pocket, and gave my Wife the rest of my cash L4, 3-8 and tell her she
shall now keep the Cash; if I want I will borrow of her. She has a
better faculty than I at managing Affairs: I will assist her; and will
endeavour to live upon my salary; will see what it will doe. The Lord
give his blessing."[105]

And nearly seventy years later John Adams, in writing to Benjamin Rush,
declares a similar confidence in his help-meet and expresses in his
quiet way genuine pride in her willingness to meet all ordeals with him.
"May 1770. When I went home to my family in May, 1770 from the Town
Meeting in Boston ... I said to my wife, 'I have accepted a seat in the
House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to
your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning that
you may prepare your mind for your fate.' She burst into tears, but
instantly cried in a transport of magnanimity, 'Well, I am willing in
this cause to run all risks with you, and be ruined with you, if you are
ruined.' These were times, my friend, in Boston which tried women's
souls as well as men's."

Surely men were not unmindful in those stern days of the strength and
devotion of those women who bore them valiant sons and daughters that
were to set a nation free. And, furthermore, from such tributes we may
justly infer that women of the type of Jane Turell, Eliza Pinckney,
Abigail Adams, Margaret Winthrop, and Martha Washington were wives and
mothers who, above all else, possessed womanly dignity, loved their
homes, yet sacrificed much of the happiness of this beloved home life
for the welfare of the public, were "virtuous, pious, modest, and
womanly," built homes wherein were peace, gentleness, and love, havens
indeed for their famous husbands, who in times of great national woes
could cast aside the burdens of public life, and retire to the rest so
well deserved. As the author of _Catherine Schuyler_ has so fittingly
said of the home life of her and her daughter, the wife of Hamilton:
"Their homes were centers of peace; their material considerations
guarded. Whatever strength they had was for the fray. No men were ever
better entrenched for political conflict than Schuyler and Hamilton....
The affectionate intercourse between children, parents, and
grand-parents reflected in all the correspondence accessible makes an
effective contrast to the feverish state of public opinion and the
controversies then raging. Nowhere would o