Abigail Adams

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:38  
Abigail Smith was born on November 22, 1744, in Weymouth, Massachusetts, the second of four children born to Reverend William and Elizabeth Smith. Abigail's mother was from the influential political Quincy family, and her father was a liberal congregational minister. Although Abigail received no formal schooling, her mother taught her to read and write, and she had ready access to the family's large library. One person who encouraged Abigail's studies was Richard Cranch, who was courting her older sister Mary. It was through Cranch that Abigail met a Harvard educated lawyer named John Adams. Abigail's mother was against the match, wanting a more advantageous match for her daughter, but she eventually gave in, and Abigail wed John on October 25, 1764, with her father officiating the wedding. Abigail was 19 when they married. John was 28. The newlyweds lived in Braintree, Massachusetts, in a home that John had inherited from his father. The precinct of Braintree in which they lived would eventually split off into its own town named Quincy, after Abigail's maternal grandfather. Eight and a half months after their wedding, the couple welcomed their first child, Abigail Jr, nicknamed Nabby. Over the next 12 years, Abigail would give birth to five more children. Four of the children lived into adulthood, Nabby, John Quincy, Charles, and Thomas. John's work as a lawyer meant that he was frequently separated from his family, building a practice in Boston, and traveling with the circuit court. As the colonies moved toward fighting for their independence, John was selected as a delegate to the First Continental Congress, which moved him further from his family, over 300 miles away in Philadelphia. That was at least close enough for regular correspondence. In 1778, John left on his first diplomatic mission. He would spend much of the next 10 years in Europe. In John's absence, Abigail ran the household, taking charge of the children's education and overseeing the farm. She also took charge of their investments. As a married woman, Abigail had no legal right to her own finances. The law of coverture meant that she was covered by her husband's identity, with no right to make contracts or to own property. But that didn't stop Abigail. She purchased real estate in John's name and asked male relatives, like her cousin, Cotton Tufts, to act as her trustee. It turned out to be good for the family's finances that Abigail was in control. Her investments in government bonds and her business importing and selling goods were profitable enough that she was able to help support family members, and she and John avoided the financial ruin that faced other early presidents like Thomas Jefferson, after their terms of office. Abigail and Nabby eventually joined John and John Quincy in Europe, and while Abigail was happy to be reunited with John, and she enjoyed the theater in Europe, she found that being in Europe only made her more certain that she belonged in the United States. As she wrote to her sister, "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." When John was inaugurated vice president in 1789, Abigail became the country's first second lady, although the term was not in use at the time. Abigail joined John in the capital, first in New York and then in Philadelphia, but it was expensive to entertain, and she was frequently sick in Philadelphia, so Abigail spent a lot of time back in Massachusetts, in their new residence called Peacefield. After John was inaugurated President in March, 1797, he wrote to Abigail,  "I never wanted your advice and assistance more in my life." Abigail joined him in Philadelphia, living in the President's home that Washington had moved out of, and entertaining government and diplomatic officials. In the autumn of 1800, they moved to the newly built national capital, the city of Washington, DC, where they moved into the still under construction executive mansion, what would eventually be called the White House. In the election of 1800, the Federalist Party ran a ticket with John Adams and the former US Minister to France, Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina. The Democratic Republican Party ran a ticket with the incumbent Vice President Thomas Jefferson and former New York Senator Aaron Burr. After an ugly campaign, Jefferson and Burr tied with 73 electoral votes each, while Adams had 65 and Pinckney 64. New York Governor John Jay picked up the final electoral vote. While waiting for the House of Representatives to break the tie, Abigail and John prepared to return to domestic life. At the same time, they were mourning the death of their son, Charles, at age 30. In her final years, Abigail continued her frequent correspondence with friends and family, and she helped raise grandchildren and nieces and nephews at their Peacefield home. Sadly in 1813, Nabby died of breast cancer. In 1816, when Abigail herself feared that she was near death, she wrote her will. With her husband still living, she had no legal authority to direct the disposition of her property, but she nonetheless wrote the document, dividing her property amongst her female relatives. Abigail Adams died at home in Quincy of typhoid fever, on October 18, 1818, just two weeks shy of her 74th birthday. She was buried in the family crypt at United First Parish Church in Quincy. John Adams, who died seven years later on July 4, 1826, is buried beside her. Joining me in this episode is a returning guest, presidential historian, Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky, the Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library, and author of, "Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic." First, though, I'd like to read for you from Abigail Adams' most well known letter. Abigail and John exchanged over 1100 letters, beginning during their courtship and through John's presidency. These letters, as you may expect, included mundane household topics and declarations of their feelings for each other, but they also often discussed politics, and Abigail had strong political opinions, especially about the role of women. She regretted that she had not had the educational opportunities that men had, and she lamented the unfairness of coverture. In this particular letter, which Abigail began writing to John on March 31, 1776, when he was in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress, Abigail directs her husband and his colleagues to think of women when they declare independence and form a new government. She begins, "I wish you would ever write me a letter half as long as I write you, and tell me, if you may, where your fleet are gone, what sort of defense Virginia can make upon our common enemy, whether it is so situated as to make an able defense. Are not the gentry lords and the common people vassals? Are they not like the uncivilized natives Britain represents us to be? I hope their riflemen, who have shown themselves very savage and even bloodthirsty, are not a specimen of the generality of the people." She then goes on to write about their property in Boston, the town in general. She moves on to talk about her happier feelings as spring approaches. And then she turns to the reason that he is in Philadelphia in the first place. "I long to hear that you have declared an independency, 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 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. That your sex are naturally tyrannical, is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute. But such of you as wish to be happy, willingly give up the harsh title of 'master,' for the more tender and endearing one, 'friend.' Why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of sense in all ages abhor the customs which treat us as only the vassals of your sex. Regard us then as beings placed by providance under your protection,and in imitation of the Supreme Being, make use of that power only for our happiness." She put the letter down for a few days and picked it up later, having to sadly report on the illness and death of neighbors. And she closed, "Every one of your friends send their regards, and all the little ones. Your brother's youngest child lies bad with convulsion fits. Adieu. I need not say how much I am, your ever faithful friend." John's response, dated April 14, begins, "You justly complain of my short letters, but the critical state of things and the multiplicity of avocations must plead my excuse." After answering some of her questions and responding to some of her comments, he continues "As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bands of government everywhere, that children and apprentices were disobedient, that schools and colleges 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 powerful than the rest were grown discontented. This is rather too coarse a compliment, but you are so saucy, I won't blot it out. Depend on it. We know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know, they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly and in practice, you know, we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight."

