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Abigail and John
Portrait of a Marriage
Chapter One
The Steel and the Magnet
When Abigail Smith decided to marry John Adams in 1764, she made the most fateful decision of her life. As a young eighteenth-century woman, she knew that marriage was her destiny and her only latitude was the selection of a mate. She needed to choose well. Her parents' opinions carried weight, but they were not conclusive. Her relatives and community might have thoughts, but in the end it would be her own sound judgment and feelings that were the determining factors. She would measure his character and test his affections and hope that her perceptions were accurate. He was educated, appeared honest and sober, was very industrious, and had high ambitions, so finally, after more than three years of courtship, she judged that John had met her standards. He certainly had won her heart.
When John Adams chose to marry Abigail Smith, he made the most fortuitous decision of his life. A twenty-nine-year-old man, he had already made several choices that would shape his future. As the eldest son in his family, he had fulfilled his parents' wishes and graduated from Harvard. However, going against their expectations, he rejected the life of a clergyman and settled instead upon the law as a profession. When he chose Abigail as his life's companion, he took yet another important step. She was attractive, came from a highly respectable family, and had youthful energy. Moreover, her greatest assets would be her steadiness of temperament, her intelligence, and her great sympathy for his ambitions. He believed that his destiny could be fulfilled with Abigail as his companion.
If, asthe saying goes, some marriages are made in heaven, the Adams marriage was. They could have hoped, but they could not have known, as their courtship progressed, that this would be the case. Indeed, as the date for their marriage ceremony came closer, both of them became anxious. John postponed the event several times, and Abigail got sick just weeks before their fixed date. Both of them wavered before the commitment that would seal their destinies. Then they took their vows and entered into a marriage bond that has become legendary. But they were not the only ones to express reservations about it.
Rumor has it that when the Reverend William Smith preached the sermon at his daughter Abigail's marriage ceremony on October 25, 1764, he chose for his text "For John came, neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and Ye say 'He hath a Devil.' " Even in the mid-eighteenth century's still-puritanical New England, his topic lacked felicity. Nor did it suggest the optimism or comfort that was generally associated with a wedding, especially the marriage of one's own daughter. Family members and biographers have puzzled over his sermon for more than two centuries. Perhaps he or his wife, Elizabeth, disapproved of their daughter's marriage. He could not have meant to disparage his new son-in-law before family and friends. Maybe, even more likely, he intended to set some record straight within the larger community. Rumors communicate coded information, and clearly, the good reverend was surreptitiously sending a message on that fall day in the parsonage at Weymouth, Massachusetts, when the bright-eyed nineteen-year-old Abigail Smith married twenty-nine-year-old John Adams of neighboring Braintree.
The portrait that survives of Abigail's father, the Reverend William Smith, is a sober picture, in black-and-white hues, a typical image of a New England clergyman. Its most striking features are his eyes, similar to his daughter's, and the furrowed mouth, clamped shut to hide toothless gums. The long visage, framed by a shoulder-length wig, is not unkindly but observant and commanding. The reverend was a strong man, a leader, one accustomed to directing the lives of his parishioners with the fierce determination of a latter-day Puritan. Moreover, this was a man who had experienced a long, satisfying life, marked not only by lengthy hours in the pulpit but also by the prosperity of his family. Significantly, Smith had his portrait painted as a legacy to his children to remind them of their ancestry among the distinguished early Puritan settlers of New England.
For more than fifty years, William Smith had served as the minister of Weymouth's First Congregational Church, preaching two long sermons every Sunday to parishioners who warmed themselves in winter under layers of clothing with containers of hot coals tucked into their wraps or sweated through summer heat for endless hours on uncomfortable wooden benches. On Thursdays, he again preached, a gruelling schedule of delivering "the word" to a community that, try as they would, violated regularly the parson's sound admonitions. Perfection was just too hard, though, for them, as for their forebears, the goal of perfect character determined life's purpose.
No portrait survives of Elizabeth Smith, the reverend's wife and Abigail's mother. Elizabeth's legacy was her maiden name: Quincy. She was born Elizabeth Norton Quincy, and her parents' distinguished past represented two different branches of Puritan pedigree, the religious elect of the Norton line from her mother and the political elite of her father, John Quincy, "the Duke of Braintree," the neighboring village to Weymouth.
Life in the small towns in which the Smith and the Adams families resided was not so different from that of their forebears who had come to the shores of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century. Typically they represented a broad range of middle-class yeomen, people who depended upon the land for their survival. They represented the main streams of developing New England society, the clergy and the merchants, artisans such as Deacon Adams, politicians, and farmers. The women and the men worked together to provide for their large families, their tasks separated by gender. They lived in a dangerous world, made that way not just by the clashing of character and motives among themselves but also because the physical dangers of disease were endemic. So, too, were the larger dangers posed by sometimes brutal nature. Nearby were the dispossessed of the country, the natives who still lived on the land that they never knew they had surrendered, now grown into the villages and towns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Abigail and John
Portrait of a Marriage. Copyright (c) by Edith Gelles . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
