“[John Paul Jones] is a most uncommon Character. I dare Say you would be as much dissapointed in him as I was. … I expected to have seen a Rough Stout warlike Roman. Instead of that, I should sooner think of wraping him up in cotton wool and putting him into my pocket, than sending him to contend with Cannon Ball. He is small of stature, well proportioned, soft in his Speach easy in his address polite in his manners, vastly civil, understands all the Etiquette of a Ladys Toilite as perfectly as he does the Masts Sails and rigging of a Ship. Under all this appearence of softness he is Bold enterprizing ambitious and active. … He knows how often the Ladies use the Baths, what coulour best suits a Ladys complextion, what Cosmecticks are most favourable to the skin. We do not often See the Warriour and the Abigail [a lady’s maid] thus united.”
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Abigail Adams to Elizabeth Cranch on December 3, 1784
I can’t believe that people have been saying for centuries that they want to wrap precious smol people in blankets and place them into their pockets to protect them.
Tag: Abigail Adams
“John Adams showed how truly thickheaded he could be when he wrote from Paris to his wife running his business and raising his children back in Braintree, Massachusetts. ‘I admire the ladies here,’ he oh so sensitively said, ‘Don’t be jealous. They are handsome and very well educated. Their accomplishments are exceedingly brilliant.’ Abigail had a ready reply: ‘I regret the trifling narrow contracted education of females in my own country…. You need not be told how much female education is neglected, nor how fashionable it has been to ridicule female learning.’ I suspect he needed not be told because she had told him again and again.”
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the death of john adams june 30 1778
(Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts)
The fondness that la Marquise discovers for her children, is very amiable; and the more remarkable in a country where the least trait of such a disposition is scarce known. She seems to adore them, and to live but in them. She has two that were presented to us; they both speak English, and sing it; the Marquis appeared very fond of them likewise. He is apparently a man of great modesty, and delicacy of manners.
Journal of Abigail Adams (daughter of Abigail and John Adams), 21 February 1785 when the family dined with the Lafayettes. When she first met Gilbert on the 14 February at a dinner at Franklin’s, she wrote “The Marquis de la Fayette I never saw before; he appears a little reserved and very modest.” (via marquisdelaughingette)
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.”
Daintyfire 