Someone who has been teaching and writing history as long as I have accumulates a host of debts that can never be repaid, let alone adequately acknowledged. So I thank all those who have helped me in a variety of ways over the past several decades. I especially want to thank my wife, Louise, my editor in chief and my chief supporter over the years. I am also grateful for all the help I received from the editors and their associates at Penguin Random House, including Kiara Barrow, Christopher Richards, Jane Cavolina, Trent Duffy, Sophie Fels, and Bruce Giffords. My thanks too to the staff of the Rockefeller Library at Brown University, where this book was written; they couldn’t have been more helpful.
For this book I am once again grateful for the support given me by Scott Moyers, the publisher of Penguin Press. Not only has he edited and published several of my books (and recommended titles for a couple of them), but he also suggested the topic of this book. I had originally intended to write about only John Adams, but he proposed comparing Adams with Thomas Jefferson. Fortunately, I took his suggestion, and I learned more about both men by pitting them against each other.
I have dedicated this book to the editors of the Papers of John Adams and The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. I could not have written the book, at least not in a decent amount of time, without the documents they have edited and made available to the public. We historians write monographs and books that are inevitably ephemeral; but the editors of the papers of these two great patriots, indeed all the many documentary editors of America’s past, are producing work for the ages.
All these documentary editors seldom receive the recognition and acclaim they deserve. We historians, indeed, the entire country, are deeply indebted to them for making available to us in print, whether online or in letterpress editions, the many documents of America’s past. Because the coming generations of students no longer read cursive handwriting, the documentary collections like those of Adams and Jefferson will become all the more important. For most scholars and students in the future the original handwritten documents of American history will remain more or less inaccessible, expressed in a foreign language not easily deciphered.