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The Adams Papers
L. H. BUTTERFIELD, EDITOR IN CHIEF
SERIES II
Adams Family Correspondence
Adams Family Correspondence
L. H. BUTTERFIELD and MARC FRIEDLAENDER
EDITORS
EDITORS
Volume 3 • April 1778–September 1780
THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
1973
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
1973
© 1973 · Massachusetts Historical Society • All rights reserved
Funds for editing The Adams Papers were originally furnished by Time, Inc., on behalf of Life, to the Massachusetts Historical Society, under whose supervision the editorial work is being done. Further funds have been provided by a grant from the Ford Foundation to the National Archives Trust Fund Board in support of this and four other major documentary publications. In common with these and many other enterprises like them, The Adams Papers benefits from the continuing and indispensable cooperation and aid of the National Historical Publications Commission, whose chairman is the Archivist of the United States.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63–14964
SBN 674–00405–1
Printed in the United States of America
This edition of The Adams Papers
is sponsored by the massachusetts historical society
to which the adams manuscript trust
by a deed of gift dated 4 April 1956
gave ultimate custody of the personal and public papers
written, accumulated, and preserved over a span of three centuries
by the Adams family of Massachusetts
is sponsored by the massachusetts historical society
to which the adams manuscript trust
by a deed of gift dated 4 April 1956
gave ultimate custody of the personal and public papers
written, accumulated, and preserved over a span of three centuries
by the Adams family of Massachusetts
illustration
The Adams Papers
ADMINISTRATIVE BOARD
- Thomas Boylston Adams
- James Barr Ames
- Frederick Burkhardt
- Mark Carroll
- F. Murray Forbes
- Arthur J. Rosenthal
- Walter Muir Whitehill
EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE
- Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University
- Samuel Flagg Bemis, Yale University
- Julian Parks Boyd, Princeton University
- Paul Herman Buck, Harvard University
- David Donald, The Johns Hopkins University
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, National Historical Publications Commission
- Leonard Woods Labaree, Yale University
- Robert Earle Moody, Boston University
- Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard University
- Kenneth Ballard Murdock, Harvard University
- Stephen Thomas Riley, Massachusetts Historical Society
- Ernest Samuels, Northwestern University
- Clifford Kenyon Shipton, American Antiquarian Society
- Vernon Dale Tate, United States Naval Academy
The acorn and oakleaf device on the preceding page is redrawn from a seal cut for John Quincy Adams after 1830. The motto is from Caecilius Statius as quoted by Cicero in the First Tusculan Disputation: Serit arbores quae alteri seculo prosint (“He plants trees for the benefit of later generations”).
Contents
Descriptive List of Illustrations
Comte d'Estaing, Admiral of the French Fleet ||facing || 116
Charles Henri Théodat, Comte d'Estaing (1729–1794), lieutenant-general and vice-admiral, commander of the French fleet or squadron assigned to operate in American waters against the British, from an engraving by Goldar after a painting by d'Haigue. The engraving was published in London by John Fielding in 1785 and was used in the third volume (facing p. 302) of John Andrews' History of the War with America, France, Spain, and Holland, 4 vols., London, 1785–1786.
Following the ill-starred Rhode Island campaign of 1778, Estaing brought his fleet into Boston Harbor in September for refitting (p. 113, below). He paid his respects to Mrs. Adams promptly at a meeting arranged for his convenience at Colonel Josiah Quincy's house because of its location on the shore of the Bay in sight of the fleet (see
Adams Family Correspondence
, 1:x); and received her and party on board his flagship on 15 October with an “entertainment fit for a princiss” as well as at an earlier sumptuous feast with “Musick and dancing for the young folks” (Abigail Adams to John Adams, 21, 25 October 1778, below). To reports of these events from his wife, Adams responded: “The accounts from all hands agree that there was an agreable intercourse, and happy harmony upon the whole between the inhabitants and the Fleet, the more this Nation is known, and the more their language is understood, the more narrow Prejudices will wear away. British Fleet and Armys, are very different from theirs. In Point of Temperance and Politeness there is no Comparison” (18 December 1778, below).
On the professional side, John Adams averred that the Comte d'Estaing was “allowed by all Europe to be a great and worthy Officer, and by all that know him to be a zealous friend of America” (to Abigail Adams, 6 November 1778, below). Despite often disappointing results from the aid the fleet was able to render the American cause, Adams seems to have maintained his regard for Estaing (to Abigail Adams, 23 February 1780, below). For an account of his part in the several campaigns, see John J. Meng, The American Expedition of the Comte d'Estaing, 1778–1779, New York, 1936.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Henry Laurens of South Carolina ||facing || 116
Stipple engraving, signed “B.B.E.,” after a drawing by Pierre Eugène Du Simitière (1736?–1784), and published in London in a col•
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lection of Du Simitière's work entitled Portraits of the Generals, Ministers, Magistrates, Members of Congress, and Others Who Have Rendered Themselves Illustrious in the Revolution of the United States of America . . ., R. Wilkinson and J. Debrett, 1783. The particular example used here is a separate, bound into an extra-illustrated copy of [John Adams,] Correspondence of the Late President Adams. Originally Published in the Boston Patriot. In a Series of Letters, Boston, 1809[–1810], owned by Henry Adams, facing p. 251.
The engraver was identified by Henry Bromley [i.e. Anthony Wilson] in his Catalogue of Engraved British Portraits, London, 1793, as Benjamin Beale Evans (Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler). To explain the initials, other suggestions with considerably less authority have been advanced, including the amusing one derived from the promise on the titlepage that the engravings were “by the Most Eminent Artists in London,” that the initials might have stood only for “Best British Engravers” (Antiques, 24:18 [July 1933]).
Du Simitière, who probably executed a similar portrait of John Adams (not now to be found; see Andrew Oliver, Portraits of John and Abigail Adams, Cambridge, 1968, p. 217 and figs. 105–105A), was a Swiss who had settled in Philadelphia and attracted John Adams' attention as “a very curious Man,” artist, and antiquary, in 1776, when designs for a medal to commemorate the evacuation of Boston and for a seal for the United States were under discussion. See Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 August 1776, vol. 2:96–97, above; also Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, Cambridge, 1961, 3:xii, facing p. 257, 376; and, for a general account, Hans Huth, “Pierre Eugène Du Simitière and the Beginnings of the American Historical Museum,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 69:315–325 (October 1945).
The personal and political relations between John Adams and Henry Laurens were close and complex. They began when Laurens came to Congress as a South Carolina delegate in July 1777, and Adams, after Laurens' election as president in November of that year, pronounced him “a thoro' Republican” (The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed. Franklin B. Dexter, New York, 1901, 2:237). Adams' chief official correspondent during his first mission to Europe, 1778–1779, was President Laurens, who sided unreservedly with the Adamses and the Lees in the dispute which rent Congress over the conduct of Silas Deane, and in fact resigned his office early in 1779 because he did not think Deane had been treated with sufficient severity. In the contest over who should represent the United States abroad, Laurens in September 1779 nominated Adams as minister to negotiate peace with Great Britain, a nomination which prevailed and sent Adams abroad a second time. In the following month Laurens was himself named commissioner to seek loans and a treaty in the Netherlands. This office he never filled, for when he at length sailed in the summer of 1780—just as Adams left Paris on his “fishing expedition” to Amsterdam—Laurens was captured and taken to England. Among the papers he carried that
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were recovered from the sea was a copy of the draft commercial “treaty” William Lee had worked out with sundry Dutch merchants and officials in 1778. Laurens was sent to the Tower on charges of treason, and the British government used the so-called treaty as justification for breaking off relations with the Dutch Republic. All this eventually converted Adams' informal mission to the Netherlands into an official one and led to his diplomatic and financial triumphs in 1782.
Laurens was released from the Tower at the end of 1781 and shortly afterward exchanged for Lord Cornwallis. He had been named to the joint peace commission with Adams, Jay, Franklin, and Jefferson in June 1781, but on account of poor health and for other reasons never made very clear he was reluctant to serve, though he lingered on in Europe. He finally did serve during the very last days of the negotiations in Paris, and is credited with having made a material contribution.
Laurens' later years were saddened by, among other things, a bitter quarrel with Adams' friend Edmund Jenings. This quarrel produced a series of pamphlets that could not help involving Adams in some degree, and very unhappily so far as he was concerned. The merits and even the issues of this protracted affair are not likely to be clarified until there is full publication of both Laurens' and Adams' papers during the 1780's.
Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Chart of the Harbor and Bay of La Coruña, 1764 ||following || 116
The “Plan de la Baye et Port de la Corogne” is reproduced from plate No. 53 in the fourth volume (l'Europe) of J. N. Bellin's La petit atlas maritime, 5 vols., Paris, 1764.
La Coruña, one of the two harbors, the other being El Ferrol, between Cape Finisterre and Cape Ortegal at the extreme northwest tip of the Spanish peninsula, was the provincial capital of Galicia. There, John Adams on his second mission to Europe, accompanied by his sons John Quincy and Charles and by John Thaxter Jr. and Francis Dana, arrived by boat and muleback on 15 December 1779 for replanning after the leaking frigate, La Sensible, bound for France, had had to put into the nearer El Ferrol (Thaxter to Abigail Adams, 15 December; John Adams to same, 16 December 1779, below). In La Coruña from the 15th to the 26th they were outfitted for the long trip ahead and secured the means of travel across northern Spain. Their stay is described by John Adams in considerable detail in the
Diary and Autobiography
,
2:409–415 and 4:202–213, including visits to a number of points of interest in the town and vicinity that are identifiable on the Bellin chart. These include the fortifications, the “magasins à poudre,” and the ancient “tour de fer.”
La Coruña was again to be an unexpected haven for an Adams in September 1781, when the frigate South Carolina, Commodore Gillon, bearing Charles Adams on his return voyage home in the charge of Major William Jackson, had to put into the harbor for
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want of water and supplies. At La Coruña, Major Jackson and his charge, along with John Trumbull and James Searle, unable to endure longer the capricious behavior and doubtful seamanship of Gillon, found another ship to take them to Bilbao and ultimately to America. The misadventures and near escapes from the departure from the Texel to the arrival five months later at Beverly are recounted in volume 4 in the letters to John Adams from William Jackson, 26 September, 26 October and note 2 there; from Benjamin Waterhouse, 30 September 1781; and from Isaac Smith Sr.,
23 January 1782 and note 1.
Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.
John Quincy Adams' Latin Grammar ||following || 116
John Adams' Spanish-French Dictionary ||following || 116
John Clarke's Introduction à la syntaxe latine. John Quincy Adams' signature and the date, 1778, inscribed with flourish on the page facing the titlepage of this French translation of a Latin grammar originally in English, make it likely that this, along with Tricot's Les rudiments de la langue latine (see under No. 12 in the present Descriptive List), was among the books acquired to forward John Quincy's early study of the Latin tongue in M. Le Coeur's private boarding school in Passy where John Adams had enrolled him on 14 April 1778, shortly after their arrival in Paris (John Adams to Abigail Adams, 19 April; John Quincy Adams to the same, 20 April1778, below; and
Diary and Autobiography
, 2:301). Since his master felt that the boy's approach to Latin was impeded by his limited knowledge of French, the book was probably not put to use until after July (Le Coeur to John Adams, 31 July 1778, below).
On John Clarke, 1687–1734, master of the public grammar school in Hull and author of numerous texts, see The Dictionary of National Biography. His An Introduction to the Making of Latin; Comprising, after an Easy Compendious Method, the Substance of the Latin Syntax, had been a standard grammar in the schools for more than half a century. By the date the present edition was published, 1773, it had gone through twenty-one editions in English; the French translation had first appeared in a Geneva edition in 1745. The work would maintain its currency in Europe and America well into the 19th century. The copy illustrated, which also bears John Quincy Adams' later bookplate adapted from the Treaty Seal, remains among his books now at the Boston Athenaeum.
In the same collection is a second copy of this Latin grammar with an inscription also in John Quincy Adams' hand, dated 1779. The date and the pasted-in business label of “L. C. R. Baudoin, à l'Orient,” indicate that when Adams father and son were in Lorient from 8–11 April 1779 awaiting the sailing of the Alliance for America, the duplicate was acquired, perhaps because the copy John Quincy had been using was not at hand and the lack of it was not to be allowed to interrupt his pursuit of the Latin language.
Francisco Sobrino's Diccionario nuevo de las lenguas española y
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francesa. The titlepage, with John Adams' signature, is reproduced from the copy of the first volume of the sixth edition (Brussels, 1760) of Sobrino's Spanish-French dictionary, the only volume of the multivolume work that remains among John Adams' books at the Boston Public Library. There were three of the handsome volumes when Adams procured the title at El Ferrol within three days of his unplanned landing in Spain on 8 December 1779: “Finding that I must reside some Weeks in Spain, either waiting for a Frigate or traveling through the Kingdom, I determined to acquire the Language, to which Purpose, I went to a Bookseller and purchased Sobrino's Dictionary in three Volumes in Quarto.” To the same end, in the few days he was at El Ferrol, he also obtained by purchase or gift a Spanish grammar in French by Sobrino and Spanish and Latin grammars in Spanish (John Adams to Abigail Adams, 11 December, below, and
Diary and Autobiography
, 2:407–408).
Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum and of the Boston Public Library.
“Bunkers Hill or America's Head Dress,” A London Satirical Print, 1776 ||following || 116
Mary Dorothy George in the fifth volume of her Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires . . . in the British Museum, London, 1935, lists (under No. 5370) and describes numerous engravings issued in London during 1776–1777 directed against the current fashion for enormous inverted pyramids of hair, richly ornamented. Often, the satire upon exaggerated coiffures had a second purpose or direction as well.
Two at least of those described in the Catalogue (Nos. 5330 and 5335) used the exaggerated hairdress to satirize the British war effort in New England and would, presumably, have been the ones to receive currency in America: “Bunkers Hill or America's Head Dress,” published in March 1776, and “Noddle-Island – or How – Are We Decieved,” published by Matthew Darly in the Strand in May. One of these or a similar one would likely be the “representation” which John Thaxter assumed Abigail Adams had seen at Brigadier Palmer's (to Abigail Adams, 6 July 1778, below).
In the satire upon the British effort at Bunker's Hill, that reproduced in the present volume, upon the vast “field” of the headdress, all the soldiers represented as in the redoubts firing point-blank at each other, as well as those marching or drawing artillery pieces, are British. The three outsized flags which fly over the redoubts and artillery position bear respectively the images of an ape, a goose, and two women holding darts of lightning. In the second, “Noddle-Island,” which satirizes Howe's evacuation of Boston, both in the pun upon his name in the title and in representing redcoats in boats rowing toward two ships in full sail, the flags which fly over the British are decorated respectively with an ass and with a fool's cap and bells.
Darly's satirical prints were used contemporaneously in a London
{p. R14}
newspaper to evoke the scene presented at a masked ball attended by about a thousand persons: “there were a great many fine women, fine jewels, fine dresses, with some good character masks. The best of the latter were . . . a lady with her head dressed agreeable to Darly's caricature of a head, so enormous actually to contain both a plan or model of Boston, and of the Provincial army on Bunkers Hill” (General Evening Post, 7–9 May 1776, quoted in R. T. H. Halsey, “English Sympathy with Boston during the American Revolution,” Old-Time New England, 46:93 [Spring 1956]).
Two years later, when exaggeratedly high hairdresses had in turn become fashionable enough in America to be satirized, Thaxter, in the letter already noted, adverted to the earlier London caricatures in describing a concluding feature of the 4th of July celebration in Philadelphia in 1778: “Some time after dinner, was escorted through the Streets a noted and infamous doxy with one of the high head dresses lately worn by some of the Ladies in this City. It was elegantly finished, but it was borne (it is a fabrick indeed on the head) by a Trull, which gave great offence to the Jewels who have lately prop'd such awful superstructures. It was designed to ridicule them. The end was answered.”
Courtesy of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum.
Invoice of Goods Shipped to Abigail Adams from Bilbao by Gardoqui & Sons in 1780 ||facing || 117
John Adams first encountered the Gardoquis, a mercantile firm at Bilbao in Spain that had strong connections with the Cabots, Tracys, and other merchant shippers of the North Shore ports of Massachusetts Bay, in January 1780, after his rugged overland journey from La Coruña. Upon hearing of his arrival, the Gardoquis called on Adams, and next day, 16 January, he recorded: “Dined, with the two Messrs. Gardoquis and a Nephew of theirs,” who thereafter showed the traveling Americans such sights as the city offered (Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 2:431). From Paris, Adams wrote his wife that he had been “treated by them with the Magnificence of a Prince,” and that they would “be very glad to be Usefull to you in any Thing they can do” (letter of 16 February 1780, below).
Since there were several American ships in the harbor at the time, Adams had an opportunity to send a substantial present home. The invoice reproduced is a record of what he ordered sent. The original was enclosed in Gardoqui & Sons to John Adams, 19 February 1780 (Adams Papers), which stated that the goods were to be shipped in the Phoenix, Captain Babson. Babson reached Beverly before the end of March.
The contents of the “Case” and “Barrell,” namely glassware, china, tea, cutlery, linens, and handkerchiefs, were typical enough of the kinds of goods furnished to Mrs. Adams not only by the Gardoquis but by French and Dutch merchants during the last years of the war, when finished goods from Europe were exceedingly scarce in America, and hard cash, for which they could be sold,
{p. R15}
was even scarcer. See letters and other invoices from (among others) the Gardoquis and the Neufvilles in the present volumes and the brief discussion of Abigail Adams' activity as an importer in the Introduction.
From the original in the Adams Papers.
John Quincy Adams' Dutch-English Dictionary ||facing || 117
Titlepage and flyleaf inscription by John Quincy Adams in Willem Sewel's Dutch-English Woordenboek or Dictionary, purchased at four florins and eight stivers by John Adams for John Quincy in Amsterdam two weeks after the family's arrival there. At the same time, for the same price, Adams bought and gave his elder son a copy of Sewel's complementary New Dictionary English and Dutch, Amsterdam, 1691 (A Catalogue of the Books of John Quincy Adams Deposited in the Boston Athenaeum . . ., Boston, 1938, p. 124). This was done in preparation for John Quincy and his brother Charles' entering, a few days after the purchases were made, the Latin School on the Singel to continue their classical studies broken off when they left Pechigny's school in Passy. This step proved disastrous, for even provided with these bilingual aids, John Quincy's Dutch was not adequate for the school, and both boys were abruptly withdrawn after a complaint by the head of the school in November. See the Introduction and the letters between John Adams and Rector Verheyk in October–November 1780, below.
The compiler of the dictionaries was an Amsterdammer of English extraction, Willem (or William) Sewel (1654–1720), best known for his History . . . of the Christian People Called Quakers, first published in Dutch, Amsterdam, 1717, and in English in 1722, with many later editions. According to The Dictionary of National Biography, the work has never been wholly superseded.
It is not clear that John Quincy Adams mastered Dutch during his several sojourns in the Netherlands. Writing his father from Leyden in the following spring, he remarked that he took “the Delft Dutch paper to learn to read the language” and sent an item of news from a recent issue (letter of 17 May 1781, below). Among his books are a few literary classics translated into Dutch from other languages, and also some Dutch plays, a literary form he was fond of. These were probably acquired at about the same time that he read the Delft newspaper and for the same purpose. Thus he seems to have had a minimal reading knowledge of Dutch. But in 18th- century Amsterdam and The Hague, French was an acceptable language for business and the normal language of diplomacy, while Latin lingered in the universities and the learned professions. John Quincy was solidly grounded in both and probably found little need to speak Dutch.
Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.
Card to John Adams Announcing the Birth of George Washington Lafayette, Paris, 1779 ||facing || 212
Brief and formal as it may be, this document signalizes a relationship between the Adams and Lafayette families that was sustained over two full generations and for more than sixty years.
“Acceptez mon compliment, Monsieur le Marquis,” Mme. de Lafayette wrote from Passy to her husband in Paris on 24 December 1779, announcing the birth of her first and only son. “Il est très sincère, il est très vif. L'Amérique va illuminer et je soutiens que Paris devrait le faire aussi. Le nombre de ceux qui vous ressemblent est si petit qu'un accroissement de ce nombre est un bienfait public” (André Maurois, Adrienne ou la vie de Mme. de La Fayette, Paris, 1960, p. 107). This was her proud way of saying that, after bearing him two daughters (one of whom had died in infancy), she had now provided him with a son and heir.
The “Card” (announcement) must have been sent to Adams at his former quarters at the Hôtel de Valentinois in Passy to await his arrival. (Adams and his sons were still in La Coruña, about to set out for Paris.) The amanuensis who wrote it evidently had trouble with Adams' given name, possibly because of the current notoriety of Captain John Paul Jones; at any rate the new peace minister appears on the superscription as “Monsieur Jones Adams.” When he heard the news, John Adams wrote Abigail: “The Marquis has a son since his Arrival in Europe, whom he has named George, not from the King of G[reat] B[ritain] but his friend Washington” (letter of 28 February 1780, below; see a brief note there on the younger Lafayette's career).
It was accordingly appropriate that Mme. de Lafayette sent George to America and placed him under President Washington's care during the imprisonment of the Marquis de Lafayette. This created a problem for the President because of the delicate diplomatic relations the United States had with the France of the Directoire, but he handled it with extreme tact and equal generosity, writing the boy's father at the end of the year and a half that George spent in his household that his conduct had “been exemplary in every point of view” and developing—as his letters to George consistently show—a genuine affection for him (Washington to Lafayette, 8 October 1797, The Writings of George Washington . . . 1745–1799, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, Washington, 1931–1944, 36:40–41; see numerous other letters and references in same, vols. 34–37).
George Washington Lafayette attended his father on his triumphal tour of the United States in 1824–1825, renewing his acquaintance with members of the Adams family both in Quincy and in Washington, where President John Quincy Adams entertained the Nation's guest and his entourage at the White House just before their return to France. Later still, George Washington Lafayette, upon request, furnished materials for J. Q. Adams' impressive and widely reprinted Oration on the Life and Character of Gilbert Motier de Lafayette . . ., Washington, 1835, delivered
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before a joint session of Congress on the last day of 1834. See J. Q. Adams to G. W. Lafayette, 3 July 1834, and reply, 21 October 1834; both in Adams Papers. Correspondence on this and related subjects continued for some years thereafter.
From the original in the Adams Papers.
John Quincy Adams Lists His Studies and Seeks His Father's Advice ||following || 212
John Quincy Adams Consults His Father About His Brother Charles' Studies ||following || 212
The two letters here reproduced represent one side of an exchange of four letters between John Quincy Adams and his father during the period when both John Quincy and his brother Charles were enrolled in M. Pechigny's school at Passy, variously called (as the covers show) an “Ecole de Mathematiques” and a “Pension de Mathematiques.” The texts indicate, however, that the school offered a regular classical curriculum. The books and other topics mentioned in the letters have been annotated under the letters themselves (16 and 21 March 1780, below; see also John Adams' prompt and decisive replies of 17 and 22 March respectively, and No.
Book Purchases by John Adams for Himself and His Sons in Paris and Amsterdam facing 21312 in the present Descriptive List).
But apart from their substance and the striking contrast between the two letters in respect to John Quincy's handwriting (following his father's injunction of 17 March), the letters have a special interest because of their postal markings. These illustrate with remarkable detail and clarity the workings of the highly efficient “petite poste de Paris,” inaugurated in 1760 for the carriage of mail within the city and suburbs. There were nine collections a day throughout the entire area, which was divided into a network of postal districts and routes between them. Both the day of the month (“16” and “21”) and the particular collection (4th and 8th “Levées”) were stamped on the cover at the sorting stage. The next mark affixed was that which appears within the circle on the cover, in both these cases “K/EI.” This was the coded mark of the “facteur” (postman or postal supervisor) in the principal place in the suburbs where letters were delivered from the surrounding localities. K stands for the bureau or office handling all mail from the suburbs, E and I for a particular district and subdistrict respectively (in this case Passy). The “BANL[IEU]” stamp was also added at this point on the letter of the 16th, signifying that it was a letter from the suburbs; its absence on the letter of the 21st, according to a modern authority on French postal history, “n'est pas étonnant . . . car on ne l'apposait que de façon très irregulière.” The final stamp, “E/P.D,” represents the post office within the city where the letter was to be delivered: E being the code name for the postal district centered on the Rue Saint-Honoré, embracing the Rue de Richelieu, and P.D being the “port dû” or postage due at that point, to be paid by the recipient (in this case, as hand-supplied on the letter of the 16th, three sols or sous, the normal rate from the
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suburbs). The amount of postage due is apparently omitted from the letter of the 21st. What looks like a “2” cannot be right for the postage and may be a squiggle by John Quincy, perhaps part of an “A” preceding the word “Monsieur.”
The above account is based in part on the excellent contemporary discussion in Hurtaut and Magny, Dictionnaire historique de la ville de Paris et de ses environs . . ., Paris, 1779, 4:132–133; it also owes much to an explanation of the postmarked covers of J. Q. Adams' letters kindly furnished to the editors by M. Rémi Mathieu, of the Archives of France, in a letter of 12 June 1967.
From the originals in the Adams Papers.
