Papers of John Adams

Papers of John Adams
Author: John Adams
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release:
Genre: Massachusetts
ISBN: 9780674654419

Vol. 14: John Adams reached Paris on October 26, 1782, for the final act of the American Revolution: the peace treaty. This volume chronicles his role in the negotiations and the decision to conclude a peace separate from France. Determined that the United States pursue an independent foreign policy, Adams's letters criticized Congress's naive confidence in France. But in April 1783, frustrated at delays over the final treaty and at real and imagined slights from Congress and Benjamin Franklin, Adams believed the crux of the problem was Franklin's moral bankruptcy and servile Francophilia in the service of a duplicitous Comte de Vergennes. Volume 14 covers more than just the peace negotiations. As American minister to the Netherlands, Adams managed the distribution of funds from the Dutch-American loan. Always an astute observer, he commented on the fall of the Shelburne ministry and its replacement by the Fox-North coalition, the future of the Anglo-American relationship, and the prospects for the United States in the post-revolutionary world. But he was also an anxious father, craving news of John Quincy Adams's slow journey from St. Petersburg to The Hague. By May 1783, Adams was tired of Europe, but resigned to remaining until his work was done

A Traveled First Lady

A Traveled First Lady
Author: Louisa Catherine Adams
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2014-03-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674369270

Louisa Catherine Adams was daughter-in-law and wife of presidents, assisted diplomat J. Q. Adams at three European capitals, and served as a D.C. hostess for three decades. Yet she is barely remembered today. A Traveled First Lady (with Foreword by Laura Bush) corrects this oversight, by sharing Adams's remarkable story in her own words.

Diary of Charles Francis Adams, Volume 1

Diary of Charles Francis Adams, Volume 1
Author: Charles Francis Adams
Publisher: Belknap Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-04-05
Genre:
ISBN: 9780674967922

Third and last of the Adams dynasty of statesmen, Charles Francis Adams followed in his grandfather's and father's footsteps by keeping a diary from youth to old age. With only a few gaps in the earliest years, Charles Francis Adams's diary extends from 1820 to 1880, furnishing a massively detailed and intensely personal record of the writer's life as an undergraduate at Harvard, manager of the Adams family's business affairs, historian and biographer, Free Soil political leader and Republican Congressman, United States minister in London during the Civil War, arbitrator of the Alabama claims at the Geneva Tribunal, and father of a whole constellation of gifted sons. The Diary of Charles Francis Adams is the second to appear in the Diaries Series of the Belknap Press edition of the Adams Papers. Unlike John Adams's Diary and Autobiography and John Quincy Adams's Diary, that of Charles Francis Adams has never before been even selectively published. This is partly because the protracted efforts of the family to prepare a satisfactory edition after the writer's death finally broke down under the sheer bulk of the material. The present volume reveals Charles Francis Adams as a sensitive and self-critical young man during his college years, in the social whirl of Washington while his father was Secretary of State and President, during his training as a lawyer in Daniel Webster's Boston law office, and throughout his prolonged courtship of Abigail B. Brooks, a New England heiress. A central theme of these volumes is the struggle which raged within young Adams's mind and heart between the warm, poetic heritage of his Southern-born mother and the cold, political, New England legacy of his Adams forebears.

Diary

Diary
Author: Charles Francis Adams
Publisher:
Total Pages: 482
Release: 1964
Genre: Statesmen
ISBN:

Diary of Charles Francis Adams, Volume 8

Diary of Charles Francis Adams, Volume 8
Author: Charles Francis Adams
Publisher: Belknap Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1986
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674204034

The period of June 1836 to February 1840, from Charles Francis Adams's twenty-eighth to thirty-second year, was characterized by his turn from the political activities that had occupied him for the preceding several years. The course of the Van Buren administration he had helped to elect dissatisfied him, the Massachusetts Whig leadership had earned his distrust, positions on political issues that would either echo or oppose those being vigorously espoused by his father, John Quincy Adams, he felt inhibited from avowing publicly. So confronted, Charles found occupation in preparing and expressing himself on economic matters of moment--banking and currency--and moral questions generated by the slavery issue. With increasing effectiveness he employed the lecture platform and the press for the expression of views to which he felt free to attach his name. On all these matters he found his opinions at odds with the prevailing ones held among those prominent in the Boston scene, as John Adams and John Quincy Adams had found before him. Yet, despite a sense of loneliness, so induced, his participation in the varied social life of the city has its place in the Diary. However, activities in Boston and its environs that provided a focus for the record of the preceding years give way in these volumes to wider scenes made available by train and ship. An extensive journey with his wife by way of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal to Niagara and Canada, a visit of some length and interest in Washington, and stays of lesser length in New York City are recounted. Wide and persistent reading, the theater, numismatics, and the building of a summer home in Quincy also occupied him and are fully reflected in his journal. Family tragedies are not absent from its pages. As the period comes to its close his long and distinguished labors as editor of the family's papers had begun. A new self-assurance has become evident.