Hi, my name is Rick Bloodworth. This is the Common Sense Christian channel, and today is Tuesday. So we're going to be talking about things with a patriotic theme, and today I wanted to talk about one of the most influential patriots in American history. And when you think about that, just, start thinking of the different ones that that you might know from Benjamin Franklin to, to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, just on and on and on. But do we often think about Abigail Adams? Because Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president of the United States and also the mother of the sixth president of the United States, was probably one of the most influential people, men or women, of all of our founding fathers. And when you look at her life, it really is an incredible life. And yet at the same time, as remarkable as it is, it's pretty reflective of the type of people that were in the nation at that time, or at least the type of people who are getting involved with the revolutionary cause. Then with the forming of the new nation, she is born in 1744, some 33, 32 years before the Revolutionary War started. She met her husband, or her future husband, John Adams when she was only 15 years old. And about five years later, they got married. And nine months later, they had their first child. They had six children in total. And, and this, I begin, I believe, begins to, to show some of the hardships that forged Abigail Adams. Because of the six children that she had, one of them passed away when it was only about two years old. She had another child that was stillborn, and so she and John both certainly knew their griefs. But they also had four other children, and those four other children they raised not just to be patriots, but first and foremost they raised them to be Christians, to be servants of God. This was something that had been inculcated in Abigail's life from her very fat, from her very beginning. Her great grandfather was the founding pastor of the Old Ship Church in Massachusetts. It's probably the only Puritan meeting house that still stands in Massachusetts to this day. And her, there was a long line of ministers after that, and her father was a Congregationalist minister, and he was an interesting man. He certainly hotly denied things that were teachings of men. doctrines of men and, and believed very firmly that Christians needed to be using their reason and needed to be living moral lives. In other words, it wasn't just something that was trying to maintain the approval of other men, but it was something that was actually functional in your life. And it was something that you used your brain with. And he taught that, he and his wife taught that to their daughter Abigail. And so Abigail, when she was married to John, she brought some of these thoughts with her. And certainly influenced her husband with many of the thoughts that she had. She did not have a lot of education growing up. She was sickly to a certain point and so wouldn't have been able to have gone to school like many others would have. But it was also an era where the women were not considered to be as worthy or as needing of education as the men were. But she certainly got her education. She was to a large extent, self taught. She made use of her father's and other relatives libraries and taught herself all sorts of things from English and French literature to to certainly scriptural topics. And, and she was just very intellectual in many ways, but not The type of pseudo intellectual that we have today who's proud of, of their brain, but she was just somebody that was very inquisitive. She had a great capacity for learning and she exercised that capacity, I believe, as well as anybody that, that we read about amongst our founders. And she was certainly a tremendous partner to John Adams. He considered her an equal, and for good reason. He may have even been a little bit too optimistic about himself, because Abigail Adams was certainly a remarkable woman. And they, they wrote letters continually back and forth. John was a lawyer and for a while he maintained a practice. in Boston, though they lived in Braintree, Massachusetts. But then he also attended the Continental Congresses. And while he was at the Continental Congresses, as they were determining whether or not they, they were going to go into the Revolutionary War she and John continually corresponded through the mail. And many of the thoughts that she had and expressed within her letters, you can actually see within things like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, those types of thinking anyway. And so as the Revolutionary War began, they continued to correspond back and forth. And it's really Abigail Adams writing and John Adams writing that give us some of the best documentation of that entire era. We get some of the best insights as to what people were thinking and, and what they believed. John and Abigail certainly did not want to get involved with the Revolutionary War, but they became convinced that, that it was needed. And so once they were convinced of that, they, they did what they needed to do. It was interesting to see some of the thoughts that Abigail expressed to John while he was at this these Continental Congresses, one of which was a plea for them to be remembering the ladies. She said for so many years men had just subjugated men women it was essentially her point. And she wanted to make certain that they understood that if they thought this revolution with England was going to be something, it would be nothing compared to the revolution that the men would have with the women. If they