Like 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.)
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