Abigail Smith was born on November 22, , in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Her father was a Congregationalist minister, her mother a member of the notable Quincy family. Like young girls of her time, Abigail lacked a formal education, but from youth she was intelligent, well read, and outspoken. Politics Prevailed On October 25, , Abigail wed John Adams, commencing a partnership characterized, and perhaps enriched, by separation.
Between and , she bore five children, one of whom, John Quincy, would become the sixth president of the United States. During these years, John balanced his law practice and political activity with increasing difficulty.
With his election to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in , politics prevailed. Abigail agreed he should go: "You cannot be, On Her Own With her husband gone, Abigail became head of the household. She educated the children, hired farmhands, coped with rampant inflation and deprivation, and staved off debt. She supplemented the farm income by selling and trading small European items that John procured for her.
She also purchased land in Braintree and Vermont in John's name, as it was illegal to do so in hers. Abigail considered her lonely duties loathsome and called them her "patriotic sacrifice. Protecting Home and Country For John, patriotic and familial concerns were in separate spheres; for Abigail, they were intertwined.
In the monumental summer of , as John triumphantly made the case for independence in Philadelphia, smallpox struck Braintree. With Abigail and the children in Boston being inoculated, John wrote that he was sick with worry, but "I cannot leave this place, without Edited by Debra Michals, PhD Works Cited.
Detroit: Gale, History in Context. Accessed February 2, Abigail Adams. Butterfield, L. Cambridge: Belknap Press, Roberts, Cokie. Weatherford, Doris. New York: Macmillan General Reference, How to Cite this page. Additional Resources. Adams, Charles Francis. New York: Penguin Books, Two Volumes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, She was taught to read and write at home, and given access to the extensive libraries of her father and maternal grandfather, taking a special interest in philosophy, theology, Shakespeare, the classics, ancient history, government and law.
Occupation before Marriage: No documentation exists to suggest any involvement of Abigail Adams as a young woman in her father's parsonage activities. She recalled that in her earliest years, she was often in poor health. Reading and corresponding with family and friends occupied most of her time as a young woman. She did not play cards, sing or dance. Marriage: 19 years old, married , October 25 to John Adams, lawyer , in Smith family home, Weymouth, Massachusetts, wed in matrimony by her father, the Reverend Smith.
After the ceremony, they drove in a horse and carriage to a cottage that stood beside the one where John Adams had been born and raised. This became their first home. They moved to Boston in a series of rented homes before buying a large farm, "Peacefield," in , while John Adams was Minister to Great Britain. Children: Three sons and two daughters;. Occupation after Marriage: Abigail Adams gave birth to her first child ten days shy of nine months after her marriage, thus working almost immediately as a mother.
She also shared with her husband the management of the household finances and the farming of their property for sustenance, while he also practiced law in the nearby city of Boston. The separation prompted the start of a lifelong correspondence between them, forming not only a rich archive that reflected the evolution of a marriage of the Revolutionary and Federal eras, but a chronology of the public issues debated and confronted by the new nation's leaders. The letters reflect not only Abigail Adams' reactive advice to the political contentions and questions that John posed to her, but also her own observant reporting of New England newspapers' and citizens' response to legislation and news events of the American Revolution.
As the colonial fight for independence from the mother country ensued, Abigail Adams was appointed by the Massachusetts Colony General Court in , along with Mercy Warren and the governor's wife Hannah Winthrop to question their fellow Massachusetts women who were charged by their word or action of remaining loyal to the British crown and working against the independence movement.
This was the first instance of a First Lady who held any quasi-official government position. As the Second Continental Congress drew up and debated the Declaration of Independence through , Abigail Adams began to press the argument in letters to her husband that the creation of a new form of government was an opportunity to make equitable the legal status of women to that of men.
Despite her inability to convince him of this, the text of those letters became some of the earliest known writings calling for women's equal rights. Separated from her husband when he left for his diplomatic service as minister to France, and then to England in , she kept him informed of domestic politics while he confided international affairs to her. She joined him in , exploring France and England, received in the latter nation by the king. Upon their return, during John Adams' tenure as the first Vice President , Abigail Adams spent part of the year in the capital cities of New York and Philadelphia, while Congress was in session.
Presidential Campaign and Inauguration: As much of her political role was conducted in correspondence, so too was Abigail Adams's active interest in her husband's two presidential campaigns, in and , when his primary challenger was their close friend, anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson.
Caring for her husband's dying mother Abigail Adams was unable to attend his March 4, inaugural ceremony in Philadelphia. She was highly conscious, however, of how their lives would change that day, with "a sense of the obligations, the important trusts, and numerous duties connected with it. Her caution about their old friend Thomas Jefferson had grown to mistrust by this point, he having come in second in the presidential election campaign against her husband and, in the old system, was thus declared the new Vice President.
Knowing that her every word, be it written or spoken, would be examined, criticized, ridiculed and used against the new Administration, she caught herself in the middle of writing one political missive.
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