John Adams

ALS as president, one page both sides, 8 x 9.75, February 28, 1798. Addressed from the United States Capitol in Philadelphia, a handwritten letter to Boston jurist and historian George Richards Minot, in full: “I have received your kind Letter of the ninth of this month, with its elegant companion, the first Volume of your continuation of the History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from the Year 1748. For this valuable present, the printing and binding of which shews the rapid improvement of the Arts in this Country, I pray you to accept my Thanks. I have read the work with great Pleasure. The Style of it is a model of historical Eloquence: the narration is very perspicuous; and the matter only Such as becomes the dignity of History.

I Should have been happy to have received you at Quincy last fall, and shall be very glad to See you at any other time: But I have no hope of giving you much assistance in your literary researches. My Life has been that of a Bird, much too volatile, to have collected Information of much consequence to your purpose. I hope you will pursue the Subject onwards: and look back too to the Beginning of our History. I am not Satisfied with Hutchinson, though his Work is valuable. Annals too I Should think preferable to History, and even minuter details even of the Indian Wars, than have hitherto been published in Print.” In fine condition.

George Richards Minot (1758–1802) was a Boston attorney, judge, and historian, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. His Continuation of the History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from the Year 1748, the first volume of which prompted this letter, was published in Boston by Manning and Loring in 1798. It picked up where loyalist Thomas Hutchinson's History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay had left off, carrying the narrative through the period leading to the Revolution.

Adams's pointed remark that he was "not Satisfied with Hutchinson, though his Work is valuable" reflects the deep personal and political animosity between Adams and Hutchinson, the royal governor whose enforcement of British policy Adams had opposed at every turn in the decade before independence. His suggestion that "Annals" and "minuter details even of the Indian Wars" would be preferable to formal history reflects Adams's lifelong preference for primary documentation over narrative synthesis. Minot died in 1802 at the age of forty-three, leaving the second volume of the Continuation unpublished at his death; it appeared posthumously. Adams wrote this letter during his single term as president, having defeated Thomas Jefferson in 1796 and three years before losing the rematch to Jefferson in 1800.