American Virtues in the Letters of John and Abigail Adams during the Revolutionary War

Jonathan Vogel

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Master's Thesis from the year 2023 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 1,0, University of Wupp...

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Master's Thesis from the year 2023 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 1,0, University of Wuppertal, language: English, abstract: Have you ever seen a carpet from below? Probably. You will have noticed a jumble of threads and colors, and it is difficult to see the beauty of the actual pattern from this perspective. The equivalent is applicable to the letters of John and Abigail Adams. If one reads only one or a few letters from the overabundant corpus, it seems like a big hodgepodge of anecdotes from the most diverse areas of life. From philosophizing about the principle of the "Passion of Superiority" in human nature, it merely takes a few lines to ask about the performance of the asparagus in the Adams' garden (cf. My Dearest Friend). John's and Abigail's writings during the Revolutionary War shift in a short time from the occupation with the "inhumane and Brutal Treatment" of war captives to a praise about "The Charms of the Morning" and "The Streakes of Glory dawning in the East". This back and forth, these ups and downs can be entertainingly varied on the one hand, but also disturbing to the reader on the other. The fact that the flow of reading is disrupted by the fragmentation of individual topics into different letters over a longer period of time can also contribute to the fact that the letters of the couple are not readily brought to hand as a source from the time of the War of Independence. John Adam's diary, for example, provides a similar or even deeper form of intimacy and familiarity, and its orderly structure by days makes it clearer to handle than an exchange of letters in a time when delivery took days, weeks or even months. However, the difficulties just depicted also render the correspondence a fascinating object of analysis. This paper will attempt to take the perspective from 'above' and see the beautiful pattern on the verso of this tangle.