Aar-Ada: Aaron through Adams, John

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Sources include: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography and Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.


AARON, born 1811, African American, former Virginia slave, anti-slavery orator.  Wrote Light and Truth of Slavery: Aaron’s History, 1845. 

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 1, p. 1.)


AARON, Samuel, 1800-1865, Morristown, New Jersey, educator, clergyman, temperance activist, abolitionist.  Manager, American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), 1840-1842.  Vice President, 1839-1840, Executive Committee, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, p. 1.)

AARON, Samuel, educator, born in New Britain, Bucks county., Pennsylvania, in 1800; died in Mount Holly, New Jersey, 11 April, 1865. He was left an orphan at six years of age, and became the ward of an uncle, upon whose farm he worked for several years, attending school only in winter. A small legacy inherited from his father enabled him at the age of sixteen to enter the Doylestown, Pennsylvania, academy, where he fitted himself to become a teacher, and at the age of twenty was engaged as an assistant instructor in the classical and mathematical school in Burlington, New Jersey. Here he studied and taught, and soon opened an independent day school at Bridge Point, but was presently invited to become principal of Doylestown academy. In 1829 he was ordained, and became pastor of a Baptist church in New Britain. In 1833 he took charge of the Burlington high school, serving at the same time as pastor of the Baptist church in that city. Accepting in 1841 an invitation from a church in Norristown, Pennsylvania, he remained there three years, when he opened the Treemount seminary near Norristown, which under his management soon became prosperous, and won a high reputation for the thoroughness of its training and discipline. The financial disasters of 1857 found Mr. Aaron with his name pledged as security for a friend, and he was obliged to sacrifice all his property to the creditors. He was soon offered the head-mastership of Mt. Holly, New Jersey, institute, a large, well-established school for boys, where, in company with his son as joint principal, he spent the remainder of his life. During these years he was pastor of a church in Mt. Holly. He prepared a valuable series of text-books introducing certain improvements in methods of instruction, which added greatly to his reputation as an educator. His only publication in book form, aside from his text-books, was entitled “Faithful Translation” (Philadelphia, 1842). He was among the early advocates of temperance, and was an earnest supporter of the anti-slavery cause from its beginning. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I. pp. 1. 


ABBEY, Cheney, New York, American Abolition Society

(Radical Abolitionist, Volume 1, No. 1, New York, August 1855)


ABBOTT, Gorham D., Boston, Massachusetts.  Member of the American Colonization Society, Boston Auxiliary.  Active in leadership of Society.  Published The Colonizationist and Journal of Freedom, a monthly magazine. 

(Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 201, 204)


ACKLEY, John, abolitionist, officer of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery (PAS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

(Nash, Gary B., & Soderlund, Jean R. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 131)


Adair, William A., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1837-40


ADAM, William, Cambridge, Massachusetts, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1843-45
 

ADAMS, Abigail, president’s wife and activist

ADAMS, ABIGAIL (November 11, 1744-October 28, 1818), noted letter writer, wife of John Adams, second President of the United States, was born at Weymouth, Massachusetts, where her father, the Reverend William Smith, was minister of the Congregational church. Her mother was Elizabeth Quincy, daughter of Colonel John Quincy and grand-daughter of the Reverend John Norton. Of her childhood she writes: "I never was sent to any school. I was always sick" (Familiar Letters, preface, p. xi). Much of her time was spent in seclusion at the home of her grandparents at Mount Wollaston. Her grandmother, with a "happy method of mixing instruction and amusement together," took the place of school. The distance separating the homes of her relatives and friends was too great to permit of frequent social intercourse, so that letter writing became habitual among the young people. On October 25, 1764 she was married to John Adams, and during the next ten years their four children were born John Quincy, Thomas, Charles, and. Abby. In the early part of the Revolution, when John Adams was much of the time in Philadelphia, Abigail was left with the entire care of the young family, exposed to many dangers. From the top of Penn's Hill, at the foot of which her house stood, she with her seven-year-old son watched the smoke of burning Charlestown. Later, she wrote, "The constant roar of the cannon is so distressing that we cannot eat, drink, or sleep" (Letters, pp. 31-32). She went through the trials of an epidemic and wrote her husband that there was sickness and death in nearly every household. During John Adams's absence in Europe she managed his affairs with great ability, at the same time attending to the farm, keeping up her keen interest in politics, and perpetuating in her letters a vivid picture of the times. After the signing of the treaty of peace, she joined her husband to spend the next eight months in Paris and then three years in London. Her letters during this period show her inimitable gift for brief and vivid description. Those from France are the more amiable; the English letters are thickly sprinkled with rather vindictive comments upon the people—although as she came to know the English better she liked them more, and long afterward could write to her son, "England, you know, is the country of my greatest partiality" (Ibid., p. 368). With her return to America in 1787, and the election of Adams as vice-president, came what was perhaps the happiest period of her life. Her health, though delicate, had not yet given way, her husband was the second man in the nation, and about her was a remarkable society. But during the twelve years of public life in America her letters lose something of their sprightliness, due perhaps to increasing ill health. She was forced more and more to withdraw from the gayeties of the capital, and much of her time was spent at Quincy, as her home was now called. Nevertheless it was reported that she exercised great political influence over her husband. She fully shared the violent social and political feelings of the Federalist party. Gallatin, with a touch of malice, after Adams had become president, sneered at "Her Majesty," and interpreted her conversation as hostess to the effect that she was "Mrs. President not of the United States, but of a faction" (Henry Adams, Life of Albert Gallatin, 1879, p. 185). After 1801 practically all of her remaining life was spent in Quincy. There she and her family passed the years as tranquilly "as that bald old fellow, called Time" would permit. She wrote her son, "You will find your father in his fields, attending to his haymakers, and your mother busily occupied in the domestic concerns of her family." She resumed her "operations of dairy-woman" and she might be seen at five o'clock in the morning, skimming the milk, or going about the house with her pet dog Juno at her heels. The death of her daughter in 1813 cast a shadow over her last years, but as she said of herself, "My disposition and habits are not of the gloomy kind." Her grandson records that her cheerful nature "enlivened the small social circle around her." The key-note of this sunset of her life was her serene religious faith, joined with a never-failing disillusion about herself. "I bear no enmity to any human being; but, alas ! as Mrs. Placid said to her friend, by which of thy good works wouldst thou be willing to be judged?" (Ibid., p. 411). She died of typhoid fever in her seventy-fourth year.

[A proposal late in her life to publish her letters was laughed aside by Mrs. Adams. Her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, published two collections-Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, and Familiar Letters of John Adams and his Wife During the Revolution; each is prefaced by a memoir. A charming portrait of her as a young woman, by Blythe, is engraved in each collection. There is also a sketchy biography, Abigail Adams and Her Times (1917), by Laura Elizabeth Richards.]

M.T.S.


ADAMS, Arianna, African American, member, Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society(BFASS).

(Yellin, Jean Fagan and John C. Van Horne (Eds). The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, 1 p. 58n40)


ADAMS, Charles Francis, 1807-1886, Vice President, Anti-Slavery Free Soil Party, newspaper publisher and editor.  Son of former President John Quincy Adams.  Grandson of President John Adams.  Opposed annexation of Texas, on opposition to expansion of slavery in new territories.  Formed “Texas Group” within Massachusetts Whig Party.  Formed and edited newspaper, Boston Whig, in 1846.

(Adams, 1900; Duberman, 1961; Goodell, 1852, p. 478; Mitchell, Thomas G. Antislavery Politics in Antebellum and Civil War America. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007, pp. 32-33; Pease, William H., & Pease, Jane H. The Antislavery Argument. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965, pp. 445-452; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 51, 298; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, pp. 12-13.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 1, pp. 40-48)

ADAMS, CHARLES FRANCIS (May 27, 1835-March 20, 1915), railroad expert, civic leader, historian, was born at Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Charles Francis Adams [q. v.] and Abigail Brown (Brooks) Adams. His earlier years were passed between Boston and Quincy and by a preference for the latter he became identified with its history as a town. He remembered his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, as an old man, "always writing ... with a perpetual ink stain on the forefinger and thumb of his right hand" (Autobiography, p. 9), and was impressed by his industrious and somewhat solitary life. From private schools the boy went through the Boston Latin School, entered Harvard University in the sophomore year, and graduated in 1856. Critical of his education and career, he looked back with pleasure on his Harvard days as a "period of rapid development and much enjoyment" (Ibid., p. 31). After leaving college he studied law in the office of Richard Henry Dana and Francis E. Parker, leading lawyers of their day; but though he was admitted to practice in 1858, he soon discovered that he had no great liking for the law. As what practice he had occupied but a small part of his time, he was in a position to form relations that developed his as yet unformed aptitudes. In 1848 he had accompanied his father to the Buffalo convention, and during the session of the convention Charles Sumner took him to Niagara Falls. He formed a close and admiring friendship for Sumner and later for Seward, with whom he and his father made a tour in the West in the campaign of 1860, where the young man made some speeches, which were well received. In Dana's office he met the best and took what was offered in the association. He grew up in an atmosphere of political discussion. His hours gave him time to write and he began, as had his father, with newspaper communications on public questions. Visiting his father in Washington in the winter of 1860, he eagerly made use of his opportunity to meet prominent men and gained in assurance as well as knowledge. Seeking a wider audience, he offered to James Russell Lowell, then editor of the Atlantic Monthly, an article on "The Reign of King Cotton," a subject of living interest. Its acceptance gave him encouragement. At this time he kept a diary, as his three forebears had done. Of this a few extracts only have been preserved, enough to cause regret that he destroyed the record in later years.

In February 1861 he again went to Washington, remained for nearly a month, and witnessed the inauguration of Lincoln, still widening his acquaintance with public men, observing, and studying the situation, only to admit in after years that, with almost every one concerned, he had failed to grasp the situation. His father and Seward seemed to him to have a policy "eminently sensible" (Ibid., p. 73), that of holding the border states loyal until the secession movement should recede, the new administration be in power, and the Union reaction encouraged. Adams's vivid account of this interval, with its uncertainties, doubtings, and lack of cooperation, the coming of the President-elect and his loose utterances on the way, and the sentiments of Seward and Sumner, give proof of his gift of description.

Returning to Boston in March, the appointment of his father to the English mission laid upon him the care of the family property, and the outbreak of war made this a heavy responsibility. As all young men were in the militia, he was a member of the 4th Battalion of Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, learned the manual and how to march, and was in garrison in Fort Independence in Boston harbor. The training was elementary yet serviceable. He saw the first regiments leave for the South without a strong wish to follow them; he had five weeks of playing soldier at Fort Independence in April and May 1861; and in the following months he watched his friends take service. By the end of October his course of action was determined and he applied for a captaincy in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry. He received a commission as first lieutenant in December and on the 28th of that month he started for South Carolina with his regiment. To Adams it proved a service of three and a half years, and five years passed before he was again a resident of Boston. Summing up his experience, he was inclined to regard his military life as educationally incomparably more valuable than his years in the university; it would have been even more valuable had he been a staff officer, as he more than once had the opportunity to become. A regimental officer, he records, "no matter how high his grade, sees nothing and knows nothing of what is going on-obedience, self-sacrifice, and patient endurance are the qualities most in demand for him; but as for any intelligent comprehension of the game in progress, that for the regimental officer is quite beyond his ken" (Ibid., pp. 135-36). His family letters during his service have been printed in A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-65 (1920) and have a quality of their own. Vivid in description, natural in expression, frank in opinion on men and events, they are shot through with the vein of introspection natural to an Adams. Sharing in two of the great battles, Antietam and Gettysburg, he gives a picture of camp and garrison service that is unmatched. Conscientious in the performance of duty and learning by experience the essentials of routine, he held an enviable reputation and General Humphreys offered him the highest position on his staff. Adams, now a colonel, declined, feeling obliged to remain with his negro regiment-the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry. In August 1864 his health began to break down and in May 1865 he was a physical wreck. Mustered out in June of that year, he received the brevet of brigadier-general. He married at Newport, November 8, 1865, Mary Hone Ogden, daughter of Edward and Caroline Callender Ogden of New York.

After eleven months in Europe in 1865-66 he returned, restored in health but without occupation. Realizing his unfitness for the law as a source of livelihood, he took to his pen and wrote on railroads, then the important feature in the economic growth of the country. The transcontinental lines were being (milt with government aid, and in Wall Street the greatest speculators were fighting for control of eastern roads. Adams, seeking for the broad principles that should apply to the development of railroad construction and management, had before him the best of examples. From 1866 to 1873 the building of roads had been overdone. They had been recklessly financed and made the object of stock gambling, involving good as well as doubtful undertakings. Adams analyzed the acts and intentions of the men seeking to gain possession of the Erie road, while wrecking it, and in a series of articles fearlessly attacked them and exposed the criminal acts to which they resorted. The papers attracted as great attention by their courage as by their grasp of some railroad problems of general application. Gathered into a volume- Chapters of Erie and Other Essays (1871) they have kept a place in the literature of railroads and stock speculations. He also wrote a series of articles on the Tweed Ring, which were printed under the title, "An Episode in Municipal Government," in the North American Review (October 1874, January and July 1875, October 1875) over the name of C. F. Wingate, who had supplied some of the material and to whom Adams characteristically gave the full credit.

When Massachusetts took the lead in establishing a Board of Railroad Commissioners in 1869 Adams because of his evident fitness was appointed one of the three members. The youngest and most active, he performed the labor, controlled the proceedings, and in 1872 became the chairman. This position he held until 1879, producing a series of reports on railway accidents and policy that drew attention to the methods and utility of the board and led to the creation in other states of boards closely modeled after that of Massachusetts. The success of his administration rested upon a full and impartial public examination of facts and a frank presentation to the public of conditions and conclusions. He won the confidence of both operators and public; and the handling of the engineers' strike in 1877 proved the efficacy of his principles, for no other, strike among railway operatives in Massachusetts occurred for twenty-five years. The subject was treated by him in 1902 in Investigation and Publicity as opposed to Compulsory Arbitration and his methods found favor but not acceptance. He left records of his railroad experience in Railroads: Their Origin and Problems (1878) and Notes on Railroad Accidents (1879). In 1878, through the influence of Carl Schurz, he became chairman of the government directors of the Union Pacific Railroad, visited the Pacific coast, and prepared the report. Later, in 1884, he became president of that road, a position forced upon him, only to be ousted from it after six years by Jay Gould and his following, who were none too friendly to Adams because of his exposure of the Erie. Adams foresaw the future importance of the road and from the verge of bankruptcy he raised it to a solvent and efficient system. The later financial situation and legislative measures hindered the completion of his administrative reforms. Through no fault of his own he was unable to meet the maneuvers of the speculative railroad wrecker. Still another recognition of his abilities in railroad affairs was his appointment to the Board of Arbitration of the Trunk Line Railroads, but he held the position for only three years, convinced that the time was not ready for such a board.

