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 JOHN ADAMS, 
 
 THE 
 
 Statesman of the American Revolution. 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
 WEBSTER HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 
 
 At its Annual Meeting in Boston, Jan. 18, 1884, 
 
 BY 
 
 HON. MELLEN CHAMBERLAIN. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIET^' 
 
 Office, 83 Equitable BuiLoiNr 
 
 1884. 
 
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 JOHN ADAMS, 
 
 THE STATESMAN OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 
 
 ADDRESS BEFORE THE WEBSTER HISTORICAL SOCIETY, AT ITS ANNUAL 
 
 MEETING IN BOSTON, JANUARY 18, 1884, BY 
 
 HON. MELLEN CHAMBERLAIN. 
 
 .--^ ENTRANCE UPON PUBLIC LIFE. 
 
 John Adams entered public life with the first session of 
 the Continental Congi-ess, which met at Philadelphia, 5 Sep- 
 tember, 1774, and remained in the service of the country 
 almost uninterruptedly until the close of his administration, 
 4 March, 1801. Of this period, nine years were covered by 
 the American Revolution, in which he took a leading part 
 and held it with undiminished zeal and constancy until the 
 Treaty of Peace in 1^8'3'.' ■ It*i§"this part of his life of which 
 I am to give some account. 
 
 His influence, during this period of national history, was 
 mainly due to his ability ; but he was fortunate in the time 
 at which he intervened in public affiiirs, as also in the char- 
 acter of the colony from which he Avas a delegate to the 
 Congress. 
 
 Of his great contemporaries, Franklin was not a member 
 until the next spring, and after a little more than a year's 
 service, he went abroad on his French mission ; neither was 
 Jejfferson, who in later years, as a political rival, drew the 
 great body of the people to his wa}^ of thinking on national 
 subjects ; nor until eight years had passed away was Ham- 
 ilton, of marvellous genius for statesmanship. Washington 
 entered the Congress with John Adams, and on his suo-ges- 
 
tion a year later, was transferred from civil life to the head 
 of the army. 
 
 Of the Congress of 1774, Edward Rutledge and John Jay 
 were younger than John Adams ; but the greater part of the 
 delegates Avere of an age which brings di sexual ifications for 
 parliamentary leadership. John Adams was thirty-nine 3'ears 
 old, and in the prime of his great powers. Peculiarities of 
 temper, which in later years impaired his influence, at this 
 time were a help rather than a hindrance. It must also be 
 counted as his good fortune that he came from Massachusetts 
 Bay ; for though that colony was regarded with distrust and 
 dislike by the middle and southern colonies, there were facts 
 in her history, as well as something in the character of her 
 people, w^hich gave potency to her voice in the national coun- 
 cils, and weight to John Adams as her leading representa- 
 tive. 
 
 Under such circumstances John Adams entered Congress, 
 which he attended through the sessions of four years. Dur- 
 ing this period of revolution, which was also the period of 
 necessary constitutional reconstruction, he rendered services 
 such as no other statesman rendered, and more widely, 
 more profoundly, and — unless present indications prove 
 fallacious — more permanently impressed the political insti- 
 tutions of the country than an}' other man who has ever liA^ed 
 in it; "and by reason of these services he became entitled to 
 rank as the pre-eminent statesman of the Revolution. 
 
 My object in this paper is to show by what endowments, 
 by what acquisitions, and by what use of his powers, can be 
 justly claimed for John Adams the first place among such 
 statesmen as Samuel Adams, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, 
 and even Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 There were no congressional reporters in those days. The 
 members were pledged to secrec3\ The journals are neither 
 
full nor accurate, and even John Adams's own diary fails us 
 at some of the most critical and interesting points ; yet his 
 services, in their results, are historically clear, and not diffi- 
 cult of estimation. It is more difficult, however, to estimate 
 the character of the statesman who rendered these services ; 
 for though his purposes w^ere single, and his methods simple 
 and direct, his character was complex. In certain aspects 
 it seems to belong to no known type of the English race, nor 
 can it be described in a phrase. 
 
 HIS CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 Here was a man born and bred in a narrow, provincial 
 sphere, remote from the centres of liberal thought, untrav- 
 elled, and separated by the ocean from those movements 
 which so powerfully affected, European society in the middle 
 of the eighteenth century ; and yet, in rare combination and 
 large measm'e, he included in his character, and exhibited by 
 his life and action, the best influences of the Reformation, in 
 Avhich those movements had their remote origin. Acknowl- 
 edging the supremacy of conscience, and yielding implicit 
 obedience to the claims of natural and revealed religion, he 
 recognized its essential unity under all its varied forms of 
 manifestation, and w^as free from the slis^htest trace of iDio-- 
 otry or sectarian narrowness. He believed in civil and relig- 
 ious liberty as inherent rights of the people, but under sub- 
 jection, as are the forces of nature, to an intelligent and ever- 
 active principle of law, which is Milton's idea of liberty. 
 He was a provincial, w^ith all the traditions of provincialism ; 
 and yet, undeniably, he was the foremost advocate and most 
 efficient promoter of nationality. Before the colonies had 
 declared themselves independent, and for the purpose of 
 promoting that measure, he advocated the formation of State 
 constitutions, and the severino- of one tie which bound them 
 
to the mother country ; and later, when the great Declaration 
 had gone forth, he strove for a closer union and the sem- 
 blance,, at least, of a national government under the Articles 
 of Confederation. Finally, when the war had closed and 
 the terms of peace were under discussion, he, more than any 
 other, secured to the nation the old colonial rights in the 
 fisheries of Newfoundland, opened to navigation the mouth 
 of the Mississippi when under doubtful jurisdiction, pushed 
 the national boundaries from the Alleoiianies to the g-reat 
 river, from the Ohio to the central line of the northern lakes, 
 from the Kennebec to the St. Croix, and only yielding the 
 Canadas to the necessities of peace. 
 
 It is an original, not an acquired, character we have to con- 
 sider. His breadth of understandino^ and liberal views were 
 not exhibited for the first time after he had left his native 
 province for the wider theatre of national activity, nor when 
 he had been in contact Avith speculative thought in Europe, 
 but while yet a boy musing upon life and his possible rela- 
 tions to it. 
 
 John Adams possessed two faculties in a degree which 
 distinguished him among his countrymen, and made him 
 pre-eminently serviceable in a period of revolution, — the his- 
 toric imagination which develops nationality from its germ, 
 and clear intuitions of organic constitutional law. In these 
 faculties he has never been surpassed by any American 
 statesman, nor equalled save by him whose name needs no 
 mention in this presence. There is evidence that from his 
 youth he was accustomed to trace the growth and develop- 
 ment of nationality in the great epochs of Saxon and English 
 history and project it under new conditions in America ; 
 and that from the earliest days of the Revolution, he saw in 
 the determining force of race tendencies, united with free, 
 independent government, the inevitable greatness of his 
 
country. This gave unity and consistency to liis wliole 
 public career, in which respect he stands nearly alone among 
 public men of equal rank. It also gave him faith when others 
 doubted, courage when they quailed in the face of danger, 
 and constancy when they lost heart from disasters. In the 
 gloomy days which succeeded the defeats at Brandywine 
 and Germantown, when Washington and his army escaped 
 destruction only by the unaccountable remissness of Howe, 
 John Adams said, "These disasters will hurt us, but not ruin 
 us." He had unshaken confidence in the course of free em- 
 pire.' 
 
 If we now look at some of those moral characteristics, 
 which marked him as a statesman, we shall find certain race 
 traits which he seems to have inherited immediately from his 
 British ancestry, rather than by transmission through his 
 colonial progenitors. He possessed the pluck, courage and 
 bull-dog tenacity which we call English, and which all 
 through their history has stood them in such stead in des- 
 perate civil and military encounters, often changing lost 
 fields to fields of victory ; and, on the other hand, there was 
 no trace in his composition of the craft, cunning or selfish- 
 ness which narrow circumstances and a hundred years of 
 contest with a treacherous and skulking foe are supposed, 
 justly or unjustly, to have engrafted on the New England 
 character of his day. 
 
 There was no strategy in his nature. His path led straight 
 to his object, and his movements in it were simple and 
 direct, though not always free from ostentation and self- 
 
 ^ At a meeting of the American Academy in 1807, at tlie request of Dr. 
 Abiel Holmes, John Adams wrote on a slip of paper, now in my posses- 
 sion, the following, lines Avhich he had seen inscribed in some forgotten 
 place : — 
 
 " The eastern nations sink; their glorj' ends, 
 And Empire rises where tlie sun descends." 
 
(5 
 
 assertion, not easily understood in so great a man. In his 
 victories we perceive no special skill in plan or science of 
 battle ; but his eye was quick to detect the stress of the en- 
 gagement, and there his honest blows fell fast and heavy. 
 How clearly he saw the inevitableness of the issue, and 
 how pluckily for more than a twelvemonth, in Congress, he 
 fouo'ht the fight of the Declaration ; and ao-ainst what odds 
 — for nothing is now more clear than this, that neither the 
 Congress, nor the people as a whole, were quite ripe for it. 
 He carried the measure by sheer force and persistence ; and 
 he was right. Yet it was one of those almost hopeless 
 struggles in which victory forms an epoch in the history of 
 human progress. 
 
 This directness of aim and impetuosity of movement were 
 not the conventional methods, either in the legislation or 
 the diplomacy of his day, and they subjected him to some 
 animadversion from those who respected his honesty and 
 ability. While on his Dutch mission, in 1781, to procure a 
 recognition of our independence and to effect a loan, he 
 shocked the old diplomatists by his memorial to their High 
 Mightinesses and the Prince of Orange. This was issued 
 against the advice, and even remonstrance, of our French 
 allies.' But it led to ultimate success. I think it will be 
 found that John Adams was always right in his well-con- 
 sidered judgments, and usually so in his measures ; if any 
 part of his conduct was open to criticism, it was his 
 manner.^ 
 
 ^ When copies of it reached America, Madison, Avritiug to Pendleton, 
 said, '• I enclose a copy of Mr. Adams's memorial to the States General. 
 I wish I could have informed you of its being lodged in the archives of 
 their High Mightinesses, instead of presenting it to you in print," 
 Madison's Letters, i. 54. 
 
