to the ancient and respectable manners of their country, submit, without ever suspecting that there can be any impropriety....  The richest person now in the island owes all his present prosperity and success to the ingenuity of his wife:  ... for while he was performing his first cruises, she traded with pins and needles, and kept a school.  Afterward she purchased more considerable articles, which she sold with so much judgment, that she laid the foundation of a system of business, that she has ever since prosecuted with equal dexterity and success....”

IV.  Patriotic Initiative and Courage

It was in the dark days of the Revolution that these stronger qualities of the feminine soul shone forth, and served most happily the struggling nation.  Long years of Indian warfare and battling against a stubborn wilderness had strengthened the spirit of the American woman, and when the men marched away to defend the land their undaunted wives and daughters bravely took up the masculine labors, tilling and reaping, directing the slaves, maintaining ship and factory, and supplying the armies with the necessities of life.  The letters written by the women in that period reveal an intelligent grasp of affairs and a strength of spirit altogether admirable.  Here was indeed a charming mingling of feminine grace, tenderness, sympathy, self-reliance, and common sense.

It required genuine courage to remain at home, often with no masculine protection whatever, with the ever-present danger of Indian raids, and there, with the little ones, wait and wait, hearing news only at long intervals, fearing even to receive it then lest it announce the death of the loved ones.  No telegraph, no railroad, no postal service, no newspaper might offer relief, only the letter brought by some friend, or the bit of news told by some passing traveller.  It was a time of agonizing anxiety.  There were months when the wife heard nothing; we have seen from the letters of Mrs. Adams that three months sometimes intervened between the letters from her husband.  In 1774, when John Adams was at Philadelphia, such a short distance from Boston, according to the modern conception, she wrote:  “Five weeks have passed and not one line have I received.  I would rather give a dollar for a letter by the post, though the consequences should be that I ate but one meal a day these three weeks to come."[305]

Again, these women faced actual dangers; for they were often near the firing line.  John Quincy Adams says of his mother:  “For the space of twelve months my mother with her infant children dwelt, liable every hour of the day and the night to be butchered in cold blood, or taken and carried into Boston as hostages.  My mother lived in unintermitted danger of being consumed with them all in a conflagration kindled by a torch in the same hands which on the 17th of June [1775] lighted the fires of Charlestown.  I saw with my own eyes those fires, and heard Britannia’s thunders in the Battle of Bunker Hill, and witnessed the tears of my mother and mingled them with my own.”