Novel: Our First Family

Overview
Margaret Lee Runbeck's 1952 novel Our First Family is a biographical narrative that traces the private and public lives of John and Abigail Adams, framing them as America's inaugural household in both spirit and, eventually, residence. Drawing on the well-known intimacy of their correspondence, Runbeck presents a domestic vantage on the founding era, showing how a marriage of intellect and conviction becomes the anchor for a nation struggling toward identity. The title signals a double meaning: the moral prototype of a republican family and the first presidential family to inhabit the new President's House in the capital.

Plot and Scope
The story opens in Massachusetts with the courtship and early marriage of John and Abigail, his restless ambition and legal practice set against her clear-eyed management of home and farm. As tension with Britain mounts, John’s summons to Philadelphia and beyond pulls him into the maelstrom of revolution while leaving Abigail to shoulder the burdens at Braintree. Their letters bridge the distance, sustaining affection, testing principles, and sharpening each partner’s sense of duty. Runbeck uses this epistolary undercurrent to pace the narrative through the Revolution, the fraught peace, and John’s diplomatic missions to Europe, culminating in the family’s reunion abroad and return to a nation uncertain of its future.

With the Constitution established, the novel shifts to partisan storms in the new republic. As vice president and then president, John faces feuds that cleave former allies into rival camps. Through the household’s eyes, figures like Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton enter as presences felt in dinner debates, cabinet intrigues, and newspaper volleys that batter reputations and marriages alike. The move to the still-unfinished President’s House becomes an emblem of the country’s own incompleteness: grand in intention, drafty in the details, demanding patience and faith from those who must live in it.

Family as Lens
Runbeck threads the national story through the Adams children. Abigail (“Nabby”) seeks happiness on terms that often conflict with her parents’ standards; John Quincy emerges as a disciplined mind shaped by expectation; Charles and Thomas reflect the weight of a famous father and the era’s temptations. Domestic successes and sorrows, births, illnesses, financial anxieties, and the waywardness of youth, become the stakes through which public service is measured. The novel neither sentimentalizes nor scolds; it shows how a family strains, endures, and sometimes breaks under the pressures of history.

Character and Relationship
John is rendered as principled and prickly, a man whose vanity is inseparable from his sense of responsibility, while Abigail stands as moral ballast: practical, witty, and unafraid to challenge him. Their partnership is the book’s steady heartbeat. Disagreement does not erode devotion; it refines it. In their exchanges, Runbeck finds both the romance of equals and the realism of two people trying to do right in a world that punishes certainty.

Themes and Resonance
The novel argues that a republic is sustained as much by kitchens, classrooms, and letters as by congresses and treaties. Education, thrift, and civic virtue form a kind of domestic constitution that the Adamses administer with the same gravity they bring to national affairs. Partisanship’s corrosions, the loneliness of executive power, and the enduring consolation of companionship are recurring motifs. By the time the narrative settles into the quieter rhythms of retirement, the family’s legacy is clear: public character is forged in private habits, and the house of state is only as sound as the home that supports it.