1. These letters cannot be positively identified because there were apparently no replies, but they presumably included Storer’s letters to AA2 of 8 Aug. and to AA of 15 Aug. (AFC description begins Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, Richard Alan Ryerson, Margaret A. Hogan, and others, Cambridge, 1963– . description ends , 7:311–312, 321–322).

2. Storer’s 15 Aug. letter to AA reported the calling of county conventions to seek redress for numerous outstanding grievances. There Storer expressed considerably more anxiety over the outcome of such assemblies than he did in his letter to JA. “The devil I am afraid,” Storer wrote, “has got in among us, and I dread his soon throwing us into a state of anarchy and confusion.” Storer’s comments are important because when his letters arrived in mid-October—possibly with the newspapers mentioned in this letter’s final paragraph—they constituted the first news received by the Adamses about the unrest that evolved into Shays’ Rebellion.

That Storer’s letters arrived in mid-October is indicated by a passage in AA’s Dft of her 15 Oct. letter to her sister Elizabeth Smith Shaw that was left out of the letter as sent (same, 7:374–375). AA wrote that “those who read our publick papers, more particularly some of the instructions to the Representitives and the county conventions will be led to think that our Liberty is become licentiousness. Publick principal and publick ends cannot be promoted by these illegal assemblies.”

Significantly, she did not refer to Storer’s reference in his letter to her that the protesters hoped to “shut up the Courts of Common Pleas.” The closing of the courts would have been even more disturbing to AA and JA than the calling of the conventions, but the first court closing occurred on 24 Aug. at Northampton, Mass., and thus would not have been mentioned in any newspapers received with Storer’s 19 Aug. letter. There are no extant replies by either JA or AA to Storer’s letters. Indeed, neither of them wrote to anyone about the disorders in Massachusetts until late November, after AA saw an account of the Hampshire convention in a London newspaper (same, 7:395), and JA received letters from Rufus King of 3 Oct., below, and John Jay of 4 Oct. (Adams Papers description begins Manuscripts and other materials, 1639–1889, in the Adams Manuscript Trust collection given to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1956 and enlarged by a few additions of family papers since then. Citations in the present edition are simply by date of the original document if the original is in the main chronological series of the Papers and therefore readily found in the microfilm edition of the Adams Papers (APM). description ends ). For the progress of the revolt see the letters, none of which reached London until early 1787, from Storer of 16 and 26 Sept. 1786, Richard Cranch of 3 Oct., and James Warren of 22 Oct., all below.

3. For Storer’s interest in lands along the Passamaquoddy Bay in Maine, see his 21 July letter, above.

4. TBA and Rev. John Shaw, his uncle and tutor, journeyed to Cambridge on 21 August. He was examined on the morning of the 22d and admitted to Harvard that day (JQA, Diary description begins Diary of John Quincy Adams, ed. David Grayson Allen, Robert J. Taylor, and others, Cambridge, 1981– . description ends , 2:81).