USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 3 > Part 21
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JOHN ADAMS, STATESMAN
from his Harvard and Worcester periods remained his friends as long as they lived.
AMBITIONS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
John Adams at this time and for long afterwards cer- tainly had no ambition or expectation for himself that matched friendly predictions, although just after his return to Braintree he writes to young Jonathan Sewell: "Though I have very few hopes, I am not ashamed to own that a prospect of immortality in the memories of all the worthy to the end of time would be a high gratification." Sewell writes to him: "Cicero's name has been handed down through many ages with admiration and applause. So may yours. Who knows but in future ages, when New England shall have risen to its intended grandeur, it shall be as carefully recorded that Adams flourished in the second cen- tury after the exode of its first settlers from Great Britain."
Sewell espoused the royalist party and spent years of isolation in England. When Adams was our ambassador at London just after the war, he made a friendly visit to Sewell, who writes that when he came in he grasped his hand warmly in both of his, exclaiming, "How do you do, my dear old friend?" Sewell adds, "If I am not mistaken, now he has reached the summit of his ambition, he finds himself quite out of his element, and looks back with regret to those happy days when, in a snug house, with a pretty farm about him at Braintree, he sat quiet in the full posses- sion of domestic happiness, with an amiable, sensible wife." Indeed, Adams wrote to his wife from Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, "Let me have my farm, family and goose-quill, and all the honors and offices this world has to bestow may go to those who deserve them better and desire them more. I had rather build stone wall on Penn's hill than be any prince in Europe or the first general or first senator in America."
Significant was his survey of history in his first year at Worcester, in a letter to a friend. Tracing the power and magnificence of England, he added: "Soon after the Ref- ormation, a few people came over into this new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this apparently trivial incident
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CHOICE OF LEGAL PROFESSION
may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks like it to me; for if we can remove the turbulent Gal- lics, our people will in another century become more numer- ous than England itself. ... The united force of all Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us."
CHOICE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION (1756 - 1764)
During his last two years at Worcester, young Adams combined school-teaching with the study of law. The fam- ily at Braintree expected he would enter the ministry; but as he said: "Necessity drove me to the law." He was a sincerely religious man, and to the end of his life a very theological mind. But he quarreled with the creed; and that ended it. In an early letter from Worcester he writes: "There is a story about town that I am an Arminian." He read Bolingbroke: "I confess without much good or harm."
Curiously, his dearest desire at this time, as he wrote long afterwards, was for a military career. "Nothing but want of interest and patronage prevented me from enlisting in the army. . . . It is a problem in my mind to this day, whether I should have been a coward or a hero."
Turning from war, as he had turned from medicine and the pulpit, he soon fixed upon the law; and few decisions at that juncture were more fortunate for American political life. In 1756 he entered the office of Colonel James Put- nam, a Worcester lawyer, to study law, living in the family. For the legal training he was to pay a hundred dollars, "when he should find it convenient." Col. Putnam's library was not large, but contained the most essential law books. The young man was a close student and a prodigious reader, now and afterwards, not only of the law books of the time and of earlier English and Roman periods, but of everything he could lay hands on upon the science and philosophy of government. From the first it was law in its broadest aspects which appealed to him.
He was sworn in as an attorney in the Superior Court at the recommendation of Jeremy Gridley, then attorney-gen- eral of the Province, one of the most eminent lawyers of the time, who from the start took a liking to him. He advised him to "pursue the study of the law rather than the gain .
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of it," but the gain of it "enough to keep out of the briars," and "not to marry early," since that would obstruct his im- provement and involve him in expense.
When John Adams returned to Braintree in 1758, he went back to live in his own home. His father died in 1761, and he remained with his mother until his marriage, in 1764. The Braintree years preceding his marriage, if his confessions in his diary are honest, had much bumptious- ness in them: "pretensions to wisdom and virtue" not sup- ported by his experience; about his Greek; and about "being a great man." He talked, too, about "the folly of affecting to be a heretic," and he warned "Hannah and Esther about the folly of love," and touched on his insensibility of tender passions, "which makes them laugh."