Living in Quincy, Massachusetts, he and his brother John Quincy Adams served as moderators in town meetings for twenty years and directed the proceedings of the town government at a time when the place by its size was outgrowing that form of administration. Charles Adams had the more suggestive mind and the greater capacity for labor, but the two brothers left their impress in permanent form. Adams was a member of the school committee, a trustee of the public library, a park commissioner, and a commissioner of the sinking fund. In each of these positions he accomplished results that in retrospect pleased him. He found the school system antiquated and the methods of teaching so imperfect as to be of little value. The average graduate of the grammar school in 1870 could not read with ease, nor could he write an ordinary letter in good English in a legible hand. Uncertain what reforms were necessary, Adams proposed the employment of a trained superintendent and in 1875 gained his end. Out of this came the "Quincy System," which was widely studied and imitated throughout the land and for which Adams was almost wholly responsible. It substituted new methods for the old mechanical ones. In place of memorizing rules, children were to learn to read, write, and cipher as they learned to walk and talk, naturally and by practice. In reading and writing, a geography or history took the place of speller, grammar, and copybook. By 1880 the success of the system seemed assured and Adams's account of the reform-The New Departure in the Common Schools of Quincy passed through six editions.

As the town possessed no public library, provision for one was made in 1871, the cost to be met by town and private subscription. Opened in that year, it proved a great success, and nine years later, through Adams's agency, the town gained the Thomas Crane library building, dedicated in 1882, Adams making the address. In 1874 the town had a debt of $112,000; after nine years of the Adams brothers' management this was reduced to $19,000 and disappeared shortly after. Owing to Adams's plans the town received Wollaston Park, historic as the site of Thomas Morton's Merry Mount. The union of the suggestive and the practical in Adams which had benefited the town by application trained him for wider fields, and in 1892 he was appointed to the state commission to devise a system of parks and public reservations in the vicinity of Boston. The work of this commission has surrounded the city with beautiful connecting roadways, saved Blue Hill from the quarrymen, and preserved the Middlesex Fells as public parks. He also served as chairman of a state commission to report upon the relations of street railways and municipalities, which caused him to study the subject, in European cities and produced useful general legislation based upon his recommendations, which again was copied in other cities.

For twenty-four years from 1882 he was a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University and was prominent in many lines of its development. The nomination of visiting committees fell to him and he himself gave special attention to the English department. His elaborate reports on conditions produced some changes, but he was never satisfied that he had fully understood the situation and the remedy. To him the Harvard system was "radically wrong," and he expressed his views in two addresses which called out much controversy. His ideas on the education to be given by college and university were developed in A College Fetich (1883), a protest against the compulsory study of dead languages; and, in 1906, near the term of his long service as overseer, in Some Modern College Tendencies, in which he pointed out the complete separation of teacher and individual student and the absence of direction in studies and of the personal influence of instructors. A remedy he found in a group of colleges, each independent and each having its specialty, where the master should know every student. The university should supplement college training. Both papers were constructive in their suggestion and served their purpose of causing reexamination of accepted methods.

Meanwhile another field had opened to him, by accident as he thought, when the citizens of Weymouth asked him to deliver an address on the 250th anniversary of its settlement. Without experience in historical investigation he accepted and in so doing entered upon forty years of historical writing, essentially his "aptitude," from which he derived his greatest pleasure and most lasting reputation. The address was given in 1874, and in the following year he was elected a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, became a vice-president of it in 1890 and president in 1895, a position he held until his death. In that period he contributed many papers, broadened the scope of the society, and added greatly to its reputation. In 1883 he printed some six copies of Episodes in New England History, a study of the history of Quincy, which in 1892 appeared in an extended form in two volumes as Three Episodes of Massachusetts History and remains a model local history in its form and treatment. In the same year (1883) appeared his edition of Morton's New English Canaan and in 1894 his Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, 1636-38, elaborately annotated. He ventured into a somewhat new field in a biography of Richard Henry Dana (1890), and in a life of his father, Charles Francis Adams (1900), both of which have taken a high place in American biography.

Wishing to write a full biography of his father, Adams for a number of years gave close study to the political history of Massachusetts and the War of Secession and its results. Not a little of his material was used in occasional papers and addresses, the more important of which were side studies of his principal theme. In a group of papers he expressed his conception of secession and particularly the conduct of General Lee: "Shall Cromwell have a Statue?" (1902), a plea for a statue to Lee in Washington; Lee at Appomattox, etc. (1902); Constitutional Ethics of Secession(1903); and Lee's Centennial (1907), a series that marked the waning of the animosities which had survived the war. Beginning with 1899 and for fifteen years thereafter he prepared a number of papers on the diplomatic history of the War of Secession, the larger part of which appeared in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Drawing largely from the family papers, he was able to give valuable material hitherto unknown, and he enriched it by an interpretation which, always original and individual, often ran counter to accepted conclusions. In 1899 he printed "The Laird Rams," in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Volume XXXIII; in 1901 he made an address in New York on Before and after the Treaty of Washington (published in 1902), and followed it by a number of essays on the British Declaration of Neutrality, the Trent Affair, the Rams, and British and French mediation. Becoming convinced that the story could not be fully told without having the contemporary English and French diplomatic papers, he went twice to England in 1913, the first visit being due to his appointment to deliver three lectures on American history at Oxford University. These lectures were printed in 1913 as Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity. He gained access to important collections in England, obtained much material, and returned to complete the life of his father. The new material led to a revision of his earlier studies in diploma tic history, but was never fully utilized.

All this does not measure the extent of his activities. He engaged in large business enterprises and with a measure of success. In the town of Lincoln, Massachusetts, whither he removed from Quincy, he showed the same interest in town government as he had in Quincy. Throughout his whole career he was keenly alive to the course of political events, took an active share in reform and independent movements, and was an eager participant in the discussions of public policy, both state and national. He began as a Republican, but later became independent of party and remained so to the end. Except for the positions held in Quincy he never was a candidate for nor held an elective office. In 1883 he was offered a nomination for the governorship, but declined it on the ground that a third candidate would divide the party and make the defeat of General Butler less certain. In dealing with public questions, he acted and wrote not as a partisan but in a large way-as had his ancestors before him. He spoke and published on ballot and electoral reform, proportional representation, free trade (he was in favor of a tariff for revenue), civil service reform, currency and finance, taxation, the abuses of the pension system, Panama tolls, the Philippines, and imperialism. To the end he remained active, individual, and suggestive. He died in Washington, March 20, 1915.

"Always independent, sometimes recalcitrant ... by nature inclined to believe that long-established practices of governments, institutions of education, and financial or industrial organizations were likely to be wrong, or at least capable of great improvement," was President Eliot's summary of his life-work (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, XL VIII, 387). "Inheriting a great tradition of public service, he felt the obligations which it imposed, and to that patriotism which was born in the descendant of men who had done so much to found and preserve this nation was added the consciousness of what was due from the members of his family," added Moorfield Storey (Ibid., XL VIII, 387). In his writing, so much of which was for special occasions, he has left a record of his own acts, opinions, and experience, expressed with detachment and independence. Possessing an inquiring and historical mind, with pronounced ability to investigate and present social and historical problems, progressive in matters of political or administrative improvement, yet conservative in action, he showed that he was near to John Quincy Adams in qualities of mind but wanting in the aggressiveness that distinguished the elder statesman. Passing a life largely in controversy, his absolute honesty of purpose and conviction was never questioned.

In addition to what has been mentioned Adams printed a number of historical addresses, of which the following are the more important: Double Anniversary, '76 and '63 at Quincy (1869); An Oration before the Authorities of Boston, July 4, 1872 (1872); History of Braintree (1891); The Centennial Milestone, Quincy (1892); Massachusetts: its Historians and its History (1893); Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters (1900); and "'Tis Sixty Years Since" (1913). On politics he published Individuality in Politics (1880) and Emancipation of the Voter (1894). In 1911 he gathered into a volume a number of his papers Studies: Military and Diplomatic, 1775-1865- and before 1912 he prepared an autobiography, published the year after his death.

[The chief sources are Charles Francis Adams 1835- 1915: An Autobiography, with a "Memorial Address" by Henry Cabot Lodge (1916) and tributes in Massachusetts Historical Society Proc., XLVIII.]

W.C.F.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I. pp. 12-13:

ADAMS, Charles Francis, diplomatist, son of John Quincy Adams, born in Boston, 18 Aug., 1807; died there, 21 Nov., 1886. When two years old he was taken by his father to St. Petersburg, where he learned German, French, and Russian. Early in 1815 he travelled all the way from St. Petersburg to Paris with his mother in a private carriage, a difficult journey at that time, and not unattended with danger. His father was soon afterward appointed minister to England, and the little boy was placed at an English boarding-school. The feelings between British and Americans was then more hostile than ever before or since, and young Adams was frequently called upon to defend with his fists the good name of his country. When he returned after two years to America, his father placed him in the Boston Latin school, and he was graduated at Harvard college in 1825, shortly after his father's inauguration as president of the United States. He spent two years in Washington, and then returned to Boston, where he studied law in the office of Daniel Webster, and was admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1828. The next year he married the youngest daughter of Peter Chardon Brooks, whose elder daughters were married to Edward Everett and Rev. Nathaniel Frothingham. From 1831 to 1836 Mr. Adams served in the Massachusetts legislature. He was a member of the whig party, but, like all the rest of his vigorous and free-thinking family, he was extremely independent in politics and inclined to strike out into new paths in advance of the public sentiment. After 1836 he came to differ more and more widely with the leaders of the whig party with whom he had hitherto acted. In 1848 the newly organized free-soil party, consisting largely of democrats, held its convention at Buffalo and nominated Martin Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams for vice-president. There was no hope of electing these candidates, but this little party grew, six years later, into the great republican party. In 1858 he was elected to congress by the republicans of the 3d district of Massachusetts, and in 1860 he was reelected. In the spring of 1861 President Lincoln appointed him minister to England, a place which both his father and his grandfather had filled before him. Mr. Adams had now to fight with tongue and pen for his country as in school-boy days he had fought with fists. It was an exceedingly difficult time for an American minister in England. Though there was much sympathy for the U. S. government on the part of the workmen in the manufacturing districts and of many of the liberal constituencies, especially in Scotland, on the other hand the feeling of the governing classes and of polite society in London was either actively hostile to us or coldly indifferent. Even those students of history and politics who were most friendly to us failed utterly to comprehend the true character of the sublime struggle in which we were engaged— as may be seen in reading the introduction to Mr. E. A. Freeman's elaborate "History of Federal Government, from the Formation of the Achaean League to the Disruption of the United States" (London, 1862). Difficult and embarrassing questions arose in connection with the capture of the confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell, the negligence of Lord Palmerston's government in allowing the "Alabama" and other confederate cruisers to sail from British ports to prey upon American commerce, and the ever manifest desire of Napoleon III. to persuade Great Britain to join him in an acknowledgment of the independence of the confederacy. The duties of this difficult diplomatic mission were discharged by Mr. Adams with such consummate ability as to win universal admiration. No more than his father or grandfather did he belong to the school of suave and crafty, intriguing diplomats. He pursued his ends with dogged determination and little or no attempt at concealment, while his demeanor was haughty and often defiant. His unflinching firmness bore clown all opposition, and his perfect self-control made it difficult for an antagonist to gain any advantage over him. His career in England from 1861 to 1868 must be cited among the foremost triumphs of American diplomacy. In 1872 it was attempted to nominate him for the presidency of the United States, as the candidate of the liberal republicans, but Horace Greeley secured the nomination. He was elected in 1869 a member of the board of overseers of Harvard college, and was for several years president of the board. He has edited the works and memoirs of his father and grandfather, in 22 octavo volumes, and published many of his own addresses and orations. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I. pp. 12-13. 


ADAMS, E. M., New York, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1836-37


ADAMS, George, Boston, Massachusetts, abolitionist, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Counsellor, 1841-42


ADAMS, John, 1735-1826, statesman, founding father, second President of the United States, opponent of slavery, father of John Quincy Adams. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, pp. 17-23; Encyclopaedia Americana, 1829, Volume I, pp. 44-52; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 1, pp. 72-82)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

