yet find clear traces only of the working of the intellect. The solitary meditation, the confidential whisper to a friend, never meant to reach the ear of the multitude, the secret wishes, not blazoned forth to catch applause, the fluctuations between fear and hope that most betray the springs of action,—these are the guides to character, which most frequently vanish with the moment that called them forth, and leave nothing to posterity but those coarser elements for judgment that are found in elaborated results.

There is, however, still another element which is not infrequently lost sight of. It is of great importance, not only to understand the nature of the superiority of the individuals who have made themselves a name above their fellow-beings, but to estimate the degree in which the excellence for which they were distinguished was shared by those among whom they lived. Inattention to this duty might present Patrick Henry and James Otis, Washington, Jefferson, and Samuel Adams, as the causes of the American Revolution, which they were not. There was a moral principle in the field, to the power of which a great majority of the whole population of the colonies, whether male or female, old or young, had been long and habitually trained to do homage. The individuals named, with the rest of their celebrated associates, who best represented that moral principle before the world, were not the originators, but the spokesmen, of the general opinion, and instruments for its adaptation to existing events. Whether fighting in the field or deliberating in the Senate, their strength as against Great Britain was not that of numbers, nor of wealth, nor of genius; but it drew its nourishment from the sentiment that pervaded the dwellings of the entire population.

How much this home sentiment did then, and does ever, depend upon the character of the female portion of the people, will be too readily understood by all to require explanation. The domestic hearth is the first of schools, and the best of lecture-rooms; for there the heart will coöperate with the mind, the affections with the reasoning power. And this is the scene for the almost exclusive sway of the weaker sex. Yet, great as the influence thus exercised undoubtedly is, it escapes observation in such a manner that history rarely takes much account of it. The maxims of religion, faith, hope, and charity, are not passed through the alembic of logical proof before they are admitted into the daily practice of women. They go at once into the teachings of infancy, and thus form the only high and pure motives of which matured manhood can, in its subsequent action, ever boast. Neither, when the stamp of duty is to be struck in the young mind, is there commonly so much of alloy in the female heart as with men, with which the genuine metal may be fused, and the face of the coin made dim. There is not so much room for the doctrines of expediency, and the promptings of private interest, to compromise the force of public example. In every instance of domestic convulsions, and when the pruning-hook is deserted for the sword and musket, the sacrifice of feelings made by the female sex is unmixed with a hope of worldly compensation. With them there is no ambition to gratify, no fame to be gained by the simply negative virtue of privations suffered in silence. There is no action to drown in its noise and bustle a full sense of the pain that must inevitably attend it. The lot of woman, in times of trouble, is to be a passive spectator of events which she can scarcely hope to make subservient to her own fame, or indeed to control in any way.

If it were possible to get at the expression of feelings by women in the heart of a community, at a moment of extraordinary trial, recorded in a shape evidently designed to be secret and confidential, this would seem to present the surest and most unfailing index to its general character. Hitherto we have not gathered much of this material in the United States. The dispersion of families, so common in America, the consequent destruction of private papers, the defective nature of female education before the Revolution, the difficulty and danger of free communication, and the engrossing character, to the men, of public, and to the women, of domestic cares, have all contributed to cut short, if not completely to destroy, the sources of information. It has been truly remarked that "instances of patience, perseverance, fortitude, magnanimity, courage, humanity, and tenderness, which would have graced the Roman character, were known only to those who were themselves the actors, and whose modesty could not suffer them to blazon abroad their own fame." The heroism of the females of the Revolution has gone from memory with the generation that witnessed it, and nothing, absolutely nothing, remains upon the ear of the young of the present day but the faint echo of an expiring general tradition. There is, moreover, very little knowledge remaining to us of the domestic manners of the last century, when, with more of admitted distinctions than at present, there was more of general equality; very little of the state of social feeling, or of that simplicity of intercourse, which, in colonial times, constituted in New England as near an approach to the successful exemplification of the democratic theory as the irregularity in the natural gifts of men will, in all probability, ever practically allow.

It is the purpose of the present volume to contribute something to the supply of this deficiency, by giving to tradition a form partially palpable. The present is believed to be the first attempt, in the United States, to lay before the public a series of private letters, written without the remotest idea of publication, by a woman, to her husband. Their greatest value consists in the fact, susceptible of no misconception, that they furnish an exact transcript of the feelings of the writer, in times of no ordinary trial. Independently of this, the variety of scenes in which she wrote, and the opportunities furnished for observation in the situations in which she was placed by the elevation of her husband to high official positions in the country, may contribute to sustain the interest with which they will be read. The undertaking is, nevertheless, too novel not to inspire the editor with some doubt of its success, particularly as it brings forward to public notice a person who has now been long removed from the scene of action, and of whom, it is not unreasonable to suppose, the present generation of readers have neither personal knowledge nor recollection. For the sake of facilitating their progress, and explaining the allusions to persons and objects very frequently occurring, it may not be deemed improper here to premise some account of her life.

There were few persons of her day and generation who derived their origin, or imbibed their character, more exclusively from the genuine stock of the Massachusetts Puritan settlers than Abigail Smith. Her father, the Reverend William Smith, was the settled minister of the Congregational Church at Weymouth, for more than forty years, and until his death. Her mother, Elizabeth Quincy, was the granddaughter of the Reverend John Norton, long the pastor of a church of the same denomination in the neighboring town of Hingham, and the nephew of John Norton, well known in the annals of the colony.[1] Her maternal grandfather, John Quincy, was the grandson of Thomas Shepard, minister of Charlestown, distinguished in his day, and the son of the more distinguished Thomas Shepard of Cambridge, whose name still lives in one of the Churches of that town. These are persons whose merits may be found fully recorded in the pages of Mather and of Neal. They were among