Adams Family Correspondence, volume 3

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Abigail Adams 2d to Elizabeth Cranch, 15 March 1779 AA2 Cranch, Elizabeth Norton, Elizabeth Cranch Abigail Adams 2d to Elizabeth Cranch, 15 March 1779 Adams, Abigail (daughter of JA and AA) Cranch, Elizabeth Norton, Elizabeth Cranch

Abigail Adams 2d to Elizabeth Cranch

Plymouth March 15 1779

As a convenient opportunity offoring by General Warren I cannot let it excape without a line for my Myrtilla. I now take up my pen to inform you that I do not feel in the writing humour and am determind to indulge myself and give way to thease Lazy freeks. I shall take my pen in the eve again and will give you an account how I shall have spent the afternoon for I am now already trigd1 to vissiat Miss Watson and can you wonder that I cannot write.

Monday eve 15 March. We have paid the vissiat and had a very agreable afternoon more so than I expected I assure you. Miss Sally Watson is I think a very prety agreable young Laidie but rather reserved. She has a sister as prety as herself, Miss Betsey. They treated us very Genteelly indeed, and I asure you I am much with the family altho they are of differend sentaments.2

I dond think myself capable of medling with politicks and therefor can have friends upon either party. Miss Watson is soon to be married. I suppose no dought she thinks she shall be happyer than at present but some people think her mistaken. Some people who ware once low in the World now Live in aff luence and Luxury but I dont think it will last always.

I dont belive the person Who rides in his Chariot is half so happy as the farmer whose nesecetyes oblige him to walk a foot. A polite person and a great fortune will make up for every other diffishencey let them be ever so great.

189

I must now bid you adeiu for my fingers are so cold I cannot hold my pen aney longer than to subscribe myself your friend,

Mercella

PS I suppose before this Mrs. Welch is the fond parrent and has either a Son or Deaughter to take up her attention.3 I wish the latter.

RC (MHi:Cranch Papers).

Trig, now a dialect word: “to dress smartly or finely” ( OED ).

This was the family of George and Elizabeth (Oliver) Watson of Plymouth. Sarah (1759–1832) was to marry Martin Brimmer of Boston on the 28th of this month. Her sister Elizabeth (1767–1806) married (1st) Thomas Russell of Boston and (2d) Sir Grenville Temple. The Watsons' “differend sentaments,” not surprisingly, were loyalist; Mrs. Watson was a daughter of former Chief Justice Peter Oliver, and the oldest sister in the family, Mary, was the wife of Elisha, son of former Governor Thomas Hutchinson. See Plymouth Church Records, 1620–1859, N.Y., 1920–1923, 1:449, 452, 456; 2:500; Bradford Kingman, Epitaphs from Burial Hill, Plymouth, Massachusetts, Brookline, Mass., p. 40, 87; Barbara N. Parker and Anne B. Wheeler, John Singleton Copley, Boston, 1938, p. 204–206; Andrew Oliver, Faces of a Family, privately printed, 1960, p. 9–10.

Mrs. Thomas Welsh (Abigail Kent), AA's first cousin, gave birth to a son, Thomas Welsh Jr., on 8 Jan. 1779. He graduated from Harvard in 1798 and during 1798–1799 served as JQA's secretary in Berlin. He later practiced law in Boston, ventured into politics and business, suffered heavy losses, and died in 1831. Information from Harvard Univ. Archives; see also vol. 1:220, above; CFA, Diary , vol. 2, passim; JQA, Diary, 12 July 1831; Adams Genealogy.