ABIGAIL SMITH ADAMS (1744 - 1818)
John Adams's marriage, in 1764, was the great blessing of his life. Abigail Smith was the daughter of Rev. Wil- liam Smith, for forty years minister of the church in Wey- mouth, a man of great vigor and wit. Her mother was the daughter of Colonel John Quincy, for many years rep- resentative from Braintree in the legislature, and for a considerable period speaker of the House, whose mother was a descendant of Thomas Shepard, the distinguished minister of Cambridge, and whose wife was a descendant of the almost equally eminent Reverend John Norton. John Adams thus became allied with the most respectable fam- ilies of the province. The result, writes his son, "was im- mediately perceptible in the considerable increase of his professional practice."
Abigail Smith was the second of three daughters, and was twenty years old at the time of her marriage. This was a century before Mary Lyon: and Wellesley and Smith Colleges were still farther in the future. A century must pass before a girl could receive a high-school educa- tion, even in Boston. As Abigail Adams herself says in one of her letters, "it was fashionable to ridicule female learning." Although she was a delicate girl, she had a keen mind, good sense, and strong moral principles; and she owed much in her training to her long visits with her
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Braintree May 15 1776
A Brother of the Adameres who lives
teen a Captain of a company in this town is defineres of joining the army provided he can offer Birth ; the aochlad prever a Majors toany other is het bok any acquaintance with any Gentlemare in the hang, Except Gall:@aloner. , the requested one to win ajour a live in in his behalf ; he is a perfor both of Steadiness & profity. and if there should be any place open, wherein he corde leve his Country , I believe au would difchange the gruft regole in doing to accept sauce. your interest fine in his favour would oblige S his absent Brother , as well as your
humble devivant Abigail Adams
Later yough Marie
From original in Massachusetts Archives
ABIGAIL ADAMS TO JOSEPH WARREN AS TO A COMMISSION
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LETTERS OF JOHN AND ABIGAIL
grandmother, Colonel Quincy's wife, in Braintree, a woman of unusual energy, piety, and animation, whose utterances were "oracles of wisdom" treasured in her memory to the end of her life. For the rest, there was much letter writing in her youthful circle, and they read the English poets and the Spectator, revelled in quotations, and adopted fictitious signatures. Miss Smith signed herself "Diana" until after marriage, when it became "Portia."
Abigail Adams was the most interesting American woman in the period of the Revolution, and there was no nobler character. Mercy Otis Warren, of whom at once we think, was her close friend. The unchanged affection, admiration and cooperation of such a woman from the time of their marriage to the time of her death, eight years before his own, is John Adams's highest credential and the answer to most of the personal criticisms of that violent period. No other understood so well his principles and purposes, his temperament, and the personal equations of his life.
Charles Francis Adams wrote of his great ancestor ; "Ardent, vehement in support of what he believed to be right, easily roused to anger by opposition, but sincere, placable, and generous when made conscious of having committed the slightest wrong, there is no individual of his time about whom there are so few concealments of either faults or virtues."
LETTERS OF JOHN AND ABIGAIL ADAMS (1774 - 1783)
Such is the man who appears in the "Familiar Letters of John and Abigail Adams during the Revolution," which were piously and fortunately given to the world in 1876 in a volume which is the most impressive revelation of the domestic life of the period on its highest stage. Its per- vasive comments on public affairs make it a "source book" of inestimable value. No one knows John Adams who does not know these letters. The public and the private conjugal love, the children, the farm, the neighbors, the Boston news, the anxieties and encouragements of war, all crowd together. The personal and most precious passages cannot be torn from their context; but a few extracts will reveal the minds of the writers and the spirit of the times.
