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Nov. 7th, 2015 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsLike basically everyone else in the world, I am currently kind of head over heels over Hamilton and definitely plan to read the Chernow biography at some point in the near future.
Currently I do not own a copy of the Chernow biography. I do own a copy of a biography of Abigail Adams that my great-aunt gave me for my high school graduation and I never got around to reading, so .... it seemed like the time had maybe finally come ....?
Anyway, I'm slightly retroactively annoyed because Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution is definitely way below my high school reading level, like, come on, Aunt Esther, you could have given me something a little meatier than this! (I should probably in fact go seek out something meatier than this.)
I mean, don't get me wrong, it's a good YA biography and I enjoyed reading it, but 200ish pages is really not enough to cover the complexities of Abigail Adams' life, and the elisions are fairly obvious. Here's a charming anecdote about how Abigail Adams defended her black servant's right to go to school! Leeeeeet's perhaps not talk about how Adams family BFF Jefferson was a slaveholder. Here's a couple sentences explaining the Alien and Sedition Act, OK, maybe those were kind of tyrannical and maybe not a great idea, but totally understandable that the Adamses would feel that way given how John Adams was being dragged in the press, now let's please move on!
...however other subjects, hilariously, are not at all elided, like the love letter in which John Adams complains that Abigail is too prone to blushing at "every violation of decency in company," like, dang, what kind of sneaky Colonial footsie were you up to, John and Abigail? No, no, it's fine, you don't need to tell me, I probably don't need to know, life is more than sexual combustibility. Natalie S. Bobet definitely enjoys her Colonial gossip, though. The Alien and Sedition Acts get three whole pages; James Lovell, another Massachusetts Continental Congress delegate whose only historical importance appears to have been that he wrote Abigail a number of flirty letters while John was away, gets more than twice that.
(To be fair, I then went and looked the letters up up, and as flirty letters to the wife of a major America political figure go, they appear to have been quite something. "I shall covet to be in the arms of Portia [TURN PAGE] 's friend and admirer [my actual wife.]" That's some A. Ham level sneaky sexy letter-writing. Portia, for the record, was one of Abigail's adopted pen-names. Her other, which she picked when she was a very young teenager, was Diana, which is kind of adorable and super Anne of Green Gables of her, bless.)
And, OK, even more fascinating Colonial-era sexy gossip which is only kind of elided: an offhand reference to a child (tragically stillborn) that "Abigail and John had planned," implying they ... planned at other times not to have children? Please tell me more about contraception and family planning in colonial New England, Natalie Bober! This is highly relevant information!
Anyway. It's a reasonable, if not particularly nuanced, preliminary overview of The Life Of Abigail Adams, Early Advocate of Women's Education, Semi-Official Presidential Political Adviser, and Frequently Single Mom. And now if my Aunt Esther ever happens to ask, I can finally say that I've read it.
(Also, for those, like me, who are in the grip of Hamilton-mania: Alexander Hamilton is mentioned ten times, and almost every time after his initial introduction it's with some variant on the phrase "Hamilton's treachery." WHICH IS HILARIOUS. Aaron Burr, alas, is not mentioned one single time, and I expect that somewhere he's really mad about it.)
Currently I do not own a copy of the Chernow biography. I do own a copy of a biography of Abigail Adams that my great-aunt gave me for my high school graduation and I never got around to reading, so .... it seemed like the time had maybe finally come ....?
Anyway, I'm slightly retroactively annoyed because Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution is definitely way below my high school reading level, like, come on, Aunt Esther, you could have given me something a little meatier than this! (I should probably in fact go seek out something meatier than this.)
I mean, don't get me wrong, it's a good YA biography and I enjoyed reading it, but 200ish pages is really not enough to cover the complexities of Abigail Adams' life, and the elisions are fairly obvious. Here's a charming anecdote about how Abigail Adams defended her black servant's right to go to school! Leeeeeet's perhaps not talk about how Adams family BFF Jefferson was a slaveholder. Here's a couple sentences explaining the Alien and Sedition Act, OK, maybe those were kind of tyrannical and maybe not a great idea, but totally understandable that the Adamses would feel that way given how John Adams was being dragged in the press, now let's please move on!
