Abigail Adams was born Abigail Smith in 1744 in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Her father was a Congregational minister. Although she was later known for advocating an education in the public schools for girls that was equal to that given to boys, Abigail Adams herself had no formal education. She was taught to read and write at home and given access to the extensive libraries of her father and maternal grandfather. On October 25, 1764, she married John Adams, a lawyer (1735-1826), in the Smith family home in Weymouth; the ceremony was performed by her father. After the ceremony, John and Abigail Adams drove in a horse and carriage to a cottage that stood beside the one where John Adams had been born and raised. This became their first home. They moved to Boston in a series of rented homes before buying a large farm, "Peacefield," in 1787 while John Adams was Minister to Great Britain. The couple had three sons and two daughters; Abigail "Nabby" Amelia Adams Smith (1765–1813), John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), Susanna Adams (1768–1770), Charles Adams (1770–1800), and Thomas Boylston Adams (1772–1832). When John Adams went to Philadelphia in 1774 to serve as his colony's delegate to the First Continental Congress, Abigail Adams remained home. The separation prompted the start of a lifelong correspondence between them, forming not only a rich archive that reflected the evolution of a marriage of the Revolutionary and Federal eras but a chronology of the public issues debated and confronted by the new nation's leaders. The letters reflect not only Abigail Adams' reactive advice to the political contentions and questions that John posed to her but also her own observant reporting of New England newspapers' and citizens' response to legislation and news events of the American Revolution. As the colonial fight for independence from the mother country ensued, Abigail Adams was appointed by the Massachusetts Colony General Court in 1775 to question her fellow Massachusetts women who were charged by their word or action of remaining loyal to the British crown and working against the independence movement. As the Second Continental Congress drew up and debated the Declaration of Independence through 1776, Abigail Adams began to press the argument in letters to her husband that the creation of a new form of government was an opportunity to make equitable the legal status of women to that of men. Despite her inability to convince him of this, the text of those letters became some of the earliest known writings calling for women's equal rights. Separated from her husband when he left for his diplomatic service as minister to France, and then to England in 1778, she kept him informed of domestic politics while he confided international affairs to her. She joined him in 1783, exploring France and England, received in the latter nation by the king. Upon their return, during John Adams' tenure as the first Vice President from 1789 to 1797, Abigail Adams spent part of the year in the capital cities of New York and Philadelphia, while Congress was in session. As much of her political role was conducted in correspondence, so too was Abigail Adams's active interest in her husband's two presidential campaigns, in 1796 and 1800, when his primary challenger was their close friend, anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson. Caring for her husband's dying mother; Abigail Adams was unable to attend his March 4, 1797, inaugural ceremony in Philadelphia. Of the four years her husband served as President, Abigail Adams was actually present in the temporary capital of Philadelphia and then, finally, the permanent capitol of Washington, D.C. for a total of only eighteen months. She nonetheless made a strong impression on the press and public. Embittered at the loss of her husband's re-election to their old friend Thomas Jefferson, now a rabid anti-Federalist, Abigail Adams remained interested in national political issues. Her focus remained primarily on her home and her family. She did not live to see her John Quincy Adams become president. She died on October 28, 1818, in Quincy, Massachusetts, at age 73.
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