Posterity You Will Never Know How

Adams wrote this to Abigail Adams on April 26, 1777, while serving in the Continental Congress and acutely aware that independence might fail. The letter reflects both his personal anguish — he was separated from his family for long stretches throughout the Revolutionary years — and his historical consciousness. He was not simply fighting for his own generation but staking the lives and sacrifices of his contemporaries on a future they could not guarantee.