The farm was leased. But the house and all their possessions Abigail decided to leave in the care of a former slave of her father's named Phoebe, who had been freed by his will and was newly married to a free black man, William Abdee. “As there was no settled minister in Weymouth,” Abigail told John, “I gave them the liberty of celebrating their nuptials here, which they did much to their satisfaction.” That the couple would remain in her house in her absence, however long that might be, gave her particular peace of mind. “I have no doubt of their care and faithfulness, and prefer them to any other family.”
In characteristic fashion she specified exactly how things were to be. “They are during the present year to have the use of the garden east of the house and that part of the great garden next to the road [and] all the fruit which grows in the garden,” she instructed Cotton Tufts.
Phoebe is to be allowed a pint of milk a day... I give her also a pig seven weeks old, 3 pounds [of] hog's lard, and what salt beef there is in the house.... The house and furniture are to be taken care of by opening and airing, rubbing, and cleaning it... They are to be allowed use of the team in the fall to bring up a load of sea weed.... The library is to be under the care of Mr. Cranch. No books to be lent out unless to him and Mr. Tyler... In November you will be so good as to give on my account the sum of 2 dollars to widow Abigail Field, 2 dollars to the widow Sarah Owen, who lives in the same house with her sister Field, 1 dollar to Mrs. Fuller and 1 dollar to the widow Mary Howard and 1 dollar to the wife of John Hayden, who is an aged woman and one of my pensioners—1 dollar to the widow Mary Green.
By the end of May, all was arranged. She had passage to England on the merchant ship Active, which was expected to sail within a few weeks. She had hoped to embark with friends. As it was, she knew none of the other passengers or the captain. She would not be sailing in winter, nor in the midst of war. Still, it was a venture that she had once thought nothing could ever tempt her to undertake. “But let no person say what they would or would not do, since we are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act,” she wrote to John on May 25, in her last letter before leaving.
Day by day, she had looked for some word from him, but there was none. “My thoughts are fixed, my latest wish depends on thee, guide, guardian, husband, lover, friend,” she wrote, borrowing from one of her poets.
Abigail said her farewells in her front parlor on the morning of June 18, the house filled with neighbors, “not of unmeaning complimenters,” she wrote, “but the honest yeomanry, their wives and daughters like a funeral procession, all come to wish me well and to pray for a speedy return.” She had tried to prepare for the moment. “Knowing I had to act my little part alone, I had possessed myself with calmness, but this was too much for me.” She and everyone around her were weeping as she shook hands one by one.
In Boston, at Isaac Smith's house the following day, Thomas Jefferson appeared out of the blue, to introduce himself and say that he, too, was soon to sail with his daughter, Martha, and a young mulatto slave, James Hemings. He had been appointed by Congress to join the commissioners, Franklin and Adams, in Paris. Thinking it important that he know more of the commercial interests of New England, he had been making a quick tour of Connecticut and Rhode Island, and had only just arrived in Boston. What Abigail's first impressions of Jefferson were during this encounter, or what he thought of her, neither recorded.
Jefferson intended to depart from New York in July and urged her to go with him. But her plans were made, her passage paid for. “I thanked him for his politeness,” she reported to John, “but having taken my measures, I was determined to abide by them.”
Like Abigail, Jefferson had never been to sea. As it turned out, he would sail from Boston after all, and only weeks later, crossing under sunny skies, the sea, as his daughter said, as calm as a river.
• • •
ABIGAIL SAILED on June 20, 1784. At age thirty-nine, having never been away from either her home or those of close relatives for more than a night or two in all her life, she, Nabby, their two servants, and a cow went on board the Active at Rowe's Wharf, and with a “fine wind” were quickly under way.
Among the few other passengers, as Abigail recorded, were a Colonel Norton from Martha's Vineyard, a Dr. Clark, a Mr. Foster, a Mr. Spear, a “haughty Scotchman” named Green, and one other woman whose name happened also to be Adams. No sooner had the ship passed the Boston lighthouse into rougher water than they were all horribly seasick. And so it was to be for days, everyone tossed about in cramped, “excessive disagreeable” quarters together.
