Episode 58: Our Unnatural Enemies May Be Turned From Us

Kathryn Gehred 

Hello and welcome to Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant. This is a women's history podcast where we feature 18th and early 19th century letters that don't get as much attention as we think they should. I am your host Kathryn Gehred. Today I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Emily Sneff to the podcast. Emily is a historian of early America and a leading expert on the United States Declaration of Independence. She is currently a consulting curator for the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence with the Museum of the American Revolution, the American Philosophical Society, and Historic Trappe. Welcome to the podcast, Emily.

Emily Sneff 

Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.

Kathryn Gehred 

We're really excited to have you. So you have a book that's going to be coming out next year, right? Can you tell me a little bit about it?

Emily Sneff 

I do, yeah, it's going to be with Oxford University Press sometime in early 2026 and it's about the Declaration of Independence in 1776 so how the news initially spread around the Atlantic, and the reactions to it and the sort of diplomatic and military stories that we often overlook because we forget that there was a moment where no one knew if independence was actually going to be secured. So it's really interesting to think about the contingencies and the sort of different emotions associated with the declaration in 1776 when no one knew that we'd still be here 250 years later.

Kathryn Gehred 

That's super fascinating. I used to be a tour guide at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and so you start to hear things about, like the Dunlap broadside and like different versions that still exist as, sort of like collectors editions of the Declaration of Independence, and there's this, like whole sort of world surrounding it that I've always thought was really interesting, and you'd never know when you're giving a tour if somebody was going to know a ton about it or have no idea.

Emily Sneff 

Like me, I tried, when I last toured Monticello, I tried to hang back and not really comment on anything, but my parents were looking at me like, you know about that, don't you?

Kathryn Gehred 

If you get a guest that knows a ton, it can be wonderful or it can be terrible. Yeah, that's awesome. What sparked your interest in the Declaration of Independence?

Emily Sneff 

So I kind of backed my way into early American history. I studied medieval history and museum studies in my undergraduate time at Johns Hopkins, and I was coming into the museum world at a time where there were not a lot of jobs. So I was volunteering and just trying to get as much experience as possible. And I ended up helping out at the American Philosophical Society on a research project about their bust of Thomas Jefferson by Jean Antoine Houdon. And I knew nothing about Jefferson, knew nothing about the founding era, and just kind of started researching, ended up helping out with a series of exhibitions that they were doing on Jefferson. And the first one was about Jefferson and the declaration. And the APS has a really phenomenal collection of unique copies of the Declaration of Independence. So I started realizing, like this thing, that I thought we knew everything about the founding document of the United States early in American history. Actually, there's still a lot to do, still a lot to uncover, and that was 10 years ago, and now I'm here, so yeah, it's been a really interesting trajectory. And I'm from Philadelphia originally. It's a great place to, you know, study the declaration and to think about the Declaration's impact. So I'm always walking past Independence Hall and just kind of, you know, soaking all of the history behind this document in but also trying to make it approachable for people who do not live here and may not have as close of a connection to the founding era as I have sort of developed over the last 10 years.

Kathryn Gehred 

Cool. Do you have a favorite edition of the Declaration of Independence?

Emily Sneff 

I have favorite editions of the declaration for like design purposes or because they were owned by a particular person, but I also have copies that really frustrate me. So there's one copy that has, like haunted me for literally 10 years at this point at the American Philosophical Society, and it's a broadside printed by John Dunlap on parchment. And it seems as though it was printed after he did his sort of initial batch of hundreds of copies on the night of July 4 into July 5. But this is on parchment, and it's a different type setting, and over the course of researching and coming back to it and stepping away from it. I still have not been able to solve the mystery of why exactly he created this copy. And the added wrinkle is it ended up in the hands of David Rittenhouse and was given to the American Philosophical Society after his death. And I descended from David Rittenhouse's sister.

Kathryn Gehred 

Oh!

Emily Sneff 

So I have this personal connection too, that makes it even more aggravating that I can't figure out why exactly this copy was printed, what its purpose was. So maybe someday I'll solve that mystery.

Kathryn Gehred 

Uncle David help us out!

Emily Sneff 

I know you would think like telepathically, I might be able to have some sort of seance and figure out. Exactly this copy existed, but no.

Kathryn Gehred 

Oh, that's fascinating. So with all of your decade of research into this, what's something that you wish more people understood about the Declaration of Independence?

Emily Sneff 

I always encourage people just read the Declaration of Independence, because I think a lot of Americans, but also people around the world, because the declaration has had such, you know, a huge impact in legacy. They think they know what's in the Declaration of Independence, but every time I read it, and I'm, you know, in the thousands of times at this point, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before. And it can seem as if it's an antiquated document. It can seem as though the grievances against King George III have no relation to modern life, but when you read the declaration, you'll find things that you can relate to. And I think, as we approach the 250 and hopefully, a lot of public readings of the declaration and sort of celebrations, but also critiques of it, people will pay attention to the text. It's only 1300 words. It doesn't take you that long to read it. So that's what I encourage people to do.

