Marriage and Children
As third cousins, Abigail and John had known each other since they were children. In 1762, John accompanied his friend Richard Cranch to the Smith household. Cranch was engaged to Adams' older sister, Mary. John was quickly attracted to the petite, shy, 17-year-old brunette who was forever bent over some book. He was surprised to learn she knew so much about poetry, philosophy and politics, considered unusual for a woman at the time.
Although Adams' father approved of the match, her mother was appalled that her daughter would marry a country lawyer whose manners still reeked of the farm, but eventually she gave in. The couple married on October 25, 1764, five days before John's 29th birthday, in the Smiths' home in Weymouth. Then Rev. Smith (the bride's father) performed the nuptials.
After the reception, the couple mounted a single horse and rode off to their new home, the small cottage and farm John had inherited from his father in Braintree, Massachusetts. Later they moved to Boston, where his law practice expanded.
In 10 years, she gave birth to six children:
- Abigail ("Nabby") (1765–1813)
- John Quincy Adams (1767–1848)
- Grace Susanna ("Susanna") (1768–1770)
- Charles (1770–1800)
- Thomas Boylston Adams (1772–1832)
- Elizabeth (stillborn in 1777)
Adams was responsible for family and farm when her husband was on his long trips. "Alas!", she wrote in December 1773, "How many snow banks divide thee and me." She raised her two younger sons throughout John's prolonged absences. She also raised her elder grandchildren, including George Washington Adams and a younger John Adams, while John Quincy Adams was minister to Russia. Her childrearing style included relentless and continual reminders of what the children owed to virtue and the Adams tradition.
Read more about this topic: Abigail Adams
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or children:
“Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)