More than a founding father’s wife: Abigail Adams takes the spotlight at USCA

Abigail Adams is remembered as the wife of a founding father and president, but she was also a savvy investor, risk-taking entrepreneur and persistent critic of laws that denied women economic independence. This Constitution Day, historian Dr. Woody Holton will bring that lesser-known Abigail Adams into focus at the University of South Carolina Aiken, revealing a woman whose ambitions and acts of rebellion extended far beyond the White House. 

USCA will host its annual Constitution Day presentation at 3:30 p.m. Sept. 17, in Penland 106, which will feature Holton’s research on Abigail Adams.  

Holton, a professor of history in USC’s McCausland College of Arts and Sciences, has written several books on early American history, specifically related to the American Revolution. The Constitution Day lecture will highlight his discoveries of the former first lady when writing her biography. 

“Her husband, John, and his congressional colleagues had literally laughed off Abigail’s 1776 injunction to 'Remember the Ladies' as they drew up America’s new independent government.” 

Throughout her life, Abigail defied conventionality, even writing a will, considered her “culminating act of rebellion,” Holton said. At the time of her death in 1818, she left all her property to women. 

Long before that, Adams had an untraditional approach to business and marriage. She was a voice her husband, a founding father and president, valued. 

Holton will explain that while her husband worked in locales away from their native Boston, including Paris, Mrs. Adams’ trans-Atlantic trade activities, defiance of British blockades, and savvy business practices made her husband a rich man. She also took a chance on buying land in what became Vermont, before it was a state, and invested in government bonds, considered by some to be “unscrupulous” practices. 

“The common quality of Abigail’s three commercial ventures was that they exhibited a tolerance for risk that gave John the jitters,” Holton said. 

While most of the money she earned legally belonged to her husband, she declared some of the income she made as her own. Routinely she appealed to John to change laws of the time that prohibited women from owning property, and he supported her defiance of these centuries-old common laws.   

Holton’s American Revolution research focuses on early American economic history and on African Americans, Native Americans, and women and their roles in the founding and building of the nation.   

He has written several books, including “Liberty is Sweet: An Integrated History of the American Revolution” (2013); “Abigail Adams” (2009), which won the Bancroft Prize; “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution” (2007), a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the National Book Award; and “Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia” (1999), which earned the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti award. 

Holton’s lecture at USCA on Constitution Day Sept. 17 is free and open to the public. 

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