Intermission

During these days when the American Constitution is under attack by thieves and brigands for making it difficult, or at least awkward, to lie, cheat, and steal from our national Treasury, the rational defenses of the 250-year-old provisions of Democracy and the Rule of Law tend to focus on the procedural struggles the Founders had in getting it done. As they should, because it was very hard to bring together slavers and abolitionists, as well as those who believed in hereditary leadership and others who trusted the wisdom of majority selection.

But last night as I was reading “John Adams,” David McCullough’s biography of our second president, I was struck by how much of a struggle it was for the Founders to actually get together in the eighth and ninth decades of the 18th Century. Using as an example Adams’s journey on horseback in January, 1776, from his home in Braintree, fifteen miles south of Boston, to Philadelphia, 400 miles distant, for the Constitutional Congress of that year, McCullough writes, “In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter … a foot or more of snow covered the landscape. Beneath the snow, after weeks of severe cold, the ground was frozen solid to a depth of two feet. Packed ice in the road, ruts as hard as iron, made the going hazardous, and the rider, mindful of the horse, kept at a walk." The journey would take two weeks at a minimum. There were five rivers to cross by ferry, and ice often stalled the service of the boats. Once in Philadelphia, they would be there for many months.

Adams, 40 that year, had left behind in Braintree a wife, Abigail, and four children. She was his “best and perfect friend,” while to her he was “the tenderest of husbands,” her “good man.” He was a lawyer and a farmer, descended from commoners, and she was a frugal wife, mother, and homemaker.

McCullough writes, “Ambitious to excel — to make himself known — he had nonetheless recognized at an early stage that happiness came not from fame and fortune, ‘and all such things,’ but from ‘an habitual contempt of them,’ as he wrote. He prized the Roman ideal of honor, and in this, as in much else, he and Abigail were in perfect accord. Fame without honor, in her view, would be ‘like a faint meteor gliding through the sky, shedding only transient light.’” In this, she understood the importance of John’s participation in the emerging revolution, but yet was compulsively honest enough to tell him in her letters of the burden of solitude that his departure and absence had visited upon her. “I have been like a nun in a cloister ever since you went away,” she wrote to him.