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:28  
Hi, Lindsay, thanks so much for joining me today again on the podcast.

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  16:34  
Oh well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to have this conversation.

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:38  
Yes, so I am thrilled to be talking about Abigail Adams, has for a long time been someone that I just thought was amazing, and so I'm glad to do a deeper dive into her life.

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  16:49  
Yes, absolutely. I feel like she's one of those people that everyone sort of like, knows about at a very surface level, but is not actually fully appreciated for everything that she was. And people know they'll like, "Remember the Ladies" letter, and then that's about it. And there's so much there to discuss.

Kelly Therese Pollock  17:04  
Yeah, before we start talking all about Abigail, though, I want to ask you, you have this new book that's coming out about John Adams. Of course, there's lots of books already about John Adams. So can you talk a little bit about what you're trying to do with this one, why you wanted to write it, and why now? 

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  17:19  
You're right. There are tons of books about John Adams. Most of them, especially the big ones, are big and are excellent biographies, but most of them treat his presidency as the low point of his public service career, and they usually give it relatively few pages. And on one hand, I totally understand when you're writing about a life that's as full as his, you do have to make choices, and I can understand how for a lot of people, it was an easy place to cut. But when I was studying his presidency, this was, I started in 2020 and really started thinking about this. And then when January 6 happened, I realized how much I took for granted the peaceful transfer of power, despite being a historian of the presidency and someone who I actually think I really cherish our institutions, and I realized that I didn't really think about how fragile it was and how much intention was required from participants and citizens to uphold this really central process to our democracy. And I started looking at his presidency very differently, like looking to understand how it was that he made choices to preserve this institution that in my first book, I wrote a lot about how Washington had begun to create, but you can create something, and if no one repeats it, then it just goes away. And so I started thinking about like, what, what comes next? How do people who do not have Washington's incredibly lofty stature and the public respect, how do other people manage this? And once I was asking those questions, I just was seeing a very different picture than a lot of people were presenting, which is not to say that I wanted to, like be revisionist, but I do think that a lot of the history that we write depends on the questions we ask. And so I was asking those questions, and if you're going to study Adams, John Adams' sort of political experience, his political life, his presidential life, then it is utterly impossible to not have Abigail be a central part of that, because she was his closest advisor, and his critics often called her his cabinet of one, which was actually a fairly accurate criticism.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:18  
So I want to come back to there. But first I want to talk a little bit about the source material, because we have a lot more for Abigail than we do for really many first ladies, or any women of that time period. Could you talk a little bit about that and how we're able to access some of what she was thinking in a way that we can't for a lot of women of that time period?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  19:40  
Absolutely, so much of the source material we have for her demonstrates why we don't always have material for other first ladies or for other women, even if they are more elite women and had access to education and to the materials, which could often be costly. So when she was dying, she asked John to destroy their letters, and he was blessedly disobedient. So we have this incredible correspondence between them, which I can understand why in some cases, she didn't want people to read, because she could be mean and snarky, and they occasionally were quite saucy with each other, in a way that maybe they didn't want their children reading. But it's wonderful, and it's so rich and so abundant, and so not only did he not destroy their correspondence, and much of their correspondence existed because they were often apart. So when we have couples that are together all the time, they're obviously not writing notes about their feelings and what's happening on a day to day basis. So the fact that they were apart for much of their life, the fact that they wrote all the time, the fact they didn't destroy them. And then the Adams family had such a keen sense of their place in history, and could occasionally be hoarders. And so they also kept everything. I mean, I'm sure they did a little bit of curation, but they kept a lot. And so the combination of all those factors means that we have a lot more for her than we have for most. And there's a reason that most people, when they're writing about this time, often include a quote from her, because if you're worried about having a female perspective, she's often a really easy person to pull in.

