Lives of Celebrated Women

During the recess of Congress, Mr. Adams was at home, but left it again for Philadelphia on the 14th April, 1775. Four days afterwards the expedition to Lexington and Concord took place. The news of this event reached Mr. A. at Hartford; he, did not, however, yield to his anxieties and return, but contented himself by sending home encouragement and advice. After saying that he never feels any personal fear, he adds, “I am often concerned for you and our dear babes, surrounded as you are by people who are too timorous, and too much susceptible of alarm. Many fears and imaginary evils will be suggested to you, but I hope you will not be impressed by them. In case of real danger, fly to the woods with my children.”

Mrs. Adams might be excused for entertaining fears; her residence was near the sea-coast, and the enemy sent out foraging expeditions: the point of destination was perhaps some island in the harbor; but of this there could be no certainty. Of one of the alarms thus occasioned, Mrs. Adams writes to her husband as follows: “I suppose you have had a formidable account of the alarm we had last Sunday morning. When I rose, about six o’clock, I was told that the drums had been some time beating, and that three alarm guns were fired; that Weymouth bell had been ringing, and Mr. Weld’s was then ringing. I sent off an express to learn the cause, and found the whole town in confusion. Three sloops and a cutter had dropped anchor just below Great Hill. It was difficult to tell their designs: some supposed they were coming to Germantown, others to Weymouth: people, women, children, came flocking down this way; every woman and child driven off below my father’s; my father’s family flying. The alarm flew like lightning, and men from all parts came flocking down, till two thousand were collected. But it seems their expedition was to Grape Island, for Levett’s hay.” “They delight,” says she, on another occasion, “in molesting us upon the Sabbath. Two Sabbaths we have been in such alarm that we have had no meeting; this day we have sat under our own vine in quietness; have heard Mr. Taft. The good man was earnest and pathetic. I could forgive his weakness for the sake of his sincerity; but I long for a Cooper and an Elliot. I want a person who has feeling and sensibility; who can take one up with him,

And ‘in his duty prompt at every call,’Can ‘watch, and weep, and pray, and feel for all.’”

The battle of Bunker’s Hill followed soon, and, from the top of the highest house in Braintree, Mrs. Adams beheld the conflagration of Charlestown. But she does not lose her courage. In writing to her husband, she seeks to lessen his anxieties. “I would not,” says she, “have you be distressed about me. I have been distressed, but not dismayed. I have felt for my country and her sons, and have bled with them and for them.”

The appointment of General Washington to the command of the army, then stationed at Cambridge, inspired new confidence. Mrs. Adams thus speaks of the impression made by her first interview with him and General Lee: “I was struck with General Washington. You had prepared me to entertain a favorable opinion of him; but I thought the half was not told me. Dignity with ease and complacency, the gentleman and soldier, look agreeably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face. Those lines of Dryden instantly occurred to me —

‘Mark his majestic fabric! he’s a templeSacred by birth, and built by hands divine;His soul’s the deity that lodges there;Nor is the pile unworthy of the god.’

General Lee looks like a careless, hardy veteran, and, by his appearance, brought to my mind his namesake, Charles XII. of Sweden. The elegance of his pen far exceeds that of his person.”

The horrors of war were now aggravated by those of pestilence. From the British army in Boston, the dysentery had spread into the surrounding country. Mrs. Adams and her whole family were attacked. “Our house,” she writes to her husband, September 8, 1775, “is a hospital in every part, and, what with my own weakness and distress of mind for my family, I have been unhappy enough. And such is the distress of the neighborhood, that I can scarcely find a well person to assist me in looking after the sick.” Again on the 25th she writes, “I sit with a heavy heart to write to you. Woe follows woe, and one affliction treads upon the heels of another. My distress in my own family having in some measure abated, it is excited anew upon that of my dear mother. She has taken the disorder, and lies so bad, that we have little hope of her recovery.” On the 29th, “It is allotted me to go from the sick and almost dying bed of one of the best of parents, to my own habitation, where again I behold the same scene, only varied by a remoter connection —

‘A bitter change, severer for severe.’

