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.
“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.”
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.
John Tyler
“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).
John Quincy Adams
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.
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.
A page from the volume, featuring comments in Adams’s own hand.
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.
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.
James Otis, Jr., by Joseph Blackburn, 1755. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
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.”
by Sara Georgini, Series Editor, The Papers of John Adams
John Adams was nervous. Readying for his 4 March 1797 presidential inauguration, Adams flashed back to his days as a suburban schoolteacher, revolutionary lawyer, and self-taught statesman. The United States, born in the “Minds and Hearts of the People,” did not exist when Adams started out over forty years earlier. Neither did the shiny new role of president. Was he up to the job? “I never in my life felt Such an awful Weight of obligation to devote all my time, and all the forces that remain, to the Public,” he reassured Elbridge Gerry on 20 February 1797.
John Adams, by William Winstanley, 1798. Adams National Historical Park.
Brimming with international intrigue, domestic drama, and sly cabinet maneuvers, Volume 22 of The Papers of John Adams provides an insider’s tour of Adams’s tumultuous first year in office. This 59th volume published by the Adams Papers editorial project includes 304 documents that chronicle John Adams’s work from February 1797 to February 1798, revealing a new profile. Of the presidency, Adams vowed in his inaugural address: “It shall be my Strenuous Endeavour.” The popular narrative of Adams’s presidency is that he sidelined an inherited cabinet and chose to set major policy solo. This volume offers a richer and more complex history of a veteran statesman struggling within the bounds of the federal structure that he co-created.
Adams enjoyed just a few celebratory weeks on the job, before a wave of crises hit. Operating within the global upheaval of European war, the second president faced a set of hard trials. French privateers preyed on neutral American commerce. Yellow fever afflicted the federal seat in Philadelphia. Adams labored with Congress to shift money and resources for military preparedness. He drove the point home in his 28 Nov. 1797 note to the Senate: “A mercantile Marine and a military Marine must grow up together: one cannot long exist, without the other.” The Quasi-War loomed. Yet John Adams’s letters reveal an administration stubbornly bent on pursuing a policy of strategic peace—even at great personal and political cost.
Running the nation’s highest office presented fresh challenges for the lifelong public servant. From a glance at his overflowing desk, it seemed like everyone wanted something right now from the new chief: a job, a pardon, some patronage to float a book idea or to fund an invention. “The friends of my youth are generally gone,” Adams lamented to Joseph Ward on 6 April 1797. “The friends of my Early political Life are chiefly departed—of the few that remain, Some have been found on a late occasion Weak, Envious, jealous, and Spiteful, humiliated and mortified and duped Enough by French Finesse, and Jacobinical rascality to Shew it to me and to the world, Others have been found faithful and true, generous and Manly.” Beyond his wife Abigail, whom did he trust? Volume 22 sketches Adams’s widening networks, as he brokered relationships with a cabinet comprised of Charles Lee, James McHenry, Timothy Pickering, and Oliver Wolcott Jr.
Thomas Buttersworth, “An Armed Revenue Cutter on Patrol with a Potential Quarry Sheltering below the Cliffs,” ca. 1802.
Overall, the urgent question of France dominated Adams’s mind. Shipping losses mounted. The country’s small fleet of revenue cutters worked mightily to defend American interests, but Adams knew that it was hard to safeguard the economy without the protection of a professional navy. He strained to salvage a tattered alliance and hold off war. “Commerce has made this Country what it is; and it cannot be destroyed or neglected, without involving the People in Poverty and distress,” Adams told Congress on [22 Nov.] 1797, adding: “I should hold myself guilty of a neglect of Duty, if I forebore to recommend that We Should make every exertion to protect our Commerce, and to place our Country in a Suitable posture of defence, as the only Sure means of preserving both.” The French threat sharpened Adams’s focus on the need for a real navy, with a six-frigate fleet under construction. When the winter froze French cruisers’ chances, Adams mobilized money and congressional support for a major military buildup. Volume 22 supplies a 360-degree experience of how cabinet members debated the future of Franco-American policy.
John Adams sensed his first steps into the presidency marked a final turn in his extraordinary life of service to the American people. “Their Confidence, which has been the Chief Consolation of my Life, is too prescious and Sacred a deposit ever to be considered lightly,” he told the Senate on [15 Feb. 1797]. He was no George Washington, but Washington’s America was changing too. John Adams’s Federalist ideology of tripartite government shaped his policymaking and his popularity; understanding how to preserve liberty while defending the people was his challenge. That history unfolds next in Volumes 23 and 24 of The Papers of John Adams, now underway.
