Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams During the Revolution with a Memoir of Mrs. Adams

Everything here is in as good a way as I could wish, considering the temper and designs of Administration. I assure you the letters have had no such bad effects as the Tories in...

Your sentiments of the importance of education in women are exactly agreeable to my own. Yet the _femmes savantes_ are contemptible characters. So is that of a pedant universall...

I do not feel easy more than two days together without writing to you. If you abound, you must lay some of the fault upon yourself, who have made such sad complaints for letters...

Your uncle has never answered my letter. Thank the Dr.; he has written me a most charming letter, full of intelligence and very sensible and useful remarks. I will pay the debt,...

Our army is at Wilmington. We have many officers out reconnoitering the country and the enemy. Our scouting parties have taken between thirty and forty prisoners, and twelve des...

Your reflections upon the rewards of the virtuous friends of the public are very just. But if virtue was to be rewarded with wealth, it would not be virtue. If virtue was to be...

Our province is nowhere blamed. The accounts of the battle are exaggerated in our favor. My love to all. I pray for you all, and hope to be prayed for. Certainly there is a Prov...

You have made frequent complaints that your friends do not write to you. I have stirred up some of them. May not I in my turn make complaints? All the letters I receive from you...

My dear John,--I hope this letter will be more fortunate than yours have been of late. I know you must have written many times since I had the pleasure of receiving a line from...

I have to acknowledge the receipt of a very few lines dated the 12th of April. You make no mention of the whole sheets I have wrote to you, by which I judge you either never rec...

I thank you for all your kind favors. I wish I could write to you much oftener than I do. I wish I could write to you a dozen letters every day. But the business before me is so...

I went to bed about twelve, and rose again a little after one. I could no more sleep than if I had been in the engagement; the rattling of the windows, the jar of the house, the...

The situation in which my masters have left me puzzles me very much. They have said nothing to me. But one set of gentlemen write that I am to go to Spain, another to Holland, a...

On second thoughts, why should I? One evening, as I sat in one room, I overheard a company of the common sort of people in another, conversing upon serious subjects. One of them...

I must bid you good night; 't is late for me, who am much of an invalid. I was disappointed last week in receiving a packet by the post, and, upon unsealing it, finding only fou...

The rumor you heard of General Gates will prove premature. I endeavored both here and with the General to have it so, and should have succeeded, if it had not been for the loss...

I am seated in a large library room with eight gentlemen round about me, all engaged in conversation. Amidst these interruptions, how shall I make it out to write a letter?

If there is a moral law, if there is a divine law,--and that there is, every intelligent creature is conscious,--to trample on these laws, to hold them in contempt and defiance,...

It is now a long time since I had an opportunity of writing to you, and I fear you have suffered unnecessary anxiety on my account. In the morning of the 19th instant, the Congr...

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but the God of Israel is He that giveth strength and power unto his people. Trust in him at all times, ye people, po...

I beg you would write by every opportunity, and if you cannot send so often as you used to, write and let them lie by till you make a packet.

Yet she lived till five o'clock that day, but I could not be with her. My dear father prayed twice beside her bed that day. God Almighty was with him and supported him that day,...

Dearest of Friends,--Shall I tell my dearest that tears of joy filled my eyes this morning at the sight of his well-known hand?--the first line which has blessed my sight since...

"You terrify me, my dear sir, when you ask for letters of mine to publish. It is true that Dr. Disney, to whom the late Mr. Hollis bequeathed his property, found amongst his pap...

I think I have sometimes observed to you in conversation, that upon examining the biography of illustrious men, you will generally find some female about them, in the relation o...

It is dull enough to be in a country, so wholly ignorant of the language and usages; but we have furnished ourselves with a dictionary and grammar, and are learning every hour....

Governor Bernard, I am told, died last fall. I wish that, with these primary instruments of the calamities that now distress almost all the world, the evils themselves may come...

I have written but once to you since I left you. This is to be imputed to a variety of causes, which I cannot explain for want of time. It would fill volumes to give you an exac...

[Footnote 30: This judgment appears from subsequent events to have been well founded. For Mr. Quincy when put to the test showed no confidence in the correctness of his reasonin...

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember...

You have had many rumors propagated among you which I suppose you know not how to account for. One was that Congress, the last summer, had tied the hands of General Washington,...

I am ashamed of our farmers. They are a lazy, ignorant set; in husbandry, I mean; for they know infinitely more of everything else than these. But after all, the native face of...

My countrymen want art and address. They want knowledge of the world. They want the exterior and superficial accomplishment of gentlemen, upon which the world has set so high a...

Josiah Quincy, always impetuous and vehement, would not stop, but drove forward; I suppose, that he might get upon the fishing ground before his brother Sam and me. I find that...

The news of the surrender of General Burgoyne had done more to hasten the desired acknowledgment, by France, of the independence of the United States, than all the efforts which...

But though her early years were spent in a spot of so great seclusion as her grandfather's house must then have been, it does not appear that she remained wholly unacquainted wi...

It is worth the while of a person, obliged to write as much as I do, to consider the varieties of style. The epistolary is essentially different from the oratorical and the hist...

I wrote you by Captain Grinnell. The _Firebrand_ is in great haste to return, and I fear will not give me time to say half I wish. I want you to say many more things to me than...

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Congress, assembles at Philadelphia, 31, xvii. Opening of, 37, 39. Adjourns, 47. Members enter the army, 59. Appoints George Washington to be Commander-in-Chief, 65. Address of,...