Free First Family by Joseph J. Ellis Page A

and urged me to have the courage of my convictions.
    Robert Dalzell, who continues to stalk the classrooms of Williams College dispensing wit and wisdom, provided suggestions about the role of family dynasties in American history and pushed me on what makes for a happy marriage.
    Stephen Smith, currently editor of the
Washington Examiner
, is a journalist who takes American history seriously. He is also a peerless critic, capable of showing you why this word is better than that, or persuading you that what you want to say is not quite what you have said.
    C. James Taylor, editor of the
Adams Papers
, not only read and commented on a late draft, but also made available the unpublished letters between Abigail and John assembled by his staff for subsequent volumes of the
Adams Family Correspondence
.
    This is my fifth book with Ash Green, who is officially retired from Knopf but remains my editor and friend until one of us goes to the hereafter. If Abigail and John had unconditional love, Ash and I have unconditional trust. Andrew Miller, his successor at Knopf, ushered the completed manuscript through the several stages of editorial wizardry that transformed it into a book.
    My agent, Ike Williams, negotiated the contract with a minimum offuss, then called periodically to see how things were going. Our conversations invariably became passionate digressions into the prospects of the Red Sox, Patriots, and Celtics.
    Although I had no research assistants—I have this stubborn conviction that reading the sources with my own eyes is the only way—Linda Fernandes was my assistant in all the other ways, including technological, clerical, and therapeutic. I wrote the drafts in longhand on the blank back sides of junk mail, sometimes late at night, when the slant of my scrawl defied translation. Linda put it all into printed form on a disk, periodically offering suggestions that I could not afford to ignore.
    Twenty students at Mount Holyoke took a research seminar with me on Abigail and John in the spring of 2008. Our conversations and their papers influenced my thinking about Abigail as a proto-feminist, the perils of parenting, and, most important, what to leave out. Undergraduates are supposed to be incapable of irony, but that was the interpretive edge they insisted upon.
    As I took notes and wrote words in my study, I was accompanied by an aging golden retriever, a young Labradoodle, a feisty Jack Russell terrier, and a defiant cat. They offered no advice that I could understand, but their sheer presence created serenity.
    My wife, Ellen Wilkins Ellis, as the dedication suggests, merely provided the ballast. I have a hunch that this was essential.
    Joseph J. Ellis              
Amherst, Massachusetts

NOTES
    The notes below represent my attempt to provide documentation for all quotations in the text, the vast majority of which come from the published and yet unpublished correspondence between Abigail and John. When the story I try to tell crosses over contested historical terrain that has spawned a formidable scholarly literature, I have tried to cite books and articles that strike me as sensible and seminal. But my accounting on this score is far from exhaustive, in part because such a standard would burden the book with notes that outweighed the text itself, in part because I think the conversation between Abigail and John should take precedence over the conversation among several generations of historians.
    That said, previous biographers of John and Abigail have blazed the trail in ways that have influenced my reading of the primary sources and, therefore, deserve mention at the start. For John there are three distinguished predecessors: Page Smith,
John Adams
, 2 vols. (New York, 1962); John Ferling,
John Adams: A Life
(Knoxville, 1995); and David McCullough,
John Adams
(New York, 2001). For Abigail there are also three biographical pioneers: Lynn Withey,
Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams
(New York,