The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding for the Papers of John Adams is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Packard Humanities Institute. All letterpress Adams Papers volumes are printed by Harvard University Press.
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.
Title page of Letters from the Mountains, Boston 1809.
“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.”
Anne MacVicar Grant by William Bewick, 1824. Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
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.
John Adams (JA) and John Quincy Adams (JQA) were fascinated by the hottest flight invention of the 1780s: hot air balloons. Their fascination rivals present-day Parisian’s enjoyment of the Olympic and Paralympic cauldron. Paris citizens are currently collecting signatures to keep the Olympic and Paralympic cauldron as a permanent display representing the French national motto, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” Since this Olympic flame uses no fossil fuels, only water and light, it could possibly be on display long term.
The Olympic Flame rises on a balloon after being lit in Paris, France during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics, Friday, 26 July 2024. Credit: Francisco Seco
JA and JQA were in Paris in 1783 when Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier developed their “aerostatique” hot air balloons. These flight experiments caught the fancy of Parisians and the Adamses. On 27 August 1783, JQA wrote in his diary:
“after dinner I went to see the experiment, of the flying globe. A Mr: Montgolfier of late has discovered that, if one fills a ball with inflammable air, much lighter than common air, the ball of itself will go up to an immense height of itself. This was the first publick experiment of it. at Paris. a Subscription was opened some time agone and filled at once for making a globe; it was of taffeta glued together with gum, and lined with parchment: filled with inflammable air: it was of a spherical form; and was 14 foot size in Diameter. it was placed in the Champ de Mars. at 5. o’clock 2. great guns fired from the Ecole Militaire, were the signal given for its going, it rose at once, for some time perpendicular, and then slanted. the weather, was unluckily very Cloudy, so that in less than 2. minutes it was out of sight: it went up very regularly and with a great swiftness. as soon as it was out of sight. 2. more cannon were fired from the Ecole Militaire to announce it. this discovery is a very important one, and if it succeeds it may become very useful to mankind.”
Although this wasn’t the first experiment of flight with the balloon, which occurred 4 June 1783, this was the first public exhibition of it. JA wrote to Abigail Adams on 7 September 1783, “The Moment I hear of it [AA’s arrival in Europe], I will fly with Post Horses to receive you at least, and if the Ballon, Should be carried to such Perfection in the mean time as to give Mankind the safe navigation of the Air, I will fly in one of them at the Rate of thirty Knots an hour.”
“Aerostatic Experiments” in Paris 1783, French colored engraving of a balloon flight in 1783
This fascination continued and spread! On 10 November 1784, JQA wrote to his friend Peter Jay Munro:
“Messieurs Roberts made their third experiment, the 19th of September, and with more success than any aerostatic travellers have had before. They went up from the Thuileries, amidst a concourse of I suppose 10,000 persons. At noon, and at forty minutes past six in the Evening they descended at Beuory in Artois fifty leagues from Paris. This is expeditious travelling, and I heartily wish they would bring balloons to such a perfection, as that I might go to N. York, Philadelphia, or Boston in five days time. M.M. Roberts have publish’d a whole Volume of Observations upon their Voyage, or Journey or whatever it may be called, but I judge from the abstracts I have seen of it that they have taken a few traveller’s Licenses, and have given some little play to their Imaginations. . . . They have established somewhere in Paris, a machine which they call une tour aërostatique where for a small price, any curious person may mount as high as he pleases, and so ‘look down upon the pendent world.’ ”
On 21 January 1785, JQA dined at Thomas Jefferson’s house in Paris and he wrote in his diary the story of the flight Dr. John Jeffries had taken earlier that month: “Mr. Blanchard cross’d from Dover to Calais in an air balloon, the 7th. of the month. accompanied by Dr: Jefferies. they were obliged to throw over their cloathes to lighten their balloon. Mr: Blanchard met with a very flattering reception at Calais, and at Paris…. All that has as yet been done relative to this discovery, is the work of the French. Montgolfier. Pilâtre de Rozier, & Blanchard, will go down, hand in hand to Posterity.”
