Mm-hmm

... name, because she's a feme sole, that is a woman alone.

They're allowed to own property, but married women are not.

So the one person in the family in whose name Abigail did not buy any of this Vermont speculative land that you buy at 300 acres a pop, the one person she didn't buy any land for was herself, 'cause she couldn't, because as a married woman she couldn't own property.

But she made all this money for John, and it's not like he was shocked when he came home 'cause they'd been corresponding about it.

But then the correspondence turns out to be really interesting because John was conservative in a lot of ways.

He wanted to declare independence from Britain, but he really admired the British government and thought that we should probably institute something like a king and something like a House of Lords here, here in the US even after we'd declared independence.

Mm-hmm.

Finally, it appointed a third committee to prepare a treaty plan for foreign powers that consisted of Dickinson, Franklin, Adams, Benjamin Harrison of Virginia, and Robert Morris of Pennsylvania.

Right.

So the Declaration of Independence that we're all gonna celebrate was really just one leg of a three-legged stool.

And like a stool, it wouldn't have held up without all three.

That is, we're gonna declare independence, and that will permit us to do these other two things of confederate to actually win our independence, E pluribus unum, and all that.

And the third leg is maybe the most important, and that is we're gonna get French allies.

But they don't mention France in particular, but that's clearly who they're talking about, so they developed this model treaty.

I think it would have extended the timeline, it would have made the war more costly, and it would have made, I think, declaring independence more controversial.