Abigail Adams

Illness kept her out of whatever schooling was on offer, and her mother taught her to read, write and cipher at home. What made the difference was shelving. Her father, her uncle and her grandfather all kept large libraries, and the Smith sisters worked their way through the English and the French in them. William Smith was a Congregational minister who preached reason and morality rather than original sin, and his household held at least four enslaved people. One of them, a woman called Phoebe, looked after the children, and later worked for Abigail for wages once she was free. Abigail met John Adams in 1759, at 15. Her mother objected that he was a country lawyer who still smelled of the farm. They married on October 25, 1764.

Her ledger is stranger than her legend. She ran the Braintree farm alone through two decades of her husband's absences, and she put the family money into Revolutionary war debt through her uncle Cotton Tufts — paper that Hamilton's funding plan later redeemed at face value, and that one researcher credits with keeping the Adamses solvent for the rest of John's life. In office she planted favorable stories in the press and supported the Alien and Sedition Acts. Opponents called her Mrs. President. BriefHistory has the letters and the argument they started. This page is about the woman underneath them.

The woman who asked for a code of laws also thought inequality was a social necessity. Her biographer Lynne Withey reads her as a conservative: afraid of revolution, convinced that family and religion were what held a society together, and satisfied that better legal standing for women was compatible with staying at home. She grew up in a house with at least four enslaved people and spent her adult life against slavery, writing in March 1776 that Virginians claiming a passion for liberty were depriving others of theirs. In Philadelphia she put a free Black youth into an evening school over a neighbor's complaint. The rest of the cost was domestic. Susanna died at two, Elizabeth was stillborn in 1777, Charles died in 1800 at 30, and Nabby died of breast cancer in 1813 after three years of pain.

Typhoid killed her on October 28, 1818, two weeks short of 74. Her last words went to John — do not grieve, she was ready, and it would not be long for him. It was almost eight years. She lies in the crypt under United First Parish Church in Quincy, with John, John Quincy and Louisa. Counts of the surviving correspondence differ, and Joseph Ellis puts the letters between the two of them at roughly 1,200. Siena College polls of historians have kept her in the top three first ladies since 1982. Quincy unveiled a seven-foot bronze of her in 2022, and a cairn on Penn Hill marks where she and seven-year-old John Quincy watched Charlestown burn.

Abigail Adams's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Letter to John Adams, March 31, 1776 article
  Remember the ladies — and a challenge to Virginians who claimed a passion for liberty 1776
• Letter to John Quincy Adams, May 5, 1816 article
  I acknowledge myself a unitarian — her clearest statement of belief 1816
• Renewed correspondence with Thomas Jefferson other
  Begun when she wrote to him after the death of his daughter Polly, whom she had cared for in London —
• Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams book
  The first published selection, edited by her grandson Charles Francis Adams 1840

• November 22, 1744 aged 0 Born at Weymouth to a Congregational minister and a Quincy Frequent illness kept her out of school. Her mother taught her at home.
• October 25, 1764 aged 19 Marries John Adams and rides to the Braintree farm Her mother had objected to a country lawyer.
• June 17, 1775 aged 30 Watches Bunker Hill and the burning of Charlestown from Penn Hill She was minding the children of Joseph Warren, who was killed in the fighting.
• March 31, 1776 aged 31 Writes the letter asking John to remember the ladies The same letter doubted the Virginians' claimed passion for liberty.
• 1784 aged ~40 Sails for Europe with Nabby to join John at his diplomatic post She had dreaded the voyage and found it interesting.
• November 1800 aged 55 Moves into the unfinished President's House in Washington
• 1813 aged ~69 Nabby dies of breast cancer at 48 after three years of pain
• October 28, 1818 aged 73 Dies of typhoid fever at Quincy, two weeks short of 74
• July 4, 1826 aged 81 John dies on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration and joins her in the crypt

• John Adams 1735–1826
  Second President and key Founding Father who helped secure independence and shaped early American diplomacy. married to
• John Quincy Adams 1767–1848
  Diplomat, sixth president, and later congressman who opposed slavery’s expansion and shaped early American foreign policy. mother of
• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. corresponded with
• Alexander Hamilton 1755–1804
  Founding Father who established the nation's financial system and co-authored the Federalist Papers. profited from his funding plan
• Martha Washington 1731–1802
  First First Lady who defined the role and spent every wartime winter in the Continental Army's camps. preceded her in the role
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815–1902
  Principal theorist and organizer of the nineteenth-century women’s rights and suffrage movements. took up the argument