The French enthusiasm for ballooning waned after a major accident in June 1785 when aeronauts Pilâtre de Rozier and Dr. Pierre Ange Romain crashed their balloon on the French shore while attempting to cross the English Channel. Their aéro-Montgolfier, a gas double balloon, exploded over a thousand feet in the air and the two fell to their gruesome deaths. On the 23 June 1785, Abigail Adams 2nd wrote to her cousin Lucy Cranch, “You talk of comeing to see us in a Balloon. Why my Dear as Americans sometimes are capable of as imprudent and unadvised things as any other People perhaps, I think it but Prudent to advise you against it. There has lately a most terible accident taken place by a Balloons taking fire in the Air in which were two Men. Both of them were killed by their fall, and there limbs exceedingly Broken. Indeed the account is dreadfull. I confess I have no partiallity for them in any way.”
Like the Eiffel Tower, created to be a temporary exhibition piece for the 1889 World Expo in Paris, I do hope the Olympic and Paralympic cauldron becomes a permanent display.
When I go to family events, I often get a confused a look when I tell them I am an editor at the Adams Papers. Once I explain that I work on the papers of Abigail and John Adams and their family, their puzzled looks often go away. But they usually have several questions about what my work includes. I realized that many people may have similar questions about what we do at the Adams Papers project. At the heart of our work is making the papers of John and Abigail Adams and their family accessible to researchers, students, and the public.
I primarily work on the Papers of John Adams, the public papers of John Adams, and Adams Family Correspondence, the family papers. For more about the different series we publish, see here. The work on both series requires the same editorial process, which comprises several tasks including selection, collation, annotation, and production. These tasks vary depending on what stage we are up to in the production of a volume. Now, I am working on collation of Papers of John Adams, volume 24, and annotation for Papers of John Adams, volume 23, so I will provide more details about what those tasks include.
Here’s what a typical day looks like:
7:45–8:30: Prepare for Collation (which includes reviewing handwriting and making sure I requested all the necessary documents)
8:30–8:45: Access the documents needed for the day
8:45–12:00: Collation
Collation is one of my favorite parts of the editorial process. Collation is the tandem reading of documents selected for a volume, and right now we are working on the Papers of John Adams, volume 24. We collate in the morning for three hours, usually three or four days a week. One editor reads the letter aloud, while a second editor checks the existing transcription. We have a first and then second round of collation with two different pairs of editors. You may ask, why do you spend this much time reading documents aloud? Well, this is how we get the transcription of the documents to reflect what the authors of the letters wrote. For example, we read the letters, but also point out when words are capitalized, punctuation marks, and when text is written in the margins of a letter.
Most of the letters I collate were written by Timothy Pickering, John Adams’s secretary of state. (That is about to change however, since we just got up to the part of the volume when John Adams fired Pickering). Pickering’s handwriting is pretty neat (yes cool, but more importantly easier to read), but he does like to superscript (i.e. Mr) a lot. Letters can be just a few lines or in the case of the Elbridge Gerry letter I recently read, 27 pages! It is one of my favorite tasks because it allows you to better understand the people who wrote these letters and their daily interactions.
An excerpt from Timothy Pickering’s letter to John Adams, 12 May 1800. The Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
12–1: Lunch
1–3:30: Annotation Revisions
After lunch, I returned to revising my annotation for the Papers of John Adams, vol. 23. We work on more than one volume at a time. Annotation are all the footnotes in our volume. Our volumes, including the annotation, are available in our digital editions, which you can check out (for free and without a login!) here. I am currently revising the annotation for documents which cover John Adams’s correspondence from July 1798. The main stories are Franco-American relations in the aftermath of the XYZ Affair and the passage of a direct tax law. Some of my revisions included providing more details on a specific topic. For example, I wrote about the Senate rejecting John Adams’s son in law William Stephens Smith for an officer role in the army. I included that Timothy Pickering lobbied some senators to vote against his nomination, but needed to find out which senators voted against him and why Pickering wanted them to vote against William Stephens Smith.
3:30–3:45: Return the documents used during the day
While all my days do not look exactly like this, the next few weeks will include annotation and collation before moving ahead on writing the index for Adams Family Correspondence, volume 16, and production tasks for the volume.
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.