Book Purchases by John Adams for Himself and His Sons in Paris and Amsterdam ||facing || 213
Laurent Tricot's Les rudiments de la langue latine. This work appears, somewhat irrelevantly, in the remarkable bibliographic letter and list that John Quincy Adams compiled and sent to his brothers Charles and Thomas Boylston, mainly of books that would contribute to their efforts to master French. Since, in writing of the book, he used the full and almost exact text of the titlepage: “a l'usage des Colleges de l'université de paris par Mr. Tricot Mtre. des [Arts] & de pension en la meme université Quatorzieme edition” (3 October 1778, below), we can assume that he wrote with the volume open before him. Moreover, from his citation of the present edition (the 14th, Paris, 1777) and from the date, 1778, that accompanies his signature on the reverse of the titlepage, it is probable that this copy, now among John Adams' books at the Boston Public Library, is one of those acquired earlier in that year as John Quincy took up the study of Latin in M. Le Coeur's pension at Passy. See No. 4 in the present Descriptive List.
Demarville's Les verbes françois. When John Quincy Adams on 21 March 1780 reported from Passy to his father in Paris a conversation that he had initiated with M. Pechigny, master of the school attended by himself and his brother Charles, on Charles' readiness to undertake Latin, in which Pechigny had held that, subject to John Adams' approval, Charles should spend another month conjugating French verbs (the letter is reproduced in the present volume; see No. 11 in the present Descriptive List), the father reacted decisively. On that same day John Adams had purchased from the bookseller Pissot, “Les Verbes François, ou nouvelle Grammaire en form de Dictionaire Par Mr. Demarville.” Next day, he purchased another copy so that he might make Charles “a Present” of one copy for his use. He accompanied it with a reply to John Quincy in which he agreed fully with M. Pechigny's opinion, quoted the extracts from the English reviews of Demarville that were printed as advertisements in the edition purchased (the 2d, London, 1773), described the book's contents, and prescribed a method for Charles to follow (to John Quincy Adams, 22 March 1780, below, and
Diary and Autobiography
, 2:437). The work is in French and
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English, printed on opposite pages or in parallel columns. The copy remaining among John Adams' books at the Boston Public Library, on the French titlepage of which he has inscribed his name, the date acquired, and the cost (“Liv. 3:0:0”), is probably the copy he retained for himself.
Sir William Temple's Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The inscription, “C. Adams & J. Q. Adams's from their father. September 9th 1780,” in the copy of the Observations among John Quincy Adams' books deposited at the Boston Athenaeum, identifies it as having been acquired by John Adams so that the two sons he had brought with him to Amsterdam in early August (p. 390, 394–395, below) could without delay become familiar with the new country in which they found themselves. John Adams had known Temple's account for some years, having described it in a letter to his wife in 1777 as “elegant and entertaining, but very brief and general” (vol. 2:286). Abigail Adams must then or later have followed that recommendation, for in a letter to John Thaxter, 5 February 1781, below, she recalls having read it and no other on the history of the Netherlands. Thaxter, in reply, 27 May 1781, below, recommended additional titles for her to read on the Low Countries, allowing loftily that Temple's book was “perhaps calculated for the Meridian of the Times in which he lived. He is not without his Errors . . . and whatever Credit he may have obtained in England and among Foreigners, this Country allows him but a small share of Merit.”
Temple's of course was a work then more than a century old, having been written not long after Sir William's triumphal return from his celebrated five-day negotiation in the Netherlands of the triple alliance in 1668 (The Dictionary of National Biography). The Observations was first published in 1672, the copy John Adams gave his sons being of the 8th edition (Edinburgh, 1747).
During and after John Adams' long efforts to win recognition at The Hague for America in 1780–1782, the figure of Sir William Temple (1628–1699) as an earlier exemplar had even more interest for John and Abigail Adams than did Temple's book. On 25 May 1781 Abigail wrote her husband wishing him the same success in his mission that had crowned Temple's efforts in the same place, noting that “there is no small similarity in the character of my Friend, and the Gentleman.” When, a year later, John Adams had attained all his diplomatic objectives, he returned, in a letter to Abigail, 16 June 1782, to the parallel between his own negotiations and Temple's, finding the only difference between them in his own regrettable want of a masterly pen to celebrate his triumph: “Your Friend will never have Leisure, he will never have the Patience to describe the Dangers, the Mortifications, the Distresses he has undergone in Accomplishing this great Work” (both letters in vol. 4).
Courtesy of the Boston Public Library and of the Boston Athenaeum.
Introduction
Docno: AFC03d001
A Private View of Early American Diplomacy
These volumes begin with John Adams and his son John Quincy aboard the Continental frigate Boston en route from Massachusetts Bay to Bordeaux in France; they end four and a half years later with Adams about to sign on behalf of the United States a treaty of friendship and commerce with the Dutch Republic, and with his son in St. Petersburg at the court of the Empress of All the Russias. Father and son had meanwhile again crossed and recrossed the Atlantic after only a little more than a year's sojourn in France, and on their return had brought back with them nine-year-old Charles Adams on what proved a harrowing voyage, followed by a wintry passage through and over the Pyrenees from the northwest tip of Spain on their way to Paris. Apart from little local visits, Mrs. Adams, her daughter Abigail, and the youngest boy, Thomas Boylston, remained during this whole time in their farm cottage at the foot of Penn's Hill in Braintree. The family was reunited there for only a few months in the summer and fall of 1779.
“I shall assume the Signature of Penelope,” Abigail Adams wrote her husband in the spring of 1782, “for my dear Ulysses has already been a wanderer from me near half the term of years that, that Hero was encountering Neptune, Calipso, the Circes and Syrens.”1 And the worst of it was that she had no way of divining when these wanderings might terminate. On the other hand, she had one consolation denied to Penelope, that of writing and receiving letters. Although, as we shall see, the transatlantic passage of letters by sailing vessels, especially in wartime, was extremely irregular, correspondence made separation tolerable for the Adamses, and it has furnished both for historians and for later readers a highly rewarding personal record.
In Paris, as successor to Silas Deane in the joint American Commission to the French court, John Adams, the son of a Braintree
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farmer, sensed that for him a great difficulty, possibly his greatest, would be resisting the worldly pleasures that this capital of European art and social life flaunted. “The Delights of France are innumerable,” he reported to Mrs. Adams over and over again in varying language; and “stern and hauty Republican” as he prided himself on being, he strongly felt their allurements. But since, like his Puritan forebears, he suspected “that the more Elegance, the less Virtue in all Times and Countries,”2 he drew himself back and remembered always—almost always—that he had long since committed himself and his country to “the Choice of Hercules.” In 1776 he had in fact suggested a design from this, his favorite classical fable, as a theme for the Great Seal of the United States.3 After visiting the royal gardens, the great collections of natural history, precious stones, and rare books, and the famous palaces in and about Paris, Adams recurred to Hercules and his choice when writing his wife in 1780:
There is every Thing here that can inform the Understanding, or refine the Taste, and indeed one would think that could purify the Heart. Yet it must be remembered there is every thing here too, which can seduce, betray, deceive, deprave, corrupt and debauch it. Hercules marches here in full View of the Steeps of Virtue on one hand, and the flowery Paths of Pleasure on the other—and there are few who make the Choice of Hercules.4
So by inherited instinct (though not without experiencing counter-instincts), by observation, and by firmly reasoning with himself, Adams concluded that the vaunted arts and the charmed society of Europe were not for America—not yet anyway. All this lay back of his pronouncement, lately become famous, that he must study “Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy” and other useful arts and sciences, “in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture,” and the rest of the fine and decorative arts.5
It was not a Puritanical rejection or an iconoclastic attitude toward the fine arts that led Adams to make such judgments (and he occasionally made still more sweeping ones),6 but what we would today call a sense of priorities. The point is reinforced by the skepticism he showed toward scientific research conducted for its own sake. In the
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1780's Europe hummed with new discoveries and newly activated international collaboration in science. Adams did not discount these developments; on the contrary, during his short stay at home in 1779 he broached the plan that led to the immediate founding of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. But in one of the most captivating letters in the present volumes, he put first things first in his characteristic way. From The Hague he reported to his wife a visit he had paid to a learned Dutch naturalist, one Lyonnet, who over the course of many years had assembled the largest collection of caterpillars known to exist, and had illustrated and written them up in a quarto volume dealing not only with their anatomy and such but their “Laws, Government, Manners and Customs.” “I dont know,” Adams added, “whether he teaches the manner of destroying them, and Saving the Apple tree,” and then concluded: “I doubt not the Book is worth studying. All Nature is so.— But I have too much to do, to study Man and his mischievous Designs upon Apple Trees and other Things, ever to be very intimate with Mr. Lionet . . . or his Book.”7
As these passages suggest, Adams' uppermost priority on arriving in Paris in April 1778 was to bring some vigor and order into the proceedings of his badly mismatched colleagues in the American Commission in France, Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee. The story of his efforts is more fully set forth in Adams'
Diary and Autobiography
than it is in the Family Correspondence, for with spies ubiquitous in Paris (one of them, Edward Bancroft, seems to have had the run of Franklin's house in Passy) and with transatlantic letters subject to seizure and publication as well as loss, Adams only occasionally reported confidential political news in his private letters. During his first diplomatic tour, 1778–1779, his feelings about Franklin, whom he considered at best casual and at worst lazy about business matters, were reserved for his diary. But his “public” letterbooks and the monumental files of his dispatches to Congress, written over his own name or as penman for the Commission, attest his industry in attending to American interests in Europe. He was also “studying French like a school Boy” and buying books on every aspect of European diplomacy and the law of nations, but “fervently” wishing as early as the summer of 1778 that he could “exchange the Elegances and Magnificence of Europe for the Simplicity of Pens Hill.”8
It did not take him long to conclude that even his relentless efforts would not set things to rights between the passive Dr. Franklin and
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the paranoid Dr. Lee, and he recommended that the Commission be dissolved. When he learned that his advice had been taken, and that Franklin was to be sole minister, he was, as so often before and afterward in such circumstances, torn by conflicting feelings of relief and frustration. He was nominally free to retreat to Penn's Hill, but because Congress could not make up its collective mind about the best further use it could make of him, he received neither a recall nor orders to proceed elsewhere. To Adams this could appear only as indifference or even contemptuous neglect, and any relief he may have felt at first soon turned to mortification. “The Scaffold is cutt away, and I am left kicking and sprawling in the Mire, I think.”9 “As they have no Business for me in Europe I must contrive to get some for myself at home.”10 But even in this he was frustrated, for after proceeding to Nantes in mid-March to take passage in an American vessel, he had word from the French court that he was to wait for the honor of traveling with the Chevalier de La Luzerne, the new minister to Congress, in a French warship. This honor cost him three mortal months of waiting, and John Adams when forced into idleness tended to conjure up all sorts of dark and self-tormenting reasons for the unhappiness it induced.
The real reason for his frustration, apart from La Luzerne's dilatoriness, was that Congress, irreparably split by the Deane-Lee feud, remained deadlocked for many months over new arrangements for its infant foreign service. Adams' name, with Franklin's, Lee's, and John Jay's, to mention no others, was in the forefront of the recurrent debates over foreign policy throughout 1779, but until a settlement was reached, no one could or would tell him what was going on. At home early in August, after submitting his accounts and writing President Jay a letter that he supposed would be his final testament on America's role among the nations, he plunged into the engrossing and congenial task of drafting a constitution for his native state.11 His draft was in progress when he was notified that he had been elected, at the end of September, sole minister to negotiate treaties of peace and commerce with Great Britain. These important events are not documented in the Family Correspondence (which suffers an unfortunate but unavoidable gap from August to November 1779)
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except by occasional retrospective allusions. But a long editorial note in the present volume outlines their background and significance in relation to the family story.12 The reasons for Adams' prompt and unhesitating acceptance of the new mission, following so closely his discouraging experience and (as he viewed it) his less than grateful treatment by Congress during his first European mission, lay deep in his character and training. Brought up “to believe that the highest duty entailed the greatest labor and privation while offering few chances of success against many of failure” (to quote the editors' own conclusion), Adams found this new challenge irresistible. No formula can sum up a man, but “the struggles, frustrations, bruising quarrels, justified and unjustified boasts, self-dedication, and occasional triumphs of his diplomatic career furnish a paradigm of the Puritan ethic in action.”13 Viewed in this light, the record as here set forth is also suggestive in interpreting the characters and public careers of John Adams' son, John Quincy, and of his grandson, Charles Francis. All three Adams statesmen, whose careers spanned almost a century of American diplomacy, were thorough individualists and differed radically in outward manners and inner dispositions. But their willingness to grasp the nettle of hard and unrewarding duty was an unmistakable genetic trait.
