Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis

Chapter one covers the Adams-Jefferson correspondence between May 1777 and October 1781. The two men met in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress in 1775. Adams, thirty-nine and Jefferson, thirty-two, were delegates and lawyers and had served for a few years in the lower house of their respective local legislatures.

Adams served as a Massachusetts representative in the 1774 Congress and was seen as a radical. He had authored the Novanglus letters, published anonymously in January 1775. It voraciously defended the authority of the Bay Colony to resist British oppression.

Jefferson was also seen as a radical due to his writing the Summary View of the Rights of British America, a series of documents Jefferson distributed to friends before he went to the 1774 meeting of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1774. His friends entitled the pieces "By a Native and Member of the House of Burgesses," without...