Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, Vol. 1

Abigail Adams was never supposed to be heard. She begged her husband to burn these letters. Instead, they survived to become one of the most intimate portraits of the American Revolution ever written. As John Adams shaped the revolution from Philadelphia and Paris, Abigail held everything else together back home in Massachusetts: four children, a household, a farm, the mounting anxieties of a wife who heard cannon fire from her window and wondered if her husband would ever return. Her letters crackle with the specific terror of 1775, when Charlestown burned and she wrote by candlelight, unable to eat or sleep for the roar of artillery. But they also reveal a woman of ferocious intelligence, writing to her husband about politics and philosophy while managing the mundane crisis of devalued currency and food shortages. This is history from the home front, unsanitized and raw, in the voice of a woman who never intended for strangers to read her words.