L. H. Butterfield – författare

The Adams Family Correspondence, L. H. Butterfield writes, “is an unbroken record of the changing modes of domestic life, religious views and habits, travel, dress, servants, food, schooling, reading, health and medical care, diversions, and every other conceivable aspect of manners and taste among the members of a substantial New England family who lived on both sides of the Atlantic and wrote industriously to each other over a period of more than a century.” These volumes are the first in the estimated twenty or more in Series 2 of The Adams Papers.Including about six hundred letters to and from various members of the family, the Adams Family Correspondence begins with a series of hitherto unpublished courtship letters between John Adams and Abigail Smith. The weekly and sometimes daily reports by Adams of what was going on in the Continental Congress during the years 1774–1777 are a far fuller and franker record than has been available before. His wife’s letters in reply recount her difficulties in raising a family of young children and operating a farm while war went on not far from her doorstep, refugees inundated Braintree, local epidemics raged, prices soared, and goods and labor became ever scarcer. We learn for the first time that amid these distractions Abigail lost a baby daughter, that getting herself and four children inoculated against smallpox was an agonizing ordeal of months in 1776, that after Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga she wrote a long, lecturing letter to her single relative who had chosen the Loyalist side, and that her comments on blundering politicos, lax generals, and unpatriotic neighbors were more frequent and incisive than has been supposed.Thinking her letters too careless and too intimate for preservation, Abigail Adams pleaded at the end of one of them, written a couple of months before the Declaration of Independence was voted and while British warships hovered within range of her house, “I wish you would burn all my Letters.” To which John Adams replied, “The conclusion of your Letter made my Heart throb, more than a Cannonade would. You bid me burn your Letters. But I must forget you first.”So he faithfully kept hers, she kept his, and they both kept their children’s. Their grandson Charles Francis Adams chose some of these for publication in a succession of small editions in the nineteenth century, but he was highly selective, and he discreetly pruned away from the letters that he printed much that is both revealing and engaging. Here, as is the practice with all the Adams documents in this edition, every letter used is given in full. The second of these first volumes ends in March 1778 with John Adams on a Continental frigate bound for his first diplomatic mission in Europe, accompanied by his ten-year-old son, John Quincy.

The letters in these volumes, written from both sides of the Atlantic, addressed by and to members of the Adams family, chronicle nearly five years of its history, They were years in which John Adams in successive missions to Europe, accompanied first by one son, then by two, initiated what would be a continuing role for Adamses in three generadons: representing their country and advancing its interests in the capitals of Europe.John Adams, a troubled but stouthearted Yankee lawyer on the vast new scene of Europe, though always circumspect in familial correspondence in referring to public matters, provides, in his revealing letters about his own health and state of mind, sufficient insight into the difficult relations among the American commissioners, the designs of America's allies, and the diplomatic failures and triumphs he experienced in Paris and the Netherlands to permit some reevaluations of purposes and tactics. With these high matters are mingled the rigors and rewards of travel, concern with his sons' education, books for their reading, Dutch cloth and ribbons for his wife.Whether Mrs. Adams' letters relate to the upbringing of children, the problems of wartime taxes and inflation, the inferior roles assigned to American women, or her wide historical reading, they bear the marks of distinction of mind and mastery of language that make them timeless.If the letters of these two are central, those written by others are hardly less interesting, relating as they do to the concerns of young John Quincy at school in Levden and his observations on his way to and during his stay in St. Petersburg at age fourteen: to the adventure-filled return voyage of Charles, aged eleven, to America; to the interests of the younger Abigail maturing in Braintree; to the reactions of sturdy patriots to the tides and rumors of war.

In these volumes the second decade of the sixty-year diary of Charles Francis Adams, the third of the family’s statesmen, is begun. As was true of the two earlier volumes of the Diary, the section appearing here has not before reached print.Covering the period from Adams’s marriage in September 1829 to the end of 1832, these volumes record the early years of his maturity during which he was seeking to find his vocation. Engaged in the day-to-day management of John Adams’s business interests in Boston, he nevertheless had no inclination toward commerce or the active practice of law. Son and grandson of presidents, proud heir to a name already great and controversial in American politics, he also at this time considered himself “not fitted for the noise of public life.” Dependent for support on his father and father-in-law but determined to maintain his independence, he devoted his available time to a program of studies and writing that would prepare him for a career he hesitated to name but in which he wished distinction. His own public career still years away, he was drawn at this period to the study of American history and his famous grandparents’ papers, an effort that would continue and that would make him the family’s archivist and editor.These volumes offer manifold opportunities for an enlarged understanding of a complex and able man who was later to assume positions of high responsibility. In addition to furnishing innumerable personal and familial insights, this portion of the diary is of capital importance for the historian of society and culture. Probably no more detailed and faithful record exists of Boston life in the period.