Instead of writing about the clowns and jokers running in the Iowa caucuses, I want to print a portion of a letter that Abigail Adams wrote to her sixteen-year-old son John Quincy, who had accompanied his father John to Europe. John Adams was in Paris representing the newly-independent United States.
She notes that because John Quincy went abroad at such an early age, he didn’t get a chance to be acquainted with his country. She writes:
Let your observations and comparisons produce in your mind an abhorrence of domination and power, the parent of slavery, ignorance, and barbarism, which places man upon a level with his fellow tenants of the woods:
A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty
Is worth a whole eternity of bondage.
...may you be led to an imitation of that disinterested patriotism and that noble love of your country, which will teach you to despise wealth, titles, pomp, and equipage, as mere external advantages, which cannot add to the internal excellence of your mind, or compensate for the want of integrity and virtue.
May your mind be thoroughly impressed with the absolute necessity of universal virtue and goodness, as the only sure road to happiness, and may you walk therein with undeviating steps--is the sincere and most affectionate wish of
Your mother,
A. Adams
John Quincy Adams was later elected the sixth president of the United States. Defeated for a second term by Andrew Jackson, he then served in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was a leader in the fight to rid the nation of slavery. I believe his mother would have been proud.
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