| Bio |

Who they were

Abigail Smith was born on 11 November 1744 (Old Style) in Weymouth, Massachusetts^{[2][3, p. 13]}. Her father, the Reverend William Smith, was the town's Congregationalist minister for more than forty years^[4][5]. Like almost all girls of her era, Abigail received no formal schooling^{[3, p. 3]}, but she read widely in her father's library and became, in her own family's words, a self-taught, lifelong reader^[2]. That informal education shaped the sharp, confident writing voice she used for the rest of her life.

In 1764, at nineteen, Abigail married John Adams, a young Massachusetts lawyer^{[6][3, p. 13]}. As John's legal and political career pulled him away from home for months and later years at a time, Abigail took charge of running the family farm, finances, and the children's upbringing largely by herself^{[7, p. 50]}. During the Revolutionary War she lived through real danger, including a smallpox outbreak that led her to have herself and her children inoculated^[8][8]. Through it all she wrote constantly, building the huge correspondence with John that survives today.

In March 1776, while John was at the Continental Congress helping debate American independence, Abigail wrote urging him to "remember the ladies" and not put "unlimited power" into husbands' hands^{[9, p. 1][1, p. 1]}. She later joined John in Paris and London during his diplomatic postings^{[3, p. 13]}. When John became the second President and the government moved to the new, unfinished capital in 1800, Abigail became the first First Lady to live in the President's House. Finding most of the building unusable, she turned its enormous, unfinished East Room into a drying room and hung the family laundry there^[10][8].

After John lost the bitterly contested election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson, Abigail returned with him to their family home in Quincy, Massachusetts^[11]. She died there on 28 October 1818, at the age of seventy-three, eight years before John^[8][12]. She did not live to see their son, John Quincy Adams, become the sixth President in 1825^[13].

Abigail's letters, published in collections such as the Adams Family Correspondence, remain one of the richest surviving personal records of the American Revolution and the early republic^{[7, p. 50]}. Her 1776 "remember the ladies" letter has become one of the most quoted documents from the founding era, cited again and again in later discussions of women's place in American political life^{[14, p. 19]}. She was the first American woman to be both the wife of one president and the mother of another^[13].

Unlike John, Abigail never kept a personal diary — almost everything historians know of her private thinking comes from her letters instead^[15]. Wartime shortages hit her household hard: in one letter she complains that a bundle of pins that used to cost only a little now cost far more, when they could be found at all^[8].

| Legacy & Reputation |

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