Papers of John Adams

No family in three generations has contributed so much to American history as the Adamses. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Charles Francis Adams, despite periods of doubt, knew that history, if not their contemporaries, would recognize their accomplishments. When the Adams Papers series is complete, the writings of these three statesmen will have been examined thoroughly.Aside from the Legal Papers of John Adams, published in 1965, these two volumes are the first in Series III: General Correspondence and Other Papers of the Adams Statesmen. Volumes 1 and 2 of the Papers of John Adams include letters to and from friends and colleagues, reports of committees on which he served, his polemical writings, published and unpublished, and state papers to which he made a contribution.All of Adams’s newspaper writings, including “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law,” are in these two volumes. In addition to being a condemnation of the Stamp Act, the “Dissertation” is shown to be one of the building blocks of the theory of a commonwealth of independent states under the king, which reaches complete statement in the Novanglus letters. For the first time, all thirteen of these letters appear in full with annotation.The period September 1755 to April 1775 covers Adams’s public service in Braintree and Boston town meetings, the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the First Continental Congress, and the First Provincial Congress of Massachusetts. During this time his political future was being shaped by circumstances not always of his choosing. He hesitated at first at the threshold of a public career, political ambition in conflict with concern for his family’s well-being. But as the confrontation with Great Britain sharpened, the crisis became acute; no choice remained. For Adams there was no shirking the path of duty.

Taken together with the celebrated Diary and Autobiography, the Earliest Diary, the Adams Family Correspondence, and the Legal Papers of John Adams, [the Papers of John Adams] constitute as revealing and complete a documentation of the development, both personal and public, of a successful revolutionist as modern history affords… In [these documents] the writer bequeathed to posterity a means of sensing some of the excitement, the importance, the fears, the apprehensions of the decade in which ‘the real American revolution’ was taking place—in short, the flavor of the times., The great theme…is that of independence; all else is subordinate to it. The reader may trace here the evolution of John Adams’ thought during this crucial year… His Plan of Treaties became a model in use down to World War II and his Thoughts on Government was designed to unite north and south on basic principles. No matter, it seems, was too small for his attention nor too large to attempt solution. A colossus indeed! The editing of this work is admirable in every way. The footnotes are exhaustive but never excessive or boring. The introductory essays are illuminating. This is an elegant and inspiring work.

Gregg L. Lint is Series Editor for the Papers of John Adams of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.