USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 3 > Part 22
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53
INFLUENCE IN MASSACHUSETTS (1774 -1775)
John Adams returned from the Continental Congress to take his place in the Provincial Congress, then sitting at Watertown, and to enter upon a vigorous polemical discussion in the columns of the Boston Gazette on the origin of the controversy between the Colonies and Great Britain. These letters, afterwards more than once repub- lished as A History of the Dispute with America, con- tinued until the first guns at Lexington and Concord.
Immediately after April 19, John Adams went over the battle-grounds, and departed at once for the new Con- gress at Philadelphia, finding the country everywhere ablaze. He opposed strenuously the proposal of another petition to the King; the time should be devoted to preparation for the inevitable conflict. Soon followed the adoption by Congress of the army gathered at Cambridge as a Continental Army, and the appointment of Washington (on John Adams's nomination) on the very day of Bunker Hill as its commander. This nomination of the Southern military leader by a New England man was a master- stroke, one of the strongest actions in John Adams's life. His energetic declarations for independence provoked the resentment of John Dickinson and others not ready for such bold talk, and many avoided him in the Philadelphia streets. The Adamses of Massachusetts and the Lees of Virginia were the "dangerous minority."
Adams had evidences of popular approval, and his initia- tive in bringing a navy into existence was supported. "From my earliest entrance into life," he now wrote, surveying the situation, "I have had upon my mind a strong impres-
230
JOHN ADAMS, STATESMAN
sion that things would be wrought up to this present crisis. I saw from the beginning that the controversy was of such a nature that it never would be settled. This has been the source of all the disquietude of all my life. It has lain down and risen up with me these twelve years. I would cheerfully retire from public life forever, renounce all chance for profits or honors, to obtain peace and liberty. But all must go before I can surrender the rights of my country to a free constitution. I dare not consent to it."
He had burned his bridges; and Massachusetts was firm behind him. At the end of 1775, the Provincial Council appointed him chief justice of the superior court, raising him over the heads of several of his seniors and thus attest- ing the high esteem in which his legal abilities and his patriotic service were held. His active assumption of the duties of the office was to depend on the claims upon his time by Congress.
STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES (1775)
He was commissioned to prepare for the hour an appeal to be issued by the authorities as a comprehensive review of the causes of the existing conditions, and an earnest appeal to all classes to unite in the maintenance of the provincial government. This address to the legislators, the courts, the churches and the educators of the Province was one of the most memorable papers that Adams ever wrote.
"As the happiness of the people," he said at the be- ginning, "is the sole end of government, so the consent of the people is the only foundation of it in reason, morality, and the natural fitness of things. Every act of govern- ment, every exercise of sovereignty against or without the consent of the people is injustice, usurpation, and tyrany. Supreme and sovereign power rests always in the body of the people. When kings or governments prostitute the powers entrusted to them to the purposes of oppression and to subverting a free constitution, they are no longer to be deemed magistrates vested with a sacred character, but become public enemies, and ought to be resisted."
This was six months before Jefferson penned the Declara- tion of Independence in words of the same import; and the
231
RELATIONS WITH JEFFERSON
cardinal principle of Jefferson that "democracy and ignor- ance can not go together," which became the principle of his later crusade for public education in Virginia, is here enforced in the words: "As a popular government can only be supported by universal knowledge and virtue in the body of the people, it is the duty of all ranks to promote the means of education for the rising generation."
RELATIONS WITH JEFFERSON (1773 - 1775)
Thomas Jefferson entered Congress as a deputy from Virginia, June 21, 1775, just as Washington left for Cam- bridge and the news came from Bunker Hill. He was only thirty-two years old. But he had been for six years a member of the House of Burgesses. In 1773 he and half a dozen of his associates, "not thinking our old and lead- ing members up to the point of forwardness and zeal which the times required," had instituted committees of corre- spondence like those just organized in Massachusetts, and before learning of those. In the spring of 1774 this group agreed that they "must boldly take an unequivocal stand in the line with Massachusetts"; and they passed startling resolutions, one in behalf of consulting the other colonies about holding annually a general conference, and another for a Virginia convention at Williamsburg in August. For that convention Jefferson drafted instructions to the dele- gates to be sent to the General Congress at Philadelphia.