ADAMS, John, second-president of the United States, born in that part of the town of Braintree, Massachusetts, which has since been set off as the town of Quincy, 31 Oct., 1785; died there, 4 July, 1826. His great-grandfather, Henry Adams, received a grant of about 40 acres of land in Braintree in 1636, and soon afterward emigrated from Devonshire, England, with his eight sons. John Adams, the subject of this sketch, was the eldest son of John Adams and Susanna Boylston, daughter of Peter Boylston, of Brookline. His father, one of the selectmen of Braintree and a deacon of the church, was a thrifty farmer, and at his death in 1760 his estate was appraised at £1,330 9s. 6d., which in those days might have been regarded as a moderate competence. It was the custom of the family to send the eldest son to college, and accordingly John was graduated at Harvard in 1755. Previous to 1773 the graduates of Harvard were arranged in lists, not alphabetically or in order of merit, but according to the social standing of their parents. In a class of twenty-four members John thus stood fourteenth. One of his classmates was John Wentworth, afterward royal governor of New Hampshire, and then of Nova Scotia. After taking his degree and while waiting to make his choice of a profession, Adams took charge of the grammar school at Worcester. It was the year of Braddock's defeat, when the smouldering fires of a century of rivalry between France and England broke out in a blaze of war which was forever to settle the question of the primacy of the English race in the modern world. Adams took an intense interest in the struggle, and predicted that if we could only drive out “these turbulent Gallics,” our numbers would in another century exceed those of the British, and all Europe would be unable to subdue us. In sending him to college his family seem to have hoped that he would become a clergyman; but he soon found himself too much of a free thinker to feel at home in the pulpit of that day. When accused of Arminianism, he cheerfully admitted the charge. Later in life he was sometimes called a Unitarian, but of dogmatic Christianity he seems to have had as little as Franklin or Jefferson. “Where do we find,” he asks, “a precept in the gospel requiring ecclesiastical synods, convocations, councils, decrees, creeds, confessions, oaths, subscriptions, and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these days?” In this mood he turned from the ministry and began the study of law at Worcester. There was then a strong prejudice against lawyers in New England, but the profession throve lustily nevertheless, so litigious were the people. In 1758 Adams began the practice of his profession in Suffolk county, having his residence in Braintree. In 1764 he was married to Abigail Smith, of Weymouth, a lady of social position higher than his own and endowed with most rare and admirable qualities of head and heart. In this same year the agitation over the proposed stamp act was begun, and on the burning questions raised by this ill-considered measure Adams had already taken sides. When James Otis in 1761 delivered his memorable argument against writs of assistance, John Adams was present in the court-room, and the fiery eloquence of Otis wrought a wonderful effect upon him. As his son afterward said, “it was like the oath of Hamilcar administered to Hannibal.” In his old age John Adams wrote, with reference to this scene, “Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.” When the stamp act was passed, in 1765, Adams took a prominent part in a town-meeting at Braintree where he presented resolutions which were adopted word for word by more than forty towns in Massachusetts. The people refused to make use of stamps, and the business of the inferior courts was carried on without them, judges and lawyers agreeing to connive at the absence of the stamps. In the supreme court, however, where Thomas Hutchinson was chief justice, the judges refused to transact any business without stamps. This threatened serious interruption to business, and the town of Boston addressed a memorial to the governor and council, praying that the supreme court might overlook the absence of stamps. John Adams was unexpectedly chosen, along with Jeremiah Gridley and James Otis, as counsel for the town, to argue the case in favor of the memorial. Adams delivered the opening argument, and took the decisive ground that the stamp act was ipso facto null and void, since it was a measure of taxation which the people of the colony had taken no share in passing. No such measure, he declared, could be held as binding in America, and parliament had no right to tax the colonies. The governor and council refused to act in the matter, put presently the repeal of the stamp act put an end to the disturbance for a while. About this time Mr. Adams began writing articles for the Boston “Gazette.” Four of these articles, dealing with the constitutional rights of the people of New England, were afterward republished under the somewhat curious title of “An Essay on the Canon and Feudal Law.” After ten years of practice, Mr. Adams's business had become quite extensive, and in 1768 he moved into Boston. The attorney-general of Massachusetts, Jonathan Sewall, now offered him the lucrative office of advocate-general in the court of admiralty. This was intended to operate as an indirect bribe by putting Mr. Adams into a position in which he could not feel free to oppose the policy of the crown; such insidious methods were systematically pursued by Gov. Bernard, and after him by Hutchinson. But Mr. Adams was too wary to swallow the bait, and he stubbornly refused the pressing offer.  In 1770 came the first in the series of great acts that made Mr. Adams's career illustrious. In the midst of the terrible excitement aroused by the “Boston Massacre” he served as counsel for Captain Preston and his seven soldiers when they were tried for murder. His friend and kinsman, Josiah Quincy, assisted him in this invidious task. The trial was judiciously postponed for seven months until the popular fury had abated. Preston and five soldiers were acquitted; the other two soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter, and were barbarously branded on the hand with a hot iron. The verdict seems to have been strictly just according to the evidence presented. For his services to his eight clients Mr. Adams received a fee of nineteen guineas, but never got so much as a word of thanks from the churlish Preston. An ordinary American politician would have shrunk from the task of defending these men, for fear of losing favor with the people. The course pursued by Mr. Adams showed great moral courage; and the people of Boston proved themselves able to appreciate true manliness by electing him as representative to the legislature. This was in June, 1770, after he had undertaken the case of the soldiers, but before the trial. Mr. Adams now speedily became the principal legal adviser of the patriot party, and among its foremost leaders was only less conspicuous than Samuel Adams, Hancock, and Warren. In all matters of legal controversy between these leaders and Gov. Hutchinson his advice proved invaluable. During the next two years there was something of a lull in the political excitement; Mr. Adams resigned his place in the legislature and moved his residence to Braintree, still keeping his office in Boston. In the summer of 1772 the British government ventured upon an act that went further than anything which had yet occurred toward driving the colonies into rebellion. It was ordered that all the Massachusetts judges holding their places during the king's pleasure should henceforth have their salaries paid by the crown and not by the colony. This act, which aimed directly at the independence of the judiciary, aroused intense indignation, not only in Massachusetts, but in the other colonies, which felt their liberties threatened by such a measure. It called forth from Mr. Adams a series of powerful articles, which have been republished in the 3d volume of his collected works. About this time he was chosen a member of the council, but the choice was negatived by Gov. Hutchinson. The five acts of parliament in April, 1774, including the regulating act and the Boston port bill, led to the calling of the first continental congress, to which Mr. Adams was chosen as one of the five delegates from Massachusetts. The resolutions passed by this congress on the subject of colonial rights were drafted by him, and his diary and letters contain a vivid account of some of the proceedings. On his return to Braintree he was chosen a member of the revolutionary provincial congress of Massachusetts, then assembled at Concord. This revolutionary body had already seized the revenues of the colony, appointed a committee of safety, and begun to organize an army and collect arms and ammunition. During the following winter the views of the loyalist party were set forth with great ability and eloquence in a series of newspaper articles by Daniel Leonard, under the signature of “Massachusettensis.” He was answered most effectively by Mr. Adams, whose articles, signed “Novanglus,” appeared weekly in the Boston “Gazette” until the battle of Lexington. The last of these articles, which was actually in type in that wild week, was not published. The series, which has been reprinted in the 4th volume of Mr. Adams's works, contains a valuable review of the policy of Bernard and Hutchinson, and a powerful statement of the rights of the colonies.  In the second continental congress, which assembled on May 10, Mr. Adams played a very important part. Of all the delegates present he was probably the only one, except his cousin, Samuel Adams, who was convinced that matters had gone too far for any reconciliation with the mother country, and that there was no use in sending any more petitions to the king. As there was a strong prejudice against Massachusetts on the part of the middle and southern colonies, it was desirable that her delegates should avoid all appearance of undue haste in precipitating an armed conflict. Nevertheless, the circumstances under which an army of 16,000 New England men had been gathered to besiege the British in Boston were such as to make it seem advisable for the congress to adopt it as a continental army; and here John Adams did the second notable deed of his career. He proposed Washington for the chief command of this army, and thus, by putting Virginia in the foreground, succeeded in committing that great colony to a course of action calculated to end in independence. This move not only put the army in charge of the only commander capable of winning independence for the American people in the field, but its political importance was great and obvious. Afterward in some dark moments of the revolutionary war, Mr. Adams seems almost to have regretted his part in this selection of a commander. He understood little or nothing of military affairs, and was incapable of appreciating Washington's transcendent ability. The results of the war, however, justified in every respect his action in the second continental congress.  During the summer recess taken by congress Mr. Adams sat as a member of the Massachusetts council, which declared the office of governor vacant and assumed executive authority. Under the new provisional government of Massachusetts, Mr. Adams was made chief justice, but never took his seat, as continental affairs more pressingly demanded his attention. He was always loquacious, often too ready to express his opinions, whether with tongue or pen, and this trait got him more than once into trouble, especially as he was inclined to be sharp and censorious. For John Dickinson, the leader of the moderate and temporizing party in congress, who had just prevailed upon that body to send another petition to the king, he seems to have entertained at this time no very high regard, and he gave vent to some contemptuous expressions in a confidential letter, which was captured by the British and published. This led to a quarrel with Dickinson, and made Mr. Adams very unpopular in Philadelphia. When congress reassembled in the autumn, Mr. Adams, as member of a committee for fitting out cruisers, drew up a body of regulations, which came to form the basis of the American naval code. The royal governor, Sir John Wentworth, fled from New Hampshire about this time, and the people sought the advice of congress as to the form of government which it should seem most advisable to adopt. Similar applications presently came from South Carolina and Virginia. Mr. Adams prevailed upon congress to recommend to these colonies to form for themselves new governments based entirely upon popular suffrage; and about the same time he published a pamphlet entitled “Thoughts on Government, Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies.” By the spring of 1776 the popular feeling had become so strongly inclined toward independence that, on the 15th of May, Mr. Adams was able to carry through congress a resolution that all the colonies should be invited to form independent governments. In the preamble to this resolution it was declared that the American people could no longer conscientiously take oath to support any government deriving its authority from the crown; all such governments must now be suppressed, since the king had withdrawn his protection from the inhabitants of the united colonies. Like the famous preamble to Townshend's act of 1767, this Adams preamble contained within itself the gist of the whole matter. To adopt it was to cross the Rubicon, and it gave rise to a hot debate in congress. Against the opposition of most of the delegates from the middle states the resolution was finally carried; “and now,” exclaimed Mr. Adams, “the Gordian knot is cut.” Events came quickly to maturity. On the 7th of June the declaration of independence was moved by Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, and seconded by John Adams. The motion was allowed to lie on the table for three weeks, in order to hear from the colonies of Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and New York, which had not yet declared their position with regard to independence. Meanwhile three committees were appointed, one on a declaration of independence, a second on confederation, and a third on foreign relations; and Mr. Adams was a member of the first and third of these committees. On the 1st of July Mr. Lee's motion was taken up by congress sitting as a committee of the whole; and as Mr. Lee was absent, the task of defending it devolved upon Mr. Adams, who, as usual, was opposed by Dickinson. Adams's speech on that occasion was probably the finest he ever delivered. Jefferson called him “the colossus of that debate”; and indeed his labors in bringing about the declaration of independence must be considered as the third signal event of his career.  On the 12th of June congress established a board of war and ordnance, with Mr. Adams for its chairman, and he discharged the arduous duties of this office until after the surrender of Burgoyne. After the battle of Long Island, Lord Howe sent the captured General Sullivan to Philadelphia, soliciting a conference with some of the members of the congress. Adams opposed the conference, and with characteristic petulance alluded to the unfortunate Sullivan as a decoy duck who had much better have been shot in the battle than sent on such a business. Congress, however, consented to the conference, and Adams was chosen as a commissioner, along with Franklin and Rutledge. Toward the end of the year 1777 Mr. Adams was appointed to supersede Silas Deane as commissioner to France. He sailed 12 February, 1778, in the frigate “Boston,” and after a stormy passage, in which he ran no little risk of capture by British cruisers, he landed at Bordeaux, and reached Paris on the 8th of April. Long before his arrival the alliance with France had been consummated. He found a wretched state of things in Paris, our three commissioners there at loggerheads, one of them dabbling in the British funds and making a fortune by privateering, while the public accounts were kept in the laxest manner. All sorts of agents were drawing bills upon the United States, and commanders of war vessels were setting up their claims for expenses and supplies that had never been ordered. Mr. Adams, whose habits of business were extremely strict and methodical, was shocked at this confusion, and he took hold of the matter with such vigor as to put an end to it. He also recommended that the representation of the United States at the French court should be intrusted to a single minister instead of three commissioners. As a result of this advice, Franklin was retained at Paris, Arthur Lee was sent to Madrid, and Adams, being left without any instructions, returned to America, reaching Boston 2 Aug., 1779. He came home with a curious theory of the decadence of Great Britain, which he had learned in France, and which serves well to illustrate the mood in which France had undertaken to assist the United States. England, he said, “loses every day her consideration, and runs toward her ruin. Her riches, in which her power consisted, she has lost with us and never can regain. She resembles the melancholy spectacle of a great, wide-spreading tree that has been girdled at the root.” Such absurd notions were quite commonly entertained at that time on the continent of Europe, and such calamities were seriously dreaded by many Englishman in the event of the success of the Americans.   Immediately on reaching home Mr. Adams chosen delegate from Braintree to the convention for framing a new constitution for Massachusetts; but before the work of the convention was finished he was appointed commissioner to treat for peace with Great Britain, and sailed for France in the same French frigate in which he had come home. But Lord North's government was not ready to make peace, and, moreover, Count Vergennes contrived to prevent Adams from making any official communication to Great Britain of the extent of his powers. During Adams's stay in Paris a mutual dislike and distrust grew up between himself and Vergennes. The latter feared that if negotiations were to begin between the British government and the United States, they might lead to a reconciliation and reunion of the two branches of the English race, and thus ward off that decadence of England for which France was so eagerly  hoping. On the other hand, Adams quite correctly believed that it was the intention of Vergennes to  sacrifice the interests of the Americans, especially as concerned with the Newfoundland fisheries and  the territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, in favor of Spain, with which country France was then in close alliance. Americans must always owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Adams for the clear-sightedness with which he thus read the designs of Vergennes and estimated at its true value the purely selfish intervention of France in behalf of the United States. This clearness of insight was soon to bear good fruit in the management of the treaty of 1783. For the present, Adams found himself uncomfortable in Paris, as his too ready tongue wrought unpleasantness both with Vergennes and with Franklin, who was too much under the French minister's influence. On his first arrival in Paris, society there had been greatly excited about him, as it was supposed that he was “the famous Mr. Adams” who had ordered the British troops out of Boston in March, 1770, and had thrown down the glove of defiance to George III. on the great day of the Boston tea-party. When he explained that he was only a cousin of that grand and picturesque personage he found that fashionable society thenceforth took less interest in him.  In the summer of 1780 Mr. Adams was charge by congress with the business of negotiating Dutch loan. In order to give the good people of Holland some correct ideas as to American affairs he published a number of articles in the Leyden “Gazette” and in a magazine entitled “La politique hollandaise”; also “Twenty-six Letters upon Interesting Subjects respecting the Revolution in America,” now reprinted in the 7th volume of his works. Soon after Adams's arrival in Holland, England declared war against the Dutch, ostensibly because of a proposed treaty of commerce with the United States in which the burgomaster of Amsterdam was implicated with Henry Laurens, but really because Holland had joined the league headed by the empress Catharine of Russia, designed to protect the commerce of neutral nations and known as the armed neutrality. Laurens had been sent out by congress as minister to Holland but, as he had been captured by a British cruise and taken to the tower of London, Mr. Adams was appointed minister in his place. His first duty was to sign, as representing the United States, the articles of the armed neutrality. Before he had got any further, indeed before he had been recognized as minister by the Dutch government, he was called back to Paris, in July, 1781, in order to be ready to enter upon negotiations for peace with the British government. Russia and Austria had volunteered their services as mediators between George III. and the Americans; but Lord North's government rejected the offer, so that Mr. Adams had his journey for nothing, and presently went back to Holland. His first and most arduous task was to persuade the Dutch government to recognize him as minister from the independent United States. In this he was covertly opposed by Vergennes, who wished the Americans to feel exclusively dependent upon France, and to have no other friendships or alliances. From first to last the aid extended by France to the Americans in the revolutionary war was purely selfish. That despotic government wished no good to a people struggling to preserve the immemorial principles of English liberty, and the policy of Vergennes was to extend just enough aid to us to enable us to prolong the war, so that colonies and mother country might alike be weakened. When he pretended to be the disinterested friend of the Americans, he professed to be under the influence of sentiments that he did not really feel; and he thus succeeded in winning from congress a confidence to which he was in no wise entitled. But he could not hood-wink John Adams, who wrote home that the duke de la Vauguyon, the French ambassador at the Hague, was doing everything in his power to obstruct the progress of the negotiations; and in this, Adams correctly inferred, he was acting under secret instructions from Vergennes. As a diplomatist Adams was in a certain sense Napoleonic; he introduced new and strange methods of warfare, which disconcerted the perfidious intriguers of the old school, of which Vergennes and Talleyrand were typical examples. Instead of beating about the bush and seeking to foil trickery by trickery (a business in which the wily Frenchman would doubtless have proved more than his match), he went straight to the duke de la Vauguyon and bluntly told him that he saw plainly what he was up to, and that it was of no use, since “no advice of his or of the count de Vergennes, nor even a requisition from the king, should restrain me.” The duke saw that Adams meant exactly what he said, and, finding that it was useless to oppose the negotiations, “fell in with me, in order to give the air of French influence” to them.  Events worked steadily and rapidly in Adams's favor. The plunder of St. Eustatius early in 1781 bad raised the wrath of the Dutch against Great Britain to fever heat. In November came tidings of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis. By this time Adams had published so many articles as to have given the Dutch some idea as to what sort of people the Americans were. He had some months before presented a petition to the states general, asking them to recognize him as minister from independent nation. With his wonted boldness he now demanded a plain and unambiguous answer to this petition, and followed up the demand by visiting the representatives of the several cities in person and arguing his case. As the reward of this persistent energy, Mr. Adams had the pleasure of seeing the independence of the United States formally recognized by Holland on the 19th of April, 1782. This success was vigorously followed up. A Dutch loan of $2,000,000 was soon negotiated, and on the 7th of October a treaty of amity and commerce, the second which was ratified with the United States as an independent nation, was signed at the Hague. This work in Holland was the fourth signal event in John Adams's career, and, in view of the many obstacles overcome, he was himself in the habit of referring to it as the greatest triumph of his life. “One thing, thank God! is certain,” he wrote; “I have planted the American standard at the Hague. There let it wave and fly in triumph over Sir Joseph Yorke and British pride. I shall look down upon the flag-staff with pleasure from the other world.”   Mr. Adams had hardly time to finish this work when his presence was required in Paris. Negotiations for peace with Great Britain had begun some time before in conversations between Franklin and Richard Oswald, a gentleman whom Lord Shelburne had sent to Paris for the purpose. One British ministry had already been wrecked through these negotiations, and affairs had dragged along slowly amid endless difficulties. The situation was one of the most complicated in the history of diplomacy. France was in alliance at once with Spain and with the United States, and her treaty obligations to the one were in some respects inconsistent with her treaty obligations to the other. The feeling of Spain toward the United States was intensely hostile, and the French government was much more in sympathy with the former than with the latter. On the other hand, the new British government was not ill-disposed toward the Americans, and was extremely ready to make liberal concessions to them for the sake of thwarting the schemes of France. In the background stood George III., surly and irreconcilable, hoping that the negotiations would fail; and amid these difficulties they doubtless would have failed had not all the parties by this time had a surfeit of bloodshed. The designs of the French government were first suspected by John Jay, soon after his arrival in Paris.  He found that Vergennes was sending a secret emissary to Lord Shelburne under an assumed name; he ascertained that the right of the United States to the Mississippi valley was to be denied; and he got hold of a despatch from Marbois, the French secretary of legation at Philadelphia, to Vergennes, opposing the American claim to the Newfoundland fisheries. As soon as Jay learned these facts he proceeded, without the knowledge of Franklin, to take steps toward a separate negotiation between Great Britain and the United States. When Adams arrived in Paris, Oct. 26, he coincided with Jay's views, and the two together overruled Franklin. Mr. Adams's behavior at this time was quite characteristic. It is said that he left Vergennes to learn of his arrival through the newspapers. It was certainly some time before he called upon him, and he took occasion, besides, to express his opinions about republics and monarchies in terms that courtly Frenchman thought very rude. Adams agreed with Jay that Vergennes should be kept as far as possible in the dark until everything was completed, and so the negotiation with Great Britain went on separately. The annals of modern diplomacy have afforded few stranger spectacles. With the indispensable aid of France we had just got the better of England in fight, and now we proceeded amicably to divide territory and commercial privileges with the enemy, and to make arrangements in which our not too friendly ally was virtually ignored. In this way the United States secured the Mississippi valley, and a share in the Newfoundland fisheries, not as a privilege but as a right, the latter result being mainly due to the persistence of Mr. Adams. The point upon which the British commissioners most strongly insisted was the compensation of the American loyalists for the hardships they had suffered during the war; but this the American commissioners resolutely refused. The most they could be prevailed upon to allow was the insertion in the treaty of a clause to the effect that congress should recommend to the several state governments to reconsider their laws against the tories and to give these unfortunate persons a chance to recover their property. In the treaty, as finally arranged, all the disputed points were settled in favor of the Americans; and, the United States being thus virtually detached from the alliance, the British government was enabled to turn a deaf ear to the demands of France and Spain for the surrender of Gibraltar. Vergennes was outgeneralled at every turn. On the part of the Americans the treaty of 1783 deserves to be ranked as one of the most brilliant triumphs of modern diplomacy. Its success was about equally due to Adams and to Jay, whose courage in the affair was equal to their skill, for they took it upon themselves to disregard the explicit instructions of congress. Ever since March, 1781, Vergennes had been intriguing with congress through his minister at Philadelphia, the chevalier de la Luzerne. First he had tried to get Mr. Adams recalled to America. Failing in this, he had played his part with such dexterous persistence as to prevail upon congress to send most pusillanimous instructions to its peace commissioners. They were instructed to undertake nothing whatever in the negotiations without the knowledge and concurrence of “the ministers of our generous ally, the king of France,” that is to say, of the count de Vergennes; and they were to govern themselves entirely by his advice and opinion. Franklin would have followed these instructions; Adams and Jay deliberately disobeyed them, and earned the gratitude of their countrymen for all coming time. For Adams's share in this grand achievement it must certainly be cited as the fifth signal event in his career.  