INTRODUCTION
Abigail Smith Adams (1744-1818) and John Adams (1735-1826) were married for 54 years, beginning in 1764. 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. 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. The couple exchanged regular letters during this period –though Abigail Adams sometimes complained about her husband’s uneven attention to their correspondence. 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. John Adams tried responding in a teasing fashion, calling his wife “saucy,” though the details of his reply suggested that he was well aware that the “Masculine systems” of their social hierarchy were in a precarious state during such a turbulent age.
TEXT: Adams, Letters (1776)
- Abigail and John Adams exchanged two private letters in March and April 1776; the excerpts provided here focus on Abigail Adams’s advice to her husband about the need for making any “Code of Laws” in their new country more “generous” toward women and John Adams’s teasing but perhaps also uneasy response
Scene from HBO miniseries “John Adams” (2008)