The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams Review

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(More customer reviews)What a joy it is to read the correspondence between two of America's greatest founding fathers. Through this collection of letters we begin to get into the minds of men who created and shaped this nation. We read of their dreams, expectations and fears for this new nation as well as typical correspondence between friends. That is when they were talking to each other. When the two men weren't, Abigail continued to write Jefferson to try and heal the breach. My favorite letter is from John Adams to Jefferson to tell him to stop writing his wife. This is a book for anyone who loves the human side of history and enjoys getting to know the real people behind the legends. I first read it in college, and then spent ten years trying to find it again. Now that I have, it will never leave my bookshelf.

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An intellectual dialogue of the highest plane achieved in America, the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson spanned half a century and embraced government, philosophy, religion, quotidiana, and family griefs and joys. First meeting as delegates to the Continental Congress in 1775, they initiated correspondence in 1777, negotiated jointly as ministers in Europe in the 1780s, and served the early Republic-each, ultimately, in its highest office. At Jefferson's defeat of Adams for the presidency in 1800, they became estranged, and the correspondence lapses from 1801 to 1812, then is renewed until the death of both in 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence.
Lester J. Cappon's edition, first published in 1959 in two volumes, provides the complete correspondence between these two men and includes the correspondence between Abigail Adams and Jefferson. Many of these letters have been published in no other modern edition, nor does any other edition devote itself exclusively to the exchange between Jefferson and the Adamses. Introduction, headnotes, and footnotes inform the reader without interrupting the speakers. This reissue of The Adams-Jefferson Letters in a one-volume unabridged edition brings to a broader audience one of the monuments of American scholarship and, to quote C. Vann Woodward, 'a major treasure of national literature.'

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