By this time he had become excessively home sick, and as soon as the treaty was arranged he asked leave to resign his commissions and return to America. He declared he would rather be “carting street-dust and marsh-mud” than waiting where he was. But business would not let him go. In September, 1783, he was commissioned, along with Franklin and Jay, to negotiate a commercial treaty with Great Britain. A sudden and violent fever prostrated him for several weeks, after which he visited London and Bath. Before he had fully recovered his health he learned that his presence was required in Holland. In those days, when we lived under the articles of confederation, and congress found it impossible to raise money enough to meet its current expenses, it was by no means unusual for the superintendent of finance to draw upon our foreign ministers and then sell the drafts for cash. This was done again and again, when there was not the smallest ground for supposing that the minister upon whom the draft was made would have any funds wherewith to meet it. It was part of his duty as envoy to go and beg the money. Early in the winter Mr. Adams learned that drafts upon him had been presented to his bankers in Amsterdam to the amount of more than a million florins. Less than half a million florins were on hand to meet these demands, and, unless something were done at once, the greater part of this paper would go back to America protested. Mr. Adams lost not a moment in starting for Holland, but he was delayed by a succession of terrible storms on the German ocean, and it was only after fifty-four days of difficulty and danger that he reached Amsterdam. The bankers had contrived to keep the drafts from going to protest, but news of the bickerings between the thirteen states had reached Holland. It was believed that the new nation was going to pieces, and the regency of Amsterdam had no money to lend it. The promise of the American government was not regarded as valid security for a sum equivalent to about $300,000. Adams was obliged to apply to professional usurers, from whom, after more humiliating perplexity, he succeeded in obtaining a loan at exorbitant interest. In the meantime he had been appointed commissioner, along with Franklin and Jefferson, for the general purpose of negotiating commercial treaties with foreign powers. As his return to America was thus indefinitely postponed, he sent for his wife, with their only daughter and youngest son, to come and join him in France, where the two elder sons were already with him. In the summer of 1784 the family was thus re-united, and began house-keeping at Auteuil, near Paris. A treaty was successfully negotiated with Prussia, but, before it was ready to be signed, Mr. Adams was appointed minister to the court of St. James, and arrived in London in May, 1785. He was at first politely received by George III., upon whom his bluff and fearless dignity of manner made a considerable impression. His stay in England was, however, far from pleasant. The king came to treat him with coldness, sometimes with rudeness, and the royal example was followed by fashionable society. The American government was losing credit at home and abroad. It was unable to fulfil its treaty engagements as to the payment of private debts due to British creditors, and as to the protection of the loyalists. The British government, in retaliation, refused to surrender the western posts of Ogdensburg, Oswego, Niagara, Erie, Sandusky, Detroit, and Mackinaw, which by the treaty were to be promptly given up to the United States. Still more, it refused to make any treaty of commerce with the United States, and neglected to send any minister to represent Great Britain in this country. It was generally supposed in Europe that the American government would presently come to an end in general anarchy and bloodshed; and it was believed by George III. and the narrow-minded politicians, such as Lord Sheffield, upon whose cooperation he relied, that, if sufficient obstacles could be thrown in the way of American commerce to cause serious distress in this country, the United States would repent of their independence and come straggling back, one after another, to their old allegiance. Under such circumstances it was impossible for Mr. Adams to accomplish much as minister in England. During his stay there he wrote his “Defence of the American Constitutions,” a work which afterward subjected him at home to ridiculous charges of monarchical and anti-republican sympathies. The object of the book was to set forth the advantages of a division of the powers of government, and especially of the legislative body, as opposed to the scheme of a single legislative chamber, which was advocated by many writers on the continent of Europe. The argument is encumbered by needlessly long and sometimes hardly relevant discussions on the history of the Italian republics.  Finding the British government utterly stubborn and impracticable, Mr. Adams asked to be recalled, and his request was granted in February, 1788. For the “patriotism, perseverance, integrity, and diligence” displayed in his ten years of service abroad he received the public thanks of congress. He had no sooner reached home than he was elected a delegate from Massachusetts to the moribund continental congress, but that body expired before he had taken his seat in it. During the summer the ratification of the new constitution was so far completed that it could be put into operation, and public attention was absorbed in the work of organizing the new government. As Washington was unanimously selected for the office of president, it was natural that the vice-president should be taken from Massachusetts. The candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency were voted for without any separate specification, the second office falling to the candidate who obtained the second highest number of votes in the electoral college. Of the 69 electoral votes, all were registered for Washington, 34 for John Adams, who stood second on the list; the other 35 votes were scattered among a number of candidates. Adams was somewhat chagrined at this marked preference shown for Washington. His chief foible was enormous personal vanity, besides which he was much better fitted by temperament and training to appreciate the kind of work that he had himself done than the military work by which Washington had won independence for the United States. He never could quite understand how or why the services rendered by Washington were so much more important than his own. The office of vice-president was then more highly esteemed than it afterward came to be, but it was hardly suited to a man of Mr. Adams's vigorous and aggressive temper. In one respect, however, he performed a more important part while holding that office than any of his successors. In the earlier sessions of the senate there was hot debate over the vigorous measures by which Washington's administration was seeking to reëtablish American credit and enlist the conservative interests of the wealthier citizens in behalf of the stability of the government. These measures were for the most part opposed by the persons who were rapidly becoming organized under Jefferson's leadership into the republican party, the opposition being mainly due to dread of the possible evil consequences that might flow from too great an increase of power in the federal government. In these debates the senate was very evenly divided, and Mr. Adams, as presiding officer of that body, was often enabled to decide the question by his casting vote. In the first congress he gave as many as twenty casting votes upon questions of most vital importance to the whole subsequent history of the American people, and on all these occasions he supported Washington's policy. During Washington's administration grew up the division into the two great parties which have remained to this day in American politics—the one known as federalist, afterward as whig, then as republican; the other known at first as republican and afterward as democratic. John Adams was by his mental and moral constitution a federalist. He believed in strong government. To the opposite party he seemed much less a democrat than an aristocrat. In one of his essays he provoked great popular wrath by using the phrase “the well-born.” He knew very well that in point of hereditary capacity and advantages men are not equal and never will be. His notion of democratic equality meant that all men should have equal rights in the eye of the law. There was nothing of the communist or leveller about him. He believed in the rightful existence of a governing class, which ought to be kept at the head of affairs; and he was supposed, probably with some truth, to have a predilection for etiquette, titles, gentlemen-in- waiting, and such things. Such views did not make him an aristocrat in the true sense of the word, for in nowise did he believe that the right to a place in the governing class should be heritable; it was something to be won by personal merit, and should not be withheld by any artificial enactments from the lowliest of men, to whom the chance of an illustrious career ought to be just as much open as to “the well-born.” At the same time John Adams differed from Jefferson and from his cousin, Samuel Adams, in distrusting the masses. All the federalist leaders shared this feeling more or less, and it presently became the chief source of weakness to the party. The disagreement between John Adams and Jefferson was first brought into prominence by the breaking out of the French revolution. Mr. Adams expected little or no good from this movement, which was like the American movement in no respect whatever except in being called a revolution. He set forth his views on this subject in his “Discourses on Davila,” which were published in a Philadelphia newspaper. Taking as his text Davila's history of the civil wars in France in the 16th century, he argued powerfully that a pure democracy was not the best form of government, but that a certain mixture of the aristocratic and monarchical elements was necessary to the permanent maintenance of free government. Such a mixture really exists in the constitution of the United States, and, in the opinion of many able thinkers, constitutes its peculiar excellence and the best guarantee of its stability. These views gave great umbrage to the extreme democrats, and in the election of 1792 they set up George Clinton, of New York, as a rival candidate for the vice-presidency; but when the votes were counted Adams had 77, Clinton 50, Jefferson 4, and Aaron Burr 1. During this administration Adams, by his casting vote, defeated the attempt of the republicans to balk Jay's mission to England in advance by a resolution entirely prohibiting trade with that country. For a time Adams quite forgot his jealousy of Washington in admiration for the heroic strength of purpose with which he pursued his policy of neutrality amid the furious efforts of political partisans to drag the United States into a rash and desperate armed struggle in support either of France or of England.  In 1796, as Washington refused to serve for a third term, John Adams seemed clearly marked out as federalist candidate for the succession. Hamilton and Jay were in a certain sense his rivals; but Jay was for the moment unpopular because of the famous treaty that he had lately negotiated with England, and Hamilton, although the ablest man in the federalist party, was still not so conspicuous in the eyes of the masses of voters as Adams, who besides was surer than any one else of the indispensable New England vote. Having decided upon Adams as first candidate, it seemed desirable to take the other from a southern state, and the choice fell upon Thomas Pinckney, of South Carolina, a younger brother of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Hamilton now began to scheme against Mr. Adams in a manner not at all to his credit. He had always been jealous of Adams because of his stubborn and independent character, which made it impossible for him to be subservient to a leader. There was not room enough in one political party for two such positive and aggressive characters. Already in the election of 1788 Hamilton had contrived to diminish Adams's vote by persuading some electors of the possible danger of a unanimous and therefore equal vote for him and Washington. Such advice could not have been candid, for there was never the smallest possibility of a unanimous vote for Mr. Adams. Now in 1796 he resorted to a similar stratagem. The federalists were likely to win the election, but had not many votes to spare; the contest was evidently going to be close. Hamilton accordingly urged the federalist electors, especially in New England, to cast all their votes alike for Adams and Pinckney, lest the loss of a single vote by either one should give the victory to Jefferson, upon whom the opposite party was clearly united. Should Adams and Pinckney receive an exactly equal number of votes, it would remain for a federalist congress to decide which should be president. The result of the election showed 71 votes for John Adams, 68 for Jefferson, 59 for Pinckney, 30 for Burr, 15 for Samuel Adams, and the rest scattering. Two electors obstinately persisted in voting for Washington. When it appeared that Adams had only three more votes than Jefferson, who secured the second place instead of Pinckney, it seemed on the surface as if Hamilton's advice had been sound. But from the outset it had been clear (and no one knew it better than Hamilton) that several southern federalists would withhold their votes from Adams in order to give the presidency to Pinckney, always supposing that the New England electors could be depended upon to vote equally for both. The purpose of Hamilton's advice was to make Pinckney president and Adams vice-president, in opposition to the wishes of their party. This purpose was suspected in New England, and while some of the southern federalists voted for Pinckney and Jefferson, eighteen New Englanders, in voting for Adams, withheld their votes from Pinckney. The result was the election of a federalist president with a republican vice-president. In case of the death, disability, or removal of the president, the administration would fall into the hands of the opposite party. Clearly a mode of election that presented such temptations to intrigue, and left so much to accident, was vicious and could not last long. These proceedings gave rise to a violent feud between John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, which ended in breaking up the federalist party, and has left a legacy of bitter feelings to the descendants of those illustrious men.  The presidency of John Adams was stormy. We were entering upon that period when our party strife was determined rather by foreign than by American political issues, when England and France, engaged in a warfare of Titans, took every occasion to browbeat and insult us because we were supposed to be too feeble to resent such treatment. The revolutionary government of France had claimed that, in accordance with our treaty with that country, we were bound to support her against Great Britain, at least so far as concerned the defence of the French West Indies. The republican party went almost far enough in their sympathy with the French to concede these claims, which, if admitted by our government, would immediately have got us into war with England. On the other hand, the hatred felt toward France by the extreme federalists was so bitter that any insult from that power was enough to incline them to advocate war against her and in behalf of England. Washington, in defiance of all popular clamor, adhered to a policy of strict neutrality, and in this he was resolutely followed by Adams. The American government was thus obliged carefully and with infinite difficulty to steer between Scylla and Charybdis until the overthrow of Napoleon and our naval victories over England in 1812-'14 put an end to this humiliating state of things. Under Washington's administration Gouverneur Morris had been for some time minister to France, but he was greatly disliked by the anarchical group that then misruled that country. To avoid giving offence to the French republic, Washington had recalled Morris and sent James Monroe in his place, with instructions to try to reconcile the French to Jay's mission to England. Instead of doing this, Monroe encouraged the French to hope that Jay's treaty would not be ratified, and Washington accordingly recalled him and sent Cotesworth Pinckney in his place. Enraged at the ratification of Jay's treaty, the French government not only gave a brilliant ovation to Monroe, but refused to receive Pinckney, and would not even allow him to stay in Paris. At the same time, decrees were passed discriminating against American commerce. Mr. Adams was no sooner inaugurated as president than he called an extra session of congress, to consider how war with France should be avoided. It was decided to send a special commission to France, consisting of Cotesworth Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry. The directory would not acknowledge these commissioners and treat with them openly; but Talleyrand, who was then secretary for foreign affairs, sent some of his creatures to intrigue with them behind the scenes. It was proposed that the envoys should pay large sums of money to Talleyrand and two or three of the directors, as bribes, for dealing politely with the United States and refraining from locking up American ships and stealing American goods. When the envoys scornfully rejected this proposal, a new decree was forthwith issued against American commerce. The envoys drew up an indignant remonstrance, which Gerry hesitated to sign. Wearied with their fruitless efforts, Marshall and Pinckney left Paris. But, as Gerry was a republican, Talleyrand thought it worth while to persuade him to stay, hoping that he might prove more compliant than his colleagues. In March, 1798, Mr. Adams announced to congress the failure of the mission, and advised that the preparations already begun should be kept up in view of the war that now seemed almost inevitable. A furious debate ensued, which was interrupted by a motion from the federalist side, calling on the president for full copies of the despatches. Nothing could have suited Mr. Adams better. He immediately sent in copies complete in everything except that the letters X., Y., and Z. were substituted for the names of Talleyrand's emissaries. Hence these papers have ever since been known as the “X. Y. Z. despatches.” On the 8th of April the senate voted to publish these despatches, and they aroused great excitement both in Europe and in America. The British government scattered them broadcast over Europe, to stir up indignation against France. In America a great storm of wrath seemed for the moment to have wrecked the republican party. Those who were not converted to federalism were for the moment silenced. From all quarters came up the war-cry, “Millions for defence; not one cent for tribute.” A few excellent frigates were built, the nucleus of the gallant little navy that was by and by to win such triumphs over England. An army was raised, and Washington was placed in command, with the rank of lieutenant-general. Gerry was recalled from France, and the press roundly berated him for showing less firmness than his colleagues, though indeed he had not done anything dishonorable. During this excitement the song of “Hail, Columbia” was published and became popular. On the 4th of July the effigy of Talleyrand, who had once been bishop of Autun, was arrayed in a surplice and burned at the stake. The president was authorized to issue letters of marque and reprisal, and for a time war with France actually existed, though it was never declared. In February, 1799, Captain Truxtun, in the frigate “Constellation,” defeated and captured the French frigate “L’Insurgente” near the island of St. Christopher. In February, 1800, the same gallant officer in a desperate battle destroyed the frigate “La Vengeance,” which was much his superior in strength of armament. When the directory found that their silly and infamous policy was likely to drive the United States into alliance with Great Britain, they began to change their tactics. Talleyrand tried to crawl out by disavowing his emissaries X. Y. Z., and pretending that the American envoys had been imposed upon by irresponsible adventurers. He made overtures to Vans Murray, the American minister at the Hague, tending toward reconciliation. Mr. Adams, while sharing the federalist indignation at the behavior of France, was too clear-headed not to see that the only safe policy for the United States was one of strict neutrality. He was resolutely determined to avoid war if possible, and to meet France half-way the moment she should show symptoms of a return to reason. His cabinet were so far under Hamilton's influence that he could not rely upon them; indeed, he had good reason to suspect them of working against him. Accordingly, without consulting his cabinet, on 18 February, 1799, he sent to the senate the nomination of Vans Murray as minister to France. This bold step precipitated the quarrel between Mr. Adams and his party, and during the year it grew fiercer and fiercer. He joined Ellsworth, of Connecticut, and Davie, of North Carolina, to Vans Murray as commissioners, and awaited the assurance of Talleyrand that they would be properly received at Paris. On receiving this assurance, though it was couched in rather insolent language by the baffled Frenchman, the commissioners sailed Nov. 5. On reaching Paris, they found the directory overturned by Napoleon, with whom as first consul they succeeded in adjusting the difficulties. This French mission completed the split in the federalist party, and made Mr. Adams's reëlection impossible. The quarrel with the Hamiltonians had been further embittered by Adams's foolish attempt to prevent Hamilton's obtaining the rank of senior major-general, for which Washington had designated him, and it rose to fever-heat in the spring of 1800, when Mr. Adams dismissed his cabinet and selected a new one. Another affair contributed largely to the downfall of the federalist party. In 1798, during the height of the popular fury against France, the federalists in congress presumed too much upon their strength, and passed the famous alien and sedition acts. By the first of these acts, aliens were rendered foible to summary banishment from the United States at the sole discretion of the president; and any alien who should venture to return from such banishment was liable to imprisonment at hard labor for life. By the sedition act any scandalous or malicious writing against the president or either house of congress was liable to be dealt with in the United States courts and punished by fine and imprisonment. This act contravened the constitutional amendment that forbids all infringement of freedom of speech and of the press, and both acts aroused more widespread indignation than any others that have ever passed in congress. They called forth from the southern republicans the famous Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798-'99, which assert, though in language open to some latitude of interpretation, the right of a state to “nullify” or impede the execution of a law deemed unconstitutional.
In the election of 1800 the federalist votes were given to John Adams and Cotesworth Pinckney, and the republican votes to Jefferson and Burr. The count showed 65 votes for Adams, 64 for Pinckney, and 1 for Jay, while Jefferson and Burr had each 73, and the election was thus thrown into the house of representatives. Mr. Adams took np part in the intrigues that followed. His last considerable public act, in appointing John Marshall to the chief justiceship of the United States, turned out to be of inestimable value to the country, and was a worthy end to a great public career. Very different, and quite unworthy of such a man as John Adams, was the silly and puerile fit of rage in which he got up before daybreak of the 4th of March and started in his coach for Massachusetts, instead of waiting to see the inauguration of his successful rival. On several occasions John Adams's career shows us striking examples of the demoralizing effects of stupendous personal vanity, but on no occasion more strikingly than this. He went home with a feeling that he had been disgraced by his failure to secure a reëlection. Yet in estimating his character we must not forget that in his resolute insistence upon the French mission of 1799 he did not stop for a moment to weigh the probable effect of his action upon his chances for reelection. He acted as a true patriot, ready to sacrifice himself for the welfare of his country, never regretted the act, and always maintained that it was the most meritorious of his life. “I desire,” he said, “no other inscription over my grave-stone than this: Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800.” He was entirely right, as all disinterested writers now agree.
After so long and brilliant a career, he now passed a quarter of a century in his home at Quincy (as that part of Braintree was now called) in peaceful and happy seclusion, devoting himself to literary work relating to the history of his times. In 1820 the aged statesman was chosen delegate to the convention for revising the constitution of Massachusetts, and labored unsuccessfully to obtain an acknowledgment of the equal rights, political and religious, of others than so-called Christians. His friendship with Jefferson, which had been broken off by their political differences, was resumed in his old age, and an interesting correspondence was kept up between the two. As a writer of English, John Adams in many respects surpassed all his American contemporaries; his style was crisp, pungent, and vivacious. In person he was of middle height, vigorous, florid, and somewhat corpulent, quite like the typical John Bull. He was always truthful and outspoken, often vehement and brusque. Vanity and loquacity, as he freely admitted, were his chief foibles. Without being quarrelsome, he had little or none of the tact that avoids quarrels; but he harbored no malice, and his anger, though violent, was short-lived. Among American public men there has been none more upright and honorable. He lived to see his son president of the United States, and died on the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of independence and in the ninety-first year of his age. His last words were, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” But by a remarkable coincidence, Jefferson had died a few hours earlier the same day. See “Life and Works of John Adams,” by C. F. Adams (10 vols., Boston, 1850-'56); “Life of John Adams,” by J. Q. and C. F. A dams (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1871); and “John Adams,” by J. T. Morse, Jr. (Boston, 1885).
The portrait that forms the frontispiece of this volume is from a painting by Gilbert Stuart, which was executed while Mr. Adams was president and is now in the possession of his grandson. The one on page 16 was taken when he was a youth. The houses represented on page 15 are those in which President John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams were born. Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888.