The struggles and privations of John Adams' second mission to Europe, or rather his series of overlapping missions, began on shipboard in November 1779, for the Sensible sprang a dangerous leak and put in at El Ferrol, which Adams estimated was “between three and four hundred Leagues” from Paris. The journey of the motley party by muleback across northern Spain is fully and colorfully related in Adams'
Diary and Autobiography
, though some further details are added in the Family Correspondence by Adams and his companions. These troubles were nothing, however, compared with those awaiting the peace minister in Paris, or rather Versailles. Vergennes, the foreign minister, was currently conducting delicate and farflung diplomatic maneuvers that he did not wish to have disturbed by an energetic Yankee who seemed never to tire of writing letters full of frank and argumentative advice. Before many months had passed, Vergennes told Adams in language little disguised by diplomatic niceties that he wished to hear nothing further from him, and, addressing the more accommodating Franklin, requested him to submit to Congress
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a great packet of Adams-Vergennes exchanges with the transparent purpose of having Adams reprimanded. In a letter that later became notorious, Franklin did so, and relations between the two Americans were thereafter never more than coolly correct at best.14
Estopped at Paris and unwilling to be idle, Adams departed at the end of July on a mission that was wholly his own idea. To experienced observers it seemed quixotic enough and therefore characteristic of the independent-minded man from Massachusetts, but it was to win him his greatest success as a diplomat and ultimately to save the financial credit of the United States in Europe—a vital factor in the winning of the American Revolution. With Vergennes' very grudging approval and Franklin's expressed disapproval, Adams set out on “a fishing expedition” to Amsterdam. He knew that America had some political sympathizers in the Netherlands and also that Dutch merchants and capitalists could sniff profits at a great distance. He would reconnoiter and see what could be done to inform himself about the Netherlanders and them about the United States. Starting out, he supposed he would be gone from Paris only a few weeks or months at most. He did not even inform Abigail of his move, with the boys, until after he had been in Amsterdam for a month, and then only in a casual, laconic way.15 But his Dutch mission, undertaken thus tentatively, was to extend, with prolonged interruptions of course, for no less than eight years, that is until he sailed home for good in 1788; and the strongest personal and official ties he was to make abroad for himself and his country were in and with the Dutch Republic. It began as a venture in what was later, and always pejoratively, to be called “militia diplomacy,” although Adams himself furnished the basis for the phrase. In a letter written after a year and a half of unremitting and intrepid labor that brought him close to his first objective—Dutch recognition of American independence—he told Secretary Livingston (whose questioning of Adams' conduct was probably stimulated by the French minister in Philadelphia): “Your Veterans in Diplomaticks and in Affairs of State consider Us as a kind of Militia, and hold Us, perhaps, as is natural, in some degree of Contempt; but wise Men know that Militia sometimes gain Victories over regular Troops, even by departing from the Rules.”16 Later in 1782,
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having negotiated a loan of five million guilders to the United States by a syndicate of Amsterdam bankers, and being on the verge of signing a treaty of amity and commerce between the two powers, he told Francis Dana that if he had asked and accepted the advice of Vergennes and his minions (among whom he certainly included Franklin, Livingston, and not a few members of the Continental Congress),
I should have been forbidden to stir, and should have been here sprawling with hands and feet in the air, pegged, like Ariel, in a rifted Oak; this Republic would at this moment have been seperately at peace, and American Independence would never have been acknowledged by any Power in Europe, except France, untill England should have done it.17
A great part of the material in the present volumes documents Adams' laborious step-by-step progress toward this culmination. It is a story not even yet told in the detail it deserves, because the sources for Adams' prodigious activity as publicist and propagandist for the American cause in the Netherlands during the years 1780–1782 have not yet been finely combed. Adams did not exaggerate in claiming that his successes in the Netherlands were his own. “A Child was never more weary of a Whistle, than I am of Embassies,” he wrote his wife after the States General had voted to recognize him as minister plenipotentiary from the United States and he had been received “in awfull Pomp” by the Prince of Orange, the most “Anglomane” of all Dutchmen, at the Huis ten Bosch:
The Embassy here however has done great Things. . . . It has not only prevailed with a Minister or an absolute Court to fall in with the national Prejudice: but without Money, without Friends, and in Opposition to mean Intrigue it has carried its Cause, by the still small Voice of Reason, and Perswasion, tryumphantly against the uninterrupted Opposition of Family Connections, Court Influence, and Aristocratical Despotism.18
Adams revealingly elaborated on this a little later in writing a close friend:
The final phrase would serve well as a motto for Adams' conduct as a servant of his country.
When I go to Heaven, I shall look down over the Battlements, with pleasure, upon the Stripes and Stars, wantoning in the Wind, at the Hague.—There is another Triumph in the Case sweeter than that over
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Enemies. You know my meaning. It is the triumph of stubborn Independence—Independence of Friends and Foes.19
The Family in Wartime
“If I had realized before you left me that intercourse between us would have been so hazardous,” Abigail Adams wrote her husband eight months after he first sailed for Europe, “I fear my magnanimity would have faill'd me.”20 Truly neither of the partners had sensed what a toll the ocean, enemy cruisers, and careless messengers would take of the letters they wrote each other, and what unbelievable delays would sometimes prolong the transit of those that did get through. It was five months before Mrs. Adams heard of her husband and son's safe arrival, and even then the news did not come directly from them. (In the meantime she had heard, however, that Franklin had been the victim of an assassination attempt, a rumor as persistent as it was false.) The near-perfect rapport between husband and wife came closer to breaking down over the question of whether he was writing her as often and as fully as he should have than over any other during their long separations. The issue was raised, by no means for the first time, in a letter from Abigail at the beginning of 1779 with the tart observation that she had surely
been the most unfortunate person in the world, to loose every Letter you have wrote since your absence, and to receive Only a few lines at various times wrote in the greatest haste, containing only the state of your Health, perhaps making mention of your Son and Servant and then concluding abruptly yours.
I determine very soon to coppy and adopt the very concise method of my Friend.21
Two days later, after “the publick packet” from France arrived at Boston with nothing from him for her, Abigail wrote again in so reproachful a tone that Adams tore up his first three attempts to answer and then (or later) destroyed her letter too because it made him so unhappy. Next day he managed to write an answer he could send:
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[Y]ou should consider, it is a different Thing to have five hundred Correspondents and but one. It is a different Thing to be under an Absolute Restraint and under none. It would be an easy Thing for me to ruin you and your Children by an indiscreet Letter—and what is more it would be easy, to throw our Country into Convulsions.—For Gods sake never reproach me again with writing Scrips [scraps]. Your Wounds are too deep.22
After this rebuke the issue was to lie dormant rather than wholly disappear, but the record shows that Abigail deserved the sobriquet Penelope she bestowed on herself. In 1780 she was to learn first from others, not from her husband, that he had left Paris for Amsterdam and taken the boys with him. There were intervals of from six months to nearly a year during which she received no letters from any members of her distant family. From early in 1781, letters from all of them, and from Adams' secretary, John Thaxter, were evidently saved up for conveyance by “Commodore” Alexander Gillon in the well-armed South Carolina, which was supposed to sail at any moment from the Texel. But when Gillon finally sailed in August he undertook an adventure of his own, circumnavigated the British Isles, put into Spain for repairs and provisions, sailed again but headed for Havana, took part in the Spanish capture of the Bahamas in May, and did not reach a port in the United States until June 1782. Little Charles Adams was a passenger on the first leg of this remarkable cruise, and for months neither of his parents knew where he was or whether he was alive or dead. He brought no letters for his mother when he arrived at Beverly in January 1782, in the ship Cicero from Bilbao, because another of Gillon's passengers, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, carried these and continued aboard the South Carolina to Havana. There he transshipped, was captured, threw his letters overboard, and was carried into New York.
This was an extreme case of bad luck, but Abigail's letters mention many others almost as painful. To the Adamses' general and Abigail's particular bad luck must be added John Adams' culpability. There were periods during both his missions when he wrote with furious frequency and voluminousness to Congress reporting on affairs in Europe, daily, sometimes three and four times a day, and copying diplomatic and political documents of enormous length to enclose with his comments. These dispatches appear with very few exceptions to have gotten through, though sometimes only after long delays and suffering the interception of one or another of the multiple copies sent.
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(For example, the news of Adams' recognition as minister by the Netherlands government in April 1782, though promptly reported by Adams, did not reach Congress from his own hand until mid-September, and, as Secretary Livingston justly pointed out, this momentous event could not be considered official until then.23) But over extended periods Adams simply seems to have written no letters at all to his wife or to members of his family or community circle back home. During his uncertainty about how the Anglo-Dutch war crisis would turn out in the winter of 1780–1781, for instance, there is no evidence that he wrote Abigail between mid-December and mid-March. This is the period during which he was getting his sons placed in the University of Leyden after their bad experience in an Amsterdam school (of which more is said below). The second of these letters, that of 11 March, is indeed a mere “scrip”; and there are none at all to such familiar correspondents as Richard Cranch, the elder Isaac Smith, Cotton Tufts, or the Warrens. All of this points to Adams' disinclination to write home when he was inwardly troubled and had no good news to report. He did not really pick up the threads of his domestic correspondence until after his diplomatic breakthrough at The Hague. This was more or less concurrent with the overthrow of North's government, which gave at least some hope for the beginning of peace negotiations. His letters to Braintree and Boston in the summer and fall of 1782 take on a new frequency, chattiness, and cheerfulness.
Abigail may not have had “five hundred Correspondents,” but she had a good many more than one, and her letters to them furnish almost perpetual delight. She hardly knew how to write a commonplace sentence, and she never wrote a dull letter of any length, because her feelings were always animated and close to the surface, her intelligence razor-sharp, and her style all her own—except when she allowed herself to rise (sink would be a better word) to the pseudo-elegance of Mercy Warren's mistakenly admired classical style.
Complaints about want of news recurred (as we have seen), and so did occasional cries of anguished loneliness. But in her own way Abigail exemplified the Puritan ethic with a fidelity equal to her husband's:
When my Imagination sits you down upon the Gallick Shore, a Land to which Americans are now bound to transfer their affections, . . . I an•
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ticipate the pleasure you must feel, and tho so many leagues distant share in the joy in finding the great Interest of our Country so generously espoused, and nobly aided by so powerfull a Monarck. . . .
[T]ho I have been calld to sacrifice to my Country, I can glory in my Sacrifice, and derive pleasure from intimate Connextion with one who is esteemed worthy of the important Trust devolved upon him.24
She was to claim in fact that “Patriotism in the female Sex” is a more “disinterested” virtue than among men:
Excluded from honours and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Goverment from having held a place of Eminence. Even in the freest countrys our property is subject to the controul and disposal of our partners, to whom the Laws have given a sovereign Authority. Deprived of a voice in Legislation, obliged to submit to those Laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the publick Welfare? Yet all History and every age exhibit Instances of patriotic virtue in the female Sex, which considering our Situation equals the most Heroick of yours.25
As always when touching on the inequality of the sexes, Abigail allowed the cutting edge of her thought to show, but she was never militant. She found compensation in being entrusted with a man's responsibilities and discharging them with distinction. Wartime scarcities, inflation, and taxes during the continent-wide financial crisis and military stalemate of 1780–1781 were almost too much for even her resourcefulness. That fall she gave a list of prices current that included beef at $8 a pound, cheese at $10, butter at $12, and sheep's wool at no less than $30.26 About the same time she reported that her tenants were refusing to pay their annual rent because it was out of their power: formerly two cows would pay it, but now it would take ten. In addition, after Congress' devaluation of its paper money at the ratio of forty to one—a measure that was a major irritant in the quarrel between her husband and Vergennes—heavy new assessments were laid on, state by state and town by town, to furnish pay and provisions for the dwindling and discontented Continental army. Mrs. Adams struggled hard to meet her substantial part of the Braintree quota, all the harder because there was talk both inside and outside Congress of giving General Washington dictatorial powers to seize the needed funds and supplies. The prospect of subordinating civil
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to military authority she pronounced “a most dangerous step, fraught with Evils of many kinds.”27 John Adams must have been prouder than ever of his wife when he read this forthright judgment.
There is much scattered evidence in these volumes to show that Adams rendered material help to his wife by sending her small consignments of European goods, which enabled her to keep her household expenses down and sometimes to obtain hard money when there was no other way to do so. The “presents” of this kind he sent, beginning with his first contact with the Bilbao firm of Gardoqui & Sons in January 1780, and Abigail's lists of desiderata sent in return for French or Dutch merchants to ship, are not without interest for historians of business and of manners; and the saga of certain chests of goods ordered from James Moylan at Lorient runs bewilderingly, and at length comically, through a year and a half of letters among numerous correspondents in these volumes. Although a few priced invoices survive and have been included with the letters, and although Abigail sometimes mentions how much she got for this or that item, the evidence is too fragmentary to tell how well she fared, as a businesswoman, with her imports.
