Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. I.djvu/138

106 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS ried to John Adams, then a young lawyer practis ing in Boston, and for the next ten years her life was quiet and happy, though she shared the intense interest of her husband in the fierce disputes that were so soon to culminate in war. During this period she became the mother of a daughter and three sons. Ten years of doubt and anxiety fol lowed during which Mrs. Adams was left at home in Braintree, while her husband was absent, first as a delegate to the Continental Congress, afterward on diplomatic business in Europe. In the zeal and determination with which John Adams urged on the declaration of independence he was stanchly supported by his brave wife, a circumstance that used sometimes to be jocosely alleged in explana tion of his superiority in boldness to John Dickin son, the women of whose household were per petually conjuring up visions of the headsman s block. In 1784 Mrs. Adams joined her husband in France, and early in the following year she accompanied him to London. With the recent loss of the American colonies rankling in the minds of George III. and his queen, it was hardly to be expected that much courtesy would be shown to the first minister from the United States or to his wife. Mrs. Adams was treated with rudeness, which she seems to have remembered vindictively. "Humilia tion for Charlotte," she wrote some years later, "is no sorrow for me." From 1789 to 1801 her resi-