Kathryn Gehred 

Thats awesome. One of my favorite ways to celebrate the Fourth of July is to, like, attend a public reading of the Declaration of Independence, because that is the type of nerd that I am.

Emily Sneff 

That's a good type of nerd.

Kathryn Gehred 

And then also, it's really powerful to read that alongside the Frederick Douglass What to a Slave is the Declaration of Independence in the Fourth of July?

Emily Sneff 

Absolutely,

Kathryn Gehred 

I just always find that really meaningful to think about.

Emily Sneff 

Yeah for the exhibit that I've been working on with the Museum of the American Revolution, I've become more familiar with these other declarations and sort of commentaries that came later. So I knew about the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 I didn't know about the 1876 Women's Declaration of Rights that they actuallyinterrupted the celebration at Independence Hall on July 4, 1876 to present their declaration. So there's so many documents out there that, like, if you pair them up, either you know, for your own personal interest or with students, it's really effective to kind of get a sense of where the language falls short, or where it sets out promises that people come back to generations later. So definitely, studying the declaration in context is important.

Kathryn Gehred 

Thank you. That's, I think, a great setup. Today we're going to be talking about a letter that talks about one of these early prints of the Declaration of Independence. I'm really excited. I had not heard of this before you sent it to me, and I just thought it was super fascinating.

Emily Sneff 

Oh, great.

Kathryn Gehred 

Today, we're going to look at a letter from Mary, mostly called Polly Palmer to John Adams, written in Germantown, Massachusetts, on August 4, 1776 so to sort of set up the context, who was Polly Palmer?

Emily Sneff 

Polly Palmer was born in 1746 so she would have been 30 years old in 1776 Unfortunately, she died in 1791 so she had a really short life. She was the daughter of Joseph Palmer and Mary Cranch, and if you can follow the family tree, Mary Cranche's brother was Richard Cranch, who was married to Mary Smith, whose sister was Abigail Smith, who was married to John Adams. So they are all related. You know, sort of kins woman of the Adams. Polly's a really fascinating person, because we have very few kind of records of what her life was like. We have an account from her grand niece that sort of records what her later life was like, and then we have a handful of letters, but as far as we can tell, when she was a young woman, she was vivacious, she was like, everyone's favorite person. She was super smart. She would ride into town. They lived in Germantown, outside of Boston, and she would ride into Boston to chat up her father's business associates and come back, you know, after the sun had set, and her mother was so worried about her riding on her own, like, you can just get a sense of like she had a really fascinating personality and a lot of potential. And when she was 19, so that was in 1765, she suffered from a nervous disorder. The story is that her father was bragging about how awesome she was to a friend of his, and, you know, said she wasn't scared of anything. And this friend said, Okay, let's test that, and fired a gun above her head while she was sort of napping. And from that moment, she suffered from seizures. And her health, both physical and mental health, declined throughout the rest of her life. So it's really as this had story of someone who, you know, we can tell was a really big personality who starts to kind of shrivel up, according to the letters that survive after this moment at such a young age. So ultimately, she doesn't marry, she doesn't have children, she stays with family members the rest of her life, and she's remembered by her grandniece as sort of poor aunt, Polly, which is really quite sad. So I love that, talking about this letter in particular, we get a sense of how she still had agency in her life, and how she still was a dynamic person, even if. One else sort of remembered her in a different way.

Kathryn Gehred 

That's like, just trying to think of, like, why you would shoot a gun over somebody's head. Like, that's messed up.

Emily Sneff 

It's really, you know, it's tragic, yeah, the story of the family is that her father was devastated by the role that he played in this so, yeah, it's really unfortunate. How did you first learn about Polly? So I first came across Polly Palmer in the fall of 2020. I had just finished my graduate exams in the pandemic, not really sure when I would be able to do research for this big transatlantic project that I had in mind. I was grieving the loss of my father. I was just like facing a lot of uncertainty, and, you know, studying the Declaration of Independence, you have people like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams who are hard to relate to. And I came across this 30 year old single woman as a 30 year old single woman myself facing similar uncertainty, right? Like, not that we can exactly compare the pandemic to the Revolutionary War, but a similar state of, like, not really knowing what comes next, being worried about your physical safety, your family's health. So I just immediately was like, Okay, now I get this perspective, like I finally have someone that I can connect with. So I felt a real kinship with her, so much so that literally, the first lines of my dissertation that I wrote were about her, because I just had the spark of an idea that I can actually relate to this person. And she also sums up really well the thesis of both my book project and sort of my approach to the declaration in general, which is there's a much more expansive history of the founding of the United States out there, if we step outside of Independence Hall and we think about where the declaration went and the people who received that news and lived through this moment, rather than just focusing on the men who drafted and debated and signed the Declaration, like John Adams.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, you've mentioned that she's related to John Adams through the Cranches, but what was her relationship like with John Adams?

