Abigail Adams was the wife of John Adams, second president of the United States, and mother of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States.
Background
Abigail Adams was born on November 22, 1744, at the North Parish Congregational Church in Weymouth, Massachusetts, to William Smith (1707–1783) and Elizabeth (née Quincy) Smith.
On her mother's side she was descended from the Quincy family, a well-known political family in the Massachusetts colony. Through her mother she was a cousin of Dorothy Quincy, wife of John Hancock. Adams was also the great-granddaughter of John Norton, founding pastor of Old Ship Church in Hingham, Massachusetts, the only remaining 17th-century Puritan meetinghouse in Massachusetts. Smith married Elizabeth Quincy in 1742, and together they had four children, including three daughters: one born in 1743, Abigail born in 1744 and another born in 1745. Their only son, born in 1746, died of alcoholism in 1787.
Education
Abigail did not receive formal schooling; she was frequently sick as child, which may have been a factor which prevented her from receiving an education.
Later in life, Adams would also consider that she was deprived an education because females were rarely given such an opportunity.
Although she did not receive a formal education, her mother taught her and her sisters Mary (1739–1811) and Elizabeth (1742–1816, known as Betsy) to read, write and cipher; her father's, uncle's and grandfather's large libraries enabled the sisters to study English and French literature. Her grandmother, Elizabeth Quincy, also contributed to Adams' education.
As she grew up, Adams read with friends in an effort to further her learning. As an intellectually open-minded woman for her day, Adams' ideas on women's rights and government would eventually play a major role, albeit indirectly, in the founding of the United States. She became one of the most erudite women ever to serve as First Lady.
Career
Abigail’s plans to marry John Adams, a Harvard-educated lawyer nine years her senior, did not gain the immediate approval of Smith, who considered a lawyer’s prospects inadequate. When they married on October 25, 1764.
Abigail managed the second decade of her marriage on her own, as John participated in the colonial struggle for independence as a member of the Continental Congress and later as a representative of his country in France. Their correspondence during these years, especially when added to the spirited letters penned earlier during their courtship, provides a rich account of their activities and thinking as well as their love and devotion to each other. It is from these letters that historians, including the Adamses’ grandson Charles Francis Adams, have concluded that Abigail played a significant role in her husband’s career, particularly in managing the family farm and his business affairs. Because of her, the Adamses avoided the financial ruin that befell some other early presidents, such as Thomas Jefferson, after they left office.
As the revolutionary spirit swept through the colonies, Abigail firmly supported the movement for independence. In March 1776, when her husband prepared to gather with his colleagues to write a statement of principles that would soon be adopted by the Continental Congress as the Declaration of Independence, she asked him to “remember the ladies and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” Although this letter has often been cited, correctly, as evidence of her fervent desire for women’s rights, she did not champion, then or later, the right of women to vote, a position virtually unheard of at the time. She did, however, strongly support a woman’s right to education, and in 1778 she wrote her husband that “you need not be told how much female education is neglected, nor how fashionable it has been to ridicule female learning.” She also favoured the abolition of slavery.
In 1784 Abigail joined her husband in Europe, when he began serving as American minister to Britain. Her letters from Paris and London contain descriptive musings on British royalty, French customs, and the superiority of the quiet life of an American farmer. She wrote in early 1788 that she much preferred her “own little farm” to “the court of Saint James’s where I seldom meet with characters so inoffensive as my Hens and chickings.” Later that year the Adamses returned to the United States; when John assumed the vice presidency in 1789, Abigail divided her time between the capital city (first New York City and then, in 1790, Philadelphia) and the family home in Massachusetts. She missed her husband’s presidential inauguration in March 1797 in order to care for his sick mother, and during his presidency she often stayed in Massachusetts to look after family matters.
As first lady, she kept a rigorous daily schedule, rising at 5:00 am to manage a busy household and receive callers for two hours each day.
In November 1800, just as the election that denied John Adams a second term as president was being held, Abigail oversaw the Adamses’ move from Philadelphia to the newly constructed presidential mansion in Washington, D. C. Her letters to family members showed her displeasure at finding the building roughly finished and unfurnished, but she warned her daughter not to reveal her thoughts, since people would think her ungrateful. On New Year’s Day 1801 she opened the mansion, soon to be known as the White House, to visitors, continuing a tradition begun by the Washingtons and maintained by every subsequent first lady until 1933.