started passing laws that would end up affecting the women, in which the women didn't have any voice or representation in making of those laws. And I believe they took that to heart. There's some other things that, about Abigail that, that I believe are quite remarkable. Once the war really got going, John went over to France and became an ambassador with France. And we always think about perhaps Benjamin Franklin is serving that role. And he certainly was the most prominent of the ambassadors, but John was actually very involved with that. And again, the correspondence continued to flow between the two. And so John was very heavily influenced by some of the things that Abigail had to say and some of her insight into different problems. It was also interesting that John took his oldest son, John Quincy, with him when he went to Paris. And Abigail wrote to John and she really encouraged him, even though he was just 11 years old, to make sure that he guarded his soul. Because she knew what, to what a worldly place that John and John Quincy were going to, and she knew how impressionable that boys were, especially as they were becoming men. And so she cautioned him to make sure that he maintained his godliness and, and his morality. She was quite influential in that, even though they were miles apart. And eventually, Abigail and the rest of the family went and, and stayed with, with John and John Quincy over in Paris for several years. Matter of fact, she was quite popular with the Parisian ladies, even though she was not quite certain what to think about them. And then after the war, when they started when they went to London and had to start doing some different negotiations with the English. She found that she was not quite as popular with the English ladies for obvious reasons. as she was with, with the Paris ladies. And so, or the, and so she was quite ready to come back from, from her time in France and in England and, and get reestablished again. And once they got reestablished, both John and Abigail got to the work, I believe, of helping the rest of our founders build the nation into what it was. John Adams became the second president of the United States in, I guess, 1796. His term would have begun in 1797. And it's interesting to look at Abigail and the way she interacted with people during that time. Alcoholism was a terrible problem during the the, the post revolutionary period. And so she had a brother who had a child who needed tending after because the brother was such an alcoholic that she was afraid that his influence would be bad and he couldn't take care of her. She also had a sister whose husband whose children were not being tended to well because of his alcoholism. And so she actually took both her brother's child and her sister's children, and she helped to raise them while she was in what they called the President's House. The White House had not been built yet. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't be built. The Capitol wouldn't be established in Washington, D. C. until their very last year, or John's very last year in office. And, and so she helped to establish where the White House was going to be put. And she always kind of bemoaned the idea that though they were in a beautiful area, and they were right next to a huge forested area, they could the family could hardly ever find anybody who would chop wood for them so that they could cook and, and to have their fires to keep warm. After John Adams first term, he was not re elected. Everybody, I believe, hopefully most everybody knows that Thomas Jefferson was elected in 1800. And so, John Adams went and served his country as best he could after that. And his son, John Quincy, started getting more and more involved in politics. And certainly, he had an influence both from his father and from, from his mother. Abigail was really a interesting woman and years ahead of her time when you think about some of her viewpoints and some of John's viewpoints and they passed these along by the way to their children. Though Abigail's family, her, her father and mother owned four slaves. Abigail didn't believe that was right, nor did John for that matter. And so when Abigail went off on her own, John and Abigail never had slaves. It was interesting because one of the slaves that helped raise or tended at least to Abigail and her sister's needs when she was freed, Abigail hired her. Abigail and John did to come and work for them in their household. as a free woman. After the, the constitution was written, and I think it was about 1791 there was an opportunity for, for, for black people in areas that perhaps they had not had as much yet. And there was a, there was a young free black boy that, that lived close to, to Abigail and John Adams, and he really wanted to learn to read and write. And so Abigail took him into her parlor and taught him to read and write, despite the fact that the neighbors did not approve of this, but she could care less. Her thought was that it was ridiculous for someone not to be able to learn to read and write and to function as a human being just because they had a different color face. then the next person. But her thoughts and John's, her husband's thoughts certainly would have influenced John Quincy Adams to a great degree. As I mentioned before, John Quincy was the sixth president of the United States. He just served for one term, but once he, he left the presidency, he immediately went back into Congress and was probably one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful abolitionist voices we've ever heard. within Congress. He certainly paved the way to the freeing of slaves