 ^ The memorial above referred to was not promulgated without mature 
 consideration of the whole case. Writing a year later to Francis Dana, 
 
When the cause of indepentlence and nationality demanded 
 an orator, — not brilliant declaimers' like Henry, Lee and 
 Eutledge, but one who, with capacity for affairs, could 
 bring powerful and intrepid advocacy into council and pas- 
 sionate appeals to patriotic sentiment, — such an orator was 
 found in John Adams, the Colossus of debate. 
 
 These special gifts were made effective by a vigorous and 
 comprehensive intellect and high courage. All his powers 
 were trained, and every opportunit}'^ for improvement em- 
 braced, with an assiduity not common in America at that day. 
 
 John Adams at his best was always a statesman ; as a 
 politician hemade a vei-y indifferent figure. In his country's 
 ends he always succeeded — always; and in his own, quite 
 likely would always have failed, had he sought any that 
 were merel}'' personal. His much-derided administration, 
 thouo-h conducted under great embarrassments, was useful 
 to the country, and not without its period of national glory ; 
 and the measure which threw his cabinet into confusion was 
 a bold stroke of statesmanship, conceived and persisted in 
 without regard to party or personal interests. Ambitious,, 
 vain, egotistical, self-confident and jealous, — for he was all 
 these, as no one knew better or ha-s oftener told us than 
 himself, — these qualities, on a superficial view, detract from 
 the perfection of his character, and have cruelly interfered 
 with his just fame. But they were mere exaggerations of 
 harmless qualities. Beneath them all we can perceive a 
 complete and well-rounded character, — large, powerful, 
 active, and full of humanities, — with more of individuality 
 
 our then unaccredited minister to St. Petersburg, he said, "I see no 
 objection against your attempt, as you propose, to tind out tlie real dis- 
 position of the Empress, or her ministers. You cannot talie any noisy 
 measures like those I have taken here. Tlie form of tlie government for- 
 bids it." Works, vii. 544. 
 
than that of any other public man of his day. His /or^e Avas 
 action. "I never shall shine," he said, "till some animating 
 occasion calls forth all my powers." When side-tracked in 
 the vice-presidency, or finally ditched at Braintree, the engine 
 puffed, and snorted, and let off steam in a very unedifying 
 manner; but on a clear course, no matter Avhat the load or 
 Avhat the grades, it moved with the swiftness and verve of the 
 lightning-train — and, it maybe added, with something of 
 its racket. 
 
 In respect to a man endowed with such rich and varied 
 gifts, Ave have a rational curiosity to knoAV something of the 
 processes of education and special training by AAdiich they 
 Avere so supplemented that in due time this native of an 
 obscure provincial town came to be regarded as the ablest 
 constitutional hiAvyer of his day and the consummate 
 orator and statesman of the Eevolution. Nor are Ave Avith- 
 out the means. 
 
 PREPARATION FOR PUBLIC LIFE. 
 
 John Adams evidently Avas not unconscious of his powers, 
 nor Avithout ambition to make them servient to the interests 
 of his country and his OAvn honorable fame. In his youth 
 he divined the coming empire of America, and formed him- 
 self, I think not AA'ithout prescience, for a distinguished part 
 in its affairs. His self-examination was critical and unspar- 
 ing. He carefully considered his life-AA^ork, as Avell as his 
 OAvn poAvers. To Avhat had been given him he added much 
 by reading, reflection, and conversation AAdth those more 
 mature than himself. Of his college life we knoAv but little ; 
 but on his graduation he entered upon a Avide course of 
 study Avith commendable diligence. His diary tells us that 
 he made himself acquainted with the great poets of antiquity : 
 Avith Homer, Viro-il, Horace and Ovid. He knew Shaks- 
 
9 
 
 peare, Milton, Baxter and Pope, and apparently understood 
 and enjoyed them. Before the adoption of the law as his 
 profession, and for the purpose of determining his choice, he 
 read with attention the works of the great divines, the 
 political, and philosophical writers then in vogue, and the 
 authoritative treatises in medical science. When fairl}^ 
 engaged in the study of the law, he pursued it with such 
 success that before the age of thirty he became one of the 
 best-equipped lawyers in America. 
 
 "The study and. practice of law, I am sure, does not dis- 
 solve the obligations of morality or of religion," so he wrote 
 at the age of twenty, as he was entering on his course of 
 study; nor did he ever forget this conviction of his unhurt 
 3^outh. His work was honest throughout, and he prepared 
 himself honestly for it. He did not gauge his legal studies 
 to the requirements of his native Braintree, where he began 
 to practise, nor by those of the metropolis in which he was 
 at one time settled. He aimed, he said, to distinguish him- 
 self among his fellow-students "by the study of the civil law 
 in its native tongues." With Bracton, Britton, Fleta, Glan- 
 ville, Coke and Lord Hale he became familiar, as also 
 with Justinian and the great commentators on the civil 
 law. To these must be added Montesquieu, Blackstone 
 (then recently published), Voltaire's Louis XIV., and, in 
 fine, whatever was within his reach that could enlarge, en- 
 rich or strengthen his understanding for grasping the prin- 
 ciples of law and constitutional government. Following the 
 advice of Gridley, the Nestor of the bar, "to pursue the 
 study, of the law rather than the gain of it," he " labored to 
 get distinct ideas of law, right, wrong, justice, equity ; to 
 search for them in his own mind, in Roman, Grecian, French, 
 English treatises of natural, civil, common, statute law; to 
 aim at an exact knowledo-e of the natui'e, end and means of 
 
10 
 
 government ; to compare the ditt'erent forms of it with each 
 other, and each of them with their effects on public and pri- 
 vate happiness for the advancement of right ; to assert and 
 maintain liberty and virtue ; to discourage and abolish ty- 
 ranny and vice." With these added extracts from his diary 
 we have the whole scheme of his life : " Let little objects be 
 neglected and forgot, and great ones engross, arouse and 
 exalt my soul." "I was born for business, for both activity 
 and study. I have little appetite or relish for anything else. 
 I must double and redouble .my diligence." The recorded 
 lives of o;i-eat statesmen have sometimes made us familiar 
 with the aspirations and purposes of their youth ; but I re- 
 call few instances where these were fixed so high, so undevi- 
 atingly pursued, and so fully attained by achievements which 
 have indelibl}^ impressed themselves on the happy fortunes 
 of a continent. These principles, made eflicient by an in- 
 tellect of extraordinary power, placed him foremost among 
 the lawyers of his day ; and as we read the history of the 
 country, we learn without surprise that John Adams was also 
 foremost amono- those wdio established the freedom and na- 
 tionality of America, and laid the foundation of its govern- 
 ment.' When he entered public life, in 1774, he was prob- 
 ably well qualified to conduct causes and argue questions of 
 public law before any tribunal sitting at Westminster, and 
 to represent with distinction any English constituency in the 
 House of Commons. 
 
 ^ John Adams's legal erudition does not, as is so often the case among 
 great lawyers, rest merely upon tradition. His dissertation on the Canon 
 and Feudal Law, written at the age of twenty-nine, is still extant, and 
 may be read with profit even in the light of later studies. It was erro- 
 neously attributed to Gridley, and pronounced by HoUis, in England, 
 where it was more than once reprinted, to be " one of the verj' finest 
 productions from jSTorth America." 
 
11 
 
 Such was the man to whom came his hour ; aud he made' it 
 an epoch in history. 
 
 John xVdams was too conspicuous to be overlooked among 
 the great men of the country, and the value of his services 
 was acknowledged by his contemporaries ; but I think they 
 were not estimated at their true value. We are in a tar 
 better position than they were to do him complete justice. 
 We understand the Revolution itself, in its causes and its 
 progress, much more fully than those who were actors in 
 it. The century of the national existence just closed Avas 
 to them the dark, uncertain future ; to us it has joined the 
 historic past. In it we see events in their relations and pro- 
 portions which to them appeared incomplete and sometimes 
 unrelated. 
 
 CHARACTER OF THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 But I venture to think that we shall not reach these desir- 
 able results unless we unlearn some things we have been 
 taught, and clear away some prejudices which have proved 
 so fatal to successful historical research. We seem now far 
 enough removed from the Revolution to study it historically, 
 and not as partisans ; to be permitted to learn that then, as 
 now, when people divide into parties, neither facts, nor 
 right, nor conscience, are wholly on one side. Nor does 
 it seem longer necessary to conceal those facts which do not 
 stand for national honor, or to be compelled to guess them 
 from ambiguous and often disingenuous apologies. It is 
 hardly exaggeration, however, to say that we can more dis- 
 passionately discuss the causes of the late civil war, and lay 
 bare the motives and conduct of the men and parties engaged 
 in it on either side, than the motives and conduct of men and 
 parties at the beginning of the Revolution, the intrigues in 
 the Congress, or the convention at Saratoga in 1777. 
 
12 
 
 The result of this state of things, growing out of undue 
 solicitude for the reputation of individuals and a patriotic 
 disposition to exalt the successful party, is that we have 
 much history that is not truth, and profitable neither for 
 reproof, instruction nor guidance. 
 
 John Adams's fame as a statesman grew out of his services 
 during the American Revolution. In the endeavor to form a 
 just estimate of those services, I have been led to consider 
 that event in its inception, progress and results, and to dis- 
 cover, if possible, the exact relations of 'John Adams to it. 
 
