"Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice... 2/5
Abigail’s letter, probably the best known plea for women’s rights in the Revolutionary era, draws a light-hearted if defensive response from John, who at the moment is puzzling over how to frame a government for a potentially independent America. 4/5
He hears “from all Parties Approbation of the Man, who, we have wish’d, should wear the Laurels, by reuniting the Colonies to the Mother Country—an Achievement deserving of more Honours, and which must be productive of more heartfelt Satisfaction to a Good Man than the Destruction of an Armada.” 3/3
“Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex.” 3/5
March 31, 1776: One of Benjamin Franklin's British friends, David Barclay, writes to the American statesman encouraging him to put some hope in the peace mission to the colonies led by Richard Howe, despite Howe also being the military commander who is leading an attack. 1/3
”Lord Howe continues as respectable a Character at this hour, as when we last parted—a Hint, that I thought, in every point of view, consistant for me to comunicate…it will not be for want of Inclination in him, should the Ollive Branch not rise superior to the direful Din of War.” 2/3
”As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bands of government everywhere,” he writes April 14. “But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented.”5/5
March 31, 1776: "Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors." Abigail Adams gives her husband John Adams, a leader in the Continental Congress, her views on the "new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make." 1/5
March 30, 1776: Vasily Tropinin, a Russian painter who rose from serfdom to fame as a portraitist, is born in Korpovo village. Allowed by his master to study painting at the country's leading academy, he achieved freedom at 47 and had a life's work of over 3,000 portraits.
"By the proposed new division, the main of those called Tories will be in the West Company," Hopkins writes. "The petitioners imagine that, upon a choice according to this division, such officers would be chosen as would give general satisfaction." 3/3
