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Volumes Published
Series II: Adams Family Correspondence
Adams Family Correspondence, vols.
1–2
December 1761–March 1778
"The Adams family correspondence," editor L. H. Butterfield wrote,
"is an unbroken record of the changing modes of domestic life, religious
views and habits, travel, dress, servants, food, schooling, reading,
health and medical care, diversions, and every other conceivable
aspect of manners and taste among the members of a substantial New
England family who lived on both sides of the Atlantic and wrote
industriously to each other over a period of more than a century."
These volumes are the first in an estimated 20 or more in Series
II of the Adams Papers.
Including about 600 letters to and from various members of the
family, the Adams Family Correspondence begins with a series
of hitherto unpublished courtship letters between John Adams and
Abigail Smith. The weekly and sometimes daily reports by Adams of
what was going on in the Continental Congress during the years 1774–1777
are a far fuller and franker record than has been available before.
His wife's letters in reply recount her difficulties in raising
a family of young children and operating a farm while war went on
not far from her doorstep, refugees inundated Braintree, local epidemics
raged, prices soared, and goods and labor became ever scarcer. We
learn for the first time that amid these distractions Abigail lost
a baby daughter; that getting herself and four children inoculated
against smallpox was an agonizing ordeal of months in 1776; that
after Burgoyne's defeat at Saratoga she wrote a long, lecturing
letter to her single relative who had chosen the Loyalist side;
and that her comments on blundering politicos, lax generals, and
unpatriotic neighbors were more frequent and incisive than has been
supposed.
Thinking her letters too careless and too intimate for preservation,
Abigail Adams pleaded at the end of one of them, written a couple
of months before the Declaration of Independence was voted and while
British warships hovered within range of her house, "I wish you
would burn all my Letters." To which John Adams replied, "The conclusion
of your Letter made my Heart throb, more than a Cannonade would.
You bid me burn your Letters. But I must forget you first."
So he faithfully kept hers, she kept his, and they both kept their
children's. Their grandson Charles Francis Adams chose some of these
for publication in a succession of small editions in the 19th century,
but he was highly selective, and he discreetly pruned away from
the letters that he printed much that is both revealing and engaging.
Here, as is the practice with all Adams documents in this edition,
every letter used is given in full. The second of these first volumes
ends in March 1778 with John Adams on a Continental frigate bound
for his first diplomatic mission in Europe, accompanied by his 10-year-old
son, John Quincy.
Adams Family Correspondence, vols.
3–4
April 1778–September 1782
The letters in these volumes, written from both sides of the Atlantic,
addressed by and to members of the Adams family, chronicle nearly
five years of its history. They were years in which John Adams in
successive missions to Europe, accompanied first by one son, then
by two, initiated what would be a continuing role for Adamses in
three generations: representing their country and advancing its
interests in the capitals of Europe.
John Adams, a troubled but stouthearted Yankee lawyer on the vast
new scene of Europe, though always circumspect in familial correspondence
in referring to public matters, provides, in his revealing letters
about his own health and state of mind, sufficient insight into
the difficult relations among the American commissioners, the designs
of America's allies, and the diplomatic failures and triumphs he
experienced in Paris and the Netherlands to permit some reevaluation
of purposes and tactics. With these high matters are mingled the
rigors and rewards of travel, concern with his sons' education,
books for their reading, Dutch cloth and ribbons for his wife.
Whether Abigail Adams' letters relate to the upbringing of children,
the problems of wartime taxes and inflation, the inferior roles
assigned to American women, or her wide historical reading, they
bear the marks of distinction of mind and mastery of language that
make them timeless.
If the letters of these two are central, those written by others
are hardly less interesting, relating as they do to the concerns
of young John Quincy at school in Leyden and his observations on
his way to and during his stay in St. Petersburg at age 14; to the
adventure-filled return voyage of Charles, aged 11, to America;
to the interests of the younger Abigail maturing in Braintree; to
the reactions of sturdy patriots to the tides and rumors of war.
Adams Family Correspondence, vols.
5–6
October 1782–December 1785
"I cannot O! I cannot be reconcild to living as I have done for
3 years past. . . . Will you let me try to soften, if I cannot wholy
releave you, from your Burden of Cares and perplexities?" So begins
Abigail Adams' correspondence to her husband in these volumes: a
plea to end their long separation, as John Adams represented the
United States in Europe while Abigail tended to family and farm
in Massachusetts and passed on crucial political information from
Congress.