Emily Sneff 

They had a really interesting friendship that lasted through the end of her life when they were young, before she had this nervous disorder, they were actually inoculated for smallpox at the same time in Boston. But there's this really interesting sort of moment where all of their friends and sort of family members kind of hole up together and go through inoculation. Abigail is not involved, because her parents were worried about her being inoculated, but John and Polly and other friends go through inoculation together, and it's a bonding experience. And the letters from that time are some of the clues of what her life was like after she and John were both feeling better. The worst symptoms had subsided. They used a wagon and drove all around town to get fresh air. And it's really, it's lovely to think about. So she was part of this friend group, and they all used pseudonyms. So she used the pseudonym Myra, another friend, Eunice Payne, used the synonym of Sylvia, and they wrote these letters back and forth to each other. So she was certainly friends with John Adams from when she was young through all of his political career. And actually, the last letter that we have of hers is from the time when he is preparing his library to actually move to his new office as Vice President of the United States, and she's helping to catalog his library. She's living in the Adams home at that time, so there's only snippets along the way of her connection to both John and Abigail Adams in the Adams papers. But they certainly were friends. They were not just acquaintances or neighbors. They were friends.

Kathryn Gehred 

There's a historical fiction novel that I read called Octavia Nothing. There's a whole section in that book that's about a smallpox party where they, like, invite everybody to a house and they give everybody smallpox at the same time. It doesn't sound like that's exactly what happened here. Just reading about that did make me think about, you know, it's scary to be inoculated back then and to go through this like, hopefully gentler version of the sickness. I can imagine that would really create a bond between people who all went through that together.

Emily Sneff 

I think so, yeah, and we can tell even like Abigail feels really left out, like she's worried about her fiance going through inoculation, she's, you know, worried for his physical health, but she also feels jealous that he's spending this time with her friends And she's not there. So you tend to forget how young these people were. You know, when we put them up on a pedestal, we forget that they are young. And you know, you can imagine a young Abigail Smith at that time being like man I have FOMO!

Kathryn Gehred 

John Adams is not my area of expertise, but I just imagine him a lot as Paul Giamatti in the the mini series, a young Paul Giamatti hanging out with smallpox, a little bit of setup of their relationship. This letter is from fourth August, 1776 most people have a general idea of what John Adams is doing in August of 1776 what sort of is. Going on in his life. Where's he? What's the context for John Adams? John Adams

Emily Sneff 

is still in Philadelphia, and at this point, he has found out that his wife and children are being inoculated for smallpox. But Abigail had made the decision to inoculate her children, a decision that her parents didn't feel comfortable with for her she made for her children during the small window when inoculation was allowed in Boston. But she didn't want John to find out, because she knew that he was working on Independence and the Articles of Confederation and foreign treaties and being the chair of the board of war like he has a lot going on. So she tried to keep that secret from him. He found out anyway, and became distraught. We're in this sort of month of time where he does not know what's going on in Boston. He, you know, has sort of a sense from letters that he's getting from different people, including from Polly, but he is worried about his family, and so I think the back and forth that he and Polly Palmer have it spread out over the course of a couple of months, just because of the pace of mail, and as we'll talk about, the shortage of paper. But you can imagine that when he did receive this letter that we're going to talk about it at least brought him a little bit of calm to get some news from Boston at this time, when he was really worried because he was so busy in Philadelphia, but he really did want to be in Boston with his family. And what's going on in Polly's life. It's hard to read between the lines and get a sense of exactly what was going on in her life the way that we can when someone like John Adams, whose daily movements are pretty well recorded, but she had just made it through the British occupation of Boston, she and her family lived in Germantown, which is outside of Boston, so they would have been able to see and hear everything that was happening during the battles from Lexington and Concord through to Bunker Hill, everything that was happening in the harbor. And it would have been a really hard year to experience that, to know what was happening with your neighbors after the evacuation of Boston that was immediately followed by this smallpox outbreak that leads to mass inoculations to try to curb it, so she was safe from that. But obviously, at the time of a lot of people moving in and out and uncertainty, her father was helping with the militia. So there's a sort of military energy in her household. So you can imagine that it was pretty busy. There was a lot happening around you, but also still a lot of uncertainty, not really knowing what was going to happen next. I imagine, for somebody who has a little bit of trauma surrounding gunfire, to suddenly be in a city that you can hear cannons and things like that, probably wasn't great for her, absolutely. Yeah, that was my first impression when I when I really started to sit with these letters between Polly Palmer and John Adams, and think about this nervous condition that she had. You don't want to diagnose medical conditions of the past, but I have to imagine that there was some sort of PTSD involved. And you can kind of tell not in these letters, though she does talk about gunfire and action happening in the harbor, but in other letters that she wrote to friends, she talks about being scared of thunder, and I have to imagine that it was really challenging for her, and it may not have been something that she felt comfortable sharing with John, but surely her family knew that it was hard for her to live through this occupation.

Kathryn Gehred 

Any other sort of final context you want to share before we jump in?