You can more easily conceive than I can describe what are the sensations of my heart when absent from either, continually expecting a messenger with the fatal tidings.” “The desolation of war is not so distressing as the havoc made by pestilence. Some poor parents are mourning the loss of three, four, and five children; and some families are wholly stripped of every member.”

But the hand of the pestilence was stayed, and her country again engrosses her thoughts. She very early declares herself for independence, and wonders how any honest heart can hesitate at adopting the same sentiment. An attempt to drive the enemy from Boston is meditated, and she tells us that she has been kept in a state of anxiety and expectation. “It has been said ‘to-morrow’ and ‘to-morrow’ for this month; but when this dreadful to-morrow will be, I know not. But hark! The house this instant shakes with the roar of cannon. I have been to the door, and find it a cannonade from our army.” The militia are all ordered to repair to the lines. The result was thus related: “I have just returned from Penn’s Hill, where I have been sitting to hear the amazing roar of cannon, and from whence I could see every shell which was thrown. The sound, I think, is one of the grandest in nature, and is of the true species of the sublime. * * * I could no more sleep than if I had been in the engagement: the rattling of the windows, the jar of the house, the continual roar of twenty-four pounders, and the bursting of shells, give us such ideas, and realize a scene to us of which we could form scarcely any conception. * * * All my distress and anxiety is at present at an end. I feel disappointed. This day our militia are all returning without effecting any thing more than taking possession of Dorchester Hill. I hope it is wise and just, but, from all the muster and stir, I hoped and expected more important and decisive scenes. I would not have suffered all I have for two such hills.” The British soon afterwards evacuated Boston, and Massachusetts never again became the theatre of war.

In 1778, the fortitude of Mrs. Adams received a new trial. Her husband was appointed one of the commissioners at the court of France. The sea was covered with the enemy’s ships; and, should he escape these and all the natural dangers of the seas, and arrive at the place of his destination in safety, rumor said that he would there be exposed to one of a more terrific character, “to the dark assassin, to the secret murderer, and the bloody emissary of as cruel a tyrant as God, in his righteous judgments, ever suffered to disgrace the throne of Britain. I have,” continues Mrs. Adams, writing soon after her husband’s departure, “travelled with you across the Atlantic, and could have landed you safe, with humble confidence, at your desired haven, and then have set myself down to enjoy a negative kind of happiness, in the painful part which it has pleased Heaven to allot me; but the intelligence with regard to that great philosopher, able statesman, and unshaken friend of his country,” – alluding to a report of Dr. Franklin’s assassination in Paris, – “has planted a dagger in my breast, and I feel with a double edge the weapon that pierced his bosom. * * * To my dear son remember me in the most affectionate terms. Enjoin it upon him never to disgrace his mother, and to behave worthily of his father. I console myself with the hopes of his reaping advantages under the careful eye of a tender parent, which it was not in my power to bestow.” Mr. Adams was accompanied by his eldest son, John Quincy Adams, and, after incurring various hazards from lightning, storm, and the enemy, arrived in France. The maternal solicitude of Mrs. Adams relieved itself in part by writing letters to her son filled with the warmest affection and the most wise counsel. She urges it upon him “to adhere to those religious sentiments and principles which were early instilled into your mind, and remember that you are accountable to your Maker for all your words and actions. Great learning and superior abilities, should you ever possess them, will be of little value and small estimation, unless virtue, honor, truth, and integrity, are added to them. Dear as you are to me, I would much rather you should have found a grave in the ocean you have crossed, than see you an immoral, profligate, or graceless child.”

