First among the many people to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for contributing to these volumes is the project's former editor in chief Robert J. Taylor. In 1982–1983, his last year at the Adams Papers, he made the preliminary selection and annotation of the great majority of the letters that appear in Volume 5. His initial research and his mastery of Massachusetts history in the 1780s have provided a firm foundation for the work that we have done to bring this volume to completion.

The two institutions that brought the Adams Papers into being continue to offer the most valuable support to the current editors. The Massachusetts Historical Society, under the direction of Louis Leonard Tucker, has provided this enterprise with a home, cared for the bulk of its documentary materials, and made available its valuable research services. Of particular help in the preparation of these volumes have been the Society's librarian, Peter Drummey, his colleagues Aimée Bligh and Mary E. Cogswell, Edward W. Hanson and Helen R. Kessler of the Society's publications staff, and the Society's curator of photographs, Chris Steele. The Society's director emeritus, Stephen T. Riley, has performed a decade of dedicated service as a trustee of the Founding Fathers Papers, Inc., the major fund-raising body for this and several other projects. Harvard University Press continues to produce our volumes with care and dedication. We would like to thank production manager John Walsh for his continued efforts in maintaining the high printing standards of our volumes and for his assistance in working with our typesetter, Kevin Krugh of Technologies 'N Typography, who skillfully generated the volumes on computer. We also appreciate the work of Bruce Lehnert of Linotype-Hell, who created special fonts for the Adams Papers. We owe particular thanks to our editor at the Press, Ann Louise Coffin McLaughlin, who, in over thirty years of the most vigilant labor, has guided all thirty-four Adams Papers volumes into print.

The financial support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission since 1975 is formally acknowledged on the lxvicopyright page of this volume, but we wish to thank the Commission staff, whose members continue to perform many important services for us, and for several dozen other projects as well, all with remarkable economy and skill.

We have received vital aid in locating or verifying manuscripts and archival information from the staffs of several institutions. The Adams National Historic Site in Quincy and its superintendent, Marianne Peak, have been consistently supportive, carrying on the fine work of one of the Adams Papers' oldest friends, the late superintendent Wilhelmina S. Harris, who died in May 1991 at age ninety-five, as the editing of these volumes was nearing completion. At Harvard University's Houghton Library, Hugh Amory and his staff, particularly Jennie Rathbun, have been most helpful. At Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, Louise Todd Ambler, curator of the University's Portrait Collection, has given us valuable assistance. The staff at the American Antiquarian Society, especially Sidney Berger (now Head, Special Collections, University of California, Riverside) has been most helpful, as have the staffs at the Boston Athenaeum, the Rare Book Room of the Boston Public Library, the Frick Art Reference Library, and the National Portrait Gallery.

Several individuals have helped us with particular research problems: John Catanzariti, editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson; Wendell D. Garrett, expert at the American Decorative Arts and Furniture Department, Sotheby's, and editor at large for The Magazine Antiques; Mary-Jo Kline, New York City, former associate editor for the Adams Papers; Claude A. Lopez, consulting editor of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin; A. Bruce MacLeish of the New York State Historical Association; Bernard Nurse, Librarian of the Society of Antiquaries of London; and Jules D. Prown, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University.

We would like to thank three persons who helped us secure and present our illustrations: Martha A. Greig, chair of the historical activities committee of the National Society of Colonial Dames of America in Rhode Island; Linda J. Pike, formerly a member of the editorial staff of the Lafayette Papers, now managing editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly at Cornell University; and David Bolles, photographer of those items drawn from the Adams Papers and from other Massachusetts Historical Society collections that are reproduced in these volumes.

Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the contribution of two members lxviiof the Adams Papers staff who do not appear on the title page. Sarah Hage, editorial assistant at the Adams Papers from 1986 to 1988, began the verification of the annotation, and entered much of the text onto our computer. Adjunct Editor Marc Friedlaender, who was co-editor of volumes 3 and 4 of the Adams Family Correspondence, read the entire manuscript and gave us the benefit of his vast knowledge of the Adams family.