Emily Sneff 

No, I think that's good.

Kathryn Gehred 

And now for the letter.

Kathryn Gehred 

Mary Palmer to John Adams, Germantown, 4 August 1776 Sir,  I had the honour of your letter of the 5th July above a fortnight ago, and should much sooner have acknowledged the favor had not an absolute want of Paper prevented, having none but blank Commissions in the House which we used for little Billets, but wou’d not do to send to the Congress. You do me great honor in receiving my Account of the Evacuation of the Harbour so well. I am sensible it was very imperfect, but it was the best I cou’d do at the time from my informations.   One thing I think I greatly err’d in, which was that the Ships did not return the fire upon Long Island, which I am since inform’d they did by those who were Eye Witnesses. I shou’d not have mention’d it now, but that I am loth that any misinformation of mind shou’d lead to a false Account of a Fact which ought to be represented as it really was, and transmitted to future ages.    Your Compliments are sufficient to make one vain, but still I make Allowances for the Privilege the Gentlemen assume of “flattering the other sex a little.” And perhaps it may be tho’t necessary sometimes in order to ease us of that Bashful Diffidence so natural to most of us—A Plea for Flattering which I think the Gentlemen much oblig’d me for. You really make me proud by desiring my future Correspondance, and I will not in hopes of being again ask’d decline the favour. All I shall say is this, that whenever there is any event of a Public Nature happens of which I can give you a proper Account to the best of my Abilities, it will give me pleasure to do it; but at present there seems little Likelihood of any such in these parts but what will be better told by your good Lady, to whom I shall cheerfully resign the Pen on her Recovery from the Small Pox.    There is nothing gives Papa much more Concern than his not being able to get time to write to You and Mr. Paine, oftener than he does; It is impossible for one Man to do more than he does, his time is wholly bestow’d on the Publick, both by Day and Night; It is but 3 Days in 2 Years that he has been at Home on his private Affairs, and even part of those 3 days have been employed either in writing Expresses or Planning Forts. Few Gentlemen cou’d say the same. He is now the chief Commander at Hull in the Room of Genll. Lincoln who is inoculated, and very busy every Hour he can steal from Business or Sleep in Planning Fortifications and Salt Works. I am sorry the former are still wanted in our Harbour but every Body is not so Active as Papa, if they were they wou’d not be to be Plannd now.    I most sincerely thank you for your Present of the Declaration of Independancy; nothing cou’d have given me more pleasure. It was universally receive’d with Joy by the friends of their Country. I don’t know what the Tories think but I believe they say nothing.    As this is a very important, so I hope it may be a very happy Revolution and that the latest Posterity may have Reason to look back to the Year 1776, as the happy Era of their Liberties being secur’d by the Wisdom of the Congress. How pleasing is the reflexion of every true Patriot to be assur’d of having done his duty to his God and Country and of having his Memory rever’d by his Descendants and Countrymen to the End of Time.   The first of this Month was kept as a Day of Fasting and Prayer by this Colony. I hope that our repeated Petitions to the Throne of Grace will be Accepted, and that our unnatural Enemies may be turned from us.   I can say little of your family, only that we hear they are Comfortable. Ours is pretty well, except Miss Paine who has an ill turn, occasion’d by overdoing herself at Work Yesterday. I hope it won’t last long but at present she is very ill. As I don’t know but my Letter may find the Way to Staten Island You will excuse my not butting my name to it any further than that of your humble Servt.,    Myra

Kathryn Gehred 

Her writing style is so good. I love that she signs with Myra as you've set up as their their sort of nicknames from back in the day. So she mentions that she sent him an account of the evacuation of the harbor. Can you tell me a little more about that?

Emily Sneff 

Yeah, on June 15, she writes this letter to John Adams, and I love how she starts, because if you know that they're friends, that their relationship pre exists this moment, this is such an awkward sentence to start a letter with. She says, you will wonder at receiving a letter from one who is very far from being sufficiently qualified to write to a member of the grand Congress, but I am under parental injunctions to do it, which every good child ought to obey. That is such an awkward opening line. It's as if they have never met, never spoken. But, I mean, she's basically just saying, like, I recognize that we are no longer, you know, just hanging out as friends up here in Massachusetts, you're serving in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. And clearly, her father had wanted to send an account to John Adams, and didn't have the time to do so, so she writes one for him. And basically, if you think about this moment the British had evacuated in March of 1776 so now we're in June, and the harbor is still not completely secured. So most of the Continental Army had left Boston and gone to New York to prepare for a likely British attack there. But Boston is sort of still in this kind of transitory moment. So Polly's father is involved in the fortifications that are being developed for the city with this sort of smaller contingent of the Continental Army that's also kind of protecting this important harbor from any British ships coming back. So Polly writes a letter on June 15 to John Adams, and she describes a sort of confrontation between ships in the harbor. And she does a really good job of recounting, kind of hour by hour, what was happening. And it seems like she wrote the bulk of the letter and then added to it as she got more information, but also as she was waiting for an opportunity to send it. So she addressed this letter to John Adams. She signed it Polly Palmer. Then she added some information that she had gotten from her father, exact numbers of you know, the different militia groups that were involved in the locations. And then she adds another note the following day, adding more information. And so this is a letter that she kept adding to but the whole time, she has this sort of energy that we see in her August letter as well. Of like, I don't quite know if I'm qualified to do this, to give you this information, so it's really hedging and anxious. And you know, to the best of my. Knowledge to the best of the information that I have, this is what I'm giving you, but that's the account that she sends. And given the timing of mail at this moment, John Adams would have received this June 15 letter around July 1, which is when the Continental Congress resumes its debate on whether or not to declare independence. So busy week, but he ends up receiving this account, as well as a couple of others, and he is glad to know again, what's happening in Boston, and both on a personal level, but also in his position on the board of war, thinking about, how can we fortify Boston? How can we make sure that the city is not at greater risk than it needs to be given all the other places that the Continental Army needs to be at this time?

