A Founding Mother: A Novel of Abigail Adams
- N.J. Mastro
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
This summer marks the 250th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence. If you’re at all interested in revisiting the American Revolution and the fifty tumultuous years that followed, I recommend picking up a copy of A Founding Mother: A Novel of Abigail Adams by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie.
A Founding Mother is a compelling, deeply researched novel that puts Abigail Adams where she belongs: seated alongside America’s earliest, most prominent and influential founding male figures.
There’s a lot of history here, but I love that in biofiction. The novel is highly readable, engaging, and because of the historical detail, enlightening.
Before you think you already know Abigail Adams, let me offer up a challenge. Yes, we all know how the American Revolution began and ended. Yes, we all know Abigail was married to John Adams, the second President of the United States. And yes, we all know John and Abigail’s son, John Quincy Adams, was the sixth President of the United States.
But how many of you know the Adamses backstory, in particular, anything about Abigail? I’d read David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Adams (highly recommend) and watched the subsequent HBO miniseries (also highly recommended). But neither does justice to Abigail. A Founding Mother is her story. If you ask me, it’s about time.
Admittedly, you can’t tell Abigail’s story without telling John’s story, and vice versa. John and Abigail were America’s first political power couple. A Founding Mother shows how their historic relationship took root and evolved during radical times. In a decidedly male-dominated society, Abigail didn’t hold back from expressing a woman’s point of view, and she was an early advocate for equal rights for women, uncommon characteristics for a female during the era. She was witty, bold, intelligent, compassionate, and intuitively political. John called her his Portia, and as his political career became their way of life, she became his most trusted advisor.
A short prologue opens the story in A Founding Mother. It’s 1814, a year before the War of 1812 ended. Washington, DC is burning. Abigail fears the country she and John helped birth will not survive a British invasion a second time. Says she on page 3 of A Founding Mother:
This is the end, then. The end of the American experiment. The death knell of the United States. The destruction of everything we believed in, everything we struggled to build, everything we sacrificed for.
A moving passage. Democracy was and always will be fragile. They didn’t know how things would end. They didn’t know if America would exist in 250 years. Their lives were on the line nearly every day, before, during, and in the early years following the Revolutionary War, John especially. He could have been hung for his political activity.
Yet they lived with great ferocity, a lion and a lioness, committed to the ideal of a democracy, not a party, not a particular office, and certainly no single individual. They were for the United States. Period.
After the prologue in which Abigail wonders if all they have sacrified has been for naught, Chapter One takes readers back to 1765, when Abigail and John were first married and living in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She’s a wife. She goes where her husband goes. What this young bride couldn’t have expected was how often she’d be left behind to tend the home fires.
Throughout the novel, John is away much of the time, first as a country lawyer, and later, carving out a great nation. In his absence, Abigail tilled the fields, raised the children, kept the coffers from going empty, and defended the family when war with the British became a reality. Later, when John was dispatched to Europe as a diplomat, then as ambassador, Abigail joined him in France and England, her, too, spending years away from her children. These were great sacrifices for America, reminding me of today’s military families where spouses may be deployed for months and years, leaving partners at home to manage on their own.
I kept trying to imagine what it must have been like for Abigail during such uncertain times: the fear, the turmoil, the worry she must have felt. Besides war and poverty, she suffered deep loss as well, burying children who died in infancy and saying farewell to family members and friends she loved. Yet she withstood what life dished her with poise and grace.
Two things were especially delightful to see in the novel. The first was Abigail’s now famous letter to John in the spring of 1776 when he was in Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress (he had also attended the first). Abigail knew the criticality of the effort underway. The founding fathers were working on a declaration of independence. She wrote to him, saying:
“I long to hear that you have declared an independency -- and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” [Excerpt exactly as written by Abigail; read the full text of the letter here.]
No one can say the men at the Continental Congress weren’t duly warned. Below is a photograph of Abigail’s actual letter, which I took this past March while visiting the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. The Society was featuring a special display honoring America’s Declaration of Independence. Her letter is bottom right.