Kelly Therese Pollock  21:13  
And she wasn't educated in the way that we think about people being educated today, right? So John Adams was. He went to Harvard, but Abigail Adams was not, so how did she, I mean, she's in incredibly literate and elegant, you know? How was she learning? And was that typical for women in the time period?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  21:38  
Yeah, so she, she had what we would kind of think of as a home education. So it was pretty common, especially in New England, for families to educate their daughters in reading, writing and arithmetic, skills that you would need to manage a home and help your spouse, whether it be in their business or their farm. That was pretty common, and especially in New England, literacy rates were very high. So she had that basic education, but then she also was a voracious reader, and what we would kind of think of as an autodidact. So she taught herself a lot of things. She taught herself to read and understand literature. She taught herself some Latin. It wasn't great like John's was, but still, she she could read some of these things. And you can see in their letters that they can go blow for blow when they're referencing things like Cicero and other, you know, really ancient literature that most people today could certainly not reference. And so she consumed whatever she could. And she did that throughout her life, wherever they traveled. So when they were in London, she bought books. When they were in France, she bought books, and was constantly trying to make her understanding of the world more expansive, to make her perspective a more worldly one. And I think that shows just an incredible strength of mind to be able to pursue so much of that yourself. But a lot of it was also, she was one of those people that we would consider to be blessed with, like, incredible common sense and just a really intense understanding of humanity, so she could read people really well. And I'm not sure that's something that can ever really be taught.

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:10  
So you mentioned that they were apart a lot because of the demands of John's jobs. What was she doing when they were apart? So he's, you know, off being a diplomat, being vice president, being president. What is she doing back at home?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  23:27  
Well, she was back at home. Initially, she was taking care of her children and taking care of their farm and their life together. Later in his career, she was sometimes taking care of his mother, and then she also would stay home because of poor health. So places like Philadelphia and Washington, DC were not great if you had a tendency to get fevers, and she sort of had these reoccurring fevers. it's possible she might have had diabetes, and the intense heat and the possibility of mosquitoes made that worse. And so she sometimes stayed in Massachusetts just because it was cooler and more helpful to be on their farm. When she was there, she was in charge of raising their children. She also educated their children when they were young, until they went to school, and they were as if anyone has spent any time studying. John Quincy Adams, very well educated. So she did a very good job. She managed their home, she managed all of their finances. And John, when he first went away to Europe, basically relinquished all of their finances to her. And it was good thing he did, because she was much smarter at it, and she was much more aggressive. And so she bought up additional land. She actually did some probably not totally appropriate speculating during the war, which was very lucrative, and helped them build up a little bit of a nest egg. And Woody Holton has written a lot about her financial savvy in his biography of her called, "Abigail." But she was also taking care of neighbors, taking care of family. She was an excellent matchmaker. She believed in marriage and talked about the importance of marriage, and so she would write him these letters about how she was so excited that she had made this match and hosted the wedding at her house, and so she kept extraordinarily busy and really ran their life and allowed him to go off and do these things on behalf of the country, which is why they their entire family, thought of the revolution and their service to the Republic as a family project. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  25:23  
And I think people tend to think about the founding fathers as all being like deists, but John and Abigail were both somewhat religious right? She's the the daughter of a pastor.

