Questions to ask Abigail Adams

Who Abigail Adams was

Abigail Smith was born on 22 November 1744 in Weymouth, Massachusetts, the daughter of a Congregational minister. Like most girls of her time she had no formal schooling; she read her way through her father's and grandparents' books. She married the lawyer John Adams in October 1764 and had six children, four of whom grew up, including John Quincy Adams, the sixth President.

For most of the Revolution John was away, in Philadelphia and then in Europe, and Abigail ran the farm at Braintree, managed money and raised the children. She joined him in Paris and London from 1784 to 1788, became the second First Lady in 1797 and, in November 1800, the first to live in the White House. She died of typhoid fever on 28 October 1818.

Start from the letters

The surest way to write strong questions for Abigail Adams is to read a letter first and ask about what is in it. These eight are short, dated and free to read in the Massachusetts Historical Society's Adams Family Papers archive.

Questions about girlhood and marriage

• 1. You never went to school. How did you become such a reader and writer?
• 2. Your family thought John Adams was a rough country lawyer. Why did you marry him?
• 3. You and John signed letters as “Portia” and “Lysander”. Why use those names?
• 4. Your daughter Susanna died as a baby, and in July 1777 you lost a stillborn daughter while John was in Philadelphia. How did you carry on?

What the record says: her letters before marriage use the pen name Diana; during the Revolution she often signed as Portia, after the loyal wife of the Roman Brutus. Susanna died in 1770. Her letters of July 1777 tell John of the stillbirth with great restraint. Ask these gently and let the letters speak.

Questions about the war on the home front

• 5. On 17 June 1775 you took your son John Quincy up Penn's Hill to watch Charlestown burn. Why take a seven-year-old?
• 6. That autumn a dysentery epidemic killed your mother. How did you keep the household going?
• 7. How did you run the farm, pay the workers and deal with rising prices with your husband away?
• 8. In July 1776 you took your children to Boston to be inoculated against smallpox. Why risk it?
• 9. What happened when the Declaration was read in Boston on 18 July 1776?

What the record says: the Penn's Hill story comes from John Quincy Adams's memories as an old man, so treat its details with care. Her letter of 21 to 22 July 1776 describes Colonel Thomas Crafts reading the Declaration from the balcony of the State House, the crowd's cheers, the bells and the cannon. She notes that smallpox kept many people from the country away. The historian Woody Holton (Abigail Adams, 2009) shows she also traded goods John sent from Europe and invested in government bonds, decisions she made herself. That makes question 7 one of the richest.

Questions about rights: women, slavery, schooling

• 10. What exactly did you ask John to do in your letter of 31 March 1776?
• 11. When John said he could only laugh, were you hurt, angry or amused?
• 12. You wrote to Mercy Otis Warren about the reply. What were you planning?
• 13. You wanted learned women. Did you want women to vote?
• 14. In 1774 you wrote against slavery. Did your neighbours agree with you?
• 15. In 1797 you defended James Prince's place at an evening school. What did you tell the objectors?

What the record says: in March 1776 she asked for laws that would not give husbands unlimited power over wives; she did not ask for the vote. Historians stress this limit: she argued for protection and education within marriage, not for modern equality. John's reply came on 14 April; her letter to Mercy Otis Warren of 27 April 1776 jokes about petitioning Congress. Our Remember the Ladies page prints the full exchange.

Questions about Europe and the White House

• 16. What shocked you most about Paris in 1784?
• 17. What was it like to be presented at the court of George III?
• 18. Why did you become close to Thomas Jefferson in Paris, and why did the friendship break?
• 19. You supported the Sedition Act of 1798. Why did you want the opposition papers silenced?
• 20. What was the President's House like in November 1800?

What the record says: her letters from France complain about dirt and expense and admire the theatre. She befriended Jefferson in Paris; party politics later divided them, and they exchanged sharp letters in 1804. In 1798 she wrote to her sister Mary Smith Cranch demanding action against Republican editors. In November 1800 she wrote that she used the great unfinished audience room, now the East Room, to dry the laundry.

Questions about her legacy

• 21. Your grandson published your letters in 1840. Which ones would you have kept private?
• 22. Your son became President in 1825. What advice did you give him as a boy?
• 23. Married women could not own property in their own name, but you made a will anyway. Why?

What the record says: her grandson Charles Francis Adams published a selection, Letters of Mrs. Adams, in 1840, and it sold well. Her will of 1816, written although the law of coverture said a wife's property belonged to her husband, left money and goods mainly to women in her family; John honoured it. She died before John Quincy's presidency, so question 22 should be about his childhood.

Sample answers in Abigail's words

For question 10:

For question 14:

For question 13, on daughters and learning:

For a question about her temper or about John's caution:

Note the spelling. Her originals use spellings like “Laidies” and “Rebelion”; most editions modernise them. Quote the version your source prints, and say which source.

What she could not answer

• Speaking from 1776, she does not know independence will succeed or that John will be President.
• She died in 1818, so nothing about John Quincy's presidency, the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920 or women in Congress.
• Do not ask whether she was a “feminist”. The word did not exist; ask what rights she wanted, and for whom.

Hear her answer out loud

Abigail Adams wrote the way she talked, quickly and with opinions, so she suits a voice rehearsal. An AI recreation of Abigail Adams on Yuga lets you try your questions by voice or text; it is free to start, with 15 voice minutes and then 5 a week. It is built from her letters and the record but is not her, and it can be wrong, so cite the letters themselves.

Where to read her letters

• Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts Historical Society: the complete John and Abigail letters, with images of the originals.
• Founders Online (founders.archives.gov): the Adams Family Correspondence volumes, including letters to her sister Mary Smith Cranch.
• Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams During the Revolution (1876), free on Project Gutenberg.
• Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor (eds.), My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams (2007), a readable selection.

For her husband's side, use the questions to ask John Adams.