Abigail Adams: Letter to Lucy Cranch

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In the summer of 1784, Abigail, who had never traveled outside eastern Massachusetts, left her two younger sons with relatives and sailed with her daughter Abigail (called Nabby in the family) to England to join her husband and her eldest son, John Quincy. In August the Adamses made the journey to France, described in a letter to her niece Lucy Cranach, so that John could join Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in negotiating commercial treaties for America. The family occupied a large, elegant house in Auteuil, then a village four miles west of Paris where several French intellectuals and writers made their homes. They remained there until May 1785, when John Quincy returned to America to prepare for college and Abigail, John, and Nabby moved to London so John could began his service as America's first diplomatic minister to Great Britain.

Abigail's letter of September 5, 1784, to Lucy was one of her earliest from France and is one of her most critical of that nation, castigating both the countryside and Paris, the general population and polite society, and even the horses. Within a few months, she would learn to tolerate Paris, to love the French theater, and to admire at least a few French women of a less eccentric and flamboyant character than Madame Helvétius, the rich, noble widow she had met at Franklin's home and whom she describes in her letter. But this letter is one of Abigail's most colorful and reveals much of her own character. In some twenty years as a correspondent to husband, family, and friends, she had seldom judged another woman in anything but the most positive terms, but when suddenly thrust, for the first time in her rather sheltered life, into the most foreign surroundings, she felt compelled to declare how a proper woman should behave.

It would be easy to dismiss this letter as the cranky complaint of a provincial New England minister's daughter, but in expressing her distaste so vividly Abigail powerfully conveys her idea of what a proper society and a healthy, prosperous nation should look like. In her nine months in Auteuil, Abigail would write some twenty long, detailed letters to her sisters and nieces in Massachusetts, and with each passing month France would appear in a more positive light. But neither the country nor its people ever won Abigail's heart; in her view, England was far superior. In the great bulk of her letters, however, America itself was better yet; if she did not find it perfect—and she never did—she always hoped for its improvement.