John Adams - SA by David McCullough

had to be done at Philadelphia.
    Abigail had already said what John knew needed saying when, in November, a petition was circulated at home calling for reconciliation with Britain. “I could not join today in the petitions ... for a reconciliation between our no longer parent state, by a tyrant state and these colonies,” she wrote. Then, making a slight but definite dash mark with her pen before continuing, as if to signify her own break from the past, she said, “Let us separate, they are unworthy to be our brethren.”
    Passing through New York, Adams bought two copies of a small anonymous pamphlet, newly published under the title Common Sense . Keeping one, he sent the other on to her.
    *   *   *
    ADAMS AND HIS TWO COMPANIONS arrived at Philadelphia on Thursday, February 8, 1776, fifteen days after leaving Braintree.
    His first letters from Abigail did not reach him until more than a month later and were filled with accounts of thrilling events. The American bombardment of Boston had begun March 2 and 3. “No sleep for me tonight,” she wrote, as the house trembled about her. On March 5 she described a more thunderous barrage: “the rattling of the windows, the jar of the house and the continuous roar of the 24-pounders.”
    The night before, working at great speed, Washington's men had moved the guns from Ticonderoga to commanding positions on the high ground of the Dorchester Peninsula, south of Boston, looking over Boston Harbor and the British fleet. With hundreds of ox teams and more than a thousand American troops at work, breastworks had been set up and cannon hauled into place, all in a night and to the complete surprise of the British. Abigail was told that the British commander, on seeing what they had accomplished, remarked, “My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.”
    Days of fearful tension followed until Sunday, March 17, St. Patrick's Day, when she went again to the top of Penn's Hill to see a spectacle such as no one could ever have imagined—the British were abandoning Boston. General William Howe had struck an agreement with Washington. If allowed to depart in peace, the army would not leave Boston in flames.
    The entire fleet, “the largest fleet ever seen in America,” was lifting canvas in a fair breeze and turning to the open sea. “You may count upwards of one hundred and seventy-sail,” she wrote. “They look like a forest.”
    The British had been outwitted, humiliated. The greatest military power on earth had been forced to retreat by an army of amateurs; it was a heady realization. As would be said by the Duke of Manchester before the House of Lords, “The fact remains, that the army which was sent to reduce the province of Massachusetts Bay has been driven from the capital, and the standard of the provincial army now waves in triumph over the walls of Boston.”
    With the departing fleet sailed a thousand Loyalists, many well known to John and Abigail Adams, including John's first mentor in the law, James Putnam of Worcester, and Samuel Quincy, brother of Hannah and Josiah, and Adams's opposing counsel in the Boston Massacre trials.
    That such had come to pass, wrote Abigail, was surely the work of the Lord and “marvelous in our eyes.”
     

CHAPTER TWO: TRUE BLUE
We were about one third Tories, and
[one]
third timid, and one third true blue.
    —John Adams
    PHILADELPHIA, the provincial capital of Pennsylvania on the western bank of the Delaware River, was a true eighteenth-century metropolis, the largest, wealthiest city in British America, and the most beautiful. Visitors wrote in praise of its “very exactly straight streets,” its “many fair houses and public edifices,” and of the broad, tidal Delaware, alive in every season but winter with a continuous traffic of ships great and small. Though more than a hundred miles from the open sea, it was America's busiest port, with wharves stretching nearly two