Free From This Day Forward by Cokie Roberts Page B

months later: “The character and situation in which I am here, and the situation of public affairs absolutely forbid my writing freely.”
    In February 1779, after a year abroad, Adams briefly thought he would be going home. He informed Abigail in a short noncommunicative letter, “I must not write a word to you about politics because you are a woman. What an offense have I committed?—a woman! I shall soon make it up. I think women better than men in general and I know that you can keep a secret as well as any man whatever. But the world doesn’t know this. Therefore if I were to write any secrets to you and the letter should be caught, and hitched into a newspaper, the world would say I was not to be trusted with a secret.” She was right all along, he was worried about someone reading his mail. In the next letter he’s even more explicit: “Let me entreat you to consider, if some of your letters had by any accident been taken, what a figure would they have made in a newspaper to be read by the whole world. Some of them it is true would have done honor to the most virtuous and most accomplished Roman matron, but others of them would have made you and me very ridiculous.” And today’s public figures think it’s new to report on private lives! Abigail’s agonies finally came to an end when, with the war winding down, and her husband somewhat confused about his instructions from Congress, in June of 1779 John Adams went home.
    Again, it was for a short but productive stay, since Adams took the time to write the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In November, Congress sent him back to Europe, this time as the sole minister responsible fornegotiating peace and commerce with Great Britain. Nine-year-old Charles went with his father to Paris this time, along with twelve-year-old John Quincy. And, though Abigail made it clear that she missed both him and the boys, the tone of her letters was much cheerier than that of the earlier ones to Europe. John must have done some fast talking while he was home.
    To help make ends meet, he would send her European goods, which she would then sell in Massachusetts. Abigail would tell him in a no-nonsense way what sold and what didn’t (the market was glutted with Barcelona handkerchiefs) and she casually mentioned her plans to buy property; she didn’t ask him about it, she told him about it. What Adams really wanted was political news and Abigail was happy to oblige. She, correctly as it turned out, predicted that the man they wanted for governor of Massachusetts would lose the election to “the tinkling cymbal,” John Hancock: “What a politician you have made me. If I cannot be a voter upon this occasion, I will be a writer of votes.” She never let up on her lobbying for the ladies.
    Instead of complaining about her abandoned state, this time Abigail used humor to get her point across. The wife of one of John’s aides visited her and they talked of their “dear absents,” agreeing that the men were “so entirely satisfied with their American dames that we had not an apprehension of their roving. We mean not however to defy the charms of the Parisian ladies, but to admire the constancy and fidelity with which they are resisted—but enough of romance.” Then she told him she heard he was getting very fat. When, after he had been gone about a year, John wrote telling her that her letters were a great delight when they did not censure or complain, she took umbrage: “I am wholly unconscious of giving you pain in this way since your late absence.” Giving a hint of what must have been said while John was home, Abigail continued, “Did we not balance accounts though thesum was rather in your favor?…In the most intimate of friendships there must not be any recrimination. If I complained, it was from the ardor of affection which could not endure the least apprehension of