Is it fair to include a First Lady who also raised a son who became the sixth president of the United States in the category of “Founder”? I think so.
“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 fruits of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues…[T]hen those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life, and form the character of the hero and the statesman.” - Abigail Adams
I can’t imagine writing something like this down to a twelve year old boy today. I often write my seven year old son notes in his lunchbox, but they are still short reminders of his parents’ love. But John Quincy Adams, Abigail’s son, was only twelve at the time she wrote this to her son.
I’m reminded of a discussion I heard on the Symbolic World, How to Read Like A Medieval Person, wherein the guest discussed how different literate people were in the past. Literacy today means that a person can decipher a code of symbols and read them aloud. Today it means that you can read a tweet.
Literacy in the past meant much more in that people could not only decipher the symbols and mouth the words, but that they used that ability to read continuously throughout life, understand concepts that writers of these words were conveying, and discuss them with their peers. I can’t imagine discussing the ideas Abigail writes to her twelve year old son with most adults today. First and foremost, they would have trouble understanding why they even matter much less why they should spend time on them.
It’s hard to understand the necessity of hardship when you’ve never been hungry. Maybe this is part of the necessary cycle that creates good people from hard times, who then create good times which soften the people.
I can’t help thinking of my daughter’s closet while writing this. It’s so packed with baby dolls and accessories that we can no longer close it without a complicated juggling of piles and a show of force.
People like Abigail grew up during a time when hardship was the norm. It was the expectation. Men like the one she married risked their lives and reputation to form a union in opposition to the greatest secular power on Earth. They faced an uncertain future as they revolted against Great Britain who possessed the most powerful navy and armed troops to date.
And from that hardship, they watched young men harden their hearts for the case of liberty, forming a brand new nation not like any the world had ever witnessed. The hardship of tyranny, of war, and of the intellectual tour de force it took to create a constitution just thirteen years after the revolution while France was still swimming in the blood of its revolutionaries.
As a witness to the transformation which hardship brought upon her husband and her countrymen, Abigail sought to communicate the same to her son. Not to live a life that sought out to identify hardship and side step it, but to see it as an opportunity for growth. To seek out what humans would otherwise naturally avoid. To sharpen his own edge as only something much harder can do.
Abigail, like many women of history, used her nurturing instincts along with great wisdom to shape the future through her children. A lesson I hope to carry with me as I raise my own.