by Sarah Hume, Editorial Assistant, Adams Papers

The latest Adams Presidential Library rotating exhibit has arrived! The relationship between George Washington and John Adams unfolds through documents and artifacts in Washington and Adams: A Tale of Two POTUSes, on view at the MHS through mid-December, 2025.

The two men met in 1774 during the First Continental Congress. Adams immediately found Washington to be a talented military man of good character. When the time came for the Continental Congress to choose a leader for the new army, Adams had the perfect man in mind; he recommended George Washington as commander.

“Mr. Washington, who happened to sit near the Door, as soon as he heard me allude to him, from his Usual Modesty darted into the Library Room,” Adams wrote. “A Gentleman whose Skill and Experience as an Officer. . . would command the Approbation of all America, and unite the cordial Exertions of all the Colonies better than any other Person in the Union.”

The Washington and Adams families grew close during and after the American Revolution, with a 15-year-old John Quincy Adams even hanging a portrait of Washington in his room. Upon Washington’s inauguration as the nation’s first president, Abigail Adams observed, “He appears to be the most sensibly affected with the supreme and over Ruling providence which has calld him to Rule over this great people rather to feel Humble than Elated.”

Behind the scenes, Washington, and Adams as vice president, worried about setting precedents for the new nation. They corresponded about protocols for congressional recesses, informal visits, and the correct title to use for the chief executive. Washington submitted a list of queries to Adams about best practices. “Many things which appear of little importance in themselves and at the beginning may have great & durable consequences from their having been established at the commencement of a new general Govt.,” Washington noted.

With the election of 1796, the nation chose Adams as its second president, the first peaceful transfer of power between two US executives. Even so, Adams feared the public would find him “less Splendid” than Washington, whose popularity and military background differed from Adams’s public reception and diplomatic experience. “He Seem’d to me to enjoy a Tryumph over me,” Adams wrote of Washington. “Methought I heard him think Ay! I am out and you fairly in! see which of Us will be happiest.”

Adams, however, would not let Washington stay retired for long. In September 1798, he nominated the Virginian once again to command the nation’s army, despite Washington’s “sorrow at being drawn from [his] retirement” (Washington to Adams, 25 Sept. 1798).  When Washington died a year later, Adams guided a mourning nation through the loss. The legacy of the two remained intertwined and their relationship continues to be a topic of interest.

See these documents and more in the new rotating exhibit Washington and Adams: A Tale of Two POTUSes and keep an eye on the MHS Calendar of Events for a gallery talk that will be announced later this fall!

The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Current funding of the edition is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Packard Humanities Institute.

by Heather Rockwood, Communications Manager

Saying goodbye to those who are dear to us is always difficult. But maybe less so for letter writers who say goodbye at the end of their letters instead of in person. Here are a few of my favorite letter signoffs from the MHS collection and archives.

“yours affectionatly AA”

“We have no other news at present peculiarly worthy of communication, and I therefore close my letter with the assurance that I am with all due respect and affection, your Son. J. Q. Adams.”

“I have not time for more and I dare say you will think this quite enough from your most affectionate Mother
L. C. A.”

by Sarah Hume, Editorial Assistant, Adams Papers

On 7 September 1842, John Quincy Adams took his seat on the 6 o’clock A.M. train from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. The weather was warm, with more than thirty people crowding onto the train. Among them were Robert Tyler and John Tyler Jr., sons of President John Tyler. When asked if they had spoken with Adams, Robert “answered no, because [Adams] had abused his father.”

Certainly, John Quincy Adams harbored no love for John Tyler. After former president William Henry Harrison died one month after his inauguration, vice-president Tyler assumed the presidency. It was the first time an acting president had died in office and the Constitution failed to provide clear next steps.

In Adams’ opinion, Tyler should have been “Vice-President acting as President,” but instead Tyler took the office. To make matters worse, Adams found Tyler “principled against all improvement— With all the interests and passions, and vices of Slavery rooted in his moral and political constitution—with talents not above mediocrity” (JQA, Diary, 4 April 1841). This extended to Tyler’s family as well.

“Captain Tyler’s two sons are to him what nephews have usually been to the Pope, and among his minor vices is nepotism,” Adams wrote. “The son John was so distended with his dignity as Secretary that he had engraved on his visiting cards ‘John Tyler junr. Private and confidential Secretary of his Excellency John Tyler, President of the United States.’”

