I believe this diary, so carefully decided upon, does not now exist. The Adams family preserved a vast number of family papers, but this was not among them. I am sorry; for I find John Quincy Adams a very pleasing child. When he was about seven years old, his father was away from home as a delegate to a Congress in Philadelphia which sought to secure unity of action among the rebellious colonies. His patriotic mother taught her boy in their retreat at Braintree to repeat daily each morning, with the Lord's Prayer, Collins' inspiring ode beginning, "How sleep the brave who sink to rest," etc. Later in life Adams wrote to a Quaker friend:—
"For the space of twelve months my mother with her infant children dwelt, liable every hour of the day and of the night to be butchered in cold blood, or taken and carried into Boston as hostages. My mother lived in unintermitted danger of being consumed with them all in a conflagration kindled by a torch in the same hands which on the seventeenth of June (1775) lighted the fires of Charlestown. I saw with my own eyes those fires, and heard Britannia's thunders in the Battle of Bunker Hill, and witnessed the tears of my mother and mingled them with my own."
The mother took her boy by the hand and mounted a height near their home and showed him the distant signs of battle. Thus she fixed an impression of a war for liberty on his young memory. Two years later, to relieve her anxious and tedious waiting for intelligence from her husband, the boy became "post rider" for her between Braintree and Boston, which towns were eleven miles apart—not a light or easy task, for the nine-year-old boy with the unsettled roads and unsettled times. The spirit of patriotism which filled the mind of all grown folk was everywhere reflected in the minds of the children. Josiah Quincy was at school in Andover from 1778 to 1786, and he stated that he and his schoolmates had as a principle, as a schoolboy law, that every hoop, sled, etc., should in some way bear thirteen marks. This was evidence of the good political character of the owner; and if the marks were wanting the article was contraband, was seized and forfeited without judge, jury, or power of appeal.
Besides journal keeping, folks of that day had a useful custom of keeping a commonplace book; that is, they wrote out in a blank-book memorable sentences or words which attracted their attention or admiration in the various books they read, or made abstracts or notes of the same. Cotton Mather tells of such note making by young students. This writing out of aphorisms, statements, etc., not only fixed them in the memory, but kept them where the memory, if faulty, could easily be assisted. It also served as practice in penmanship. A verb, to commonplace, came from this use of the word. The biography of Francis North, Baron Guildford, gave an account which explains fully commonplacing:—
"It was his lordship's constant practice to commonplace as he read. He had no bad memory but was diffident and would not trust it. He acquired a very small but legible hand, for where contracting is the main business (of law) it is not well to write as the fashion now is, in uncial or semi-uncial letters to look like a pig's ribs. His writing on his commonplaces was not by way of index but epitome: because he used to say the looking over a commonplace book on any occasion gave him a sort of survey of what he had read about matters not then inquisited, which refreshed them somewhat in his memory."
People invented methods of keeping commonplace books and gave rules and instructions in commonplacing. I have seen several commonplace books, made by children of colonial times; pathetic memorials, in every case, of children who died in early youth. Tender and loving hearts have saved those little unfinished records of childish reading, after the way of mothers and fathers till the present day, whose grieved affections cannot bear the thought even of reverent destruction of the irregular writing of a dearly loved child whose hands are folded in death. One of these books with scantily filled pages was tied with a number of note-books of an old New England minister, and in the father's handwriting on the first leaf were these words:—
"Fifty years ago died my little John. A child of promise. Alas! alas! January 10th, 1805."