...however other subjects, hilariously, are not at all elided, like the love letter in which John Adams complains that Abigail is too prone to blushing at "every violation of decency in company," like, dang, what kind of sneaky Colonial footsie were you up to, John and Abigail? No, no, it's fine, you don't need to tell me, I probably don't need to know, life is more than sexual combustibility. Natalie S. Bobet definitely enjoys her Colonial gossip, though. The Alien and Sedition Acts get three whole pages; James Lovell, another Massachusetts Continental Congress delegate whose only historical importance appears to have been that he wrote Abigail a number of flirty letters while John was away, gets more than twice that.
(To be fair, I then went and looked the letters up up, and as flirty letters to the wife of a major America political figure go, they appear to have been quite something. "I shall covet to be in the arms of Portia [TURN PAGE] 's friend and admirer [my actual wife.]" That's some A. Ham level sneaky sexy letter-writing. Portia, for the record, was one of Abigail's adopted pen-names. Her other, which she picked when she was a very young teenager, was Diana, which is kind of adorable and super Anne of Green Gables of her, bless.)
And, OK, even more fascinating Colonial-era sexy gossip which is only kind of elided: an offhand reference to a child (tragically stillborn) that "Abigail and John had planned," implying they ... planned at other times not to have children? Please tell me more about contraception and family planning in colonial New England, Natalie Bober! This is highly relevant information!
Anyway. It's a reasonable, if not particularly nuanced, preliminary overview of The Life Of Abigail Adams, Early Advocate of Women's Education, Semi-Official Presidential Political Adviser, and Frequently Single Mom. And now if my Aunt Esther ever happens to ask, I can finally say that I've read it.
(Also, for those, like me, who are in the grip of Hamilton-mania: Alexander Hamilton is mentioned ten times, and almost every time after his initial introduction it's with some variant on the phrase "Hamilton's treachery." WHICH IS HILARIOUS. Aaron Burr, alas, is not mentioned one single time, and I expect that somewhere he's really mad about it.)
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no subject
Date: 2015-11-08 02:43 am (UTC)For the record, my favorite Abigail Adams biography is the one written by Lynne Withey. It's still pretty obviously slanted towards the general Adams point of view, but it's a bit more nuanced than that sounds.
no subject
Date: 2015-11-08 03:00 am (UTC)I'm not familiar with that one! But I mean, I expect an Adams bio to be slanted towards the Adams point of view, which is fine, that's why one carries grains of salt. I've been eyeing the Woody Holton one, which came out I think not that long ago and seems to be reasonably meaty (and well-reviewed.)
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Date: 2015-11-08 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-11 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-11 05:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-09 12:46 am (UTC)(Also, apparently Abigail Adams met Sally Hemings! When Jefferson sent his daughter to London he sent Sally along with her to be her nursemaid- they were about five years apart in age- and both girls turned up on Abigail's doorstep. She wrote a letter to Jefferson not long after saying basically "uhhh why have you sent this girl to take care of your child when she is obviously way too young to be taking care of anyone?")
no subject
Date: 2015-11-11 03:30 am (UTC)(Sally turning up with Jefferson's daughter is actually mentioned even in this book! ... kind of awkwardly, because guess what ISN'T mentioned? haha yeah.)
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Date: 2015-11-11 05:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-09 02:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-11 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-09 04:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-11 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-12 04:10 am (UTC)I think the reason that Burr got so many votes was that Jefferson had agreed to have him as his running mate. And by this point Jefferson and Madison had between them created a party with good discipline, so all the Republicans voted for Jefferson and Burr, whom they understood to be the Republican 'ticket,' and so those two wound up with exactly the same number of electoral votes. In today's system, that would be normal, because we understand that the president and vice president run as a pair, but this was the first time anyone had tried doing that, and the official Constitutional rules interpret "same number of votes" as "tie for the presidency," so the election got thrown into the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives was chock full of extremely bitter Federalist party members who had just been voted out of power and hated Jefferson's guts/genuinely feared he would dismantle the government. They decided, basically out of pure spite, to see if they could elect Burr president instead of Jefferson by swinging their votes to him. Which Jefferson rightly regarded as an absurd abuse of the electoral process, since none of the original people who cast their votes for Burr had been voting for him to be president, he had run as vice president.
Of course, Burr could have put a stop to this by announcing that he would not accept the presidency and had run on the understanding that he would be vice president. But did Burr do this? Definitely not. He sat back to see if the presidency would get handed to him by a confluence of political enmities.
So that's why Jefferson hated Burr's guts. I can't actually blame him on that one, myself. That is, if I'm remembering this rightly, which is about a 50/50 shot since it's been over a decade since I read up on this stuff :)
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Date: 2015-11-15 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-11 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-11 03:34 am (UTC)