Part 10 (1/2)
”The small-pox! the small-pox! what shall we do with it? I could almost wish that an inoculating hospital was opened in every town in New England. It is some small consolation that the scoundrel savages have taken a large dose of it. They plundered the baggage and stripped off the clothes of our men who had the small-pox out full upon them at the Cedars.”
Vaccination was not yet, but careful people were hastening to be inoculated, all the country over. Mrs. Adams took all the children into Boston for this purpose, and a miserable time they had of it. Her eyes were much affected, and for some days she could not write. Mr. Adams, receiving no letters, on July 20th grew anxious:
”This has been a dull day to me. I waited the arrival of the post with much solicitude and impatience, but his arrival made me more solicitous still. 'To be left at the Post Office,' in your handwriting on the back of a few lines from the Dr. was all that I could learn of you and my little folks. If you were too busy to write, I hoped that some kind hand would have been found to let me know something about you. Do my friends think that I have been a politician so long as to have lost all feeling? Do they suppose I have forgotten my wife and children? Or are they so panic-struck with the loss of Canada as to be afraid to correspond with me? Or have they forgotten that you have a husband, and your children a father? What have I done, or omitted to do, that I should be thus forgotten and neglected in the most tender and affecting scene of my life? Don't mistake me. I don't blame you. Your time and thoughts must have been wholly taken up with your own and your family's situation and necessities; but twenty other persons might have informed me.
”I suppose that you intended to have run slyly through the small-pox with the family, without letting me know it, and then have sent me an account that you were all well. This might be a kind intention, and if the design had succeeded, would have made me very joyous. But the secret is out, and I am left to conjecture. But as the faculty have this distemper so much under command, I will flatter myself with the hope and expectation of soon hearing of your recovery.”
A few days later he writes:
”How are you all this morning? Sick, weak, faint, in pain, or pretty well recovered? By this time, you are well acquainted with the small-pox. Pray, how do you like it?”
He had been inoculated himself, and knew all about it. He longed to send some comforting thing to his beloved, and fixed upon a canister of green tea, for which she had sometimes sighed, though she would not buy it. He sent the tea by a friend, Mr. Garry, ”an old bachelor, and what is worse a politician.” I must add, ”what is worse still, an absent-minded person!” for he carried the tea to Mrs. _Samuel_ Adams, who received it with great delight. Meantime, John Adams was flattering himself that his Abigail, amidst all her fatigues and distresses, was having ”the poor relief of a dish of good tea.” Mr. Garry returned to Philadelphia and Mr. Adams, meeting him, asked without a misgiving, ”You delivered the tea?”
”Yes, to Mr. Samuel Adams' lady.”
Poor John! he was so vexed that he ordered another canister and sent it by a surer hand. He bids his wife ”send a card to Mrs. S. A., and let her know that the canister was intended for you, and she may send it you, if she chooses, as it was charged to me. It is amazingly dear; nothing less than forty s.h.i.+llings, lawful money, a pound.”
Meantime Abigail was writing:
”The herbs you mention I never received. I was upon a visit to Mrs. S.
Adams about a week after Mr. Garry returned, when she entertained me with a very fine dish of green tea. The scarcity of the article made me ask her where she got it. She replied that her _sweetheart_ sent it to her by Mr. Garry. I said nothing, but thought my sweetheart might have been equally kind, considering the disease I was visited with, and that it was recommended as a bracer. A little after, you mentioned a couple of bundles sent. I supposed one of them might contain the article, but found they were letters. How Mr. Garry should make such a mistake I know not. I shall take the liberty of sending for what is left of it, though I suppose it is half gone, as it was very freely used. If you had mentioned a single word of it in your letter, I should have immediately found out the mistake.”
Moral: Don't send ”surprises” unless you are sure of the hand by which they are sent.