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JOHN ADAMS, STATESMAN
Abigail Adams, August 15, 1774 (just as her husband had started for the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia) : "I Was much gratified upon the return of some of your friends from Watertown who gave me an account of your social dinner and friendly party. May you return merit and meet with the grateful acknowledgements of every well- wisher of their country. The rocks and quicksands appear upon every side. Did ever any state regain its liberty when once it was invaded, without bloodshed? I cannot think of it without horror. . . . Yet Sparta ought to have reflected, says Polybius, that 'as there is nothing more desirable or advantageous than peace, when founded in justice and honor, there is nothing more shameful, and at the same time more pernicious, when attained by bad measures and purchased at the price of liberty'." Septem- ber 24: "There has been in town a conspiracy of the negroes. It is kept pretty private, and what steps they will take in consequence of it, I know not. I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the Province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me-to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have. You know my mind upon this subject."
John Adams replies, October 7, 1774-"I had the characters and tempers, the principles and views of fifty gentlemen, total strangers to me, to study, and the trade policy and whole interest of a dozen provinces to learn, when I came here. There is a great spirit in the Congress. But our people must be peaceable. Let them avoid war if possible-if possible. I say, Mr. Revere will bring you the doings of the Congress, who are now all around me debating what advice to give to Boston and the Massachusetts Bay. . The esteem, the affection, the admiration expressed for the people of Boston and the Massachusetts, and the fixed determination that they shall be supported, were enough to melt a heart of stone." October 9: "The business of the Congress is tedious beyond expression. Every man in it is a great man, an orator, a critic, a statesman; and therefore, every man upon every question has shown his
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oratory and his political abilities. Business is spun out to an immeasurable length."
June 17, 1775-". I can now inform you that the Congress has made choise of the modest and virtuous, the amiable, generous, and brave George Washington, Esq., to be general of the American army, and that he is to repair as soon as possible to the camp before Boston. This apparently will have a great effect in cementing and secur- ing the union of the colonies. I hope the people of our province will treat the general with all that confidence and affection, that politeness and respect, which is due to one of the most important characters in the world. The liberties of America depend upon him in great degree ....
I have found this Congress like the last. When we first came together, I found a strong jealousy of us from New England, and Massachusetts in particular; suspicions entertained of designs of independency, an American re- public, Presbyterian principles, and twenty other things. Our sentiments were heard with great caution. But the longer we sat, the more clearly they saw the necessity of pushing vigorous measures. It has been so now. Every day we are more convinced that the designs against us are hostile and sanguinary, and that nothing but fortitude, vigor and perseverence can save us. But America is a great unweildy body. Like a coach and six, the swifter horses must be slackened and the slowest quickened, that all may keep an even pace."
Abigail replies, June 18, 1775-"The day-perhaps the decisive day-is come, on which the fate of America de- pends. My bursting heart must find vent at my pen. I have just heard that our dear friend, Dr. Warren, is no more, but fell gloriously fighting for his country. Great is our loss. He has distinguished himself in every en- gagement, by his courage and fortitude, by animating the soldiers, and leading them by his own example. The battle began upon our entrenchments, upon Bunker's Hill, Satur- day morning about three o'clock, and has not ceased yet, and it is now three o'clock Sabbath afternoon. It is ex- pected they will come out over the neck tonight, and a dreadful battle must ensue."
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JOHN ADAMS, STATESMAN
Abigail Adams, March 31, 1776-"I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound to any laws in which we have no voice or representation."
John Adams, July 3, 1776-"Yesterday the greatest ques- tion was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was nor will be decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony 'that these United Colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states'. You will see in a few days a Declaration setting forth the causes which have impelled us to this mighty revolution, and the reasons which will justify it in the sight of God and man. When I look back to the year 1761, and recollect the arguments against Writs of Assistance. . . . I am surprised at the suddenness as well as greatness of this revolution."
