ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Far too many people contributed to the final version of this book for all of them to be listed here, but I would like to express my appreciation of the staffs at Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, Philadelphia’s Congress Hall, and Colonial Williamsburg for the way in which they have brought the past to life. Special thanks go to Buzz Harris and the staff of the Arisia Science Fiction Convention in Boston, for getting me into the Adams houses in the middle of winter and for taking me out to Old Sturbridge Village. Thanks also to Nancy Smith with the National Park Service at the two Adams houses in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Thank you to my dear friends Laurie, Hazel, Ev, and Nina for putting up with me on the Colonial Death-March through Virginia doing research: I could not have done it without you.

And as always, thanks to my agent Fran Collin; to my editor Kate Miciak; to Kathleen Baldonado for her untiring devotion to detail in preparing the manuscript; and to Nita Taublib, for the original idea of this novel.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Patriot Hearts is a work of fiction. It is not—and cannot be—a history of the United States in the Revolutionary and Federalist periods; it cannot even be a comprehensive fictionalized biography of any of the four women about whom it is written. There are acres of territory I would have loved to cover, had my intent been simply to write the accounts of four women’s lives (and to end up with about half a million words at the lowest reasonable estimate).

I would have loved to go on at greater length about the scandal that rocked the Washington Administration in the aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion, about the circuslike atmosphere of Congress in the 1790s, about the skullduggery surrounding the treaty that ended the Revolution. I would have loved to include Abigail Adams’s reaction to Ben Franklin’s Parisian girlfriend, the details concerning Martha Washington’s illegitimate half-caste East Indian stepgrandchildren, and the more Gothic ramifications of the eccentric family into which Jefferson’s daughter Patsy married.

But all of these things, I found, wandered from the focus of the story.

Patriot Hearts is a book about the relationships of four women—Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Sally Hemings, and Dolley Madison—with their families, with their men, with the societies they lived in, with the choices their men made…and with one another. They were four women who lived in astonishing times, and they were called upon, as women usually are, to perform the age-old juggling-act of caring for their children while following their hearts, insofar as they were permitted to do so by the world in which they lived.

“My children give me more pain than all my enemies.”

—JOHN ADAMS

DOLLEY

Washington City