After leaving office, Abigail and John retired to their home in Massachusetts. She continued a lively correspondence with many people and even resumed writing to Thomas Jefferson, from whom she had been estranged as a result of political differences. She died in October 1818 and was buried in the First Church of Quincy; her husband, who died in 1826, was buried beside her.
Until the 20th century few first ladies shared Abigail Adams’s interest in politics or in the treatment of government leaders by the press. She vigorously objected to what she considered inaccurate reporting on her husband and son. But she was not altogether surprised by the “lies Falshoods,” writing in 1797 to her sister that she “expected to be vilified and abused, with my whole family.” Although her approach to the office of first lady was in many ways advanced, her fame rests primarily on her thousands of letters, which form an eloquent and evocative description of her life and times.
Adams died on October 28, 1818, of typhoid fever. She was 73 years old, exactly two weeks shy of her 74th birthday.
Achievements
Abigail Adams is sometimes considered to have been a Founder of the United States, and is now designated as the first Second Lady and second First Lady of the United States, although these titles were not in use at the time.
Adams's life is one of the most documented of the first ladies: she is remembered for the many letters she wrote to her husband while he stayed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the Continental Congresses. John frequently sought the advice of Abigail on many matters, and their letters are filled with intellectual discussions on government and politics. Her letters also serve as eyewitness accounts of the American Revolutionary War home front.
An Adams Memorial has been proposed in Washington, D. C. , honoring Adams, her husband and other members of their family. One of the subpeaks of New Hampshire's Mount Adams (whose main peak is named for her husband) is named in her honor.
The First Spouse Program under the Presidential $1 Coin Program authorizes the United States Mint to issue half-ounce $10 gold coins and bronze medal duplicates to honor the first spouses of the United States. The Abigail Adams coin was released on June 19, 2007, and sold out in just hours. She is pictured on the back of the coin writing her most famous letter to John Adams. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Adams was an active member of First Parish Church in Quincy, which became Unitarian in doctrine by 1753. Her theological views evolved over the course of her life. In a letter to her son near the end of her life, dated May 5, 1816, she wrote of her religious beliefs:
"I acknowledge myself an unitarian – believing that the Father alone, is the supreme God, and that Jesus Christ derived his Being, and all his powers and honors from the Father. There is not any reasoning which can convince me, contrary to my senses, that three is one, and one three."
She also asked Louisa Adams in a letter dated January 3, 1818, "When will Mankind be convinced that true Religion is from the Heart, between Man and his creator, and not the imposition of Man or creeds and tests?"
Politics
Unlike Martha Washington, who had been a gracious hostess but avoided all political discussions, Abigail involved herself in the most interesting debates of the day. As the two major political factions, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists (later the Jeffersonian Republicans), developed into political parties in the 1790s, she pointed out her husband’s friends and foes in both groups.
Abigail Adams wrote about the troubles and concerns she had as an eighteenth-century woman and she was an advocate of married women's property rights, more opportunities for women, particularly in the field of education. Women, she believed, should not submit to laws not made in their interest, nor should they be content with the simple role of being companions to their husbands. They should educate themselves and thus be recognized for their intellectual capabilities, so they could guide and influence the lives of their children and husbands. She is known for her March, 1776 letter to John and the Continental Congress, requesting that they, "remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable 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 particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation."
Adams believed that slavery was evil and a threat to the American democratic experiment. A letter written by her on March 31, 1776, explained that she doubted most of the Virginians had such "passion for Liberty" as they claimed they did, since they "deprived their fellow Creatures" of freedom.
Views
Quotations:
Her last words were, "Do not grieve, my friend, my dearest friend. I am ready to go. And John, it will not be long."
Personality
Historian Joseph Ellis says that Abigail, although self-educated, was a better and more colorful letter-writer than John, even though John was one of the best letter-writers of the age. Ellis argues that Abigail was the more resilient and more emotionally balanced of the two, and calls her one of the most extraordinary women in American history.
Connections
Although Adams' father approved of the match, her mother was appalled that her daughter would marry a country lawyer whose manner still reeked of the farm, but eventually she gave in. The couple married on October 25, 1764, in the Smiths' home in Weymouth. Smith, Abigail's father, presided over the marriage of John Adams and his daughter. After the reception, the couple mounted a single horse and rode off to their new home, the small cottage and farm John had inherited from his father in Braintree, Massachusetts. Later they moved to Boston, where his law practice expanded. The couple welcomed their first child nine months into their marriage. In 12 years, she gave birth to six children.
