Free From This Day Forward by Cokie Roberts Page A

jealous. They are handsome, and very well educated. Their accomplishments are exceedingly brilliant.” What was he thinking? Well, no one ever claimed John Adams was a good politician. Abigail used his reveries about Frenchwomen to push home one of her pet points: “I regret the trifling narrow contracted education of females of my own country…. You need not be told how much female education is neglected, nor how fashionable it has been to ridicule female learning.” She kept complaining about the lack of education for women for the rest of her days.
    But Abigail’s much more serious complaint was John’s neglect. She scolds him that she hasn’t heard much from him, that his letters are short and cold. So what, she asks, if the enemy intercepts them? “Friendship and affection will suggest a thousand things to say to an intimate friend which if ridiculed by an enemy will only be another proof among the thousands we already have of savage barbarity.” John’s reaction was one of exasperation, claiming to have written her many more letters than he actually had. (He kept a ledger with copies of all his letters to her, so they were well documented.) Abigail was truly distraught: “I have scarcely ever taken my pen to write but the tears have flowed faster than the ink.” Soon she moves, however, from sorrow to anger. Another “very short letter” from John brings on her fury: “By heaven if you could you have changed hearts with some frozen Laplander or made a voyage to a region that has chilled every drop of your blood. But I will restrain a pen already I fear too rash, nor shall it tell you how much I have suffered from this appearance of—inattention.”
    He would not be moved, closing one letter, “It is not possible for me to express more tenderness and affection to you than will be suggested by the name of…John Adams.” Some of the letters did get lost at sea, and it took months for the others to arrive. After John had been gone nine months and Abigail had received only three short letters, her pen was white-hot: “I have never let an opportunity slip without writing to you since we parted, though you make no mention of having received a line from me; if they are become of so little importance as not to be worth noticing with your own hand, be so kind as to direct your secretary.” She immediately regretted those words: “I will not finish the sentence, my heart denies the justice of the accusation, nor does it believe your affection in the least diminished by distance or absence.” Still, she wanted desperately to hear it from him: “The affection I feel for my friend is of the tenderest kind, matured by years, sanctified by choice and approved by heaven. Angels can witness to its purity, what care I then for the ridicule of Britains should this testimony of it fall into their hands.” The message was clear: he had more to fear from her than the British.
    If she hoped for an outpouring of apologies and testaments of undying affection, Abigail must have been sorely disappointed. John’s first, somewhat tepid, response: “For heaven’s sake, my dear don’t indulge a thought that it is possible for me to neglect, or forget all that I hold dear to me in this world.” And then, a couple of weeks later, after another letter from her had made its way across the Atlantic: “This is the third letter I have received in this complaining style…. If you write me in this style I shall leave off writing entirely, it kills me…. What course shall I take to convince you thatmy heart is warm? You doubt, it seems—shall I declare it? Shall I swear to it?…I beg you would never more write to me in such a strain for it really makes me unhappy.” He sternly adds, “I write to you so often as my duty will permit.” And then, in the face of ever-more-complicated relations with France, a few