Abigail and John: How a Marriage Shaped American Politics

Power changes when it meets a clear-eyed partner. That’s the thread that runs through our conversation with Dr. Kirsten Birkhaug as we trace the political and personal partnership of John and Abigail Adams—two sharp minds who treated marriage like a working lab for ideas that would shape the early republic. We open with why their story is the right entry point for Women of the Founding, then follow the through line from courtship candor to presidential counsel, guided by the letters that map their lifelong exchange.

John’s reputation as a formidable thinker grows more interesting when you watch him think with Abigail. While he serves as lawyer, revolutionary, diplomat, and president, she runs the Quincy homestead through war and inflation—hiring hands, negotiating prices, and making the farm solvent when legal coverture makes every contract harder. Her plea to “remember the ladies” was not a slogan; it was a precise push against a system that erased married women’s legal identities, blocking them from the very commerce they kept alive. We unpack those letters, the teasing reply about a “republic of petticoats,” and the way Abigail’s wider correspondence—especially with Mercy Otis Warren—kept the pressure on. The picture that emerges is not a myth of perfect founders but a credible model for how theory meets the ledger, and why that friction made John’s political judgment age unusually well.

We also share where to start if you want to read the record yourself: the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Papers, the exchanges between John and Abigail, and biographies like David McCullough’s that render the texture of their days. Along the way, we contrast John’s grounded pragmatism with more untethered strains of founding-era thought, and we close with the lesson that still resonates: ideas last when they are tested against the lives they will touch. If this conversation reframes how you see the Founding, tap follow, share it with a friend who loves history, and leave a quick review telling us which Adams letter you’ll read first.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Why Start With John and Abigail
• 2:55 A Marriage of Intellectual Equals
• 5:46 Partnership at Work: Politics and Farm
• 8:42 Where to Begin: Letters and Biographies
• 10:32 “Remember the Ladies” and Coverture
• 13:06 Influence, Disagreements, and Growth
• 15:08 Lasting Takeaways from the Adamses

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:46

Welcome back to Civics in a year. I am so excited because today I am joined by Dr. Kierston Burkhog, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hope College. She teaches courses ranging from American politics to advanced political theory and advises the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Leadership Fellows. Her research focuses on early American political thought and the often overlooked contributions of women, with recent work on figures like Phyllis Wheatley, Mercy Otis Warren, and John Adams. She also serves as a books review editor for the Journal of Religion, Culture, and Democracy. Dr. Burkog, welcome to the podcast. And we are actually going to be doing a couple of these together because we're going to be talking about Women of the Founding, maybe women people have heard of, but don't know a whole lot about. And you know, you and I have had conversations about this. And today's episode is actually on John and Abigail Adams. And we will be doing a separate run on Abigail. But welcome to the podcast. And can you tell me, or maybe let viewers in a little bit to our conversation on why we're starting with John and Abigail Adams?

SPEAKER_01: 1:55

Great. Thank you so much, Liz, for having me. It's a delight to be here on the Civics in a Year podcast. I think John and Abigail Adams is in fact the best place we could possibly start for a series like this. On the one hand, while John Adams maybe isn't the most famous of the Founding Fathers, people do know of him, right? He's our second president. People might know about those pesky alien and sedition acts, or they might know him from Hamilton, the kind of bit part, not very flattering that he plays in the musical. John Adams is a familiar name to us. And the reason that I think it's important to talk about John and Abigail together is that it's really hard actually to talk about John Adams' politics without talking about Abigail's influence on him. So there's a variety of different and interesting marriages throughout the founding generation, but I think John and Abigail Adams have maybe one of the most fascinating marriages. We know from their extremely long exchange of letters over the course of time that they're apart during their courtship and their marriage, that they considered themselves to be intellectual equals and that this, in fact, is sort of the heart of their marriage. One of my favorite letters from when they were courting, Abigail says, you know, we really should just be very honest with each other before we get married. I wish you to tell me everything you don't like about me. I'll tell you everything I don't like about you, and we'll go from there. So these were the sorts of people that they were, you know, very honest and also very intelligent. And like I said, a true marriage of equals. And one of the things that sort of crops up in their letters as John is off, you know, being involved with the founding of the nation. He's a prominent son of liberty. They were the kind of early groups who were interested in the independence movement and sort of the engine behind it. Uh, you have Abigail as a kind of sounding board for him. He's firing off ideas to her, he's asking for her opinions on them. And then we see him take her opinions into account, and then it actually filters out in the ways that he enacts his own politics. So not only is he actively seeking her advice, but he's modifying his opinions based on the sorts of things that she's saying. In a lot of ways, Abigail Adams is the half the heart and half the brain of the entire Adams operation. And that was true throughout the entirety of John's political career, up to his presidency and beyond a fact that was recognized by people who knew him and the people that surrounded him in politics. So, yeah, I think this is a perfect place to start to sort of talk about the important role of women in the founding generation.

