From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   The burden of the war fell on both sexes, which may have been a factor in   
   Abigail Adams famously asking her congressman-husband to 'Remember the Ladies'   
   in the 'New Code of Laws' that independence would necessitate. Like thousands   
   of women whose husbands    
   were away at war, Abigail Adams was left at home alone to cope with the   
   children, the family's economic concerns, and the travail caused by the war.   
   After assisting refugees from occupied Boston during the first months of   
   fighting, the war came to her    
   doorstep when camp diseases — ranging from smallpox to assorted fevers —   
   spread from the siege lines in Boston to Braintree. Casualty rates were   
   appalling. 'Some poor parents are mourning the loss of 3, 4 & 5 children, and   
   some families are wholly    
   stripped of every Member,' she reported to her husband in Philadelphia. She   
   came to believe that the plight of civilians caused by the 'desolation of War'   
   and the 'Havock made by the pestilence' equaled the distress faced by the   
   soldiery, and in fact    
   civilian deaths in Braintree late in 1775 may have been proportionally greater   
   than the death rate among soldiers besieging Boston...   
      
   Abigail Adams was separated from her husband for all but about twelve months   
   during the decade between 1774 and 1784. Most women whose husbands went to war   
   faced a separation consisting of months, perhaps a year or two. Many of these   
   women were compelled    
   to take on the duties ordinarily performed by their spouse — 'to plough and   
   hoe... and raise bread,' as a Virginian put it, but also to market what was   
   grown and to manage the family's finances — in addition to their customary   
   responsibilities of    
   caring for children and the house. A Connecticut woman whose husband was   
   serving at Fort Ticonderoga noted that her 'duties were not light' and left   
   her with 'no time for aught but my work.' Even Abigail Adams, who was far more   
   affluent than most, took    
   on assignments that she had never previously faced. The Adamses' prewar income   
   had come from the farm and John's law practice; the high cost of wartime labor   
   stripped the farm of much of its profitability, and for all practical   
   purposes, John never again    
   practiced law after the summer of 1774, when he attended the First Continental   
   Congress. Abigail never walked behind a plow, but she learned how to supervise   
   those who were hired to tend to the farm, and in time she grew to be a   
   successful manager of the    
   couple's financial resources. She bought and sold land, and invested in bonds   
   and securities, and in the end she succeeded in preserving the family's   
   solvency despite the severe economic dislocations brought on by the war.   
      
   For some women, the experience of taking charge of family and farm was   
   transformative. Early in the war, one woman wrote to her husband at the front   
   about 'Your farming business'; in time, she subtly shifted to writing about   
   'our farming business.' For    
   women whose husbands were away, the war brought loneliness, endless toil,   
   uncertainty, and apprehension, and for some it brought the grim news that   
   their loved one had either died or been seriously wounded while serving his   
   country. For the handful    
   living near the front lines, or in the no-man's land of civil warfare in, say,   
   New Jersey in 1776 or South Carolina after 1780, there was the churning fear   
   of mistreatment, including molestation, at the hands of an armed soldier.   
      
   The war wore on women, as it did on men, and though fervor for the ideals of   
   the American Revolution may not have vanished for those of either sex, the   
   protracted nature of these hostilities tested their willingness to sacrifice.   
   Sarah Hodgkins was    
   twenty-four years old and married to an Ipswich, Massachusetts, shoemaker when   
   the war began and her husband, Joseph, enlisted. Sarah was caught up in the   
   patriotic fervor at the outset of hostilities, but as the war continued   
   seemingly without end, and    
   Joseph reenlisted time and again, Sarah's patriotic intensity waned. At home   
   with seven children — one of whom died during the conflict — she   
   eventually expressed her disappointment with Joseph's unremitting service,   
   notifying him that he had a 'duty    
   to come home to [his] family.' Telling Joseph that she felt like a 'widow,'   
   Sarah finally said, 'Let some body else take your place.' He did, though not   
   until he had served for four years. For all her support of the war, Abigail   
   Adams came to share Sarah'   
   s frustration. In 1782, three years after she had last seen her husband,   
   Abigail told John that she felt 'deserted, unprotected, unassisted,   
   uncounseled.' She added that his absence was nothing less than a 'moral evil,'   
   for in the 'holy [marriage]    
   ceremony' he had agreed to the vow 'What God has joined Let no Man put   
   asunder.' Two additional years passed before they were reunited.   
      
   The wives of husbands who chose loyalty to the king faced even greater trials.   
   Many Tory families were driven from their homes and forced to flee to strange   
   surroundings. None fell further than Grace Galloway. At the time of her   
   marriage to Joseph, some    
   fifteen years before the war erupted, she and her husband were widely thought   
   to be the wealthiest family in Pennsylvania. They owned five houses, including   
   a mansion on a spacious Bucks County estate. But she lost everything in the   
   course of the war —    
   her houses, their contents, even her friends. After the British army abandoned   
   Philadelphia in June 1778, Grace was forced to spend her last years living   
   alone in a tiny back alley apartment while her husband was in London   
   desperately trying to persuade    
   the British to continue to wage the war. Saying that she was 'undone' and   
   'could Not forgive' Joseph for having picked the wrong side, she acknowledged   
   that she was 'easey Nay happy not to be with him.' She died alone in   
   Philadelphia not long after the    
   war ended.   
      
   Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It, by John Ferling   
   (Bloomsbury Press, p. 252-254).   
      
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