Yet family life went on in spite of these increasing difficulties. The diaries and letters of such remarkable women as the patriotic Abigail Adams, the Quakeress, Mrs. Eliza Drinker, the letters of the Loyalist and exile, James Murray, the correspondence of Eliza Pinckney of Charleston, and the reminiscences of a Whig family who were obliged to leave New York upon the occupation of the town by British forces, abound in those details of domestic life that give a many sided picture. Joys derived from good news of dear ones, and family reunions; anxieties occasioned by illness, or the armies’ depredations; courageous efforts on the part of mothers not to allow their children’s education and occupations to suffer unnecessarily; tragedies of death and ruined homes—all are recorded with a “particularity” for which we are now grateful to the writers.
It is through these writings, also, that we are allowed glimpses of the enthusiasm for the cause of Liberty, or King, which was imbibed from the parents by the smallest children. On the Whig side, patriotic mothers in New England filled their sons with zeal for the cause of freedom and with hatred of the tyranny of the Crown; while in the more southern colonies the partisanship of the little ones was no less intense. “From the constant topic of the present conversation,” wrote the Rev. John J. Zubly (a Swiss clergyman settled in South Carolina and Georgia), in an address to the Earl of Dartmouth in seventeen hundred and seventy-five,—“from the constant topic of the present conversation, every child unborn will be impressed with the notion—it is slavery to be bound at the will of another ‘in all things whatsoever.’ Every mother’s milk will convey a detestation of this maxim. Were your lordship in America, you might see little ones acquainted with the word of command before they can distinctly speak, and shouldering of a gun before they are well able to walk.”[92-*]
The children of the Tories had also their part in the struggle. To some the property of parents was made over, to save it from confiscation in the event of the success of the American cause. To others came the bitterness of separation from parents, when they were sent across the sea to unknown relatives; while again some faint manuscript record tells of a motherless child brought from a comfortable home, no longer tenable, to whatever quarters could be found within the British lines. Fortunately, children usually adapt themselves easily to changed conditions, and in the novelty and excitement of the life around them, it is probable they soon forgot the luxuries of dolls and hobby-horses, toy-books and drums, of former days.
In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania the sentiment of the period was expressed in two or three editions of “The New England Primer.” Already in 1770 one had appeared containing as frontispiece a poor wood-cut of John Hancock. In 1775 the enthusiasm over the appointment of George Washington as commander-in-chief brought out another edition of the A B C book with the same picture labelled “General Washington.” The custom of making one cut do duty in several representations was so well understood that this method of introducing George Washington to the infant reader naturally escaped remark.
Another primer appeared four years later, which was advertised by Walters and Norman in the “Pennsylvania Evening Post” as “adorned with a beautiful head of George Washington and other copper-plates.” According to Mr. Hildeburn, this small book had the honor of containing the first portrait of Washington engraved in America. While such facts are of trifling importance, they are, nevertheless, indications of the state of intense feeling that existed at the time, and point the way by which the children’s books became nationalized.
In New England the very games of children centred in the events which thrilled the country. Josiah Quincy remembered very well in after life, how “at the age of five or six, astride my grandfather’s cane and with my little whip, I performed prodigies of valor, and more than once came to my mother’s knees declaring that I had driven the British out of Boston.” Afterwards at Phillips Academy, in Andover, between seventeen hundred and seventy-eight and seventeen hundred and eighty-six, Josiah and his schoolfellows “established it as a principle that every hoop, sled, etc., should in some way bear Thirteen marks as evidence of the political character of the owner,—if which were wanting the articles became fair prize and were condemned and forfeited without judge, jury, or decree of admiralty.”[94-*]
Other boys, such as John Quincy Adams, had tutors at home as a less expensive means of education than the wartime price of forty dollars a week for each child that good boarding-schools demanded. But at their homes the children had plenty of opportunity to show their intense enthusiasm for the cause of liberty. Years later, Mr. Adams wrote to a Quaker friend:
“For the space of twelve months my mother with her infant children dwelt, liable every hour of the day and of the night to be butchered in cold blood, or taken and carried to Boston as hostages. My mother lived in uninterrupted danger of being consumed with them all in a conflagration kindled by a torch in the same hands which on the Seventeenth of June [1775] lighted the fires of Charlestown.”[94-†]
He was, of course, only one of many boys who saw from some height near their homes the signs of battle, the fires of the enemy’s camps, the smoke rising from some farm fired by the British, or burned by its owner to prevent their occupation of it. With hearts made to beat quickly by the news that filtered through the lines, and heads made old by the responsibility thrust upon them,—in the absence of fathers and older brothers,—such boys as John Quincy Adams saw active service in the capacity of post-riders bearing in their several districts the anxiously awaited tidings from Congress or battlefield.
Fortunate indeed were the families whose homes were not disturbed by the military operations. From Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, families were sent hastily to the country until the progress of the war made it possible to return to such comforts as had not been destroyed by the British soldiers. The “Memoirs of Eliza Morton,” afterward Mrs. Josiah Quincy, but a child eight years of age in seventeen hundred and seventy-six, gives a realistic account of the life of such Whig refugees. Upon the occupation of New York by the British, her father, a merchant of wealth, as riches were then reckoned, was obliged to burn his warehouse to save it from English hands. Mr. Morton then gathered together in the little country village of Basking Ridge, seven miles from Morristown, New Jersey, such of his possessions as could be hastily transported from the city. Among the books saved in this way were the works of Thurston, Thomson, Lyttleton, and Goldsmith, and for the children’s benefit, “Dodsley’s Collection of Poems,” and “Pilgrim’s Progress.” “This,” wrote Mrs. Quincy, “was a great favorite; Mr. Greatheart was in my opinion a hero, well able to help us all on our way.” During the exile from New York, as Eliza Morton grew up, she read all these books, and years afterward told her grandchildren that while she admired the works of Thurston, Thomson, and Lyttleton, “those of Goldsmith were my chief delight. When my reading became afterward more extensive I instinctively disliked the extravagant fiction which often injures the youthful mind.”