A portrait of Abigail Adams by an unidentified artist.
(New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown)
By Jill Goetz
Cornell students are some of the first people ever to read a collection of letters written by John and Abigail Adams, thanks to a fellow student and her sister who have given them to Cornell University Library.
Sarah Johnson, a graduate student in developmental psychology, and her sister, Gwyneth Johnson Lymberis, have donated the Johnson Family Pa pers, which include dozens of letters written between Adams relatives; let ters, land grants and army discharge papers signed by presidents George Washington, James Monroe, Martin Van Buren and Chester Arthur; an autograph book signed by President Rutherford B. Hayes and members of his administration, Supreme Court justices and Civil War generals; an autographed engraving of Ulysses S. Grant; a signed copy of an autobiography by Mary Emily Cornell (daughter of Ezra Cornell, the university's founder); and even a lock of John Adams' hair.
The Johnson sisters are the great-great-great-great-granddaughters of John and Abigail Adams, the nation's second president and First Lady.
Most of the papers, numbering about 250, are in excellent condition, in part because 18th- and early 19th-century American paper was rag-based and highly durable. They are kept in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, located in the Carl A. Kroch Library. Like the library's other rare documents, the Johnson papers are available for public use in the division's reading room.
"Although specific documents are of sufficient importance to draw scholars from around the world, these materials will offer the greatest enhancement for Cornell students and faculty," said University Archivist Elaine Engst of the Johnson collection. "They will provide a dramatic historical dimension to the student experience at Cornell."
Living near a fault line
Sarah Johnson, 49, has known her whole life about the papers' existence -- they were stored in tin boxes in a cupboard in her parents' Santa Ana, Calif., home (near the San Andreas fault).
"I'd looked at them a bit when I was younger, but I hadn't really paid much at tention," said Johnson, a graduate student in the College of Human Ecology. When she looked at them again about five years ago, she said, "Their breadth astonished me."
After attending a lecture by Professor Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a social and cultural histo rian, and learning of Brumberg's research in the history of American families, Johnson e -mailed her a note about the papers.
When she later saw them, what most excited Brumberg was a series of letters written from 1806 to 1816 between Abigail Adams, her widowed daughter-in-law, Sa rah, and her granddaughters, Susanna (Susan) and Abigail Louisa (Abbe). After John and Abigail's son, Charles, died an alcoholic at age 30, they raised Susan in Quincy, Mass.; they were also deeply involved in raising Abbe, who lived with her mother in Utica, N.Y. Many of the letters are from Abigail to Sarah, expressing her concerns over both girls' sensibilities and suitors.
In a letter dated May 20, 1816, regarding Susan's courtship by one Charles Thomas Clark, Abigail writes to Sarah, "His name is Clark, native place Maryland, his whole deportment has been solid, modest and pleasing, his understanding improved, hav ing received a Liberal Education, his character, so far as I have been able to learn it, is correct and amiable. He is not what is called handsome, he is well made, tall and slender. His age 24. His parents both dead, one brother who is married and has a family and one sister single. What his property is I know not."
On Susan's wedding day, Aug. 8, 1817, Abigail writes Sarah (who did not attend the wedding): "This evening, my dear daughter, will give you a son and me a grandson whom I have no doubt will prove himself worthy [of] that relation. He has plead so hard and appeared so anxious and distrest that it should be so before he again went abroad that I could no longer withhold my assent. . . . I feel this morning little able to add to my letter the thoughts of parting with one whom I have had from her early years under my care & who has been the Life and Spirits of the family. . . ."
"It's a bit like a Jane Austen story," Brumberg said. "I'm also the grandmother of two granddaughters, so I'm kind of tick led to see the pattern of Abigail's involvement in her granddaughters' lives.
"What's especially interesting about these letters," added Brumberg, who teaches an undergraduate course titled "The History of Female Adolescence," "is that these girls and their mother, Sarah, were basically lost to history before this collection." (That might be, she guessed, because John and Abigail's son Charles "was not a happy subject for his parents.")
Already, students in Brumberg's class are transcribing and annotating photocopies of the Adams letters, viewing the originals in the library when needed. Their transcrip
tions later will be put on-line and made accessible via the World Wide Web.
"So in a sense," Brumberg said, "these students are going to be creating a historical collection that can be used by people out side Cornell and that will contribute to our knowledge of history."
The Adams legacy
The importance of Abigail and John Adams to America's history cannot be over estimated, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen, Cornell's Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture.
"They were exceedingly thoughtful and articulate about public affairs," Kammen said. "They both had a very strong sense that history was being made in their own time in a particularly dramatic and pivotal way."
The only woman to be both wife and mother of a U.S. president (son John Quincy Adams led the nation from 1825-29), Abigail Adams was an unusually outspoken and involved first lady, Kammen added.
Just as Hillary Rodham Clinton broke ranks with Barbara Bush, in terms of her outspokenness and political involvement, so did Abigail Adams differ from her pre decessor, Martha Washington, by engaging frequently in sophisticated political dis course concerning matters of the day -- often in letters with Thomas Jefferson. She believed women had as great a stake in those matters as men -- as she often re minded John.
"He's off at the Continental Congress, she's back in Massachusetts, and she knows he's dealing with the most profound of issues," Kammen said. "She tells him, 'Re member the Ladies; don't forget us while you are away, or that we are now doing many of the things that men traditionally once did.'
"Abigail Adams had a very strong sense that in this new society that was going to be created as a result of the American Revolution, the role of women would have to be reconceived -- that women couldn't and shouldn't be second-class citizens as they had been in Old-World societies," Kammen said.
The Adams letters in the Johnson collection, which were written after John had retired from the presidency, reveal another side of Abigail -- that of matriarch. She essentially had raised her four children alone (a fifth, Susanna, died as a baby) in Quincy, while managing the family farm and finances, as her peripatetic spouse served as a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; as vice president and president in Washington (where she lived only briefly); and as ambassador to Great Britain.
Largely as a result of these long separations, the Adams' letters and other docu ments today number more than 20,000 and are stored at more than 200 U.S. libraries and institutions.
A home in Cornell
"My sister and I felt quite strongly that the collection should be in institutional hands," Johnson said, "not only so that it would be protected and preserved, but so that students and researchers would have access to it. The way I think about this collection is that it's not really my history; it's our history. It belongs to all of us."
Cornell Library seemed especially appropriate, she added, because it has a world -renowned archive of family papers and business records documenting the history of New York state. The Johnson papers illustrate the Adams family's strong connection to New York state (a connection that has been overlooked by most historians, ac cording to Brumberg) and also include letters written by Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins; De Witt Clinton, New York state senator, governor and New York City mayor; John Savage, chief justice of the state Supreme Court; and Aaron Burr, vice president and U.S. senator from New York.
Brumberg said, "It's very interesting that these letters came to us via a graduate student at Cornell, as opposed to a wealthy donor who might have purchased them for the university. Sarah Johnson understood their significance for the study of American family life, and she deserves our gratitude, because of the research opportunities they will provide for people who are interested specifically in the Adams family and for those of us interested in the social and cultural life of early 19th-century America."
"It's been a great privilege to be here at Cornell," Johnson said, "and I feel very fortu nate to be able to give something in return."
Adriana Rovers/University Photography
Professor Joan Jacobs Brumberg, gesturing at right, speaks to her class in the Carl A. Kroch Library on Feb. 1. Elaine Engst, university archivist, is at her right. Students in "The History of Female Adolescence" course are getting their first view of the Abigail Adams letters and other documents in the Johnson Family Papers, recently donated to Cornell.