350 the NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY My Dearest Friend
350 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams. Edited by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. xx, 508.$35.00.) In the realm of founders’ chic—that neighborhood of the public sphere populated by the numerous readers of the recent biographies of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton—John and Abigail Adams are the power couple. The letters they exchanged—by turns witty, affectionate, pointed, informative, and always intelligent— are the prime reason for their status and popularity. John Adams’s most attractive, readable prose arguably emerges in his letters, par- ticularly in those to his wife. None of the other leading founders had wives who wrote as well as Abigail did, or, if they did, their letters have not been preserved. For example, when their spouses died, Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson destroyed their inti- mate correspondence. Although John and Abigail’s letters are full of homely details about life in Braintree or, for John, about life away from home, their exchanges sparkle with intelligent concern about the issues of their day and gracefully display the wide reading that informed their thought. In 1876, Charles Francis Adams prepared an edition of John and Abigail’s letters to mark the centennial of the Revolution. He pre- sented 284 letters that dated from 1774 to 1783, when the Treaty of Paris was concluded. In 1975, on the occasion of the war’s bicen- tennial, Lyman Butterfield and fellow editors of the Adams Papers prepared The Book of Abigail and John, another edition of selected letters between the Adamses.
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