Kathryn Gehred 

I fell like that's really significant for, like, the history of gender in the American Revolution, particularly of white women and gender of the revolution. Because she's doing an important job. She's passing along a military correspondence, but she's acknowledging, I actually find that relatable, of her being like, I am giving you important military information, and this is not my job. I'm so sorry if I mess this up. I'm doing my best. This is not what I signed up for, exactly, but her dad trusts her enough. Okay, I'm too busy to do this. You do this, and then she does a good job.

Emily Sneff 

She does! John Adams tells Abigail that Polly Palmer gave him a more accurate account than anyone else. So we know that she did a good job of this, even though she feels like she needs to correct the numbers. She doesn't want any decisions to be made on a false account that she accidentally gave. But yeah, she does a good job, and her reason for writing it beyond her father probably asking her to do so is Abigail Adams, who's typically in Braintree with her children on their farm, was in Plymouth that week, so she was close enough to the Adams family that she knew that Abigail was away and that no one would be writing to John Adams. So she has an awareness of communication networks, and even though she does not feel qualified to do this, and, you know, maybe hasn't written to him before. Maybe has only kind of been in conversation with him in person, and their friendship has existed sort of face to face. She feels like I have to do this. I have to write this letter to the grand Congress. So, yeah, really intimidating.

Kathryn Gehred 

What did John think of the information that he got when he got this very apologetic opening letter.

Emily Sneff 

So John Adams receives this letter the first week of July. Obviously he's also voting to declare independence from Great Britain, and his letters from this week are very well known. He writes two letters to Abigail Adams that are really well known for the way that he talks about how the Fourth of July, he thinks it's the second of July, but how Independence Day is going to be remembered by generations to come. So he is on a roll with his letter writing this week, and on July 5, he writes to Polly to thank her for this account that he thought was really well done, explaining exactly what had happened in Boston Harbor. And he says, You've given me, notwithstanding all your modest apologies, an account that was written with elegance and to minute and circumstantial narration of what happened in the harbor. I always say that John Adams uses a lovingly condescending tone to the women in his life. He does so with Abigail, and he does so with Polly. And in this letter that he writes on July 5, he says, in times as turbulent as these, commend me to the ladies. For historiographers, the gentlemen are too much engaged in action. The ladies are cooler spectators and fine. The men are busy. The women need to step up and do the writing. Okay? But I think what he's really saying is that the people involved in the action are almost too close to it. And so a woman like Polly, who is informed and educated and connected to the people who have the information that he needs, can write an account that's more of a sort of history of what was happening. And so she did a good job of that, and he kind of treats her as if this is something that she could continue to do.

Kathryn Gehred 

I'm just going to jump in and say I do believe that women are better at history than men. I'll go on record and say that that's my belief and that John Adams backs me up.

Emily Sneff 

We can ask Mercy Otis Warren what she thinks about that.

Emily Sneff 

Yeah, it's exactly like you say. He's being a little condescending. I know that this is just the way people wrote letters back then, but his letter feels a little bit flirty to me, the way he's writing to her, like, Oh, you did such a nice job.

Emily Sneff 

He does, yeah, he addresses it Miss Polly, which I think is cute, but it also confirms that that's, you know, what her friends called her, if you think of how his week was going, right that he is exhausted and relieved at finally having declared independence and approved the Declaration of Independence and been part of that process, and he's starting to work on a new seal for the United States, and he's preparing for an attack on New York, like he has a lot going on, and yet he takes the time to write a pretty lengthy. Letter to his friend, complimenting her. And you can tell that he has this sort of like, I don't know if flirty is the right word, but just like congenial tone to him that like he's delighted to have received a letter from her, and he's also grateful for the information she gave but he's sort of like reflecting on the fact that, like you could do this, I rely on women to give me accounts of what's going on. It's a letter that has been sort of separated from its context. It's been treated for John Adams perspective and not Polly's perspective, and I think that's missing a key part of the story that like for all of her apologies and her sort of anxiety about writing to him, he is genuinely so glad to have heard from her. That's kind of nice to think about.