 In the prosecution of this purpose I have observed some 
 facts ^vhich do not appear to me to be sufficiently empha- 
 sized, to say the least, in the histories of that period ; and I 
 have reached some conclusions which require a fuller state- 
 ment of the grounds on which they rest than is ordinarily 
 found in an address of this description. 
 
 It seems to me that we shall fail to appreciate the true 
 character of the Revolution if we restrict its entirety to the 
 events which transpired between the Stamp Act of 1765 and 
 the Peace of 1783 ; for, thus limited, I am unable to find ade-- 
 quate causes in those events when regarded in their necessary 
 political sequence, or when referred in historical parallelism 
 to other movements of society which have resulted in the 
 disruption of governments. The causes of revolution are 
 usually remote from the event. No matter on what soil they 
 are planted, the seeds of a new order of government germi- 
 nate slowly, and only children's children are permitted to 
 repose beneath its branches. For the history of the Revolu- 
 tion we must go back to the planting of the seeds. John 
 Adams is authority for this view of the subject. "The prin- 
 ciples and feelings which contributed to produce the Revolu- 
 tion ought to be traced back for two hundred years, and 
 sought in the history of the country from the first plantations 
 
13 
 
 in America." Seldom, if ever, are revolutions the spontane- 
 ous action of an entire community. Their interests may be 
 the same, they may suffer from a common grievance, but 
 people will not think alike. Divergences of opinions are 
 sure to arise, and out of these parties are formed. A contest 
 ensues with vicissitudes of fortune, but ultimately terminat- 
 ing in accordance with the movement of society out of which 
 it springs. The American Eevolution was no exception to 
 this general rule, though one might infer otherwise from 
 much which passes for history. 
 
 To understand the services which John Adams rendered 
 to the country in the Revolution, it is essential to understand 
 the attitude of the parties which brought it on, and, with 
 great exactness, the questions which divided them in their 
 inception, progress and urgency, at the time when he en- 
 gaged in public affairs ; and especially so in his case, since, 
 to a profound knowledge of these questions, and the forma- 
 tive influence of this knowledge on his mind and character, 
 was due in no small degree his success in giving direction 
 and happy issue to the movement. 
 
 The commonly received notion is, that the passage of the 
 Stamp Act so clearly contravened the rights of the colonists 
 as British subjects, that they with one accord rose in resistance, 
 and after eight years of strife, finally achieved their indepen- 
 dence. I venture to think that this is the apparent, rather 
 than the real, state of the case. I think that those who 
 accept it fail to perceive the true nature of this demonstration, 
 and wholly overlook the vital elements of genuine revolution 
 which existed in the antecedent history of the two colonies 
 whose hearts were earliest engaged in the cause, — Virginia 
 and Massachusetts, — and made revolution possible; and 
 that of these causes, perhaps the prime cause, without which 
 the Revolution would never have beo-un when it did and 
 
14 
 
 where it did, was ecclesiastical rather than political, begin- 
 ning with the settlement of the colony of Massachusetts 
 Ba}^ and operating with unbroken succession and efficiency 
 down to the commencement of hostilities. 
 
 It also overlooks the origin and continuity of that civil 
 contest which began in Massachusetts with the revocation of 
 the first charter in 1684, between the friends of the royal 
 government and the champions of popular rights, in which 
 parties arrayed themselves under the respective and succes- 
 sive lead of Randolph and Danforth, Dudley and Cooke, 
 Burnett and Wells, on issues as sharply defined, involving 
 the same general principles, and as hotly contested, as those 
 which divided Bernard and Hutchinson from James Otis and 
 Samuel Adams. 
 
 Another misconception which belittles the contest and 
 detracts from the merit of the patriotic party, is that which 
 regards the Tories as a mere handful of malignants, composed 
 mainly of commercial adventurers and government officials, 
 having no stake in the community, together with a few old 
 families which, for personal aggrandizement, set themselves 
 in opposition to the principles and measures of the patriots, 
 and sought to compass the subjugation and ruin of the 
 country in which they were born, and in which their dearest 
 interests centred. 
 
 The only remaining matter to which I shall allude, relates 
 to the grounds on which the patriotic party opposed the par- 
 liamentary claim of right to tax the colonists. 
 
 In readinof the histories of those times, one is likelv to 
 receive the impression that the outburst of popular indigna- 
 tion which pervaded the colonies on the news of the passage 
 of the Stamp Act would not have occurred had the col- 
 onists been represented in Parliament ; but there is no foun- 
 dation for this impression. Their main objection was com- 
 
15 
 
 mercial, and not political. It was to the tax, not to non- 
 representation ; still less to any merely theoretical claim of 
 parliamentary supremacy, as is evident from the quiet which 
 followed the repeal of the act, though accompanied by the 
 express declaration of the right to tax the colonists. And we 
 are to regard the resolutions of the Congress of 1765, as well 
 as those of the provincial assemblies in the early stages of 
 the controversy, and perhaps as late as 1775, in the nature 
 of protests, like the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of a 
 later day, designed, of course, to influence parliamentary 
 legislation, but not as preliminaries of forcible resistance. 
 
 But there came a time — earlier in Massachusetts than else- 
 where, for reasons to be given hereafter — when all this was 
 changed ; when the colonists came to understand that there 
 Avere colonial constitutions as well as a British constitution, 
 and that both were subject to like laws of growth and devel- 
 opment ; that by the operation of these laws in the direction 
 of natural rights, their own constitutions had come to be the 
 basis and measure of their rights and immunities ; that in all 
 cases, especially ii; internal afiairs, where the imperial and 
 colonial constitutional maxims conflicted, the latter were the 
 fundamental rule of right and action ; and finally, that if the 
 validity of this construction involved a reference to the ulti- 
 ma ratio, it would only be one more instance, of which Eng- 
 lish history is full, of that mode of settling constitutional 
 questions. When the colonists came to this ground, they 
 had a good fighting position, not before. Here John Adams 
 stood — stood nearly alone ; altogether alone in the clearness 
 with which he saw the strength of this position, and in the 
 courage and pertinacity with which he maintained it. To 
 this clear constitutional ground he first led his own colony, 
 and finally the representatives of the thirteen colonies in 
 Congress assembled, in a declaration of their rights in 1774, 
 
16 
 
 and of their independence in 1776. This was his greatest 
 public service ; and it was the greatest feat of statesmanship 
 during the revolutionary period. He had able co-adjutors, 
 but to him, more than to any other, the honor is due. This 
 ground of rights under colonial constitution once taken, the 
 strife was no longer rebellion, but maintenance of constitu- 
 tional rights. "We are not exciting a rebellion," exclaimed 
 John Adams. " Opposition, nay, open, avowed resistance by 
 arms, against usurpation and lawless violence, is not rebel- 
 lion by the law of God or the land." The colonists were no 
 longer traitors, but patriots ; and those who undertook to 
 force their position were justly deemed public enemies. 
 Final success was no longer doubtful. The cause had 
 aligned itself to the great movement of society, which began 
 with the Eeformation, in the direction of nationality, and in 
 its support had secured the resources of a continent. 
 
 MASSACHUSETTS IN THE EE VOLUTION. 
 
 These positions must now be referred to their historic ba- 
 sis. It was by no accident that the Revolution broke out in 
 Massachusetts Bay. It could have happened, at that time, 
 nowhere else upon the continent. Nowhere else had a suc- 
 cession of causes, civil and religious, operative through a 
 hundred years, prepared the way for it. Hither the royal 
 troops had been sent, because here they were needed to 
 maintain the royal government : and to these troops the first 
 armed resistance in which blood was shed, was on the field 
 of Lexington, 19 April, 1775.' 
 
 ^ On this point it is scarcely necessary to quote authorities. One will suf- 
 fice. "In all the late American disturbances, and in every attempt 
 against the authority of the British Parliament, the people of Massachu- 
 setts Bay have taken the lead. Every new move towards independence 
 has been theirs ; and in every fresh mode of resistance against the law, 
 
17 
 
 Starting, then, from that place and hour, and running back 
 on the line of colonial history in search of adequate causes 
 not connected with antecedent causes, I find my progress 
 arrested and my historic sense of cause and effect satisfied 
 only by the events and motives which led to the settlement 
 of the Bay in 1630. These motives were two : religious and 
 civil liberty. And the greatest of these was religious lil)erty. 
 It was also the most efficient. And I find that these mo- 
 tives, regarded as causes, continued to exist and operate in 
 clear religious and political sequence, with only insignificant 
 interruptions, and with scarcely impaired vitality, to the 
 treaty of peace in that j^ear of God of which the last was 
 the happy centennial ; and that the events which occurred 
 iDetween 1765 and 1783, though dramatically complete in 
 themselves, yet historically are only the closing act of a 
 drama which opened in 1630 with the coming of Winthrop 
 and his Puritans. 
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM A CAUSE OF THE EE VOLUTION. 
 
 And thus the American Revolution began in the colony of 
 Massachusetts Bay, and in its vital and most potent force 
 was religious rather than political. This character of the 
 Revolution was impressed upon it by the circumstances which 
 led to the Puritan hegira from England in 1630; and those 
 circumstances, only changed in form, but remaining the same 
 in their essential character, continued to exist until tlie 
 
 they have fli'st set the example, and then issued out admonitory letters 
 to the other colonies to follow it." Mauduit's Short "View of the His- 
 tory of tlie New England Colonies, 5. An addi'ess to the House. 7 Feb- 
 ruary, 1775, and before the events at Lexington, proposed by the min- 
 ister, and carried after great debate, declared that a rebellion already 
 existed in Massachusetts, countenanced and fomented by unlawful com- 
 binations in the other Colonies. Hildreth, Hist. U.S. iii. 61. 
 
18 
 
 events at Lexington in 1775 notified the Bishop of London, 
 as well as the King of England, that the descendants of the 
 Puritans had referred both the polemics of the hierarchy and 
 the casuistry of parliamentary supremacy to the decision of 
 war. The motive which led to the Puritan emigration was 
 religious rather than civil. It was from the crozier rather 
 than the sceptre — from Laud and the High Commission 
 rather than Charles the First — that the Puritans fled.' 
 
 They came hither to escape the hierarchy of the Church of 
 England and to set up one of their own. And it was in 
 defence of this domestic hierarchy — though civil and reli- 
 gious liberty were indissolubly connected in their minds — 
 that the clergy of New England, alone of all the professional 
 or propertied classes, arrayed themselves on the popular side. 
 
 Li the middle and southern colonies, as well as in New 
 England, there had been political contests with the represen- 
 tatives of the Crown. All the colonies were dissatisfied with 
 the Navigation Laws and Acts of Trade, and the exercise 
 of the royal prerogatives ; but out of New England, the colo- 
 nists, who were mainlj- of the Church of England, — certainly 
 not Puritans, — became quiet as the enforcement of these 
 laws was relaxed or evaded. But in New England, and 
 especially in Massachusetts, disquietude prevailed unceas- 
 ingly, and the Revolutionar}' cause, when no other disturbing 
 
 ^ "Independence of English Church and State was the fimdamental 
 principle of the first colonization, has been its general principle for 
 two hundred years, and noAV, I hope, is past dispute. Who, then, was the 
 author, inventor, discoverer, of independence? Tlie only true answer 
 must be. the first emigrants. When we say that Otis. Adams. Mayhew, 
 Henry, Lee, Jefferson, &c., were authors of independence, we ought to 
 say they were only awakeners and revivers of the original fundamental 
 principle of colonization."' John Adams's Works, x. 359. " It is certain 
 that civil dominion was but the secondary motive. I'eligious the i^rimary, 
 with our ancestors in coming hither and setthng this land." President 
 Stiles, American Pulpit, xxx. 
 
19 
 
 element was apparent, fluctuated with the efibrts of the Bishop 
 of Loudon to establisli Episcopacy in New Enghind. For 
 the accomplishment of this end there was the ever present, 
 always active motive of sectarian zeal for the propagation of 
 religious faith, and still more of ecclesiastical government. 
 To this was added a special reason in the dissatisfaction of 
 the Church-of-England people in Massachusetts, to whom 
 Puritanic ways were displeasing. This class, consisting in the 
 early days chiefly of crown officials and commercial sojourners, 
 was not large, but increasing sufficiently so as to excite the 
 commiseration of the Bishop of London, as sheep without 
 a shepherd, and wandering in unconsecrated pastures. His 
 efibrts for their relief kept the Puritans in hot water for 
 more than seventy years, and gave rise to a mutual dislike 
 which became hereditary. Li their resistance to Episcopacy 
 the Massachusetts people were regarded in England as 
 bigoted religionists and refractory subjects. And so were 
 they by the people of the colonies out of New England; a 
 fact never to be lost sight of in tracing the progress of the 
 Revolution. For the middle and southern colonies had been 
 settled or become possessed by people in sympathy with the 
 Church of England, or at least having no special cause of 
 hostility to it, — as was the case with the Puritans, — under 
 whose ministrations they were contented, with loyalty to the 
 King, to worship God after the manner of their fathers. 
 
 To this grateful privilege of ecclesiastical relationship was 
 added a pecuniary advantage, so long as the Society for the 
 Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts liberally expended 
 the contributions of the piously disposed churchmen of the 
 mother country in establishing parishes, erecting church edi- 
 flces, and paying the salaries of missionaries in colonial ter- 
 ritory. To this they saw no more objections than occur to 
 the minds of our frontier settlers to the benevolent opera- 
 
20 
 
 tions of the Home Missionary Society. But to the Puritans 
 of Massachusetts, scattering the seeds of Episcopacy was 
 sowing tares by the Evil One. To escape from soul-destroy- 
 ing conformity, their fathers had fled their pleasant homes in 
 Lincolnshire, and set up their altars in a bleak and sterile 
 wilderness. They had come hither, not so much to erect a 
 state as a church ; and if, after a time, the two became one, 
 that one was the church-state, not the state-church, between 
 which there is an immense difference. They set it up for 
 themselves, not for others. To that liberality of toleration 
 they made no pretension, as is so often forgotten. To their 
 new home came unwelcome intruders ; and with them came 
 trouble. I am now to trace this history.' Laud, at the head 
 
 ^ Some years since, I noticed facts in ecclesiastical history apparently 
 of more importance in the Revolutionary struggle than had been ac- 
 corded to tliem by historians ; and later, special study has confirmed this 
 impression. This reticence on the part of those who wrote early on the 
 war of the Revolution had been observed by Boucher, the Tory clergyman 
 of Virginia, and by him attributed to some discreditable motive, such as 
 a disposition to conceal the Puritan narrowness which would exclude 
 Episcopalians from the privileges of church worship after their form. 
 View of the Causes of the Revolution, 148. Bancroft and Hildreth have 
 treated the subject as fully, perhaps, as the necessary regard to propor- 
 tions in a general history would permit ; but neither, so as to apprise the 
 reader how early and how continuously, nor, I think, how efiiciently, 
 ecclesiasticism operated as a cause of the Revolution. Hildreth. who 
 treats the subject more fully and more directly than Bancroft, says, "The 
 Congregational ministers of New England, an intelligent and very influ- 
 ential body, headed at this period by Chauncy and Cooper, of Boston, cher- 
 ished a traditionary sentiment of opposition to British control, — a senti- 
 ment strengthened, of late years, by the attempts of the English Society 
 for the Propagation of the Gospel to build up Episcopacy in New England 
 by supporting there some thirty Episcopal missionaries. An unseasonable 
 revival of the scheme for a bishop in the colonies had recently excited a 
 bitter controversy, in which, since Mayhew's death, Chauncy had come 
 forward as the Congregational champion; a controversy which could 
 
21 
 
 of the High Commission, began the assault on the expatriated 
 Puritans in 1634, but the civil wars prevented further efforts 
 to set up Episcopacy until the Restoration. The contention, 
 however, did not cease when Presbyterianism became the 
 State religion under the Commonwealth, since the adherents 
 of that ecclesiastical polity sought to introduce it into Massa- 
 chusetts. This the Puritans resisted as strenuously as they 
 had resisted prelacy. They had established independent 
 
 only tend to confirm the Congregational body In hostility to the extension 
 of English influence." Hist. U.S. iii. 55. 
 
 There is a very interesting letter written by John Adams to Dr. 
 Morse in 1815, the whole of which should be read by those who would 
 know the views of one most competent to speak on this subject. The 
 following extract will serve to show some foundation at least for the 
 view I have taken in the text ; and I may add, had I met with it earlier in 
 my reading, it would have saved me much research, and the reader some 
 Images of my owai : — 
 
 " Where is the man to be found at this day, when we see Methodisti- 
 cal bishops, bishops of the Church of England, and bishops, archbishops 
 and Jesuits of the Church of Rome, with indifference, who will believe that 
 the apprehension of Episcopacy contributed fifty years ago, as much as 
 any other cause, to arouse the attention, not only of the inquiring mind, but 
 of the common people, and urge them to close thinking on the constitu- 
 tional authority of Parliament over the Colonies ? This, nevertheless, was 
 a fact as certain as any in the history of North America. The objection 
 was not merely to the office of a bishop, though even that was dreaded, 
 but to the authority of Parliament, on which it must be founded. ... If 
 Parliament can erect dioceses and appoint bishops, they may introduce 
 the whole hierarchy, establish tithes, forbid marriages and funerals, estab- 
 lish religions, forbid dissenters." Works, x. 185. 
 
 At an earlier date he had said, " It is true that the people of this coun- 
 try in general, and of this province in special, have an hereditary appre- 
 hension of, and aversion to, lordships, temporal and spiritual. Their 
 ancestors fled to this wilderness to avoid them, — they suffered suffi- 
 ciently under them in England. And there are few of the present gener- 
 ation who have not been warned of the danger of them by their fathers 
 and grandfathers, and enjoined to oppose them. Novanglus, February 
 13, 1775. 
 
22 
 
 churches, and determined they should remain such. They 
 agreed with John Milton, — 
 
 jSTew Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large. 
 
 But the Restoration of Charles II. renewed the strife under 
 its old form — resistance to Anglicanism. For, as soon as 
 the domestic affairs of the realm would permit, royal com- 
 missioners were sent over to inquire into the reports from 
 Massachusetts Bay, " that his subjects in those parts did not 
 submit to his government, but looked upon themselves as 
 independent upon him and his laws ; " and with instructions 
 "to take care that such orders were established there that 
 the Act of Navigation should be punctually observed ; " and 
 to send home a detailed report of the frame and constitution 
 of the local government in Church and State. ' 
 
 The significance of these directions was clear to the colo- 
 nists when they found their old enemy, the Church-of-Eng- 
 land Samuel Maverick, among the commissioners. This 
 unfriendly scrutiny into their ecclesiastical and civil affairs 
 was met by the colonists with infinite skill and patience, if 
 not with entire candor ; for nobody knew better than them- 
 selves that they had claimed and exercised substantial sover- 
 eignty in Church and State, and that they were determined 
 to yield it only in the direst extremity. In that extremity 
 they soon found themselves ; but neither they, nor their 
 descendants, ceased to resist the introduction of prelacy, 
 until armed resistance at the Revolution involved the thirteen 
 colonies in a strife which had its origin in a question of local 
 polemics. 
 