This "Summary View of the Rights of British America" was so radical that the convention substituted something milder. But it was so well liked by Peyton Randolph, President of the Continental Congress, and others there that it was printed in pamphlet form; and it was at once re- printed in London, noticed by Burke, and ran rapidly through several editions. We may be sure that nobody at Philadelphia greeted it more warmly than John Adams, "and that nobody more warmly approved the manifesto which Jefferson drafted, as his first act in Congress, immediately after the battle of Bunker Hill, setting before the world the justification for the rebellion. This statement was too vigorous for Dickinson and his group, and they toned it down. Jefferson's mind had described the same course
232
JOHN ADAMS, STATESMAN
as that of John Adams. "I am sincerely one of those Jeffersonists who still wish for a reunion with their parent country. . . . But I am one of those too who rather than submit to the rights of legislating for us assumed by the British Parliament and so cruelly exercised, would lend my hand to sink the whole island in the ocean."
Jefferson had a warm admiration for the local political institutions of New England, especially for the town meet- ing. He declined reelection to Congress in 1776 to devote himself to the reorganization of Virginia, feeling that "our whole code must be revised and adapted to our republican form of government." Jefferson's views were shared by many of his Virginia colleagues, who felt that their aristo- cratic system must somehow be counteracted for the good of the colony and the country.
INFLUENCE ON POLICIES (1775)
They discussed it with the New England men, and es- pecially with John Adams, who felt strongly on the sub- ject. An efficient union could be formed, he held, "only on popular principles, which are so abhorrent to the in- clinations of the barons of the South and the proprietary interests of the Middle States. . . . Thirteen colonies under such a form of government as Connecticut, or one not quite so popular, leagued together in a faithful confederacy, might bid defiance against all the potentates of Europe if united against them." Richard Henry Lee urged Adams to de- velop these ideas in a letter for use in Virginia; and in November, 1775, Adams prepared such a letter, which was carried to Virginia by Lee and circulated among his friends in manuscript. It was followed by a pamphlet by Adams, which was printed anonymously, under the title of Thoughts on Government Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies, which proved of immense service to Jefferson and Lee and their reforming friends. Adams similarly helped the North Carolina democrats engaged in reforming their constitution.
He was also looking abroad. He had got well over the fear of the "turbulent Gallics" which had haunted him in his old Worcester days, when he was dreaming of com-
233
VIEWS ON INDEPENDENCE
plete English supremacy in America, and saw that it was those same Gallics who could now help most to break the English power over the colonies. He saw that France, still lamenting her humiliation at Quebec, would grasp the opportunity for retaliation; and he was the first to urge the sending of ambassadors to France to propose an alliance. In the autumn of 1775, with Samuel Chase he made a motion for sending ambassadors. Thirty years afterwards he wrote to Dr. Rush that "the grimaces, the agitations and the convulsions were very great." In a year Franklin was in Paris; and in two years John Adams was there.
VIEWS ON INDEPENDENCE (1776)
The Massachusetts delegates to Congress in 1776, and signers of the Declaration of Independence, were John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, and Elbridge Gerry. At the beginning of 1776 some of the colonies were averse to any irreparable breach with the mother country.
May 15, 1776, John Adams brought forward a resolu- tion, in accordance with his personal convictions for a year, urging the respective colonies which had not already done so to organize effective state governments for their own safety and welfare and those of America in general; and this resolution was adopted. On that very day the Virginia Convention instructed their delegates to propose Independence; and strong words came from Massachusetts. June 7, Richard Henry Lee moved the resolution, and John Adams seconded it. In the memorable debates of the month that followed, John Adams took the most powerful part. Webster has made the occasion live for us in his great oration on Adams and Jefferson; and Jefferson himself in his later life said in the presence of Webster, who re- peated the word in his oration: "John Adams was our colossus on the floor. Not graceful, not eloquent, not always fluent in his public addresses, he yet came out with a power both of thought and of expression which moved us from our seats."
The committee appointed to prepare the Declaration con- sisted, in the order of their choice by ballot, of Thomas
234
JOHN ADAMS, STATESMAN
Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston. By common consent, as well as by the implication of the ballot and the desire of his colleagues, the office of drafting the Declaration fell to Jefferson. He submitted his draft to Franklin and Adams, but they suggested only slight alterations. Congress itself, in the course of its debate, made certain changes which were improvements. The Declaration was adopted with substantial unanimity on July 4.
John Adams wrote at the time that the Declaration de- cided "the greatest question which was ever debated in America." No man had done more than he to effect the Declaration in the two years preceding it by shaping the mind of the country for the crisis. He regarded it as the consummation of all his labor since he came into pub- lic life, "the end of his creation." It was certainly the culmination of the heroic and glorious period of his life; although a quarter century of public service remained for him.
He has been called the "Atlas of American Independ- ence." The real Atlas, as another has said, was the great leader whom he had nominated to the command of the army.
OPINIONS ON WASHINGTON (1775 - 1799)
At first a strong believer in Washington, he soon be- came his lukewarm supporter and then his pronounced critic. A few months after the Declaration of Independence, he "would be glad to see Congress elect all the general officers annually," a foolish judgment understood to be aimed at Washington. At the time of the Saratoga cam- paign, both he and Samuel Adams were strong supporters of Gates, who was John Adams's personal friend, and "sick of Fabian systems." "My toast," John Adams said, with a lack of military sagacity which we can measure even better than his contemporaries, "is a short and violent war," and he counted the people's reverent affection for Washington a "dangerous idolatry." His words about Washington, then and afterwards, were such as we do not like to remember. We do like to remember that when
Courtesy of The Halliday Historic Photograph Co.
BIRTHPLACE OF JOHN ADAMS, QUINCY, MASS.
235
MASSACHUSETTS CONSTITUTION
as Vice-President he came into close touch with Washing- ton and witnessed the steadfastness and power with which he met his great responsibilities, often under wanton criti- cism, he changed his tone, and his own attitude became one of profound sympathy and admiration.
To the end of his life he could not endure to hear Washington spoken of as the Father of his Country or the Founder of the American Republic. "These ascriptions belong to no man, nor to any twenty men." A certain envy and frequent disparagement of Washington constitute an unpleasant blot upon Adams's record.
John Adams was not a good judge of men, lacking in this respect the penetration of Samuel Adams and Jeffer- son. Two temperaments more unlike than those of Wash- ington and Adams it would be hard to conceive. They never seem to have fraternized warmly during the Revolu- tion nor during Washington's presidency; and when the talk began of sending Adams on his foreign mission in 1777, Washington did not think he would make a good diplomat, although in this judgment he was not wholly right.
Yet neither in diplomacy nor in executive functions was John Adams in his element; his preeminence was in cham- pionship and legislation. In his years in Congress he ap- pears at his best. His character and carriage were then most attractive. With growing importance came growing egotism, though never slackness in duty or devotion.
INFLUENCE ON THE MASSACHUSETTS CONSTITUTION
(1777 - 1780)
He was appointed commissioner to France in December, 1777, to join there Franklin and Arthur Lee. He had but just returned to Boston from Philadelphia, where his services in Congress during the period following the Declar- ation were devoted to promoting the interests of the army, federal organization, and foreign policy. He sailed from Boston in February, 1778, accompanied by his young son, John Quincy Adams; and he was absent from Massachusetts from this time until 1788, barring a brief visit to Massa- chusetts from August to November, 1779.
236
JOHN ADAMS, STATESMAN
This brief period, however, was of great significance in his life and in the life of Massachusetts. For, just as he reached home, a convention was called to frame a con- stitution for the state, and he was chosen a delegate. The course of that convention and the great services of John Adams are treated in detail elsewhere in this volume. He was received with great honor and deference in the con- vention; and by its invitation he gave at the opening a general address on government, in which he did much to reconcile discordant elements. He was made a member of the committee appointed to submit a preliminary draft for the constitution; and the leading features of that draft, with its preliminary bill of rights, were his work.