Kathryn Gehred 

She does mention that she gets the Declaration of Independence. She gets his letter from John Adams, and she wants to write him back, but there's no paper in the house. She has these little things, these military commissions on them that they've been using in the house, but they would not do to send to Congress. Was this part of like a revolutionary war paper shortage. What was going on there?

Emily Sneff 

Definitely, so if you think about the timeline. So she writes to John on June 15. He writes back on July 5, and he encloses, more than likely, one of the first printings of the Declaration of Independence to her, probably one of John Dunlap's broadsides that he printed the night of July 4. If he had included a different copy of newspaper or something, he probably would have described it differently. So we can assume that this was one of the men who worked on the Declaration of Independence, enclosing one of the first copies to this woman in Massachusetts. And that is intimidating, right? You get this letter that has this big poster size copy of the declaration folded up in it. She writes back to him on August 4. So if you think about a sort of two week window that it took for mail to travel from Philadelphia to Boston, she received his letter around the middle of July. That's when the news of the Declaration of Independence reaches Abigail Adams and everyone else in Boston. So She then waited two weeks to write her response, and yeah, it's certainly a reflection of shortages, wartime shortages. Again, Boston is still recovering from the British evacuation, and so she has the sort of like forms and like things in her house that could be used to write a letter, you know, on the back of it, but that would be appropriate for like sending a letter down the street, a note to someone, not for sending something to Philadelphia. And the other piece of this letter that's interesting at the end of it, when she talks about the risk of it being intercepted, you wouldn't necessarily want a military commission blank, though it is to be intercepted by the British. So she's really being thoughtful as she waits for, you know, a suitable piece of paper to use. But yet, it's definitely a reflection of just the material conditions of this period of time, and also her awareness of like, the importance of her correspondent.

Kathryn Gehred 

That also comes through to me a lot in this letter, where she she says, I'm loathe that any misinformation could lead to a false account, because things need to be transmitted to future ages. So she knows that this is a historical moment, and she knows that she's writing with somebody who's kind of making history, and that she's now a part of it, and she's really deeply aware of that. I think that's interesting, because, like you say, with the Declaration of Independence, they didn't know what the impact was. But it seems like she is really optimistic that this is going to be a moment that's really important.

Emily Sneff 

Absolutely, this coincides with a moment where John Adams also realizes that his papers are going to be transmitted to future ages, and he buys a letter book that he can start to keep an account of the letters that he's receiving and sending. And he tells Abigail, I wish I could send you one, because your letters are much better than mine. And he wishes that they could create some sort of archive. So we're fortunate as historians to have the Adams papers as this resource of what was happening during the revolution, and especially the two sides, right? We typically get the men writing to their wives, but not the wives responses to their husbands, which is maddening. And here, you know, we have the same thing. We have the back and forth with Polly that, you know, I think she has an awareness, and he has an awareness that someday someone might read what she's writing. And so she wants to make sure that the actual product looks good, that it's not scratched and, you know, blotted and messy, and it's not written on the back of some piece of paper. She wants it to be on a clean sheet of paper. So I think that is very relatable.

Kathryn Gehred 

And also she's imagining future historians reading this and being like, that's not right, exactly, yeah, he got that wrong information from this woman, yeah?

Emily Sneff 

Like you don't want to be a footnote for the wrong reason, right?

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, incredibly relatable. So it seems like John Adams, in his response is sort of saying, hey, let's keep up a correspondence. Would this be something that's sort of normal between men and women of this time?

Emily Sneff 

It's really interesting because, yeah, he really wishes that she would continue to write to him. And, you know, I think, on the one hand, he just wants as much information as possible from Boston all the time. So in her letter, she gives you know this military information, but also just updates on his family, her family, all of the people that they know. So I think he, you know, would appreciate that, but I think he also admires her writing style. And in a letter to Abigail Adams, he compliments Polly's writing style, and so you can imagine that he legitimately wanted to keep a correspondence. And it wasn't that unusual, even though she was, you know, a single woman. She's Abigail's family member. They're part of this friend group. It would not have been crazy for them to keep up a correspondence. And John Adams keeps a correspondence with her father. So it would have been easy to enclose, you know, her letters within his letters to send to Philadelphia, but Polly is just not interested.

Kathryn Gehred 

Where she says, like, thank you very much. I'm very honored. Do you want to have a correspondence with me? But you should write your wife. Is that sort of how you take that section?

Emily Sneff 

It is, yeah. I mean, you can read it a few different ways. I think she must have known, as we all know, that Abigail Adams letters are remarkable, right? She is a very good writer. She has some spelling things and phraseology that is really interesting, but she is detailed and she is emotional and she just her letters are jam packed with information, and that's a high standard, as her friend, I can imagine Polly Palmer, if she knows that Abigail is out of town, then she knows that there's going to be this gap that she is trying to fill, but she also feels inadequate to do that job. So I think she's speaking from a place of not wanting to commit herself to keeping a correspondence, and also probably just the stress of having to correspond with John Adams, right? Like, she already waited two weeks to try to find a clean piece of paper to write to him. You can just imagine that.

