But Lovell was a practiced flatterer, sometimes to the point of impropriety. In a note to Abigail the summer before, accompanying some information on the war he thought she would want to see, Lovell had declared, “This knowledge is only part of the foundation of my affectionate esteem for you. Nor will I mention the whole.” So an appeal to Adams’s self-regard, by extolling his integrity to the point of implying that Franklin and Arthur Lee had none, was quite in the Lovell mode.
