Adams, Abigail (redirected from Abigail Smith)

Adams, Abigail, 1744–1818, wife of President John Adams and mother of President John Quincy Adams, b. Weymouth, Mass. She was born Abigail Smith. A lively, intelligent woman, she was the chief figure in the social life of her husband's administration and one of the most distinguished and influential of the first ladies in the history of the United States. Her detailed letters are a vivid source of social history. The correspondence with her husband was edited in a number of volumes by Charles Francis Adams; her letters as well as John's, are included in The Adams-Jefferson Letters, edited by Lester J. Cappon (1959); letters to her sister, Mary Smith Cranch, are in New Letters of Abigail Adams, 1788–1801, edited by Stewart Mitchell (1947, repr. 1973).

Bibliography

See biographies by J. Whitney (1947, repr. 1970), L. E. Richards (1917, repr. 1971), and C. W. Akers (1980). See also bibliography for Adams, John.

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Adams, Abigail

 orig. Abigail Smith

(born Nov. 22, 1744, Weymouth, Mass.—died Oct. 28, 1818, Quincy, Mass., U.S.) U.S. first lady. She was the daughter of a Congregational minister. Educated entirely at home, she became an avid reader of history. She married John Adams in 1764 and raised four children, including John Quincy Adams, in Quincy, Mass. In 1774 she began a prolific correspondence with her husband, who was attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; she described daily life and discussed public affairs during the American Revolution with wit and political acuity. She continued her letters to family and friends while in Europe (1784–88) and Washington, D.C. (1789–1801), during her husband's diplomatic and presidential careers. She was considered an influential adviser to him.

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Adams, Abigail (b. Smith) (1744–1818) First Lady; born in Weymouth, Mass. A minister's daughter, she married John Adams in 1764, beginning a classic partnership that lasted for 54 years. She had no formal schooling but taught herself Latin and then educated her five children, one of whom, John Quincy Adams, became the sixth president. Adams was often away on government business and she ran the family farm in Quincy. She and Adams maintained a long correspondence during those years of separation; her letters displayed a political bent which exceeded that of most Revolutionary period women. She was not overly happy as first lady; she resented both the expense of entertaining and the lack of privacy. She and Adams resided in Philadelphia until 1800, when she supervised the move to Washington, D.C. Following the presidency, she continued her letter writing (Thomas Jefferson was one of her correspondents). She is the only woman to have been both the wife and the mother of U.S. presidents.