Chapter Eleven
brAINTREE
Massachusetts Bay Colony
The British were fleeing Boston!
Thanks to a daring plan to haul cannons over ice all the way from Fort Ticonderoga—a plan executed by Boston’s own Henry Knox,
the former bookseller—the British had awakened one morning to the shock of seeing our guns on Dorchester Heights pointing
back at them.
Realizing that they weren’t the only ones with cannons anymore, they turned tail and ran.
“Cowards,” little Charlie said. “They stood it only one year, but we’d have stood it three.”
I laughed, exhilarated. “Right you are, my little man.” And that night I wrote to my husband, demanding to know where the
British might go. Was the fight over?
Congress was soon to make my husband president of the Board of War, and I was keen to know the progress of it. Only a month
before, I’d not known whether we could plant or sow with safety, whether we could rest in our own cottages or should flee
to the woods. But now I felt as if we might sit under our own vine and eat the good of the land.
Was it unpardonable hubris to think we might actually win this fight?
With spring’s arrival on the horizon, the long grief over my mother’s passing lifted. The sun looked brighter, the birds sang
more melodiously, and I felt bold and optimistic about the world’s infinite possibilities.
Perhaps that’s why I took up my pen to write my husband, “And by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose will be necessary, I desire you would remember the ladies. Be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.”
These words felt impertinent. Demanding. Audacious. Even a husband as indulgent as John Adams might take them amiss. I ought
to scratch them out or feed the letter to the fire and start again. But as I looked to see Nabby studying alongside my sons,
I could think of no good reason why we should fight for the freedom of her brothers whilst leaving her to the whims of whatever
man she might one day marry.
All patriots now said they’d rather die than live without freedom. So, with this thought, I added, “If particular care is
not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we
have no voice or representation.”
I sent this letter with the highest hopes in my heart.
I received a reply that made it ache.
“I cannot but laugh at what you say about the ladies,” John wrote. “We know better than to repeal our masculine systems, which
would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat.”
He plainly believed I’d written a bit of saucy jousting. But I’d meant it earnestly and now felt stung by his dismissal. Resentful,
too.
My husband had wounded me in this exchange; he had, in fact, for the first time in our lives, truly disappointed me. Thus, I did not mind quite so much when he told me that he wouldn’t be home in May.
And when I turned my mind to the finances that sustained our family, it was with a much more independent turn of mind. John—who
had laughed at my plea for some small semblance of legal protection for women—had nevertheless asked me to begin making saltpeter
for the soldiers’ muskets. As if it was not all I could do to maintain his farm.
His financial fate rested on my merits. But the corn looked poor, I didn’t have the strength to work the land by myself, and I couldn’t make it rain.
I’d have to lean harder on my own resources.
So, when Dr. Tufts stopped by on his way to Boston, I asked, “When you make house calls, do you ever encounter ladies who need pins?”
“Every housewife in Massachusetts needs pins,” he replied. “Why? What scheme is brewing in your head?”
“I’ve been selling pins to friends,” I explained. “I’m already trading with Mrs. Warren for soap, wool, and cloth from Plymouth.
Now I want to expand my enterprise, but a respectably married woman cannot go from town to town hawking pins like a tinker.”
“Why not?” he asked.
For a moment, I startled. His question wasn’t just a flippant quip. The world as we knew it was coming apart, so, truly, why
not? But unlike Mrs. Warren, I had to care about conventions and pleasantries. “Because it isn’t done. Certainly not by a
delegate’s wife.” We couldn’t afford for our fellow citizens to wonder whether my husband was using his role in the public
trust to corrupt advantage. Still, we needed to survive. “But your son is in trade. Might you and he consider, for some percentage
of the profits, selling for me?”
My good Uncle Tufts grinned as if we were hatching a plot, and I supposed we were. “I don’t see why not.”
He hadn’t hesitated, so neither did I, launching into a discussion of plans and possibilities. “I think even more money could
be made in Boston.”
“If only it were safe to go there,” he warned. “The British have left smallpox in their wake.”
In the aftermath of the siege, General Washington insisted upon inoculating the entire Continental Army against the disease,
which was sometimes called distemper. I knew my husband wished for an inoculating hospital to be opened in every town in New
England. Meanwhile, Uncle Tufts told me the city of Boston would embark upon the experiment of inoculating its populace all
at once.
I decided then and there to be part of that experiment. I would not simply wait, complacently, for another contagion to carry
off me and mine. For I was in a revolutionary spirit and would take fate into my own hands.