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Abigail Adams was the first - and, so far, only - woman to be both the wife and mother of a President. She enjoyed her husband John's eminence and found it stimulating to be the wife of a President for a term. She also took satisfaction in her son John Quincy's steady rise in public life; and, though she didn't live to see him become President, she was delighted when President Monroe made him Secretary of State, a stepping stone to the Presidency, in 1817. Abigail even thought she could take some credit for her husband's and her son's achievements. Women were, she knew, expected to be good wives and mothers; and Abigail, for all her "saucyness" ( John's term), was conscientious about her womanly responsibilities. But she also struck off on her own at times; and both John and John Quincy were well aware of her unusual abilities. John regarded her as his intellectual peer and depended a great deal on her counsel; and John Quincy attributed much of his own success in life to her tutelage when he was a boy. "How shall I offer you consolation for your loss," he asked his father when Abigail died in 1818, "when I feel that my own is irreparable?" "Any consolations are more than I can number," John assured his son, for he expected to join her soon. "The separation cannot be so long as twenty seperations heretofore."

There were far more than twenty separations. From almost the beginning, John's absences from home were frequent, at times lengthy, and always painful for him and his wife. Abigail once complained that she had been a "widow" for much of her married life. "Who shall give me back Time?" she wailed at one point, "who shall compensate to me those years I cannot recall?" John began courting Abigail Smith, a Congregational minister's daughter, in 1761 when he was twenty-six and she only seventeen, and they were married in her father's parsonage in Weymouth, not far from Boston, in 1764, and settled down in Braintree to begin a family. But during their early married years John was away a lot on the court circuit trying to get ahead as a lawyer and Abigail was left alone as a young wife to run the house and raise the children. When the Stamp Act crisis came in 1765 and Adams joined the resistance movement, separation gradually became a way of life for the young couple. The American Revolution brought excitement, adventure, and patriotic fervor into their lives, but it also tore them apart. First it was Philadelphia, where Adams served in the First and the Second Continental Congress from 1774 until 1778. Then it was Europe, where he served, first, as Commissioner to France in 1778 and then, with Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, as negotiator of the Paris peace treaty ending the war in 1783. It wasn't until 1784, just before he became the first U.S. Minister to Great Britain that Abigail finally went to London to join him in his work.

Separation was harder on Abigail than on John. The "one left behind," she once remarked, was always "the greatest sufferer." She also thought women suffered more than men did from being separated from loved ones and said she "never wondered at the philosopher who thanked the gods that he was created a Man rather than a Woman." Once, when she hadn't heard from her husband for five weeks, she exclaimed: "I had rather give a dollar for a letter by the post, tho the consequence should be that I Eat but one meal a day for these three weeks to come." Another time, when he was in Europe, she cried: "Alass my dear I am much afflicted with a disorder call'd the Heartach, nor can any remedy be found in America. . . ." But Adams missed her keenly, too, and both of them lamented the way public responsibilities kept them apart. "If I were to tell you all the tenderness of my heart," he once told her, "I should do nothing but write to you. . . ." From Amsterdam he wrote her in 1781: "What a fine Affair it would be if We could flit across the Atlantic as they say Angels do from Planet to Planet. I would dart to Penns Hill and bring you over on my Wings." John's and Abigail's was one of America's great love stories.

When Abigail Adams was asked late in life whether she would have wanted her husband to go into politics had she known it would mean years of separation from him, she replied in the affirmative. "I feel a pleasure," she explained, "in being able to sacrifice my selfish passions to the general good, and in imitating the example which has taught me to consider myself and family but as the small dust of the balance, when compared with the great community." Her answer was vintage Adams: a bit solemn, perhaps, but utterly sincere in its insistence on the primacy of public duty over personal concerns. Both Abigail and John Adams tended to minimize the pleasure they took in winning public recognition, though it was real enough; but both, surely, had a generous measure of what the eighteenth century called "public virtue." . . .

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