 In 1684 the enemies of the Puritan Church overthrew the 
 old charter under which the colonists had been allowed to 
 manage civil and ecclesiastical affairs in a very free and in- 
 dependent w^ay. What of disaster to civil and religious lib- 
 
 > Palfrey, Hist. ii. 584. 
 
23 
 
 erty, as the Puritans understood these terms, this change 
 imported, soon became evident. It overthrew their consti- 
 tution of government ; it confiscated the title to their lands 
 and all improvements on them, and it imperilled their cher- 
 ished form of church government. The significance of the 
 loss of their charter, in its influence upon the hundred years 
 of controversy which ensued, Avill not be fully appreciated, 
 unless we keep in mind that ecclesiastical, as Avell as civil, 
 causes led to that result. It was not merely that the colo- 
 nists had disobeyed the Navigation laws, coined money, and 
 performed other acts of civil sovereignty, that Charles's com- 
 missioners were sent on their errand of inquiry. In fact, the 
 formation of the commission was instigated in the colony 
 itself by those whose chief grievance was, that they had 
 suffered under the strictness of the Puritan hierarchy, in 
 not being permitted those consolations to be found by them 
 only in the bosom of the Anglican Church. "They discoun- 
 tenance the Church of England," was the constant complaint 
 to the Privy Council by Randolph, the memory of whose 
 malign influence, as the evil genius of New England, still 
 survives in tradition as well as in recorded history. 
 
 The new order of things under the presidency of Dudley 
 began 25 May, 1686, and the day following the Rev. Mr. 
 Ratcliffe, who had been sent over by the Bishop of London 
 to institute Episcopal w^orship, Avaited upon the Council. 
 Mason and Randolph, members of that body, proposed that 
 he should be allowed one of the three Puritan meeting- 
 houses to preach in ; and in June the first Anglican church 
 in NeAV England was organized at Boston. The next year 
 the Old South meeting-house was virtually seized by Andros, 
 Avho had succeeded Dudley, and used for the Church of 
 England service. "If," says Palfrey, "the demand had 
 been for the use of the l)uildino; for a mass, or for a 
 
24 
 
 carriage-house for Juggernaut, it could scarcely have been 
 to the generality of people more offensive." ' But the 
 Revolution of 1689, of which the detestation of Episcopacy 
 was one of the chief causes, swept away Andros and his 
 government, and the Puritan Zion had comparative peace 
 until 1699, when the Earl of Bellomont, the first Church- 
 of-England governor under the new charter, arrived. He 
 was attached to the communion of his church, which he at- 
 tempted to revive in Boston. In this he was encouraged 
 by the Bishop of London, the diocesan for America, and 
 the Lords of Trade, who interested themselves to obtain for 
 the colonists the advantages of ecclesiastical supervision.^ 
 And from this time down to the breaking out of the war, 
 Bishops Tenison, Sherlock and Seeker were successivel}' 
 active in promoting the establishment of an Anglican hier- 
 archy, with resident bishops, in America ; and in 1761, there 
 w^ere in New England thirty missionaries who had been sent 
 over b}'- the Propagation Society. 
 
 For nearly a hundred years preceding the Eevolution, 
 these efforts to establish Episcopacy in Massachusetts were 
 causes of anxiety and alarm. On the anniversary of the 
 death of Charles the First, January 30, 1750, twenty-five 
 years before the Avar broke out. Dr. Jonathan jNIayhew, of 
 Boston, preached a discourse which became famous on both 
 
 ' What also gave great offence, the Quakers and Dissenters were en- 
 couraged by the Governoi- to refuse payment of the taxes levied by 
 the towns for the support of the ministers. The celebrating of marriages, 
 no longer exercised by the magistrates, as had been the case under the 
 old charter, was confined to Episcopal clergymen, of whom there was 
 hut one in the province. It was necessary to come to Boston in order to 
 be married. Hildreth, Hist. U.S. ii. 110, 111. 
 
 ^ The zeal of Wilham's colonial governors on behalf of the Church of 
 England originated quite as much in political as in religious motives. 
 Community of religions, it was thought, would be a security for political 
 obedience. lb. 214. 
 
25 
 
 sides of the Atlantic, in which ho attacked the doctrines of 
 the divine right of kings, passive obedience, and the exchi- 
 sive chiims of the Episcopal hierarchy. A sentence from 
 the preface to the published sermon will indicate its character 
 and temper : " People have no security against being unmer- 
 cifully priest-ridden but by keeping all imperious bishops, 
 and other clergymen who love to lord it over God's heritage, 
 from getting their feet into the stirrup at all." It breathes 
 an intense spirit of religious and civil liberty, and did much 
 to intensify the colonial hatred of the threatened Episcopal 
 hierarchy. In this it expressed — perhaps inspired — the 
 sentiments of Samuel Adams, and was one of the most pow- 
 erful influences which kept alive the spirit of revolution, 
 and finally prepared the minds of the Massachusetts colonists 
 for open resistance. The following extracts will show how 
 continuous was the expressed hostility to Episcopacy, — a 
 feeling not confined to the ignorant, illiberal crowd, but 
 shared by the most enlightened of the colonists : — 
 
 Samuel Adams, as the voice of the House of Representa- 
 tives, presumably expressing the sentiments of the people, 
 in a letter to their agent in London, in 1768, said, "The 
 establishment of a Protestant Episcopate in America is also 
 very zealously contended for ; and it is very alarming to a 
 people whose fathers, from the hardships they sufi'ered under 
 such an establishment, were obliged to fly their native coun- 
 try into a wilderness. . . . We hope in God such an 
 establishment will never take place in America, and we de- 
 sire you would strenuously oppose it. The revenue raised 
 in America, for aught we can tell, may be as constitutionally 
 applied towards the support of prelacy as of soldiers and 
 pensioners." ' 
 
 ^ Wells's Life of Sam. Adams, i. 157. 
 
26 
 
 Dr. Andrew Eliot, the enlightened clergyman who de- 
 clined the presidency of Harvard College, in one of a series 
 of letters chiefly on this subject, written between 1768 and 
 1771, addressed to Thomas Hollis, in England, said, "The 
 people of New England are greatly alarmed; the arrival of 
 a bishop would raise them as much as any one thing." ' 
 
 As late as 1772, the Boston Committee of Correspondence 
 appointed to state the rights of the colonists, in their report 
 made in Faneuil Hall, among other things declared, "that 
 various attempts have" been made, and are now made, to es- 
 tablish an American Episcopate ;" though " no power on earth 
 can justly give temporal or spiritual jurisdiction within this 
 province except the General Court." ^ 
 
 It may be difficult for us who live under the mild and 
 beneficent influence of Episcopacy to understand the alarm 
 which its proposed introduction occasioned to the most 
 liberal minds amons: our New Euo^land ancestors durino- the 
 century which immediately preceded the Eevolution. Mak- 
 ing all due allowances for the exaggerated apprehensions of 
 the common people, I mean those who were ready to mob a 
 bishop, as well as for the personal pecuniary interest which 
 the clergy of the ruling order had in resisting encroachments 
 upon their establishment, there was, at that time, a real 
 danger to civil liberty, as it existed under democratic forms, 
 in the attitude and claims of the Anglican hierarchy. Nor 
 was New England alone in this state of alarm. There were 
 many in Old England, some high in the Church itself % who 
 
 1 Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll. xxxiv. 492. Tudor's Life of Otis, 136. 
 
 ^ Thornton's Amer. Pulpit, 192; and see Adams's "Works, ix. 287. 288. 
 
 ^ English Dissenters, with some churchmen, were in full accord with their 
 American brethren on this subject. Archdeacon Blackbume says, '• They 
 knew the hardships of those legal disabilities under which they them- 
 selves lay at home. They had good reason to believe that the influence 
 of the established hierarchy contributed to continue this grievance. Their 
 
27 
 
 deprecated the reactionary tendency towards the exercise of 
 the temporal powers. In both countries the question was 
 the same at the period of our Revolution, and had been for 
 a hundred and fifty years. During this period the Puritans 
 in Old Eno^land who abided the result of the contest on their 
 native soil, and their descendants, finally threw ofi" the excess 
 of prelatical domination, with its included doctrines of the 
 divine right and passive obedience, and relegated Episcopacy, 
 in all but the name, to the exercise of its spiritual functions, 
 restrained the power of the nobles, extinguished that of the 
 sovereign, and raised the people, through the commons, to 
 their true place in the body politic. To accomplish this, 
 cost one king his head, another his crown, and the people 
 themselves untold treasures of blood and money. 
 
 Some of the Puritans sought quiet by flight into the New 
 England wilderness ; but in vain. They found no exemption 
 in that war. The spirit of ecclesiastical domination followed 
 them, and for a century and a half they streniTously resisted 
 the re-imposition of that system which their brethren at 
 home were endeavoring to throw ofi". The contest was 
 essentially the same on both sides of the Atlantic, and con- 
 tinued down to the Revolution, of which it was one of the 
 principal causes. During this long contest, names often 
 changed, and the evils experienced on one side of the water, 
 and feared on the other, were mitigated by the lapse of time 
 and the general progress of the age. But the principle con- 
 tended for, civil and religious liberty, remained to the end. 
 
 brethren in America were as yet free from it, and if bishops were let in 
 among them, and particularly under the notion of presiding in established 
 churches, there was the highest probability they would take their prece- 
 dents of government and discipline fi-om the establishment in the mother 
 country, and would probably never be at rest till they had established it 
 on the basis of an exclusive test. They knew their American brethi-en 
 thought on this subject just as they themselves did." AVorks, ii. 73. 
 
