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My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and . 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 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. That edition presented only 207 let- ters, but it improved upon the 1876 collection, which had modern- ized spelling and punctuation and silently omitted passages that the editor felt were too personal or undignified. Adams had printed the letters in an order he identified as chronological, but he failed to contextualize them historically or to flag the occasional gaps in the correspondence when John was back in Braintree. Butterfield, setting the Adams Papers’ high editorial standards, presented the original let- ters’ full text, complete with Abigail’s characteristic phonetic spellings, and supplied helpful bridging passages that clarified an implied nar- rative around the letters. My Dearest Friend, prepared by subsequent Adams Papers editors, adheres to the same scholarly practices, while including 289 letters that track the correspondence through the 1790s. The edition under review, by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor, is welcome both for its more helpful editorial bridges and,

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particularly, for its attractive, reader-friendly design. The spacing of the text on the page is easier on the eye than that of the 1975 vol- ume, and My Dearest Friend includes attractive color illustrations that enhance the reading experience. Most interesting, however, is the edition’s inclusion of letters from the period of John Adams’s vice-presidency and presidency. These letters reveal the political ten- sions of the 1790s, as old friendships dissolved under the pressure of partisan warfare and as John Adams eventually found himself under attack, even from within his own party. Abigail supports her husband at every turn, calling his appointment of William Vans Murray to be a minister plenipotentiary to France “a master stroke of policy” (p. 464) and stridently denouncing his opponents, referring to the Jeffersoni- ans as a “Swineish Herd” following their electoral victory (p. 475). She is at her best, however, when facing down neighbors who object to her black servant James attending the local school. She reprimands their delegate, Azariah Faxon, “This ...isattacking the principle of Liberty and equality upon the only Ground upon which it ought to be supported, an Equality of Rights. The Boy is a Freeman . . . and merely because his Face is Black, is he to be denied instruction. . . . Is this the Christian Principle of doing to others, as we would have others do to us?” (p. 439). Like its predecessors, Hogan and Taylor’s edition has been aimed at general readers; it advises readers with more scholarly interests to consult the published volumes of the Adams Family Correspondence (1963–2007). If general readers are the targeted audience of these volumes, however, the editors do not serve that audience as well as they might. Individuals referred to by a first or last name only are not identified. When it concerns major figures like , this state of affairs poses the reader no difficulty, but for a person like General Charles Lee (to say nothing of his dog Spada), it is more problematic. When John Adams reports that Pierpont Edwards gave great offense in in 1792 “by mentioning his nephew” (p. 333), how many general readers would know that the offensive nephew was Aaron Burr? Other details could use clarification as well. When Abigail praises John’s “appointment of Mr. Murrey Minister Plenipo to France,” an explanation of what this issue was about and why it “astonished all the Federilist” (p. 474) would have been helpful for general readers. A recent Penguin edition, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams, is limited because it reprints Charles Francis Adams’s imperfect edition (although with the elided passages restored), but it does provide explanations of matters such as this and it also identifies

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most of the poetry that Abigail Adams was so fond of quoting in her letters. (Full disclosure: I edited this volume.) Full-bodied footnotes would have been a welcome addition to the present volume, attractive as it is in other respects.

Frank Shuffelton, Professor of English at the University of Rochester, has written extensively on the founders. He is the editor of the Penguin edition of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.

Excursions: The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer. (Princeton: Press, 2007. Pp. viii, 650.$65.00.) In his “Historical Introduction” to this long-awaited volume, Joseph Moldenhauer remarks that “excursion” was “a favorite word of Thoreau’s for his hikes and longer trips” (p. 343). It was Ralph Waldo Emerson, apparently, who picked this modest word for the title of the first posthumous collection of Thoreau’s short writings, here re- born in the authoritative Princeton Edition of the Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. The long genesis of this volume—underway since the late 1970s—bespeaks the massive and painstaking research and labor demanded by the task of establishing an authoritative text for the nine essays included herein. Ranging from the early “Natural His- tory of Massachusetts,” “Walk to Wachusett,” and “A Winter Walk,” through “Yankee in Canada,” “The Succession of Forest Trees,” to the posthumous “Autumnal Tints” and “Wild Apples,” and crowned by “Walking,” Thoreau’s eloquent defense of the excursion form, Ex- cursion’s essays are, arguably, Thoreau’s key works. Moldenhauer’s edition, the first to be based on an exhaustive study and collation of all surviving manuscripts, printed versions, and col- lateral materials, including Thoreau’s journals, correspondence, and sources, presents the essays in clear text, with the extensive editorial apparatus forming the bulk of the volume. Students of textual editing should study this production as a model of the meticulous layers of investigation required to reach the highest standards of their craft. Thanks to Moldenhauer and the many others who assisted with this work, scholars and general readers now have, at long last, a critical text of Thoreau’s beloved nature essays, a text that reproduces as closely as possible Thoreau’s authorial intentions. Though not authorial, the title, Excursions, felicitously highlights why these particular essays lie at the heart of Thoreau’s achievement.

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