ABSTRACT
John Adams returned to the Quincy farm nursing the scars inflicted by a long, strenuous public life. After passing a few years with Abigail in philosophical serenity and deserved quiet, he expected to ease out of this life and on to a proper reward. Charles Francis Adams remembered his grandfather as such a man, an indomitable old figure, even at ninety. As time eroded physical strength, the mind still fired the old being with the vigor present in the Gilbert Stuart portrait or the Browere life mask. The Adams-Jefferson correspondence, of course, did not strike up again until 1812. In fact, Rush was responsible for reuniting the two old patriots, by that time the two most famous fathers of their country, in one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American literary and political history. Adams answered Taylor's work in a series of letters, dealing primarily with aristocracy, which finished the body of his political writings.