There are no letters between October, 1776, and January, 1777, which means that John Adams had a happy visit at home with his dear ones. A winter, too, of tremendous excitement, of breathless waiting for mails and despatches. We can see Mr. Adams in his arm chair, one January day, trying to read--let us say Xenophon! he would be good reading in those days--one eye on the book, the other out of window: Madam Abigail opposite, with Abby beside her, both at their tambour work.
”Isn't it time he was here?” says Mr. Adams for the tenth time; and he gets up and starts on parasangs of his own up and down the room. Madam Abigail probably suggests patience, after the manner of women, but she looks out of window just as often as he does.
At last! at last comes the clatter of hoofs. The post-rider (only nine years old, and he has ridden all the way from Boston!) is here. The gate clicks, and Master Johnny's legs come flying up the path. He is waving a paper over his head; I don't know who gets to the door first, but I seem to see the Head of the Family tearing the despatch open in unstatesmanlike haste.
On Christmas night, he reads, General Was.h.i.+ngton crossed the Delaware above Trenton, amid ice and snow, storm and tempest. He surprised the British camp, captured a thousand Hessians and carried them off with him to Pennsylvania.
Glory! glory! Stay! there is more. On the second of January, he was once more face to face with the British at Trenton, surrounded by them; they had him fast. ”I have the old fox penned!” chuckles Cornwallis; ”I'll bag him in the morning!”
But morning showed a row of empty earthworks, and the fox and his cubs well on their way to Princeton, where they fell upon another body of British, routed them in twenty minutes, and carried off three hundred of them, with much ammunition and arms, whereof they, to wit, fox and cubs, stood grievously in need.
This was the gist of the despatch; I do not pretend to give its wording.
But fancy the effect of it, however worded, on the quiet Braintree household! John and Charles and even little Tommy, dancing up and down in their flapped waistcoats, shouting and huzzaing; Abby, very likely, shedding tears of happiness over her tambour frame; Father John striding up and down the room again, but now in different mood, probably declaiming lines from Horace in a voice that will not allow itself to tremble; Mother Abigail trying still to be Portia, and to pretend that she knows one end of the needle from the other. A pleasant picture indeed; and--who knows? Possibly not so far from the truth.
All the harder was it, amid all these great happenings, for Mr. Adams to mount and ride, leaving his dear ones to face the winter without him; but mount he must, and did.
He writes on his way back to Philadelphia:
”Present my affection in the tenderest manner to my little deserving daughter and my amiable sons. It was cruel parting this morning. My heart was most deeply affected, although I had the presence of mind to appear composed. May G.o.d Almighty's providence protect you, my dear, and all our little ones. My good genius, my guardian angel, whispers me that we shall see happier days, and that I shall live to enjoy the felicities of domestic life with her whom my heart esteems above all earthly blessings.”
The war began to press heavily on New England housekeepers. Prices went steadily up, and the necessaries of life became hard to procure. Abigail writes in April, of 1777: ”Indian corn at five s.h.i.+llings; rye, eleven and twelve s.h.i.+llings, but scarcely any to be had even at that price; beef, eight pence; veal, sixpence and eightpence; b.u.t.ter, one and sixpence; mutton, none; lamb, none; pork, none; cotton-wool, none; mean sugar, four pounds per hundred; mola.s.ses, none; New England rum, eight s.h.i.+llings per gallon; coffee, two and sixpence per pound; chocolate, three s.h.i.+llings.”
She tells at the same time a curious story, of five Tories being carted out of town under the direction of ”Joice junior,” for refusing to take the paper money of the new Republic. ”Joice junior” was a name which might be a.s.sumed by any patriot who wished to redress a grievance. He wore a horrible mask, and in this case ”was mounted on horseback, with a red coat, a white wig, and a drawn sword, with drum and fife following.
A concourse of people to the amount of five hundred followed. They proceeded as far as Roxbury, when he ordered the cart to be tipped up, then told them if they were ever caught in town again it should be at the expense of their lives. He then ordered his gang to return, which they did immediately without any disturbance.”