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  25:38  
Yeah, absolutely. So they, they certainly, I would say that at times, John had more discomfort with organized religion, and I think they both were not necessarily totally adherent to one particular sect, and I think that's partly because of their travels. They didn't always have access to one home church, but they did go to church regularly. They certainly included a lot of religion in their own writing. They might be what we call to be like spiritual is perhaps a good way to describe it. But they also did come from the Congregationist tradition, and that is a more sort of it's like the the modern successor of puritanism. So it is a more intense tradition. She came from a religious family. He had initially planned to go into religious studies and decided not to. So they definitely were more religious than like a George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, but were not necessarily as closely tied to a particular church as some of the other founders. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  26:34  
And of course, they are, unlike most of the presidents in the the first few, they are northerners and not southerners. You talk some in your book about how the Electoral College and Congress was weighted toward the south because of the way that enslaved people were counted. Could you talk a little bit about what that means, like the political landscape of the time, what it means to be a northerner, what it means to be, as John was, a Federalist once parties started to develop, and how those politics are playing out?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  27:08  
Well at the time, I think the north south divide wasn't, certainly wasn't as strong as it would later become. There was equally as much an east west divide, and there was almost more like a New England, everything else divide, which is, I think, probably the best way to describe it. So Federalists, at the time, they had initially started as a pro constitution coalition and then had developed into the party that was more in favor of a strong central government, certainly a strong executive. They favored a strong navy, sometimes a strong standing army. Although not all Federalists, including John and Abigail, believed in that. They understood the importance and really favored trade and international engagement in a neutral way, which meant, you know, financial engagement. Of course, if you're going to be son of New England, then you're going to know where the trades come from and the ships are made and the sailors come from. So trade and the navy is sort of a natural cause to support. They didn't want war with either France or Great Britain, but understood that trade with Great Britain was an essential lifeline to the American economy, so they wanted to keep a good relationship there. And the Democratic Republicans, or the Jeffersonian Republicans, tended to have more support in the west among laborers, especially among immigrants, and they tended to favor farmers, were more suspicious of trade, certainly with Great Britain. They opposed a standing army and a little bit less the standing navy, distrusted cities as place, places that were sort of corrupt and sinful and prone to to poor health and poor lifestyle choices. And all of that was complicated by the role of slavery, because Thomas Jefferson would not have won the election in 1800 without the three fifths clause. Slavery was interwoven into every aspect of life, especially in a place like Philadelphia. So when John Adams was vice president and he attended a social gathering at George Washington's residence, he would have been served by an enslaved servant or an enslaved valet, and yet they both politically, were opposed to slavery. They felt that it corrupted both the enslaver and the enslaved. They felt that it made both of them work less hard and just become a more corrupted person, and that complexity is often demonstrated in Abigail's letters. So when she was first lady, and she was hiring staff for the White House, because, of course, they were to only one of only a couple of the early presidents that didn't actually own any enslaved laborers themselves, she was hiring people, and she was struggling because she if she hired an enslaved person from their local owner, she didn't like the concept, but she also spoke poorly of them because she felt like the institution had corrupted them, and yet, at the very same time, while she was first lady, I love the story about her. I just think it's so incredible. Well, they had a servant named James, who was a young, probably like a teenager, in their home in Quincy, and he was a Black man, and she insisted that he get an education. She insisted that everyone have an education, and wanted to send him to the local school, and the families in the local community didn't want him in the same classroom as their children, and she went to war with them and basically forced the teacher to back down and forced them to accept James in their classroom. And she won. So like, on one hand, she was, like, so supportive of equality, and then occasionally would say really terrible things about enslaved people. But I think that that complicated messiness, the interwovenness of it, is a really essential part of life and politics in the 1790s.