SPEAKER_00: 4:38

So, can you kind of go back a little bit? Because and I love that you talked about their letters, like I love those kinds of primary sources. Was their relationship kind of a common relationship in the time they were in, or is this something that like we don't actually see in politics that during that time period?

SPEAKER_01: 4:57

So, in terms of the love that they had for each other, plenty of founders loved their wives. Even Jefferson, who has plenty of weirdness about his romantic relationships, his wife, who died relatively early on in the course of the American Founding, their letters are also quite lovely. Found a lot of founders loved their wives. They were not purely in marriages of convenience, many of them. The kind of thing that makes makes John and Abigail Adams unique is the extent to which they involve each other in their daily pursuits and in fact their pursuits of work. So John is a politician and a lawyer. That is what he does by profession. And Abigail is involved in this with him. At the same time, Abigail also has a sort of profession of her own. This is quite unique for the time. As John went off to help out with the founding and be in Philadelphia a lot, he left behind their family homestead in Quincy, Massachusetts. Abigail ran the whole thing. She was doing all of the hiring and firing, all of the selling of the product from the farm, all of the strategizing as to how the farm would be managed, especially in the wake of the revolution, which was a kind of giant economic catastrophe. They both effectively have jobs and they're very involved with the work of one another. And they're both kind of pulling in the same direction and viewed it as a team pursuit, which I think is quite unusual among the founding generations. Very few founders are involving their wives in their political ideas the way someone like John Adams is.

SPEAKER_00: 6:37

So if I am somebody who is maybe just hearing about this for the first time, what are some good, maybe primary sources to start with to start to really understand the relationship between John and Abigail and how it affected those around them, whether it was politically, whether it was their family, because we do know one of their sons also becomes president. Where can somebody start to do a little bit of research on these two?

SPEAKER_01: 7:03

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's hard to find a better place to start than their letters. The Massachusetts Hist Historical Society has their collection of letters, which one ought to read. They have all of the exchanges between John and Abigail themselves, and also a bunch of letters between, of course, John and other founding fathers, in which he's frequently mentioning his wife. And also Abigail's kind of vast collection of letters. She's writing to a lot of people as well. In fact, there's a very famous letter, which I think we'll get to at some point here, that Abigail writes to John. She receives a response from him, and she doesn't quite love the response she gets from him. So she fires a letter off to her friend Merci Otis Warren, kind of complaining about the fact that John isn't quite taking her as seriously as she wishes that he would. Additionally, I think there's a couple of really great biographies that you could put on the stack here. David McCullough's John Adams biography, which is the basis for the HBO show John Adams, I think, paints a really beautiful portrait of their relationship as well. And one second, I just need to- There's also a number of biographies on Abigail Adams herself, and a couple of particular books on her writing history and the letters and the pistolary exchanges that she had with the people around her that I think are really helpful starting places to understand her in her context and as she was thinking about herself and her writing.

