{"id":80,"date":"2025-08-16T17:31:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T17:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/fys-pinsker\/?page_id=80"},"modified":"2025-09-15T15:01:00","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T15:01:00","slug":"abigail-and-john-adams-letters-1776","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/fys-pinsker\/texts\/abigail-and-john-adams-letters-1776\/","title":{"rendered":"Abigail and John Adams, Letters (1776)"},"content":{"rendered":"

INTRODUCTION<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\"Portraits<\/a>
John and Abigail Adams (New England Historical Society<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Abigail Smith Adams (1744-1818)<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0John Adams (1735-1826)<\/a> were married for 54 years, beginning in 1764.\u00a0 By the spring of 1776, when Abigail was in her early thirties and John was in his early forties, the couple had five young children, living in their home in Braintree, Massachusetts.\u00a0 John Adams, a noted lawyer, was then serving as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia and proving to be vital in helping to forge the movement for American independence from Great Britain.\u00a0 The couple exchanged regular letters during this period \u2013though Abigail Adams sometimes complained about her husband\u2019s uneven attention to their correspondence.\u00a0 In this lively exchange from March and April 1776, Abigail Adams went further and pressed her husband on political matters, urging him in delicately crafted language to apply the revolutionary principles of freedom and equality to women as well as men.\u00a0 John Adams tried responding in a teasing fashion, calling his wife \u201csaucy,\u201d though the details of his reply suggested that he was well aware that the \u201cMasculine systems\u201d of their social hierarchy were in a precarious state during such a turbulent age.<\/p>\n

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