Adriana Rovers/University Photography

Selected items from the Johnson collection, including the discharge papers of Abraham McKillip, 2nd New York Artillery Regiment, signed by General and Commander-in-Chief George Washington (1783); and a letter from John Adams to daughter-in-law Sarah Adams, dated Oct. 26, 1814.

A major collection of previously undocumented papers from U.S. presidents and other political leaders of the 18th and 19th centuries has been donated to Cornell University Library by a current student. The collection includes a number of letters written by John and Abigail Adams, the nation's second presidential couple.

The Johnson Family Papers contain some 250 documents, including dozens of letters written between Adams relatives; letters, land grants and army discharge papers signed by presidents George Washington, James Monroe, Martin Van Buren and Chester Arthur; an autograph book signed by President Rutherford B. Hayes and members of his administration, Supreme Court justices and Civil War generals; an autographed engraving of Ulysses S. Grant; a signed copy of an autobiography by Mary Emily Cornell (daughter of Ezra Cornell, the university's founder); and even a lock of John Adams' hair.

The collection was donated by Sarah Johnson, a Cornell graduate student in developmental psychology, and her sister, Gwyneth Johnson Lymberis. They are the great-great-great- great-granddaughters of John and Abigail Adams.

The Johnson papers are also rich in New York state historical value. They include letters written by Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins; De Witt Clinton, New York state senator, governor and New York City mayor; John Savage, chief justice of the state Supreme Court; and Aaron Burr, vice president and U.S. senator from New York.

Most of the documents are in excellent condition, in part because 18th- and early 19th-century American paper was rag- based and highly durable. They are kept in Cornell University Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, located in the Carl A. Kroch Library. Like the library's other rare documents, the Johnson papers are available for use in the division's reading room.

No mere display pieces, these documents will form the basis of vital research projects for students and scholars alike. Already, Cornell undergraduates in one class have begun working with John and Abigail Adams letters that were all but lost to history.

Living near a fault line

Sarah Johnson, 49, has known her whole life about the papers' existence -- they were stored in tin boxes in a cupboard in her parents' Santa Ana, Calif., home (near the San Andreas fault).

"I'd looked at them a bit when I was younger, but I hadn't really paid much attention," said Johnson, a graduate student in Cornell's College of Human Ecology. When she looked at them again about five years ago, she said, "their breadth astonished me."

After attending a lecture by Professor Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a social and cultural historian, and learning of Brumberg's research in the history of American families, Johnson e- mailed her a note about the papers.

When she later saw them, what most excited Brumberg was a series of letters written from 1806 to 1816 between Abigail Adams, her widowed daughter-in-law, Sarah, and her granddaughters, Susanna (Susan) and Abigail Louisa (Abbe). After John and Abigail's son, Charles, died an alcoholic at age 30, they raised Susan in Quincy, Mass.; they were also deeply involved in raising Abbe, who lived with her mother in Utica, N.Y. Many of the letters are from Abigail to Sarah, expressing her concerns over both girls' sensibilities and suitors.

In a letter dated May 20, 1816, regarding Susan's courtship by one Charles Thomas Clark, Abigail writes to Sarah, "His name is Clark, native place Maryland, his whole deportment has been solid, modest and pleasing, his understanding improved, having received a Liberal Education, his character, so far as I have been able to learn it, is correct and amiable. He is not what is called handsome, he is well made, tall and slender. His age 24. His parents both dead, one brother who is married and has a family and one sister single. What his property is I know not."

On Susan's wedding day, Aug. 8, 1817, Abigail writes Sarah (who did not attend the wedding): "This evening, my dear daughter, will give you a son and me a grandson whom I have no doubt will prove himself worthy [of] that relation. He has plead so hard and appeared so anxious and distrest that it should be so before he again went abroad that I could no longer withhold my assent. . . . I feel this morning little able to add to my letter the thoughts of parting with one whom I have had from her early years under my care & who has been the Life and Spirits of the family. . . ."

"It's a bit like a Jane Austen story," Brumberg said. "I'm also the grandmother of two granddaughters, so I'm kind of tickled to see the pattern of Abigail's involvement in her granddaughters' lives.

"What's especially interesting about these letters," added Brumberg, who teaches an undergraduate course titled "The History of Female Adolescence," "is that these girls and their mother, Sarah, were basically lost to history before this collection." (That might be, Brumberg guessed, because John and Abigail's son Charles "was not a happy subject for his parents.")