Adams himself was no stranger to nepotism. When he had been a young diplomat, his father President John Adams nominated him for a diplomatic post in Prussia. John Quincy had long vowed he would never take a position given by his father. When he accepted the post out of duty for public service, he felt he had “broken a resolution that I had deliberately formed…  I have never acted more reluctantly” (JQA to AA, 29 July 1797).

In Adams’ eyes, the same could not be said for John Tyler’s sons. The two men seemed to revel in their newfound power. “Robert is as confidential as John, and both of them divulged all his cabinet secrets to a man named Parmelee and John Howard Payne, hired Reporters for Bennett’s Herald Newspaper at New-York,” Adams wrote (JQA, Diary, 7 Sept. 1842).

Just a few short months later, T.N. Parmelee would be dismissed from the paper for his “indolence and incompetence,” and move to Washington, D.C. to “hang upon the President and his friends,” as reported by the New York Herald on 31 Dec. 1842.

In this way, Adams’ views were confirmed: Tyler’s sons and T.N. Parmalee had little confidentiality to spare. These ethical questions of nepotism, pride, and public good raised the tension between Adams and John Tyler, exacerbating their public issues over slavery.

And though Adams predicted that slavery would ultimately end, he sensed that it would come at a cost. “The conflict will be terrible,” he wrote on 13 Dec. 1838, “and the progress of improvement perhaps retrograde before its final progress to consummation.”

The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding for the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary was provided by the Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund, with additional contributions by Harvard University Press and a number of private donors. The Mellon Foundation in partnership with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission also supports the project through funding for the Society’s digital publishing collaborative, the Primary Source Cooperative.

by Gwen Fries, Adams Papers

Dear Reader,

How did you enjoy the “rich mental feast” of Anne MacVicar Grant’s Letters from the Mountains? (Not ringing a bell? You have a bonus blog post to read!) I so enjoyed getting to know Mrs. Grant. It’s easy to fall in love with someone through their letters—what merits inclusion, what advice they give to one in need, how they comfort a friend who mourns, and especially the humorous and generous way they see those around them.

My only sadness in reading Grant’s Letters is the fact that she and Abigail Adams never met. We’ve all read a book or listened to a lyric that felt like it was written just for us. How badly do we want to sit down and chat with someone who understands us on that profound level? I have no doubt Adams and Grant would have been the best of friends.

Speaking of Abigail’s dearest friend, last time I promised that John would have the next pick. While I desperately wanted to pick a fun book that I would enjoy reading, in my heart of hearts I know John’s idea of fun has to do with the science of government. Thus, our pick is William Ellis’s translation of Aristotle’s Treatise on Government.

Don’t click away yet! I can redeem myself!

Our friends at the Boston Public Library hold John Adams’s actual copy of the book and have kindly digitized it for the public—marginalia and all!

What better way to get inside a person’s head than to see what sentences struck them and required underlining? Or to read where they disagreed and why? This is essentially a chance to pick John Adams’s brain. Seize it!

The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding of the edition is currently provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Packard Humanities Institute. Major funding for the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary was provided by the Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund, with additional contributions by Harvard University Press and a number of private donors. The Mellon Foundation in partnership with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission also supports the project through funding for the Society’s digital publishing collaborative, the Primary Source Cooperative.

by Heather Rockwood, Communications Manager

On 22 April 1790, John Adams and Congress learned of Benjamin Franklin’s death due to pleurisy, a lung condition. Upon learning of his friend’s death, Adams wrote an imagined conversation between four historical figures, as they waited for Franklin’s arrival in the afterlife. Adams then filed it away and more than two decades later came across it while searching “among a heap of forgotten rubbish for another paper….” In 1813, he added to the bottom of the work:

“Quincy Nov. 24. 1813.

This little thing, was written at Richmond Hill, or Church Hill, where I lived in New York in 1789, in an Evening after the News arrived of Dr Franklins Death, and after I had retired to my Family, after presiding in the Senate of U.S. The moment when it was written is the most curious Circumstance attending it.”

This style of writing—the imagined conversation—was popularized by the Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata (b. ca.120 CE) and was utilized by the French writer Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757). The conversationalists in this imagined scenario were Charlemagne (747–814), the first Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; Frederick II (1194–1250), another Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), a French philosopher, originally from Switzerland, whose novels inspired the French Revolutionaries and the subsequent Romantic generation; and James Otis (1725–1783), a lawyer and politician from Massachusetts and a friend and mentor to John Adams, who also happens to be one of my favorite pre-Founding Fathers.

