Analysis Of Abigail Adams Letter To John Quincy Adams

The wife of one future president and mother of another, Abigail Adams, writes a letter to her son, John Quincy Adams that outlines his potential success and establishes the expectations she has for him. Adams employs imagery, historical allusions, and appeals to her son’s rationale in order to encourage her son to take advantage of his blessings by creating something more out of them. She creates a maternal tone to highlight her credibility as a mother. Adams opens her letter with a strong maternal tone that would appeal to John Quincy Adams’ emotions and make him more likely to listen to what his mother has to say. Adams acknowledges her son with a sentimental “[m]y dear son” (0). Her loving tone sets a positive connotation for her argument which makes what she has to say seem agreeable. Adams furthers her position as a mother as she explains that she made a decision for her son because he was not “capable of judging” (5) what was best for himself, and that she in fact did it to benefit him. She creates a maternal tone in order to remind her son that she’s writing to him as a parent and to establish why he should trust and consider what she has to say. Once she gains her son’s attention she can get

She employs the use of imagery as she describes a metaphor she heard of as a spring going “through rich veins of minerals” (19) compared to a traveler such as her son. This exemplifies that she expects her son to pick up knowledge and experience while he is on the trip with his father, such as how the spring picked up the beneficial minerals. She uses this colorful description in order for her son to be able to clearly envision his own development and understand what is needed of him to accomplish this. As long as he can envision himself gaining momentum through experience then he can fulfill his mother’s wish of becoming a successful