Profiles in Character: Abigail Adams Models and Shapes American Citizenship
“Every assistance and advantage which can be procured is afforded to the sons,” Abigail Adams wrote her cousin John Thaxter in 1778, “whilst the daughters are totally neglected. It is really mortifying, Sir.” She thus reiterated an earlier, March 31, 1776, plea on behalf of greater rights for girls and women. Writing then to her husband John, a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, she said:
“I long to hear that you have declared independency - and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”
Abigail believed that America’s rise or failure would be linked to the enlightened engagement of all its citizens. Yet females were not considered the equal of males, legally or socially. The English common law practice of coverture then held that upon marriage a woman’s legal rights were subsumed by her husband. Her property and even her children were legally his. Educational opportunities open to boys were mostly closed to girls.
Born in 1744, she had little access to formal schooling, relying instead on sharing what she read with friends in an eighteenth century version of a “book group.” She credited an uncle with being the first to “put proper Bookes into my hands” and knew her passion for learning was shared with other women. “Women you know Sir are considered Domestick Beings”, she wrote her cousin Isaac Smith, but “they inherit an Eaquel Share of curiosity with the other Sex.”
Her curiosity was extensive, including not just farming and domestic affairs but encompassing emerging sciences. When John served as Ambassador to Great Britain she relished attending lectures in electricity, magnetism, and optics. She was passionate about politics too. “My mind has ever been interested in publick affairs,” she wrote John in 1797. When the nation’s capital moved to Washington, D.C., she remarked that she read every word of congressional debates published in the National Intelligencer.
When John wrote in August 1776 that “New England must produce the Heroes, the statesmen, the Philosophers, or America will make no great Figure for some Time,” she replied that “we should have learned women.” Women, she argued, had a profound effect on the young and educating a woman would, as she would later say, help “form the minds of her children to virtue.”
She applied this to all their children, intent on making them a blessing to their country. What she wrote in 1781 to her thirteen-year-old son, John Quincy, when he accompanied his father overseas, articulated her hopes and expectations for those entrusted with the nation’s future:
“Improve your understanding for acquiring usefull knowledge and virtue, such as will render you an ornament to society, an Honour to your Country, and a Blessing to your parents. Great Learning and superior abilities, should you ever possess them, will be of little value and small Estimation, unless Virtue, Honour, Truth and integrity are added to them.”
She lived as she taught. While prohibited from voting and public office, she insisted that “[I]f a woman does not hold the Reigns of Government, I see no reason for her not judging how they are conducted.” She shared her political views with her husband, regularly offering counsel and criticism. “I never wanted your Advice and assistance more in my Life,” he wrote in a tribute to her political acumen two weeks after his 1797 inauguration as president.
American success depended on commerce as well as “politicks.” She acquired a significant degree of business and financial knowledge and used it with an independence rare for her gender. In John’s protracted absences as lawyer, public official, diplomat and president, she tended the farm and hired and fired help while also raising their family. Yet, she refused to be limited by her husband’s directions, sometimes quietly ignoring them. When he wanted to buy more land, she often bought government bonds (through male trustees since she could not own them), which years later John acknowledged had been better investments. In June 1775 she asked him to send her six thousand pins from Philadelphia – not for herself but because the price had tripled due to British blockades and she could make a handsome profit. She also developed an import business. When John worried that foreign goods might be seized by British battleships and privateers, she replied with savvy that “[I]f one in 3 [shipments] arrives I should be a gainer.”
When typhus overcame her on October 28, 1818 she left a will, which Woody Holton notes in his insightful biography, Abigail Adams: A Life, was in itself astounding. She legally could own nothing but made bequests of property, all to women. John had once admiringly called her “saucy” and that characteristic animated a life that set an example and offered a challenge to define civic virtue for future generations.
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