In October 1782, the Adams family was as widely scattered as it
would ever be, with young John Quincy Adams in St. Petersburg, John
at The Hague, and Abigail in Braintree with her daughter and younger
sons. With the summer of 1784, however, Abigail would have her fondest
wish, as most of the family reunited to spend nearly a year together
in Europe. As the Adams family traveled, and as the children came
of age, so their correspondence expanded to include an ever larger
and more fascinating range of cultural topics and international
figures. The record of this remarkable expansion, these volumes
document John Adams' diplomatic triumphs, his wife and daughter's
participation in the cosmopolitan scenes of Paris and London, and
his son John Quincy's travels in Europe and America. These pages
also welcome Thomas Jefferson, who soon became one of Abigail's
closest friends, into the family correspondence. From the intimacies
of the children's education, sentimental and worldly, to the details
of the warm friendship between Abigail and Madame Lafayette, to
the grand drama of Edmund Burke and William Pitt the Younger debating
in Parliament, the contents of these letters draw an incredibly
rich picture of international life in the 1780s and an incomparable
portrait of America's first family of politics and letters.
Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 7
January 1786–February 1787
Continuing the saga of the Adamses of Massachusetts as told through their myriad
letters to one another, as well as to their extended family and friends, this volume
opens in January 1786 with the family physically divided. John and Abigail were living
at Grosvenor Square in London with their daughter Nabby, partaking of the English
social scene while John represented the United States at the Court of St. James. Back
in Massachusetts, John Quincy had rejoined his brothers Charles and Thomas to prepare
for his entrance to Harvard, where Charles was already a student.
The correspondence among the family members over the ensuing fourteen months documents
changes in both the family and the wider world. In Europe, John engaged in treaty
negotiations with Great Britain, Prussia, Portugal, Tripoli, and Morocco, but also found
the time to tour English gardens and historic sites with Thomas Jefferson. Abigail joined
him for additional trips to the English countryside as well as to the Netherlands, where
her observations on Dutch society and its people provided material for many letters. This
volume also chronicles Nabby's marriage to William Stephens Smith in June 1786, following
a painful broken engagement with Royall Tyler. By the fall of that year, Nabby and her
husband were expecting their first child.
In America, the lives of the three Adams boys at Harvard are described through the letters
John Quincy wrote to his parents and sister in Europe, as well as through the continuing
correspondence of Abigail's sisters, who acted as surrogate mothers for the boys. John Quinicy
intersperses stories of exams and orations with tales of dormitory life and collegiate
traditions on the Cambridge campus. He and other family members also served as witnesses to
the growing unrest in Massachusetts that culminated in Shays' Rebellion. As the volume closes
at the end of February 1787, Adamses on both sides of the ocean are left debating the meaning
of the rebellion and its effect on the future of the American state.
Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 8
March 1787 - December 1789
By early 1787, as the latest volume of this award-winning series opens, John and Abigail Adams were eagerly planning their return home to Massachusetts from Great Britain, frustrated by John's lack of progress in his diplomatic mission and anxious for a reunion with family and friends. Arriving in Massachusetts in mid-1788, they anticipated a quiet retirement from government service running their farm. But they barely had time to unpack and arrange the furniture in their new home before they were pulled back into the public sphere by John's election as the first vice president under the newly ratified Constitution. Settling in New York City in 1789 John and Abigail found themselves once again center stage in American political life.
Meanwhile, John and Abigail's children were rapidly growing up. Sons John Quincy, Charles, and Thomas Boylston all studied at Harvard during this period, causing their anxious parents to fear that the boys' morals and reputations would be challenged by the temptations of college life. After John Quincy's graduation in the summer of 1787, he moved on to Newburyport, Massachusetts, to begin his training as a lawyer. Charles would follow the same path in 1789, studying at the offices of Alexander Hamilton in New York City. Perhaps most importantly, daughter Nabby presented the family with two new members—the first grandchildren of the Adams clan.
As always, the Adamses serve as prescient and thoughtful observers of the world around them, from the manners and mores of English court life to the political intrigues of the new federal government in New York. Beyond that wider world, however, these letters also comment on the more intimate day-to-day domestic concerns of a New England family, chronicling the myriad challenges of educating one's children, running a household and farm, managing intractable servants, and successful matchmaking. With more of the forthright candor that marks all of the Adamses' correspondence, this volume offers the unique perspective of this preeminent family on a crucial period in American history.
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Online:
Adams Time Line
Adams Genealogy
Biographical Sketches
Quotations
Selected Manuscripts
Adams Electronic Archive
JQA: One President's Adolescence
Other Resources:
Related Web Sites
Books about the Adamses
Adams Family Papers manuscript collection
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