Kathryn Gehred 

She was, like, adding to that first letter, like, for such a long time, trying to make sure it's all right.

Emily Sneff 

Trying to make sure that she has as much in there as possible. Like, there is definitely anxiety baked into her writing, and so I don't think that she really wanted to commit herself to continuing to correspond. And I feel bad because, like, I would love to have more letters of hers to read and get her account of the things that were happening around her, but at least we have this one from such an important moment of receiving the Declaration of Independence, like if you were going to pick a moment to have correspondence, this is the moment to pick. So, yeah, it's unfortunate that she didn't keep a correspondence with John. She did write a little bit with Abigail while John and Abigail were in Europe during his diplomatic career. And those letters, you know, they're from a decade later, and her health has seriously declined by then, in part due to her nervous condition persisting. And those letters are honestly really sad, because Abigail is describing all these wonders that she's seeing in France and saying, I wish you could come to Paris like I wish you could see all of these things. And Polly, again, takes a really long time to respond, not because of a lack of paper, but because she just can't get her words on paper. So something like mentally is blocking her from writing, and she's reflecting and saying, I'm probably never going to see the things that you're seeing, but I'm grateful for you telling me about them. You know, I could never make a journey across the Atlantic, but at least my friend did, and she can tell me about it. So it's really heartbreaking, this dissent from sort of feeling like, oh, I don't know if I can write to someone in Congress, to feeling like I'm never going to have the experiences that my friends are having, you know, it's really sad.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, did she keep up any kind of correspondence with John Adams after this?

Emily Sneff 

There's one more letter in the Adams papers from when he's preparing to go be vice president, and she's helping with this library. And, you know, I have to imagine that most of their friendship took place in person. So just because there's a 12 year gap in the archive of the Adams papers doesn't mean that they didn't talk to each other for 12 years. But that letter is really interesting, because she is helping out with this process of cataloging all of his books and figuring out which books he wants to take with him. So again, she must be educated, right? She must have a love of reading herself, because she's understanding sort of what books are necessary for this new political office that he's taking on. And I love that letter because there was a book that the two of them were trying to find and they couldn't find it on the shelves of the library. And after John leaves, she finds it, and so she says. I found this book, and it'll be part of your library unless the fairy that took it away comes back. She still has this playfulness to her. You can tell that they had a sort of affectionate friendship in person, even though it's not recorded in more than these handful of letters.

Kathryn Gehred 

I think that's really important to point out, because we depend so much on these paper written sources as historians. But I used to work on the Martha Washington papers, and there's almost no letters between her and, you know, her mom and her father and some of her siblings. That's because they were talking to each other constantly every day. There's almost no letters. And that's one of the most important personal relationships that she had. But then with somebody who, like, maybe you sort of have to keep up a correspondence with there might be more letters from someone. You have to really think about these human relationships sometimes.

Emily Sneff 

Yeah and you know, we have the best Abigail Adams letters from the times when she and John were apart, and that doesn't mean that they didn't have really deep conversations about politics and women's education and all these things in person, we just happen to have the records of it from when they were at a great distance. And you know, there's a lot of other emotions that are part of those letters, too. It's easy to just kind of assume limitations on a relationship because of what survives, but there's definitely much more there that didn't survive.

Kathryn Gehred 

It's interesting that she's worried about her letter being taken by the British. Tell me a little more about that.

Emily Sneff 

So this is really interesting, because since it took her so long to write her response, the war has changed. So at the time that John was writing to her on July 5 and enclosing a copy of the Declaration of Independence for her, the British ships were just starting to assemble at Staten Island over the course of a couple of days, have started to assemble in another really interesting moment of timing, of like, what if they had come before the Declaration of Independence? So by the time that she's writing in August, there is a real like, minute by minute threat of a British attack on New York. And New York is obviously right in the middle between Boston and Philadelphia. So she is worried that this increased British presence at New York will mean that whatever networks John is using to get correspondence to Boston are going to be interrupted. And you know, this is a concern that Abigail Adams and other people in Boston have as well, that Boston is going to be effectively cut off from Philadelphia by what's happening in New York. So whereas her first letter in June of 1776 before any British ships had arrived, she signs it with her name. In this August letter, she uses her pseudonym, and on the one hand, it's kind of reaching back into their younger times of friendship when they use these pseudonyms in a sort of playful way, but the same way that Abigail Adams chooses to write under a pseudonym to her husband, there's this real awareness of the political stakes of writing to someone like John Adams, so she recognizes that even if the British intercepted it, they wouldn't get that much information out of her. She's not sending political secrets or anything, but she is giving her account of what she thinks of independence. And that is pretty remarkable. So there were definitely concerns, and ultimately, some of John Adams' correspondence is intercepted by the British. So they were not unfounded concerns, and it's really interesting to see them reflected on the page.

