What comes across to me is the same thing that confronts me often as I read these accounts and that is the fact that almost without exception these people were dehumanized,
Abigail was taken from her "home" here to France,leaving family behind. At some point Jay's wife wrote a letter asking if she still had a husband but if there was a response it has been lost.
The very fact that she died in France but no record of her person remains,
The apparent lack of concern by Franklin et al only serves to put an explanation point on this loss of human dignity.
I find it terribly sad.
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis