A Discourse in Commemoration of the Lives and Services of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

Daniel Webster (1782–1852)
From The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text

Interesting Links

“The Living Declaration: calendar of events” (Library of America)

“Jefferson, Adams, and the Crucible of Revolution” (Jane Kamensky, National Constitution Center)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “It is impossible we should think of Submission,” Benjamin Franklin
• “The Declaration of Independence,” Abigail Adams
• “The natural right of all Men—& their Children,” Lancaster Hill, Peter Bess, Brister Slenser, Prince Hall, et al.
• “The Epocha of the Stamp Act,” John Adams

Buy the Book
The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text
Ted Widmer presents 68 fascinating historical texts offering new insights on key moments and figures in American history.
393 pages, with 83 illustrations.
List price: $29.95
Web Store price: $22.50

“Funeral thoughts, excited by the death of John Adams and Thos. Jefferson on the Fourth of July, 1826, the jubilee of independence,” a broadside published in Boston following the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on July 4, 1826. Printed by Howe & Norton. (Library of Congress)

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The introduction to this week’s selection is by Ted Widmer, excerpted from his new book, The Living Declaration, published by Library of America:

With exquisite timing, Adams and Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826: Jefferson at noon, Adams a few hours later. It was the perfect day for the two elderly statesmen to meet “the Great Legislator of the Universe,” as Adams once referred to God, in a declaration of his own, the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution.

Americans were already inclined to see the hand of Providence in all that they did; here, it seemed, was confirmation that they had a special destiny. The co-demise is still regarded as one of the more remarkable coincidences in American history, and it has cast an enduring, almost supernatural glow on the Declaration of Independence. Sixteen years earlier, in 1809, another signer, Benjamin Rush, described a dream in which he had a premonition that Adams and Jefferson would expire “nearly at the same time.” Now it had come to pass.

Of the many eulogies delivered around the country for these two giants, none captured the public imagination more than the one Daniel Webster delivered to a packed crowd in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. At a time when oratory served to entertain as well as edify, Webster (then a congressman, soon to be a U.S. senator) took his audience back to Philadelphia, fifty years earlier, and offered an almost minute-by-minute account of the tense deliberations that led to the Declaration. Five days later, the Boston city council ordered that seven thousand copies be printed “for the use of the citizens.”

Webster had done his research well. The imagined language he put into the mouth of John Adams often echoed actual quotations. A case in point: just days before Adams’s death, the Reverend George Whitney, who would preach the sermon at the former president’s funeral, paid a call on the old patriarch. He later recorded the encounter: “Spent a few minutes with him in conversation, and took from him a toast, to be presented on the Fourth of July as coming from him. I should have liked a longer one; but as it is, this will be acceptable. ‘I will give you,’ said he, ‘Independence forever!’ He was asked if he would not add any thing to it, and he replied, ‘not a word.’”

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Notes: John Hancock (1737–1793) served as president of the Continental Congress. The “venerable colleague” to whom Adams refers is Samuel Adams. In April 1775, Massachusetts’s last royal governor, the British general Thomas Gage, received instructions from Lord Dartmouth, the British secretary of state for the colonies, to arrest Hancock and Adams as “the principal actors and abettors in the Provincial congress whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason and rebellion.”

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the text of the excerpt from Webster’s speech below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs, and this selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

A Discourse in Commemoration of the Lives and Services of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, delivered in Faneuil Hall, Boston, August 2, 1826.
. . . Let us, then, bring before us the assembly, which was about to decide a question thus big with the fate of empire. Let us open their doors, and look in upon their deliberations. Let us survey the anxious and care-worn countenances, let us hear the firm-toned voices, of this band of patriots.

HANCOCK presides over the solemn sitting; and one of those not yet prepared to pronounce for absolute independence, is on the floor, and is urging his reasons for dissenting from the declaration.

‘Let us pause! This step, once taken, cannot be retraced. This resolution, once passed, will cut off all hope of reconciliation. If success attend the arms of England, we shall then be no longer colonies, with charters, and with privileges; these will all be forfeited by this act; and we shall be in the condition of other conquered people, at the mercy of the conquerors. For ourselves, we may be ready to run the hazard; but are we ready to carry the country to that length? Is success so probable as to justify it? Where is the military, where the naval power, by which we are to resist the whole strength of the arm of England, for she will exert that strength to the utmost? Can we rely on the constancy and perseverance of the people? or will they not act, as the people of other countries have acted, and wearied with a long war, submit, in the end, to a worse oppression? While we stand on our old ground, and insist on redress of grievances, we know we are right, and are not answerable for consequences. Nothing, then, can be imputable to us. But if we now change our object, carry our pretensions further, and set up for absolute independence, we shall lose the sympathy of mankind. We shall no longer be defending what we possess, but struggling for something which we never did possess, and which we have solemnly and uniformly disclaimed all intention of pursuing, from the very outset of the troubles. Abandoning thus our old ground, of resistance only to arbitrary acts of oppression, the nations will believe the whole to have been mere pretence, and they will look on us, not as injured, but as ambitious, subjects. I shudder, before this responsibility. It will be on us, if relinquishing the ground we have stood on so long, and stood on so safely, we now proclaim independence, and carry on the war for that object, while these cities burn, these pleasant fields whiten and bleach with the bones of their owners, and these streams run blood. It will be upon us, it will be upon us, if failing to maintain this unseasonable and ill-judged declaration, a sterner despotism, maintained by military power, shall be established over our posterity, when we ourselves, given up by an exhausted, a harrassed, a misled people, shall have expiated our rashness and atoned for our presumption, on the scaffold.’

It was for Mr. Adams to reply to arguments like these. We know his opinions, and we know his character. He would commence with his accustomed directness and earnestness.

‘Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand, and my heart, to this vote. It is true, indeed, that in the beginning, we aimed not at independence. But there’s a Divinity which shapes our ends. The injustice of England has driven us to arms; and, blinded to her own interest for our good, she has obstinately persisted, till independence is now within our grasp. We have but to reach forth to it, and it is ours. Why then should we defer the declaration? Is any man so weak as now to hope for a reconciliation with England, which shall leave either safety to the country and its liberties, or safety to his own life, and his own honor? Are not you, sir, who sit in that chair, is not he, our venerable colleague near you, are you not both already the proscribed and predestined objects of punishment and of vengeance? Cut off from all hope of royal clemency, what are you, what can you be, while the power of England remains, but outlaws? If we postpone independence, do we mean to carry on, or to give up, the war? Do we mean to submit to the measures of parliament, Boston port-bill and all? Do we mean to submit, and consent that we ourselves shall be ground to powder, and our country and its rights trodden down in the dust? I know we do not mean to submit. We never shall submit. Do we intend to violate that most solemn obligation ever entered into by men, that plighting, before God, of our sacred honor to Washington, when putting him forth to incur the dangers of war, as well as the political hazards of the times, we promised to adhere to him, in every extremity, with our fortunes and our lives? I know there is not a man here, who would not rather see a general conflagration sweep over the land, or an earthquake sink it, than one jot or tittle of that plighted faith fall to the ground. For myself, having, twelve months ago, in this place, moved you, that George Washington be appointed commander of the forces, raised or to be raised, for defence of American liberty, may my right hand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I hesitate or waver, in the support I give him. The war, then, must go on. We must fight it through. And if the war must go on, why put off longer the Declaration of Independence? That measure will strengthen us. It will give us character abroad. The nations will then treat with us, which they never can do while we acknowledge ourselves subjects, in arms against our sovereign. Nay I maintain that England, herself, will sooner treat for peace with us on the footing of Independence, than consent, by repealing her acts, to acknowledge that her whole conduct towards us has been a course of injustice and oppression. Her pride will be less wounded, by submitting to that course of things which now predestinates our independence, than by yielding the points in controversy to her rebellious subjects. The former she would regard as the result of fortune; the latter she would feel as her own deep disgrace. Why then, why then, sir, do we not as soon as possible, change this from a civil to a national war? And since we must fight it through, why not put ourselves in a state to enjoy all the benefits of victory, if we gain the victory?

If we fail, it can be no worse for us. But we shall not fail. The cause will raise up armies; the cause will create navies. The people, the people, if we are true to them, will carry us, and will carry themselves, gloriously, through this struggle. I care not how fickle other people have been found. I know the people of these colonies, and I know that resistance to British aggression is deep and settled in their hearts and cannot be eradicated. Every colony, indeed, has expressed its willingness to follow, if we but take the lead. Sir, the declaration will inspire the people with increased courage. Instead of a long and bloody war for restoration of privileges, for redress of grievances, for chartered immunities, held under a British king, set before them the glorious object of entire independence, and it will breathe into them anew the breath of life. Read this declaration at the head of the army; every sword will be drawn from its scabbard, and the solemn vow uttered, to maintain it, or to perish on the bed of honor. Publish it from the pulpit; religion will approve it, and the love of religious liberty will cling round it, resolved to stand with it, or fall with it. Send it to the public halls; proclaim it there; let them hear it, who heard the first roar of the enemy’s cannon; let them see it, who saw their brothers and their sons fall on the field of Bunkerhill, and in the streets of Lexington and Concord, and the very walls will cry out in its support.

Sir, I know the uncertainty of human affairs, but I see, I see clearly, through this day’s business. You and I, indeed, may rue it. We may not live to the time, when this declaration shall be made good. We may die; die, colonists; die, slaves; die, it may be, ignominiously and on the scaffold. Be it so. Be it so. If it be the pleasure of Heaven that my country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready, at the appointed hour of sacrifice, come when that hour may. But while I do live, let me have a country, or at least the hope of a country, and that a free country.

But whatever may be our fate, be assured, be assured, that this declaration will stand. It may cost treasure, and it may cost blood; but it will stand, and it will richly compensate for both. Through the thick gloom of the present, I see the brightness of the future, as the sun in Heaven. We shall make this a glorious, an immortal day. When we are in our graves, our children will honor it. They will celebrate it, with thanksgiving, with festivity, with bonfires, and illuminations. On its annual return they will shed tears, copious, gushing tears, not of subjection and slavery, not of agony and distress, but of exultation, of gratitude, and of joy. Sir, before God, I believe the hour is come. My judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is in it. All that I have, and all that I am, and all that I hope, in this life, I am now ready here to stake upon it; and I leave off, as I begun, that live or die, survive or perish, I am for the declaration. It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment; independence, now; and INDEPENDENCE FOREVER.’

And so that day shall be honored, illustrious prophet and patriot! so that day shall be honored, and as often as it returns, thy renown shall come along with it, and the glory of thy life, like the day of thy death, shall not fail from the remembrance of men. . . .

Excerpted from Daniel Webster’s A Discourse in Commemoration of the Lives and Services of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, delivered in Faneuil Hall, Boston, August 2, 1826 (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard and Company, 1826) and reprinted in The Living Declaration.

The Epocha of the Stamp Act

John Adams (1735–1826)
From John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1755–1775

Interesting Links

Audio, with accompanying article: “Dear John, Dear Abigail: A Love Story Through Letters” (Talk of the Nation, NPR)

John Adams Birthplace in Braintree, MA (National Park Service)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770,” Joseph Warren
• “Destruction of the Tea in Boston,” John Adams
• “The Declaration of Independence,” Abigail Adams
• “It is impossible we should think of Submission,” Benjamin Franklin

Buy the book
John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1755–1775
List price: $42.50
Web store price: $30.00

Also Available
John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1775–1783
List price: $42.50
Web store price: $30.00

“Burning of Stamp Act, Boston.” Photomechanical print of a postcard, 1903. The framed artwork in the center is a hand-colored reproduction of one of twelve engravings about the American Revolution that were drawn in 1784 by German artist Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801). (Library of Congress)

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After a hiatus of nearly three years, on December 18, 1765, John Adams resumed his habit of keeping a diary. In that day’s entry, he noted, “The Year 1765 has been the most remarkable Year of my Life.” In fact, the entire period during which he neglected his diary proved most consequential for a Harvard graduate in his late 20s who had once aspired to follow in his father’s footsteps and live a quiet life as a farmer.

In late 1762, Adams renewed his acquaintance with Abigail Smith prior to the wedding of her older sister, Mary, and his close friend Richard Cranch. He had been unimpressed with all three Smith sisters when he met them three years earlier. At the time, he was on the verge of proposing marriage to their second cousin Hannah Quincy, the daughter of Josiah Quincy, a leading town citizen and justice of the peace. Comparing the sisters’ demeanor to Hannah’s compassionate character, he wrote, “Parson Smiths Girls have not this fondness, nor this Tenderness,” but John nevertheless seemed to have second thoughts—and Hannah had several suitors. A rival, the physician Bela Lincoln, proposed first.

Abigail was only fifteen when she first failed to make an impression on John, but as an eighteen-year-old she no longer paled next to Hannah Quincy. A month before the Cranch wedding, he sent her a letter that begins:

By the same Token that the Bearer hereof satt up with you last night I hereby order you to give him, as many Kisses, and as many Hours of your Company after 9 O’Clock as he shall please to Demand and charge them to my Account. . . .

They were married two years later, in October 1764. “His marriage to Abigail Smith was the most important decision of John Adams’s life, as would become apparent with time,” writes historian David McCullough. “She was in all respects his equal and the part she was to play would be greater than he could possibly have imagined, for all his love for her and what appreciation he already had of her beneficial, steadying influence.” McCullough wryly points to the abandonment of Adams’s diary, with the resulting absence of any mention of his courtship of and marriage to Abigail, as “a sure sign of how preoccupied he was.”

In early 1764, while John was still courting Abigail, a smallpox outbreak occurred in Boston; on March 13, the town voted to allow anyone to be inoculated during the next five weeks. Until Edward Jenner’s discovery in the 1790s of vaccination (which used a milder but immunizing disease, cowpox), inoculation with the smallpox virus was itself very dangerous, not only to the patient receiving inoculation but to others who had not had the disease, and many physicians generally resisted inoculation unless an outbreak of the disease threatened to get out of control. By March 30 there had been 699 cases of natural smallpox with 124 deaths, and 4,977 cases of inoculated smallpox with only 46 deaths. Adams decided to endure the treatment and on April 13 he was successfully inoculated under the care of Dr. Joseph Warren, who later became a close friend. During the month he quarantined himself in Boston, he and Abigail exchanged a total of 21 letters.

Before the end of the first year of their marriage, John became active in the struggle against implementation of the Stamp Act. Issued in March 1765 and scheduled to take effect on November 1, the Act imposed a hefty tax on the paper used in the colonies for newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, broadsides, and legal and commercial documents. By the time word of the Act reached the colony, Adams had begrudgingly become an official in his hometown of Braintree, twelve miles south of Boston: he had been nominated for—and then elected—surveyor of highways, responsible for the maintenance of roads and bridges. “I was very wroth, because I knew no better, but said Nothing,” he wrote years later in his autobiography. “My Friend Dr. Savil came to me and told me, that he had nominated me to prevent me from being nominated as a Constable: for said the Doctor, they make it a rule to compell every Man to serve either as Constable or Surveyor, or to pay a fine. I said they might as well have chosen any Boy in School, for I knew nothing of the Business.” The position, however, pushed him into a more prominent role at town meetings.

That summer, protests against the Stamp Act occurred throughout the colonies. In Boston, on August 14, mobs looted the home of Andrew Oliver, a prominent merchant who had been appointed stamp distributor for Massachusetts, and they hanged him in effigy. In Adams’s diary is an extended passage that may have been meant as a letter to a newspaper but was apparently never published. On the one hand, Adams wrote, “to be carried thro the Town, in such insolent Tryumph and burned on an Hill, to have his Garden torn in Pieces, his House broken open, his furniture destroyed and his whole family thrown into Confusion and Terror, is a very attrocious Violation of the Peace and of dangerous Tendency and Consequence.” On the other hand, he reminded his would-be readers how Thomas Hutchinson, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, had filled prominent government posts with almost a dozen members of his own family—including Andrew Oliver, his brother-in-law. “Is not this amazing ascendancy of one Family, Foundation sufficient on which to erect a Tyranny? Is it not enough to excite Jealousies among the People?” And would it not be prudent, he continued, “to remove these Jealousies from the Minds of the People by giving an easy solution of these Difficulties?” Two weeks later another mob attacked Hutchinson’s three-story mansion, looting the valuable objects and destroying virtually everything else, including his papers and manuscripts and even the walls and roof. Hutchinson and his family escaped only moments before the crowd arrived.

The following month, Adams wrote “Instructions to Braintree’s Representative Concerning the Stamp Act,” directing the town’s representative in the Massachusetts legislature, the General Court, to oppose the Stamp Act. Adopted unanimously at a town meeting, Adams’s document denounced the Act as unconstitutional: “We have always understood it to be a grand and fundamental Principle of the Constitution, that no Freeman should be subjected to any Tax, to which he has not given his own Consent, in Person or by Proxy.” After it was printed on October 10 in the Massachusetts Gazette the Braintree Instructions were adopted by about forty other towns.

Between 1802 and 1807, with the Revolution and his Presidency behind him, Adams worked on his autobiography. “It is not for the Public but for my Children that I commit these Memoirs to writing,” he states in the preface, and all three volumes of the unfinished work remained unpublished until 1961. Early in the first volume, Adams recalls the events that unexpectedly altered his life and career—from the smallpox epidemic to his marriage to the Stamp Act—and we present those passages below.

Notes: Adams’s preparatory treatment for smallpox inoculation with a milk-and-vegetable diet and purgatives was popularized by Dr. Adam Thomson of Philadelphia in 1750. Draper’s paper was the Massachusetts Gazette, published by Richard Draper. The Mr. Paine mentioned by Adams should not be confused with Thomas Paine, referred to earlier. Instead, he is Robert Treat Paine, who later became a member of the Continental Congress.

The refusal of colonial lawyers to purchase stamped legal paper resulted in the closing of the court system in Massachusetts. On behalf of Boston townsmen, Adams, accompanied by lawyers Jeremiah Gridley and James Otis Jr., appeared before Governor Francis Bernard on December 20 and argued unsuccessfully for the reopening of the courts, particularly the Court of Common Pleas, the main trial court in Massachusetts. Otis was a celebrated lawyer whose speeches and writings Adams revered, but by this time the mental illness that would end Otis’s political career was beginning to reveal itself. “He is liable to great Inequalities of Temper—sometimes in Despondency, sometimes in a Rage,” Adams wrote in his diary at the end of December 1765.

Faced with the intransigence of all the American colonies, the British House of Commons repealed the Stamp Act on February 24, 1766.

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In the Winter of 1764 the Small Pox prevailing in Boston, I went with my Brother into Town and was inocculated under the Direction of Dr. Nathaniel Perkins and Dr. Joseph Warren. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

“The Spirit of party has overpowerd the Spirit of Patriotism”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818)
From Abigail Adams: Letters

Interesting Links

“There’s a Reason the Election of 1800 Still Sings Out to Us—and It’s Not Only Because of Hamilton and Burr” (Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times)

Online exhibition: “Creating the United States: Election of 1800” (Library of Congress)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Becoming a First Lady,” Abigail Adams
• “The Work Before Us,” Frederick Douglass
• “A Presidential Candidate,” Mark Twain

Buy the book
Abigail Adams: Letters
Includes 430 letters—more than a hundred published for the first time • 1,180 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $30.00

The President’s House, Washington, D.C. Site Plan and Principal Story Plan, 1807. Watercolor and ink on paper by architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764–1820). Library of Congress. Click to see full plan. In letter written in April 1800, Abigail Adams worried that her husband’s insistence on moving into the still-under-construction house “would prove his death.” When she arrived that fall, she wrote “this House is built for ages to come” but complained of the damp inside. “Not one room or chamber is finished of the whole.”

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Edith Gelles, editor of Abigail Adams: Letters, provides this week’s introduction of an especially noteworthy letter from Adams to her son John Quincy after the election of 1800, when her family was beset by public and private calamity.

“The Spirit of party has overpowerd the Spirit of Patriotism,” observes Abigail Adams in her January 29, 1801, letter to her eldest son John Quincy, then American minister to the Prussian court in Berlin. Written after having learned that her husband John had been defeated for a second term as president, Adams’s letter vividly conveys the unsettled nature of American politics in the early republic.

The election of 1800 was perhaps the most vituperative in our history. Federalist John Adams, the incumbent, was despised by a prominent faction of his own party, the so-called Essex Junto. Alexander Hamilton, the de facto leader of the Federalist party, had written a pamphlet denouncing the President as a madman. This fratricidal conflict opened the door for the two Republican candidates, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, who, by a fluke of the original electoral process established by the Constitution, ended up tied in the Electoral College, with Adams coming third. The deadlock shifted the decision to the House of Representatives, where (two weeks after Abigail wrote her letter) it would take 36 ballots over the course of seven days for Jefferson to secure election. Denied a second term, President Adams, in a move that was as controversial then as it would be today, made a series of “midnight appointments” in the final days of his administration, including that of John Marshall to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. As the young nation prepared for the first transfer of power from one party to another, the outgoing First Lady despaired for the future.

Adams’s mood in this letter is melancholy for more personal reasons as well. She had recently arrived in the swampy new capital, the first First Lady to occupy what would become known as the White House. On her journey to Washington, over roads that were so rutted that “it was like a ploughd field,” she had passed through New York City to pay a “dying visit” to her beloved second son, Charles, who was fast fading from the effects of alcoholism. Not yet regarded as a disease, alcoholism was then considered a sign of personal weakness and a sin. She prays that Charles, the son she remembers as the charming and loveable man “he once was,” will be forgiven, and that John Quincy will become a surrogate father to his brother’s younger daughter. Abigail and John took Charles’s older daughter, Susanna, home with them to Quincy, Massachusetts, where she remained until her marriage in 1817.

Abigail’s ray of hope in this grim landscape is the prospect of John Quincy’s return home and a fantasy of retirement “passed in Peace and quietness,” surrounded by her family.

Notes: The pamphlet by Alexander Hamilton. The Public Conduct and Character of John Adams Esq., President of the United States, was a savage, 54-page attack not only on the policies but on the temperament of the President. John had considered responding immediately to this calumny of the charges but delayed until 1809 in a series of letters in the Boston Patriot.

Until 1933, U.S. Presidents were inaugurated on March 4 (or if the 4th was a Sunday, March 5). Thus, there were still five weeks left of the Adams administration when Abigail wrote this letter. In the section discussing her husband’s recent changes in the Cabinet, Abigail mentions that Oliver Wolcott Jr., the secretary of the treasury who resigned at the end of December, was replaced by Samuel Dexter, the secretary of war. Roger Griswold, a Federalist lawyer and congressman from Connecticut declined John Adams’s request to replace Dexter as secretary of war and the post remained unfilled until Jefferson appointed Henry Dearborn in early March. Col. Smith is William Stephens Smith, John and Abigails’s son-in-law and husband of Abigail Adams Smith. He had been appointed by President Adams as surveyor of the Port of New York, “an office which affords him and his Family a handsome Support,” as Abigail notes. William Cranch, the son of Abigail’s sister, was one of John’s “midnight judges,” appointed to the District of Columbia Circuit Court, where he served until his death.

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below.
You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

Abigail Adams to John Quincy Adams

Washington Jan’ry 29 1801

My dear Son
Your Brother Thomas has performed the painfull office of announcing to you the death of your Brother Charles. With what a weight of sorrow is my bosom opprest, when I reflect, that he was cutt down in the bloom of Life, in the midst of his days. he is numberd with the dead; it becomes me in Silence to mourn; mourn over him living, I have for a long time, and now he is gone.—the tender remembrance of what he once was rises before me, and I wish to forget. I wish to draw a veil over all those propencities, which have rung my Heart, with unutterable pang’s. I would hope, that from that Throne of Sovereign Mercy, where I have often besought it for him, he may have obtaind forgiveness—think of him my Son with the compassion of a Brother, and if you are permitted to return to your native Country, be a Father to the little Girl who bears my Name—the other I have taken, and if my Life is Spared, I mean to bring her up,—the Mother has no means of Support but that which She derives from her Friend’s She is amiable and worthy; I can lay no blame to her Charge. She attended with constant and unwearied Solisitude, to the last Scene, his Sickness was short; his constitution was undermined; his Sufferings were Severe, his patience under them was great, a dropsey in his Chest was the cause of his Dissolution; I knew not that he was Sick: indeed he had not been more than a week confined, when I arrived in November at Newyork, on my way to this City, I went to see him but you may judge of my feelings, when I Saw that his case was desperate, tho he entertaind no Idea himself that it was so, but he Survived only a fortnight. he was at Lodgings. your sister Smith who had Spent the Summer with me, returnd to Nyork when I did. She removed him immediatly, and every kind care and Sisterly attention was Shewn him, both from the Col. & herself. the removal of him, was all the releaf, all the consolation I could derive; I came to this city with a heavey Heart; in daily expectation of his death, which took place on the first of december; my Residence in this City, has not Served to endear the World to me, to private and domestick Sorrow, is added a prospect of publick Calamity for our Country. the Spirit of party has overpowerd the Spirit of Patriotism. the Intrigue of one Man, and the dissapointed ambition of an other has divided the Strength of the Country, and thrown into the antifediral Scale the weight of Numbers; this Change has been produced by the practise of all those low arts of calumny, and falshood, which are the weapons of unprincipled Men, and the power of faction, the corrupt and infatuated members of it, have acted without any regard to right, or wrong, and the question with them has been who shall govern, not how they shall be governed; If as is expected a total Change of Men, and measures follow, universal confusion will be the concequence. The Election is not yet determined, for two candidates being equal, the House of Representitives must decide; if they stear from Scylla, they must wrecked upon Charibdis—what is before us Heaven only know’s time only can unfold—that ingratitude was considerd by the Athenians as a Sin; we are told could Athens produce stronger instances, than are to be found in our Country? You can trace the train of my thoughts, when you consider the wise and judicious administration of our Government for the last 12 years—when you view it rising in power at home, and respectability abroad, acquiring wealth, and oppulence daily; who but must lament, that this fair prospect is vanishing like the baseless fabrick of a vision—it would require a vol’m instead of a single Letter; to unfold to you, all the Machinations which have combined to produce this Change in the Administration; honest Men have been cheated, and duped, ambitious Men have Seen themselves, and their plots discoverd, and counteracted by a watchfullness which they could not elude; and were therefore determined to get rid off, at any hazard; If you received a Letter I wrote you, just before I left Quincy it will Serve you, in Some measure as a clue to the objects of a certain Party call’d the Essex Junto, but a pamphlet written by Hamilton concerning the public conduct & Character of John Adams President of the united States, and which I presume has been sent you, will more fully display the falshood and malignity of the Anglo Federalist. from this pamphlet however the Author has not acquired more fame, or reputation than he did from the precious confession of an other; to Burr is the merrit due, with the antifederal party for turning the Election of Nyork in their favour. to Burr then will that party owe their President, provided mr Jefferson is chosen—and this was a bargain and Sale business!! Is it not sufficent to give every considerate, and reflecting person a surfeit of Elective Governments, when in this young Country and thus early such proffs appear of corruption and want of principle?—

I turn from this disgusting object to one nearer my Heart. I mean the return of my dear Son to his family and Friends my last letter was full upon this Subject; tho it will be urksome to you to return with Such prospects opening before you; I presume you will not feel as tho you could remain abroad;

I expect to take a final leave of this City next week, and return to Quincy; could I be assured that the remainder of my days might be passed in Peace and quietness, I should have reason to rejoice in a liberation from public Life; The President retains his Health, and his Spirits beyond what you could imagine; he has the conscienciouss of having served his Country with pure intentions; with upright views and from the most disinterested motives, as his own pecuniary affairs manifest. tho free from debts, or embarassments of that nature; his income will oblige us to a strickt oeconomy, in order to preserve that independance upon which Our future tranquility rests. I repine not, at any of the allotments, or dispensations of providence; we have been a scatterd family if some of my Children could now be collected round the parent Hive it appears to me, that it would add much to the happiness of our declining Years; Thomas has determined to remain in Pennsilvana he is the joy of our Hearts. his conduct in all respects, is prudent and judicious I think it not unlike that the State he has chosen for his residence may become under the new administration Such a hot bed of turbulence and Sedition as to induce him to change his Quarters; Some recent Changes have taken place in the public offices. mr Wolcot has resignd, and mr dexter is appointed in his place; Mr Marshall is appointed Chief Justice of the united States in the Room of mr Elsworth, resignd. Mr Griswold is this day nominated in the place of mr Dexter; Secritary of War. no Secretary of State is yet nominated and I cannot say that any will be; it is difficult to get Such Gentlemen as are esteemed proper, to accept offices from which they may be removed in the course of a few weeks—Yet in the present critical State of the Country when it is undetermined, and altogether uncertain which of the candidates will be our future President, or whether there will be any Election at all, the President has thought it best to fill up the offices with Such men as are fit, and capable of discharging the duties of them in any Event; if they are to be removed; let the world See how they will again be filled.

I have not any Letter from you of a later date than July 11th, I have seen Letters from Louisa to her Father in August and to the 5 of Sep’tr. Your Brother has Letters of as late a date from you which have been a source of much entertainment to me; I have very little cause to accuse you of not writing to me. I have myself been very deficient. tell Louisa that her Family are all well Situated about one mile from the Presidents house, but Such a quagmire between, that our intercourse is much impeeded. Caroline has had a long fit of Sickness, a Nervious fever from which she has so far recoverd as to have Spent one Day with me. I expect the Family all to dine with me on Saturday for the last time. Col. Smith is now in an office which affords him and his Family a handsome Support. my mind is easier upon their account. mr W. Cranch will do very well here. he is appointed one of the city Commissoners—my paper obliges me to conclude. Your truly affectionate &c &c.

From original at the Massachusetts Historical Society, via The Founders website (founders.archives.gov).

The Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770

Joseph Warren (1741–1775)
From The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764–1776

Interesting Links
“Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of the Boston Massacre” (Massachusetts Historical Society)

“Ten Things You Should Know about Joseph Warren” (Christopher Klein, History.com)

Previous Story of the Week selections
⦁ “Destruction of the Tea in Boston,” John Adams
⦁ “The Declaration of Independence,” Abigail Adams
⦁ “It is impossible we should think of Submission,” Benjamin Franklin

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The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764–1776
Two-volume boxed set
1,889 pages
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Web store price: $60.00

Boston Massacre, March 5th, 1770, 1855, original painting by illustrator William L. Champney (fl. 1850–1857), reproduced as a chromolithograph and published by Henry Q. Smith, Boston. Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum. In the center is Crispus Attucks, a Boston resident of African and Native American descent who was the first to die during the confrontation. Champney’s painting was modeled after the famous hand-colored engraving by Henry Pelham, versions of which were sold as prints by both Paul Revere and Pelham only weeks after the event took place.

The following introduction is adapted, with minor changes and the addition of an excerpt from John Adams’s diary, from headnotes by Gordon S. Wood in the two-volume Library of America collection The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764–1776.

In his testimony before the House of Commons in 1766, Benjamin Franklin drew a distinction between “internal” taxes, such as the stamp taxes on newspapers and legal documents, and “external” taxes, such as duties levied on imports. Although few colonists made much of this distinction, the British government seized on it. The following year the chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townshend, admitted that he could not see “any distinction between internal and external taxes; it is a distinction without a difference, it is perfect nonsense.” But “since the Americans were pleased to make that distinction,” he was “willing to indulge them.”

Consequently, Parliament went on to levy “external” taxes or duties on colonial imports of lead, glass, paper, and tea, the revenue from which was to be applied to the salaries of royal officials in the colonies, thereby affording them a measure of independence from the colonial assemblies, their traditional paymasters. At the same time the British government decided that the North American colonies had at long last become important enough to require their own ministerial department. Lord Hillsborough, a hard-liner, was appointed the first secretary of the new American department.

The reforms accompanying the Townshend Duties created three new vice-admiralty courts in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston to supplement the one in Halifax. To oversee these institutions of trade enforcement, Parliament also established a new American Board of Customs located in Boston. This was scarcely the best place to put it, for Boston—in fact the entire colony of Massachusetts—was seething. Attacked by mobs, customs officials in Boston found it impossible to enforce the new trade regulations, and they pleaded for military support. When a British warship arrived in Boston in June 1768, emboldened customs officials promptly seized John Hancock’s ship Liberty for violating the trade laws. This set off one of the fiercest riots in Boston’s history.

Following Governor Francis Bernard’s dissolution of the Massachusetts assembly, Boston’s town meeting ordered the town’s inhabitants to arm and called upon all the towns in the colony to send delegates to an extra-legal convention. Lord Hillsborough concluded that all order had broken down in Massachusetts, and he sent two regiments to Boston. By 1769 there were nearly four thousand armed redcoats in the crowded seaport of fifteen thousand inhabitants. Since the colonists shared the traditional English fear of standing armies, relations between the townspeople and soldiers rapidly deteriorated. On March 5, 1770, a party of eight British soldiers fired on a threatening crowd, killing five civilians (three died at the scene and two later from their wounds).

This “Boston Massacre,” as it was called, immediately aroused American passions and inspired some of the most sensational rhetoric of the period. That fall, John Adams and Josiah Quincy as co-counsels successfully defended the soldiers against the charge of murder. As Quincy told his father, he and Adams took the case only after the leading patriots, including Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Dr. Joseph Warren, had urged them to do so. Three years later, on the anniversary of the event, John Adams wrote in his diary:

The Part I took in Defence of Captn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right.

This however is no Reason why the Town should not call the Action of that Night a Massacre, nor is it any Argument in favour of the Governor or Minister, who caused them to be sent here. But it is the strongest of Proofs of the Danger of standing Armies.

Boston began commemorating the incident with an annual oration, an observance that would continue until independence, when it was replaced by orations celebrating the Fourth of July. Warren, who was called on to deliver the oration in 1772, had become a prominent radical in 1767 when he published in the Boston Gazette under the pseudonym of “A True Patriot” a series of protests against the Townshend Acts. They were so incendiary that Governor Bernard sought to have him prosecuted for libel. Warren would be asked to deliver the Massacre oration once again in 1775, just three months before he was killed at the battle of Bunker Hill. The second time he delivered the oration while wearing a Roman toga—a vivid sign of the republicanism that was by then fast approaching.

Notes: The quote by Virgil on the title page is from the Aeneid, which reads in the Fairclough translation: “What Myrmidon or Dolopian, or soldier of stern Ulysses, could in telling such a tale refrain from tears?” The quote by Cicero in the footnote on page 748 is from Orations against Cataline: “All ranks support the preservation of the republic with heart and will, with zeal and virtue, and with their voices.” The rape of Lucretia, a noblewoman, led to the end of the Roman monarchy in 510–509 BCE. The second quote from Virgil (page 756, footnote) is from the Eclogues: “But soon as thou canst read of the glories of heroes and thy father's deeds, and canst know what valour is.”

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When we turn over the historic page, and trace the rise and fall of states and empires; the mighty revolutions which have so often varied the face of the world strike our minds with solemn surprize, and we are naturally led to endeavor to search out the causes of such astonishing changes. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Becoming a First Lady

Abigail Adams (1744–1818)
From Abigail Adams: Letters

Interesting Links

History of the President’s House Site (National Park Service)

“How Philly lost the nation’s capital to Washington” (National Constitution Center)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Urgent Necessity,” George Washington & John Adams
• “Dear sister, I must leave this house,” Dolley Madison
• Artemus Ward on His Visit to Abe Lincoln, Artemus Ward

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Abigail Adams: Letters
Includes 430 letters—more than a hundred published for the first time • 1,180 pages
List price: $40.00
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“Residence of Washington in High Street,” 1795, watercolor by American artist William L. Breton (c. 1773–1855). Soon after becoming President, John Adams moved into the residence, the site of which is at Sixth Street and Market Street (formerly High Street). Abigail joined him there when she arrived in Philadelphia on May 10, 1797. From the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

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Even after it became apparent that her husband John would be the second President of the United States, Abigail Adams was reluctant to leave her home in Quincy, Massachusetts, and she decided to put off a trip to the capital (which was then in Philadelphia) for nearly a year. One of several candidates supported by Federalists, John Adams won the ballot cast by electors on December 7, 1796, with 71 votes, and Republican Thomas Jefferson, with 68 votes, would be vice president. The remaining 137 votes were spread among twelve other candidates. (Each of the 138 electors voted for two candidates, and thus Adams was elected with a two-vote majority.) Writing to her son Charles on February 5, Abigail remarked, “it is the will of Providence to place me in a very conspicious [sic] station.” She would have no official role in the new administration—the term “First Lady” wouldn’t be commonly used until the middle of the next century—but the expectation was that she would join her husband during his presidency.

Her husband begged her to come to Philadelphia immediately rather than wait until the fall. On January 15, Abigail responded, “You ask me what I think of comeing on in Feb’ry? I answer that I had rather not if I may be excused. I have not for Many Years enjoyd so good Health as this Winter. I feel loth to put it to risk by passing a spring in Philadelphia.” Not only was Abigail still recovering from an extended illness, but the family finances were a shambles (“at present I am living on credit”), she was responsible for running the family farm, and John’s 88-year-old mother, Susanna Boylston Adams, was no longer able to live alone and would move into the Adams’s residence in late March.

As Vice President under Washington, John Adams was also president of the Senate, so on March 4 he presided over the counting of the electoral votes and announced his own election. “You have this Day to declare Yourself Head of a Nation,” Abigail wrote a month earlier in anticipation of the occasion. George Washington (“the General”) was in attendance, and John wrote to Abigail, “He Seem’d to me to enjoy a Tryumph over me. Methought I heard him think Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of Us will be happiest.” In a later letter he joked nervously, “It is the general Report that there was more Weeping than there has ever been at the Representation of any Tragedy. But whether it was from Grief or Joy, whether from the Loss of their beloved President, or from the Accession of an unbeloved one . . . I know not.”

He was now the nation’s second President, but he still didn’t have a residence appropriate to the position. “There was no executive mansion in Philadelphia,” biographer Edith Gelles reminds us, “and the house in which the Washingtons had resided, though it would be available, appeared unaffordable to Adams. Furthermore, the Washingtons had used their own household furnishings, which they planned to take home to Mt. Vernon.” John found the prospect of moving into a new residence overwhelming and pleaded for Abigail’s help. She responded emphatically that he should have “a Committee appointed to Do it, if a sum Should be granted for the purpose. I desire to have nothing to Do with it. There are persons who know what is both necessary & proper.” Adams did decide to move into the Washingtons’ former residence, only to discover that the place had been trashed, allegedly by servants after the previous inhabitants had vacated the premises. Fortunately, Congress appropriated $14,000 for the furnishing of the home, an extravagant sum in 1797. Nevertheless, Gelles notes, “The Adamses entered the nation’s highest offices in debt,” and John was nervous about the expenses that the demands of the Presidency would require of him. He complained to Abigail in early February, “I hope you will not communicate to any body the hints I give you about our Prospects: but they appear every day worse and worse.”

In the weeks after the inauguration Adams sent increasingly frantic messages home to his wife. The next day, he wrote, “I must go to you or you must come to me. I cannot live without you till October.” Later that month: “I never wanted your Advice and assistance more in my Life.” In early April: “I can do nothing without you. We must resign every Thing but our public Duties, and they will be more than We can discharge, with Satisfaction to ourselves or others I fear.” Most of the letters John sent Abigail in March and April—there are twenty of them in all—contain similar pleas. His isolation in Philadelphia was aggravated by his choice to retain Washington’s entire cabinet rather than to appoint his own secretaries—a decision he soon had reason to regret.

Abigail surrendered to the inevitable and decided to travel to Philadelphia that spring, but the trip was postponed by the illnesses of both her eighteen-year-old niece, Mary Smith, who was suffering from tuberculosis, and John’s mother. Both of them died in mid-April. Abigail finally joined John in Philadelphia on May 10 and began immediately to take charge of household tasks and to help him with administrative duties.

For our Story of the Week selection, then, we present a series of letters written by Abigail in the months after John’s election. The first is her brief note to John a month prior to the inauguration. The second is a remarkable document, a lengthy and severe criticism of his farewell address to the Senate, in which he announced he no longer thought the office of senator should be hereditary. Abigail took him to task for his opening sentence (or “period”), particularly because its length obscured the meaning. (John answered, “I am highly pleased with your Criticisms and Observations on my Adieus to the Senate, their Answer and my Reply.”) The third letter, sent on April 17 when both her niece and mother-in-law were near death, reassured him that she still planned to leave for Philadelphia as soon as she was able. And the final selection, sent to her sister Mary Smith Cranch, describes her arrival in the capital and her first activities as a First Lady.

Notes: February 8 letter: The epigraph is from James Hervey’s “Ode from Casimire.”
      March 12 letter: Charles Jarvis, a political follower of Jefferson, had been reelected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives; in his Autobiography, John Adams wrote of Jarvis’s “virulence against me.” The man (H     n) whose conduct had been mysterious is Alexander Hamilton. Prior to leaving office, Washington had appointed Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina (1746–1825) as minister to France. The French, having been angered by Jay’s Treaty, refused to accept his diplomatic credentials and ordered him to leave the country. William Vans Murray was minister to Netherlands, an office previously held by John and Abigail’s son John Quincy. Benjamin Russell, identified as “Printer to the United States, for the Northern States,” was also the publisher of the Columbian Centinel, which reprinted Adam’s farewell address with several omissions and errors.
      April 17 letter: Oliver Ellsworth was the third Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
      May 16 letter: The speech to Congress John Adams delivered that day was his first message on relations with France. Abigail refers to the Minister at the Hague, who was in fact her son John Quincy. She also mentions the hiring of a new minister for their church in Quincy, where a search committee voted unanimously in favor of Peter Whitney over Jacob Flint. Susannah Tufts was the second wife of Cotton Tufts, a physician who was John Adams’s cousin.

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If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Declaration of Independence

Abigail Adams (1744–1818)
From Abigail Adams: Letters

Interesting Links

Edith Gelles on the incomparable letters of Abigail Adams (Library of America)

“What you know about July 4th is wrong” (Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post)

Other Story of the Week selections for the Fourth of July
• “The Sentiments of a Lady in New-Jersey,” Anonymous
• “It is impossible we should think of Submission,” Benjamin Franklin
• “A Virginia Barbecue,” John M. Duncan
• “Immigrant Picnic,” Gregory Djanikian

Buy the book
Abigail Adams: Letters
Includes 430 letters—more than a hundred published for the first time

Detail from “The manner in which the American colonies declared themselves independant of the king of England, throughout the different provinces, on July 4, 1776.” (Click on image to view entire illustration.) Hand colored print by William Hamilton (1751–1801); engraved by George Noble (fl. 1795–1806) for Edward Barnard’s New Complete & Authentic History of England, 1783. Courtesy of The Society of the Cincinnati.

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On July 3, 1776, John Adams excitedly wrote to his wife, Abigail:

Yesterday the greatest Question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater perhaps, never was or 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, and as such, they have, and of Right ought to have full Power to make War, conclude Peace, establish Commerce, and to do all the other Acts and Things, which other States may rightfully do.”

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.—I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

Adams’s prediction proved to be substantially correct—but, as we all know, he was wrong about the date. Although the colonies voted for independence (12–0, with New York abstaining) on July 2, the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4—and that is the date Americans celebrate each year.

Adams concluded his letter with an acknowledgment of the challenges ahead:

I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.—Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means.

In response to John’s news, Abigail sent the two letters reprinted here as our Story of the Week selection. She shares his excitement for independence and conveys pride in his role, and her second letter includes an account of a public reading of the Declaration of Independence in Boston. Yet she expresses disappointment that the final printed version of the document omitted “some of the most Manly Sentiments” included in an earlier draft. She may well have been thinking, in part, of a deleted reference to the evils of the slave trade. John appears to have said nothing to Abigail about the draft’s authorship, and so she might also have inferred that he, rather than Thomas Jefferson, was its author.

As one would expect from correspondence between wife and husband, the letters include other news relating to family and community. Aside from the war, dominating their concerns is the small pox epidemic plaguing Boston and areas to the north (in “Canady,” or Canada), an outbreak that had infected about three thousand Continental Army soldiers; the second letter discusses the popular and moderately successful use of a “new method” of inoculation developed by London doctor Daniel Sutton, involving a small puncture to infect people with a milder form of the disease. On the war front, she mentions the sighting of a British fleet worrying the Boston harbor and the concern that the city was not yet properly prepared for its own defense. And she expresses anger about the “conspiricy [sic] at New York”: a private in General Washington’s guard confessed that he had been one of a number of Continental Army soldiers planning to defect to the British, fueling rumors that the plot had included the assassination of Washington himself.

Notes: The following references all appear on the last page. Colonel Thomas Crafts participated in the Boston Tea Party and commanded the artillery unit during the Revolutionary War in which Paul Revere served. James Bowdoin Sr. was a local political leader and later the second governor of Massachusetts (1785–87). Belcona is Abigail’s curious spelling for balcony; Gorge is King George III. The Borgias were a prominent Renaissance family known for using theft, bribery, and murder to gain political and ecclesiastical power. Catiline, a first-century BCE. Roman senator, was involved in a conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic.

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By yesterdays post I received two Letters dated 3 and 4 of July and tho your Letters never fail to give me pleasure, be the subject what it will, yet it was greatly heightned by the prospect of the future happiness and glory of our Country;  . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

“Remember the Ladies”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) & John Adams (1735–1826)
From Abigail Adams: Letters and John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1775–1783

Interesting Links

“Abigail, John Adams: America’s Original ‘Power Couple’” (Interview with Edith Gelles, Voice of America)

“The Righteous Revolution of Mercy Otis Warren” (Ray Raphael, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Sentiments of a Lady in New-Jersey,” Anonymous
• “Destruction of the Tea in Boston,” John Adams
• “The Urgent Necessity,” George Washington & John Adams

Buy the books
Abigail Adams: Letters
Includes 430 letters—more than a hundred published for the first time • 1,180 pages
List price: $40.00
Save 25%, free shipping
Web store price: $30.00

John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1775–1783
Includes Thoughts on Government • 811 pages
List price: $42.50
Web store price: $30.00

Portraits of John and Abigail Adams, circa 1766, pastel on paper by American artist Benjamin Blyth (1746–1811).

On February 8, 1776, John Adams traveled to Philadelphia for the new session of the Continental Congress. His wife Abigail remained at their home in Braintree, south of Boston. The British garrison evacuated Boston on March 17, sailing to Nova Scotia and leaving the town in control of the colonists. During the spring months John wrote his influential essay Thoughts on Government, which he circulated first in letters and then published as a pamphlet. And, as they always did when apart, John and Abigail continued their remarkable correspondence, including Abigail’s now-famous letter urging John and his fellow representatives to “Remember the Ladies” in “the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make.”

Beginning her letter at the end of March, Abigail broached two sensitive subjects: slavery and the role of women in society. On slavery, she wrote, “the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs.” And on women: “Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.” Abigail’s petition was not for political equality but rather for legal protections: “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”

Biographer Edith Gelles contends that the fact Abigail sent this letter at all—after holding on to it for nearly a week and adding a second part—hints that she thought John might be receptive to its message. “Slavery was the live specter that the delegates avoided,” writes Gelles, “but the idea of rights of women ran so contrary to anyone’s imagination, much less expression in the halls of Congress, that the issue would be considered amusing rather than alarming.” And John was indeed amused. “As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh,” he responded before teasingly dismissing women as yet “another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest.” His concession, if it can be considered such, is the assertion that although the “Masculine systems . . . are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude.”

For our Story of the Week selection, then, we present Abigail’s original letter (in both its parts), followed by John’s response of April 14 and Abigail’s subsequent letter to her friend, the political writer and playwright Mercy Otis Warren, in which she complains about John’s dismissiveness (“He is very sausy to me in return for a List of Female Grievances which I transmitted to him”).

Abigail did not let the matter drop, however, and a later letter (May 7) included a final retort:

I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives. But you must remember that Arbitary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken—and notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without voilence [sic] throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet. . . .

Notes: The two letters between Abigail and John mention John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, governor of the colony of Virginia, who issued a proclamation in November 1775 offering freedom to slaves who joined the British side. Both letters also discuss Samuel Quincy, the Solicitor General for the Massachusetts Colony, who became a Loyalist and returned to England in 1776, leaving behind his wife, who fervently supported the colonists. He died in exile in 1789. Abigail’s reference to “your President” is to John Hancock, president of the Second Continental Congress, and gaieti de Coar is her spelling of the French expression gaité de coeur (lightheartedness). John’s reference to Common Sense is to the famous pamphlet by Thomas Paine. Abigail’s letter to Mercy Otis Warren closes with a line from Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to a Lady,” followed by a stanza from “An Epistle to Lord Bathurst,” by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Abigail often signed her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman politician Brutus.

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“The Urgent Necessity”

George Washington (1732–1799) & John Adams (1735–1826)
From John Adams: Writings from the New Nation 1784–1826 and George Washington: Writings

Interesting Links

“Always Ready, Even 230 Years Later” (Erika Cosme, The Mariner’s Museum and Park, Virginia)

“The War Between Adams and Hamilton” (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New Republic)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Washington Resigns His Commission,” George Washington & Thomas Mifflin
• “Destruction of the Tea in Boston,” John Adams

Buy the books
John Adams: Writings from the New Nation 1784–1826
Over 200 letters, diary excerpts, political essays, and presidential messages

George Washington: Writings
Over 440 letters, orders, addresses, and other writings

Christopher Jackson (center, as George Washington) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (as Alexander Hamilton) in the Broadway musical Hamilton. Photograph posted on Twitter by David Korins, the show’s set designer.

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In a profile of George Washington written fourteen years after his death, Thomas Jefferson recalled, “His temper was naturally irritable and high toned but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it. If ever however it broke its bonds he was most tremendous in his wrath.” During his own term as president John Adams found himself on the receiving end of that wrath when he brought Washington out of retirement to lead a fledgling U.S. Army against the French.

As tensions mounted between the two countries during the 1790s (climaxing in what became known as the Quasi-War), fears of an invasion by French forces increased. In early July 1798 Washington made it known privately that, if Alexander Hamilton were his deputy, he might be willing to come out of retirement to defend the country against France. Adams subsequently appointed Washington as commander-in-chief of a new army created by Congress to resist the threat—but he did so without consulting the retired general, who learned of his confirmation from accounts in the press. The Secretary of War, James McHenry, subsequently delivered the commission to Washington, who in the end decided to accept the appointment.

As Ron Chernow writes, “Adams had asked McHenry to sound out Washington on his preferred officers without realizing that Washington would regard his advice as binding. . . . Here lay the dilemma in a nutshell: neither Hamilton nor Washington would serve without Hamilton being the main deputy, while Adams found this intolerable.” Washington thus indicated that his chief officers should be, in order, Hamilton, Charles Pinckney, and Henry Knox—even though the latter two outranked Hamilton, who was merely a colonel during the Revolution. In addition, Adams simply detested Hamilton. As he later wrote, “His origin was infamous; his place of birth and education were foreign countries; his fortune was poverty itself; the profligacy of his life—his fornications, adulteries, and his incests—were propagated far and wide.” Adams exercised his prerogative as President and recommended to the Senate that the order of the ranking be reversed.

That decision whipped up Washington’s indignation, and he sent a harshly worded letter to Adams in late September. In the face of his predecessor’s anger, Adams was left with little choice but to acquiesce. And so Washington, with Hamilton as deputy, traveled to Philadelphia in November to direct planning of the new army. By December 19 he was back in Mount Vernon, and the easing of rancor between France and the United States the following spring allowed him to return semi-permanently to retirement. Most of the command duties were carried out by “General Hamilton,” who almost singlehandedly created the new army—which only increased the belief by some civil leaders that he meant to spearhead some “mischievous plot” against Adams.

For this week’s selection, we present three pieces of correspondence that detail this story: Adams’s short missive informing Washington of his appointment, followed by Washington’s gracious acceptance and, two months later, his angry follow-up letter upon learning his assignment of officers had been countermanded.

There was a sequel to this kerfuffle: After Washington’s death on December 18, 1799, Adams refused to elevate Hamilton to commander of the Army and instead left the position unfilled. Still saddled with the responsibilities—yet still without the honor—Hamilton saw what was coming and wrote to an ally that it was “certain that my present station in the army cannot very long continue.” In May 1800, to Adams’s relief and with his encouragement, Congress disbanded the army that Hamilton had built over the previous two years—an act that unleashed Hamilton’s fury toward the President and cemented a mutual antipathy that carried over into the next election and beyond.

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