Mothers and Sons: Abigail Adams and John Quincy Adams

Abigail Adams was one of only two first ladies who were both wife and mother to a president. (The other was Barbara Bush.)
From all evidence, John and Abigail loved each other, and Abigail served as John’s closest adviser, so much so that during the couple’s White House years some of her husband’s enemies referred to her as “Mrs. President.” She had studied history, particularly that of the Greeks and Romans, and was an ardent supporter of the American Revolution and an early advocate for the rights of women, especially in the field of education. Her voluminous correspondence reveals a quick and lively mind very much acquainted with the politics of the day.
Because John was so frequently absent from home, away on the business of the Revolution and its aftermath, Abigail shouldered many responsibilities: supervising work on the farm, managing the household accounts and investments, and overseeing the education of her children, including that of her son John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), who would one day become the sixth president of the United States (1825–1829).
On at least one occasion, Abigail gave her son a more direct learning experience than he might have wished. As Remini tells us, June 17, 1777, found Abigail and her 7-year-old son watching the Battle of Bunker Hill, in part so that he might witness firsthand the cost of patriotism and the demands of revolution. Long afterward, John Quincy recollected the horrors of  this spectacle and “the tears of my mother and mingled with them my own” over the battlefield death of Dr. Joseph Warren, a close friend of John Adams. Here was a harsh lesson for a boy with only one foot out of the nursery.
An inscription on John Quincy Adams’s casket read in part: “Having served his country for half a century, and enjoyed its highest honors.”
A good amount of credit for that service and those honors goes to Abigail Smith Adams.