We get a very telling glimpse of Abigail Adams’s own views about one aspect of race relations in a letter she wrote upon seeing the play Othello in 1786, just one year before she met Sally Hemings. By her own admission, Adams was simply undone by the play’s depiction of the marriage between a Moor, portrayed by a white man done up in black face, and a white woman. Adams wrote of her “horror and disgust” every time the “sooty” actor touched the “gentle” actress who played Desdemona, even though she knew they were just actors on a stage. She was not sure why she felt that way and seemed discomfited by her response, but her reaction against racial mixture was visceral and extremely powerful. Her son John Quincy, who would later write a number of satirical poems about Sally Hemings, saw Othello thirty years after his mother. He offered more detailed responses to the play in two essays in which he was able to put into words, in a way that his mother could not in 1786, exactly what was troubling about the play. Adams wrote:

“Who can sympathize with the love of Desdemona? The great moral lesson of the tragedy of Othello is, that the black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the law of Nature; and that, in such violations, Nature will vindicate her laws…. The character takes from us so much of the sympathetic interest in her sufferings, that when Othello smothers her in bed, the terror and the pity subside immediately into the sentiment that she has her just deserts.”

The only reasonable reading of this passage is that Adams was saying that Desdemona deserved death for race mixing with Othello. As it happens, he made exactly that point very graphically to the renowned actress Fanny Kemble at a dinner party in Boston in 1839. Kemble described Adams’s face as displaying “the most serious expression of disgust” as he told her that Desdemona should have died for marrying, in Adams’s words “a [n-word].” Kemble was offended by Adams’s use of what she called “that opprobrious title.” Her journal entry on the conversation reads a biting esprit d’escalier moment, with Kemble noting sarcastically that some might think Adams’s characterization superior to Shakespeare’s. At the right moment on stage, she wrote, Iago could adopt Adams’s language and say in a soliloquy, “I hate the [n-word]” instead of “I hate the Moor.”