Cobblestones Home : Colonial Lives : The Biography of Abigail Smith Adams

I am going to tell you about Abigail Smith Adams. She was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts on November 11,1744. Her ancestors were English and Welsh. Abigail Smith Adams paternal great grandfather Thomas Smith was born in 1645 and immigrated to Charleston, South Carolina. Her great-great-great grandmother came from a Welsh family.

Abigail Adams was the second born. She had a brother and two sisters. Mary Smith (1741-1811) William Smith (1746- 1787) Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody(1750-1815). Abigail was five foot one and she had brown hair and brown eyes. She liked to read and corresponded with family and friends and that occupied most of her time as a young woman. She did not play cards, sing or dance. Abigail didn’t go to school,
but she was taught to read and write at home. Her brothers were able to go to school.

She met a man named John Adams, a twenty nine year old lawyer. They both loved learning and they became good friends and eventually fell in love. They got marred in 1767 when she was twenty. For all of their life together John and Abigail wrote letters to each other that you can still readed today. As the second Continental Congress drew up and debated the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Abigail 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 woman to that of man.

If I met Abigail Adams I would ask her three questions. Did you like being married to a president? Did you wish to have more kids? What are your dreams? I think she would like America today because she could go to college.

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