It is not too much to say that John Adams was the father of the Constitution of Massachusetts as truly as James Madison was the father of the Constitution of the United States. The wisdom and success of the new Constitution are attested by the fact that it won the approval alike of James Bowdoin and Samuel Adams. As the first experiment in constitution-making by a special convention, whose work was submitted to popular vote, it is of high significance and had its influence on other state constitu- tions and upon the National Convention of 1787.
When John Adams was eighty-five years old, only half a dozen years before his death, he was elected by his fellow citizens of Quincy a delegate to the second constitu- tional convention of Massachusetts, called to effect certain changes in the state constitution. He was even elected president of the convention, as an expression of the honor in which Massachusetts held him. But he wisely declined . the office, and took no active part in the debates. He did endeavor to secure such a modification of the article in the bill of rights as would do away with recognition of distinct modes of religious faith by the state. In this good purpose he failed. Massachusetts was not yet ripe for it.
RELATION TO THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION (1787)
The Massachusetts delegation at the National Conven- tion of 1787 had not the distinction nor influence of the
237
FEDERAL CONSTITUTION
delegation in 1776. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1787 were both in Europe, the one ambassador to England, the other ambassador to France. Otherwise both would undoubtedly have played a conspicuous part in the deliberations at Philadelphia. Both, while in Europe, studied and reflected much upon government and the in- struments of government; and Adams in London published a careful work on the American Constitutions, for the enlightenment of England.
Both Adams and Jefferson accepted the new national Constitution cordially, although both for different reasons would have wished it different in particulars. Jefferson's trouble was the more fundamental; it was its lack of a bill of rights declaring the great principles to which his life was devoted. This John Adams had drafted for the Massachusetts constitution, and the lack was immediately supplied in the form of amendments. Indeed the first ten amendments to the national Constitution, often popu- larly spoken of as a bill of rights, touch hardly a point which had not somehow been covered by John Adams in the Declaration of Rights prefixed to the Constitution of Massachusetts. The Frame of Government which follows this Declaration of Rights follows precisely the same course presently adopted at Philadelphia, defining successively the legislative, executive, and judiciary power. John Adams was justified in saying that in its structure the new national Constitution presented little new.
It should also not be forgotten in what high degree the National Convention of 1787 profited directly from John Adams's labors. Defense of the Constitutions of Govern- ment of the United States of America, published in London in 1787, rendered great educational service here. He pre- pared it because, as he says in his preface, he had "long seen the facility with which philosophers of greatest name have undertaken to write of American affiairs without knowing anything of them." The first volume, the preface of which was dated from his house on Grosvenor Square, January 1, 1787" (the other two volumes were not com- pleted until late in 1787), was immediately republished here, editions appearing in Philadelphia, New York, and
238
JOHN ADAMS, STATESMAN
Boston; and it was carefully studied by the members of the Constitutional Convention and had distinct influence. Washington's own copy, with his autograph on the title- page, is preserved among the books from his library now in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. In view of these things, as well as Adams's influence upon the constitu- tions of New York, Maryland, and New Hampshire, to- gether with his early contributions to constitutional reform in Virginia and North Carolina, it is not too much to claim that only to Madison do we owe more for the Constitu- tion of the United States than to John Adams.
ADAMS IN EUROPE (1779 - 1788)
When John Adams returned to Paris at the end of 1779, it was with two commissions: (1) to negotiate a treaty of peace; (2) whenever Great Britain should accept the inevitable, to negotiate with her a treaty of commerce. He spent a year in Holland, working for the recognition of our independence by that country and for a loan. In the face of every imaginable opposition, he secured both, and then rejoined Franklin in Paris. Wherever he was, in Paris, at The Hague, in London, he was the prince of publicity agents, utilizing the press, the pamphlet, and every available means to dispel the almost universal ignorance as to what America was and what it was bound to be politi- cally and commercially, which ignorance was the chief hindrance in our appeals to Europe for sympathy and aid.
