Abigail Adams
Abigail Adams was the wife of one president and the mother of another, and her letters are among the best sources for the American founding. Born in Weymouth, Massachusetts in 1744, the daughter of a Congregational minister, she had no formal schooling — which she resented all her life — and educated herself in her father's and grandfather's libraries. She married John Adams in 1764, and their marriage produced some 1,100 surviving letters, written because he was almost always away: at the Continental Congress, in France, in the Netherlands, in England. She ran the family farm at Braintree alone for a decade, managing labour, tenants and finances through wartime inflation, and invested independently in government bonds against her husband's preference for land — successfully. In March 1776, as the Congress moved towards independence, she wrote asking him to remember the ladies in the new code of laws, warning that they would not hold themselves bound by laws in which they had no voice, and observing that all men would be tyrants if they could. He replied that he could not but laugh. She wrote back that their sex was determined to rebel. She also wrote against slavery, calling it a wicked practice and objecting that the colonists were fighting for a liberty they denied others, and she placed a free black servant in the local school over objections. She was an outspoken political adviser, criticised as Mrs President during his term, and she supported the Alien and Sedition Acts. She died of typhoid in 1818, eight years before her son became president.
- Lived: 1744 CE – 1818 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: letter_writer, political_advisor