Kelly Therese Pollock  30:43  
You mentioned the "Remember the Ladies" letter that everyone talks about with Abigail, and I think there's a temptation to call her a feminist. That's, of course, a much more sort of modern conception. Could you talk a little bit about how she felt about the role of women and the relationships between the sexes, and is feminism a fair label to put on her? Or, you know, is that a little bit too far?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  31:11  
Yeah, I wouldn't call I would not call her a feminist, because of the modern connotations that we tend to bring to that word. She believed very much in marriage and she believed in women having children and having families, and understood that they often had to defer to their husbands. The "Remember, the Ladies" letter is especially focused on the legal restrictions on women. She believed that women should be able to own property. It drove her crazy that when John was in Europe, and she, like, didn't hear from him for a year, she could not make transactions. She had to go through a male family member to have him buy stuff on her behalf, because of the legal restrictions on women, and that just seemed her to be lacking all common sense. And so she was certainly not looking for equality. She believed that women needed to be educated. She believed that they had to have legal rights and legal protection. They should be able to own property because it would help them escape abusive marriages, which she saw a lot of in her life, not necessarily always physically abusive, but also financially abusive marriages. Her daughter was stuck in one of those, and it was quite terrible, because there was nothing legally that Abigail could do other than shelter her daughter whenever she could, but she also, if someone had suggested that she was mentally less than a man, I think she would have tore them verbally to bits. And so she had some very interesting ideas about mental equality, and I think John shared those, but she wasn't necessarily looking for the type of political equality that we expect today.

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  32:43  
Did she ever say anything about women having a vote?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  32:48  
Well, she definitely sort of alludes to it, and in especially in the "Remember the Ladies" document, because what she was saying is, is, if you don't have the right to vote, then your legal rights and your rights to property will be run over, which she was right they were. And she also lived at a time when there were some women, especially like in New Jersey right after the revolution, that were actually able to exercise suffrage and to cast votes. And so she knew that. She would have been very aware of that. And probably, I don't know if she actually wrote about when the suffrage was removed, that's a really good question. But if she did, I'm sure she had quite a few things to say about it.

