This was written in the days when there was such a thing as genuine patriotism; when, as in the noble Greek and Roman years, there lived among us also noble men, who freely surrendered all that life offered them of sweet and splendid, to work for their fellows, and to exalt their country's state, content that old age should find them poor in fortune and broken in health, so only that integrity remained, and a serene conscience led them undisturbed to the end of life.
Among these former glories of our Republic, the name of John Adams stands in the clearest sunlight of fame. No purer patriot ever lived. The names which dazzle us in history become no fables when read by his light; Plutarch tells no nobler story, records no greater claims; Athens and Sparta smile upon him from their starry places, and Rome holds out her great hand of fellowship to him—for there is no virtue which has lived that may not live again, and our own day shows that there has never been a political corruption so base as to despair of being emulated.
Concerning the civil life of such a man, much might with ease be written. The head and front of every great political movement of his country, from his thirtieth year to the day of his death he lived no obscure life, and was missed from no contest. "The great pillar of support to the Declaration of Independence," as Jefferson called him, its fearless and eloquent defender, the right hand of his country's diplomacy, and the strength of her treaties, he is a portion of her history and his acts are her annals. But this devotion to the great political struggles of his time was not consistent with home delights. These he was to scorn and to live laborious days. Early immersed in the stirring events of his day, he surrendered to the duty of serving, all private claims; he gave up his profession, he separated himself from his wife and children to go wherever he could be useful; he abandoned a mode of life most dear to him; and leaving his little Sabine farm and his friendly books, with no hopes of personal aggrandizement, and small, unjoyous prospect of success in the venture he was aiding, went out to fight. His first act of importance, a worthy beginning to such career, was his defence of Preston, in the famous trial for the murder of certain citizens of Boston by British soldiers, in 1770. Preston was the captain of the British troops stationed in Boston, and under government orders. As may easily be imagined, in the uneasy state of public feeling, exasperated by real injuries and petty tyrannies, suspicious, discontented and spurred on by men who circulated a thousand injurious reports, the people and the foreign soldiery were ready at any moment to break out into open quarrel. Finally, this did indeed happen. The soldiery, provoked beyond endurance, resisted the assaults of the people, and fired upon them. Captain Preston was arrested and imprisoned; five citizens had been killed and many wounded, and it was with difficulty that the people were restrained from rising into furious rebellion. Preston was taken to prison to await his trial, but it was for a time impossible to obtain counsel, so great was the hatred of the people to the soldiery, and so strong the feeling that no man would be safe from violence who would attempt to defend these foreigners for the murder of his own fellow-citizens. John Adams—then a rising lawyer in Boston, and a man who had already given hints of coming greatness—was sent for by the unfortunate captain, who begged him to undertake his cause. "I had no hesitation in answering," says Adams in his autobiography, "that counsel ought to be the very last thing that an accused person should want in a free country; that the bar ought, in my opinion, to be independent and impartial at all times, and in every circumstance, and that persons whose lives were at stake ought to have the counsel they preferred. But he must be sensible this would be as important a cause as was ever tried in any court or country in the world; and that every lawyer must hold himself responsible, not only to his country, but to the highest and most infallible of all tribunals, for the part he should act. He must therefore expect from me no art or address, no sophistry or prevarication in such a cause, nor anything more than fact, evidence, and law would justify." And a little after he tells us what it cost him to act up to his own standard of duty. "At this time I had more business at the bar than any man in the province. My health was feeble. I was throwing away as bright prospects as any man ever had before him, and I had devoted myself to endless labor and anxiety, if not to infamy and to death, and that for nothing, except what was and ought to be all in all, a sense of duty. In the evening, I expressed to Mrs. Adams all my apprehensions. That excellent lady, who has always encouraged me, burst into a flood of tears, but said she was very sensible of all the danger to her and to our children, as well as to me, but she thought I had done as I ought; she was very willing to share in all that was to come, and to place her trust in Providence."
Such were the politicians of that day; and though we do not doubt that private virtue as much abounds with us as with them, and that as great private sacrifices as this was public can be instanced in these later times, yet no one will be so hardy as to say that any politician of this day would brave such hazards or so daringly face peril. Politics are become a trade with us. The curse of popular governments is this, that they make office desirable in proportion to the ease with which it is attained, and that seeking place becomes in time as legitimate a profession as seeking oysters. No one will so mock at common sense, or hold the judgments of his fellow spectators in such light esteem, as to aver that any one of our public men serves his country for his country's sake, or for any better reason than because it is conducive to bread and butter. Hence it is with us a jeer and a by-word to talk about patriotism. The fact seems to be, that our material prosperity is so great, our resources so boundless, our outlook so glorious, our liberty so well assured—or at least the liberty of those among us who are white—that there is no call for sacrifice and patriotic service. The country is rich and can well afford, if she will be served, to pay the servant; but we speak of devotion to principle, which we believe is clean gone out from us, and can be predicated of no public man.
