In Ellis's rich and striking new history, John and Abigail's relationship unfolds in the context of America's birth as a nation.īefore Bill and Hillary took to the White House, or Al and Tipper inspired Love Story, in a pre-Brangelina world (if one can imagine it), there was another power couple, John and Abigail Adams. The political situation was perilous at best, and he needed his closest advisor by his side: 'I can do nothing,' John told Abigail after his election, 'without you.' President Adams inherited a weak and bitterly divided country from George Washington. She no doubt had further reservations about moving to the swamp on the Potomac when John became president, although this time he persuaded her. John was elected the nation's first vice president, but by the time of his reelection, Abigail's health prevented her from joining him in Philadelphia, the interim capital. These years apart stressed the Adamses' union almost beyond what it could bear: Abigail grew lonely, while the Adams children suffered from their father's absence. Later he was sent to Paris, where he served as a minister to the court of France alongside Benjamin Franklin. Yet in order to attend the Second Continental Congress, he left his wife and children in the middle of the war zone that had by then engulfed Massachusetts. John's political career took him first to Philadelphia, where he became the boldest advocate for the measures that would lead to the Declaration of Independence. Over the next decades, the couple were separated nearly as much as they were together. But they soon began a passionate correspondence that resulted in their marriage five years later.

Ellis distills this unprecedented and unsurpassed record to give us an account both intimate and panoramic part biography, part political history, and part love story.Įllis describes the first meeting between the two as inauspicious-John was twenty-four, Abigail just fifteen, and each was entirely unimpressed with the other. John and Abigail Adams left an indelible and remarkably preserved portrait of their lives together in their personal correspondence: both Adamses were prolific letter writers (although John conceded that Abigail was clearly the more gifted of the two), and over the years they exchanged more than twelve hundred letters. The Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of 'Founding Brothers' and 'His Excellency 'brings America's preeminent first couple to life in a moving and illuminating narrative that sweeps through the American Revolution and the republic's tenuous early years.

First family by joseph j ellis