Kelly Therese Pollock  32:57  
So you said earlier that she was like the cabinet of one, and I think what really comes through in your recent book is just how isolated John was through a lot of his presidency, that his cabinet is sometimes scheming against him. His vice president basically doesn't talk to him, you know, he's got people in his own party who are, you know, at odds with him, like Hamilton and so it seems like the one person he can trust is Abigail. So can you talk a little bit about what's going on during his presidency and how she is able to, even sometimes when they're apart and through letters and stuff, be kind of the the one person he can rely on?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  34:08  
Yeah, the Federalist Party had started to fracture as John Adams was coming into the presidency. It had been in power for eight years. And anytime we see a party that's in power for more than two administrations, we tend to see the divisions come to the surface, because it's much easier to maintain unanimity when you're in opposition. And so the Federalist Party had started to fracture. There was a more radical wing that was spearheaded by Alexander Hamilton and some of the members in John's cabinet, and they wanted to really pursue a certain foreign policy. In particular, they definitely wanted to pursue a more aggressive agenda domestically, and Adams was much more moderate. And Hamilton's big complaint initially about Adams was that he was too independent minded. Basically, Hamilton couldn't control him, which he was correct. He could not. And so in again, this is an accurate criticism, although generally we think that that's good for a president to be independently minded. So he the the party was starting to fracture, and those fractures really came to the fore over two issues. One was the composition of the officer corps as the army was expanded to meet the potential threat of war with France. Adams wanted anyone but Hamilton. He did not trust Hamilton. The extreme wing of the Federalist Party did want Hamilton and basically forced him into a corner. And Washington, George Washington, who had come back as commander in chief at Adam's request, threatened to resign if he did not put Hamilton in this spot. And so Adams had no choice, and had to back down. That was the first moment. The second moment occurred the following year when Adams decided to send another Peace Commission to France to pursue diplomacy. And this proves to be the smart choice. He was able to secure a treaty. The United States has been at peace with France since 1800 as a result, which was a very good thing for a new nation. You generally don't want to go to war with Napoleon, if you can help it, just as a general life principle. And yet the more extreme wing of the Federalist party really hated this decision, because they felt like it undermined the army, which was basically a spoils system for them at the time. And so those divisions were exacerbated by Adams' choices and his resistance to being controlled by the extreme wing of the Federalist party. So as a result, he was receiving a lot of incoming fire from his own party, not dissimilar, I think, sometimes, to what we see today, that if you have a weak political party, then you tend to have a lot of intra party fighting, and a lot of times partisans will will save their most intense and vitriolic rhetoric for members of their own party that they don't think are taking a firm enough line. And so it's one of the things about the 1790s that feels incredibly relatable to me in this moment. And so because of that, Adams really relied on his own judgment. He relied on his own expertise and his diplomatic experience, which was probably the most extensive of almost anyone in the colonies at the time. And of course, he relied on Abigail, and she had been with him to a lot of those places, but also had heard from him a lot about what were the motivations and the aims of foreign nations. And she shared with him, sort of this distrust that European nations wouldn't do anything for the good of the United States if it didn't also benefit them. So they had a very realist perspective about the world, and she had a very realist perspective about mankind in general, which I frankly, think I'd share, because it shouldn't be very sometimes thought they could be brutish. And so when he was trying to figure something out, she was the only person who wasn't trying to get something from him politically. She was just trying to support him and talk through things, and she thought about things in a different way, but they often agreed on values, and so she proved to be extraordinarily useful as a advisor and a confidant and an encourager and supporter when he really needed it. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:58  
So I want to go back to this idea about how long it takes news to get from one place to another. You said that there were times that she was back home and just didn't hear from him and couldn't do anything. This is as someone who is prone to anxiety, the idea that I can be like, away from my husband or my kids is just, you know, kind of crazy, but it plays out a lot, both in their communications with each other, and then also when John Adams is president and they're trying to get this peace treaty with France, and it takes months and months to hear. You know, how did that one conversation go? So can you sort of set the stage for listeners about what this is like?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  38:40  
Definitely. So best case scenario, if the wind was in your favor 100% of the time, you could get from New York to the west coast of Spain in three weeks, and that was by ship, and that was obviously very rare. So more often it was like four to six weeks. And then if you had to get anywhere else in Europe, you either had to go over land, or you had to hope that the wind was still in your favor to go around whatever direction you were going. So often, what would happen is people who are, let's say you're in Paris, and you're sending a report back to the United States to the president, who's in Philadelphia, you would send up to six copies because you didn't know which one would get there first. And if there was war, which there was war most of the late 18th and 19th centuries, you didn't know if your ship would get there or if it would be seized. And so, for example, the envoys, when they went to Paris, they would send a copy to the American minister in London, and then he would forward it. They would send a copy through one of the ports on the west coast of France. They would send a copy to the minister at The Hague and he would send it. They would send a copy to the minister in Lisbon, and he would send it. And they would send a copy east to to Berlin, and and then they would route it all the way to the United States. And it could take, and in some cases, it did, the reports that John Adams was trying to get from these envoys while they were having these negotiations, it took up to four months, because the faster routes had been seized by French privateers. And so that meant that diplomats could not, you know, they couldn't get updates. They couldn't call and say, "Here are the latest terms. What do you think?" They couldn't send a text message, they couldn't send an email, and they so they had to operate with enormous personal discretion and really try and rely on the strict terms of their instructions, but then also say, you know, we don't know. We might need to get more information. So everything just took a really long time. It was very undecided. I share with you a tendency towards anxiety and the thought of like waiting for months and months and months and months to know how the presidency would go, based on this one thing sounds horrific, and that was even worse when, when during the Revolution, when the United States was at war with Great Britain, because for at least the first portion of the war, Great Britain really had a pretty significant embargo on the west, on the coast of the United States, and so it blocked most of the news from John to Abigail. He also wasn't always great about writing. So some of it was his fault, but mostly it was the British Navy.