A revealingly feminine, or maybe simply human, note is sounded in other letters Abigail exchanged with her husband in the spring of 1780. There had been discussion of her accompanying him and the two boys on the second voyage, but the idea was given up “because you say a Lady cannot help being an odious creature at sea”—an observation she later proved to her own satisfaction, if the expression may be allowed—“and I will not wish myself in any situation that should make me so to you.”28 Before leaving, it appears that Adams had offered her a sort of placebo. She alluded to it mysteriously as a certain “article . . . for which you gave me Liberty to draw upon you for payment.”29 It was, in fact, “a genteel Chaise,” which the best carriagemaker in Boston had been ordered to build for her.30 Abigail evidently supposed a minister plenipotentiary's wife was entitled to this amenity, but at $300 her husband pronounced the “Machine . . . horribly dear.”31 Another indulgence was of a very different order. As if earnestly rather than merely fancifully desirous of finding a rustic retreat in which she and her husband could take refuge from public cares when he finally came home, Abigail was captivated by
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the idea of buying a tract of wild land in Vermont. In this she was following a fashion that swept several states during the last years of the war, when it appeared that the United States would become a viable confederation and Vermont would become a part of it. Her acquisition of more than three hundred acres of undeveloped land, traced in these letters, turned out to be her single serious mistake as manager of the family's affairs. Interestingly, it was her one move of the kind that John Adams disapproved from across the Atlantic. “[D]ont meddle any more with Vermont,” he told her, after she had already committed her carefully gathered funds to make the purchase. And to a friend he somewhat explosively remarked: “God willing, I wont go to Vermont. I must be within the Scent of the sea.” The comment is irresistible that he also had to be within the scent of politics.32
So far as they affected her husband, politics were quite as vital an interest to Abigail as they were to John Adams, “For myself I have little ambition or pride—for my Husband I freely own I have much,” she wrote James Lovell after learning that Congress had revoked Adams' powers as sole minister for peace with Great Britain.33 “[W]hen he is wounded I blead.”34 Her correspondence on the critical subject of foreign affairs, notably Franco-American relations and the personal animosities they engendered, runs throughout these volumes and is a moving revelation of the strength and depth of her feelings. Fortunately her grandson Charles Francis Adams preserved these letters, some of them incomplete and otherwise imperfect drafts written at white heat, along with at least some of the replies from such friends as Lovell and Gerry, but the family editor did not publish them, for Abigail's treatment of Franklin and his French ringmasters—as she believed them to be—was too strong for his stomach. The story cannot and need not be summarized here, but those interested in it will find a good starting point in Alice Lee Shippen's letter addressed to Mrs. Samuel Adams in Boston, 17 June 1781, mistakenly delivered to Mrs. John Adams in Braintree, and can then follow its sequels for almost a year. More Catholic than the Pope, Abigail may never have quite understood why her husband did not then and there resign when
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yoked with “a selfish avaritious designing deceitfull Villan”35 under “orders dishonorary to [their] country.”36
For some readers a startling revelation in these volumes will be the streak of flirtatiousness—the word is not quite adequate or just, and the quality is hard to define—that runs perceptibly through Abigail Adams' homilies on morals and her denunciations of Chesterfieldianism in all its manifestations. (New Englanders of the period were as fascinated by the real-life gallantries of the fourth Earl of Chesterfield as they were by the fictionalized ones of Richardson's Lovelace.) Her correspondence with, among others, young John Thaxter is marked not only by the immemorial feminine preoccupation with matchmaking and all its accompaniments but by a notable susceptibility to flattery. From the hopelessly innocent Thaxter she was in no danger. But in another relationship, though it was purely epistolary, she did run considerable risks. In equal favor as a literary figure with Richardson, Thomson, and Goldsmith in the later decades of the 18th century was Laurence Sterne. Everyone who could read seems to have read Sterne's Tristram Shandy, his Sentimental Journey, and his published sermons and letters; and not a few writers, in America as well as in England, imitated his turns of style and sentiment, made up of quirks and innuendoes, often sexual in character. Abigail had one avid correspondent, James Lovell, a former Boston schoolmaster and a perennial Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress, who was an addict of Shandean suggestiveness. Tiresome as it may seem to present-day readers, proof that Abigail enjoyed Lovell's queer sort of gallantry is her acceptance with only mock protests of a constant flow of letters from him in this vein. But in the winter of 1780–1781 things took a different turn. British patrols along the Hudson captured some of Lovell's letters directed to Boston, including one addressed to Abigail Adams. That letter was not published by the tory papers (perhaps it was too “enigmatical” even for them), but others of his letters were printed; yet he kept right on writing as if he were Yorick and she Eliza.37 This led to Abigail's giving Lovell several scoldings, but she did not entirely shut off his fanciful endearments as long as they continued to correspond. On reflection, it is surprising that C. F. Adams, who destroyed by far the greater part of the letters his grandmother received (except those from members of her family), did not
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destroy these. His sense of obligation to history must have been too strong, for these exchanges provide a more intimate record of feelings about the Adams-Franklin tensions and contentions—though of course from only one point of view—than anything else we possess.
It is proper to end this summary account of the family, during nearly five years of wartime stress, with the children. As we have said elsewhere, one of the striking values of the family's literary legacy over four generations is that the children helped create it. From the amount of wholesome advice on morals, behavior, and studies given them by their parents and by each other, one might suppose that the daughter and three sons of John and Abigail Adams had little chance to become anything but little stuffed paragons of the Puritan ethic. In some measure this happened. Writing the younger Abigail from El Ferrol in Spain, her father talked a little of the landscape, the opera, and other novelties and amenities, but then turned to a favorite theme:
Gold is very little more prescious for being burnished. . . . I dont mean by this . . . to suggest, that the Arts and Accomplishments which are merely ornamental, should be wholly avoided or neglected especially by your Sex: but that they ought to be slighted when in Comparison or Competition, with those which are useful and essential [particularly those that] contribute the most to qualify Women to act their Parts well in the Relations of Life, those of Daughter, Sister, Wife, Mother, Friend.38
In one of his last letters to her in the correspondence now published, Adams made the point again. He had sent her a present, and now she was asking for another, but “I should have been happier if you had asked me for Bell's British Poets. There is more elegance and beauty, more sparkling lustre to my eyes, in one of those volumes, than in all the diamonds which I ever saw about the Princess of Orange, or the Queen of France, in all their birth-day splendour.” And much more to the same effect.39
Young Abigail's response was to grow up a very reserved young woman, with universally attested beauty but, as her letters show, mediocre intellectual gifts. These volumes leave her on the point of being almost but not quite swept off her feet (with surprisingly energetic help from her mama) by a dashing young lawyer and wit, Royall Tyler, who had recently come to Braintree and caused a great stir there. In these volumes she makes but a pallid figure, as she was to
{p. R36}
remain, though misfortunes were to endow her later life with true pathos.
Passing over Charles and Thomas, too young at this stage to have left any letters and hence any clear impressions of their characters (though Charles seems to have charmed everyone who encountered him as a nine- or ten-year-old in Europe), we come to John Quincy, an unusual case of personality development if there ever was one. Not yet eleven when he first crossed the ocean with his father in 1778, not yet thirteen when he went again, what can we make of a lad who, on a short vacation from school, sat down to write his little brothers at home that they ought to learn French and, to encourage them, sent them a list in five folio pages of grammars, dictionaries, and treatises on the history, prosody, orthography, and rhetoric of the French language, some in multiple quarto and folio volumes?40 Astonishing, even though what he was doing was simply copying off the titlepages of the formidable collection of books his father had assembled within a few months for his own intensive study of the French language.
To this son John Adams, whenever he could seize a moment from his country's business, thought it necessary to furnish warnings against wasting time, and his mother seconded this advice at every opportunity.41 Adams oversaw John Quincy's studies in the utmost detail (not forgetting the important matter of disciplining himself always to write a legible hand), as shown by several touching exchanges while his sons were at M. Pechigny's “Ecole de Mathématiques” in Passy early in 1780.42 In Amsterdam later that year Adams, doing what seemed best, made the mistake of placing the boys in an academy (“the Latin School on the Singel”) governed by the strictest Dutch rules for study and conduct. Classes were conducted in Dutch, and Rector Verheyk, clearly a martinet, penalized John Quincy for his language deficiency by keeping him back among the most elementary pupils. John Quincy then did a (for him) unheard-of thing: he showed his temper and revolted. According to Verheyk, Master John's “disobedience” and “impertinence,” in which he tried to get Charles to join him, were insufferable and likely to corrupt the school as a whole. John Adams took his son's part unqualifiedly and instantly withdrew both boys from the school.43 Some of the most engaging
{p. R37}
correspondence in these volumes then follows, relative to the enrollment, studies, and diversions of the Adams boys in the famous University of Leyden. Their experience there, particularly John Quincy's (despite the fact that among other academic obligations he attended Professor Pestel's lectures in jurisprudence delivered in Latin), was immeasurably happier and more profitable than at Amsterdam. Paternal advice continued to flow quite as freely. Even in assenting to John Quincy's request to buy a pair of skates, Minister Adams indulged in a short homily. “Skaiting is a fine Art. It is not simple Velocity or Agility that constitutes the Perfection of it but Grace.” So on the whole he could recommend it, along with dancing and riding, as a means of improving both one's health and
Elegance of [bodily] Motion. . . . Do not conclude from this, that I advise you to spend much of your Time or Thoughts upon these Exercises or Diversions. In Truth I care very little about any of them. They should never be taken but as Exercise and Relaxation of Business and study.
Every Thing in Life should be done with Reflection, and Judgment, even the most insignificant Amusements. They should all be arranged in subordination, to the great Plan of Happiness, and Utility.44
Thus, barely turned fourteen, John Quincy Adams was prepared to set off for St. Petersburg in the role of companion, clerk, and French interpreter to Francis Dana in July 1781. From Amsterdam and The Hague his father continued to advise him about his reading, and from Braintree his mother and sister to adjure him to preserve his purity of morals; but a retrospective judgment suggests that their efforts were at the very least gratuitous. The events of the American Revolution, in which he and his family were so inextricably bound up, conspired to make John Quincy Adams a man before he had finished boyhood.
Notes on Editorial Method and the Status of the Edition as a Whole
The rationale for presenting the family correspondence of the Adamses in a single sequence of 130 years was set forth in the Introduction to the first volume of this series (The Adams Papers, Series II:
Adams Family Correspondence
, 1963, 1:xix–xxv). An account of the principal sources and their previous use and partial
{p. R38}
publication followed (p. xxv–xli), together with an explanation of the editors' criteria of selection, textual method, and annotation policy (p. xli–xlviii).45
These policies and practices, not restated here, have proved workable and have been continued in the present volumes except for some extensions and refinements necessitated by problems not earlier encountered or foreseen.
In the matter of selection of letters for inclusion, we have on the one hand been more rigorous in excluding routine and duplicative letters, particularly those of John Thaxter (though some readers may still think him overrepresented), who as John Adams' private secretary and companion to the Adams boys in Europe is often informative on matters that others do not mention or develop but who is commonly a long-winded and seldom an exciting correspondent. On the other hand, we have slightly enlarged our definition of what a “family letter” is by including letters, written and received by no matter whom, that deal wholly or significantly with the Adamses' domestic concerns, most commonly, in the present volumes, with the boys' schooling. Thus letters between John Adams and the masters of the Passy and Amsterdam schools where John Quincy and Charles were enrolled, are printed, and so are the letters of Benjamin Waterhouse, who made the first arrangements for the boys' admission to the University of Leyden and kept a kindly eye on them thereafter. (Such letters as survive between Waterhouse and John Quincy Adams, however, are reserved for Series III, Part 2: The Papers of John Quincy Adams.) A number of highly informative letters from sundry parties bearing on the wanderings of little Charles on his long voyage home in 1781–1782 have also qualified for inclusion.
In volumes 3 and 4 we have made two departures from the plan of volumes 1 and 2. First, since each pair of volumes does indeed form a unit, with a single index, we have consolidated in volume 3 the entire editorial apparatus for both volumes. (The Contents and Descriptive List of Illustrations remain divided between the two.) Second, we have added a Chronology for all four published volumes, 1761–1782, preceding the Index in volume 4. It was originally thought that chronologies in the Family Correspondence would so largely duplicate those in the other series of The Adams Papers as to be of little utility. But although there will be much duplication, it will
{p. R39}
be useful to see how family events, for example the journeys of the various members, relate to their official acts and to current public events. The wide dispersion of the family that begins in volume 3 and was to continue through several generations is a phenomenon that only a tabular view can bring out. Hereafter, a Chronology will appear at the end of each pair of volumes of
Adams Family Correspondence
published and indexed together.
For the first time in the family letters (and occasionally in material quoted in the annotation), readers will encounter words, phrases, or longer passages written in a numerical code in the originals. These have been decoded in the texts as printed and enclosed between double verticals (||. . .||). An explanation of the code used and a summary history of it are furnished in an appendix to volume 4: The Lovell Cipher and Its Derivatives.