that eventually happened at the end of the Civil War. And that influence was as a result, a direct result of his parents, and especially his mother. His mother had firm religious convictions, but they were not with the doctrines of men. She wrote to, I believe, one of her children, or to a friend, one of her letters, where she said she considered herself a Unitarian, at least that was the, the congregation with which she worshiped. But, but, but she, she believed very firmly. Let me see if I can find the comment on that. She said, I consider myself, or I acknowledge myself, a Unitarian, believing that the Father alone is the Supreme God and that Jesus Christ derived his being and his power and honors from the father. And so she was a great believer in the father and the son. And she believed that, that, that God was in fact, the supreme being. She did not by any stretch of the imagination depreciate Jesus's role as, as the son and as our savior. But she recognized from her reading of the scripture that they were two separate individuals. Even though, as Jesus put it, that if you've seen the Father, you've seen me for we are one. They're one in spirit. They're one in purpose. And that was something that Abigail believed. She also wrote this. She believed that family and religion were the essential props of social order. She was absolutely convinced that it required a strong family with a strong religious belief in order to maintain the social order that was so needed for this new nation. And again, when you look at her background and you see how many generations of her family were, were absolute followers of Christ, you can understand how she began with that reasoning. But this was something that she solidified with her own study and with her own commitment to God and to Christ. And again I believe she's representative of so many of our founders who were absolutely strong believers in God and in Christ, not just because somebody had told them about them, but because they were actually students and scholars of the word. It's something I believe sadly lacking today. One of the reasons I believe it's so important for us to go back to our founders is to see what type of thinking went in to making this nation so great. And if you want to talk about great thinking, start with Abigail Adams, a woman who was at her husband's side as he took part in everything from the Continental Congress to the Revolutionary War to serving as president. And she was very much a partner in that. She was on the cutting edge of, of women's rights, not radical women's rights, but appropriate women's rights. Just like there are all sorts of of rights that we have in life, we don't have to get radical about everything. We still need to believe and understand that we're servants of God and that we're not above anything that he might have regardless of the things that, that concern us. But she was on the cutting edge of women's rights. She was certainly on the, on the cutting edge and the forefront of, of the belief that it was, it was wrong to own a slave. As a matter of fact, she believed that the owning of slaves in her own words was one of the greatest threats to American democracy. And so she was on the cutting edge of the abolitionist movement. And she was always right at the forefront of service to God and passing along the responsibility of God's servants to her family and to other people. At the end of her life, she died, I think, about eight years before her husband. At the end of her life she said this. These are her last recorded words. And it's to John Adams. She said, Do not grieve, my dearest friend. Any husband and wife that can say this honestly, that their spouse is their dearest friend, has had quite a, quite a blessing. Have they not? And so she said, Do not grieve, my dearest friend. I'm ready to go. And John, it won't be long. And it wasn't long from that point that she breathed her last. 73 years old, not very old by the standards of today, but a ripe old age for, for, for the average age of that time. And she packed certainly much, much more into those 73 years than most people have ever even dreamed of, were they able to live two or three or four different lifetimes. She was a remarkable woman, and we owe a lot of what America is today To her thoughts, to her reasoning, and to her encouragement as she and her husband and her family, including a future president, worked side by side as a family for God and country. This is what makes a patriot. This is what makes a patriot great, is a love for God and family and country in that order. And she certainly loved God, and she certainly loved her country. And she certainly loved her family. And we've all benefited from the great loves that Abigail and John Adams had. Well, that's the slice of history I wanted to share with you today. I hope you enjoyed it. I certainly enjoyed. researching it. If you want to do deeper research into this, because I've just scratched the surface, go to some of the letters of Abigail Adams. I believe you will find an insight into that time period that perhaps you didn't even understood, understand existed. There are certainly things that I did not understand were so prominent during that time. And so, if you get a chance, read the letters of Abigail Adams. and certainly do some research into her life because it's a fascinating life and again, we owe her an awful lot for the nation that we had become and can become again if we'll just turn back to the simple principles that Abigail and John, John Adams lived when it came to their family and to their country. That's it for today. Thanks for watching. I appreciate it. Okay.