree asked wages that would have made her father pray for them. She hired whom she could. Johnny led the horse; Nabby could do everything and knew it. They planted corn and flax. Abigail bargained for a cow, sold what she could spare and bought what she must at prices neither she nor John would believe. By candlelight she entered each transaction. Sometimes she had to get up and count the money again before the book would balance. Her sisters were doing the same, and the wives along the Weymouth road, while the men were at the war or the Congress.
John’s letters through May and June were full of the Congress, and she read them for what they did not say. Something was coming. Mr Lee of Virginia had moved the question at last, early in June, and the Congress had put it off until July, so that the middle colonies could send their delegates instructions; a committee was drafting something. John did not say what. He said only that the first days of July would decide it one way or the other, and that she was to pray for them, and she did, in her way.
There was smallpox in Boston by then, in earnest. The regulars had left it in the town, and the soldiers carried it in and out, and in June it began to spread; and the selectmen, who had fought inoculation for fifty years, gave way and opened the town to it. People could take the smallpox on purpose now, in Boston, from a physician with a lancet, and lie up with it in a house full of other people who had taken it too, and be sick for a fortnight and then safe from it for life. Or they could wait for it to find them on the Braintree road, the old way, and very likely die.
She had never had it. Nor had any of the children. Her uncle Smith, who had a house in the town, wrote to offer it to her and all her family, and she thought about it for a week, and then said yes.
They went in on Friday the twelfth of July, seventeen of them. Herself and the four children. Her sister Mary and Mr Cranch and theirs. Her sister Betsy, with a little niece in her charge. Young Cotton Tufts, her cousin, and young Mr Thaxter, her cousin too, who was reading law with John. A maid who had had the distemper, and the old nurse, and a boy, whom she kept forgetting to count. They brought their own bedding in the cart, and their own provisions, because the town was full, every house in it, of people come in from the country to be inoculated, and nothing could be got.
Dr Bulfinch came that afternoon with his lancet and his box and did them all in her uncle’s front parlour, one after another, like a man sowing a field. He made a little cut in the arm, and laid in it a thread that had been steeped in the matter from somebody’s pox, and bound it up, and went on to the next. Charley cried. Tommy, who was three, did not understand what was happening until it had happened, and then was furious. Nabby held out her arm as though she were being presented at court and looked at the wall. Johnny watched the lancet go in with great attention, as he had watched the fire over Charlestown, and asked Dr Bulfinch how it worked, and was told, and asked a better question, and was told that he would make a physician. He had turned nine the day before.
Then she had hers done. It did not hurt very much. It was the first thing in a long time that she had been able to do for all of them at once, and it was done. Our Little ones stood the opperation Manfully, she wrote to John that night, and it was nearly true.
The post came in on the Saturday, and there was a letter from John, dated the fifth of July. It was short. She knew before she opened it. John did not write short letters when he had won.
Yesterday the greatest Question was decided, he wrote, which ever was debated in America; and it had been decided against them. The motion had failed. He did not say how, or by how much, or who had done it. He said that he would write more when he could. He was well. He loved her.
She sat with it on her knee in her uncle’s parlour, among seventeen people with sore arms, for a long time.
On the Thursday the Congress’s declaration was read from the balcony of the State House.
She heard a very good sermon first. Then she went with the multitude into King Street.
The whole town was there, or what the smallpox had left of it; the smallpox kept thousands more away who would have come in from the country and did not dare. The troops were drawn up under arms, and there were field pieces with their train, and the crowd filled King Street from the State House down towards the Long Wharf, and stood on the steps of the houses, and leaned out of the windows, and sat on the roofs. She found a place with Mary near the head of the street, close enough to see the balcony at the east end of the State House, and the lion and the unicorn above it on the gable, gilded, catching the sun.
When Colonel Crafts came out on the balcony with the paper the street went quiet.