28 
 
 The claim of the high churchmen was, "that every comitry 
 acts naturally and prudently in making the ecclesiastical 
 polity conformable to its civil government." This was a 
 proposition which neither the early nor the later Puritans 
 would care to dispute, since they acted upon it themselves. 
 Their contention was that, their civil government being essen- 
 tially democratic, their ecclesiastical system should be the 
 same. They opposed the engrafting of the prelatical system, 
 which was monarchical, upon their system, which was re- 
 publican, well knowing the tendency of ecclesiasticism to 
 draw to itself the civil government. They saw Monarchy 
 and Episcopacy as correlated facts, and in resisting the 
 latter, they resisted the former. Such was their view of 
 the case ; nor were the facts against them. 
 
 The Church of England, so far as it had a civil establish- 
 ment, was the creature of Parliament. It looked up to the 
 king as its head, and to the Parliament as its lawgiver. 
 Its creed and book of prayer were established by statute. 
 It could not reform its own abuses. Through Parliament, 
 the laity amended and regulated the Church. The election 
 of the bishops by the clergy was only nominal. The purity 
 of spiritual influence was tarnished by this strict subordina- 
 tion to the temporal power. ^ This was the system. Its ad- 
 ministration was still more objectionable to the Puritans. Its 
 establishment in New Eng-land meant a return to that state 
 of ecclesiastical and civil afiairs from which they had suffered 
 so much, and from which they fled to the privations and suf- 
 ferings of an inhospitable wilderness.^ So at least they 
 
 • Bancroft, Hist., ed. 1883, iii. 4. 
 
 - The Episcopate would legitimately bring in the whole system of 
 canon ecclesiastical courts, in contravention of the constitutional judicial 
 powers of the provincial courts; nor would the colonists listen to the 
 suggestion that the bishop's power would be merely spiritual, for they 
 feared that, as Mayhew expressed it, if the bishop's foot was once in the 
 stirrup the people would be effectually priest-ridden. 
 
29 
 
 regarded it, and the efforts of the Anglican hierarchy down 
 to the Revolution never permitted this feeling to subside. 
 Under the old charter, the churches, with the consent of the 
 General Court, called their synods, which laid down or modi- 
 fied their platform of religious faith and ecclesiastical govern- 
 ment according to the convictions of a body of professed 
 christians. But when the Congregational ministers of 
 Massachusetts, as late as 1725, memorialized the General 
 Court for permission to hold a synod, the Bishop of London, 
 instigated by the Anglican clergy of Boston, brought the 
 matter to the attention of the home government ; and 
 Yorke, afterwards Lord Hardwicke, then Attorney General, 
 and the Solicitor General, gave as their official opinion: 1. 
 That synods cannot lawfully be held without the royal 
 license. 2. That an application to the provincial legislature 
 was a contempt of the sovereign; and, 3. That if notice of 
 this should find them (the synod) in session, the Lieutenant 
 Governor should " signify to them . . . that they do forbear 
 to meet any more ; " and, if they persevere, "that the prin- 
 cipal actors therein be prosecuted by information for misde- 
 meanors." ' This incident of colonial history shows that the 
 objection to Anglicanism was not merely theoretical, for it 
 invaded the constitution of the civil government. Its adhe- 
 rents were generally on the side of prerogative ; and John 
 Adams has recorded in his diary, in 1765, that "the Church 
 people are, many of them, favorers of the Stamp Act at 
 present." * 
 
 However we of the present generation may choose to 
 regard the apprehensions of the Massachusetts Puritans and 
 their descendants late into the last century, in respect to the 
 designs of the Anglican hierarchy, this fact — and it is the 
 
 ^ Palfrey, iv. 454. 
 2 Works, ii. 168, 348. 
 
30 
 
 only fact of present interest — remains clear : that the 
 series of events — and it is their continuity which should be 
 particularly noticed — which stand to the Revolution in the 
 relation of operative sequence, if not primarily of cause and 
 effect, began in Massachusetts Bay with the coming of the 
 Puritans ; and that these events were religious as well as 
 civil, unless the true expression would be, — religious rather 
 than civil. 
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM IN VIRGINIA. 
 
 Nor was the ecclesiastical element as a cause of the Revo- 
 lution restricted to Massachusetts. It entered into the con- 
 troversy — was one of the causes of the Revolution — in 
 Virginia, as well as in Massachusetts : but with a difference. 
 The Puritans fled to Massachusetts because they hated Angli- 
 canism : the cavaliers fled to Virginia because they hated 
 Puritanism. The Puritan hostility to Anglicanism was 
 based upon the profoundest religious conviction. It was 
 transmitted to their children, and ever associated with the 
 trials and sufferings of the first generation. It was kept 
 alive by the unintermitting efibrts of the English hierarchy 
 to establish its ecclesiastical system *!n the Puritan colonies. 
 Whatever may have been the feelings of the Virginia Church- 
 men in the days of the Revolution towards the Congrega- 
 tionalists of New England, owing to circumstances which 
 will be presently narrated, they came together on the ground 
 of hostility to Anglicanism, which, as has already been said, 
 was a cause of the Revolution. ' 
 
 It was one cause :' no one claims that it was the sole cause. 
 
 ^ Jonathan Boucher, writing from the extreme High Church view, puts 
 this matter in an interesting light. " That the American opposition to 
 Episcopacy was at all connected with that still more serious one so soon 
 afterwards set up against civil government, was not indeed generally ap- 
 parent at the time [in Virginia] ; but it is now [1797] indisputable, as it 
 
31 
 
 And it has been dwelt upon at some length, not only because 
 it seems to have failed of due recognition in the historical 
 accounts of that event, but also since a clear understanding of 
 the matter is essential to a correct view of the position of 
 Samuel Adams, the Puritan, one of the prime movers of the 
 Eevolution, as well as somewhat by way of contrast, of John 
 Adams, its great statesman.' 
 
 The union between Massachusetts and Virginia in the 
 Eevolution has been alluded to ; a union which, considering 
 the respective origin and history of the two colonies, was 
 incongruous, and almost grotesque; a union of the descend- 
 ants of the fanatical Puritans and of the High Church loyal- 
 
 also is that the former contributed not a little to render the latter suc- 
 cessful. As therefore this controversy was clearly one great cause that led 
 to the Revolution, the view of it here given, It is hoped, will not he 
 deemed wholly uninteresting." View, 150. 
 
 ^ The difference was this : Samuel Adams was a Puritan and Calvinist 
 of the strictest sect. John Adams strenuously dissented from Calvinism, 
 but firmly adhered to the doctrines of the Puritans concerning civil and 
 religious liberty, and regarded with equal aversion the designs of the 
 Anglican hierarchy. His dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 
 already alluded to, was a "Tract for the Times." It was printed in the 
 year of the Stamp Act, 1765, when he was twenty-nine years old, and 
 shows how inseparably ecclesiastical and political tyranny were asso- 
 ciated in his mind as things of present dread, and also how thoroughly 
 he had studied the questions on which in later years he exercised a 
 commanding influence. He was fully in accord with Mayhew, Chaun- 
 ey, Eliot and Samuel Adams in their hostility to the Anglican preten- 
 sions and endeavors to establish an Episcopate in the colonies. At the 
 age of twenty, he asked, "Where do we find 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 ?" Works, ii. 5, 6. 
 ' ' Honesty, sincerity and openness I esteem essential marks of a good 
 mind. I am, therefore, of opinion that men ought (after they have 
 examined with unbiased judgments every system of religion, and chosen 
 one system on their own authority, for themselves) to avow their opin- 
 ions and defend them with boldness." Works, ii. 8. 
 
32 
 
 ists, of the roundhead and of the cavalier. And yet these 
 two colonies entered the contest earlier than any other, — 
 Virginia the earlier, if it is regarded as merely civil, — and 
 were mutually helpful and steadfast to the end. This phe- 
 nomenal embrace requires explanation to the bystanders, 
 from both parties. 
 
 The religion of Virginia was Anglican, and it was the 
 established religion, with the canons, the liturgy and the 
 catechism. The anniversary of the execution of Charles I. 
 was a legal fast, and the restoration of Charles II. was a 
 holiday. Besides their glebes and parsonages, a maintenance 
 was secured to the parish ministers in valuable and current 
 commodities of the country ; and the New England laws 
 against Quakers, says Hildreth, to whom I am indebted for 
 this paragraph, were in full force.' 
 
 Devotion to the Church was a test of devotion to the king 
 as its head and defender, and non-conformity was identified 
 with republicanism and disloyalty.^ 
 
 The following extract will serve not only to show the 
 views of a Virginia Anglican, but it also throws much light 
 upon the attitude of the New England congregation alists in 
 relation to the introduction of Episcopacy ; " The constitu- 
 tion of the Church of England is approved, confirmed and 
 adopted by our laws, and interwoven with them. No other 
 form of church government than that of the Church of Eng- 
 land would be compatible with the form of our civil govern- 
 ment. No other colony has retained so large a portion of 
 the monarchical part of the British Constitution as Virginia ; 
 and between that attachment to monarchy and the govern- 
 ment of the Church of England there is a strong connexion."* 
 
 1 Hist. i. 512. 
 
 ^ Thompson's Church and State, 34, 35. 
 
 ^ Boucher's View, 103. 
 
