Adams, Abigail

Fragment of autograph letter signed ("A. Adams"), one half page on wove paper written on recto and verso, (6 x 6 3/4 in.; 152 x 172 mm), n.p., n.d. [Quincy, ca. February 1809], to her daughter-in-law Ann Harrod Adams; bottom portion of letter torn away.

Sotheby's would like to thank Hobson Woodward of the Adams Papers for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.

"I pray to God to spare the life of our dear Child and to give us all submission and resignation to his will." Dangerous illness plagues the Adams household, threatening the lives of Abigail's young grandchildren. Abigail affectionately provides an account of the health of her grandson Thomas to her daughter-in-law, Ann Harrod Adams (wife of Thomas Boylston Adams), whom she addresses as her "dear afflicted Daughter." It would appear that Ann herself was ill at the time as well worried sick about the health and fate of her children. "Thomas wants care and attention I am sensible. And as I wrote you I took him to Juda altho with all the precautions you have recited, but I shall go and bring him back again and take all the care possible of him altho Juda I know is judicious and will do everything for him that is proper. Yet if anything should happen to him or he be unwell I should accuse myself. I shall give him freely of old wine. I carried him a bottle of bark ... "  Juda was apprently a family servant or wet nurse, and Thomas was at the time a nursing infant. Bark was a traditional remedy for fever, inflammation, and headaches.

The approximate date and the recipient of this letter can be established based on another letter dated 10 February 1809 from Abigail to Ann, located in the DeWindt Family papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, which indicates that Abigail herself is sick and says she is sorry to hear that a child named Abigail (the eldest daughter of Thomas and Ann, born 1806) is also ill.  She mentions the servant Juda and reports that a child named Elizabeth (Thomas and Ann's second child, born 1808) is well.

In the present fragment, Abigail indicates that a female, most likely either her granddaughter Abigail or Elizabeth, "is my dayly care. I have at last got a woman to attend her. Your father sends his Love to you and sensibly feels y[our] affliction as do all the rest of the family who desire to be remembered to you. I know you receive from your friends ev[ery] assistance and consolation in their power. I wish I could render you my service but I know you will think I do in the case of the dear children with me. I still hope our dear Elizabeth may be spared to us."

The Adamses were extremely doting on their grandchildren. When Abigail's son Charles died, his wife Sarah and their two girls came to live with them. When any of the grandchildren would write John Adams, he would always reply promptly and affectionately. When an infant grandchild (Frances Foster, Thomas's third daughter) died in 1812, a devastated Adams wrote to his son John Quincy: "I have been called lately to weep in the chamber of my birth over the remains of a beautiful babe of your brother's, less than a year old. Why have I been preserved at more than three quarters of a century, and why was that fair flower blasted so soon, are questions we are not permitted to ask" (quoted in McCullough, John Adams, p. 609).   

Frances was the only child of Thomas and Ann's brood of seven to die in infancy.  Thomas survived childhood and died in 1837, aged 28, while Elizabeth, the most robust of the clan, outlived all her siblings. She died at the ripe old age of 95 in 1903.