Biography from National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans:

AMONG the earliest settlers of the English colonies in Ne-w England was a family by the name of Adams. One of the grantees of the charter of Charles the First to the London Company was named Thomas Adams, though it does not appear that he was of those who emigrated with Governor Winthrop, in 1630.

It appears by the Governor’s journal, that in 1634 there came a considerable number of colonists, under the pastoral superintendence of the Rev. Thomas Parker, in a vessel from Ipswich, in the county of Essex, in the neighborhood of which is the small town of Braintree.

There was, it seems, after their arrival, some difficulty in deciding where they should be located. It was finally determined that Mount Wollaston, situated within the harbor, and distant about nine miles from the three mountains, and whence the intrusive merry mountaineer Morton had been expelled, should, with an enlarged boundary, be annexed to Boston; and the lands within that boundary were granted in various proportions to individuals, chiefly, if not entirely, of the new company from Ipswich.

The settlement soon increased; and feeling, like all the original settlements in New England, the want of religious instruction and social worship, found it a great inconvenience to travel nine or ten miles every Sunday to reach the place of their devotions. In 1636 they began to hold meetings, and to hear occasional preachers, at Mount Wollaston itself. Three years afterwards they associated themselves under a covenant as a Christian Church; and in 1640 were incorporated as a separate town, by the name of Braintree.

Of this town Henry Adams, junior, was the first town-clerk; and the first pages of the original town records, still extant, are in his handwriting. He was the oldest of eight sons, with whom his father, Henry Adams, had emigrated, probably from Braintree in England, and who had arrived in the vessel from Ipswich 1634. Henry Adams the elder, died in 1646, leaving a widow, and a daughter named Ursula, besides the eight sons above-mentioned. He had been a brewer in England, and had set up a brewery in his new habitation. This establishment was continued by the youngest but one of his sons, named Joseph. The other sons sought their fortunes in other towns, and chiefly among their first settlers. Henry, who had been the first town clerk of Braintree; removed, at the time of the incorporation of Medfield in 1652, to that place, and was again the first town-clerk there.
Joseph, the son who remained at Braintree, was born in 1626; was at the time of the emigration of the family from England, a boy of eight years old, and died at the age of sixty-eight in 1694, leaving ten children,—five sons and five daughters.

One of these sons, named John, settled in Boston, and was father of Samuel Adams, and grandfather of the revolutionary patriot of that name.

Another son, named also Joseph, was born in 1654; married Hannah Bass, a daughter of Ruth Alden, and grand-daughter of John Alden of the May Flower, and died in 1736 at the age of eighty-two.

His second son named John, born in 1689, was the father of JOHN ADAMS, the subject of the present memoir. His mother was Susanna, daughter of Peter Boylston, and niece of Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, renowned as the first introducer of inoculation for the small-pox in the British dominions.

This JOHN ADAMS was born on the 30th October, 1735, at Braintree. His father’s elder brother, Joseph, had been educated at Harvard College; and was for upwards of sixty years minister of a Congregational church at Newington, New Hampshire. 

John Adams, the father, was a farmer of small estate and a common school education. He lived and died, as his father and grandfather had done before him, in that mediocrity of condition between affluence, and poverty, most propitious to the exercise of the ordinary duties of life, and to the enjoyment of individual happiness. He was for many years a deacon of the church, and a select man of the town, without enjoying or aspiring to any higher dignity. He was in his religious opinions, like most of the inhabitants of New England at that time, a rigid Calvinist, and was desirous of bestowing upon his eldest son the benefit of a classical education, to prepare him for the same profession with that of his elder brother, the minister of the gospel at Newington.

JOHN ADAMS, the son, had at that early age no vocation for the Church, nor even for a college education. Upon his father’s asking him to what occupation in life he would prefer to be raised, he answered that he wished to be a farmer. His father, without attempting directly to control his inclination, replied that it should be as he desired. He accordingly took him out with himself the next day upon the farm, and gave him practical experience of the labors of the plough, the spade, and the scythe. At the close of the day the young farmer told his father that he would go to school. He retained, however, his fondness for farming to the last years of his life.

He was accordingly placed under the tuition of Mr. Marsh, the keeper of a school then residing at Braintree, and who, ten years afterwards, was also the instructor of Josiah Quincy, the celebrated patriot, who lived but to share the first trials and to face the impending terrors of the revolution.

In 1751, at the age of sixteen, JOHN ADAMS was admitted as a student at Harvard College, and in 1755 was graduated as Bachelor of Arts. The class to which he belonged stands eminent on the College catalogue, for the unusual number of men distinguished in after-life. Among them were Samuel Locke, some time President of the College; Moses Hemmenway, subsequently a divine of high reputation; Sir John Wentworth, Governor of the province of New Hampshire; William Browne, a judge of the Superior Court of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and afterwards Governor of the island of Bermuda; David Sewall, many years judge of the District Court of the United States in the district, and afterwards State of Maine; and Tristram Dalton, a Senator of the United States. Three of these had so far distinguished themselves while under-graduates, that, in the traditions of the College, it was for many years afterwards known by the sons of Harvard as the class of Adams, Hemmenway, and Locke.

John Adams, the father, had thus given to his eldest son a liberal education to fit him for the gospel ministry. He had two other sons, Peter Boylston and Elihu, whom he was educating to the profession which JOHN had at first preferred, of farmers. In this profession Peter Boylston continued to the end of a long life, holding for many years a commission as a justice of the peace, and serving for some time the town of Quincy as their representative in the legislature of the Commonwealth. He died in 1822 at the age of eighty-four leaving numerous descendants among the respectable inhabitants of Quincy and of Boston. Elihu, at the commencement of the Revolution entered the army as a captain, and with multitudes of others fell a victim to the epidemic dysentery of 1775. He left two sons and one daughter, whose posterity reside in the towns of Randolph, (originally a part of Braintree,) Abington, and Bridgewater. The daughter was the mother of Aaron Hobart, several years a member of the House of Representatives of the United States, and afterwards of the Council of the Commonwealth.

Among the usages of the primitive inhabitants of the villages of New England, a liberal, that is, a college education, was considered as an outfit for life, and equivalent to the double portion of an eldest son. Upon being graduated at the College in 1755, JOHN ADAM’S, at the age of twenty, had received this double portion, and was thenceforth to provide for himself.

“The world was all before him, and Providence his guide.”

At the commencement, when he was graduated, there were present one or more of the select-men of the town of Worcester, which was then in want of a teacher for the town school. They proposed to Mr. Adams to undertake this service, and he accepted the invitation. He repaired immediately to Worcester, and took upon him the arduous duties of his office; pursuing at the same time the studies which were to prepare him for the ministry.

His entrance thus upon the theatre of active life was at a period of great political excitement. Precisely at the time when he went to reside at Worcester, occurred the first incidents of the seven years’ war, waged between France and Britain for the mastery of the North American continent. The disaster of Braddock’s defeat and death happened precisely at that time, like the shock of an earthquake throughout the British colonies. Politics were the speculation of every mind—the prevailing topic of every conversation. It was then that he wrote to his kinsman, Nathaniel Webb, that prophetic letter which has been justly called a literary phenomenon, and which shadowed forth the future revolution of Independence, and the naval glories of this Union.

His father had fondly cherished the hope that he was raising, by the education of his son, a monumental pillar of the Calvinistic church; and he himself, reluctant at the thought of disappointing the hopes of his father, and unwilling to embrace a profession laboring then under strong prejudices unfavorable to it among the people of New England, had acquiesced in the purpose which had devoted him to the gospel ministry. But the progress of his theological studies soon gave him an irresistible distaste for the Calvinistic doctrines. The writings of Archbishop Tillotson, then at the summit of their reputation; the profound analysis of Bishop Butler, with his sermons upon human nature and upon the character of Balaam, took such hold upon his memory, his imagination, and his judgment, that they extirpated from his mind every root of Calvinism that had been implanted in it; and the philosophical works of Bolingbroke, then a dazzling novelty in the literary world, although wholly successless in their tendency to shake his faith in the sublime and eternal truths of the gospel, contributed effectively to wean him from the creed of the Genevan Reformer.

About one year after his first arrival at Worcester, after much anxious deliberation and consultation with confidential friends, he resolved to relinquish the study of divinity, and to undertake that of the law. He accordingly entered the office of Colonel James Putnam, then a lawyer of reputation at Worcester, and became at the same time an inmate of his house. With him he lived in perfect harmony for the space of two years, pursuing, with indefatigable diligence, the study of the law, and keeping at the same time the town school. In 1758 he completed his preparatory professional studies; relinquished his school, and returned to his paternal mansion at Braintree. He applied, though a total stranger, to Jeremy Gridley, then the most eminent lawyer in New England, and Attorney-general of the Province, to present him to the judges of the Superior Court for admission to the Bar. Mr. Gridley examined him with regard to him proficiency in the studies appropriate to his profession, and warmly recommended him to the Court, securing thereby his admission.

He opened an office, and commenced the practice in his native town. Two years after, in 1760, he lost his father; but continued to reside with his mother and brother till 1764. His attendance upon the Courts in the counties of Suffolk, and of the old colony, was assiduous; but an accidental engagement in a private cause, before the Court at Plymouth, gave him the opportunity to display talents, which brought him immediately into large and profitable practice. In 1762 the seven years’ war was concluded by the cession to Great Britain and Spain of all the possessions of France on the continent of North America; and at the same time commenced in England the system of policy, which terminated in the Revolution of Independence. It commenced by an increased rigor of exaction and of restriction in the execution of the laws of trade. For this purpose the officers of the customs were instructed by an order of the royal council, to apply, in cases when they suspected articles of merchandize upon which the duties had not been paid, were concealed, to the justices of the Superior Courts, for writs of assistance, such as were sometimes issued from the Court of Exchequer in England, authorizing them to enter the houses and warehouses of the merchants, to detect the unlawfully imported goods. This was a new and odious process, to which the merchants in the colonies had never before been subjected; and its legality was immediately contested before the Superior Court. It was substantially the same case as that of the general search warrants, which some years after kindled so fierce and inextinguishable a flame upon the prosecution of John Wilkes in London. The spirit of English liberty was as sensitive and as intractable in the colonies, as it ever had been in the mother country. The remark of Junius, that the dogs and horses of England lost their metal by removing to another hemisphere, but that patriotism was improved by transportation, meant by him for a sarcasm, was a truth too serious for the derision of a British statesman. The trial of John Peter Zenger, at New York, had vindicated the freedom of the press, and the rights of juries, twenty years before they issued victorious from the re-considered opinions of Camden, and the prevaricating wisdom of Mansfield. And in the trial of the writs of assistance, at Boston, James Otis had

—————“taught the age to quit their clogs
“By the known rules of ancient Liberty;”

while the search warrants for the Essay on Woman, and the 45th number of the North Briton, and the Letter of Junius to the King, were slumbering in the womb of futurity.

JOHN ADAMS, at the age of twenty-seven, attended as a member of the bar, the trial upon the writs of assistance, and witnessed the splendid exhibitions of genius and learning exerted in the cause of freedom by the pioneer of American Independence, James Otis. Small is the portion of mankind to whom it is given to discern the great events which control the destinies of nations in their seminal principles. The origin of the American Revolution has been usually ascribed to the Stamp Act; JOHN ADAMS had seen it in the first campaign of the seven years’ war in 1755. He saw and marked its progress on the argument of James Otis upon writs of assistance in 1762; a cause which, although it produced great excitement at the time, would scarcely have been noticed among the historical incidents of the term, but for the minutes, which his curiosity induced him to take of the trial as it proceeded, and from an imperfect copy of which, taken afterwards by one of the law students in his office, the account of it in the subsequent histories of that period has been published.

On the 25th of October, 1764, he was married to Abigail Smith, second daughter of William Smith, minister of a congregational church at Weymouth, then in her twentieth year.

This was the memorable year of the Stamp Act, and from this year may be dated his first entrance upon political life. His friend and patron, Gridley, had just before that formed, with some other members of the bar and men of literary taste, a small social circle, who met once a week at each other’s houses for the discussion of topics of literature and law, oral or in writing. Before this society MR. ADAMS one evening read a short paper of Observations on the Feudal and Canon Law, which he afterwards published in the Patriotic newspaper. The sensation which it produced on the public mind was so great, that in the following year it was re-published, in London, and there attributed to the pen of Gridley. It has been frequently since re-published, and even now may be considered as a worthy precursor to the declaration of Independence.

Popular commotions prevented the landing of the Stamp Act papers, which had been sent from England to be used in all processes before the judicial courts.

Thomas Hutchinson, at once the Lieut. Governor and Chief Justice of the Superior Court of the Province, had closed the sessions of the Court, on the pretence that they could not be lawfully held but by using the stamps.

The suspension of the Courts was severely felt throughout the Province; but especially in the town of Boston, where, after some time, a town meeting was held, at which it was determined to present a petition to the Governor and Council, that the Courts of justice might be forthwith re-opened; and they prayed to be heard by counsel in support of the petition. This was accorded, and the counsel appointed by the town were Jeremy Gridley, then Attorney-general, James Otis, and JOHN ADAMS, then a young man of thirty, and not even an inhabitant of the town. The Governor and Council had not ventured to refuse hearing counsel in support of the town petition; but, perhaps, from the same timid policy, would hear them only with closed doors, and without admitting any supernumerary hearers. They suggested to the three gentlemen, who represented the town, the expediency of deciding between themselves the points upon which they proposed to support the petition. Mr. Gridley, the officer of the crown, without entering upon the question of right, represented only the general and severe distress suffered by all classes of the people, not only of the town, but of the whole province, by the suspension of all proceedings in the Judicial Courts. Mr. Otis argued, that from this unforeseen and unexampled state of things, the nature of the case gave a right of necessity, authorizing the Governor and Council to command the re-opening of the Court until the pleasure of the authority beyond the sea could be known. MR. ADAMS assumed, as the basis of his argument, that the British Parliament had no right of taxation over the colonies. That the Stamp Act was an Assumption of power, unwarranted by, and inconsistent with, the principles of the English constitution, and with the charter of the Province. That it was null and void; binding neither upon the people, nor upon the courts of justice in the colony; and that it was the duty of the Governor and Council to require of the judges of the courts, that they should resume their judicial Courts, and proceed without exacting from suitors, or applying to their own records, the use of any stamps whatever. This, and a cotemporaneous resolution of the same import, introduced into the House of Representatives of the Province by Samuel Adams, are believed to have been the first direct denial of the unlimited right of legislation of Parliament over the colonies in the progress of that controversy. In the argument before the Governor and Council, it could be assumed, only by MR. ADAMS. Mr. Gridley being at that time the king’s Attorney-general and Mr. Otis having, in a celebrated pamphlet on the rights of the colonies, shortly before published, admitted the right of taxation to be among the lawful authorities of Parliament.
The Governor and Council deferred their decision upon the petition of the town, and before the period arrived for the next regular session of the Superior Court, the intelligence came of the repeal of the Stamp Act, and relieved them from the necessity of any decision upon it.

The selection of MR. ADAMS as one of the law council of the town of Boston upon this memorable occasion, was at once an introduction to a career of political eminence, and a signal advancement of his professional reputation as a lawyer. He had already, as chairman of a committee of the town of Braintree, draughted instructions, on the subject of the Stamp Act, to the Representative of the town in the general court, which had been published, and attracted much notice; and he was shortly after elected one of the select-men of the town.

He had formed an intimate acquaintance and warm friendship with Jonathan Sewall, who had married a Miss Quincy, a relation of MR. ADAMS. Sewall, a man of fine talents, distinguished as an orator and a writer, had commenced his career as a patriot; but had been drawn over by the artifices of Bernard and Hutchinson, and by lucrative and honorable offices, to the royal cause. Through him the office of advocate-general was offered to MR. ADAMS, which he declined, though tendered with an assurance that no sacrifice of his political sentiments would be expected from him by his acceptance of the office. He was already known in that Court by the defence of Ansell Nickerson, an American seaman, who, in self-defence against a press-gang from a king’s ship in the harbor of Boston, had killed, with the stroke of a harpoon, their commander, Lieut. Panton. MR. ADAMS’S defence was, that the usage of impressment had never extended to the colonies; that the attempt to impress Nickerson was, on the part of Lieutenant Panton, unlawful; and that the act of Nickerson in killing him was justifiable homicide. Although the commander of the naval force on the American station, Captain Hood, afterwards Lord Hood, a name illustrious in the naval annals of Britain, was a member of the Court which decided the fate of Nickerson, he was acquitted and discharged; and thus, even before the question of Parliamentary taxation had been brought to its issue in blood, it was solemnly settled that the royal prerogative of impressment did not extend to the colonies. That prerogative, so utterly irreconcileable with the fundamental principle of the great charter, “nullus homo capietur,” that dark spot on the snow-white standard of English freedom, that brand of servitude which Foster, from the judicial bench, stamped on the forehead of the British seaman; that shame to the legislation of the mother country, was, by the exertions of JOHN ADAMS, banished from the code of colonial law.

