“Tell her to make her cheese a little salter”

Yesterday I recounted how Moses Gill, lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, gave a large cheese to John Adams as he assumed the office of President.

Gill sent the cheese late in March 1793 and advised Adams, “it will be in eating the first weake in may.” Adams told his wife before she set out from Quincy to Philadelphia, “it will last till you come.”

For years Abigail Adams had overseen a dairy on the family farm. She knew about making cheese. And in that regard, as in almost everything else, she had high standards. So how did she react to Lt. Gov. Gill’s cheese?

There’s no more mention of that particular cheese in the Adams correspondence. By the end of May Abigail was writing back to Massachusetts to ask for more cheese—but not from Gill.

Instead, on 24 May Adams told her elder sister, Mary Cranch, back in Quincy:

I will thank you to get from the table Draw in the parlour some Annetto and give it to mrs Burrel, and tell her to make her cheese a little salter this Year. I sent some of her cheese to N York to Mrs [Abigail] smith and to mr [Charles] Adams which was greatly admired and I design to have her Cheese brought here.

when she has used up that other pray dr [Cotton] Tufts to supply her with some more, and I wish mrs French to do the Same to part of her Cheese, as I had Some very good cheese of hers last Year.

Abigail Adams definitely wanted more cheese from Massachusetts. But she was hungry for cheese from local suppliers she knew, and she had particular tastes. We don’t know what Abigail thought of the cheese Gill sent, but we know she didn’t ask for more.

After learning about this episode, I wondered if Gill told any newspapers about his gift. I found no coverage of this cheese in the Massachusetts press. It was a private favor between two gentlemen who had known each other for years.

That was quite a contrast to the next time someone from Massachusetts sent the President a large cheese. In January 1802, as described back here, the Rev. John Leland (1754-1841) of Cheshire presented Thomas Jefferson with a cheese to celebrate his becoming President the year before.

Cheshire was the exceptional Republican town in a Federalist county. Leland, leader of a Baptist congregation in a state with a Congregationalist establishment, supported Jefferson on the grounds of religious freedom.

Leland organized his community to produce a giant cheese for the new President. Their gift weighed 1,235 pounds—more than ten times the size of Gill’s cheese. Leland also made sure to tell the newspapers about that gift.

Jefferson, in turn, carefully paid for the cheese instead of accepting it as a perquisite of office. Even so, the Federalist press seized on this story, mixed in Jefferson's interest in recently discovered mammoth fossils, and harped on the President’s “mammoth cheese” for years.

Indeed, the cheese for President Jefferson was so famous that in 1837 another set of cheesemakers sent a giant cheese to President Andrew Jackson.

In 1940 the Sons of the American Revolution erected a monument to John Leland in Cheshire. It includes a bronze memorial plaque about him and a replica of the cider mill used to press the mammoth cheese.

In June of this year, the Cheshire Community Association unveiled a replica of the giant wheel of cheese itself.

“The ladies of Massachusetts begin to give their cheese”

On 8 Aug 1801, the Impartial Observer of Providence, said to be a “short-lived Jeffersonian paper," ran this exclusive news item:

For the IMPARTIAL OBSERVER.

The Cheshire Ladies’ respect to President Jefferson.

In the town of Cheshire, state of Massachusetts, the ladies of the Rev. Mr. Leland’s church and society agreed to make a cheese to present to his Excellency Thomas Jefferson as a mark of the exalted esteem they had of him as a man of virtue, benevolence, and a real sincere friend to all Christian denominations, and their full coincidence in his being placed in the Executive chair of the American nation, and their full assurance of his wielding the government at much less expence than his predecessor, and as well, and it is hoped much better.

Accordingly, they requested Mr. Leland to procure a cheese vat at their expense six feet diameter, and twenty one inches thick, to press the cheese in; and on a certain day they were to assemble at Mr. Daniel Brown’s with the curd to make the cheese. They all punctually attended and placed the vat in a cyder press and then filled it with curd. The vat held fourteen hundred weight of curd, and they had three hundred weight left. This cheese was made from the milk of 900 cows at one milking. When our informant left Cheshire, the cheese had not been turned, but would be in a few days, as the machinery for that purpose was nearly completed.

If the ladies of Massachusetts begin to give their cheese out of respect to Mr. Jefferson, and if some of the high toned Adams men do not soon turn and become friendly to Jefferson and the ladies, it is thought they will lose their esteem and have to eat their bread without cheese. This cheese is to be sent on in the spring of 1802, to the seat of government, under the care of Mr. Lealand, who was formerly a neighbour to Mr. Jefferson fifteen years in the State of Virginia. The motto on this cheese is “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

J.

I discussed the origin of that motto back in May, and how it became a particular favorite of Jefferson. The plans for this cheese show how Americans associated the line with Jefferson. A week earlier, the Impartial Observer also listed it among the Fourth of July toasts at a celebration in New York.

Later in August, the Federalist Hampshire Gazette picked up the story of Cheshire’s cheese for the President, adding some sarcastic commentary. The printer headed that item “THE MAMMOTH CHEESE,” which was both a reference to Jefferson’s interest in natural history and the first use of “mammoth” as an adjective.

Was the ”J.” who sent this report to the Impartial Observer the Rev. John Leland himself? Possible but unproven. He was an itinerant Baptist evangelist who had been born in Grafton in 1754. The American Antiquarian Society published L. H. Butterfield’s biographical article about Leland, available as a P.D.F. here. Pictured above is the town of Cheshire’s monument to Leland and the cheese.