John Adams was inaugurated as the second President of the United States on March 4, 1797. Abigail Adams became the second First Lady. She was the first to live in the White House, arriving in November 1800 when the building was still unfinished. The Adams Papers document the presidency through the correspondence she maintained with John Adams and with her son John Quincy Adams throughout the period.
Abigail Adams did not hold office. She had no formal role in the government. She was present for most of John Adams's presidency and actively engaged in its politics. Her correspondence with John Adams during the periods they were separated, and her letters to her son John Quincy Adams, then serving as minister to Prussia, constitute a detailed record of how the Adams administration understood its own decisions.
The presidency was marked by the XYZ Affair and the resulting Quasi-War with France, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the split with Hamilton that divided the Federalist party, and the loss of the 1800 election to Jefferson. Abigail Adams held strong views on all of these. Her letters express them without reservation.
We are all well, and I think it a duty I owe to my Country to return thanks for the preservation of my Husbands Life through the perils of the ocean, and to express my earnest wishes that his Administration may be as beneficial to his Country as his intentions are pure and upright.
The federal government moved from Philadelphia to Washington in 1800. Abigail Adams arrived at the President's House in November 1800. The building was incomplete. She described the condition in a letter to her daughter: walls unplastered, only six rooms made habitable, wood scarce, the main audience room used to hang laundry because there was nowhere else to dry it. John Adams had been living there since November 1. They would live in the White House for four months before Jefferson's inauguration ended the Adams presidency.
Not one room or chamber is finished of the whole. It is habitable by fires in every part, thirteen of which we are obliged to keep daily, or sleep in wet & damp walls, with a hundred workmen around us.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had broken during the 1790s and become enemies by 1800. In 1804, Abigail Adams wrote to Jefferson expressing condolences on the death of his daughter. The exchange that followed was a private attempt to repair the friendship. It failed. The correspondence revealed that the wounds from 1800 were too recent. Jefferson and John Adams did not resume correspondence until 1812, after mutual friends engineered a reconciliation.
Abigail Adams died October 28, 1818, at the age of 73. John Adams survived her by eight years, dying on July 4, 1826, the same day as Thomas Jefferson, exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence. The Adams Papers at MHS hold the complete correspondence from the founding through the retirement years.
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