Lines of Communication

Lives in letters

As some of you know, I am slated to become a grandfather in 2025. To mark the occasion, I have begun writing letters to my prospective granddaughter, which I hope will ultimately become part of a larger project that tries to capture what it’s like to be alive in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. I hope it will be of some value to you now and her later. —Jim

January 5, 2025

Dear Baby,

In the last couple weeks I’ve been reading and writing about Abigail Adams, whose most obvious claim to fame was her 54-year marriage to Founding Father John Adams, who helped lay the foundations of our republic. She was a remarkable person in her own right—not only a wife and mother, but also a savvy political advisor and (sometimes hard-headed) financial investor—and I do hope you will someday learn about her, whether from me or someone else. The main reason that we do know about her is that she and John exchanged well over a thousand letters over the course of a 37-year period in which the spent months and even years apart. Paradoxically, it was the distance that separated them that allows us to understand their lives together in a set of documents that is among the most remarkable records of the American Revolution that we have.

Those letters range across a mix of quotidian matters that range from the price of coffee to what to do if the British invade (take the kids and flee into the woods, John tells her from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; she’s living in a war zone in occupied Boston). They also regularly express their affection for each other with impressive continuity. At some level, of course, these letters are performative: first for each other, and then a wider world they had to know that sooner or later would be reading over their figurative shoulders. (Martha Washington, for her part, destroyed all her correspondence with George.) So it is, for example, that we have this famous exchange from March of 1776, when John was leading his peers toward a break with Great Britain, in which she said:

I long to hear that you have declared an independency—and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies [this is the phrase that has resounded through the ages], and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

As there often was, Abigail had her tongue—partially—in cheek. So did John in his response, though exasperation is also apparent. “As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh,” he replied in a letter two weeks later. “We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government everywhere. That children and apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.” With regard to women in particular, he noted that “in practice you know we are the subjects. We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the Despotism of the Petticoat. I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight.” Amid the banter—a prominent feature of their correspondence—was an important truth that they both realized: that a struggle against a global imperial empire was primarily led by rich white men would have important implications for the non-rich, non-white, and non-men. Abigail was the first to invoke the American Revolution as a usable precedent, and John was the first to fear that precedent, though his marriage to Abigail also suggests his willingness to face those fears and grapple with them, as great American leaders have done ever since.

Anyway, my dear grandchild, I’m writing you about these letters mindful that I am engaged in the act of writing you a letter. Here in the twenty-first century, there’s something quaint about this, though everybody still knows what letters are and may once in a while actually send or receive one. We still rely on the written word to communicate. Most common are text messages on our phones, which tend to be short but have been known to pack a powerful emotional punch. There’s also email, though this tends to fall more into the realm of work than play, and seems to be regarded as a slower, less direct form of communication than text messaging (it plays the role that so-called snail-mail used to play relative to email). In choosing to create this documentary record using a traditional form through more modern media, I’m making a guess about what is most likely to resonate and last. I’m imagining someday creating a paper record because a physical object seems like the most promising means of survival, even if it isn’t practical in the short run. I hope at some point it will be in reach of your fingers.

And what is my larger point in this particular letter, besides the fact that I am writing a letter? It’s that insofar as this document is likely to have any value, it’s likely to take a form beyond what I intend or can imagine. Though my self-presentation is managed, I’m betraying myself, as it were, in my effort to connect, however tenuously, with you. But my hope is that whatever else I may reveal, it is the urgency of my desire to extend that which is best in myself—forms of love, variously construed—in ways that will be helpful. But the rest, beloved, is up to you.