Accidental Advantages: Lessons From Young Abigail Adams

Accidental Advantages: Lessons From Young Abigail Adams
Abigail Smith Adams (1744–1818), wife of American president John Adams and mother of president John Quincy Adams. From a painting by C Schessele, circa 1775. MPI/Getty Images
Jeff Minick
Updated:

Abigail Adams was an amazing woman. No—that compliment cuts in half her talents and her ardor. She was an amazing human being.

“Faced with the unfamiliar task of providing financially for her children while her husband was in Europe for four years, Abigail used her imagination and discovered talents she hadn’t realized she possessed to accomplish her goal,” Natalie S. Bober wrote in the “Foreword” to her 1995 biography of this heroine.

Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
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