For the first time, too, beginning with John Quincy's arrival in St. Petersburg in 1781, the problem of dealing with the eleven-day difference between old-style and new-style dates arises. Commonly, Westerners writing from Russia used double dates; in such cases the editors have given both (see John Quincy Adams to James Thaxter, St. Petersburg, 8/19 September 1781), but have followed the later or new-style date for placement of the letter. When only one date appears and it is indicated or establishable as old style, the new-style date has been editorially inserted and of course followed (see John Quincy Adams to John Adams, St. Petersburg, 21 August / [1 September] 1781).
The order in which letters written on the same date are printed is primarily alphabetical according to the writers' names, and thereunder (when a single writer wrote several letters on the same day) alphabetical according to their recipients' names. Exceptions are made to avoid having an answer appear ahead of the letter it answers. When more than one letter was written to the same recipient on the same date, the editors have used such evidence as could be found to place them in the order they were written, but this is sometimes guesswork.
The letters of children and of semiliterate writers are, in stated cases, exempted from the minimal regularization of punctuation, capitalization, and the like, set forth as textual policy throughout The Adams Papers. Thus John Quincy Adams' letters are given in “literal style” through the year 1778 (but not thereafter). The younger Abigail's first letter, to Elizabeth Cranch, 1 January 1779, is also given literally (but her later letters are not).
Finally, mention should be made of several devices now systemat•
{p. R40}
ically employed in this series, to save space or for other reasons that may be more arbitrary. References and cross-references in the notes to letters and other documents give only day and month and omit the year if the dates referred to fall within the year of the letter being annotated. Where ambiguity might arise from references to a number of letters and documents falling in more than one year, the pertinent years are of course specified. Cross-references to letters in earlier volumes of
Adams Family Correspondence
include the volume number in which they appear, as well as their dates, but only exceptionally the page or pages. In editorial references to texts properly definable as “family letters” but omitted in this series, locations are by date and repository (most often “Adams Papers”), with citation of a text printed elsewhere if one is known. References to family letters later in date than these volumes run (after September 1782) take the same form but imply no determination whether or not they will be included in or omitted from the work as it progresses.
It has been a long interval since the first two volumes of
Adams Family Correspondence
issued from the press—too long an interval. But it is proper to point out, unapologetically, that the Belknap Press edition of The Adams Papers is not and never could be a single set of books. It is, rather, by necessity and intent, a collection of editorial units or “editions” documenting the public and private lives of four generations of American men and women, some of whom became famous but others of whom were ordinary enough. In the over-all plan of the Belknap Edition we have designated these “editions” as Series, some of which are subdivided into Parts, and a number of the Parts will run to a good many volumes each (e.g. John Quincy Adams' diary). The plan has been set forth in as concise a form as possible in a note at the beginning of the Introduction to Series II46 and has been reinforced by the half-title of each published volume and sundry printed prospectuses. A primary purpose of that note was to urge scholars using The Adams Papers not to cite the over-all work (which for obvious reasons cannot employ a single serial numbering for all its volumes), but the precise title of the particular series and/or part (e.g. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols., 1961). If this is not done, all is confusion. Another purpose was to set library-cataloguers straight on the pattern of independent units within the large framework. In both purposes the editors have achieved only limited success. The point seems worth repeating.
{p. R41}
Since the appearance of volumes 1 and 2 of
Adams Family Correspondence
, the following ten other volumes of The Adams Papers have been published:
Diary of Charles Francis Adams, vols. 1–2, edited by Aïda DiPace Donald and David Donald, 1964; vols. 3–4, edited by Marc Friedlaender and L. H. Butterfield, 1968
Legal Papers of John Adams, edited by L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, 3 vols., 1965
The Earliest Diary of John Adams, edited by L. H. Butterfield, Wendell D. Garrett, and Marc Friedlaender, 1966
Portraits of John and Abigail Adams, by Andrew Oliver, 196747
Portraits of John Quincy Adams and His Wife, by Andrew Oliver, 1970
In a very forward state are volumes 5 and 6 of Charles Francis Adams' Diary; and about to go into editorial preparation is the first volume of the Papers of John Adams, which will include his general (i.e. non-family) correspondence, state papers, and miscellaneous writings, that is to say, all his papers deserving annotated letterpress publication exclusive of those that have appeared or will appear in his Diary, Legal Papers, and the Family Correspondence. The decision to proceed with John Adams' Papers before launching the greatest of all the Adams diaries, that of John Quincy Adams, which can only be characterized as a mastodon, was a hard one, but was determined by the approaching bicentennial anniversaries of the major events of the American Revolution, in so many of which John Adams was a principal actor.
Work on several ancillary Adams projects, essential to the scholarship of the edition as a whole, proceeds, but only as time permits or unavoidable confrontation occurs, rather than systematically or intensively. The pertinent Adams materials located and reproduced (or in some cases only earmarked for reproduction) in the two great federal repositories in Washington, the Library of Congress and the National Archives, and in certain foreign archival establishments, including those of Czarist Russia during J. Q. Adams' mission there (1809–1814) and in the Public Record Office during J. Q. Adams' and his son C. F. Adams' respective missions to London (1815–1817, 1861–1868)—the accumulation of these materials in or ready for our
{p. R42}
hands is so enormous (they run to five figures) that the processing of them has had to be in large part deferred altogether. Nor, under the pressure of daily editorial routines, have we been able to do more than amplify and refine our working materials for either the Adams Genealogy (a biographical register of the Adams Presidential line and its connections by blood and marriage) or the Adams Bibliography. We consider both of these undertakings of such intrinsic scholarly value and so essential to readers and users of The Adams Papers that we stand pledged to perfect and publish the first and would very much like to do the same for the other. A union checklist of the Adamses' books collected over four lifetimes is a still more formidable task that awaits attention but may or may not become a reality. We refuse to think of these projects as visionary, but meanwhile our minds and hands are fully occupied and our other resources are equally taxed.
1. 10 April 1782, vol. 4, below.
2. 12 April 1778, below.
4. Letter of April–May 1780, below.
5. To Abigail Adams, post 12 May 1780, below.
6. See Foreword by the editor in chief to Andrew Oliver, Portraits of John and Abigail Adams, Cambridge, 1967, p. xv–xvi.
7. 25 July 1782, vol. 4, below.
8. To Abigail Adams, 26 July 1778, below.
9. To the same, 28 February 1779, below.
10. To the same, 20 February 1779, below.
11. On these matters see the editorial note on James Lovell to Abigail Adams, 9 August 1779, below, p. 220–222, 226–228; Adams to John Jay, 4 August 1779, printed in Adams, Works, ed. C. F. Adams, Boston, 1850–1856, 7:99–110, and elsewhere.
12. Pages 228–233, below.
13. The editors acknowledge their indebtedness in this interpretation to Edmund S. Morgan's highly illuminating article, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 24:3–43 (January 1967).
14. Franklin to Congress, 9 August 1780, in Franklin, Writings, ed. A. H. Smyth, New York and London, 1905–1907, 8:126–128. On the quarrel between Adams and Vergennes at large, and Franklin's involvement in it, see the editorial note under John Thaxter to Abigail Adams, 7 August 1780, p. 390–395, below.
15. 4 September 1780, below.
16. 21 February 1782, National Archives: Record Group 360, Papers of the Continental Congress, No. 84, IV, printed in The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, ed. Francis Wharton, Washington, 1889, 5:196; and elsewhere.
18. 14 May 1782, vol. 4, below.
19. To Francis Dana, 17 September 1782, Massachusetts Historical Society: Dana Papers.
20. 29 September 1778, below.
21. 2 January 1779, below.
23. See John Adams to Abigail Adams, 17 September 1782, vol. 4, below; Robert R. Livingston to John Adams, 15–18 September 1782, ||in Papers of John Adams, vol. 13, and ||
Diplomatic Correspondence, ed. Wharton, 5:728.
24. To Adams, 18 May 1778, below.
25. To the same, 17 June 1782, vol. 4, below.
26. To the same, 15 October 1780, vol. 4, below.
27. To the same, 13 November 1780, vol. 4, below; see note 10 there.
28. To the same, 10 December 1779, below.
29. To the same, 15 April 1780, below.
30. Richard Cranch to John Adams, 26 April 1780, below.
31. To Abigail Adams, 17 June 1780, below.
32. Many letters deal with the notion and consummation of the Vermont purchase; the main editorial note and references on the subject are at Abigail Adams to John Adams, 25 April 1782, vol. 4, below. John Adams told his wife not to “meddle . . . with Vermont” in his letter of 12 October 1782 (Adams Papers); and his explosive remark is in a letter to James Warren, 17 June 1782, Boston Public Library.
33. 12 September 1781, vol. 4, below.
34. To the same, 30 June 1781, vol. 4, below.
35. From the letter cited in the preceding note.
36. To James Lovell, 20 July – 6 August 1781, vol. 4, below.
37. Documentation of this incident begins with Abigail Adams' letter to Lovell, 3 January 1781, is continued in Lovell to Abigail Adams, 8 January 1781, and in exchanges that follow over six months or more, all in vol. 4, below.
38. 12 December 1779, below.
39. 26 September 1782, vol. 4, below.
40. J. Q. Adams to Charles and Thomas Boylston Adams, 3 October
1779
1778
, below.
41. For example, Adams to J. Q. Adams,
1
2
March 1780, below.
42. J. Q. Adams to John Adams, 16, 21 March 1780; Adams to J. Q. Adams, 17, 22 March 1780, all below. The son's letters are reproduced in facsimile as
John Quincy Adams Lists His Studies and Seeks His Father's Advice following 212illustrations in this volume.
43. See John Adams to Abigail Adams, 25 September 1780, below; Adams to Verheyk, 18 October 1780, and the exchange between Adams and Verheyk, 10 November 1780, all in vol. 4, below.
44. 28 December 1780, vol. 4, below.
45. For a more detailed statement of the treatment of texts throughout The Adams Papers, see the Introduction to the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 1961, 1:lv–lix.
46. Vol. 1:xix, above.
Acknowledgments
Docno: AFC03d002
Since these two volumes have been so long in the making, it would be appropriate to repeat many if not most of the names of individuals and institutions mentioned gratefully in the Acknowledgments furnished in all the volumes of The Adams Papers published during the last decade. To do so is manifestly impossible, and the following list of those who have rendered valuable aid in the preparation and production of volumes 3 and 4 of
Adams Family Correspondence
, sometimes in a continuous way and sometimes on small and specialized but important matters, is highly selective.
Two institutions brought The Adams Papers into being, and a third has been vital to its welfare from an early stage.
The Massachusetts Historical Society, under the directorship of Stephen T. Riley, has continued to provide the enterprise a home, the great bulk of the original documentary materials, and essential services of many kinds, even during the period of turmoil of the last several years while it was enlarging and renovating its own physical plant. To the Society and its entire staff we extend our heartfelt thanks.
Harvard University Press, under whose Belknap Press imprint we are honored to have the edition appear, has maintained its editorial and production standards, which are the highest, in a time of stress for all publishers. The unfailing vigilance and resourcefulness of our HUP editor since the very outset, Ann Louise McLaughlin, we shall never cease to marvel at and be grateful for. And the enthusiastic and constructive interest in every aspect of our enterprise shown by Mark Carroll, both before and during his term as director of the Press from 1968 through early 1972, must be recorded with the editors' personal and professional gratitude and admiration.
The financial role of the National Historical Publications Commission since 1964, through funds granted by the Ford Foundation to the National Archives Trust Fund Board, has been formally acknowledged on the copyright page of this volume. But the services performed by the Commission and its staff, for us as for many other like undertakings, have been too multifarious to be detailed. Yet we
{p. R44}
must express our particular thanks to H. B. Fant for his exhaustive searches, under a plan foresightedly worked out by Oliver W. Holmes, for Adams materials among the vast manuscript holdings of the Library of Congress. To Dr. Holmes himself, executive director of the Commission from 1961 through February 1972, we have, along with his countless friends in the historical and archival communities, expressed elsewhere some part of what we feel about his incomparable leadership in the field of documentary editing and publication.
Many other institutions and those who direct and staff them have continued what has become something like a working collaboration between them and our editorial undertaking. Among those that must be named in any such listing are the Adams National Historic Site at Quincy, the Harvard University Library, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the New-York Historical Society, the Reference Branch of the New York Public Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Library of Congress.
In specialized fields we have had the help of, among others, the following: John Alden, Jacob Blanck, and Edwin Wolf 2d on bibliographical problems; the late R. M. Gummere and Zeph Stewart on classical languages; G. D. Goudappel of the Delft Gemeente-archief on Dutch newspapers of John Adams' time; Laurence Wylie on J. Q. Adams' juvenile French; William C. Edwards on the genealogy of early Braintree families; Kimball C. Elkins, Harley P. Holden, Mary Meehan, and Clifford K. Shipton on biographies of 18th-century Harvard graduates; Whitfield J. Bell Jr. on early members and elections in the American Philosophical Society; R. Marquant and Rémi Mathieu of the Archives Nationales on the early Paris postal system; and H. C. Johnson on documents in the Public Record Office, London.
