PREFACE
My serious interest in the Adams family began twenty years ago, when I wrote a book about John Adams in retirement, eventually published as
Passionate Sage
. I had a keen sense that I was stepping into a long-standing conversation between Abigail and John in its final phase. And I had an equivalently clear sense that the conversation preserved in the roughly twelve hundred letters between them constituted a treasure trove of unexpected intimacy and candor, more revealing than any other correspondence between a prominent American husband and wife in American history.
I moved on to different historical topics over the ensuing years, but I made a mental note to come back to the extraordinarily rich Adams archive, then read all their letters and tell the full story of their conversation within the context of America’s creation as a people and a nation. The pages that follow represent my attempt to do just that.
The distinctive quality of their correspondence, apart from its sheer volume and the dramatic character of the history that was happening around them, is its unwavering emotional honesty. All of us who have fallen in love, tried to raise children, suffered extended bouts of doubt about the integrity of our ambitions, watched our once youthful bodies betray us, harbored illusions about our impregnable principles, and done all this with a partner traveling the same trail know what unconditional commitment means, and why, especially today, it is the exception rather than the rule.
Abigail and John traveled down that trail about two hundred years before us, remained lovers and friends throughout, and together had ahand in laying the foundation of what is now the oldest enduring republic in world history. And they left a written record of all the twitches, traumas, throbbings, and tribulations along the way. No one else has ever done that.
To be sure, there were other prominent couples in the revolutionary era—George and Martha Washington as well as James and Dolley Madison come to mind. But no other couple left a documentary record of their mutual thoughts and feelings even remotely comparable to Abigail and John’s. (Martha Washington burned almost all the letters to and from her husband.) And at the presidential level, it was not until Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt occupied the White House that a wife exercised an influence over policy decisions equivalent to Abigail’s.
It is the interactive character of their private story and the larger public story of the American founding that strikes me as special. Recovering their experience as a couple quite literally forces a focus on the fusion of intimate psychological and emotional experience with the larger political narrative. Great events, such as the battle of Bunker Hill, the debate over the Declaration of Independence, and the presidential election of 1800, become palpable human experiences rather than grandiose abstractions. They lived through a truly formative phase of American history and left an unmatched record of what it was like to shape it, and have it happen to them.
As I see it, then, Abigail and John have much to teach us about both the reasons for that improbable success called the American Revolution and the equally startling capacity for a man and woman—husband and wife—to sustain their love over a lifetime filled with daunting challenges. One of the reasons for writing this book was to figure out how they did it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As every author can attest, a book that has only one name on the cover is really a child with multiple parents, or at least several midwives who have nurtured it into the world. In my case, four readers provided wisdom, a critical eye for both style and substance, and savvy about how to tell the story.
Edmund S. Morgan, my long-ago mentor at Yale, and beyond much doubt the most distinguished historian of early American history over the last half century, heartily endorsed the project, caught many gaffes,
My serious interest in the Adams family began twenty years ago, when I wrote a book about John Adams in retirement, eventually published as
Passionate Sage
. I had a keen sense that I was stepping into a long-standing conversation between Abigail and John in its final phase. And I had an equivalently clear sense that the conversation preserved in the roughly twelve hundred letters between them constituted a treasure trove of unexpected intimacy and candor, more revealing than any other correspondence between a prominent American husband and wife in American history.
I moved on to different historical topics over the ensuing years, but I made a mental note to come back to the extraordinarily rich Adams archive, then read all their letters and tell the full story of their conversation within the context of America’s creation as a people and a nation. The pages that follow represent my attempt to do just that.
The distinctive quality of their correspondence, apart from its sheer volume and the dramatic character of the history that was happening around them, is its unwavering emotional honesty. All of us who have fallen in love, tried to raise children, suffered extended bouts of doubt about the integrity of our ambitions, watched our once youthful bodies betray us, harbored illusions about our impregnable principles, and done all this with a partner traveling the same trail know what unconditional commitment means, and why, especially today, it is the exception rather than the rule.
Abigail and John traveled down that trail about two hundred years before us, remained lovers and friends throughout, and together had ahand in laying the foundation of what is now the oldest enduring republic in world history. And they left a written record of all the twitches, traumas, throbbings, and tribulations along the way. No one else has ever done that.
To be sure, there were other prominent couples in the revolutionary era—George and Martha Washington as well as James and Dolley Madison come to mind. But no other couple left a documentary record of their mutual thoughts and feelings even remotely comparable to Abigail and John’s. (Martha Washington burned almost all the letters to and from her husband.) And at the presidential level, it was not until Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt occupied the White House that a wife exercised an influence over policy decisions equivalent to Abigail’s.
It is the interactive character of their private story and the larger public story of the American founding that strikes me as special. Recovering their experience as a couple quite literally forces a focus on the fusion of intimate psychological and emotional experience with the larger political narrative. Great events, such as the battle of Bunker Hill, the debate over the Declaration of Independence, and the presidential election of 1800, become palpable human experiences rather than grandiose abstractions. They lived through a truly formative phase of American history and left an unmatched record of what it was like to shape it, and have it happen to them.
As I see it, then, Abigail and John have much to teach us about both the reasons for that improbable success called the American Revolution and the equally startling capacity for a man and woman—husband and wife—to sustain their love over a lifetime filled with daunting challenges. One of the reasons for writing this book was to figure out how they did it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As every author can attest, a book that has only one name on the cover is really a child with multiple parents, or at least several midwives who have nurtured it into the world. In my case, four readers provided wisdom, a critical eye for both style and substance, and savvy about how to tell the story.
Edmund S. Morgan, my long-ago mentor at Yale, and beyond much doubt the most distinguished historian of early American history over the last half century, heartily endorsed the project, caught many gaffes,
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