Adams Family Correspondence Volumes 5 And 6

I cannot O! I cannot be reconciled to living as I have done for 3 years past... Will you let me try to soften, if I cannot wholy) releave you, from your Burden of Cares and perplexities?'' So begins Abigail Adams' correspondence to her husband in these volumes: a plea to end their long separation, as John Adams represented the United States in Europe while Abigail tended to family and farm in Massachusetts, and passed on to John Crucial political information from Congress. In October 1782, the Adams family was as widely scattered as it would ever be, with young John Quincy Adams in St. Petersburg, John at The Hague, and Abigail in Braintree with her daughter and younger sons. With the summer of 1784, however, Abigail would have her fondest wish, as most of the family reunited to spend nearly a year together in Europe. As the Adams family traveled, and as the children came of age, so their correspondence expanded to include an ever larger and more fascinating range of Cultural topics and international figures. The record of this remarkable expansion, these volumes document John Adams' diplomatic triumphs, his wife and daughter's participation in the cosmopolitan scenes of Paris and London, and his son John Quincy's travels in Europe and America. These pages also welcome Thomas Jefferson, who soon became one of Abigail's closest friends, into the family correspondence. From the intimacies 0f the children's education, sentimental and worldly, to the details of the 'arm friendship between Abigail and Madame Lafayette, to the grand drama of Edmund Burke and William Pitt the Younger debating in Parliament, the contents of these letters draw an incredibly rich picture of international life in the 17805 and an incomparable portrait of America's first family of politics and letters.

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.

A collection of letters exchanged by members of the Adams family through three full generations and part of a fourth beginning with the courtship of John Adams and Abigail Smith and ending with the death of Abigail Brooks Adams, wife of the first Charles Francis Adams, United States minister to London during the American Civil War.

A collection of letters exchanged by members of the Adams family through three full generations and part of a fourth beginning with the courtship of John Adams and Abigail Smith and ending with the death of Abigail Brooks Adams, wife of the first Charles Francis Adams, United States minister to London during the American Civil War.