DOMESTIC LIFE (1770 - 1774)
The letters continue to the time when John Adams signed the treaty of peace at Paris in 1783. Meanwhile before 1774 their five children were born, three sons and two daughters, the oldest son being John Quincy Adams. For most of that early period the family continued to live in Braintree; but for a few years the home and office were transferred to Boston, and John Adams became a citizen of Boston. It was as such that he was elected to the General Court in 1771, his first entrance upon public or official life beyond being a selectman of Braintree. He had no ambition for public life, and his wife had no such ambition for him. When he talked over his election to the General Court with her, she, "who had always en- couraged me, burst into a flood of tears, and said she was very sensible of all the dangers to her and our children,
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PUBLIC LIFE
as well as to me, but she thought I had done as I ought, she was very willing to share in all that was to come, and to place her trust in Providence."
He devoted himself assiduously to his profession, and became one of the most successful lawyers in the Province. "He was as honest a lawyer as ever broke bread," wrote Jonathan Sewell long afterwards, harking back to this time; and he was fast forging to the front.
PUBLIC LIFE (1763 - 1765)
When compelled by his sense of duty to enter public service, "I was," he wrote, "throwing away as bright pros- pects as any man ever had before him." He was slow to do it. He was never rash; he was not a radical like Samuel Adams; he was not like him, a born agitator; he was not a natural leader of men. As late as 1772 he registered a pledge "not to meddle with public affairs." The fiery Otis reproached him for his lukewarmness. "Dancing from Boston to Braintree and from Braintree to Boston, moping around the streets of this town, seem- ingly regardless of everything but to get money to carry you smoothly through the world!" This was unjust. He was sincerely devoted to the cause of the colonies; he was studying profoundly the principles involved; he was writing energetic letters to the newspapers; and he was becoming the recognized spokesman for his fellow citizens of Brain- tree. The resolutions which he drew up in 1765, protest- ing against the Stamp Act, carried unanimously in the town meeting, were adopted by forty other towns as in- structions to their respective representatives. When Hutch- inson, then chief justice, prevented the opening of the courts in Boston, and the transaction of business without stamps, Adams was associated with the venerable Jeremiah Gridley and James Otis as counsel for the town of Boston in support of a memorial against the action. He grounded his argument on "the invalidity of the Stamp Act, it not being in any sense an Act, we having never consented to it." That became the central colonial position from that time to the day of independence,-the injustice and un- lawfulness of legislation, especially for taxation, over per-
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JOHN ADAMS, STATESMAN
sons not represented in the legislature. It did not take John Adams long to see where that led, since there was no chance that Colonial representation would be conceded. On the general issue he was moving rapidly to Samuel Adams's side. In one of his choleric moments he ex- claimed that "there was no more justice left in Boston than there was in hell," that he "wished for war" and that Britain "might be brought to reason or to ruin;" although he had misgivings about this language as "boyish and raw."
RELATIONS OF SAMUEL AND JOHN ADAMS (1773 - 1774)
It would be unjust to present John Adams as the states- man of the Revolution without distinct recognition that up to the Declaration of Independence his great kinsman Samuel Adams was the leading figure. Samuel Adams was a born democrat and a born revolutionist. When he took his Master's degree at Harvard, his thesis was on "Whether it be lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate if the Commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved." Like John Adams, he thought of entering the ministry; he thought of the law; his son studied medicine with Dr. Warren. Samuel Adams's father was a man of higher social position than John Adams's father. He was a busi- ness man, a maltster, a man of importance in the commer- cial life and the political life of Boston; and finally the son joined the father and then succeeded him in the man- agement of the malt-house in Purchase Street. But he was more interested in politics than in business, and the business came to grief. His thrifty and efficient wife averted household calamity; and he was made tax collector. He gave up pretense of private business and devoted him- self solely to public affairs, profoundly respected by his fellow-townsmen for his incorruptible character and single- ness of purpose. He was an assiduous reader of history and English politics. He was a more religious man, at least a much more orthodox man, than John Adams, and liked to sing psalms as well as to moderate the town meet- ings. Politics and religion with him went hand in hand.