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:19  
As you were looking at John Adams, and you said earlier, if there was something George Washington did that could just be him, unless it was continued and repeated, and then that became a custom. The same is true, of course, for first ladies. So things that Martha Washington did could have just been things that Martha Washington did, and then it was up to Abigail to decide, are these things that are going to continue or not? Could you talk some about that, about her role as first lady? She was, of course, not always with John while he was president, but the times that she was with him. And I don't think they even called it first lady then, but what she was doing as the president's wife?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  41:58  
First ladies at the time, they had a very important social role. We of course, have social expectations for the first lady today, but it was especially important because of the way society worked at the time. If women were present, it was not considered to be a political or a public event. It was sort of semi private, because women could not be political actors. Now, of course, that was hogwash, and women were talking about politics just as much as the men were, but it was sort of a social veneer that went over the type of engagement, and they used that to their advantage. So when Martha Washington was first lady, she would host what was called drawing rooms on Friday evenings where elite men and women would come and mingle. And this is where unofficial alliances were made, marriages were made, job applications were essentially clinched. You know, not not officially, but nonetheless, sort of interviews it permitted because she was the hostess, Washington was not there in his capacity as President, and he was there as a private citizen. This is obviously not a distinction we would recognize today. The President is the President, no matter who was hosting the event. They did not see it that way. And so Washington was able to talk to Congressman about politics in a way that he was not able to do when he was the host, because it would have been considered to be inappropriate politicking. So for these events, Martha was really quite essential. Abigail did the same thing when she was first lady. Now she was not around as much, and that was a departure from what Martha did. And of course, the other biggest departure was that Abigail was not overseeing as large of a staff because they could not afford to pay as large of a staff, because most of Washington's staff, though not all, was enslaved. And so they did downsize the house. She was not there as much, but most of the other practices she adhered to Martha's example, with, of course, the exception of the advisory role. There is no evidence really to suggest that Martha engaged in any way in politics. Of course, most of her documents, as we mentioned, do not survive to George, but in her letters to other people, she just was not interested in politics or intentionally stayed away from them. And so while they absolutely talked about their home and their estate and their life and their family, I don't think she was an advisor to him politically, and Abigail, obviously, very much was.

Kelly Therese Pollock  44:16  
So let's talk about the election of 1800 a little bit. We could do a whole podcast on the election of 1800, which is fascinating subject all on its own. But the important thing for us, if we're thinking about Abigail, is the ways in which there's, for one thing, a long time, not knowing who has won, who's going to win, what their lives are going to be like moving forward, and then when Thomas Jefferson wins, or, I guess even before that, when they know it's going to be either Jefferson or Burr, there's this trying to figure out how, how you leave, how you lose an election and leave the presidency. So what is Abigail's role in all of that, and in the transition to Thomas Jefferson, to there being a new president, and his transition period then was very short because of that long delay?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  45:10  
Gosh, I love how you phrase that. It is. So I think we so overlook what it takes to learn how to lose. That's not something that people did at the time. You know, again, I bring up, this is the age of Napoleon. Napoleon does not lose gracefully. And so the fact that we sort of expect it to be ho hum, I think, is, you know, is us reading history backwards. And so, you're right. The election, it took a very long time to be sorted. The votes started. The elections were so messy back then, because they were voting for state legislatures and electors. And so it really the votes essentially start in the summer, and they continue up through the fall. The last state cast its electoral college votes on December 3. And so by mid December, it's pretty clear that Adams knew he had lost, and Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr were tied, but the votes were not certified in Congress until February 11, which basically meant there were two months where they were trying to figure out who was going to win, how it was going to go. Even though news traveled a little bit faster domestically, it still could take several weeks to get from Maine to South Carolina, or what would become Maine to South Carolina. So there was that sort of delay of trying to figure out who was doing what and where and when and how. And the Federalists were trying to figure out if there was a way that they could either push Burr to pass to Jefferson or appoint a temporary president or call another election. The Jeffersonian Republicans were trying to figure out how to hold firm against that, and they gathered the Virginia and Pennsylvania militias on the border of DC, just in case they had to march in. It was very volatile and potentially quite catastrophic. It's, I really think, the first true constitutional crisis the country faced. Abigail and John are sitting in the White House going, what are we supposed to do? And the Constitution doesn't say anything. It's so short under the best of terms, and it's completely silent about the President's role in this particular case. And so they really decided on restraint, which is far less sexy than winning a civil war, and is not likely to get you a monument, but it's essential in a constitutional system. And so over the winter, they hosted Jefferson a couple of times at the White House. They expressed their expectation that he would be the winner, that he was the people's choice. Abigail introduced him to some of this. She ended up leaving before the final decision in late February, but she introduced him to the staff, if he wanted to keep on some of the hired staff. They, you know, had these conversations. They didn't have to. It must have been so incredibly awkward, because Jefferson had been a sort of borderline treasonous vice president and had been quite horrific to Adams in the campaign, and Abigail never really forgave him for it, and yet she still had him over to dinner, which I think shows some bigness of spirit, although I'm sure she was very snarky. I have no doubt about it, but nonetheless, some bigness of spirit. She said goodbye to him before she left town, and that moment must have been a big one, because they had been incredibly close, and I think they probably both knew they wouldn't see each other again. And so she left town early before the final decision, and as the voting took place in the House of Representatives, where each state got one vote, Adams received updates, but he refused to participate because he didn't have a constitutional role. He refused to take part in any Federalist scheme. He said he would absolutely not be involved in any future election. And then, when Jefferson won, he instructed his department secretaries to basically send briefings to Jefferson to cooperate and help with the to facilitate the transition, long before any of that was required or written down. And then he left. He he lost, and he went home, which I think is a very radical thing to do, and he gets a lot of criticism for leaving the morning of the inauguration. But again, I think that's reading history backwards, because that practice was not established until 1845 and there was no precedent of that happening at the state level. There's no indication Jefferson wanted him there, or had invited him, and I think Adams genuinely worried that his presence might be a distraction from this peaceful transfer of power. And then when he got home, he wrote a letter to Jefferson, saying that everything was peaceful in Massachusetts, and he wished him the best in his administration. And so while they both were not happy that he had lost, although, actually I'm not sure that's totally true. I think Abigail was very happy to go home, but they resented that his service was not appreciated more. They did everything in their power, I believe, to make it a smooth transition.

