Abigail Adams

Who Was Abigail Adams?

Abigail Adams was one of the most remarkable women of the American founding era — a self-educated thinker, political counselor, and moral witness whose letters constitute one of the great epistolary records of the eighteenth century. Born Abigail Smith in Weymouth, Massachusetts, she was largely educated at home, yet read widely in history, theology, and political philosophy, developing a mind that her husband John Adams consulted with regularity and respect.

Her correspondence spans more than forty years and documents not only the intimate life of a family navigating revolution and nation-building, but the intellectual and moral struggles of a woman who understood, perhaps more clearly than most of her contemporaries, that the principles of the new republic carried implications that would outlast the founding generation. Her famous injunction to “remember the ladies” was not a passing remark but a theological and political claim: that the rights being asserted for men derived from a source that made no distinction of sex.

Adams understood liberty as grounded in something more than social contract. Her reading of Scripture, her Congregationalist formation, and her acute observation of human nature led her to distrust any politics that did not reckon with the moral dimensions of power. She lived to see the republic tested in ways she had anticipated, and her letters bear witness to a faith that took both human dignity and human fallenness seriously.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Letters of Abigail Adams — posthumously collected correspondence
• The Book of Abigail and John — ed. L.H. Butterfield
• My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams — ed. Margaret Hogan