“We crawled upon [the] deck whenever we were able, but it was so cold and damp that we could not remain long,” Abigail wrote. The ship was filthy and carrying a cargo of whale oil and potash. With every roll of the waves the whale oil leaked, the potash “smoked and fermented,” contributing further to the “flavor” below.
The staterooms for the women comprised two tiny, airless cabins opening onto the main cabin where meals were served and the men slept. Nabby and the other Mrs. Adams were in one cabin, while Abigail and Esther Field shared the other. At night, to keep from suffocating, they had to leave the doors open onto the main cabin. “We can only live with our door shut whilst we dress and undress,” Abigail wrote in a journal she began for her sister Mary Cranch.
Necessity has no law, but what should I have thought on shore to have layed myself down to sleep in common with a half dozen gentlemen. We have curtains it is true, and we only partly undress... but we have the satisfaction of falling in with a set of well behaved, decent gentlemen.
In a storm off the Grand Banks, with bottles and plates crashing to pieces all about them, the women had to be held fast in their chairs, “as some gentleman sat by us with his arm fastened in ours and his feet braced against a table or chair that was lashed down.”
Afterward, the sailors assured her it had been only a breeze. Yet the hard rocking of the ship had so badly injured her cow that the animal had to be killed and cast overboard.
In the unrelieved dampness below decks Abigail suffered severely from rheumatism. The food was inedible. The cook she described as a “lazy, dirty Negro with no more knowledge of his business than a savage.” But with a favorable turn in the weather, finding she could get about, her usual spirit returned, and very like John Adams on board the Boston, she proceeded to “make a bustle,” in her expression. “And as I found I might reign mistress on board without any offense, I soon exerted my authority with scrapers, mops, brushes, infusions of vinegar, etc., and in a few hours you would have thought yourself in a different ship.”
She “took up the direction of our cabin,” as she wrote in another account for her sister Elizabeth, “taught the cook to dress his victuals, and have made several puddings with my own hands.” When she mastered the names of all the masts and sails, the captain said he was sure she could take over at the helm as well.
Unlike John, she loved watching the sea. Wrapped in an old camblet cloak, she spent hours on deck, her soul filled with feelings of the sublime. After a night of brilliant phosphorescence in the water, a phenomenon she had longed to witness, she wrote in ecstasy of a “blazing ocean” as far as she could see. “ ‘Great and marvelous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty,’ ” she recorded reverently.
With Nabby she passed the time in the main cabin reading, writing, chatting, or playing cards with the other passengers, whose company she enjoyed. The doctor, John Clark, her favorite, was consistently cheerful, while Mr. Spear's “drollery” kept everyone in high spirits. From a book she was reading on medicine, she copied a passage about association with cheerful people being good for the health, and speculated whether her husband might not benefit from a little unbending of the mind.
There was only one of the group whom they would all have been happy to do without, the “haughty Scotchman,” Mr. Green, who harped incessantly on the importance of rank and social position and who himself, Abigail concluded, had neither. He paid atte
ntion to her only because she was the wife of John Adams, she saw with distaste. “I know his politeness to me is not personally upon my own account, but because of my connection which gives me importance sufficient to entitle me to his notice.
He is always inquiring who was such [and such] a general? I have felt a disposition to quarrel with him several times, but have restrained myself, and only observed mildly that merit, not titles gave a man preeminence in our country, that I did not doubt it was a mortifying circumstance to the British nobility to find themselves so often conquered by mechanics and mere husbandmen—but that we esteemed it our glory to draw characters not only into the field, but into the senate, and believed no one would deny but what they had shone in both. All our passengers enjoyed this conversation.
One of the crew came to her with a story he felt he must tell her. He had been taken prisoner during the war and held in a jail in England. When he and several others escaped to Holland, the only help they were able to get was from John Adams, who gave them money from his own pocket.
