Six primary documents from the years after the Revolution. Paris and London. The Vice Presidency. The move to the unfinished White House. The prayer John wrote for it. The defeat. The final years at Quincy. The letters are the primary record of the second half of her life.
After the Revolution ended, John Adams was appointed Minister to Britain, and Abigail joined him abroad in 1784, the first time she had left Massachusetts in her life. She spent eight months in Paris before moving to London. Her letters from this period are among the most vivid accounts of European court life written by any American of the founding era. She met Jefferson in Paris. She found Paris society fatiguing and London society cold.
In London, she was presented at the Court of St. James's, where she and John were introduced to King George III, whose colonial policies they had spent a decade opposing. Abigail's account of the court presentation is in her letters to her sister Mary Cranch. Those letters are at the Massachusetts Historical Society and in the Adams Family Papers at Founders Online.
Rank and title are the great passion of the English. Every lord and lady is tenacious of their privileges. They treat Americans with great civility, but they speak of them with contempt... I confess to you, my sister, that I am more homeward bound in my heart than I expected. I love my country because it is the country of rational Liberty — where every man may sit under his own vine and eat the good of the land.
John Adams was inaugurated as the first Vice President of the United States on April 21, 1789. Abigail remained at the farm in Braintree to manage the household and property while John went to New York for the first session of Congress. He wrote her on May 14, 1789, asking her to come immediately, a letter that captures both his need for her presence and the practical reality she had been managing at home for years. The letter is at Founders Online.
I pray you to come, as soon as possible. As to money you must if you can borrow enough to bring you here. If you cannot borrow enough, you must sell horses, oxen, sheep, cows, anything. If no one will take the place, leave it to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, but not one moment longer delay your coming.
John Adams moved into the President's House in Washington on November 1, 1800, the first president to inhabit what would become the White House. The building was unfinished, damp, and cold. Only six of the thirty-six rooms were habitable. Abigail was still traveling from Quincy to join him. John wrote to her the following day, November 2, 1800, describing the house and including a prayer that would later be carved into the mantelpiece of the State Dining Room by order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. The original letter is at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Before I end my Letter I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof. I shall not attempt a description of it. You will form the best Idea of it from Inspection.
Abigail arrived in Washington on November 16, 1800. She lived in the White House for four months. When John lost the election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson, they left Washington in March 1801 and returned to Quincy for good. John and Abigail never held public office again.
After the defeat of 1800, John and Abigail retired to Quincy. The friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had collapsed over the election. In 1804, Abigail wrote to Jefferson directly, not at John's direction, but on her own initiative, to condole him on the death of his daughter Mary (Polly), whom Abigail had cared for briefly in London years before. Jefferson responded. The correspondence between Abigail and Jefferson ran for several months in 1804 and addressed their political differences directly.
Jefferson later told Benjamin Rush, who worked to reconcile Adams and Jefferson, that it was Abigail's letters, and the proof they offered that the friendship could be revived, that helped make the reconciliation possible. The Adams-Jefferson correspondence, including Abigail's 1804 letters, is at Founders Online.
The weight of grief is not lessened by time, when it is seated in the Heart. I have now before me the last Letter of that amiable Girl, written with the same cheerfulness with which she always wrote to me — she never suspected the critical state of her Health. It was only a few weeks before she died. She says, "Do not let me be forgotten by you."
Abigail Adams spent the last years of her life at Peacefield in Quincy, the house where she and John had raised their family, which John had purchased during the diplomatic years. She continued writing. Her letters from this period address national politics, the War of 1812, the careers of her children and grandchildren, and the daily life of the household. She was seventy-three years old and had been writing letters for more than fifty years.
Do you know that I have sometimes amused myself with conjecturing what your Epitaph ought to be? "Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of Peace with France in the year 1800." I think it a most honorable record — as honorable, perhaps, as any that could be inscribed upon a human tombstone.
Abigail Adams died on October 28, 1818, at Peacefield in Quincy, Massachusetts. She was seventy-three years old. The cause was typhoid fever. John Adams, eighty-two, was at her bedside. He survived her by eight years, dying on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the same day as Thomas Jefferson.
John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson about her death. The letter is at Founders Online. He told Jefferson that fifty-four years of marriage had produced in him not a diminished but an increased sense of what he had depended on her for. He never remarried.
The Dear Partner of my Life for fifty four Years as a Wife and for many Years more as a Lover, now lyes in extremis, forbidden to speak or be spoken to. If human Life is a Bubble, no matter how soon it breaks. If it is as I firmly believe an immortal Existence We ought patiently to wait the terminated time.
The Adams Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society contain more than 1,160 letters between John and Abigail alone, spanning 1762 to 1801. They are among the most complete records of a marriage in the founding era, and among the most complete records of a woman's intellectual and political life in eighteenth-century America. Every letter is freely accessible at masshist.org/digitaladams.