The Man Who Loved His Wife

Heritage

Jul 18

No single American Founder lived to be so badly burned by the work of his own hands as John Adams. Adams was the practical, boots-on-the ground brain of the independence effort; he was one of the core members of the Sons of Liberty and devoted his entire life, often at great personal cost, to the success of the American political project. Today, his presidency is best remembered for the disastrous Alien and Sedition Acts (which were supported and promoted by the Federalist party at large, and under which the courts prosecuted less than thirty people), and his legacy dulled by his unceremonious ousting from his own party upon leaving office—a fate due in part to his longstanding feud with Alexander Hamilton.

Upon closer examination, however, Adams stands out among the other Founders as a man dedicated to the practice of his own theories. Where Founders of similar fame, like Jefferson and Madison, can be utterly frustrating in the incongruence between their thought and action (especially on the topic of slavery), Adams’s actions cleaved to his philosophy with an almost mulelike stubbornness. Take, for example, Adams’s commitment to defending in court the perpetrators of the Boston Massacre—a job he undertook in no small part to set the tone for rule of law in burgeoning United States. Throughout his career, Adams was similarly dogmatic in his advocacy for practical political measures that aligned with his theoretical beliefs, including those advancing public education, virtue formation among American citizens, and the abolition of slavery. Compared to many other Founders, Adams’s writing holds up impeccably today; history has vindicated most, if not all, of Adams’s positions.

The integration of Adams’s thought and action, as well as the comparative agelessness of his assessments, are refreshing exceptions within the Founding generation, which raises the question: why? What made Adams different from his fellows in this regard? While there are perhaps a number of ways to answer to this question, the most compelling may be, quite simply, that John Adams had an unusual regard for his wife.

There is no question that John and Abigail Adams shared a deep and abiding love. Their mutual affection permeates the pages of their lengthy epistolary exchange. But John did not just love Abigail—he respected her, and valued her thoughts on the rapidly-changing world around them. In February of 1776, he sent her a copy of Common Sense, eager for her opinion of it. In the same letter, he detailed ongoing plans for American diplomatic efforts in Canada, anxious for her approval on some of the more controversial choices. In late July of the same year, as the greatest political minds in North America began to consider how the new United States might be ruled, John wrote to Abigail that “I am, at this present writing, perplexed and plagued with two knotty problems in politics. You love to pick a political bone. So I will even throw it to you.” In a number of different letters, John extolled his good fortune in acquiring a wife who had both the intellectual capacity to understand affairs of state, and the moral virtue to discern good and bad policies.

Beyond just serving as an interlocutor on various political topics, however, Abigail’s correspondence with John kept him tethered to the practical effects of political decisions made in Philadelphia. This was true in a literal sense: from the relatively close remove of Braintree, Massachusetts, Abigail watched the Revolution unfold in Boston, and reported back to her husband what she observed. In April of 1776, as the Continental Congress debated the terms of the Declaration of Independence, John wrote to her: “Don’t hesitate to write by the Post. Seal well. Don’t miss a single Post. You take it for granted that I have particular intelligence of everything from others. But I have not…I have more particulars from you than anyone else.”

In an even deeper sense, John’s theoretical politics accounted for the practical experiences of his wife, particularly as she went about running their homestead and raising their children in his absence. In the spring of 1776, Abigail wrote John the famous “remember the ladies” letter, wherein she insisted that her husband take great pains to eliminate the tyranny of men over women in the new United States. Here, Abigail was likely thinking about coverture laws, which subsumed the legal identities of women into their husbands’ upon marriage, and which might have hamstrung her own abilities to conduct the necessary business of farming on the Adams homestead had she had been submitted to them. While John initially underestimated the seriousness of his wife’s argument in this regard, his later letters and politics show him to be much more sympathetic to the plight of women than many of his peers. His exchanges with Abigail on the education of their own children foreshadow his later advocacy for public education as essential for the maintenance of virtue throughout the United States, and his assertion that the education of women was a core part of that mission. Even further, Adams’s consistent disavowal of the institution of slavery reflected his wife’s observation that “the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow-creatures of theirs.”

What sets Adams apart from his fellows is that he loved his wife, and respected her enough to account for her experiences in his own thoughts about politics. His care for her resounds not only in the letters he wrote her, but in the political causes he advanced. Their marriage of equals was essential in producing Adams’s impressively sound political theory—a theory that he not only believed, but practiced consistently throughout the whole of his public and private life.