A Founding Mother gives readers so much more than a peek into family life. We also get Abigail’s take on Alexander Hamilton (she saw him as the scoundrel everyone accused him of being), and the Adamses friendship and subsequent fallout with Thomas Jefferson (whom she eventually came to despise). John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were, essentially, the first Republican (Federalist at the time) and Democratic presidents, reminding us the political divisions we feel so pointedly today have existed for 250 years. What has changed, perhaps, is society’s ability and that of our elected officials to find common ground. The founding fathers knew the necessity of compromise. What would Abigail say about today’s dysfunctional branches in America’s state and federal governments? I think she would scold them all and tell them to knock it off and get to work! (In case you don’t know, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson patched things up between them in their old age and died on the very same day, July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. God bless ‘em.)
A second special callout in the story was a minor reference to Mary Wollstonecraft, the British writer and philosopher widely considered the world’s first feminist and the subject of my biographical novel, Solitary Walker: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft. John teases Abigail about being a Wollstonecraft acolyte. She was. Abigail read and admired Wollstonecraft’s political writings. Wollstonecraft argued women were not inferior to men, only that society had forever denied women an education. Abigail’s views regarding girls’ education, marriage protections for women — or lack thereof — and women’s property rights were consistent with Wollstonecraft’s. Today, the Abigail Adams Institute seeks to strengthen humanistic education at Harvard. The Institute also hosts The Wollstonecraft Project, linking the two women in contemporary society, which I find utterly fitting.
It’s hard not to romanticize what people like John and Abigail Adams did to spawn a nation, along with men like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the other 53 delegates to the Second Continental Congress. Below is "The Signing of The Declaration of Independence," a painting by the French artist Charles Edouard Armand Dumaresq (1826-1895), who is said to have painted it as a gift to America after emigrating here to escape Nazi sentiments in 19th-century Europe. In the late 1980s, First Lady Barbara Bush decided to hang the painting, which had been gifted to the Kennedy White House, over the fireplace in the Cabinet Room. It’s worth mentioning Barbara Bush is the only woman besides Abigail Adams to have been married to a president and to give birth to another.
I hope you’ll read A Founding Mother: A Novel of Abigail Adams. Dray and Kamoie didn’t need to make Abigail’s story up. It’s all there in the historical record. Adding to the chronicle of public events, over 1,100 letters between John and Abigail exist, revealing the intricacies of their life together. Excerpts of the letters are scattered throughout the novel, lending an authenticity and “just in time” insights to the narrative. Going behind the curtain and peering into the lives of so prominent a family, we see how imperfect they were, how much they relied on faith and the strength of their convictions to guide them, and most of all, their undying love for one another.
Still, A Founding Mother is a work of fiction, and readers must view it as such. In their author’s notes, Dray and Kamoie do a stellar job explaining their choices regarding where they departed from the historical record and why.
John Adams failed to deliver Abigail’s wishes regarding women’s rights, and she roundly chastised him for it. It only took another 200 years for women to capture some of those rights. Had the Second Continental Congress only listened to a woman…
By the way, did you know the Declaration of Independence was voted on by the delegates on July 2nd? John Adams was certain the date would be celebrated as our national holiday for generations to come. So why do we celebrate America’s independence on July 4th? Find out here.
No matter if America was officially founded on July 2nd or July 4th, we’re still working toward the full promise of a representative democracy. The Declaration of Independence is a powerful, bold vision for America that has stood the test of time. Whether it stands another 250 years is up to us. Democracy is not guaranteed, nor are we a perfect Union. We live in turbulent times, and America has failed many groups of people in its two and a half centuries. But John and Abigail Adams, along with others, including those with whom they vehemently disagreed, were able to find a path forward toward the audacious goal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. It’s up to us to make it better. A Founding Mother: A Novel of Abigail Adams offers us a way to revisit their wisdom and other important lessons of the past.
Before I go, one more fun fact: The War of 1812, which was underway at the beginning of A Founding Mother, ended in 1815 with the Treaty of Ghent, brokered by none other than John Quincy Adams, then U.S. Secretary of State.
