Adams, John | Presentation copy of the rarest presidential book

Adams, John

Letters. [London: Privately printed for Adams, 1786]

8vo (206 x 131 mm). Occasional very light browning. Contemporary straightgrain red morocco, covers gilt with a Greek-key border and dot-and-diamond frame, smooth spine gilt in six compartments, the second gilt-lettered, marbled endpapers, gilt edges; two tiny wormholes to front joint, extremities rubbed. (The text has early stab-sewing holes, indicating that it was sent to the recipient simply stitched and bound by him.)

The very rare privately printed first edition of what was later published as Twenty-Six Letters, upon Interesting Subjects, Respecting the Revolution in America; presentation copy, inscribed to Adams's cousin Ward Nicholas Boylston on the title-page, probably by Adams's London secretary: "Presented to W.N. Boylston by his affectionate friend The Author." 

John Adams travelled to the Dutch Republic in 1780, seeking a loan that could decrease American dependence on France and pressure Britain into peace (Adams was appointed United States Minister Plenipotentiary to Holland in April 1782). Among his acquaintances was Hendrik Calkoen, a leader of Amsterdam's legal community who was sympathetic to the American cause. Adams wrote a series of letters between October 4 and October 27, 1780, in response to questions that Calkoen had raised about the American Revolution and allied matters. Adams recalled the genesis of the letters in the prefatory "Advertisement" to the present work: "Dr. Calkoen, an eminent civilian at Amsterdam, to whom these letters were written, composed, by means of them, a comparison between the revolt of the Low Countries from Spain, and the revolution of the United States of America; in which he concluded, upon the whole, that 'as it was a kind of miracle that the former succeeded, it would be a greater miracle still if the latter should not.'—This composition was read by him to a society of gentlemen of letters … who met sometimes at Amsterdam; and by its means just sentiments of American affairs began to spread in that country … which finally procured the acknowledgement of American independency, the treaty of commerce, and a loan of money." Adams concluded, "These papers are now printed, in order to preserve them; but by no means to be made public for the present."

The edition size of Adams's private printing of the Calkoen Letters must have been very small. ESTC records five institutional copies: British Library, American Antiquarian Society, Boston Athenæum (George Washington's copy), Massachusetts Historical Society, and New-York Historical Society. There has evidently been no copy other than this sold at auction since the Brinley sale in 1880 (lot 3931). Washington praised the book extravagantly in a letter to Benjamin Lincoln, 14 November 1788, "There is good sense in the answers given by Mr Adams to the questions of Doctr Calkoen, combined with an extensive knowledge of the interests and resources of this Country. If there be in some instances an exageration of our force, it is not a matter of wonder—but the tenor of the whole performance rather affords a subject for admiration that so much accurasy should have been discovered in representations, mostly drawn from recollection. Indeed I was very much pleased with the perusal & doubt not but the work must have been well calculated to answer the good purposes for which it was intended" (Papers, Presidential Series, 1: 107–10).

Adams's Letters "sets forth his views on the nature of the American Revolution, the qualities of the American character, and the potential of the United States after the Revolution. This is by far the greatest rarity of Presidential books, many times rarer than the privately printed edition of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, and arguably more important as a political statement of one of the most important founders" (Celebration).

PROVENANCE

Bonhams, 15 December 2009, lot 5380 (undesignated consignor)

REFERENCE

Celebration of My Country 106; ESTC T83250; Catalogue of the Washington Collection in the Boston Athenæum, pp. 2–3