33 
 
 The aspect in which the New Englaiiders appeared to the 
 people of Virginia, and the obstacles to be surmounted in 
 securing their cordial co-operation in the Ee volution, may 
 be seen in the same author: "That a people [Virginians] in 
 full possession and enjoyment of all the peace and all the 
 security which the best government in the world can give, 
 should, at the instigation of another people [New England- 
 ers], for whom they entertained an hereditary national dis- 
 esteem, confirmed by their own personal dislike, suddenly 
 and unprovoked, and in contradiction to all the opinions they 
 had heretofore professed to hold on the subject of govern- 
 ment, rush into a civil war against a nation they loved . ■. . 
 is one of those instances of inconsistency in human conduct 
 which are often met with in real life, but which, set down in 
 a book, seem marvellous, romantic and incredible. This, 
 however, is an unexaggerated description of the general tem- 
 per of mind which prevailed in the people of Virginia and 
 Maryland towards those of New England." ' 
 
 One more extract from the same writer will show the 
 approach of Virginia and Massachusetts to the same ground : 
 "When it is recollected that till now^ [1771] the opposition 
 to an American Episcopate has been confined chiefly to the 
 demagogues and independents of the New England prov- 
 inces, but that it is now espoused with much warmth by the 
 people of Virginia, it requires no great depth of political 
 sagacity to see what the motives and views of the former 
 have been, or what will be the consequences of the defection 
 of the latter." ' 
 
 It is now desirable to understand by what circumstances 
 
 ' Boucher, xxxiv. This writer suggests in a note that the Xew Eng- 
 laiiders endeavored to overcome these prejudices by pitching on Mr. 
 Randolph, a Virginian, to he the first president of Congress, and on Mr. 
 Washington, who was also a Virginian, to command the American army. 
 
 - lb. 103. 
 
34 
 
 two provinces so dissimilar in their form of government, 
 religion, social life, and general habits of thought, were 
 brought together on the common ground of hostility to 
 Episcopacy, which was so considerable a cause of the Revo- 
 lution. 
 
 There were Puritans in Virginia, though but a handful, 
 who, in the early days of the colony, had established rela- 
 tions with their New England brethren. Commercial rela- 
 tions also existed between these colonies, and some points 
 in their civil history were not dissimilar. Both had suffered 
 from the repeal of their charters, and both had lived in 
 chronic dissatisfaction with the mother country ; and if, at 
 any time and for any cause, the Revolution had failed in 
 Massachusetts, it would not have been hopeless until it had 
 also failed in Virginia. But ou these two colonies it rested. 
 The constitution of Virginia, when compared with that of 
 Massachusetts, was monarchical, and, as has been said, her 
 religion was Anglican, and it was the established relisfion. 
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM IN VIRGINIA POLITICS. / 
 
 In 1740 there was not, so far as is known, a single Dis- 
 senting congregation in Virginia; but in 1770, there were 
 eleven Dissenting ministers regularly settled, who had each 
 from two to four congregations under his care. ' 
 
 At the Revolution, and for thirty years before, Virginia 
 had been making strenuous efforts to throw off the Anglican 
 system, so far, at least, as related to its temporal powers ; 
 and during the same period, as always, Massachusetts was 
 as strenuously resisting its imposition. In this respect they 
 were alike. But the resemblance ends here. In the latter 
 colony, it was essentially a question of civil and religious 
 
 ' Boucher, 100. 
 
35 
 
 liberty ; in the former, it was essentially a question of taxa- 
 tion . 
 
 Every one is familiar with the case between the clergy of 
 the Established Church in Virginia and the planters, known 
 as the "Parsons' Case," which gave first occasion to Pat- 
 rick Henry for the display of his unrivalled eloquence. It 
 arose out of a question of tithes, in substance, and has a 
 twofold significance in Revolutionary history. In the first 
 place, it served to undermine the influence of the Anglican 
 hierarchy ; and secondly, it d'rew into question the right of 
 Parliament to set aside a Virginia law respecting a matter 
 essentially domestic, — this very matter of tithes. Singularly 
 enough, it united ecclesiastical and civil questions as causes 
 of the Revolution in Virginia, as they had been united, yet 
 with a difference, in Massachusetts from the beo-inninsf of 
 her settlement. 
 
 If we desire to know the attitude of some of the Viro-in- 
 
 o 
 
 ians, — how many, is only matter of conjecture, — near the 
 time when the war broke out, we have the most authentic 
 intelligence. Madison, writing to Bradford in Pennsylvania, 
 in April, 1774, says, "Our Assembly is to meet the 1st of 
 May, when it is expected something will be done in behalf of 
 the Dissenters. Petitions, I hear, are already forming among 
 the persecuted Baptists, and I fancy it is in the thoughts of 
 the Presbyterians also, to intercede for greater liberty in 
 matters of religion. . . . The sentiments of our people of 
 fortune and fashion, in this respect, are vastly different from 
 what you have been used to. That liberal, catholic and 
 equitable way of thinking, as to the rights of conscience, 
 which is one of the characteristics of a free people, and so 
 strongly marks the people of your province, is but little 
 known among the zealous adherents of our hierarchy. . . . 
 Besides, the clergy are a numerous and powerful body, have 
 
36 
 
 great influence at home by reason of their connection Avith, 
 and dependence on, the bishops and Crown, and will naturally 
 employ all their arts and interest to depress their rising ad- 
 versaries, for such they must consider Dissenters who rob 
 them of the good-will of the people, and may, in time, en- 
 danger their livings and security." In the previous January, 
 he wrote to the same, "I want again to breathe your free 
 air. . . . Poverty and luxury prevail among all sorts ; pride, 
 ignprance and knavery among the priesthood. . . . This is 
 bad enough, but it is not the worst I have to tell you. . . . 
 There are at this time in the adjacent county not less than 
 five or six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their 
 religious sentiments, which, in the main, are very orthodox." 
 In another letter to the same, he says what is much to the 
 point, "If the Church of England had been the established 
 and general religion in all the northern colonies, as it has 
 been among us here, and uninterrupted tranquillity had pre- 
 vailed throughout the continent, it is clear to me that slavery 
 and subjection might and would have been gradually insinu- 
 ated among us." ' 
 
 From the foregoing extracts, it is obvious how Madison 
 regarded the eiforts of the New England Puritans in their 
 resistance to the imposition of Episcopacy ; but that he was 
 not pleased with all their conduct, appears from the follow- 
 ing : " I congratulate you on your heroic proceedings in 
 Philadelphia with regard to the tea. I wish Boston may 
 conduct matters with as much discretion as they seem to do 
 with boldness." This is also relevant to the Revolution : 
 " I verily believe the frequent assaults that have been made 
 on America (Boston especially) will in the end prove of 
 real advantage." ^ 
 
 ^ Letters of Madison, i. 10 et seq. 
 
 ^ lb. 10. In stating the motives which drew the people into the Revolu- 
 
37 
 
 From the foregoing outline of a phase of ecclesiastical his- 
 tory in the Massachusetts Colony may be seen how early, as 
 well as continuously, the religious element operated as a 
 cause of the Revolution ; and how — and yet with what dif- 
 ference — Virginia came to stand on the same ground with 
 the former colony. 
 
 ORIGIN OF THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
 
 Althouo^h ecclesiasticism stands first among: the causes 
 which prepared the Massachusetts colonists for the Revolu- 
 tion, and was influential in precipitating that event, yet the 
 event itself was a disruption of the civil and political relations 
 between the contending parties, and as such should be traced 
 to its origin. ' 
 
 Soon after the restoration of Charles II., the colonies came 
 to have a common grievance in the operation of the Naviga- 
 tion Laws and Acts of Trade,' which were designed to pour 
 
 tion, it ought not to be concealed that there were some not altogether cred- 
 itable. Madison gives this : •' As to the sentiments of the people of tliis 
 Colony with respect to the Bostonians [in regard to the Port Bill] , I can as- 
 sure you I find them very warm in their favor. ... It must not be dertied, 
 though, that the Europeans, especially the Scotch, and some interested 
 merchants among the natives, discountenance such proceedings as far as 
 they dare, alleging the injustice and perfidy of refusing to pay our debts 
 to our generous creditors at home."' lb. 16. Boucher is more explicit on 
 this subject. He says, "Among other circumstances favorable to a revolt 
 of America, that of the immense debt owing by the colonists to the mer- 
 chants of Great Britain deserves to be reckoned as not the least. It was 
 estimated at three millions sterling ; and such is the spu'it of adventure 
 of British merchants, and of such extent are their capitals and their 
 credit, that not many years ago I remember to have heard the amount of 
 their debts to this country calculated at double that smn : it is probablj^ 
 now trebled." View, xl. 
 
 ^ " If any man wishes to investigate thoroughly the causes, feelings and 
 principles of the Revolution, he must study this Act of Navigation and the 
 Acts of Trade." And of those who wrote in favor of their enforcement. 
 
38 
 
 the wealth of commerce into the lap of England, and, by the 
 prohibition of certain manufactures in the colonies, to create 
 a market for English productions ; but previous to the Stamp 
 Act, there was no British regulation which produced the 
 same practical results in all the colonies. Most of the manu- 
 factures were in New England, while her lumber and the 
 tobacco of Virginia — for cotton was not yet, and rice and 
 indigo were grown only on a limited territory of the Carolinas 
 — constituted the bulk of American commerce. These cir- 
 cumstances served to bring: Massachusetts and Virg-inia to the 
 same platform in the Eevolution. They also explain in some 
 degree the backwardness of some other colonies whose in- 
 terests were less severely affected by the Britisl* commercial 
 policy. But these resemblances in certain facts of Massa- 
 chusetts and Virginia affairs in their relation to the common 
 cause should not lead us to overlook the essential differences 
 in their civil and ecclesiastical history. 
 
 Massachusetts history more immediately concerns us. 
 Whatever rights the king may have intended to confer upon 
 the members of the Massachusetts Company by their charter 
 of 4 March, 1629, two things are clear. First, it is clear 
 that the charter is susceptible of a legal interpretation which 
 makes it the basis of a government proper, with very large 
 powers, having little more than a formal dependence upon 
 the Crown ;' and it is equally clear that the colonists them- 
 selves were disposed to give, and did give, the most lib- 
 eral construction to their charter powers. Hutchinson says 
 of them, "Upon their removal they supposed their relations 
 both to civil and ecclesiastical government of England, ex- 
 
 " All I can say is, that I read them all in my youth, and that I never read 
 
 them without being set on fire." Adams's Works, x. 320, 336. 
 
