Referring Benjamin Davis, apparently notorious for taking gingerbread from refugees, Adams wrote: “How many little ones can say I was an Hungry & you gave me no Bread, but inhumanely took what little I had from me.”
The Massachusetts Historical Society shared a scan of this letter, so we can confirm she spelled the words that way.
As a minister’s daughter, Adams knew her Christian scripture. But she wasn’t quoting the King James Bible exactly. Matthew 25:42 says: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat:…” According to linguists, “an” was a form of the prefix “a,” as in “times’s a-wasting,” adapted to go before an H.
Adams instead used the form “an hungry,” which this linguistic website defines in its single-word form as “an obsolete word for hungry that is allowed to stay in Webster's Third New International Dictionary because it shows up in Shakespeare (Coriolanus I:i:209).” Did Adams misremember the Biblical verse? Or were people in the mid-1700s people reading the phrase that way?
Discussing Abigail Adams’s expressions leads me to Susan Walsh and Christopher S. Davis’s Adams Letters and Language podcast, hosted on YouTube. Walsh portrays Adams, along with being a librarian and educator. Davis is a historical dialect coach who studied 18th-century New England speech for the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.
On Saturday I heard their presentation at History Camp Boston, which will become a future podcast episode. Each episode includes a reading of John and Abigail Adams’s in period style “as well as discussion of the history, themes, and linguistics revealed by the letters.”
Since I’ve been impressionistically opining on how people really spoke in Revolutionary America since 2008, I look forward to hearing a more expert discussion.
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