But I prefer to be guided somewhat in these matters by your great grandfather, John Adams, for whom I have always had a great fancy. If you will pardon me for saying so I think that his attention was more closely and intensely directed to these matters than yours has ever been. His neck was at stake as well as your own valuable existence and reputation. The British statute of that time provided a terrible punishment for what he was doing. Possibly you have never read it.
"That the offender be drawn to the gallows, and not be carried or walk; that he be hanged by the neck, and then cut down alive; that his entrails be taken and burnt while he is yet alive; that his head be cut off; that his body be divided into four parts; that his head and quarters be at the king's disposal."
The disposal the king was accustomed to make of the heads and quarters of such people was to have the quarters hung about in conspicuous parts of London like quarters of beef; and the heads were set up on poles on Temple Bar or London Bridge to rot as a ghastly warning.
I am inclined to think that the opinion of a man who from 1765 to 1780 worked with that enactment hanging over his head is worth considering. I find on picking up the first life of him that comes to hand, that he was anything but blind to the consequences. England had shown her hand. She outnumbered the colonists four to one; and, in the same proportion, she could send a disciplined army against their undisciplined militia and guerilla forces.
It was even worse than that. The colonists were not united in resisting England; not nearly so unanimous as the Boers are. It was by no means certain that our colonial rebel party had a bare majority. The loyalists insisted and believed that they themselves had the majority. So if we cut off from the supposed 3,000,000 population of the colonies the black slaves who numbered about 800,000 and the loyalists who were even more numerous, we had at the utmost only about 1,400,000 whites who were prepared to resist the army, fleet, and 8,000,000 population of England without counting nearly a million loyalists in their own midst.
In fact on the showing of hands it was an utterly hopeless contest, and within a few years proved itself to be such. All that saved your ancestor's party from complete annihilation was the assistance after 1778 of the French army, fleet, provisions, clothes and loans of money followed by assistance from Spain, and at the last moment by the alliance of Holland. And even with all this assistance your ancestor's cause was even as late as the year 1780 generally believed to be a hopeless one.
Your ancestor did not like the prospect. He was fully prepared for misery, beggary and his family blood attainted and rendered infamous to the last generation by the English law. Death was the least thing he dreaded.
"I go mourning in my heart all the day long," he writes to his wife, "though I say nothing. I am melancholy for the public and anxious for my family. As for myself a frock and trousers, a hoe and a spade would do for my remaining days."
"I feel unutterable anxiety," he writes again. "God grant us wisdom and fortitude! Should the opposition be suppressed, should this country submit, what infamy, what ruin, God forbid! Death in any form is less terrible."
"There is one ugly reflection," he says in a letter to Joseph Warren. "Brutus and Cassius were conquered and slain, Hampden died in the field, Sidney on the scaffold, Harrington in jail. This is cold comfort." (Morse's Adams, pp. 54, 60.)