THE FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS 227
He was an eighteenth-century Roundhead of the robustest and noblest nature.
In the preparation of his reply to Hutchinson in 1773, Samuel Adams had taken John Adams into counsel, for he respected his superior knowledge of law and political theory. It was at his suggestion that John Adams had been associated with Gridley and Otis as counsel for the town of Boston in the protest against Hutchinson's closing of the courts at the time of the Stamp Act. It was un- doubtedly at his urging that John Adams was made one of the five Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Con- gress at Philadelphia in 1774. The five delegates selected at Salem for Philadelphia were James Bowdoin, Thomas Cushing, Samuel Adams, John Adams and Robert Treat Paine.
In 1817, nine years before his death, John Adams in his graphic letters to William Tudor depicting critical events in Boston before 1775, paid memorable tribute to his great Massachusetts associates. "James Otis, Samuel Adams and John Hancock," he wrote, "were the three most essential characters; and Great Britain knew it, though America does not. The British ministry had sagacity enough to discriminate for inexorable vengeance the two men most dreaded by them, Samuel Adams and John Hancock; and had not James Otis been either dead or worse than dead, his name would have been at the head of the triumvirate. . James Otis in 1761 electrified the town of Boston, the province of Massachusetts Bay and the whole continent more than Patrick Henry ever did in the whole course of his life. These three were the first movers, the most constant, steady, persevering springs and agents, and the firmest pillars of the whole Revolution. Without the char- acter of Samuel Adams, the true history of the American Revolution can never be written."
IN THE FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS (1774)
Samuel and John Adams had never been outside of Massachusetts before they left for Philadelphia on the tenth of August, 1774. Bowdoin was prevented from going. The other four delegates departed "in consider-
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able state"; and their progress through Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey was marked by popular ovations which avouched the deep sympathy of the people with their mission. Just before entering Philadelphia they were met by a group of the Philadelphia Sons of Liberty, who came to caution them against radical utterances, as rumor from proper Boston folk which preceded them had it that they were desperate adventurers. It was said that Mr. Cushing was a harmless kind of man, but poor. Samuel Adams was an artful man, dependent upon his popularity with the low and vulgar for his living. John Adams and Mr. Paine were two young lawyers of no great weight or reputation. Even shrewd old Joseph Hawley warned John Adams before they started not to forget the opinion preva- lent in other colonies that the Massachusetts gentlemen were rather dictatorial in the leadership they took in con- tinental measures, and were apt to assume "big and haughty airs."
The fear at Philadelphia was that their accent on in- dependence would be far too strong. The good sense and good manners of the Massachusetts men quickly allayed suspicion and won confidence. The Southerners were much bolder in their talk; and John Adams liked it. On the whole, no delegation played a stronger part than the Massa- chusetts delegation. Samuel Adams brought a greater reputation than any other man in the Congress; and both he and John Adams were on the committee which framed the Congress's Declaration of Rights. John Adams pre- ferred to include an appeal to the general idea of natural right, such as had been clearly stated by Samuel Adams at the beginning of his report On the Rights of the Colonists in 1772, clearly echoing John Wise; and as was broadly laid down two years afterwards in the Declaration of In- dependence. But Pennsylvania and New York were not prepared for such a step; and it was concluded that no grievances should be stated having their origin beyond acts of Parliament passed since 1763. What was declared about taxation without representation was only what had been said again and again in Massachusetts. But the Massa- chusetts men went home feeling that they no longer stood
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INFLUENCE IN MASSACHUSETTS
exposed alone, but that their cause had been made the cause of eleven colonies.
The ability and temper of the Congress was such that John Adams wrote home: "The magnanimity and public spirit which I see here make me blush for the sordid, venal herd which I have seen in my own province. . . . Every question is discussed with a moderation, an acuteness, and a minuteness equal to that of Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council."
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