Kathryn Gehred 

I feel like she threw a couple little digs at the Tories and, like, just in case she did.

Emily Sneff 

Yeah. I mean, we think of Massachusetts as being this sort of, you know, radical part of the colonies turned states. You know, Massachusetts dragging the rest of the states toward independence, but there certainly were still loyalists in Boston. Many of them had evacuated with the British in March of 1776 but there are still Tories around. And so she can tell John, this is what everyone that we agree with thinks about the Declaration of Independence. I don't know what the Tories think. They haven't said anything yet. You know, I think that's really interesting perspective that, like she understands that the majority of people are excited about independence, and she certainly is, but there are still kind of enemies within neighbors who don't agree with this decision.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah. So what strikes you as important about the way she receives the gift of the Declaration of independency, as she calls it?

Emily Sneff 

There are a couple things that make this letter really remarkable. The first is that despite doing a lot of research, I've only been able to find three accounts of women in their own words reacting to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and all three of those women are in Massachusetts. So it's it's a very skewed sample size, unfortunately. One is Polly Palmer. The other is probably obvious. It's Abigail Adams reacting multiple times because she receives a copy from John and she attends a public reading, and then she hears it read again in her church in August. So we have these different moments of reception. And then the third one is from a teenage. Her name's Kezia Coffin, who was on the island of Nantucket. She kept a diary, and when the declaration is brought over to Nantucket, she writes in her diary that it was horrible, and she wished that the Continental Congress and all of their supporters had been strung 50 feet in the air before they had been allowed to issue this declaration.

Kathryn Gehred 

Strong words

Emily Sneff 

Yeah, at least I have one Tory perspective. And also, you know, all three of these women, they understand the politics that are happening around them, which is really awesome to see, but that's it. So Polly Palmer's letter stands out, and it's kind of been forgotten, because her copy of Declaration of Independence, to our knowledge, does not survive. So the letter that John Adams sent on July 5 of 1776 in closing, the declaration became a collectible. It was collected by someone who was interested in his autograph, more than the content of the letter or the recipient. So we don't know if the copy of the declaration was something that Polly held on to or something that she immediately handed over to her father or shared with her community. But to our knowledge, it doesn't survive. And from my perspective, that doesn't mean that the story doesn't need to be told. Right? We tend to prioritize and emphasize the Select copies of the declaration that survive and are valued at millions of dollars, and, you know, highly prized. But there are also sort of gaps in the archives that are worth exploring and thinking about how Polly Palmer became separated from the declaration that she received. I think her explanation of how she feels about the declaration is really interesting, too. It's different than the other accounts that we have. And I think it reflects a sort of relief of, you know, knowing that, in John Adams words, that blue skies, you know, clear skies, are going to come over Boston, that there's going to be this hopefulness. And I love her phrasing of like, it's happy, it's a happy revolution, right? Independence is a happy thing. She also though thinking about the gendered language here. She talks about how the declaration is going to be remembered for generations to come. She knows that John Adams is involved in the process. She may not know exactly that he was helping to draft it, but she knows that he's part of the Congress. And she talks about how it's going to be to the esteem of patriots, and she uses masculine pronouns, so she's not counting herself as a patriot. She's talking about John Adams and his colleagues as the patriots who are going to be remembered by generations of Americans to come. And that's kind of sad, because she clearly has a grasp on the importance of the moment that she's living through these unprecedented times, but she doesn't think she's going to be remembered. So part of my work of really writing about her and focusing on this letter is to show she is worthy of being remembered alongside John Adams, and you know, the people who signed the declaration that, like her, reception of the news of independence is important, and she shouldn't just be poor at Polly. She shouldn't be a footnote. She should really be someone that we look to as an example of what it was like to learn about the Declaration of Independence for the first time.

Kathryn Gehred 

That's awesome. And look at us 250, years later.

Emily Sneff 

Yeah!

Kathryn Gehred 

Who would have thought

Emily Sneff 

Women lifting up women, right?

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, so you're sort of dragging Polly kicking and screaming back into the historical narrative, but she deserves it.

Emily Sneff 

She did not want to be a historiographer. She didn't want to keep up a correspondence, but her letter is remembered, or at least it's going to be remembered by me.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Well, Emily, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was such a fascinating and enlightening conversation.

Emily Sneff 

Oh I'm so glad. I'm really glad that we were able to highlight this letter and Polly and prepare for the 250 by talking about women writing about the declaration.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, write on! To my listeners, thank you very much for tuning into the show. I will link to the letters that we talked about in our show notes, and as ever, I am your most obedient and humble servant. Thank you very much.

Kathryn Gehred 

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I'm Kathryn Gehred the creator and host of this podcast. Jeanette Patrick and Jim Ambuske are the executive producers. Special thanks to Virginia Humanities for allowing me to use their recording studio. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend and be sure to rate and review the series in your podcast app. For more great history podcasts, head to R2studios.org. Thanks for listening!