In the inimitable portrait of the just man drawn by the great Roman Lyric Poet, he is said to be equally immovable from his purpose by the flashing eye of the tyrant, and by the burning fury of a multitude commanding him to do wrong. Of all revolutions, ancient or modern, that of American Independence was pre-eminently popular. It was emphatically the revolution of the people. Not one noble name of the parent realm is found recorded upon its annals, as armed in the defence of the cause of freedom, or assisting in the councils of the confederacy; a few foreign nobles, La Fayette, De Kalb, Pulaski, Steuben, Du Portail, Du Coudray, and a single claimant of a British peerage, Lord Stirling, warmed by the spirit of freedom, and stimulated by the electric spark of military adventure, joined the standard of our country; and more than one, of them laid down their lives in her cause. Of the natives of the land, not one—not Washington himself—could be justly styled the founder of Independence. The title of Liberator, since applied to an immeasurably inferior man in another continent of this hemisphere, could not be, and never was, applied to Washington. Of the nation, formed after the revolution was accomplished, he was by the one people placed at the head; of the revolution itself, he was but the arm.

North American Independence was achieved by a new phenomenon in the history of mankind,—by a self-formed, self-constituted, and self-governed democracy. There were leaders of the people in the several colonies; there were representatives of the colonies, and afterwards of the States in the continental Congress; there was a continental army, a continental navy, and a continental currency; agents, factors, and soldiers; but the living soul, the vivifying spirit of the whole, was a steady, firm, resolute, inflexible will of the people, marching through fire and sword, and pestilence and famine, and bent to march, were it through the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds—to INDEPENDENCE.

The objections urged from time-immemorial against the democracies of former ages were, the instability of the popular will—the impetuosity of their passions—the fluctuation of their counsels, and the impossibility of resisting their occasional and transitory animosities and resentments. Little of al this was seen in the course of the North American revolution. Even before its outset the people were trained to a spirit of self-control, well suited to prepare them for the trials that awaited them, and to carry them triumphantly through the fiery ordeal. No event contributed more to the formation of this spirit than the tragedy of the 5th of March, 1770, and its consequences. To suppress the popular commotions which the system of Parliamentary taxation had excited and could not fail to provoke, two regiments of soldiers were stationed at Boston; and becoming daily more odious to the inhabitants, were exposed to continual insults from the unguarded and indiscreet among them. On the 5th of March, a small party of the soldiers, under command of Lieut. Preston, were thus assailed and insulted by a crowd of people gathering round them, until they fired upon them, and killed and wounded several persons. The passions of the people were roused to the highest pitch of indignation, but manifested themselves by no violence or excess. Lieutenant Preston and six of the soldiers were arrested by the civil authority, and tried before the Superior Court for murder. They were so well advised as to apply to JOHN ADAMS and Josiah Quincy, known as among the most ardent among the patriots, to defend them; and they hesitated not to undertaker the task. The momentary passions of the people identified the sufferings of the victims of that night with the cause of the country, and JOHN ADAMS and Josiah Quincy were signalized as deserters from the standard of freedom. How great was the load of public obloquy under which they labored, lives yet in the memory of surviving witnesses; and is recorded in the memoir of the life of Josiah Quincy, which the filial veneration of a son, worthy of such a father, has given to the world. Among the most affecting incidents related in that volume, and the most deeply interesting documents appended to it, are the recital of this event, and the correspondence between Josiah Quincy the defender of the soldiers and his father on that occasion. The fortitude of JOHN ADAMS was brought to a test equally severe; as the elder council for the prisoners on trial, it was his duty to close the argument in their defence. The writer of this article has often heard from individuals, who had been present among the crowd of spectators at the trial, the electrical effect produced upon the jury, and upon the immense and excited auditory, by the first sentence with which he opened his defence; which was the following citation from the then recently published work of Beccaria.

“May it please your Honors, and you, Gentlemen of the Jury.

“I am for the prisoners at the bar, and shall apologize for it only in the words of the Marquis Beccaria. ‘If I can but be the instrument of preserving one life, his blessing and tears of transport shall be a sufficient consolation to me for the contempt of all mankind.’”

“Captain Preston and the soldiers were acquitted, excepting two, who were found guilty of manslaughter, an offence which, being at that time entitled to the benefit of clergy, was subject to no sharper penalty than the gentle application of a cold iron to the hand, and, except as a warning for the future, was equivalent to an acquittal.

The town of Boston instituted an annual commemoration of the massacre of the 5th of March, by the delivery of an oration to the inhabitants assembled in town meeting. This anniversary was thus celebrated for a succession of thirteen years, until the close of the Revolutionary War, when that of the 4th of July, the day of national Independence was substituted in its place. The Boston massacre is, however, memorable as the first example of those annual commemorations by public discourses ever since so acceptable to the people.

Within two months after the trial of the soldiers, MR. ADAMS received a new testimonial of the favor and confidence of his townsmen, by their election of him as one of their Representatives in the General Court or Colonial Legislature. In this body the conflict of principles between metropolitan authority and British colonial liberty was pertinaciously maintained. Sir Francis Bernard had just before closed his inglorious career, by seeking refuge in his own country from the indignation of the people over whom he had been sent to rule. He was succeeded by Thomas Hutchinson, a native of the province, a man of considerable talent, great industry, and of grasping ambition; who, in evil hour for himself, preferred the path of royal favor to that of patriotism for the ascent to power and fortune.

In times of civil commotion, the immediate subject of contention between the parties scarcely ever discloses to the superficial observer the great questions at issue between them. The first collision between Hutchinson and the two branches of the General Court was about the place where they were to hold their sessions.

Hutchinson, by instructions, secretly suggested by himself, convened the General Court at Cambridge, instead of Boston. They claimed it as a chartered right to meet at the town-house in Boston; and hence a long controversy between the Governor and the two, houses, which, after three years of obstinate discussion, terminated by the restoration of the Legislature to their accustomed place of meeting.

By the charter of the colony, the members of the House of Representatives were annually elected by the people of the towns, and twenty-eight counsellors by the House of Representatives and council, with the approbation of the Governor. The judges of the Superior Court were appointed by the Governor and Council; and the Governor, Lieutenant-governor, and Judges were paid by annual-grants from the General Court. In ordinary times the Council had always been more friendly to the Executive administration, and less disposed to resist the transatlantic authority than the House; but as the contest with the mother country grew warmer, and the country party in the House stronger, they dropped in their elections to the Council all the partizans of the Court, and elected none but the most determined patriots to the council board. The only resource of the Governor was to disapprove the most obnoxious of the persons elected, and thus to exclude a few of the most prominent leaders; but in their places the House always elected others of the same principles.

Among the devices to which, at the instigation of Hutchinson himself, the British Government resorted to remedy these disorders, was that of vacating the charter of the colony; of reserving to the King in council the appointment of the councillors, and of paying by Parliamentary authority the Governor and Judges, himself. The drift of these changes could not be mistaken. Hutchinson, who affected the character of a profound constitutiona1 lawyer, entered into long and elaborate discussion of the rights and authority of Parliament in messages to the General Court, which were answered separately by reports of committees in both Houses. In the composition of these papers MR. ADAMS was frequently employed, together with his distinguished relative, Samuel Adams. For the discussion of profound constitutional questions, the education of JOHN ADAMS as a lawyer, had pre-eminently qualified him to cope with Hutchinson in his black letter messages; and for the arguments on chartered rights and statutory law, he was relied upon beyond all others.

In 1772, having removed to his primitive residence at Braintree, he ceased to represent the town of Boston in the Legislature; but he was soon after elected to the council, and negatived by the Governor. In 1774 he was elected one of the members from the colony of Massachusetts Bay to the Continental Congress; and on the first meeting of that body, on the 5th of September of that year, took his seat among the founders of the North American Union. His service in Congress continued until November, 1777, when he was chosen by that body, in the place of Silas Deane, a joint commissioner at the Court of France, with Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee.

He embarked for France on the 13th of February, 1778, in the Boston frigate, commanded by Samuel Tucker; and, after a most tempestuous passage of forty-five days, landed at Bordeaux in France. The recognition by France of the Independence of the United States, and the conclusion of the treaties of commerce and of alliance between the two nations, had taken place between the appointment of MR. ADAMS and his arrival at Paris.

After the ratification of those treaties, Congress thought proper to substitute a single minister plenipotentiary at the court of France.

Dr. Benjamin Franklin was appointed the minister. Arthur Lee had previously received a separate commission as minister to the Court of Spain. MR. ADAMS, without waiting for a letter of recall, returned in the summer of 1779, in the French frigate La Sensible, to the United States. The French minister to the United States, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, together with his secretary of legation, since highly distinguished through all the scenes of the French Revolution, Barbe de Marbois, were passengers in the same frigate. They arrived at Boston on the 2d of August, 1779. Precisely at that time the convention which formed the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was about to assemble, and MR. ADAMS was returned to it as a member from the town of Braintree.

The convention assembled at Cambridge on the 1st of September, 1779, and, after appointing a committee of thirty-one members to prepare a declaration of rights, and a constitution for the Commonwealth, adjourned over, on the 7th of that month, to the 28th of October ensuing, to receive the report of the committee. MR. ADAMS was a member of this committee, and made the first draught of the declaration of rights and of the constitution reported to the convention.

But, in the interval of the adjournment, MR. ADAMS had received from Congress a new commission for the negotiation of peace with Great Britain; in pursuance of which he embarked on the 14th of November, at Boston, in the same French frigate in which he had returned to the United States. Her destination was Brest; but having sprung a leak on her passage, and being in, danger of foundering, she was obliged to make the first European port, which was that of Ferrol in Spain. There she arrived on the 7th of December, and thence MR. ADAMS travelled, in mid-winter, by land to Paris.

The events of the Revolutionary war were not yet sufficiently matured for the negotiation of peace. Soon after the appointment of MR. ADAMS to this service, Henry-Laurens of South Carolina, then President of Congress, was appointed Minister plenipotentiary to negotiate a treaty of amity and commerce with the United Netherlands, with a separate commission to negotiate a loan of money in that country. On his passage to Europe, Mr. Laurens was captured by a British cruizer, and was lodged in the tower of London as a prisoner of state. MR. ADAMS then received a commission for the same service, and a new appointment was made of five commissioners for the negotiation of peace. These were JOHN ADAMS, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Henry Laurens, and Thomas Jefferson; the last of whom was, however, prevented by the circumstances of his family from proceeding to Europe until after the conclusion of the peace. In July, 1780, MR. ADAMS left Paris and went to Holland, where, as a preliminary to the negotiation of a treaty of amity and commerce, it was necessary to procure the recognition of the United States as an Independent power. The negotiation for a loan was a separate power to contract with individuals. In both these negotiations MR. ADAMS was eminently successful. The condition of the United Netherlands at that time require a different mode of negotiation from that which was suitable with the other nations of Continental Europe. They constituted a free, confederated republic; with a prince allied to many of the European sovereigns, and especially to the Kings of Great Britain and of Prussia, at their head. The politics of the country were discussed in the Legislative Assemblies of the several provinces, and the freedom of the press opened avenues to the hearts of the people. In point of form, MR. ADAMS, as the representative of the United States claiming to be a sovereign and independent power, was to address the President of the States General, which he did in a memorial claiming to be received as a public minister; but setting forth all the arguments suited to produce an impression upon the minds of the people favorable to the objects of his mission. The President of the States General received the memorial and laid it before the Assembly, who referred it to the Legislative Assemblies of the several provinces for consideration; MR. ADAMS caused it forthwith to be published in the English, French, and Dutch languages in pamphlets; and it was re-published in many of the newspapers and other periodical journals of the country. No public document of the revolution was ever so widely circulated; for, as an extraordinary state paper, it was re-published in every country and every language of Europe. Its success was not less remarkable than the extent of its circulation. It set in motion the whole population of the Netherlands. Popular petitions, numerously signed, poured in upon the States of the provinces, praying for the recognition of the Independence of the United States, and the reception of MR. ADAMS as their minister. The similarity of the condition of the United States to that of the Netherlands in their struggle for Independence against Spain, strongly urged in the memorial, became a favorite topic for popular feeling in all the provincial Assemblies. The Leyden Gazette, edited by John Luzac, one of the most accomplished scholars of the age, and one of the purest republican spirits of any age or clime, was engaged with deep and fervid interest in the cause of America, stimulated, even to enthusiasm, by the personal friendship formed with the kindred spirit of JOHN ADAMS. Another Frenchman of great ability, and highly distinguished as the author of the best history extant, in the French language, of the United Provinces, A. M. Cerisier, at the instance of MR. ADAMS, commenced a weekly journal under the title, of the Politique Hollandais,” devoted exclusively to the communication of correct intelligence from America, and to set forth the community of principles and of interests between the new and the old republic. Having formed, an intimate acquaintance with an eminent lawyer at Amsterdam, named Calkoen, that gentleman, who was a member of a political and literary society which held private weekly meetings, addressed sundry queries to MR. ADAMS respecting the state of the war, the condition, of the people in the United States, and their dispositions with regard to the cause of Independence; which he answered in twenty-six letters, since frequently published. They were read and discussed at the in meetings of the society, and furnished facts and argument for the friends of America and of freedom to counteract the influence States at the Court of the British king. They still remained jointly charged with the commission for negotiating treaties of commerce, under which was concluded a treaty with the Emperor of Morocco, and a commercial treaty with Portugal; the ratification of which by the Portuguese Government was withheld, under the controling influence of Great Britain at that Court.
In May, 1785, MR. ADAMS proceeded to London, where he was received by George the Third as the minister of the Independent States of North America. He was authorized to form a commercial treaty with Great Britain of the most liberal character; but a proud and mortified spirit had succeeded in the breast of the monarch, and a resentful and jealous rivalry in the temper of the nation, to the cruel and desolating war, which for seven years had been waged to subdue the North American people. In that people, too, an irritated and resentful temper still rankled long after the conflict for independence had closed. Mutual charges of bad faith in failing to execute the articles of the treaty of peace, but two well founded on both sides, continued the alienation of heart between the nations, which the contest and the separation had caused. The British Government had, indeed, more than plausible reasons for declining to conclude a commercial treaty with a Congress, which had not even authority to carry into execution the stipulations of the treaty of peace. After a residence in England of three years, in June, 1778, MR. ADAMS returned to the United States, precisely at the moment when the ratification, by nine States, of the constitution, had established the form of government for the Union, under which we yet live.

During his residence in England he had composed and published, in three volumes, his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States,—a treatise upon Government, afterwards called the History of the principal Republics of the World; a work which has contributed more than any other ever written, to settle the opinions of mankind upon the great question, whether the legislative power of a free state should be vested in a single assembly, or in two separate co-ordinate branches; incidental to which is the question, not less important, of a single or a plural executive. Upon these points there is now scarcely any diversity of opinion among the enlightened theorists of Government.

Just before his return to the United States, MR. ADAMS had been elected, by the Legislature of Massachusetts, a member of Congress, under the articles of Confederation; but that body was in a virtual state of dissolution. The constitution of the United States had received the sanction of the people. The times and places for holding the elections to organize the new government, had been fixed and the semblance of authority, which was all that the Confederation Congress had ever possessed, was vanishing even before the fabric of its more efficient substitute was completed.

