The Adams Papers--a massive family record of American life from colonial times down to 1890--have now been prepared for American readers. The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press published the first books of a set which may run to 75 volumes or more, and will take years to complete.

The series opens with the diary of John Adams--as a young lawyer struggling for professional recognition and "gallanting" girls in Quincy, Mass., as a Revolutionary leader and member of the Continental Congress, as envoy of the new States to France and the Netherlands, and then as first U.S. minister to Great Britain--and with large fragments of an incomplete autobiography written by the retired second President of the United States. Adams was alone among the founders of the republic in making full notes, in "flat-like phrases," of the day's events as they happened. The first volumes also include several short unpublished journals kept by John's wife, Abigail Adams.

125 Years of Letters

The series will later include the much longer diary of John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, running from 1779 (when he was 12) to 1848, and the diary of Charles Francis Adams from 1820 to 1880. Charles Francis Adams was Lincoln's Civil War Minister to Great Britain.

Still another series of The Adams Papers, according to Lyman Butterfield, lecturer on History and Editor of the series, is now in active production. This is the Adams Family Correspondence, running continuously from the courtship letters of John Abegail Adams in 1762 to the death in 1989 of another Abigail, the wife of Charles Francis Adams. The family correspondence is expected to run to some 20 volumes.

A final series will complete publication of The Adams Papers--years hence--with the General Correspondence and Other Papers of the three Adams statesmen--John, John Quincy, and Charles Francis.

Six years of sorting and editing have gone to opening the John Adams material to the general public in books. The Adams Papers, held under a family trust, were turned over to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1956, when preparations for editing had already been going on for two years, with support for editorial work from Life Magazine in return for first serial rights of publication. The entire archive, meanwhile, has been made available to historical scholars in a microfilm edition of 608 reels, sets of which are held by major research libraries across the country. The Massachusetts Historical Society, owner of the papers, has administrative and editorial responsibility for the Belknap Press edition as a whole.

The Adams Character

John Adams in his diary "told more about the birth of the United States in the years 1774-1776 than any of his colleagues did," and from it "we learn much about village life in New England during the 1750's and 1760's, about the origins of resistance in Massachusetts, and about the ordeals and triumphs of the Revolution itself in Congress and in European courts." His diary-keeping was spotty--sometimes brief for spells, and sometimes full; months, even years passed without entries; he kept his diary through the election campaign of 1796 but stopped when he became President.

But these insights into public life are dividends, said Butterfield:

"John Adams would have been a 'character' at any time or in any part of the world...The information in the diary may in the end be judged secondary to its picture of a remarkable human being--self-important, impetuous, pugnacious, tormented by self-doubts and yet stubborn to the point of mulishness, vain, jealous, and suspicious almost to the point of paranoia; and yet at the same time deeply affectionate and warmhearted, 'as sociable as any Marblehead man,' irrepressibly humorous, passionately devoted all his life to the welfare of his country, and as courageous a diplomat as his country ever had."