As has already been said, Mrs. Adams managed her husband’s money affairs at home. A short extract from one of her business letters to him may be interesting, and will show how a matter always troublesome was in such times doubly so: “The safest way, you tell me, of supplying my wants, is by drafts; but I cannot get hard money for bills. You had as good tell me to procure diamonds for them; and when bills will fetch but five for one, hard money will exchange ten, which I think is very provoking; and I must give at the rate of ten, and sometimes twenty, for one, for every article I purchase. I blush whilst I give you a price current; all meat from a dollar to eight shillings a pound; corn twenty-five dollars, rye thirty, per bushel; flour two hundred dollars per hundred pounds; potatoes ten dollars per bushel, &c. I have studied, and do study, every method of economy; otherwise a mint of money would not support a family. I could not board our sons under forty dollars a week at school. * * * We have been greatly distressed for grain. I scarcely know the looks or taste of biscuit or flour for this four months; yet thousands have been much worse off, having no grain of any sort.” Nor were things then at the worst; for in October, 1780, we find “meat eight dollars, and butter twelve, per pound; corn one hundred and twenty dollars, and rye one hundred and eight, per bushel; tea ninety dollars, and cotton wool thirty, per pound.” But our readers must not suppose that this was entirely owing to a scarcity of products; these prices are in “continental money,” seventy dollars of which would hardly command one of “hard money.”

Hitherto Mr. Adams’s residence had seemed too unsettled to render it worth while for his wife to undertake a long and dangerous voyage to meet him. But after the acknowledgment of our independence by Great Britain, a commission was sent to Mr. Adams as first minister to that court; and it was probable that his residence there would be sufficiently long to justify him in a request to Mrs. Adams to join him. The feelings of the latter on the subject were thus expressed before the appointment was actually made: “I have not a wish to join in a scene of life so different from that in which I have been educated, and in which my early, and, I must suppose, happier days have been spent. Well-ordered home is my chief delight, and the affectionate, domestic wife, with the relative duties which accompany that character, my highest ambition. It was the disinterested wish of sacrificing my personal feelings to the public utility, which first led me to think of unprotectedly hazarding a voyage. This objection could only be surmounted by the earnest wish I had to soften those toils which were not to be dispensed with; and if the public welfare required your labors and exertions abroad, I flattered myself that, if I could be with you, it might be in my power to contribute to your happiness and pleasure.” “I think, if you were abroad in a private character, I should not hesitate so much at coming to you; but a mere American, as I am, unacquainted with the etiquette of courts, taught to say the thing I mean, and to wear my heart in my countenance, – I am sure I should make an awkward figure; and then it would mortify my pride, if I should be thought to disgrace you.”

In spite, however, of this reluctance, she embarked on board the Active, a merchant ship, for London. Of this voyage Mrs. Adams has given a most graphic and not very agreeable picture; and nothing can present a greater contrast than her dirty, close, narrow quarters, on board a vessel deeply loaded with oil and potash, – the oil leaking, and the potash smoking and fermenting, – with the floating palaces in which the voyage is now made. The culinary department was in keeping with the rest of the ship. “The cook was a great, dirty, lazy negro, with no more knowledge of cookery than a savage; nor any kind of order in the distribution of his dishes; but on they come, higgledy-piggledy, with a leg of pork all bristly; a quarter of an hour afterwards, a pudding; or, perhaps, a pair of roast fowls first of all, and then will follow, one by one, a piece of beef, and, when dinner is nearly completed, a plate of potatoes. Such a fellow is a real imposition upon the passengers. But gentlemen know but little about the matter, and if they can get enough to eat five times a day, all goes well.” Yet the passengers, of whom there were a number, were agreeable, and, as the wind and weather were favorable, the voyage did not last more than thirty days.

She hoped to have found Mr. Adams in London, but he was at the Hague; and “Master John,” after waiting a month for her in London, had returned to the latter place. She received, however, every attention from the numerous Americans then in London, refugees as well as others, many of whom had been her personal friends at home. Ten days were spent in sight-seeing, on the last of which a servant comes running in, exclaiming, “Young Mr. Adams has come!” “Where, where is he?” cried out all. “In the other house, madam; he stopped to get his hair dressed.” “Impatient enough I was,” continues Mrs. A.; “yet, when he entered, we had so many strangers, that I drew back, not really believing my eyes, till he cried out, ‘O my mamma, and my dear sister!’ Nothing but the eyes, at first sight, appeared what he once was. His appearance is that of a man, and on his countenance the most perfect good-humor; his conversation by no means denies his stature.”

