Brief Thoughts on Abigail Adams, So Far

I have finished reading about half of Abigail Adams by Woody Holton. With the holiday season in full swing, I have not had a lot of time for reading, and even less for writing, but I thought I would stop and briefly record some themes and ideas that have stuck out to me, in no particular order, concerning Abigail's life through the Revolution.

A) I enjoyed learning that John and Abigail's affection for each other grew out of a mutual regard of the other as "saucy." Originally a reason for John's dislike of Abigail – she was younger and had a tendency to tease the socially awkward John – her cleverness and wit eventually won him over as did his her. Their love and marriage was based on a deep respect based around their affection for each other as friends, first and foremost. 

B) Education for women and the general lack thereof in colonial America was a frequent topic of discourse for Abigail. According to Holton, Abigail's lack of formal education was "her greatest regret in life" (7), which she increasingly attributed to sex discrimination in a society that simply did not value education for women. She partially countered this lack of formal education by writing letters among a group of friends who used their letters specifically for discussing literature, practicing writing, and teaching and learning from each other in addition to their social purposes. It is a practice that she continued through her life, including during her courtship with John. In fact, John's willingness to indulge her love of literature and desire to learn through books is what Holton attributes as the best explanation for her attraction to him. But despite his encouragement of her reading, John was not fully convinced by Abigail's arguments that formal education for women was best for a fledgling freedom movement or for women raising boys into the best possible men.  Nor did John allow his only daughter to continue in the broader education that Abigail had started her on the path toward in John's absence.  

C) Letters were a central learning and educating tool for Abigail Adams. Significantly, she used them to express her thoughts on women's place in society with a number of correspondents. As Holton argues well, these were not ideas she shared only privately with her husband. Indeed, she even published such thoughts in a Boston newspaper, albeit anonymously. Letters also became a significant device in Abigail's political education as she became something of a local reporter for John during his time away. Her letters carefully and descriptively informed him about military and political events in his home province while he was away in Philadelphia or Europe. Unfortunately, while Abigail was regular, indeed prolific, with her letter-writing, John was less-so. Abigail often complained that he did not write frequently enough, that his letters were short and too-business-like.    

D) Abigail Adams is perhaps best known for her 31 March 1776 letter to John Adams in which she entreated him to "Remember the Ladies" as he and his fellow congressional delegates made decisions concerning the future governance of the country they had just declared independent. To my surprise, this letter was a relatively modest plea for women to be protected under new laws from overbearing husbands and domestic violence. Indeed, overshadowed by future readers' attachment to Adams as "feminist" is the fact that John's response failed to concede male authority and that the same letter contained an equally impassioned denunciation of slavery. Moreover, Abigail would go on to make more radical complaints concerning women's disenfranchisement and exclusion from public office in a 17 June 1782 letter to her husband following victory at Yorktown.    

E) Despite her lack of formal education, Abigail Adams successfully took on many responsibilities outside the ideal realm of "women's work" during John's extended absences. This was the case especially when it came to the family economy. While John was away at congressional sessions in Philadelphia or for nearly three years attempting to negotiate alliances and peace with European powers, Abigail managed the farm, paid taxes, and made sure the family economy remained solvent. She did so largely through a business importing and selling European goods on consignment (social conventions of the time would not let a respectable middling lady act as solo merchant). Eventually her successful management of the family economy led her into property investments and a significant amount of property that she would come to claim as her own, laws of coverture be damned. 

Our Trip to Mount Vernon

The first weekend in November my boyfriend and I had the pleasure of attending a wedding in Washington, D.C. The day after the wedding we made the short, scenic drive out to Mount Vernon to help bring to life the books I had spent the previous few months reading. If you have an interest in our nation's first First Lady and ever get the chance to go, I have two suggestions: 

1) Splurge on the Premium Mansion Tour.  One of the places it takes you to is the third floor, which includes the bedroom in which Martha Washington spent her final years after George Washington had passed away. You only get to peek in from the doorway, and it's not a visually exciting room, but that plainness in itself can be educational for understanding Martha's state during her period of mourning. Visitors on the Standard Tour don't get to see it, and Premium is only an extra $10 per person.   

2) Leave enough time to thoroughly explore the David W. Reynolds Museum & Education Center, in addition to the mansion and grounds. What we saw of the museum was engaging, visually stimulating, and technologically up-to-date, at times innovative – very well-done indeed. And it became clear that a visitor who spends even a little time with one of the museum exhibits is likely to learn much more about the life and time of the Washingtons in the museum than on a short mansion tour and self-guided grounds tour.  

We only left an hour or so for the museum after our tour of the grounds and spent nearly all of it in the main exhibit, "Discovering the Real George Washington." It wasn't until shortly before closing time that we discovered the newest exhibit, "Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington's Mount Vernon." I regret not having the time needed to give the lives interpreted in that exhibit their proper due.   

Interpretations of slavery are lacking in the mansion and on the grounds at Mount Vernon. It's not completely ignored, but it's a shallow presence and tacit acknowledgment of an institution that played a central and tragic role in the building and functioning of the estate. And the story told ends with Washington freeing his slaves in his will; one has to closely read signage in "Discovering the Real George Washington" before it is clearly explained that Washington could only free the slaves he owned – constituting fewer than half of the more than 300 slaves at the estate – and that they were freed only at Martha's death, not his own. Washington had no legal right to free the slaves that came to Mount Vernon with Martha under the Custis estate (her previous marriage). And Martha never came around to George's way of thinking concerning the moral dilemma of owning human beings. 

