I'm Barry Catherine, and I'm celebrating America 250 by reading primary documents written for or by the founders for as many of the days of the year as I can. Thanks for joining me on this mini episode of Getting Hammered. Today in 1776, George Washington is arriving in New York for a new fight, but John Adams is replying to Abigail Adams' famous, remember the ladies' letter of March 31st, which I have posted there so you can go back and listen.

In it, she had real words of critique, not just for the men who would craft the Constitution and create the nation, but specifically for slaveholding Virginians.

Let's hear from John. You justly complain of my short letters, but the critical state of things and the multiplicity of

avocations must plead my excuse. You ask where the fleet is. The enclosed papers will inform you.

You ask what sort of defense Virginia can make. I believe they will make an able defense.

Their militia and minute men have been sometime employed in training themselves, and they have

nine battalions of regulars, as they call them, maintained among them, under good officers at the continental expense.

They have set up a number of manufacturers of firearms, which are busily employed,

they are tolerably supplied with powder, and are successful and assiduous in making saltpeter.

Their neighboring sister, or rather daughter colony of North Carolina, which is a warlike colony,

and has several battalions at the continental expense, as well as a pretty good militia,

are ready to assist them, and they are in very good spirits, and seem determined to make a brave

resistance. The gentry are very rich and the common people very poor. This inequality of property

gives an aristocratic term to all their proceedings and occasions a strong aversion

in their patricians to common sense. But the spirit of these barons is coming down, and it must

submit. It is very true, as you observe, that they have been duped by Dunmore, who was the

royal governor of Virginia. But this is a common case. All the colonies are duped more or less

at one time or another.

A more egregious bubble has never blown up than the story of commissioners coming to treat with the Congress. Yet it has gained credit like a charm, not only without, but against

the clearest evidence. I never shall forget the delusion which seized our best and most

sagacious friends in the dear inhabitants of Boston the winter before last,

credulity and the want of foresight are imperfections in the human character that no politician

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