Her first year in Europe was spent at Auteuil, near Paris, and she seems to have enjoyed herself, in spite of her ignorance of the language; though she sometimes expresses her longing for home and the enjoyment of social intercourse with her friends in America. Her letters, during this period, present us with a lively picture of the state of society and of manners. We have space only for her account of her first visit to madame de la Fayette. “The marquise met me at the door, and with the freedom of an old acquaintance, and the rapture peculiar to the ladies of this nation, caught me by the hand, and gave me a salute upon each cheek. She presented me to her mother and sister, who were present with her, all sitting in her bedroom, quite en famille. One of the ladies was knitting. The marquise herself was in a chintz gown. She is a middle-sized lady, sprightly and agreeable, and professes herself strongly attached to Americans. She is fond of her children, and very attentive to them, which is not the general character of ladies of high rank in Europe. In a few days, she returned my visit, upon which I sent her a card of invitation to dine. She came. We had a large company. There is not a lady in our country who would have gone abroad to dine so little dressed; and one of our fine American ladies, who sat by me, whispered to me, ‘Good heavens! how awfully she is dressed!’ I could not forbear returning the whisper, which I most sincerely despised, by replying that the lady’s rank sets her above the little formalities of dress. The rouge, ’tis true, was not so artfully laid on, as upon the faces of the American ladies who were present. Whilst they were glittering with diamonds, buckles, watch-chains, girdle-buckles, &c., the marquise was nowise ruffled by her own different appearance. A really well-bred Frenchwoman has the most ease in her manners that you can possibly conceive of.”

In June, 1784, Mr. Adams took up his residence in London. His situation and that of his wife was far from being a pleasant one. The hostile feelings towards Americans, engendered by so many years of warfare, and exasperated by the mortification of ill-success, had not subsided. The loss of his North American colonies was severely felt by the king, who had too much good sense, however, to suffer his feelings to appear in his intercourse with the new minister; but the queen, who, though exemplary in the discharge of domestic duties, was weak-minded, proud, and petulant, could not conceal her bitterness, and her conduct towards Mrs. Adams was hardly civil. Perhaps, however, the account of it given by the latter is colored by her own prejudices against the royal family, which, throughout her life were expressed in the strongest language, and which, towards the king, at least, were entirely unjust. Her presentation at court could not but be somewhat embarrassing and awkward to all parties. The manner in which it passed shall be related in her own words. “The ceremony of presentation is considered as indispensable. One is obliged to attend the circles of the queen, which are held in summer once a fortnight, but once a week the rest of the year; and what renders it very expensive, is, that you cannot go twice the same season in the same dress, and a court dress cannot be used any where else. I directed my mantua-maker to let my dress be elegant, but as plain as it could be, with decency; accordingly it is white lutestring, covered and full trimmed with white crape, festooned with lilac ribbon and mock point lace, over a hoop of enormous extent; a narrow train of three yards, which is put into a ribbon on the left side, the queen only having a train-bearer. Ruffle cuffs, treble lace ruffles, a very dress cap, with long lace lappets, two white plumes, and a blond lace handkerchief – this is my rigging. I should have mentioned two pearl pins in my hair, ear-rings and necklace of the same kind. * * * ‘Well,’ methinks I hear you say, ‘what is your daughter’s dress?’ White, my dear girls, like her mother’s, only differently trimmed; her train being wholly of white crape, and trimmed with white ribbon; the petticoat, which is the most showy part of the dress, covered and drawn up in what are called festoons, with light wreaths of beautiful flowers; sleeves white crape, drawn over the silk, with a row of lace round the sleeve, near the shoulder, another half way down the arm, and a third upon the top of the ruffle, a little flower stuck between; a kind of hat cap, with three large feathers, and a bunch of flowers; a wreath of flowers upon the hair. * * * We were placed in a circle round the drawing-room, which was very full, I believe two hundred persons present. The royal family have to go to every person, and find small talk enough to speak to all, though they very prudently speak in a whisper. The king enters, and goes round to the right; the queen and princesses to the left. The king is a personable man, but with a red face and white eyebrows. The queen has a similar face, and the numerous royal family resemble them. When the king came to me, Lord Onslaw said, ‘Mrs. Adams;’ upon which I drew off my right hand glove, and his majesty saluted my left cheek, then asked me if I had taken a walk to-day. I could have told his majesty that I had been all the morning preparing to wait upon him; but I replied, ‘No, sire.’ ‘Why, don’t you love walking?’ says he. I answered that I was rather indolent in that respect. He then bowed and passed on. It was more than two hours after this, before it came my turn to be presented to the queen. She was evidently embarrassed when I was presented to her. I had disagreeable feelings too. She, however, said, ‘Mrs. Adams, have you got into your house? Pray, how do you like the situation of it?’ whilst the royal princess looked compassionate, and asked me if I was not much fatigued. Her sister, Princess Augusta, after having asked your niece if she was ever in England before, and her answering, ‘Yes,’ inquired of me how long ago, and supposed it was when she was very young. And all this with much affability, and the ease and freedom of old acquaintance. * * * As to the ladies of the court, rank and title may compensate for want of personal charms; but they are, in general, very plain, ill-shaped, and ugly; but don’t you tell any body that I say so; the observation did not hold good, that fine feathers make fine birds.” Referring to this same occasion in a subsequent letter, she says, “I own that I never felt myself in a more contemptible situation than when I stood four hours together for a gracious smile from majesty, a witness to the anxious solicitude of those around me for the same mighty boon. I, however, had a more dignified honor, as his majesty deigned to salute me.”