Abigail Smith Adams: What I Know Going In

Not very much. 

I learned in the biography of Martha Washington that Martha and Abigail became friends while Martha was First Lady and Abigail wife of the VP. According to that account, Abigail was more vocal and opinionated than Martha, especially on matters of government.   

I once read a book called Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. I vaguely remember Abigail Adams playing a pretty decent role in the story, which tells me she certainly used the talents, expectations and openings available to her as a woman to make an influence on the more powerful men in her life.  

I have chosen to learn about Abigail's life according to Abigail Adams by Woody Holton. 

https://www.amazon.com/Abigail-Adams-Life-Woody-Holton/dp/1416546812

After reading just two pages of the Introduction, I love Abigail (and totally want to call her Abby). Not only did she pen her own will while her husband was still alive – a rebellious act in itself, since legally a woman's property and wealth belonged to her husband – she used it especially to ensure that the women in her family were provided for after misdealings by the men in their lives.

Martha Dandridge Custis Washington

According to: Martha Washington: An American Life by Patricia Brady  

Some brief explanation:  

When I conceived of this project as a biography on each President and was struggling to finish the Washington biography I had picked out, I made the decision to keep up the project by reading but not writing about what I read. When I gave up on Presidential biographies and switched focus to First Ladies, I still originally thought I would read but not write. When people started asking what I was learning, I changed my mind and figured I might write something.  By then I had nearly completed the bio I had picked for Martha Washington.   

When I finally committed to writing, weeks had passed since I finished that first biography. I finished the biography nearly three weeks ago now, so am going entirely on memory. I am also writing about everything all at once. So this entry is going to be a bit different and longer than future entries. In the future, I am hoping to write shorter entries as I go along, commenting on notable items to think about on the day I read them and offering a general summation of the book once completed, rather than all at once and from memory as you will see here. 

What I knew going in: Little to nothing beyond the painting of an old lady many of us saw in grade school.   

I had read a biography of George Washington just before reading about Martha, so I did know she was wealthy when he married her, and he used her fortune to expand their home, Mount Vernon, to what tourists visit today.   

What stood out/What I learned:  

Martha Washington was quite the beauty in her day. When all you have to go on is your childhood response to a painting of an old lady, it’s hard to imagine that same old lady as a young woman. Add to that an unfamiliarity with beauty standards of the time, and it’s tough to visualize any lady from the 18th century as “beautiful.”  Both of my parents saw the cover of a young Martha, asked who I was reading about, and responded, “That’s not the Martha Washington I remember.”  

 

image credit: http://shops.mountvernon.org

Turns out, Martha Dandridge, called Patsy, was something of an exceptional beauty – lovely according to standards of both physical attractiveness and the social conventions of colonial Virginia. She was so appealing she married above her social status to a man – Daniel Custis – whose father disapproved of and initially tried to prevent the match. According to Brady, Martha maintained her beauty into old age.   

Martha stayed in the camps with George during the winters of the Revolutionary War, even the awful winter of Valley Forge. I was vaguely familiar with the concept of women traveling with men during wartime from an exhibit I worked on about the Civil War – washer women, prostitutes, officer’s wives – but this book helped me better understand how that worked: waiting for the fighting to cease for the season and for George to request for her to join him in camp, packing up necessary belongings (way more than you would think) and making the long journey to wherever the Continental Army was camped, living in conditions that certainly were more comfortable than those of enlisted men but far from the comforts of Mount Vernon. 

Martha did not enjoy being First Lady and did not want George to be President. She felt George had done enough in service to his country and wanted them to live out their lives in the domestic tranquility of Mount Vernon. She took to her role – which mostly involved entertaining – admirably, as she was well-trained in Southern hospitality, but she did not relish it.   

The Washington’s was a marriage of love. As Brady explains, Martha Custis was a wealthy and handsome young widow when she met George Washington. She would have had her pick of suitors for her second marriage and specifically chose Washington even as she was being simultaneously courted by another man. Brady also argues that George loved Martha, sighting that he could have waited to marry someone else, that he was concerned with her comfort and safety, and invited her to join him whenever possible when he was away from Mount Vernon, even during wartime.   

General Summation 

Martha Washington, to protect the privacy and intimacy of her marriage, burned her correspondence with George before her death. Only a few letters between the couple survive.  Much of Martha's life and her relationship with George is lost to history. What we know about Martha today comes from letters between her and other relations and what must have been a tedious search through the writings of other important and relevant figures of the day to find mentions of Martha. It is a testament to Brady's ability as a historian to put together the engaging biography she did with the limited source base she had to work with. 

As such, Martha Washington: An American Life is as much a book about eighteenth century domesticity, everyday life, and the people and events surrounding Martha as it is about the subject herself. At times it can be annoying, such as when we get an extended discussion of President Washington and his struggle with the new government or what seems like merely a litany of names when talking about all the rotating relatives and visiting friends staying at the Washingtons' residence. We learn little about any specific influence Martha had on Washington's shaping of the new government, and keeping track of the Washingtons' extended family can be difficult for modern readers (the family tree in the front matter of the book is a necessity). Yet, such thick description of the time period is enlightening in itself, and readers will learn a good deal about what life was like in the late-colonial era and very early republic. By placing Martha Washington within that thick description, we begin to approach her as another human being who lived, loved, suffered, and survived along with her fellow citizens—someone with whom we can find points of identification rather than simply placing her on a pedestal as the wife of an American icon with whom we cannot find common ground.