Abstract
On any given day in 1775, you’d find Abigail Adams, soon to become the fledgling nation’s second first lady, up at five in the morning to light the fire and get breakfast ready for her four children. From that point on, the day was full of domestic responsibilities for her—cooking and cleaning for the family and guests, managing the farmhands and property, overseeing assets and expenditures, hiring and governing servants, and conducting the education of her children. Schools were available in Braintree, the town the Adamses called home, but Abigail preferred her own instruction and the tutorship of her cousin John Thaxter, who boarded with the Adams family and gave instructions to the boys, and to her daughter Abigail too. After a day of tutoring, chores, and perhaps some outdoor play, the family would gather around the fire until bed. Some evenings John Quincy, age eight, would read aloud a page or two from Rollin’s Ancient History as mother and daughter sewed, and then Abigail would take over and finish the chapter, drawing connections between ancient political events and those then taking place in the American colonies. Her husband John was so busy being a founding father that he was seldom home to father his own children, but the pair corresponded constantly, almost obsessively, about the educations and futures of their children.
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Notes
David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 55–58
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© 2008 Milton Gaither
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Gaither, M. (2008). The Family Nation, 1776–1860. In: Homeschool. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-61301-0_3
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