John Adams, son of John Adams and Susannah Boylston Adams, was born at Quincy, Massachusetts, on the 19th day of October, 1735. He received the best education that the times afforded, graduated at Harvard College, and afterward commenced the study of divinity with a view to the ministry; at the same time he was occupied in teaching school, that universal stepping-stone in New England to professional life. Indeed, there was then hardly more than there is now any such thing as a schoolmaster by profession; and without doubt a sufficing reason for the fact that our young men are so inefficiently educated, is, that the teachers are in nine cases out of ten only one lesson in advance of their scholars. In those days, however, the schoolmaster was apt to be a person of some consequence. He held a position very often next in importance to that of the parson, and ruled an autocrat over his little flock of beardless citizens. Nowhere has he been better described than in "Margaret," in the character of Master Elliman, whose mingled pompousness, verbiage, and pedantry, admirably represent the class to which he belonged. But the character gradually lost its individuality as society advanced, until at length the great bulk of teachers, except in the colleges, were merely young men preparing for the learned professions.
The injurious effect of this state of things, which has made a very decided mark upon our national character, we will not discuss here, but it is well to note the differences between the manners of the colonial times, and those of our present day—and of these differences none is so striking as the great decrease of respect in which professional men are held with us compared with that which was yielded to them by our forefathers. With them the schoolmaster, the parson, the physician, the lawyer, were considered and treated as a sort of sacred nobility, apart from the vulgar, and wholly refusing admixture with them; they were placed in the seats of honor, and counted among counsellors; their company was sought by the wealthy and the educated, their acts were chronicled, and their words were echoed from mouth to mouth. In the streets, when the schoolmaster or minister appeared, the children at play drew up into a hurried line, took off their caps, made deferential bows and listened with humility to the greeting or word of advice. Nowadays, the Pope himself would be hustled in an omnibus, and if Master Elliman were to appear in the streets and offer advice to the children, ten to one but that they would throw dirt at him. It was in the twilight which followed the departing day of these venerable times and preceded the coming on of these degenerate darker hours, that John Adams became a pedagogue. He was hardly at that age fit to be a teacher. He was thoughtful, ambitious and lofty in his aims, but he was also somewhat indolent and wanted persistency. It is true that his mind was hardly made up as to what he should do for a living. We have said that he began with studying for the ministry, but he tells us that he at one time read much in medical books, and inclined to the study of physic.[2]
Yet I imagine that his inclination to either of these professions was never very strong. His education at Cambridge, then the high seat of orthodoxy, and perhaps the advice of his parents, his father holding an office in the church government of his town of some importance at that day, may have led his mind in the direction of the ministry, and his studies in that line were very regular and persistent for some time. Surgery and medicine had probably merely the fleeting fascination for him which they have for multitudes of eager young men, striving to pry into all the subtile secrets of nature, and to find out all the mysteries which environ us. But as he says of himself, "the law drew me more and more," and in his Diary under the date of Sunday, 22d of August, 1756, we have the following entry:—
"Yesterday I completed a contract with Mr. Putnam to study the law, under his inspection, for two years. I ought to begin with a resolution to oblige and please him and his lady in a particular manner; I ought to endeavor to please every body, but them in particular. Necessity drove me to this determination, but my inclination, I think, was to preach; however, that would not do. But I set out with firm resolutions, I think, never to commit any meanness or injustice in the practice of law. The study and practice of law, I am sure, does not dissolve the obligations of morality or of religion; and, although the reason of my quitting divinity was my opinion concerning some disputed points, I hope I shall not give reason of offence, to any in that profession, by imprudent warmth."
He now gave up his school, and somewhat changed his manner of life. Before we leave him let us hear his quaint description of the schoolboys of his day—not very different from the youngsters of 1853.
"15. Monday (1756).—I sometimes in my sprightly moments consider myself in my great chair at school, as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth. In this little state I can discover all the great geniuses, all the surprising actions and revolutions of the great world, in miniature. I have several renowned generals not three feet high, and several deep projecting politicians in petticoats. I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockle-shells, &c., with as ardent curiosity as any virtuoso in the Royal Society. Some rattle and thunder out A, B, C, with as much fire and impetuosity as Alexander fought, and very often sit down and cry as heartily upon being outspelt as Cæsar did, when at Alexander's sepulchre he recollected that the Macedonian hero had conquered the world before his age. At one table sits Mr. Insipid, foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig, or playing with his fingers, as gayly and wittily as any Frenchified coxcomb brandishes his cane or rattles his snuff-box. At another, sits the polemical divine, plodding and wrangling in his mind about "Adam's fall, in which we sinned all," as his Primer has it. In short, my little school, like the great world, is made up of kings, politicians, divines, L.L.D.'s, fops, buffoons, fiddlers, sycophants, fools, coxcombs, chimney-sweepers, and every other character drawn in history, or seen in the world. Is it not, then, the highest pleasure, my friend, to preside in this little world, to bestow the proper applause upon virtuous and generous actions, to blame and punish every vicious and contracted trick, to wear out of the tender mind every thing that is mean and little, and fire the new-born soul with a noble ardor and emulation? The world affords us no greater pleasure. Let others waste their bloom of life at the card or billiard-table among rakes or fools, and when their minds are sufficiently fretted with losses, and inflamed by wine, ramble through the streets, assaulting innocent people, breaking windows, or debauching young girls. I envy not their exalted happiness. I had rather sit in school and consider which of my pupils will turn out in his future life a hero, and which a rake, which a philosopher, and which a parasite, than change breasts with them; though possessed of twenty laced waistcoats and a thousand pounds a year."[3]