First Family: Abigail and John Adams
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Product Description
The Pulitzer Prize–winning, best-selling leader of Founding Brothers and His Excellency brings America’s preeminent first couple to life in a moving and illuminating narrative that sweeps through the American Revolution and the republic’s tenuous early years.
John and Abigail Adams left an quick and remarkably preserved portrait of their lives together in their personal correspondence: both Adamses were prolific letter writers (although John conceded that Abigail was clearly the more gifted of the two), and over the years they exchanged more than twelve hundred letters. Joseph J. Ellis distills this unprecedented and unsurpassed record to give us an account both intimate and panoramic; part biography, part political history, and part like tale.
Ellis describes the first meeting between the two as inauspicious—John was twenty-four, Abigail just fifteen, and each was entirely unimpressed with the additional. But they soon started a passionate correspondence that resulted in their marriage five years later.
Over the next decades, the couple were separated nearly as much as they were together. John’s political career took him first to Philadelphia, where he became the boldest advocate for the measures that would lead to the Declaration of Independence. Yet in order to attend the Second Continental Congress, he left his wife and children in the middle of the war zone that had by then engulfed Massachusetts. Later he was sent to Paris, where he served as a minister to the court of France alongside Benjamin Franklin. These years apart stressed the Adamses’ union nearly beyond what it could bear: Abigail grew lonely, while the Adams children suffered from their father’s absence.
John was elected the nation’s first vice president, but by the time of his reelection, Abigail’s health prevented her from joining him in Philadelphia, the interim capital. She no doubt had further reservations about moving to the swamp on the Potomac when John became president, although this time he persuaded her. President Adams inherited a weak and bitterly divided country from George Washington. The political situation was perilous at best, and he needed his closest advisor by his side: “I can do nothing,” John told Abigail after his election, “lacking you.”
In Ellis’s rich and arresting new history, John and Abigail’s relationship unfolds in the context of America’s birth as a nation.
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This is an informative and well-crafted book that is the best presentation and analysis that I have come across of a partnership that is both inspiring in itself and the best-documented in history. It has some limitations but if you are interested in the social rather than political fundamentals of the early Republic, this is a book I highly recommend. Here are the standout features:
1. It offers a convincing and rich portrayal of the long partnership between the brilliant, morally courageous, really honest and equally reasonably weird – perhaps even mentally disturbed – John Adams and his stable, supportive but independent wife Abigail. It is very unlikely that Adams could have held to his steadfast course lacking a right equal, with all his insecurities, feelings of being unappreciated, his ability to say the incorrect thing at the incorrect time, and his self-importance. Abigail comes across as very grounded, shrewd and anchored in reality, far unlike her spouse at times. The book doesn’t stray into psychobabble or add romantic flourishes; it just presents the tale as we know it from the evidence, most obviously the couple’s letters to each additional. Professor Ellis is judicious in his selection from these, building the reader’s sense of confidence in his judgment. One tiny touch that illustrates this is the sense in the correspondence that the pair really loved their sex life. This is not discussed in depth nor ignored, but is just part of the perfect sketching of the picture, delicately handled.
2. It shows the complex dynamics of a family tree – Abigail’s strengths, commonsense and management skills, the family tree investment in the superstar son, John Quincy Adams, the disappointments of additional children, with business failures, poor marriage choices and death from chronic alcohol abuse. It’s very much a partnership at work – John indefatigably trying to do the right thing and Abigail keeping it all together.
3. It brings out the very heavy burdens and fee paid by the couple in Adam’s truly patriotic service; the long, multi-year absences in France and England where their letters were infrequent, cautiously phrased because of the dread of their being intercepted by the British Navy in the many weeks it took for them to be conveyed across the Atlantic, and the frustrations each had to deal with but could not easily complain about. For me, this was one of the strongest fundamentals of the book.
4. It has the right balance – enough depth to make it a serious contribution and enough pace and selectivity to make it a excellent read.
It has some limitations. It is not exciting, though it flows well. There’s nothing new in the book – a might as well as a limitation. It organizes material that is widely available and stays in the centrist mainstream, with no revisionist theory. Ellis doesn’t play games with history; as he states in his opening he offers a “biography of a partnership.” If you are already pretty familiar with the politics and personalities, this may not offer much. It takes the viewpoint of Adams and doesn’t throw much light on Washington, who remains a background enigma. It has a marked flavor of being anti-Hamilton, Adam’s villain and the most powerful political driver of the times. It continues the increasingly consensual puncturing of Franklin’s skilled self-publicity and describes him as a double-dealing egotist. It covers Jefferson in more detail because of the centrality of their friendship and its breakdown. By and large, he takes Adam’s side on the issues of Anglo- versus Franco-relationships.
A excellent book, a silent pleasure, and an explanation of why Professor Ellis wins Pulitzer Prizes for his books.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
There’s nothing new here that you haven’t seen before in the HBO mini series and the wonderful McCullough biography from a few years back, but this time, the tale of John Adams, one of our most foremost founding fathers, is told through the eyes of his relationship to his dear friend Abigail. The two of them wrote so regularly to each additional, and so many of their letters have been preserved, that we find a significant part of the history of the beginning of the USA through their pens. So anything that is written about them is more than a small worth reading.
