It contained his prayer and blessing for the house. The next day he sent the following letter to his beloved wife Abigail in Quincy, Massachusetts. President John Adams arrived in the new Washington City on November 1, 1800, to spend his first night in the new President’s house. The letters of John and Abigail Adams number in the thousands, and because they wrote with such candor and in such vivid detail, it is possible to know them-to go beneath the surface of their lives-to an extent not possible with other protagonists of the time. Housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, the full collection of letters, diaries, and family papers of all kinds, ranges from the year 1639 to 1889. There is no comparable written record of a prominent American family. may be rightly described as a national treasure. Historian David McCullough writes in the acknowledgement notes of his Pulitzer Prize winning biography John Adams: Those letters are part of one of our nation’s most valuable historical collections, The Adams Papers. In Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out, children’s book author Jane Yolen based her delightful, witty poem “The White House First Residents” on the historical letters written by John and Abigail Adams. Primary Sources: The Letters of John and Abigail Adams The First White House Correspondence
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