A special word of thanks is due to all those who have helped us in locating, reproducing, and annotating the illustrations. These include, as always, Harold Hugo and his colleagues at The Meriden Gravure Company, as well as Alan Fern and Virginia Daiker of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; W. Downer of the Leyden Gemeente-archief; David McKibbin of the Boston Athenaeum; George S. Rogers of The Papers of Henry Laurens, University of South Carolina; J. W. Schulte Nordholt of the University of Leyden; and Nicholas B. Wainwright of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
As hitherto, our use of original manuscripts owned by other institutions and individuals is acknowledged at the points where these
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manuscripts are printed or quoted—in the case of institutions by symbols, of which a list, with their expanded forms, appears in the Guide to Editorial Apparatus which follows, and in the case of private owners by their full names. Without such continuing generosity on the part of all concerned, our work would fall far short of its scholarly goals.
We are indebted, as heretofore, to a former associate editor of The Adams Papers, Wendell D. Garrett, and to members of the Society's Publication Committee for reading galley proofs; these include Malcolm Freiberg, Stephen T. Riley, and Clifford K. Shipton.
Virtually all members of The Adams Papers staff over the last decade have had some part, incidental or substantial, in the preparation and production of the two volumes now issued. (Transcription of the letters themselves had of course begun even earlier.) Mr. Garrett, before he left his post as associate editor in 1966, had done preliminary collation and furnished materials for annotating many of the letters printed herein. Since then, two Ford Fellows in advanced historical editing, Gaspare J. Saladino, 1968–1969, and B. Richard Burg, 1970–1971, have made editorial contributions during their terms of duty. Former editorial assistants and associates who contributed notably to the work include Susan F. Riggs, D. Maureen Clegg, Sarah I. Morrison, Patricia O'R. Drechsler, and Nancy J. Simkin. The current team of Kate Heath and Kathleen O'Mara have ably and cheerfully assisted the editors in seeing the greater part of these volumes through the press.
Guide to Editorial Apparatus
In the first three sections (1–3) of the six sections of this Guide are listed, respectively, the arbitrary devices used for clarifying the text, the code names for designating prominent members of the Adams family, and the symbols describing the various kinds of MS originals used or referred to, that are employed throughout The Adams Papers in all its series and parts. In the final three sections (4–6) are listed, respectively, only those symbols designating institutions holding original materials, the various abbreviations and conventional terms, and the short titles of books and other works, that occur in volumes 3 and 4 of the
Adams Family Correspondence
. The editors propose to maintain this pattern for the Guide to Editorial Apparatus in each of the smaller units, published at intervals, of all the series and parts of the edition that are so extensive as to continue through many volumes. On the other hand, in short and specialized series and/or parts of the edition, the Guide to Editorial Apparatus will be given more summary form tailored to its immediate purpose.
Textual Devices
The following devices will be used throughout The Adams Papers to clarify the presentation of the text.
| [...], [....] | One or two words missing and not conjecturable. |
| [...], [....] | More than two words missing and not conjecturable; subjoined footnote estimates amount of missing matter. |
| [ ] | Number or part of a number missing or illegible. Amount of blank space inside brackets approximates the number of missing or illegible digits. |
| [roman] | Conjectural reading for missing or illegible matter. A question mark is inserted before the closing bracket if the conjectural reading is seriously doubtful. |
| <italic> | Matter canceled in the manuscript but restored in our text. |
| [italic] | Matter editorially inserted. |
| ||roman|| | Matter editorially decoded. |
Adams Family Code Names
| First Generation | |
|---|---|
| JA | John Adams (1735–1826) |
| AA | Abigail Smith (1744–1818), m. JA 1764 |
| {p. R47} | |
| Second Generation | |
| JQA | John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), son of JA and AA |
| LCA | Louisa Catherine Johnson (1775–1852), m. JQA 1797 |
| CA | Charles Adams (1770–1800), son of JA and AA |
| Mrs. CA | Sarah Smith (1769–1828), sister of WSS, m. CA 1795 |
| TBA | Thomas Boylston Adams (1772–1832), son of JA and AA |
| Mrs. TBA | Ann Harrod (1774?–1845), m. TBA 1805 |
| AA2 | Abigail Adams (1765–1813), daughter of JA and AA, m. WSS 1786 |
| WSS | William Stephens Smith (1755–1816), brother of Mrs. CA |
| Third Generation | |
| GWA | George Washington Adams (1801–1829), son of JQA and LCA |
| JA2 | John Adams (1803–1834), son of JQA and LCA |
| Mrs. JA2 | Mary Catherine Hellen (1806?–1870), m. JA2 1828 |
| CFA | Charles Francis Adams (1807–1886), son of JQA and LCA |
| ABA | Abigail Brown Brooks (1808–1889), m. CFA 1829 |
| ECA | Elizabeth Coombs Adams (1808–1903), daughter of TBA and Mrs. TBA |
| Fourth Generation | |
| JQA2 | John Quincy Adams (1833–1894), son of CFA and ABA |
| CFA2 | Charles Francis Adams (1835–1915), son of CFA and ABA |
| HA | Henry Adams (1838–1918), son of CFA and ABA |
| MHA | Marian Hooper (1842–1885), m. HA 1872 |
| BA | Brooks Adams (1848–1927), son of CFA and ABA |
| LCA2 | Louisa Catherine Adams (1831–1870), daughter of CFA and ABA, m. Charles Kuhn 1854 |
| MA | Mary Adams (1845–1928), daughter of CFA and ABA, m. Henry Parker Quincy 1877 |
| Fifth Generation | |
| CFA3 | Charles Francis Adams (1866–1954), son of JQA2 |
| HA2 | Henry Adams (1875–1951), son of CFA2 |
Descriptive Symbols
The following symbols will be employed throughout The Adams Papers to describe or identify in brief form the various kinds of manuscript originals.
| D | Diary (Used only to designate a diary written by a member of the Adams family and always in combination with the short form of the writer's name and a serial number, as follows: D/JA/23, i.e. the twenty-third fascicle or volume of John Adams' manuscript Diary.) |
| Dft | draft |
| Dupl | duplicate |
| FC | file copy (Ordinarily a copy of a letter retained by a correspondent other than an Adams, for example Jefferson's press copies and polygraph copies, since all three of the Adams statesmen {p. R48} systematically entered copies of their outgoing letters in letterbooks.) |
| Lb | Letterbook (Used only to designate Adams letterbooks and always in combination with the short form of the writer's name and a serial number, as follows: Lb/JQA/29, i.e. the twenty-ninth volume of John Quincy Adams' Letterbooks.) |
| LbC | letterbook copy (Letterbook copies are normally unsigned, but any such copy is assumed to be in the hand of the person responsible for the text unless it is otherwise described.) |
| M | Miscellany (Used only to designate materials in the section of the Adams Papers known as the “Miscellany” and always in combination with the short form of the writer's name and a serial number, as follows: M/CFA/32, i.e. the thirty-second volume of the Charles Francis Adams Miscellany—a ledger volume mainly containing transcripts made by CFA in 1833 of selections from the family papers.) |
| MS, MSS | manuscript, manuscripts |
| RC | recipient's copy (A recipient's copy is assumed to be in the hand of the signer unless it is otherwise described.) |
| Tr | transcript (A copy, handwritten or typewritten, made substantially later than the original or than other copies—such as duplicates, file copies, letterbook copies—that were made contemporaneously.) |
| Tripl | triplicate |
Location Symbols
| CSmH | Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery |
| DLC | Library of Congress |
| DNA | The National Archives |
| ICHi | Chicago Historical Society |
| M-Ar | Massachusetts Archives |
| MB | Boston Public Library |
| MBAt | Boston Athenaeum |
| MBCo | Countway Library of Medicine (Harvard – Boston Medical Libraries) |
| MH | Harvard College Library |
| MH-Ar | Harvard University Archives |
| MHi | Massachusetts Historical Society |
| MQA | Adams National Historic Site, Quincy, Massachusetts |
| MWA | American Antiquarian Society |
| MeHi | Maine Historical Society |
| MiU-C | William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan |
| NHi | New-York Historical Society |
| NN | New York Public Library |
| NhD | Dartmouth College Library |
| NjMoW | Washington Headquarters Library, Morristown National Historic Park, New Jersey |
| PHarH | Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg |
| PHi | Historical Society of Pennsylvania |
| PPAmP | American Philosophical Society |
Other Abbreviations and Conventional Terms
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Adams Genealogy - A set of genealogical charts and a concise biographical register of the Adams family in the Presidential line and of closely related families from the 17th through the 19th century. The Adams Genealogy is now being compiled and will be published as a part of The Adams Papers.
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Adams Papers - Manuscripts and other materials, 1639–1889, in the Adams Manuscript Trust collection given to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1956 and enlarged by a few additions of family papers since then. Citations in the present edition are simply by date of the original document if the original is in the main chronological series of the Papers and therefore readily found in the microfilm edition of the Adams Papers (see below). The location of materials in the Letterbooks and in the volumes of Miscellany is given more fully and, if the original would be hard to locate, by the microfilm reel number.
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Adams Papers, Microfilms - The corpus of the Adams Papers, 1639–1889, as published on microfilm by the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1954–1959, in 608 reels. Cited in the present work, when necessary, by reel number. Available in research libraries throughout the United States and in a few libraries in Europe.
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The Adams Papers - The present edition in letterpress, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. References to earlier volumes of any given unit will take this form: vol. 2:146. Since there will be no over-all volume numbering for the edition, references from one series, or unit of a series, to another will be by title, volume, and page; for example, JA, Diary and Autobiography, 4:205.
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Arch. Aff. Etr., Corr. Pol., E.-U., Paris - Archives Affaires Etrangères, Correspondance Politique, Etats-Unis, Paris.
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PCC - Papers of the Continental Congress. Originals in the National Archives: Record Group 360. Microfilm edition in 204 reels. Usually cited in the present work from the microfilms, but according to the original series and volume numbering devised in the State Department in the early 19th century; for example, PCC, No. 93, III, i.e. the third volume of series 93.
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P.R.O. - Public Record Office, London.
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Quincy, First Church, MS Records - First Church of Quincy, Mass., MS Records, 1639–1854.
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RG - Record Group. Used, with appropriate numbers, to designate the location of documents in the National Archives.
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Thwing Catalogue, MHi - Annie Haven Thwing, comp., Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630–1800; typed card catalogue, with supplementary bound typescripts, in the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Short Titles of Works Frequently Cited
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AA, Letters, ed. CFA, 1840 - Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams. With an Introductory Memoir by Her Grandson, Charles Francis Adams, Boston, 1840.
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AA2, Jour. and Corr. -
Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, Daughter of John Adams, . . . edited by Her Daughter [Caroline Amelia (Smith) de Windt], New York and London, 1841–[1849]; 3 vols.Note: Vol. [1], unnumbered, has title and date: Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, 1841; vol. 2 has title, volume number, and date: Correspondence of Miss Adams . . . Vol. II, 1842; vol. [3] has title, volume number, and date: Correspondence of Miss Adams . . ., Vol. II, 1842[!], i.e. same as vol. 2, but preface is signed “April 3d, 1849”[!], and the volume contains as “Part II” a complete reprinting from same type, and with same pagination, of vol. 2 (i.e. “Vol. II”), above, originally issued in 1842.
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Adams Family Correspondence - Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield and others, Cambridge, 1963– .
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AHR - American Historical Review.
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Ann. Register - The Annual Register: A Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad, ed. Edmund Burke and others, London, 1759– .
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Appletons' Cyclo. Amer. Biog. - James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography, New York, 1887–1889; 6 vols.
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Austin, Gerry - James T. Austin, The Life of Elbridge Gerry. With Contemporary Letters, Boston, 1828–1829; 2 vols. [Vol. 1:] To the Close of the American Revolution; [vol. 2:] From the Close of the American Revolution.
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Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets - Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776, Cambridge, 1965– .
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Barry, History of Mass. - John Stetson Barry, The History of Massachusetts, Boston, 1855–1857; 3 vols.
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Bemis, Diplomacy of the Amer. Revolution - Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution: The Foundations of American Diplomacy, 1775–1823, New York and London, 1935.
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Biog. Dir. Cong. - Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774–1949, Washington, 1950.
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Black, Law Dictionary - Henry Campbell Black, A Law Dictionary Containing Definitions of the Terms and Phrases of American and English Jurisprudence Ancient and Modern, 2d edn., St. Paul, Minn., 1910.
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BM, Catalogue - The British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books, 1881–1900, Ann Arbor, 1946; 58 vols. Supplement, 1900–1905, Ann Arbor, 1950; 10 vols.
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BN, Catalogue - Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), Catalogue générale des livres imprimés de la Bibliothèque nationale: Auteurs, Paris, 1897– .