What was ahead for her, she pondered in a diary she kept for herself only. Where would she be living? “No matter where,” she wrote, “so that it only be in the arms of my dearest, best of friends. I hardly dare trust my imagination or anticipate the day. Cruel sleep how you have tormented me.”
When, after a month at sea and the voyage nearly over, the ship lay becalmed, she found the wait intolerable. Motion, she decided, was the most desirable state. “Man was made for action... I am quite out of conceit with calm.”
Heading up the English Channel, the ship was caught in gale winds and for three days there was little sleep for anyone. At last, orders were given to drop anchor in the Downs, the roadstead of the Channel, within sight of the little town of Deal. The passengers were lowered over the side into an open pilot boat and in squally rain and the roar of heaving waves, with everyone soaked to the skin, they made for shore.
We set off from the vessel now mounting upon the top of a wave as high as a steeple [Abigail would write], and then so low that the boat was not to be seen. I could keep myself up no other way than as one of the gentlemen stood braced up against the boat, fast hold of me and I with both arms around him. The other ladies were held in the same manner whilst every wave gave us a broadside.
Then with a sudden rush and a sound like thunder, an immense wave swept the boat broadside high up onto the beach. And thus it was, on Tuesday, July 20, 1784, that Abigail and Nabby were “safely landed upon the British coast.”
• • •
UNDER WAY BY POST CHAISE the next morning, they traveled hill and dale to Canterbury, then Chatham, then on to London, seventy-two miles all in a day. Beyond Chatham, they rolled with all possible speed to pass before dark the Black Heath, dreaded for its lurking highwaymen. Fear of the road, the threat of robbery or worse at the hands of highwaymen, was something foreign to Americans. At home it was not uncommon even for women to travel alone feeling perfectly safe. “Every place we passed, and every post chaise we met were crying out a robbery,” Abigail later recounted. “The robber was pursued and taken in about two miles, and we saw the poor wretch, ghastly and horrible, brought along on foot.” She judged him to be no more than twenty years old. Hearing that “the lad” was certain “to swing,” she shuddered. “Though every robber may deserve death, yet to exult over the wretched is what our country is not accustomed to. Long may it be free of such villainies and long may it preserve a commiseration for the wretched.”
Though a “monstrous great” city, London struck Abigail as more pleasant than ever she imagined. There was even sunshine, and the small, elegant Adelphi Hotel, on a narrow street just off the Strand, near the Thames, was “as quiet as at any place in Boston.” That John and John Quincy had stayed there during their visit to London gave it further appeal.
She immediately dispatched a letter to John at The Hague reporting her arrival and her extreme desire to see him. “Heaven give us a happy meeting,” she wrote.
Adams replied at once. Her letter had made him “the happiest man on earth,” he said. “I am twenty years younger than I was yesterday.” Because of the press of business, he was unable to “fly” to her just yet, but John Quincy was proceeding at once.
Hearing that John, while in London the previous fall, had had a full-length portrait done by Copley, and that the painting was on view at the artist's studio in Haymarket, she hurried off to see it. Adams, in court dress of brown velvet, stood holding a scroll in one hand—his memorial to the Dutch Republic, perhaps, or the Treaty of Paris—while with the other hand he pointed to a map of America spread on a table. Beside the table, a globe figured prominently. He was the picture of a statesman—firm of stance, his expression one of grave resolve. He wore lace at his sleeve and a gold-handled sword. If he looked a little older and stouter than when Abigail had last seen him, she thought it “a very good likeness ... a most beautiful picture.” She was delighted.
A steady stream of visitors left her little time to herself. They came every day, Americans in London who wished to pay their respects, including a number of Loyalists. She was told how young she looked, offered assistance, invited to tea. When not receiving visitors, she and Nabby went sightseeing (to Westminster Abbey, the British Museum) or shopping for new clothes, but astounded by the prices, they bought little. She was surprised at how familiar the faces of the English looked, so like Americans, that it was as if she had seen them before. “The London ladies,” she also noted, “walk a vast deal and very fast.”
