Browsing: Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 1

1. For a table of the members of the family in the Presidential line principally concerned, see p. liv–lv, below.

Series I of the Belknap Press edition of The Adams Papers comprises the Diaries, of which the first segment was published as the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, edited by L. H. Butterfield and others, 4 vols., Cambridge, 1961, and the next segment will begin with the first volumes of the Diary of Charles Francis Adams, edited by David and Aïda DiPace Donald, now in the press. Series III is reserved for the General Correspondence and Other Papers of the three Adams statesmen and will, like Series I, consist of three parts, one each for John, John Quincy, and Charles Francis Adams. The first volumes of Series III, the Legal Papers of John Adams, are scheduled for publication in 1964, under the editorship of L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, with Professor Mark DeWolfe Howe serving as consulting editor, under a grant from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation to the Harvard Law School.

The over-all plan of publication of The Adams Papers is more fully set forth in the introduction to the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 1:xxxvii–xli. The editors intended to make clear in that statement, but did not say as explicitly as they should have, that since the precise number of volumes in any single series or part that was to follow could not be predicted, and since work on more than one part is going on simultaneously, there could and will be no continuous volume numbering for The Adams Papers as a whole. They therefore take the present opportunity to point out, with emphasis, that scholarly references to the Belknap Press edition should be to particular units therein (such as John Adams' Diary and Autobiography , his Legal Papers, or the Adams Family Correspondence ) rather than to The Adams Papers , which is a collective name for an editorial enterprise that includes several sets of books, each with its own volume numbering and indexes and each intended to stand as a unit by itself, though of course related to the other parts of the work as a whole.