President's Day: The Woman of Faith Behind One of America's Founding Fathers

John Quincy Adams was America's 6th president and a dedicated man of God. However, it was his mother Abigail's unshakeable faith and heart for the Lord that truly shaped him to be the man he was. 

Abigail Adams was a constant source of strength for her husband during the Revolutionary War, and reminded him that the battle was really the Lord's.

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but the God of Israel is He that giveth strength and power unto His people. Trust in Him at all times, ye people, pour out your hearts before Him; God is a refuge for us," she wrote in one of her many letters to her husband after a particularly devastating battle. 

Adams loved her country and believed it was impossible to be a true patriot without loving God first. 

"A patriot without religion in my estimation is as great a paradox as an honest man without the fear of God," she wrote. "He who neglects his duty to his Maker may well be expected to be deficient and insincere in his duty towards the public."

This deep reverence for God expressed in her letters to her husband is the same love she instilled in her son, John Quincy Adams. 

"Great learning and superior abilities, should you ever possess them, will be of little value and small estimation, unless virtue, honor, truth, and integrity are added to them. Adhere to those religious sentiments and principles which were early instilled into your mind and remember that you are accountable to your Maker for all your words and actions," she wrote in a letter addressed to him when he was just 10 years old. 

Her words stuck with Adams his entire life, even during his presidency. 

"She taught me to repeat daily, after the Lord's Prayer, before rising from bed, the Ode of Collins on the patriot warriors who fell in the war. . . . Of the impression made upon my heart by the sentiments inculcated in these beautiful effusions of patriotism and poetry, you may form an estimate by the fact that now, seventy-one years after they were thus taught me, I repeat them from memory," he wrote years later. 

Abigail Adams was a Christian, a patriot, and a heroine of the American Revolution. Most of all, she is a prime example of the power of a God-fearing mother.