The conversation starts discussing Franklin and whether he had “passed the River,” perhaps meaning the River Styx, with Otis saying he had not and he cared not. Otis also says, “[Franklin] told some very pretty moral Tales from the head—and Some very immoral ones from the heart. I never liked him: so if you please We will change the subject. Populus Vult Decipi, decipiatur was his Maxim.” Populus Vult Decipi, decipiatur is noted to mean “The people want to be deceived, so let them be deceived.”

That sentence captures James Otis’s eloquence with words, as well as Franklin’s temperament. Perhaps John Adams should have been a writer, not a politician?

Then the speakers move on to flattering each other, then chastising each other for their faults. In turn, each repents, saying if he returned to earth, he would mend his ways and warn others against acting how he did the first time around.

Upon discovering this piece of writing in 1813, John Adams sent it to James Otis’s sister, Mercy Otis Warren, a playwright and historian. She wrote back, “The sketch in my hand in connection with some of the greatest actors who have exhibited their parts on this narrow stage of human action, is a proof of your correct knowledge of history and your capacity for comparing the ages of Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, Rousseau, and Otis, though in times so remote from each other, and drawing the results of their sentiments and transactions and the operation thereof on the moral conduct of mankind in our own age and in that of Posterity.”

Read the entire Dialogues of the Dead. Read more about James Otis and his sister Mercy Otis Warren in this Beehive blog.

by Gwen Fries, Production Editor, Adams Papers

I don’t imagine you’ll be too bowled over when I tell you that I believe the Adamses’ writings have great value. There’s a reason that a team of us dedicate our lives to making their words and ideas accessible to all. (Have I mentioned our free digital edition?) While we give them hours of every day, our closest attention—and possibly our eyesight years before it would’ve failed otherwise—I don’t think we can ever repay all the wisdom, adventure, and laughter they give us. Frankly, they’re the best company for which you could ever wish.

So, when a member of the Adams family writes about something they read that gave them the same kind of rush, my ears prick up. Thus was born my idea of Adams Book Club, where we find free and accessible works and read them to gain a deeper understanding of the Adamses and what make them tick. First up? Anne MacVicar Grant’s Letters from the Mountains.

“Pray have you met with these Letters from the Mountains?” Abigail Adams wrote to her daughter Abigail Adams Smith (Nabby) on 13 May 1809. “If you have not, I will certainly send them to you.” The “Mountains” in question are the Scottish Highlands. If you’ve been following along at home, you know Abigail had a particular affinity for all things Scottish. (Am I saying Abigail would’ve been an Outlander fan?…I’m not not saying that.)

“I have never met with any letters half so interesting,” Abigail gushed to her daughter. “Her style is easy and natural, it flows from the heart and reaches the heart. In the early part of her life, and before she met with severe trials and afflictions, her letters are full of vivacity, blended with sentiment and erudition. Though secluded from the gay world, she appears well acquainted with life and manners. Her principles, her morals, her religion, are of the purest kind.”

Abigail recommended the Letters to many in her orbit of influence, including her son John Quincy Adams, who took a copy on the boat to St. Petersburg. On 11 August 1809, he recorded in his (free and fully accessible online) diary, “The Night was almost entirely calm— I employed much of it in reading Mrs: Grant’s letters, which I find more interesting than Plutarch— I return to them of choice.”

We’ve all had a book find us when we needed it most. In the spring and summer of 1809, Abigail had her daughter move to the backwoods of New York, her son leave for the other side of the world, and with her 65th birthday rapidly approaching was feeling the weight of her years. “The more I read, the more I was delighted,” she confided to Nabby, “until that enthusiasm which she so well describes, took full possession of my soul, and made me for a time forget that the roses had fled from my cheeks, and the lustre departed from my eyes.”

“I long to communicate to you this rich mental feast,” Abigail wrote. And so I communicate it to you, dear reader. Meet you next month to discuss the Letters and to delve into John Adams’s retirement reads!

The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding of the edition is currently provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Packard Humanities Institute. Major funding for the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary was provided by the Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund, with additional contributions by Harvard University Press and a number of private donors. The Mellon Foundation in partnership with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission also supports the project through funding for the Society’s digital publishing collaborative, the Primary Source Cooperative.