However, she retained a steadfast confidence in her husband, which was confirmed by his election as President and her new role as a First Lady in 1860. Through this position and through her husband she satisfied her high social aspirations but she also faced continuous challenges and disappointments even long after President Lincoln's death. Her years in the White House combined tragedy with triumph. With the Civil War, Southerners belittled her as a deserter to her origin while those loyal to the Union spread talks of her disloyalty. Critics also accused her of unpatriotic lavishness in her entertaining while after her son Willie's death in 1862, they criticized her of avoidance of her social duties. .
Abigail Adams and Mary Tod Lincoln both lived in times of national change and crisis and therefore their accounts are significant windows into the past American societies. However, the fact that they were both women who found themselves next to highly public lives of their husbands provides for interesting insight into roles and limitations of females in the past. And while Abigail Adams passed the very year that Mary Lincoln was born, the lives of these very different women show some very similar concerns such as marriage, struggle for female education, meaning of childbirth, the role of religion and also the role that these two women were to assume as first ladies in their respective eras of Revolution and Civil War. Abigail Adams" account stands as a testimony to the birth and political maturation of the U.S while Mary Todd's story gives insight into the more factional nation of Civil War years. .
Marriage and motherhood were considered the principal occupations of every female and "patient submission" in all duties was the expected norm and virtue. (Akers 5) This was a norm in both women's eras. In Abigail Adams" case, the years of French-Indian War and the crisis that followed were the beginning of installation of ideas and conduct within "Christian patriotism" that Abigail Adams closely understood and embodied.
