In 1774, Mason was appointed an Engineer by the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. He began secretly collecting military stores and armaments and purchasing cannons, and worked with a local blacksmith, Captain Robert Foster, to fit them up in readiness to resist British aggression. The cannons were secretly stored in Foster’s workshop on the North side of the North River. These were the weapons that Leslie, with a force of 250 men of the British 64th Regiment of Foot, came to capture on a Sunday in late February 1775. Mason lived in a house near the North Bridge and the North Church where Barnard preached. When an alarm from Marblehead warned of the approaching British troops, Mason and others sprang into action and hid the cannons in North Salem. Mason was also involved in negotiating the settlement, along with Leslie, Barnard, Pickering and others. Accepting Leslie’s word of honor, the colonists allowed the British soldiers to cross the bridge, go a short distance, and then reverse and go back to Boston. A biographic sketch recorded in 1824 by Mason’s daughter Susan Smith was published by the Essex Institute’s journal, the Essex Institute Historical Collections, in 1912.

Women’s fashion and portraiture in Salem also provide clues about their family’s social aspirations and political beliefs. Elizabeth Gardner Dabney Bridges Stevens’ portrait stands in contrast to portraits of her Salem neighbors thanks to her fashion choices. Her robe is trimmed with ermine, a fur associated with European and British royalty and nobility. The style of portrait was informed by English painting conventions used in portraits of British royalty and aristocracy by artists such as Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, known to American colonists through prints and engravings produced in Great Britain and shipped to the colonies. Stevens’ first husband, apothecary Nathaniel Dabney, had Loyalist sympathies and fled to Halifax, Nova Scotia and later England and France. While her choice of fashion might suggest the family’s Loyalist leanings, she remained in Salem with some of their children and later, after Dabney’s death, remarried two more times.

The museum’s fashion collection also holds clues about the revolutionary era. One set of wedding garments from 1775 shows how tailors and seamstresses in colonial Massachusetts worked with fabrics imported from England, and reveals a connection to lives shaped by the events leading up to the war.

Marblehead bride Elizabeth Gerry was the sister of Elbridge Gerry, a member of the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Gerry wrote the preamble to the Massachusetts bill authorizing privateering, the arming of private vessels in the cause of American liberty. He later became Vice President of the United States under President James Madison. The groom, Burrill Deverreux, was a Harvard College graduate and merchant in Marblehead. He supported the revolutionary cause by investing in privateer ships and was a leader in the town of Marblehead after the war.

Two of the most fascinating individuals from Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War were John and Abigail Adams, rising from modest beginnings to become one of America’s first power couples during John’s presidency. In October 1818, after learning of Abigail’s death, Reverend William Bentley of Salem recalled meeting her years before. His remembrance included a description of her physical appearance and dress:

“We have had notice of the death of Abigail, wife of the (late) President John Adams, who is still living at his home in Quincy…The first time I ever saw Madam was at her own house shelling her beans for a family dinner to which without any ceremony or apology she invited me but from engagements I did not accept. I saw her repeatedly at her own house without any impression unfavourable to her person or manners. I found a freedom in conversation which took its familiar topics.

“She was in appearance of middle size, in the dress of the matrons who were in New England in my youth. The black bonnet, the short cloak, the gown open before & quilted petticoat, & the high heeled shoe, as worn universally in that day. Everything the best but nothing different from our wealthy & modest citizens.”

An object in PEM’s fashion collection reveals a surprising touchstone for one of the Adams’ most memorable literary exchanges. What is Abigail Adams’ most famous quotation? “Remember the Ladies.”

Abigail Adams was in many ways a woman ahead of her time. She believed in women’s rights, including education, the ability to own property and participation in the political life and governance of the new nation. Some of these ideas appear in private letters between John and Abigail Adams. In a letter drafted in Massachusetts between March 31 and April 5, 1776, while John was at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Abigail proposed a revolutionary idea:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independancy -- and by the way in the new Code of Laws [the Declaration of Independence] which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.“

Her husband wrote back on April 14, 1776:

“As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient -- that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent…But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented. -- This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy, I wont blot it out.

Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude. We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in Practice you know We are the subjects. We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight.”

Adams Papers Digital Edition, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

While John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and other delegates at the Continental Congress labored to adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, it required nearly 150 years more for even a portion of American women to gain the right to vote. White women could vote nationwide after the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920. Asian American women campaigned for the right to vote until the Immigration and Nationality Act passed in 1952, while Black women activists were instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Abigail Adams’ petticoat provides a tangible presence for the conversations and advocacy required by activists to overcome misperceptions about women, their abilities and their roles in society. The commemoration of events like Leslie’s Retreat and the upcoming semiquincentennial of the United States gives Americans the opportunity to reflect on the many private and public conversations, and acts of advocacy and resistance, needed to achieve the rights and freedoms established in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights, and our responsibility to preserve them now and for many years to come.

To find more upcoming reenactments and events, read the comprehensive list of Revolution 250 initiatives planned by Massachusetts National Historic sites and parks. And read a full commentary on the weekend’s events, including the Revolutionary Ball at Hamilton Hall, on the Streets of Salem blog. Leslie’s Retreat 250 is a cooperative partnership between Salem 400 + and the Leslie’s Retreat SR Steering Committee to spearhead and work in cooperation with individuals and institutions to present a series of community events to mark the 250th anniversary of Leslie’s Retreat.