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Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president of the United States, was never a leader of any kind during her lifetime, except in the circle of her devoted family. But a generation after her death, Americans began to see her as a paragon of domestic patriotism during the Revolution. By the late nineteenth century she was widely regarded as one of America's finest letter writers. In the late twentieth century she took on a new role as a feminist heroine, and her current reputation--as a fully engaged patriotic wife and mother, as an accomplished literary correspondent, and as a powerful voice for all women in the pre-modern era stands higher than ever.

Nearly every brushstroke in this striking portrait would have astonished Abigail Adams, although perhaps not her admiring husband, John. Born Abigail Smith in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in November 1744, to the town's leading pastor, the Reverend William Smith, and the well-born Elizabeth Quincy, she was raised in a modest but comfortable home. Although her parents were not wealthy, her father's profession and her mother's prominent family placed her squarely in the small upper-middle class of eastern Massachusetts's largely rural, agrarian society. Like nearly all eighteenth-century colonial women, Abigail was not schooled outside her home, but as the daughter of a learned minister with a large personal library, she was not only fully literate but relatively well read by her teens in literature and history, and she continued her reading in her lawyer husband's large library for more than two decades after her marriage.

Raised to be a dutiful wife and devoted mother, Abigail took on both roles without complaint or regret during her twenties and remained her husband's strongest supporter and closest confidant through every victory and defeat in his long career, until her death. Yet quietly, in her private letters to John, to her sisters, and to a few close friends, she gradually became an effective critic of eighteenth-century American society and particularly of the role that married women were forced to play in that traditional world. It was this critique, fused with a strong pride in New England's social virtues, that brought her letters to the attention of nineteenth- century American readers, both men and women, and commanded an even higher regard from twentieth-century women as they sought to recover an American past from which they could take both pleasure and instruction.

The course of Adams's life was fairly straightforward. A few facts are of the first importance in understanding her letters. In October 1764, just before her twentieth birthday, she married John Adams, an aspiring young Harvard educated lawyer nine years her senior, and moved about five miles to neighboring Braintree, Massachusetts, the hometown of both her husband and her mother. She and John had four children who reached adulthood: Abigail (1765), John Quincy (1767), Charles (1770), and Thomas Boylston (1772). Adams lived mostly in Braintree, with shorter stays in Boston, until her voyage to Europe in 1784 to join her diplomat husband in France and then in England; and after their return in 1788, she resided seasonally in New York and Philadelphia and briefly in Washington, again to accompany John during his vice presidency and presidency, before their long retirement in Quincy (formerly Braintree), Massachusetts. She died there in October 1818, shortly before her seventy-fourth birthday, survived by her husband and her sons John Quincy (later the sixth president of the United States) and Thomas Boylston.

References:

1. Akers, Charles W. Abigail Adams: An American Woman. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2006.

2. Gelles, Edith B. Portia: The World of Abigail Adams. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

3. Levin, Phyllis Lee. Abigail Adams. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.

4. Nagel, Paul C. The Adams Women: Abigail and Louisa, Their Sisters and Daughters. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

5. Withey, Lynne. Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams. New York: Free Press, 1981.

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