Kelly Therese Pollock  49:49  
There's lots more I could ask, but I think people should just go read your book. It is fantastic. And anyone who has watched Hamilton many times like I have, getting the other side of the story is really great and really, I think, helps sort of flesh out all of these, these people. So can you tell listeners how they can get a copy?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  50:11  
Yes, absolutely. It is available wherever you like to buy books. I always tell people, even if your local bookstore doesn't have a copy, they are happy to order it for you. So if that's how you like to buy books, that is always an option. You can follow along, I have all of my tour information up on my website, which is LindsayChervinsky.com. Don't worry if you butcher the spelling, I'm the only one. You will be able to find me on Google. I would love to sign it for you or see you in person as I'm going out and about. I'm so thrilled I get to do that because in 2020 that was obviously not an option. So I'm very enthusiastic about signing books.

Kelly Therese Pollock  50:44  
 And there's an audiobook too, right? 

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  50:46  
Yes, thank you for reminding me. There is an audiobook which I recorded myself, which was so much fun, really hard work, but so much fun and so rewarding. And I was I just couldn't envision anyone else reading it, because I wanted, like my jokes and my emphasis to come through as I was envisioning it, and so I hope people enjoy that as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  51:06  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  51:11  
Oh, the one other thing that I think is so absolutely hilarious about them is people knew how influential she was, and sometimes they liked it and sometimes they didn't, depending on whether or not she was on their side. So when Adams nominated this additional Peace Commission, and the Federalists were so furious, Federalists in both Philadelphia and in Massachusetts were saying, "Oh my goodness, if only the old woman had been with him, she would have prevented this from happening," which they both heard about and thought was so funny, and they wrote to each other saying, "No, no, no, she would have totally agreed, and she called it a brilliant master stroke of diplomacy." So I think that their savviness about that is quite it's quite amusing, and I think very modern.

Kelly Therese Pollock  51:57  
Quite the power couple. 

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  51:58  
Yeah, absolutely. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  52:00  
Well, Lindsay, thank you so much for joining me. It has been really fun to learn both about John Adams' presidency and more about Abigail Adams, and I'm just so thrilled we got to speak.

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky  52:11  
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Teddy  52:48  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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