The MHS, like all archives, holds a number of manuscripts that are unidentified for one reason or another. Of course, we try to identify the authors of these materials whenever possible, but if we can’t, they can still be cataloged by subject, location, time period, etc.
Recently I was tasked with identifying the author of an anonymous diary in our collections. I always enjoy these “investigations,” and I’ve written about a few of them here at the Beehive. So let’s dive in!
Anonymous diary, 1895–1899
The diary is a thin hardbound volume measuring 5 ½ x 7 inches. The leather binding is suffering from red rot and separating from the text block, but the paper itself is in good shape. Only about a third of the pages contain any writing, and the handwriting is, well, challenging. So my first hurdle was just figuring out what the diary says.
The entries date from 24 April 1895 to 19 July 1899 and describe a number of separate trips from Boston to the Midwest and Northwest U.S., as well as Mexico, Jamaica, and Europe. The author was apparently a man traveling on business of some kind, visiting places like factories, stockyards, and other properties. He wrote a lot about railroads, and the front of the volume contains detailed itineraries of each trip. At the back is a pencil sketch signed “M.A.A.” Could these be the initials of our author?
Pencil sketch at the end of the volume
Between the scrawly handwriting, cryptic abbreviations, and lack of context, I had a tough time finding clues at first. I noticed two names: Harry, who was ill and in whom the writer was interested, and Molly, with whom he corresponded. But this wasn’t much to go on.
Then I stumbled across a recurring name that would prove crucial. The writer’s frequent traveling companion was a Mr. Adams, sometimes C.F. Adams or just plain C.F.A. These initials are of course very familiar to MHS staff and historians. Were these references to one of the several Charles Francis Adamses, relatives of presidents John and John Quincy Adams?
The diary was written in the 1890s, so assuming I was on the right track, I had two candidates. One was Charles Francis Adams (1866-1964), but I ruled him out because, as mayor of Quincy, Mass. at the time, he was probably not traipsing around the country looking at properties. But his uncle, Charles Francis Adams (1835-1915), served as chair of the Massachusetts Railroad Commission and president of the Union Pacific Railroad. This set off alarm bells. I literally wrote in my notes beside his name: “Railroad guy!”
Next I consulted Adams family genealogies. In fact, “railroad guy” had a daughter Mary Ogden Adams, who went by Molly. She married Grafton St. Loe Abbott in 1890. Maybe Grafton was our man? He and Molly had a son Henry Livermore Abbott, who might have been the Harry who was ill.
Now that I was more familiar with the handwriting, I returned to the diary for confirmation. Sure enough, on 13 May 1895, the writer was recognized by a friend and used his own name in relaying the story: “As I was walking up [the] street a man stopped me & asked if I [was] Mr Abbott, it turned out to be Prescott.” And an entry at the end of 1897 refers to the death of Molly’s aunt Anne Ogden. Molly’s mother was Mary Hone Ogden.
Grafton St. Loe Abbott graduated from Harvard with a degree in law, but spent most of his life working in the mining and railroad businesses. This diary describes trips taken with his father-in-law Charles Francis Adams in the latter capacity. A detailed biographical notice of Grafton was printed in the 1917 report of the Harvard Class of 1877.
The sketch at the end of the volume, from a trip Grafton and Molly took to Falmouth, Jamaica, was drawn by Molly in 1898.
The catalog record for the diary is here. The MHS also holds the papers of Charles Francis Adams, Molly and Grafton’s daughter Mary Ogden Abbott, and other members of the Abbott family. Special thanks to MHS library assistant Hannah Goeselt, who helped gather details from the diary.
As the weather warms it’s time to be out of doors, and the best way to enjoy the weather is to take a walk—just like John Quincy Adams. His parents encouraged him in both diary writing and walking, he notes in many of his diary entries, and he kept a diary from the age of 11 in 1778 until his death in 1848, at age 81. He was a believer in walking for exercise even in inclement weather. On 22 November 1792 he wrote, “Very cold. exercise by way of punishment, walked a great deal.” He lamented how his commitments prevented him from his favorite exercise on 14 July 1811, “My occupation, my Company, and the weather prevented me the whole day from my usual exercise of walking.” And towards the end of his life, on 14 May 1847, he found it hard to walk, “I took a short walk in the afternoon, but finding it from day to day, more difficult to walk, fear that I must henceforth, confine all my bodily exercise, to riding in a carriage.”
