Abigail Adams: Letter to Thomas Boylston Adams

As a thoroughly domestic person throughout her life, Abigail Adams wrote no formal documents of any kind, but her private correspondence with every member of her family and with several prominent contemporaries, including Thomas Jefferson, was voluminous. Her sharp wit and discerning political and social observations, her paraphrases and quotations from her extensive reading in history and literature, and her deeply felt beliefs as a wife, a mother, and a woman appear in hundreds of passages throughout these letters. At their center is her correspondence with John Adams, beginning during their courtship in the early 1760s, when she was in her teens, and extending through more than a thousand exchanged letters before John's retirement in 1801.

Although the contents of Adams's letters to John, her children, other relatives, and friends, were wide ranging—from farm management and Braintree gossip to international news—she always regarded her entire correspondence as strictly private. Adams wrote for her own comfort and to both comfort and inform her husband, family, and other intimate acquaintances, and never for the public world. Adams always feared that any miscarriage or misplacement of her letters might place her and her family uncomfortably in the public gaze. As early as September 1774 she instructed John to burn her letters lest they should fall into others' hands. Some twenty years later, after harshly criticizing Alexander Hamilton in a letter to her husband, she reiterated her plea to burn the letter. John Adams, however, had his own ideas about Abigail's correspondence. To the great benefit of his countrymen and countrywomen of later generations, John Adams apparently never destroyed a single letter from his wife.

Virtually all of Adams's letters remained closed to the public, who scarcely guessed at their existence, until 1840, when her admiring grandson, Charles Francis Adams, published a selection from her family correspondence. In 1848 he followed this with dozens of his grandfather John's letters to Abigail, a massive edition of John Adams's published works and more public letters in the 1850s, and finally a Revolutionary centennial edition of Abigail's and John's correspondence in 1876. Since the 1960s the editors of the Adams Papers project at the Massachusetts Historical Society have published annotated texts of virtually all of Abigail's letters up to 1789 and several of her best letters, without notes, from the 1790s.