From This Day Forward by Cokie Roberts Page A

diplomatic life in Europe. They exchange political information and express political views. Abigail’s most famous admonition to her husband as he helped form a new government, that he and his colleagues “remember the ladies,” is but one of many of her strong statements on affairs of state. But, above all, the Adams letters tell the story of a marriage, a marriage of genuine partnership for more than fifty years. Because the couple were separated by momentous events, their letters give us a close view throughout a ten-year window in their marriage when the only way they could communicate was through the primitive post. From the time of their courtship in the early 1760s until Abigail joined John in Europe in 1784, we can see the relationship evolve and mature through the letters. Even today, it’s rare to find a union like the one we learn about from this couple’s own words; think how unusual it must have been in the late eighteenth century!
    John Adams doesn’t seem to have been a very fun-loving person—except with Abigail. In their courtship, he addressed her as “Miss Adorable,” and ordered her, at age seventeen, to give him “many kisses…I presume I have good right to draw upon you for the kisses as I have given two or three millions at least.” When he went to Boston for a lengthy and dangerous inoculation procedure against smallpox, it wasn’t the treatment he was worried about, it was his six-week separation from his lady love. Once he went home to Braintree, a town not far from Boston to the south, he couldn’t wait to see her: “I am, until then, and forever after will be your admirer and friend, and lover.” Even as he proclaims his love, though, the always priggish Adams tells Abigail he will write her a list of her faults: “You’ll be surprised, when you come to find the number of them.” From the tone of her next letter, she was understandably miffed and curious, and demanded the accounting: “There can be no time more proper than the present, it will be harder to erase them when habit hasstrengthened and confirmed them.” But then, a couple of weeks later, she beat him to it, letting him know she’d heard from her friends that he had a few failings of his own—his haughtiness and unsociability: “I expect you to clear up these matters, without being in the least saucy.” That got a quick response, with him telling her that she neglects some social skills such as cardplaying and singing, that she lacks a certain bashfulness, that she walks funny, hangs her head oddly, and crosses her legs. Her retort? “A gentleman has no business to concern himself about the legs of a lady.” John Adams certainly knew he wasn’t taking up with a shy violet when he finally married Abigail in 1764.
    He set up law practice and she set about having babies. Abigail, John Quincy, Susanna, who died before she was two, Charles, and Thomas had all been born by the time Abigail went to visit her parents in 1773 and had occasion to write John at home: “The roads at present are impassible with any carriage…. My daily thoughts and nightly slumbers visit thee, and thine.” John traveled the court circuit and wrote home regularly urging his wife to watch her spending, and giving her various instructions for managing the farm and bringing up the children in his absence. One letter from this venerated founder, dated July 1, 1774, two years almost to the day before he would help lead the revolution for independence, sounds like one of those consumer groups’ warnings to modern parents. He recounts that some facts came out in a trial about the effects of loud noises on children: “A gun was fired near a child…the child fell immediately into fits, which impaired his reason, and is still a living idiot. Another child was sitting on a chamber floor. A man rapped suddenly and violently on the boards which