But there was another side to Abigail Adams that hasn’t drawn nearly as much attention: She was also an astute, successful businesswoman and investor.
Her skills certainly didn’t go unnoticed in her time. Thomas Jefferson, for one, saw her as exceptional in her grasp of business matters. He described her as one of the “most attentive and honourable economists” in a letter to James Madison, and he praised her financial acumen and her direction of the couple’s financial affairs while John Adams was stationed in Europe on behalf of the fledgling American government.
Building a business
Indeed, Jefferson could have used her help with his own finances. Although he was a member of Virginia’s aristocratic planter class, he notoriously died in significant debt. He overspent on home remodeling and luxuries, including exquisite furnishings, artworks and hundreds of bottles of fine wine he brought back from his stint in Paris as the American minister to France.
Abigail Adams, on the other hand, was frugal by nature and upbringing. She and her husband appreciated the finer things in life, but they spent within their means. Although they were never wealthy—they would be considered middle-class in today’s terminology—they ended up comfortably off in their later years.
What wealth they had was amassed in no small part due to Abigail’s economic stewardship, initiative and willingness to take measured risks.
The years leading up to and during the war disrupted many normal patterns of domestic life, at times allowing women like Abigail to breach the barrier that had excluded them from the realm of commerce and politics.
Despite the challenges in those times of finding reliable labor and coping with rising inflation, Abigail ably managed the Adams farm in Braintree, Mass., for many years before renting it out to tenants. She also started a small but thriving wartime business selling neighbors luxury French fashion and household items sent to her from Europe by her husband. These items, popular with fashionable women in the Boston area, included fine handkerchiefs, gauze fabric, ribbons, decorative feathers and artificial flowers. She also offered prized Dutch lace.
There were risks in this business. Ships carrying cargo were often captured by the British, and Abigail lost some items this way that she had planned to sell. Still, she felt the risks were worth it, because even with reduced inventory the scarcity of the luxury items meant they would command a high price. With her urging, despite John’s reservations, he continued to regularly ship her merchandise, and the business was profitable.
Profitable investments
Not only did the income that Abigail Adams brought in help to pay the family’s Massachusetts taxes and living expenses, it also gave her sufficient capital to make investments.
She became increasingly confident about her financial prowess, and she sometimes disagreed openly with John about how best to increase their wealth and keep their finances on firm footing. John, the more financially conservative of the two, favored acquiring land, while Abigail saw far better profit opportunities in depreciated government securities and war bonds.
There were risks here just as there were in her business. In the midst of the Revolution, there was a real possibility that state or federal securities ultimately would prove to be worthless. “Purchasing depreciated government bonds from private individuals on the open market would transform her into a full-scale securities speculator,” according to historian Woody Holton.
Abigail wasn’t an infallible investor, but for the most part her judgment was sound. For instance, in 1777 she bought a depreciated note issued by Massachusetts to help fund the war. It ultimately brought her a 24% return, astounding for the time. In the early 1790s, she converted some of her Massachusetts government bonds into new federal securities that appreciated quickly and earned her significant returns.
Asserting control
With her success in business and investing, Abigail would come to assert a rather radical notion at the time—that some of the money she had earned belonged to her exclusively. For instance, in a 1785 letter to an uncle, she asked him to purchase bonds for her and use the “money which I call mine.” That flew in the face of the laws of coverture at the time, which asserted that husbands wholly controlled their wives’ finances. She also used some of her personal money to provide gifts of food and money to impoverished local women.
Some have argued that Abigail was an early feminist, one who famously urged her husband John to “remember the ladies” in the design of the new American government. The truth is more nuanced. Throughout her adult life, she valued as primary her domestic roles as mother and wife and adhered to the notion of a family hierarchy with the husband at the helm. At the same time, however, she exercised personal agency and was forward thinking in her support of robust education and legal and economic rights for women, helping carve a path for modern-day women.
She carried that independence and assertiveness through to the end of her life. Even though a personal will wasn’t considered a binding legal document in her time, Abigail— who died in 1818 at the age of 73—composed one in which she bequeathed her valuable possessions including jewelry, clothing, and even in some cases money and securities, to mostly female relatives. To John’s credit he honored her wishes.
Abigail’s strength earned her wide admiration in her day, as it does now. According to writer Judith Sargent Murray, an American female intellectual of their era, Abigail became so respected by some highly placed men in Boston that they declared that if John Adams were to die while serving as president, “they should rather see Mrs. Adams in the Presidential chair, rather than any other character now existing in America.”
If Abigail Adams had lived in our times, who knows? She might have become our nation’s first woman president—or just the chair of the Federal Reserve.
Jeanne Abrams is professor emerita at the University of Denver and author of “A View from Abroad: The Story of John and Abigail Adams in Europe.” She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