Students in Brumberg's class will team up to transcribe and annotate photocopies of the Adams letters, viewing the originals in the library if needed. Those transcriptions later will be put on-line and made accessible via the World Wide Web.

"So in a sense," Brumberg said, "these students are going to be creating a historical collection that can be used by people outside Cornell and that will contribute to our knowledge of history."

One student who has already been touched by the Adams letters is Lisa Sasaki '97, an assistant in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, who helped organize the Johnson papers when they were deposited in the library in the fall of 1995. "I could really identify with a lot of it," Sasaki said. "Little things -- like Susan writing to her mother, requesting that she pick up a hat and send it to her, describing exactly the kind of hat she wants."

A home in Cornell

The opportunity for hands-on research and discovery is what inspired Sarah Johnson and her sister to donate the documents to Cornell.

Adriana Rovers/University Photography

From left, library assistant Lisa Sasaki '97; Elaine Engst, university archivist; Sarah Johnson, graduate student and donor of the collection; and Joan Jacobs Brumberg, professor in human development and family studies, view a payroll of the "Company of Rangers," dated 1776.

"My sister and I felt quite strongly that the collection should be in institutional hands, not only so that it would be protected and preserved, but so that students and researchers would have access to it," she said. "The way I think about this collection is that it's not really my history; it's our history. It belongs to all of us." Cornell Library is especially appropriate, she added, because it has a world-renowned archive of family papers and business records documenting many aspects of New York state history. The Adams papers in the Johnson collection highlight the family's strong connection to New York state -- a connection that has been overlooked by most historians, Brumberg said.

University archivist Elaine Engst noted, "The Johnson collection complements our extensive 19th-century collections, particularly for New York state. Although specific documents are of sufficient importance to draw scholars from around the world, these materials will offer the greatest enhancement for Cornell students and faculty. They will provide a dramatic historical dimension to the student experience at Cornell."

The Adams legacy

The importance of Abigail and John Adams to America's history cannot be overestimated, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen, Cornell's Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture.

"They were exceedingly thoughtful and articulate about public affairs," Kammen said. "They both had a very strong sense that history was being made in their own time in a particularly dramatic and pivotal way. They both thought a great deal about what kinds of values would be important in this newly defined society that was no longer British and monarchical, but instead would be American and republican." The only woman to be both wife and mother of a U.S. president (son John Quincy Adams led the nation from 1825-29), Abigail Adams was a particularly outspoken and involved first lady, Kammen added.

Adriana Rovers/University Photography

On Feb. 1, undergraduates in Joan Jacobs Brumberg's class "The History of Female Adolescence" got their first glimpses of Abigail Adams' letters and other documents from the Johnson Collection in Cornell's Carl A. Kroch Library.

Just as Hillary Rodham Clinton broke ranks with Barbara Bush, in terms of her outspokenness and political involvement, so did Abigail Adams differ from her predecessor, Martha Washington, by engaging frequently in sophisticated political discourse concerning matters of the day -- often in letters with Thomas Jefferson. She believed women had as great a stake in those matters as men -- as she often reminded John.

"He's off at the Continental Congress, she's back in Massachusetts, and she knows he's dealing with the most profound of issues," Kammen said. "She tells him, 'Remember the Ladies; don't forget us while you are away, or that we are now doing many of the things that men traditionally once did.'

"Abigail Adams had a very strong sense that in this new society that was going to be created as a result of the American Revolution, the role of women would have to be reconceived -- that women couldn't and shouldn't be second- class citizens as they had been in Old-World societies," Kammen said. "So she is wonderfully interesting and important, because she managed to connect in her thinking the way in which public affairs would intersect with a change in relations between men and women."

The Adams letters in the Johnson collection, which were written after John had retired from the presidency, reveal another side of Abigail -- that of matriarch. She essentially had raised her four children alone (a fifth, Susanna, died as a baby) in Quincy, while managing the family farm and finances, as her peripatetic spouse served as a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; as vice president and president in Washington (where she lived only briefly); and as ambassador to Great Britain.

As a result of these long separations, the Adams' letters and other documents today number more than 20,000 and are stored at more than 200 U.S. libraries and institutions, according to the Massachusetts Historical Society -- home to the world's largest assemblage of Adams papers. The society receives an average of 25 photocopied Adams papers each year, many of them documented elsewhere.