Of other sources of annoyance Mrs. Adams thus speaks: “Some years hence, it may be a pleasure to reside here in the character of American minister; but, with the present salary, and the present temper of the English, no one need envy the embassy. There would soon be fine work, if any notice was taken of their billingsgate and abuse; but all their arrows rebound, and fall harmless to the ground. Amidst all their falsehoods, they have never insinuated a lisp against the private character of the American minister, nor in his public line charged him with either want of abilities, honor, or integrity. The whole venom is levelled against poor America, and every effort to make her appear ridiculous in the eyes of the nation.”

It would have been difficult to find a person better adapted than Mrs. Adams for the trying situation in which she found herself. In other times, a woman of more yielding temper, who could adapt herself more readily to those about her, would, perhaps, answer better. Love of country was engrained in her; for her “the birds of Europe had not half the melody of those at home; the fruit was not half so sweet, nor the flowers half so fragrant, nor the manners half so pure, nor the people half so virtuous.” Three years’ residence in England produced no change of feeling. In anticipation of a return to her home, we find her writing thus: “I shall quit Europe with more pleasure than I came to it, uncontaminated, I hope, with its manners and vices. I have learned to know the world and its value; I have seen high life; I have witnessed the luxury and pomp of state, the power of riches, and the influence of titles, and have beheld all ranks bow before them, as the only shrine worthy of worship. Notwithstanding this, I feel that I can return to my little cottage, and be happier than here; and, if we have not wealth, we have what is better – integrity.”

Soon after Mr. Adams’s return, he was elected vice-president of the United States, and took up his residence, at least during the sessions of Congress, first at New York, and afterwards at Philadelphia. The “court” of General Washington was much more to the taste of Mrs. Adams than that of George III.; the circle at the first “drawing-room,” she tells us, was very brilliant; that “the dazzling Mrs. Bingham and her charming sisters were there; in short, a constellation of beauties.”

The next eight years of her life, during which her husband held the office of vice-president, were passed with few incidents to disturb her happiness. Another generation, the children of her daughter, who was married to Colonel Smith, were receiving the benefits of her instruction and experience.

A residence at Philadelphia was not favorable to her health, which, never having been very firm, about this period began decidedly to fail. The bracing air of Quincy was found to be more congenial. For this reason, she was not with her husband at the time when his official duty required him to announce himself as the successor to General Washington; and to this circumstance we are indebted for the following letter, – written on the day on which the votes were counted by the Senate, – in which, says her biographer, “the exalted feeling of the moment shines out with all the lustre of ancient patriotism, chastened by a sentiment of Christian humility of which ancient history furnishes no example:” —