I would have to say that the aforementioned McCullough biography is probably the best biography I ever read, but Joseph Ellis tells the same tale in fewer pages, and gives us just a slightly different slant on the tale, and for persons who just don’t have the stomach or the time for a very very long book, the whole thing is told in about 250 pages.
There are fantastic leadership lessons here, nice examples of how a couple works out some huge family tree problems, amidst a grand and readable biography that will most likely give Ellis the attention he’s also gotten with his previous works on the same period.
I establish the book a bit fleeting, I wanted more, but then again, there is ALWAYS another wonderful biography from that period to read. Bravo!
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Joseph Ellis has once again done a remarkable job in taking us back to early American history in this account of Abigail and John Adams. Truly, they were probably the most unique and close First Family tree of our Nation.
We are fortunate that Abigail and John maintained constant contact throughout their marriage with a multitude of letters and notes that have been preserved from their day. As a result, the leader had an plenty of personal information from which to draw and as a result has agreed us insight that goes beyond mere past documentation.
John was a determined man, set in his own thoughts and very much opposed to partisan politics. Abigail was permanently there, if not in person, then by letters of encouragement and regularly helpful advice.
Through this personal account the reader will feel a close encounter with the lives of these two fantastic Americans. You will follow John’s career from the defending of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre to his presidency and to his final days. You will feel the pain and suffering he endured with so many personal problems with his children as well as his heartaches from friends who turned on him. The beauty of the tale is Abigail was permanently there for him.
This is a fantastic look at history and a family tree that had so much impact in our founding years. It’s a fantastic read and I know you will delight in it.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Even if he weren’t as excellent a writer as he is, one would have to admire Joseph J Ellis’s choice of theme matter. It would be far simpler to write a book about, say, Button Gwinnett (like that name!), about whom we know comparatively small than to tackle such well-trod (and therefore simple to make comparisons to) facts as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and the additional Founding Fathers, and John and Abigail Adams. But, his Jefferson book (“American Sphinx”) won the National Book Award; his “Founding Brothers” won the Pulitzer; and “His Excellency” about Geo. Washington was hailed as “sharp” and “eloquent” by the NY Times. Now, with this book, Ellis offers his take on the Adams family tree. Agreed some of the additional (regularly brilliant, regularly immense) tomes on the only person from American history described on the stage by both “Knight Rider”’s Kitt and “Star Trek”’s Data, (not to mention the fantastic HBO miniseries) it’s really reasonably brief. In a small over 250 pages of narrative, Ellis manages to convey, better than this reader has ever before seen, the very heart and soul of one of the truly fantastic, well, like tales of history. At the same time he surrounds us with the sights/sounds/feel of the times in a far more profound and involving way than many books 2 or 3 times its size. I don’t know that the in-depth student of the Revolutionary period will find much new in these pages, but for the interested amateur, I can’t imagine a better… or better written… intro to the theme.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Joseph Ellis is one of the finest writers of well loved biographical nonfiction in the market today. While on the surface, there seems to be not much new in this book over the additional longer biographies by David McCullough and Page Smith, there is still enough justification to read this book to buy a slightly different slant on John, Abigail and the rest of the Adams Family tree nearly exclusively through their writings to each additional, friends, and relatives. Ellis is able to cut through the tangential, while keeping enough of the life and times by focusing on the emotional aspects of this family tree. Ellis walks a fine line and does it perfectly as the reader will miss very small of the major events in the works as he zeroes in on the effects these extraordinary times have on the entire Adams Family tree.
If you have read any of the additional biographies, then you know the history, but Ellis is able to reflect and delve into the persona of both Abigail and John Adams by going into the details of their periphery correspondence with friends and relatives – especially on the Abigail side of the equation. We get a slightly different Abigail that is wounded deeply by John’s constant movement into the political limelight that neglects his family tree and wife as he puts his political ambitions before his familial obligations. Ellis takes a step further than others by suggesting that John Adams had a thyroid problem that in the absence of Abigail, who was his sense of balance, may have lead to his quick and aggressive temper. Additionally, Ellis puts the question of “favoritism (of John Quincy) squarely on John and Abigail as they place pressure upon John Quincy at a very early age. The additional males are not treated in the same pressurized manner and in some cases (Thomas) nearly ignored for long stretches.
Additionally, Ellis examines the reasons that John may have left the Presidency vacated to spend time with Abigail during a seven month period when he left his office to live with her in Quincy as she slowly recovered from a very debilitating bout with disease. While I do not agree, Ellis makes an appealing and plausible case.
The Jefferson – Adams relationship is extensively examined and shows that the once close friends became rivals which lead to the battle of words as the Presidential elections between the two became a reality. It leads to very emotional moments between the three long time friends.
If you have not read the longer versions of the Adams’ Family tree, and do not want to spend the time necessary to do so, then this is an brilliant book with which to start your study of this incredible and pivotal Revolutionary Family tree. Ellis writes a wonderfully full if fleeting biography that spans the entire family tree, but leans more towards the effects of John’s life choices on Abigail.
I highly recommend this book.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5