Cornell's Brumberg said, "It's very interesting that these letters came to us via a graduate student at Cornell, as opposed to a wealthy donor who might have purchased them for the university. Sarah Johnson understood their significance for the study of American family life, and she deserves our gratitude, because of the research opportunities they will provide for people who are interested specifically in the Adams family and for those of us interested in the social and cultural life of early 19th-century America." "It's been a great privilege to be here at Cornell," Johnson said, "and I feel very fortunate to be able to give something in return."

 Ninety-two personal and family letters from members of the Adams/Smith/Johnson and related families, including 17 letters from Abigail Adams, three from John Adams, and two from John Quincy Adams (1808--1872).

• Lock of John Adams' hair, "Cut from the head of our Dear Grand Father the day he entered his 90th year" (1825).
• Twenty-nine business letters to John Savage from Martin Van Buren, Aaron Burr, Henry Clay and New York Govs. Daniel D. Tompkins, De Witt Clinton, Enos T. Throop, William L. Marcy, John A. Dix and others (1816--1837).
• Discharge of Abraham McKillip, 2nd New York Artillery Regiment, signed by General and Commander-in-Chief George Washington (1783).
• Six payrolls of "Captain Joshua Conkey's Company of Rangers Raised in the County of Charlotte and Now Doing Duty, Lieut. Edward Savage" (1776--1777).
• Land Grant certificates signed by President James Monroe (1817--1818).
• Autograph album belonging to Ward Hunt Johnson, including signatures from President Rutherford B. Hayes, his vice president, William A. Wheeler, and members of his cabinet; various U.S. Supreme Court Justices; Civil War generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan; Joseph Henry, president of the Smithsonian Institution; John Greenleaf Whittier, Thomas Nast, William Cullen Bryant, George Bancroft, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edwin Booth, Henry Ward Beecher and others, and a fragment of a James Fenimore Cooper manuscript (1877).
• Arthur B. Johnson's Commissioner of Railroads commission signed by President Chester A. Arthur (1882).
• Handwritten notes identifying Jewish ancestors of the Johnsons, a prominent Utica, N.Y., family.
• Autographed engraving of Ulysses S. Grant.
• Album of charcoal, pencil and watercolor drawings by Laura Savage, (1838--1856).
• Signed copy of The Autobiography of Mary Emily Cornell. 

"I would have your hand writing and arithmetic and grammar particularly attended to. Make yourself mistress of each branch. You may find them necessary to you to procure you a living. . . . No lady is qualified to pass through Life with credit to herself and usefulness to others without some knowledge of them all and why when you undertake a thing should you not excel in it."
-- Abigail Adams to Abigail Louisa Adams (Abbe), July 23, 1811

"I fix it as a principle that every Lady should have her own Country in preference to any other . . . for in the freedom and independence of her country is contained her own happiness and that of her connections."
-- Abigail Adams to Abigail Louisa Adams, July 23, 1811

"As your mother has been very concise in her communications, you cannot wonder that I am anxious to learn the age, abode, situation, prospects and connections of the gentleman you are to give me for a grandson."
-- Abigail Adams to Abigail Louisa Adams, October 26, 1814

"As the comfortable and reputable establishment in life of my grandchildren is very near my heart, your letter of the 14th of this month could not fail to give me much pleasure. Yesterday the 25th, the anniversary, the 50th anniversary of my own marriage, your letter was brought to me from the Post Office. I devoutly pray that my lovely Abigail may be as happy in her marriage as I have been."
-- John Adams to Sarah Smith Adams, October 26, 1814

"I think sometimes, my dear Mother, that you must smile at my warmth in politics, but when the interests of our Country are at stake, I feel too warmly concerned to stand as silent spectator of the scene, and I generally write what is uppermost in my thoughts."
-- Susan B. Adams to Sarah Smith Adams, February 3, 1815

"What I anxiously hope and now presume to ask for is no less than the hand of your daughter in marriage."
-- Charles Thomas Clark to Sarah Smith Adams, May 20, 1816

"This evening, my dear daughter, will give you a son and me a grandson whom I have no doubt will prove himself worthy [of] that relation. . . . I feel this morning little able to add to my letter the thoughts of parting with one whom I have had from her early years under my care & who has been the Life and Spirits of the family. . . . "
-- Abigail Adams to Sarah Smith Adams, August 8, 1817