ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on John Adams’s famous pronouncement on the “real American Revolution” constituting changes in Americans’ opinions and “sentiments” before the commencement of war with Great Britain in 1775. It finds that Adams proffered several historiographical messages in his retirement writings to guide future historians of this revolution, his last message being the centrality of friendship to the historical process. Adams’s well-known friendships were integral to that history (notably with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, James Otis, and his wife, Abigail Adams), but instead, Adams controversially exemplified his personal friendship with the Loyalist Jonathan Sewall as an opportunity to investigate changes in Americans’ allegiances. While Adams’s claim that Sewall authored the influential Loyalist tracts Massachusettensis was challenged by contemporaries, who came to accept Daniel Leonard as sole author, the Prologue offers that (a) Sewall and Leonard were coauthors and (b) that understanding the mystery surrounding authorship illuminates how friendship shaped political discourse. Subsequent chapters examine the nature of the Adams-Sewall friendship and use friendship as an analytical category to explore politics and political writing.