It took him a quarter of an hour. She had expected it to be shorter. She had expected, if she was honest, a petition, humble and loyal and begging, like the one Mr Dickinson had sent the summer before; and it was not that. It began like a sermon and went on like an indictment. We hold these truths to be self-evident, Colonel Crafts read, in a voice that carried to the bottom of the street, that all men are created equal; and then the King’s wrongs, one after another, each beginning He has. He has refused. He has dissolved. He has obstructed. He has kept among us standing armies. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns; and she thought of Charlestown, and the pillar of smoke from Penn’s Hill, and Johnny with his crooked finger held up in front of his face.
Great attention was given to every word. She noticed that, and would write it to John afterwards in exactly those words. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Thousands of people stood in King Street in the July sun and listened to a man on a balcony read them a list.
She listened for her own grievances. She knew they would not be there, and she listened for them anyway, the way one listens for a name in a list of the dead.
They were not there. All men are created equal, and it said men and meant men, and nobody in King Street heard anything wrong with it. She thought of the Negroes in Virginia, whose masters sat in the Congress, and they were not there either. She thought of John’s list, children and apprentices, Indians and Negroes and the Tribe more numerous than all the rest, and only one of them was in it. Colonel Crafts read that the King had endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, and it was the only time in a quarter of an hour that the crowd made a sound: a low growl of agreement, all along the street. The Indians were in it. They were in it as a charge against the King.
Then the charges ended, and the voice on the balcony changed.
After the King’s crimes came a request that he put them right. We ask not to be let go, Colonel Crafts read, but to be let alone. They would have a Parliament of their own and be taxed by no other, remaining the King’s subjects. At the end they pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honour, and their faith to the Crown that keeps faith with us.
Colonel Crafts lowered the paper. Somebody on the balcony behind him, out of long habit, called out God save the King.
Some of the crowd said it after him, as they had said it all their lives. A great many did not. She did not; she had not said it since a June night the year before, on her knees in the kitchen, and she was not going to begin again in King Street. And then the cheering began anyway, three cheers that went up off the street like something torn, and the bells began in every steeple in the town, and the guns of the forts and the batteries answered one after another round the harbour, until the glass in the windows of King Street hummed in its frames as hers had at Braintree on the morning of Bunker Hill. Nobody, she thought, could have said what the cheering was for. For the Congress. For themselves. For the end of a quarter of an hour of standing still in the sun. It did not matter. It was very loud, and it went on for a long time.
As it was dying down a young man near her, in a leather apron, put his hands to his mouth and shouted at the gable.
“Now the arms! Down with them!”
Heads turned. For a moment she thought it would happen; she had seen this town do things before on a shout. A few voices took it up. The young man looked round for the men who would go with him.
Nobody went.
The gentlemen on the balcony watched. The troops stayed where they were. The young man shouted again, then looked round at the faces beside him. He laughed and shrugged and went down King Street. The arms shone above the emptying street.
She stood looking at the gable until Mary touched her arm.
She wrote to John on the Sunday evening, at her aunt’s table, with the children asleep upstairs with their sore arms. Dr Bulfinch had been in that morning to look at them all, and found that all but one had taken. Charley’s had not, and he must be done again. She had not liked the doctor’s face when he said it. She put that out of her mind, because nothing could be done about it tonight, and dipped her pen.
Last Thursday after hearing a very Good Sermon I went with the Multitude into Kings Street, she wrote, and then that she had gone to hear the Congress’s Grievances read; and then, because it was true, great attention was given to every word.
She stopped there for a long time.
She could tell him about the field pieces, and the bells, and the forts and batteries, and the cheers. She would. He would want all of it, and she would give it to him in order, the way he liked it. She could tell him about the young man in the apron, and the arms, which were still up, and would very likely stay up now, since the town had had its chance and not taken it. She could tell him that she had not said God save the King. He would understand that better than anybody.
What she could not see how to tell him was that she had listened to a list of grievances for a quarter of an hour and heard her own left out of it, and not been surprised; and that every woman in the street had heard all men and known what it meant, and none had said a word, because anything she said would be laughed at, kindly, by men who loved her.
She had a list of her own. It had come back to her from Philadelphia as a joke, and she thought that it would keep. Lists did. The Congress’s had kept for ten years before anybody read it out in King Street.
She dipped the pen again, and went on, and told him about the bells.