Imaginary Friendship in the American Revolution: John Adams and Jonathan Sewall [Hardcover]

Imaginary Friendship is the first in-depth study of the onset of the American Revolution through the prism of friendship, focusing on future US president John Adams and leading Loyalist Jonathan Sewall. The book is part biography, revealing how they shaped each others progress, and part political history, exploring their intriguing dangerous quest to clean up colonial politics. Literary history examines the personal dimension of discourse, resolving how Adamss presumption of Sewalls authorship of the Loyalist tracts Massachusettensis influenced his own magnum opus, Novanglus. The mystery is not why Adams presumed Sewall was his adversary in 1775 but why he was impelled to answer him.

Prologue: History  1. Friendship  2. John and Jonathan  3. Politics  4. The Kings Law  5. Imagining Revolution  6. Massachusettensis and Novanglus  7. Debate  8. The British Question  9. Revolution.  Epilogue: War and Reunion

This book is a microhistory of how friendship operated in the American Revolution. It explores the friendship of two political adversaries whose careers coincided with and were shaped by the escalating imperial crisis of 1760-75: the Patriot and future US president John Adams and the prominent Loyalist Jonathan Sewall.

Colin Nicolson is Lecturer in History at the University of Stirling.

Owen Dudley Edwards is an Irish historian and former Reader in Commonwealth and American History at the University of Edinburgh.