The treaty of peace was signed September 3, 1783. Jay and Laurens having come to Paris joined Franklin and Adams in the final negotiations. The years had been stormy ones for John Adams. He constantly rubbed Vergennes the wrong way; and with warrant he thoroughly distrusted him. Vergennes came to hate him; and Franklin felt con- strained to write to the president of Congress about the friction. Adams did not get on well with Franklin himself, and but for Franklin's tact and self-control, there would have been open rupture; for Franklin came to heartily dislike Adams. John Adams was not an easy man with whom to work in harness, and of all men he and Franklin were least suited for team work. He neglected to consult
239
VICE-PRESIDENCY
Franklin, on the alleged ground of Franklin's "indolence and dissipation." In a word, he was a startling representa- tive at the beginning of things of "the new diplomacy." He brought to the European courts and council chambers a novel manner. He was not an international man, like Franklin or Jefferson, but an American first, last, and all the time; but it cannot be denied that he brought to the Paris negotiations contentions that were imperative and that were successful, in some of which John Jay sided with him against Franklin himself.
Adams remained in Paris until the beginning of 1785, when he took his place as minister to Great Britain, where he remained for three years. Happily his wife and daughter came to join him in Paris in the summer of 1784, remain- ing until the end. Jefferson came over to succeed Franklin; and both in Paris and in London Adams and he saw much of each other and got on well together. Jefferson was keenly sensitive to some of Adams's limitations, but sturdily respected him. Both were happy in Paris, and both hated the existing British officialdom, which in its recent humilia- tion was naturally none too cordial. Adams was constantly snubbed at court and in the public councils; and Jefferson said that the English "required to be kicked into common good manners." Nevertheless, Adams plodded on with his work, patiently and effectively. He earned the respect of the respectable; and in the summer of 1788 he was back in his beloved Massachusetts home, presently to become Vice-President of the United States.
VICE-PRESIDENCY (1789 - 1797)
The Vice-Presidency Adams pronounced at the time "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man con- trived, or his imagination conceived." Nothing, certainly, could give less opportunity for the display of his peculiar and striking qualities. However he worked through the eclipse creditably and usefully for eight years, when he succeeded Washington as President. The source of Adams's troubles now and their continued cause was Alexander Hamilton, who had come also into conflict with Jefferson when both were together in Washington's cabinet, in a
240
JOHN ADAMS, STATESMAN
way fundamental and historic. The conflict between Hamil- ton and Jefferson, however, was a conflict of great principles ; the conflict between Hamilton and Adams, in the beginning at least, was a personal conflict. It would have been im- possible when it was over for Adams to place Hamilton's bust in his home, as Jefferson did. Hamilton had a deep personal dislike for John Adams, and his prejudice, whether born of envy or of honest feeling that Adams was not fitted for his high position, need not here be considered. As a clever political manipulator, he engineered the first vote for Adams as Vice-President in a way designed to curtail his prestige; and he influenced the vote for him as Presi- dent in ways which made the result still more humiliating and changed Adams's feeling toward him into a violent and abiding resentment. This mutual antipathy and dis- trust between the two leaders of the Federalist party was the joccasion of John Adams's woe.
PRESIDENT ADAMS'S CABINET (1797 - 1801)
It is customary to speak of Adams's administration as a failure; and such in many ways it was. The four years of his presidency were a tumult; and the strong Federalist party, which elected him in 1796, was in 1800 a wreck. Nevertheless, if his administration was a failure, it was not he who was responsible; it failed, so far as it did fail, through the envy, malice, disloyalty, and false am- bitions of his associates, who were thinking of party and themselves, when he was thinking of his country and striv- ing sturdily to do his patriotic duty. He is in that mourn- ful period like a strong and noble figure in some Greek tragedy, fighting against fate, and often falling, though unyielding, through Fate's remorseless blows.
His primary mistake was in taking over most of Wash- ington's cabinet, instead of selecting a new cabinet of his own. Timothy Pickering became his Secretary of State, Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, and James Mc- Henry, Secretary of War. He said afterwards that Wash- ington had "saddled" him with these three secretaries; but that was when he was angry, and it is not the whole story. All of them were disloyal to him, and showed it in ways
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.