John and Abigail Adams: A Revolutionary Marriage

Over the past few years, vast changes have occurred in the concept of marriage, at least in the Western world.  There is tremendous disagreement over the goals, purposes, and the very definition of marriage these days.   Surprisingly, however, there is one thing that everyone on all sides of the matrimonial culture wars seems to agrees upon. It’s that marriage, at its core, is about a profound relationship of mutual support and affection that must be intimate and deeply fulfilling for both spouses.

What we often don’t realize is that marriage in America has been in almost constant flux ever since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.  And the very first great shift in the concept of matrimony took place just before the American Revolution.  For 100 years after the landing of the Mayflower, the choice of a spouse had been most often determined by parents with an eye towards practical financial concerns not only of the future bride and groom, but their extended families as well.  Loving affection was not ignored; it was simply expected that it would develop after the wedding.  But about 1750 or so, romantic attraction and friendship came increasingly to the fore as the primary criteria for the selection of a spouse.

No couple better illustrates this shift to this surprisingly modern approach to marriage as intimate friendship as the union of John and Abigail Adams.

Abigail Smith was a fascinating personality, even as a teenager.  She was not well-to-do, being the daughter of a Congregationalist minister.  Though Massachusetts was certainly a literate culture, women were not allowed at Harvard and generally received no formal schooling.  Extensive education was generally considered a distraction from womanly responsibilities of keeping watch over home, farm, and children.  Nonetheless, Abigail was bright and hungered for knowledge and intellectual stimulation.  This was especially provided by her grandfather Quincy who introduced her to Shakespeare, Moliere, Milton and other great authors, poets and playwrights.

She was only 15 when she first met John Adams, a young lawyer nearly 10 years her senior.  John was popular with the ladies, and many of his female friends were prettier and wealthier than Abigail. But none were as interesting.  John and Abigail were both longing for a spouse who would be not only a help-mate but also a true soul-mate.  They dreamed of a marriage that was a union not only of bodies, assets and families, but a union of hearts and minds as well.

Far from arranging this marriage, the parents of John and Abigail withheld their blessing, forcing the couple to postpone their wedding for nearly three years.  Their intellectual attraction did not mean that their friendship was platonic; they experienced a romantic attraction to each other as well.  But, at a time when 10% of brides were pregnant before their wedding day, John and Abigail patiently waited to come together.  It would not be the last time that they would wait.

John was a country lawyer from a middle class rather than a wealthy family.  Building a law practice from scratch required traveling on horseback all over New England in search of cases.  Abigail, with five children coming in rapid succession, often endured long periods of separation from John in these early years.  Yet when John was elected to the Continental Congress, the distance suddenly became farther, the absence longer, and the danger to John and to his family, left behind in war-torn Massachusetts, was greater.  A correspondence between the two, begun in the days of their courtship, now intensified.  The over 1100 letters that survive provide us with a fascinating window into their complex and tender relationship.  Tellingly, in these letters they most often addressed each other as “my dearest friend.”

As a lawyer in Boston before the war, John handled very delicate and controversial cases.  He defended patriots but also agreed to defend British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre.  While John was their legal counsel, John’s counsel was Abigail.  Her penetrating intellect and uncompromising honesty constituted not only a support but also a challenge to her husband. When John was being vain or unreasonable, she did not hesitate to tell him so.  This sort of critical collaboration continued through the time when he served in the Continental Congress, advocated for a “Declaration of Independency,” as he called it, and later served his country as Vice President and President.  Whether in person or by letter, John asked for and received the advice of the shrewdest and most virtuous political advisor that he knew, his wife.

Prior to the end of the war, Congress sent John to Europe to secure financial, military, and political support for the fledgling nation from France and then the Netherlands.  Abigail had to worry about the dangerous voyage dodging both gales and British Men o’ War.   But once he arrived, she could not help but worry whether the flirtatious society women of  Paris might steal John’s heart and tempt him to break his marital commitment.  It was during this time that Abigail became aware that her own father had been unfaithful right under her mother’s nose, and had sired at least one illegitimate child.  If temptation was so strong even for a pastor at home, how much more so for a statesmen abroad!  Some in the American delegation to France, notably Benjamin Franklin, apparently had affairs with French women, so Abigail’s concern was well founded.

Because letters from John back to Abigail were often miscarried, she went a period of five years without seeing him and three years scarcely hearing from him, all the while wondering if his love for her had remained true.

Prolonged separation, war, difficult in-law relations, the death of two children, tension between career and commitment to family – all of these waves of pressure broke violently upon the marital relationship of John and Abigail Adams.

Through it all the Adamses not only stayed faithful; they remained intensely in love.  It seems that the pressures had only served to strengthen their commitment to one another.  And, after the storms of public life subsided, they enjoyed 18 years together in retirement on the family farm before death did them part.

In public discourse on marriage in America today, one often hears the words intimacy, friendship, and fulfillment.  However the words sacrifice and duty appear much less frequently–  sacrifice of immediate gratification for the sake of duty to children, spouse, aging parents, country, and God. Yet Abigail and John’s correspondence includes these words just as frequently as the terms intimacy, friendship and fulfillment that meant as much to them then as they do to us today.

Perhaps that is what they most have to teach us.  Indeed, marriage for them, as it is for us, was an intimate life partnership oriented towards a passionately fulfilling friendship.  But perhaps sacrifice and duty are the necessary pathways to this mutual fulfillment, not obstacles that stand in the way.

 

This is a summary of Dr. Italy’s talk given at 9/25/2015 at the World Meeting of Families