John and Abigail Adams' prescience about what was to become the U.S.
- sciart0
- 6 hours ago
- 1 min read
Excerpt: "Because we know the outcome, we cannot comprehend what it felt like to devote, as Thomas Jefferson later put it, “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” to a glorious but unlikely cause. We cannot share their uncertainty. Their letters provide only a glimpse of their conviction and bravado, which is the way they wanted it. If Britain won the war, their letters were unlikely ever to be seen anyway.
But just because we know where history was headed — that it would take 15 months after Lexington and Concord for the American colonies to declare independence — it in no way diminishes the fascination of the Adams’ correspondence during that period.
The letters show us their frustrations with and their criticisms of their more hesitant colleagues (“The Fidgets, the Whims, the Caprice, the Vanity, the Superstition, the Irritability of some of us,” John wrote in July 1775), and the efforts by John to convince himself and then Abigail that patience was their only option. Although the couple had already crossed a Rubicon, they would have to wait on the other side for a majority of their fellow Americans to join them."