He can thank talented biographers (David McCullough) and inspired actors (Paul Giamatti) for some of this, but mostly he deserves the credit himself, for leaving to future scholars one of the great masses of writing in our history, a body of scribbling that revealed a mind perpetually at work. The Adams-Jefferson correspondence is justifiably famous for its moving display of two of the original Argonauts (Jefferson’s term), once enemies, eventually reconciled and reflective. But there was another correspondent to whom he opened his heart even more fully, and that was his wife, Abigail, to whom he wrote more than 1,200 letters over a remarkable lifelong partnership.
Joseph Ellis, the renowned Mount Holyoke College historian, has written about Adams before in different formats. But now he has delved into those letters, preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the result is a stirring portrait of a marriage. “First Family’’ reminds us that in certain presidencies (FDR and Clinton spring to mind), there is no closer adviser than a brilliant spouse, improving the thoughts of her husband, often before he has even conceived them. “It may be called the telegraph of the mind,’’ Abigail wrote to explain their connection. Sometimes it seemed that they shared the same body (“When he is wounded, I bleed,” she wrote), and Ellis takes obvious pleasure in exploring their physical connection as well.
