The Kendal Residents Website is adding a new feature to its NEWS section - Book Reviews. Noted author and Kendal resident Hope Cooke will be writing occasional book reviews for reader perusal. Those that she chooses will be works recently acquired by the Kendal Library.
Hope’s first review is The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams family, edited by L.H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlander and Mary-Jo Kline, Northeastern University Press (1975, republished 2002). It follows:
Think times are hard now? For much of the period, 1762-1784 that this correspondence covers, small-pox (and with it a nasty vaxing—anti-vaxing debate) raged alongside the volatile politics leading up to the war. The Adamses and others actually smoked their letters to kill the virus that continued throughout the conflict, its debilitating effects forcing the American troops to retreat from Quebec, John writes from the field, where he assisted General Washington.
Meanwhile, back in Massachusetts, Abigail and the Adams children are down with the deadly disease in Braintree where Abigail raises their five kids on her own, runs the family farm, copes with a nearly valueless Continental currency, deals with privations due to the bans on imports brought by the Revolution and hoarding and price gouging as well. (The women of Boston, she writes, hogtie an offending merchant and dump his body in a cart.) In her husband’s absence, she carries and bears a stillborn infant, conceived on one of his rare trips home.
Due to her patriotism, however, as well as some super cool unfamiliar to me, she never complains –even sotto voce--until 1782 when John informs her he plans to extend his European assignment where Congress had sent him earlier to help negotiate peace for the new country, a duty that would mean three more years abroad. In France his chief enemies are Ben Franklin, the longstanding Francophile boss of the American delegation, who treats the unsophisticated Yankee with disdain, and the attractions of Paris that seriously alarm him. Abigail doesn’t really complain even then but merely suggests that she and a daughter should join him despite the ‘perils of Neptune’. The Atlantic dangers are so great that many of the ships carrying their letters routinely sink, and as much as half a year will go by without their hearing from one another. The mail is also threatened by spies and ‘Ruffians’ infesting the overland postal routes. For months at one point due to a break in correspondence, Abigail lives with a rumor that her oldest son who is traveling may be lost at sea.
These are just starters. Read on for a riveting exchange, with Abigail (famous for advising her husband “to remember the ladies” when he’s co-drafting the Constitution in Philadelphia) being the emotive voice and John, the dry reporter who happened to be present at the birth of our parlous Republic.
Do not be put off by the initial exchange of ‘love letters’ during the Adams’ courtship, an excruciating badinage of classical allusions. My advice: skim until you reach the business of their long-distance marriage, an epistolary treasure.
FIVE STARS