Abigail Adams
1766 Portrait by Benjamin Blythe
“If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers, we should have learned women.” Abigail Adams to John Adams, August 14, 1776.
John Adams looked upon his wife as an equal helpmate at every station of his life in an age when such an attitude was not necessarily expected of men.
She deserved it. She was wise, warm, pragmatic and virtuous, advising him in a variety of matters both practical and passionate.
The intimate couple exchanged over 1,100 letters during intermittent separations over the course of forty years.
Abigail’s intellectual prowess often shines through in her letters to her husband, family and friends. These letters are remarkable, especially given the fact that she was never writing for a public audience.
She often quoted maxims by Shakespeare or classical philosophers in between items of gossip in her correspondence, once quoting an observation by the English essayist Sir William Temple on the nature of kairos—“it is an observation of a ‘Statesman that Some periods produce many great Men and few great occasions. On the contrary great occasions and few great Men!’ I believe that great occasions will make great Men, all out of talents which would other ways be dorment”—in a letter to her daughter-in-law. (2)
Her letters reveal her critical influence in the lives of the two great men within her own family. Her husband recognized that he would not have reached the presidency without her, and she wielded similar powers over her son, John Quincy, the sixth president of the United States.
One of the most enduring examples of her influence is found in a letter she wrote to 12-year-old John Quincy while he was accompanying his father on a diplomatic mission to Europe during the American Revolution.
“These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. Would Cicero have shone so distinguished an orator if he had not been roused, kindled, and inflamed by the tyranny of Catiline, Verres, and Mark Anthony? The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities, which would otherwise lie dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman. War, tyranny, and desolation are the scourges of the Almighty, and ought no doubt to be deprecated. Yet it is your lot, my son, to be an eyewitness of these calamities in your own native land, and, at the same time, to owe your existence among a people who have made a glorious defence of their invaded liberties, and who, aided by a generous and powerful ally, with the blessing of Heaven, will transmit this inheritance to ages yet unborn.” (3)
Abigail Adams displayed an incredible knowledge of history long before she realized her own leading role in the founding history of the United States.
It was from this knowledge that she gleaned the value of character in a kairos moment. She instilled these virtues in her husband and son as only a woman could.
It was she who fanned the embers of their ambition in hard times, reminding them when the going got tough that it is kairos character that makes men—and women—great.
(1) Abigail Adams to John Adams, Weymouth, June 16, 1775.
(2) Abigail Adams to Catherine Johnson, Quincy, August 18, 1810, as quoted in John P. Kaminski, ed., The Quotable Abigail Adams (Massachusetts Historical Society, 2009), 62.
(3) Abigail Adams to John Quincy Adams, 12 January, 1780.
Additional reading: Adams Family Papers, an electronic archive, http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/