I read that in the wake of the recent presidential election, 70,000 Texans signed a petition for secession from the Union. For a man descended from generations of Republicans the re-appearance of secessionist sentiment seems like a confirmed report of the beginning of a zombie apocalypse; still, I feel the Texans' pain.

I know I offended many of my Democratic friends on Facebook, when I informed them, shortly after the election, that I felt like Charlton Heston at the end of the '70s Hollywood, sci-fi blockbuster "Soylent Green," when with dying breath he tries to warn the masses about the new food source discovered by the corporations, revealing "Soylent Green is people!"

"So are we cannibals now, Paul? Is that what you are saying? For shame." One of them shot back. I probably deserved that. I decided it would be best if I stopped posting on Facebook while I licked my wounds.

Some people turn to alcohol in the face of bad news, others sports, or work. I read. I know it's a bad habit. After the presidential election I picked up Edith B. Gelles' paired biography of John and Abigail Adams that had been lying around the house. A friend gave it my wife, Shelly, a couple years ago, because she said, "you two remind me of them." After Shelly finished reading it, I asked her if we were anything at all like the Adamses. She laughed at me and answered, "some of us" in exactly the way (I imagine) Abigail would have teased John.

(When she was particularly angry with him, Abigail signed her letters to her husband, "Most sincerely, Mrs. Adams." How can you not love a woman like that?)

The source material for the book is the voluminous correspondence John and Abigail piled up over 50-plus years of marriage. Early on, when they made the fateful decision to devote their lives to the "Cause of America," they knew it meant that they would have to spend large portions of their shared life apart. So Abigail made this one request of John: "All the letters I receive from you seem to be wrote in so much haste, that they scarcely leave room for a social feeling. I want sentimental Effusions of the heart."

We can safely say that John delivered.

Under Abigail's tutelage, John Adams became one of the few men of his era who freely unburdened himself to a woman, worse than a woman - a wife - sharing, for instance, his pain at the way Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington were so beloved by the people despite: "shew(ing) silence and reserve in public," whilst he, who "insert(s) himself... into the Conduct of Affairs... and answers all the Objections of opponents, makes himself too familiar with the public, and unavoidably makes enemies." It was left to Abigail to try for the 10,000th time to explain to her dear man the concept of the existence of such a thing as "tact."

John also shared with his great love his belief that the genius of Americans derived from three sources: faith in God, closeness to nature, and devotion to education. "An American who cannot read or write is as rare as a comet or an Earthquake." He boasted, a tiny bit inaccurately.

Yet over the years the Adamses watched America change. At the beginning of the Revolution there were only five American cities larger than the present-day town of Rathdrum, Idaho. By 1800 the cities had grown exponentially, becoming squalid and full of a new, seemingly foreign and dependent class. Secular public education began to supplant church and family based education. Most disturbing of all, the people were drifting away from their moorings in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For the son of a deacon and the daughter of a pastor, it was almost too much to bear.

Eventually John was shunted aside, outmaneuvered by Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, all the younger men who fully understood the innovation of political parties and appreciated the uses the new First Amendment could be put to.

John and Abigail retired to their farm, where she wrote to a friend, "If we are to count our years by the revolutions we have witnessed, we might number them among the antediluvians." She was left, she said, gazing at what she could neither "fathom nor comprehend."

This is a lovely, bright, 18th-century way of saying that if change were time, she and John could count themselves as old as Methuselah. (In darker, 21st-century parlance, a much-lesser writer might parrot Charlton Heston in the movie Soylent Green.)

The God of her fathers called Abigail home a few years before her husband. As his wife lay dying, John confided to a friend, "I wish I could lie down beside her - and die, too."

In his remaining years, the lonely widower tried to kindle something like the epistolary romance he had formerly enjoyed with his wife with his larger-than-life, frenemy Thomas Jefferson - even going so far as to delicately approach the subject of the Jefferson's incomprehensible (to a well-disciplined, Christian man like Adams) relationship with a slave woman, Sally Hemings.

It was not to be. Abigail had no equal among the living. Compared to her unguarded, effortlessly fluent command of the language of emotional intimacy, Jefferson's pen was as warm and effusive; and as cold and calculating; as polished and vacant as a game-show host's post-commercial break patter. He very deliberately wrote of everything, while effectively communicating nothing, consoling Adams on the Death of Love Forever, with the quotidian advice, "...for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicine."

Thanks, Thom.

Two centuries on, the love story of John and Abigail Adams does more than display a model of the perfect Christian marriage: of body, mind, and spirit. It seems to say to us still smarting from our recent presidential election (though I may be paraphrasing a bit from my perspective as a lesser, 21st-Century creature):

"My dear future Republicans, we understand the temptation to give up, to number ourselves 'among the antediluvians,' to retire to the farm, sign petitions for secession, read books, or lay down beside the failing body of our fathers' great Republic - and die, too. But we knew from the beginning that, 'Certain controversies are of a nature that they will never be settled.' There is nothing left but to remain engaged in the Cause of America from the very first to the very last. Really, to do otherwise will only make you the most miserable of mortals. Love each other. Love America. And endure."

Best regards and most sincerely,

Abigail and John

Paul Matthews is a Rathdrum-based architect.