Special Valentine’s Day Edition

Valentine’s Day feels like the right moment to talk about my favorite love story from the American Revolution: the partnership between John and Abigail Adams. John was brilliant, combative, and ambitious. A lawyer with a talent for making enemies and a habit of worrying how history would judge him next to the giants of his generation. Abigail was even sharper. At a time when most women were denied the education given to men, she matched her husband argument for argument and held her own with some of the most formidable minds in America. Even Thomas Jefferson learned that crossing her was rarely a winning strategy.

I love these two so much that my wife and I named our youngest daughter after one of them. I made the other a mentor to my protagonist in the novel I’m releasing this summer. I’ll let you guess which is which.

But for John Adams and Abigail Smith, it wasn’t love at first site. In 1759, a 23-year-old John probably accompanied a friend who was courting Abigail’s sister to the Smith house. He met her, took stock, and later wrote in his diary what might be the least romantic impression in American history: “Not fond, not frank, not candid.” I’ve always wondered if Abigail ever saw this entry?

Despite that chilly first impression, within three years John was writing her love letters. On October 4, 1762, he addressed a letter to “Miss Adorable” implying she owed him for the “two or three Million” kisses he’d given her:

Miss Adorable

By the same Token that the Bearer hereof satt up with you last night I hereby order you to give him, as many Kisses, and as many Hours of your Company after 9 OClock as he shall please to Demand and charge them to my Account. [] And I presume I have good right to draw upon you for the Kisses as I have given two or three Millions at least, when one has been recd, and of Consequence the Account between us is immensely in favor of yours.

By Valentine’s Day 1763—and yes, they absolutely recognized the day—the relationship had warmed considerably. John sent Abigail what might fairly be described as an eighteenth-century R-rated love letter:

Dear Madam

Accidents are often more Friendly to us, than our own Prudence. I intended to have been at Weymouth Yesterday, but a storm prevented. Cruel, Yet perhaps blessed storm! Cruel for detaining me from so much friendly, social Company, and perhaps blessed to you, or me or both, for keeping me at my Distance. For every experimental Phylosopher knows, that the steel and the Magnet or the Glass and feather will not fly together with more Celerity, than somebody And somebody, when brought within the striking distance. And, Itches, Aches, Agues, and Repentance might be the Consequence of a Contact in present Circumstances.

Racey even by modern Tinder standards!

So it was no surprise that by January 1776, when John left Abigail at their farm in Braintree and rode south to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, they were already parents of five living children. Another daughter had been buried the year before. What survives from that separation is their correspondence, a running conversation carried across hundreds of miles of winter roads and wartime uncertainty. It’s filled with John’s political news from Philly and Abigail’s updates on the military situation around Boston.

What stands out this Valentines Day, though, is the uncertainty each of them constantly faced. Weeks passed with no word. Then more weeks. Roads were slow, winter was brutal, and rumors traveled faster than truth. On March 2, Abigail wrote that she had not heard from John until the day before, more than a month after he had left. Someone had reported that he and John Hancock had been seized in New York and shipped to England. She doubted it. She prayed it wasn’t true. But she couldn’t know until a letter arrived in his hand.

John lived in the same fog. Writing on March 19, he told Abigail he had finally received her note of March 10, the first word from his family since he’d ridden away nearly two months earlier. Nearly two months of not knowing whether she and the children were safe in a town that trembled under cannon fire.

We are fortunate to live in an age of instant contact. A text to the other side of the globe unanswered for an hour can feel like an insult. In 1776, husbands and wives could sit a few hundred miles apart and spend months wondering if the other was already dead.

This was part of the sacrifice that delivered us America.