The recent controversy over Hilary Clinton's email while serving as secretary of state has once again brought the question of public access to the correspondence of our public figures to the fore. But access is not an issue when it comes to the private letters between our second president, Massachusetts' own John Adams, and his remarkable wife, Abigail — and the American public is all the richer for it.
"Abigail was very much her own woman and she was a bit fiery," said Sara Martin, the series editor of the Adams Family Correspondence at the Massachusetts Historical Society. "She is an independent spirit and so she is curious and inquisitive and loving and not always rational and, you know, she’s one of us."
That we know Abigail Adams, and her husband John, with such depth and intimacy, is thanks in large part to their extraordinary correspondence: more than 1,000 letters between them, that we still have today.
"Of course the reason that we have so many letters is because they spent so many years during their marriage away from one another," Martin said. "So we’re the richer for it but you definitely see that thread coming through the letters."
The letters reveal a couple engaging each other on all matters, from the practical to the political, the intellectual to the emotional. Perhaps the most celebrated of them was penned by Abigail on March 31, 1776, from the Adams' farm in Quincy to John, knee-deep in the heady business of creating a new nation at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
"The heart of the war is going on in Boston and she’s in Quincy and she’s able to see the smoke and hear the cannon from her home and her husband is several hundred miles away," Martin said.
Abigail is not only managing the day-to-day of the family farm, but also caring for the couple’s four young children. She opens the letter with a powerful indictment of John’s slaveholding southern colleagues.
"I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breast," Abigail Adams wrote.
Then, amidst family updates, and talk of war damages, smallpox and mumps in the three-page letter, comes its most famous passage.
"I long to hear that you have declared an Independency and by the way in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors."
She continues with a bit of spirited button-pushing that Martin says is classic Abigail Adams.
"If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound in any laws in which we have no voice or representation," Adams wrote.
John’s response, two weeks later, engaged her in a bit of verbal jousting.
"As to your extraordinary code of laws I cannot but laugh," he wrote, adding a comment that Abigail's being saucy.
But he goes on to cleverly, if not endorse, at least validate her viewpoint.
"They actually agree more than they don’t, but it’s just the language that they’re using to communicate," Martin said.
It’s an extraordinary exchange, candid and progressive. And it’s easy today to see Abigail’s words as an early rallying cry for women’s rights under the law. But Martin views Abigail’s words more in the context of the times.
"It’s not a viewpoint that I think she would have seen herself," she said. "She might have embraced it. Oh, that we could have those conversations!"
That Martin doesn’t believe Adams was necessarily calling for suffrage, or equal representation under the law, doesn’t lesson the importance of her words. In this passage, and countless others it in her letters, we can plainly see — right from America’s start — a woman that was the equal of any man.
"Abigail acknowledges the inequalities in society and that is probably the most powerful thing in the 'remember the ladies letter.' She isn’t a crusader. She is someone that holds beliefs, who understands society around her and the way it works and may accept that, but doesn’t like everything about it and is educated enough and opinionated enough that she writes about Abigail Adams’ “Remember the Ladies” letter," Martin said.
Just one of more than 1,000 penned between what some call America’s first power couple, written to her husband John, 239 years ago this week.
Read some of the letters between Abigail and John Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society website.