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Boston Record Commissioners, Reports - City of Boston, Record Commissioners, Reports, Boston, 1876–1909; 39 vols.
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Braintree Town Records - Samuel A. Bates, ed., Records of the Town of Braintree, 1640 to 1793, Randolph, Mass., 1886.
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Brooks, Medford - Charles Brooks, History of the Town of Medford, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, From its First Settlement in 1630 to 1855, rev. . . . by James M. Usher, Boston, 1886.
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Burnett, Continental Congress - Edmund C. Burnett, The Continental Congress, New York, 1941.
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Burnett, ed., Letters of Members - Edmund C. Burnett, ed., Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, Washington, 1921–1936; 8 vols.
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Cal. Franklin Papers, A.P.S. - I. Minis Hays, comp., Calendar of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1908; 5 vols.
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Catalogue of JA's Library - Catalogue of the John Adams Library in the Public Library of the City of Boston, Boston, 1917.
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Catalogue of JQA's Books - Worthington C. Ford, ed., A Catalogue of the Books of John Quincy Adams Deposited in the Boston Athenaeum. With Notes on Books, Adams Seals and Book-Plates, by Henry Adams, Boston, 1938.
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CFA, Diary - Diary of Charles Francis Adams, Cambridge, 1964– . Vols. 1–2, ed. Aïda DiPace Donald and David Donald; vols. 3–4, ed. Marc Friedlaender and L. H. Butterfield.
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Col. Soc. Mass., Pubns. - Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications.
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Commonwealth Hist. of Mass. - Albert Bushnell Hart, ed., Commonwealth History of Massachusetts: Colony, Province and State, New York, 1927–1930; 5 vols.
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Cushing, History of the Transition - Harry A. Cushing, History of the Transition from Provincial to Commonwealth Government in Massachusetts (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, vol. 7, no. 1), New York, 1896.
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DAB - Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, New York, 1928–1936; 20 vols. plus index and supplements.
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DAH - James Truslow Adams and R. V. Coleman, eds., Dictionary of American History, New York, 1940; 5 vols. and index.
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Deane Papers - Papers of Silas Deane, 1774–1790, in New-York Historical Society, Collections, Publication Fund Series, vols. 19–23, New York, 1887–1891; 5 vols.
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Dexter, Yale Graduates - Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, with Annals of the College History, New York, 1885–1912; 6 vols.
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Dezallier, Environs de Paris, 1779 - [Antoine Nicolas Dezallier d'Argenville,] Voyage pittoresque des environs de Paris, 4e. édn., Paris, 1779.
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Dict. Amer. Fighting Ships - U.S. Navy Department, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Naval History Division, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Washington, 1959– .
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Dict. historique de la ville de Paris, 1779 - Pierre Thomas Nicolas Hurtaut and —— Magny, Dictionnaire historique de la ville de Paris et de ses environs . . ., Paris, 1779; 4 vols.
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DNB - Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds., The Dictionary of National Biography, New York and London, 1885–1900; 63 vols. plus supplements.
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Essex Inst., Hist. Colls. - Essex Institute Historical Collections.
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Evans - Charles Evans and others, comps., American Bibliography: A Chronological Dictionary of All Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America [1639–1800], Chicago and Worcester, 1903–1959; 14 vols.
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Ford, Mass. Broadsides - [Worthington C. Ford, comp.,] Broadsides, Ballads &c. Printed in Massachusetts, 1639–1800 (Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, vol. 75), Boston, 1922.
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Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend - Worthington C. Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend: Correspondence of John Adams with Benjamin Waterhouse, 1784–1822, Boston, 1927.
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Franklin, Papers, ed. Labaree and Willcox - The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, William B. Willcox (from vol. 15), and others, New Haven, 1959– .
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Franklin, Writings, ed. Smyth - The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert Henry Smyth, New York and London, 1905–1907; 10 vols.
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Gérard, Despatches and Instructions - Despatches and Instructions of Conrad Alexandre Gérard, 1778–1780: Correspondence of the First French Minister to the United States with the Comte de Vergennes, ed. John J. Meng, Baltimore, 1939.
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Gottschalk, Lafayette - Louis Gottschalk, Lafayette, Chicago, 1935–1950; 4 vols. [Vol. 1:] Lafayette Comes to America; [vol. 2:] Lafayette Joins the American Army; [vol. 3:] Lafayette and the Close of the American Revolution; [vol. 4:] Lafayette between the American and the French Revolution (1783–1789).
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Grandmother Tyler's Book - Frederick Tupper and Helen Tyler Brown, eds., Grandmother Tyler's Book: The Recollections of Mary Palmer Tyler (Mrs. Royall Tyler), 1775–1866, New York and London, 1925.
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Haraszti, JA and the Prophets of Progress - Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, Cambridge, 1952.
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Harper's Dict. of Classical Lit. - Harry Thurston Peck, ed., Harper's Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities, New York, 1898.
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Harvard Quinquennial Cat. - Harvard University, Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates, 1636–1930, Cambridge, 1930.
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Heitman, Register Continental Army - Francis B. Heitman, comp., Historical Register of Officers of the Continental Army during the War of the Revolution, new edn., Washington, 1914.
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Hoefer, Nouv. biog. générale - J. C. F. Hoefer, ed., Nouvelle biographie générale depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à nos jours, Paris, 1852–1866; 46 vols.
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Hutchinson, Diary and Letters - The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, ed. Peter Orlando Hutchinson, Boston, 1884–1886; 2 vols.
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JA, Collection of State-Papers, 1782 - [JA, comp.,] A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgement of the Sovereignity[!] of the United States of America, and the Reception of Their Minister Plenipotentiary, by Their High-Mightinesses the States-General of the United Netherlands, The Hague, 1782.
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JA, Corr. in the Boston Patriot - Correspondence of the Late President Adams. Originally Published in the Boston Patriot. In a Series of Letters, Boston, 1809[–1810]; 10 pts.
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JA, Diary and Autobiography - Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield and others, Cambridge, 1961; 4 vols.
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JA, Earliest Diary - The Earliest Diary of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield and others, Cambridge, 1966.
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JA, Legal Papers - Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, Cambridge, 1965; 3 vols.
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JA, Works - The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, ed. Charles Francis Adams, Boston, 1850–1856; 10 vols.
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JA-AA, Familiar Letters - Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams, during the Revolution. With a Memoir of Mrs. Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, New York, 1876.
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Jay, Correspondence and Public Papers - The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, ed. Henry P. Johnston, New York and London, 1890–1893; 4 vols.
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JCC - Worthington C. Ford and others, eds., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, Washington, 1904–1937; 34 vols.
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Jefferson, Papers, ed. Boyd - The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd and others, Princeton, 1950– .
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Jones, Loyalists of Mass. - E. Alfred Jones, The Loyalists of Massachusetts: Their Memorials, Petitions and Claims, London, 1930.
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JQA, Memoirs - Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, ed. Charles Francis Adams, Philadelphia, 1874–1877; 12 vols.
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Kelly, Amer. Medical Biog. - Howard A. Kelly, A Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography . . . from 1610 to 1910, Philadelphia and London, 1912; 2 vols.
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Lasseray, Les français sous les treize étoiles - André Lasseray, Les français sous les treize étoiles (1775–1783), Macon and Paris, 1935; 2 vols.
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LC, Catalog - A Catalog of Books Represented by Library of Congress Printed Cards, Ann Arbor, 1942–1946; 167 vols. Supplement, Ann Arbor, 1948; 42 vols.
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R.H. Lee, Letters, ed. Ballagh - The Letters of Richard Henry Lee, ed. James C. Ballagh, New York, 1911–1914; 2 vols.
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Lüthy, La banque protestante en France - Herbert Lüthy, La banque protestante en France de la révocation de l'édit de Nantes à la Révolution, Paris, 1959–1961; 2 vols.
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Madison, Papers, ed. Hutchinson - The Papers of James Madison, eds. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal, Chicago, 1962– .
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Mass., Acts and Laws - Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts [1780–1805], Boston, 1890–1898; 13 vols.
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Mass. Constitutional Convention, 1779–1780, Journal - Journal of the Convention for Framing a Constitution of Government for the State of Massachusetts Bay, . . . September 1, 1779, . . . to June 16, 1780, Boston, 1832.
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Mass., House Jour. - Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts [1715– ], Boston, reprinted by the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1919– . (For the years for which reprints are not yet available, the original printings are cited, by year and session.)
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Mass., Province Laws - The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, Boston, 1869–1922; 21 vols.
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Mass. Soldiers and Sailors - Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, Boston, 1896–1908; 17 vols.
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MHS, Colls., Procs. - Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections and Proceedings.
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Miller, ed., Treaties - Hunter Miller, ed., Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, Washington, 1931–1948; 8 vols.
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Monaghan, John Jay - Frank Monaghan, John Jay, Defender of Liberty . . ., New York and Indianapolis, 1935.
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Morison, H. G. Otis - Samuel Eliot Morison, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765–1848, Boston and New York, 1913; 2 vols.
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Morris, Peacemakers - Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence, New York, 1965.
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NEHGR - New England Historical and Genealogical Register.
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NEQ - New England Quarterly.
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Nieuw Ned. Biog. Woordenboek - P. C. Molhuysen and others, eds., Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek, Leyden, 1911–1937; 10 vols.
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OED - The Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, 1933; 12 vols. and supplement.
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Oliver, Portraits of JA and AA - Andrew Oliver, Portraits of John and Abigail Adams, Cambridge, 1967.
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Oliver, Portraits of JQA and His Wife - Andrew Oliver, Portraits of John Quincy Adams and His Wife, Cambridge, 1970.
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Paige, Hist. of Cambridge, Mass. - Lucius R. Paige, History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630–1877. With a Genealogical Register, Boston and New York, 1877. Supplement and Index . . ., by Mary I. Gozzaldi, Cambridge, 1930.
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Parliamentary Hist. - The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, London: Hansard, 1806–1820; 36 vols.
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Pattee, Old Braintree and Quincy - William S. Pattee, A History of Old Braintree and Quincy, with a Sketch of Randolph and Holbrook, Quincy, 1878.
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PMHB - Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.
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Repertorium der diplomatischen Vertreten aller Länder - Repertorium der diplomatischen Vertreten aller Länder seit dem Westfälischen Frieden (1648), ed. Ludwig Bittner and others, Oldenburg, &c., 1936–1965; 3 vols.
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Benjamin Rush, Letters - Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield, Princeton, 1951; 2 vols.
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Sabin - Joseph Sabin and others, comps., A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, from Its Discovery to the Present Time, New York, 1868–1936; 29 vols.
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Sabine, Loyalists - Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, with an Historical Essay, Boston, 1864; 2 vols.
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Sheppard, Tucker - John H. Sheppard, The Life of Samuel Tucker, Commodore in the American Revolution, Boston, 1868.
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Sibley-Shipton, Harvard Graduates - John Langdon Sibley and Clifford K. Shipton, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cambridge and Boston, 1873– .
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Stevens, Facsimiles - B. F. Stevens's Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives Relating to America, 1773–1783, London, 1889–1898; 25 vols.
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Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island - I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1919, New York, 1915–1928; 6 vols.
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Thiéry, Almanach du voyageur à Paris - Luc Vincent Thiéry, Almanach du voyageur à Paris . . ., année 1784, Paris [1784].
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John Trumbull, Autobiography, ed. Sizer, 1953 - The Autobiography of Colonel John Trumbull, Patriot-Artist, 1756–1843, ed. Theodore Sizer, New Haven, 1953.
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Van der Kemp, Autobiography - Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 1752–1829: An Autobiography, Together with Extracts from His Correspondence, ed. Helen Lincklaen Fairchild, New York and London, 1903.
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Van Doren, Secret History - Carl Van Doren, Secret History of the American Revolution, New York, 1941.
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Walpole, Corr., ed. W. S. Lewis - The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis and others, New Haven, 1937– .
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Warren-Adams Letters - Warren-Adams Letters: Being Chiefly a Correspondence among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren (Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, vols. 72–73), Boston, 1917–1925; 2 vols.
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Washington, Writings, ed. Fitzpatrick - The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, Washington, 1931–1944; 39 vols.
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Washington, Writings, ed. Sparks - The Writings of George Washington, . . . with a Life of the Author, ed. Jared Sparks, Boston, 1839–1840; 12 vols.
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Weis, Colonial Clergy of N.E. - Frederick Lewis Weis, comp., The Colonial Clergy and the Colonial Churches of New England, Lancaster, Mass., 1936.
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Wharton, ed., Dipl. Corr. Amer. Rev. - Francis Wharton, ed., The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, Washington, 1889; 6 vols.
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WMQ - William and Mary Quarterly.
volume 3
Family Correspondence
1778–1780
Cite web page as: Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Winthrops and the Adamses, ed.C. James Taylor. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2007.
http://www.masshist.org/ff/
http://www.masshist.org/ff/