In December, 1788, the first elections were held for carrying into execution the Constitution of the United States; at which George Washington was unanimously chosen President, and JOHN ADAMS was elected Vice-President of the Union; and four years afterwards they were both, in like manner, re-elected to the same offices. At the close of the second term, Washington declined a second re-election, and MR. ADAMS was chosen President of the United States.

During the eight years of Washington’s administration, MR. ADAMS presided in the Senate. Throughout the whole of both those terms he gave to the administration a firm and efficient support.

Wherever there is Government there must be councils of administration and collisions of opinion, concerning its mode and its measures. In all governments, therefore, there are parties which necessarily become braided, and, too often, entangled with the personal characters, principles, passions, and fortunes of individual men. No sooner had the founder of the Christian faith laid the corner-stone, for the establishment of the purest and most self-sacrificing of all religions, by the selection of the twelve apostles, than ambition and avarice, the thirst of place and treachery, were disclosed among them.

The Constitution of the United States was the result of a compromise between parties, which had existed from the first formation of the American Union. It drew together, by closer ties, the inhabitants of an extensive country, chiefly descended from one common stock, but greatly diversified by the varieties of climates, and of soils on which they had settled, and the oppositions of religious and political opinions in which they had originated. It made them permanently, and by political organization, what the enthusiasm of a common struggle for freedom, common sufferings and common dangers had made them for a time, in the war of Independence, but which the imbecility of the Articles of Confederation had failed to sustain, it made them One People. This stupendous monument of wisdom and virtue was accomplished by a party—then known by the denomination of Federalists; a name which, from various causes, has since become a term of reproach, but which, at that time, Washington and Madison were alike proud of bearing. In the disjointed condition of the confederacy, there was but one man whose talents and services had rivetted him in the gratitude and affections of all his countrymen, and that was, the leader of the armies of the Revolution. He presided in the convention which formed the Constitution; and no one can analyse that instrument without perceiving that much of its character, and expecially the construction of its executive power, was adapted to him, and fashioned upon the preconception that the office would be occupied by him.

Nor was this anticipation disappointed. He was twice elected by the unanimous suffrages of the electoral colleges President of the United States. But he was scarcely installed in office, and the wheels of the new machine of government had scarcely began to move, when the spirit of party, transferred from the confederacy to the constitution, sought, in the principal subordinate officers of the government, leaders for the succession, to be thereafter seated in the chair of Washington. These leaders immediately presented themselves in the persons of Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State, and Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury. In the diversity of the principles of these two men, conflict immediately sprung up, as to those which should govern the administration. Those of Hamilton were more congenial to the mind of Washington, and became the ruling principles of the administration; upon which Jefferson retired from public office, and was thenceforward looked up to as the head of the opposition to Washington’s administration. Before the close of Washington’s second term, Hamilton had also retired, but continued to support his administration.

At the time when MR. ADAMS was chosen President of the United States, he was supported by the party which had sustained the administration. Jefferson was his competitor, as the leader of the opposition. The contest was close. MR. ADAMS was elected by a bare majority of the electoral votes; and by the provision of the constitution then existing, that both candidates should be voted for as President, and that the person having the highest number of votes short of a majority should be Vice-President, Mr. Jefferson was elected to that office; and thus the head of the opposition became the presiding officer in the Senate of the United States, and at the next election, in December, 1800, was chosen President of the United States.

On the 3d of March, 1801, the official term of MR. ADAMS expired, and he retired to his residence at Quincy, where he passed the remainder of his days.
 
The administration of MR. ADAMS was but a continuation of that of his predecessor. It was the practical execution of the constitution, by the party which had formed and fashioned it, and had succeeded against a determined and persevering opposition in procuring its acceptance by the people. Mr. Jefferson had availed himself of the passions and prejudices of the people to obtain the possession of power, constantly modifying his opposition according to the fluctuations of public opinion, and taking advantage of every error, in the policy of the federal party, to which an odious imputation could be applied. In the course of their common service in Congress during the War of Independence, and in that of the joint commission in Europe after the peace, the most cordial harmony had subsisted between him and MR. ADAMS. Their views of the French Revolution first divided them; and upon a re-publication in this country of one of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlets, Mr. Jefferson, in a note to the printer, recommended it as a corrective to the political heresies then in circulation. The allusion was universally understood as intended to apply to the publication of certain essays, under the title of Discourses on Davila, and known to be written by MR. ADAMS. Mr. Jefferson, in a letter to MR. ADAMS, disclaimed all such intention; but his subsequent deportment, and the essential diversity of their opinions, gradually alienated them from each other, and dissolved the personal friendship which had subsisted between them. During the administration of Mr. Jefferson there was no personal intercourse between them; but when the great questions of the rights of neutral commerce, and the outrageous impressment of American seamen by the naval officers of Great Britain, brought the Government of the United States into imminent danger, MR. ADAMS, though remaining in private life, sacrificed all his resentments and by numerous writings in the public journals, gave the most efficient support to the administration of his successor.

In 1809 Mr. Jefferson himself was succeeded by his friend and most faithful counsellor, James Madison. During his administration, the controversies with Great Britain, in the midst of which Mr. Jefferson had retired, rankled into a war, precisely at the time when the tide of victory and of triumph was turning in favor of Britain against Napoleon, at the closing stage of that revolution by which France had passed from an absolute monarchy, through a brutal and sanguinary mock-democracy, to a military despotism, and thence to the transient resurrection of the dry bones of the Bourbons.

In the contests with Great Britain concerning neutral rights and impressment, which had preceded and led to the war, the interests of the commercial portion of the community were most immediately and deeply involved. But Mr. Jefferson’s system of defence consisted in commercial restrictions, non-intercourse and embargoes, destructive to the very interest which it was the duty of the Government to maintain. The Cæsarian ambition of Napoleon, and his unparalleled succession of military triumphs, had alarmed the American politicians of the federal school, till they had frightened themselves into the belief that Napoleon Bonaparte was affecting universal empire, and about to become master of the world. They believed also, that Great Britain presented the only obstacle to the accomplishment of this design; and in this panic-terror, they lost all sense of the injustice and insolence of Great Britain exercised upon themselves. The restrictive system bore most impressively upon New England, to whose people, commerce, navigation, and the fisheries, were necessaries of life; and they felt the restrictive system as aggravation rather than relief. When the war came, it was a total annihilation of all their modes of industry, and of their principal resources of subsistence. They transferred their resentments from the foreign aggressor to their own Government, and became disaffected to the Union itself. The party in opposition to Mr. Madison’s Administration prevailed throughout all the New England States; and had the war continued one year longer, there is little doubt that the floating projects of a separation, and of a northern confederacy, would have ripened into decisive action. Throughout the whole of this ordeal, MR. ADAMS constantly supported the Administration of Mr. Madison, till the conclusion of the peace at Ghent, in December, 1814, scattered the projects of the northern confederacy to the winds, and restored, for a short and happy interval, the era of good feelings.

In December, 1820, MR. ADAMS was chosen one of the electors of President and Vice-President of the United States; and, together with all his colleagues of the electoral College of Massachusetts, voted for the re-election of James Monroe and Daniel D. Tompkins to those offices.

The last public service in which MR. ADAMS was engaged, was as a member of the convention to revise the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, of which body he was unanimously chosen President. Then in the 86th year of his age, he declined to assume the arduous duties of that station, but gave his attendance as a member throughout the sessions of the convention, and occasionally took part in their debates.

This election was communicated to MR. ADAMS by a Committee of the Convention, with the following resolutions;—

“In Convention, November 15, 1820.

“Whereas, the Honorable JOHN ADAMS, a member of this Convention, and elected the President thereof, has, for more than half a century, devoted the great powers of his mind, and his profound wisdom and learning, to the service of his country and mankind:

In fearlessly vindicating the rights of the North American provinces against the usurpations and encroachments of the superintendant government:

In diffusing a knowledge of the principles of civil liberty among his fellow subjects, and exciting them to a firm and resolute defence of the privileges of freemen:

In early conceiving, asserting, and maintaining the justice and practicability of establishing the independence of the United States of America:

In giving the powerful aid of his political knowledge in the formation of the Constitution of his native State, which constitution became in a great measure the model of those which were subsequently formed:

In conciliating the favor of foreign powers, and obtaining their countenance and support in the arduous struggle for independence:

In negotiating the treaty of peace, which secured forever the sovereignty of the United States, and in defeating all attempts to prevent it; and especially in preserving in that treaty the vital interest of the New England States:

In demonstrating to the world, in his defence of the Constitutions of the several united States, the contested principle, since admitted as an axiom, that checks and balances in legislative power, are essential to true liberty: 

In devoting his time and talents to the service of the nation, in the high and important trusts of Vice-President and President of the United States:

And lastly, in passing an honorable old age in dignified retirement, in the practice of all the domestic virtues, thus exhibiting to his countrymen and to posterity, an example of true greatness of mind and of genuine patriotism:—

Therefore, Resolved, That the members of this convention, representing the people of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, do joyfully avail themselves of this opportunity to testify their respect and gratitude to this eminent patriot and statesman, for the great services rendered by him to his country, and their high gratification that, at this late period of life, he is permitted by Divine Providence to assist them with his counsel in revising the constitution which, forty years ago, his wisdom and prudence assisted to form.

Resolved, That a committee of twelve be appointed by the chair, to communicate this proceeding to the honorable JOHN ADAMS, to inform him of his election to preside in this body, and to introduce him to the chair of this convention.

In this resolution, honorable alike to the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to their representatives by whom it was adopted, and to him whom it intended to honor, is contained a concentrated summary of the life, character, and services of JOHN ADAMS. It closes with appropriate dignity his career as a public man.

Nor was he less exemplary in all the relations of private and domestic life. As a son, a husband, a brother, a father, and a friend, his affections were ardent, disinterested and faithful. His filial piety not exclusively confined to his immediate parents, carefully preserved the memorials of their ancestors, for three preceding generations, to the patriarch, first settler of Braintree, Henry Adams, and he caused to be erected in the cemetery, where

“Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
  The rude fore-fathers of the hamlet sleep,”

monuments of the solid and simple granite from the soil on which they had settled, recording their names and years, spelt by no unlettered muse, but embracing in the inscription of little more than those dates, all that remains of their short and simple annals.

In the common experience of mankind, friendship, the pleasures of which are among the choicest enjoyments of life, is yet a sentiment of so delicate a texture, that it almost invariably sinks under the collision of adverse interests and conflicting opinions. With contests of opinion untainted with opposing interests, friendship may indeed subsist unimpaired; but in the discussion of religious or political opinions, which divide the minds of men, interest and opinion act and re-act upon each other, till the tender bloom of friendship withers and dies under their chilling frost. So fared it with the friendship formed by MR. ADAMS in early life with Jonathan Sewall. So fared it with the friendship formed in a common service, in the trying scenes of the war of Independence, with Thomas Jefferson. An affecting passage in his diary in 1774, records the pang with which he had parted from the friend of his youth, and an intercourse of mutual respect, and good-will was restored between them after the close of the revolutionary war. A reconciliation with Mr. Jefferson was, by the interposition of a common friend, effected, after all collisions of interests had subsided; and for the last ten years of their lives a friendly and frequent correspondence was maintained, with mutual satisfaction, between them. Many of those letters have been published, equally creditable to both; and that of Mr. Jefferson upon the decease of Mrs. Adams, in October, 1818, as an effusion of sympathy with the severest of earthly afflictions, in the administration of tender and delicate condolence, has never been surpassed.

They died on one and the same day, the jubilee of the day of Independence—a coincidence so remarkable, that men of a religious turn of mind, in days of more devoted faith, would have regarded it as a special interposition of Providence, to stamp on the hearts of their country, and of unnumbered future ages, a more indelible remembrance of that memorable event, and of the share which they had jointly taken in its imperishable deed.

The death of JOHN ADAMS occurred on the 4th of July, 1826, at the moment when his fellow-citizens, of his native town of Quincy, were celebrating in a social banquet, to which he had been invited, the anniversary of the Nation’s Independence. His physical faculties had gradually declined in the lapse of years, leaving his intellect clear and bright to the last hour of his life.

Some years before his decease he had, by two several deeds of gift, conveyed to the inhabitants of the town of Quincy, his library and several valuable lots of land, the proceeds of the income of which were to be devoted to the erection of a stone temple for the worship of God, and of a school-house for a classical school.

Shortly after his death, the worshippers at the first Congregational church in Quincy, of which he had been a member, determined, with the aid of his donation to erect the temple, which was done in the year 1828; and after it was completed, his mortal remains with those of the partner of his life, were deposited side by side in a vault beneath its walls.

Within the same house, a plain, white marble slab, on the right hand of the pulpit, surmounted by his bust, (the work of Horatio Greenough,) bears the following inscription, written by his eldest son.

Libertatem, Amicitiam, Fidem, Retinebis.

D. O. M.

Beneath these walls
Are deposited the mortal remains of
JOHN ADAMS,
Son of John and Susanna (Boylston) Adams,
Second President of the United States.
Born     October, 1735. 
On the fourth of July, 1776,
He pledged his Life, Fortune, and sacred Honour
To the INDEPENDENCE OF HIS COUNTRY.
On the third of September, 1783,
He affixed his seal to the definitive treaty with Great Britain,
Which acknowledged that independence,
And consummated the redemption of his pledge.
On the fourth of July, 1826,
He was summoned
To the Independence of Immortality
And to the JUDGMENT OF HIS GOD.
This House will bear witness to his piety;
This Town, his birth-place, to his munificence;
History to his patriotism;
Posterity to the depth and compass of his mind.
At his side
Sleeps, till the trump shall sound,
ABIGAIL,
His beloved and only wife,
Daughter of William and Elizabeth (Quincy) Smith.
In every relation of life a pattern
Of filial, conjugal, maternal, and social virtue.
Born November, 1744,
Deceased 28 October, 1818,
Aged 74.
———
Married 25 October, 1764.
During an union of more than half a century
They survived, in harmony of sentiment, principle and affection,
The tempests of civil commotion:
Meeting undaunted and surmounting
The terrors and trials of that revolution,
Which secured the freedom of their country;
Improved the condition of their times;
And brightened the prospects of futurity
To the race of man upon earth.

PILGRIM,

From lives thus spent thy earthly duties learn;
From fancy’s dreams to active virtue turn:
Let freedom, friendship, faith, thy soul engage,
And serve, like them, thy country and thy age.
                                                                                                         J. Q.A.

Source: National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans, 1839, Volume 4.



Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.