On Friday, July 30, a servant came “puffing” up the stairs at the hotel to announce, “Young Mr. Adams.” When John Quincy entered, Abigail hardly knew him. As tall as his father, he looked older than seventeen—a man nearly. The resemblance to his father was striking. Seeing him with Nabby made her feel very much the matron, she confided to her sister Mary, but “were I not their mother, I would say a likelier pair you will seldom see in a summer's day.”
Nabby judged her brother a “sober lad,” but one she was sure she would like once they were reacquainted. To a cousin at home John Quincy wrote, quite properly, “You can imagine what an addition has been made to my happiness by the arrival of a kind and tender mother, and a sister who fulfills my most sanguine expectations.”
From The Hague, John Adams promised to be with them in a matter of days, but warned that there could be no lingering in London. He must join his colleagues in Paris.
• • •
ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, August 7, Nabby had been out for a walk. When she returned, she noticed a man's hat on the table with two books in it.
Everything around appeared altered, without my knowing in what particular [she wrote that night in her diary]. I went into my room, the things were moved; I looked around.... “Why are these things moved?”—All [this] in a breath to Esther....
“Why is all this appearance of strangeness? Whose hat is that in the other room?” ... “Tis my father's!” I said, “Where is he?”
“In the room above.”
Up I flew, and to his chamber, where he was lying down, and received me with all the tenderness of an affectionate parent after so long an absence. Sure I am, I never felt more agitation of spirits in my life; it will not do to describe.
Abigail's only reference to the reunion with John was in passing in a letter to Mary Cranch: “You know my dear sister that poets and painters wisely draw a veil over those scenes which surpass the pen of one or the pencil of the other; we were indeed a very happy family once more met together after a separation of four years.”
Early the following day they were all off for Paris.
• • •
THE JOURNEY WAS MADE in record time. They went by fast coach from London to the Channel, and by boat to Calais, landing on the shores of France at dawn the next morning, then sped on by coach-and-six. If Abigail felt still, as on shipboard, that motion was the preferred state, she must have been ecstatic.
The whole route from Calais
to Paris, she and Nabby felt they were riding through scenes from a favorite novel, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey. There were all kinds of travelers, Sterne had written—inquisitive travelers, idle travelers, vain travelers—but the true value of travel was not in strenuous sight-seeing. It was in opening one's heart to feeling.
Adams had been away from Paris for nearly a year. In an effort to regain his strength after the illness that struck him down in the late summer of 1783, he had moved to a large house with a garden on the outskirts of the city, just beyond Passy in the still-rural village of Auteuil.
Long a believer in the therapeutic benefits of fresh air and exercise, he had become still more adamant on the subject during his years in Europe. If the dank atmosphere of Amsterdam had been the cause of his first terrible collapse, so the noisome air of Paris had laid him low the second time.
Like Passy, Auteuil was set on an airy hill above the Seine, and adjoined the beautiful Bois de Boulogne, where he could take his daily walks or ride horseback. But when his American doctor, James Jay, the brother of John Jay, had suggested a sojourn in England, he had gone off to London with John Quincy and later to Bath, to take the waters, an experience Adams had found little to his liking and that was cut short by a summons to return to Holland to secure still another desperately needed loan.
Adams again succeeded with the Dutch bankers, but only after one of the most horrendous episodes in all his earthly pilgrimage. Crossing a wintry North Sea, he and John Quincy had been caught in a storm. Landing on a desolate Dutch island, they had had to press on the rest of the way by foot and iceboat. “The weather was cold, we were all frequently wet,” he wrote. “I was chilled to the heart, and looked I suppose, as I felt, like a withered old worn out carcass. Our polite skipper frequently eyed me and said he pitied the old man.” Adams, by then forty-eight, felt that during the ordeal he had left one stage of life and entered another.