SPEAKER_00: 8:36

So when I think about Abigail Adams and John Adams, I think about their partnership, but I also think about her very famous plea to remember the ladies. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that means, kind of the context surrounding her plea?

SPEAKER_01: 8:55

Absolutely. So yes, this is a letter written right in the late 1770s, right as you would imagine the American Revolution at its most exciting and highest temperatures. And Abigail writes a letter to John where she just says, in your political pursuits, as you're establishing what is going to be effectively a new nation, I hope that you would remember to remember the ladies. And she also has a couple of really interesting lines about how all men would be tyrants if they could. And there needs to be explicit provisions made in this new document to make sure that women are respected in some kind of way. And I think that this letter oftentimes it's a fascinating letter, and it can be read in a lot of different directions, but the historical context matters here. Specifically, what Abigail is talking about is coverture laws. So coverture laws were these laws that existed around the time of the founding era, wherein women's legal identities would be subsumed upon marriage into the identities of their husbands. So women like Abigail didn't necessarily have independent legal identities. Their legal identities were joined up with their husbands. And then remember, for Abigail, that's a huge problem because John is never around. She writes a letter to him when they've been married 14 years, and she says, And isn't it amazing? We've been married 14 years and we've only lived together half that time. So she's been running the farm effectively for half the time that they've been married, and she can't do some of the things that she needs to do because of the fact that she doesn't have a legal identity of her own. So I mentioned that she's doing the hiring and the firing and the selling and the buying, and she is doing all of that, but she's having to do it by proxy of male relatives, which becomes really laborious and difficult, especially as the revolution ramps up and a lot of men are preoccupied with fighting the war or otherwise trying to keep an economy afloat. So this is specifically what she's talking about, is the fact that women need to be remembered as people with distinct legal identities, uh, so that they can have a role in the commercial functioning of the society in which they live. And this is something that is really specific to her. And John is kind of tickled by this letter. He thinks that this is just sort of charming of Abigail, and he thinks, oh, you know, we'll have a republic of petticoats, you know, if if you get the things that you want or something like that, sort of brushes her off. And like I said, she's she is very unhappy with this response and fires off some letters to some of her female friends, indicating that she did not feel she was taken seriously in this exchange, which she communicates to John, and later we can see John being one of the more sympathetic figures of the founding as regards the rights of women.

SPEAKER_00: 11:45

So at the end of the day, what would you want people to know and to take away from the relationship between John and Abigail Adams as it relates to the founding, as it relates to really thinking about how women shaped the founding of the United States?

SPEAKER_01: 12:02

One of the things that always strikes me about John Adams is how extremely well many of his thoughts and ideas about politics have aged. If you can, if you go back and you read John Adams' writings about politics and about his political theory and what he thinks politics ought to look like, there's so little to disagree with, even on the margins. He's getting so much right and he's foreseeing so many of the problems and making good accountings for how to deal with those problems. He's really, I think, underrated in that regard. And when I first got into reading him, I kept thinking, what makes this guy so different? What makes him stand out so much among other founders? And what I think it really does boil down to is this was a man who loved his wife and always kept one foot rooted in the practical effects any policies he came up with would have on the person that he loved and his family, who he was often apart from. And there are other founders who aren't quite as rooted in that sort of way. I think Jefferson actually is a pretty good example. You know, Jefferson's wife dies and he's got, you know, his estate, but at the same time, he's able to have a much more theoretical take on politics that doesn't need to be as grounded in the practical because he's not concerned about some of the real life situations that John is always returning to by taking in and thinking about how things will affect his wife. It's a moderating influence on him. And I think this is super important to remember. So when we think of a founder whose ideas still ring true to us today, what is unique about this founder? This is a founder who, at root, had a really well established marriage, and that is meaningful.

SPEAKER_00: 13:45

Dr. Burkhog, thank you so much. And listeners, this is the first in our series of women of the founding. So please join us for the next episode, Dr. Burkog. I am so excited to dig into this more video.