 ' See the discussion of this subject by the late Prof. Joel Parker. Mass. 
 and its Early History, 357. 
 
39 
 
 cept so for as a special reserve was made hy their charter, 
 was at an end, and that they had right to form such new 
 model of both as pleased them." ' On this construction of 
 their powers they acted. 
 
 But the home government took an entirely different view 
 of their powers, as well as of the conduct of the colonists 
 in their exercise of them. As early as 28 April, 1634, 
 a commission for regulating plantations was issued to the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Keeper and others, to 
 inquire, besides other matters, "whether any privileges or 
 liberties granted to the colonists by their charter were 
 hurtful to the king, his crown, or prerogative royal, and if 
 so, to cause the same to be revoked."^ 
 
 Here bes^an the lons^ contest which rao-ed with chansfinof 
 fortunes until the treaty of peace in 1783. It was an 
 endeavor, on one side, to set up and maintain a free and 
 essentially independent government; and on the other side, 
 to overthrow such a government, reduce the colonists to 
 monarchical subjection, and regulate their affairs agreeably to 
 the imperial policy. To such a contest there could be only 
 one result : the colonists were sure to win. Growth, 
 development, a boundless continent, remoteness, the inher- 
 ited fierce spirit of liberty w^hich neither fire nor steel had 
 been able to subdue, and invincible courage, in time would 
 settle the question. It was a question of time, and this 
 they seem to have felt all through their history until the final 
 consummation of their expectations. In any other view of 
 the subject, their conduct was neither consistent nor entirely 
 to their credit. 
 
 Chalmers, an accurate though unfriendly historian, has 
 sketched the progress of the colony towards independency 
 
 ' Hist. Mass. i. 368. 
 ^ Parker, ut sup. 375. 
 
40 
 
 for the first fifty years, in the following words : "Massachu- 
 setts, in conformity with its accustomed principles, acted, 
 during the civil wars, almost altogether as an independent 
 state. It formed leagues, not only with the neio-hborino- 
 colonies, but with foreign nations, without the consent or 
 knowledge of the government of England. It permitted 
 no appeals from its courts to the judicatories of the sovereign 
 State, without which a dependence cannot be preserved or 
 enforced. And it refused to exercise its jurisdiction in the 
 name of the Commonwealth of England. It assumed the 
 government of that part of New England which is now called 
 New Hampshire, and even extended its powers farther east- 
 ward, over the province of Maine. And, by force of arms, 
 it compelled those who had fled from its persecution beyond 
 its boundaries, into the wilderness, to submit to its authority. 
 It erected a mint at Boston, impressing the year 1652 on the 
 coin as the era of independence . . . thus eviucino- to all, 
 what had been foreseen by the wise, that a people of such 
 principles, religious and political, settling so great a dis- 
 tance from control, would necessarily form an independent 
 State."' 
 
 Chalmers's statement is not exaggerated. It matters little 
 with what intent respecting their future political relations 
 the colonists embarked for Massachusetts Bay. Their eccle- 
 siastical independence was an avowed purpose from the 
 beginning; and circumstances of which they promptly 
 availed themselves favored the formation of an independent 
 civil state. Nor should their actual condition at the time 
 of the Restoration be overlooked in reading their subsequent 
 history down to the Eevolution. 
 
 This state of aff'airs in the Puritan colony, the refuo-e of 
 the Eegicides, could hardly have been other than displeasing 
 ^ Political Annals, 181. 
 
41 
 
 to Charles II. and his advisers. They determined to change 
 it, but their success was partial and temporary. Undoubt- 
 edly the loss of their charter was a serious blow to the 
 colonists. It was their first fall, but they soon regained 
 their feet. The substituted government under the presi- 
 dencies of Dudley and Andros was resisted by all prudent 
 means, and by violence even, before a knowledge of the 
 progress of the Revolution of 1689 had opened a fair 
 prospect of success. The charter of 1692 was forced upon 
 the colonists in derogation of their acquired constitutional 
 rights ; and had they then, or at any time down to the 
 Revolution of 1775, quietly submitted, the result would 
 have been serious to their liberties. But they did not sub- 
 mit, though then, as at the later period, there were those who 
 counselled submission ; and during the succeeding century 
 there were infractions of their constitutional rights in which, 
 from prudential considerations, they silently acquiesced. 
 
 The king, by his Court of Chancery, abrogated the first 
 charter, and imposed upon the colony one less favorable to 
 popular rights. Here is the answer of the colonists in their 
 Declaration of Rights of the same year, entitled an act set- 
 ting forth general privileges: "No aid, tax, tallage, assess- 
 ment, custom, loan, benevolence or imposition whatsoever 
 shall be laid, assessed, imposed or levied on any of their 
 Majesties' subjects or their estates, on any color or pretence 
 whatsoever, bnt by the act and consent of the governor, 
 council and representatives of the people assembled in gen- 
 eral court." ' 
 
 ^ Acts and Resolves Province Massachusetts Bay, i. 40. Palfrey says, 
 " If this had been confirmed, the cause of dispute which brought about 
 the independence of the United States would have been taljen away. 
 But such proved not to be tlie will of the Privy Council of King William." 
 Hist. New Eng. iv. 139. This statement is misleading. It is quite true 
 that the Council disallowed the whole act, but fortunately they specified 
 
42 
 
 It is not easy to overestimate the importance of this Decla- 
 ration of Colonial Eights. In the very first year of the new 
 charter the General Court opened the contest on the grounds 
 on which, eighty years later, after some preliminary skirmish- 
 ing on less tenable positions, the battle was fought and 
 independence won. It is also interesting to know that in 
 1765, at Avhich time John Adams intervened in public affairs, 
 in his first public address before the governor and council, 
 on the question of opening the courts which had been closed 
 for lack of stamps, he took the identical position of the 
 General Court in 1692 ; and again, in the general congress of 
 1774, in the Declaration of Rights of the colonies. 
 
 Nor was resistance confined to mere declarations. Their 
 obstruction of the Navigation Laws and Acts of Trade,' 
 
 the grounds of their objections. These objections relate to section 8, 
 respecting the allowance of bail, and section 9, which relates to escheat and 
 forfeitures. To the sections which declare general rights — the colonial 
 Magna Charta — no objections were made, and they consequently retained 
 the political significance which inheres in all unchallenged claims of right. 
 
 ' In 1698, when the General Court was asked to pass laws enforcing the 
 Acts of Trade, even the consei'vative councillors insisted " that they were 
 too much cramped in their liberties already, and they would be great 
 fools to abridge, by law of their own, the little that was left them." 
 Hildreth, ii. 202. This spirit became hereditary. John Adams has said, 
 " These acts never had been executed, and there never had been a time 
 when they would have been, or could have been, obeyed." Letter to 
 Tudor, March 29, 1818, Novanglus, 245. 
 
 In 1728, when Governor Burnett, under royal instructions insisted that 
 the General Court should fix by law the governor's salary, instead of 
 leaving it to depend upon the temper of that body from year to year, they 
 persistently refused, '' because it is an untrodden path, which neither we 
 nor our predecessors have gone in ; . . . because it seems necessary to 
 form, maintain and uphold our constitution ; . . . because it is our un- 
 doubted right to raise and dispose of moneys for the public service of our 
 free accord, without anjr compulsion; and because, if we should now 
 give up this right, we shall open a door to many other inconveniences." 
 See Journal of the Gen. Court. 
 
 To these maxims of policy and government, they and their successors 
 
43 
 
 their assumption of powers not granted by charter, their re- 
 fusal to transmit their laws for examination, or allow appeals 
 from their judicial decisions, at length produced their legiti- 
 mate results in England; and in 1701, as oftentimes later, 
 called forth impatient notes of warning from the Board of 
 Trade : " The denial of appeals is a humor which prevails so 
 much in proprietary and charter plantations, and the inde- 
 pendency they thirst after is now so notorious, that it has 
 been thought tit those considerations and other objections 
 should be laid before the Parliament." ' But these warnings 
 and threats were disregarded until the patience of the home 
 government was exhausted, and a bill for the repeal of the 
 charter was introduced, which failed in the exigencies of more 
 pressing concerns. 
 
 Under the first charter all officers were elected directly or 
 indirectly by the people ; under the second charter the gov- 
 ernor was appointed by the crown, with a negative upon the 
 election of the speaker and councillors chosen by the House. 
 To this invasion of their old constitution the people lacked 
 the power of forcible resistance ; but the popular party, 
 under the consummate leadership of Cooke, neutralized 
 the governor's power, and held him in thrall, by exercis- 
 ing their constitutional right of determining his salary. And 
 this they continued to do with exasperating persistency and 
 disregard of the royal instructions, quite down to the Kevo- 
 lution. ^ 
 
 adhered to the end, notwithstanding royal menaces. This was revolution, 
 as clearly as any declaration which more immediately preceded the war. 
 
 ^ Palfrey, iv. 200. 
 
 * Palfrey has graphically described the chronic contests between the 
 royal governors and the representatives, as also between the latter and 
 the more conservative council, all of which is more fully seen in the jour- 
 nal of the House, which, from 1715 to 1730, he does not appear to have 
 consulted. " The House of Representatives began to print its journal just 
 
44 
 
 This view of the beginning and progress of the contest, 
 which ended in the Revolution, might be supported by much 
 additional evidence ; but I trust that, even in the foreffoins: 
 imperfect' sketch, it fairly appears that the Massachusetts 
 Puritans came to the Bay that they might be free and inde- 
 
 before the beginning of Belcher's administration, the first publication 
 being of the proceedings of May 27, 1730." History, iv. 532, n. This is 
 erroneous. The printed journals of the House — and I am informed that 
 they exist in no other form — begin with 25th May, 1715, and were con- 
 tinued without interruption till the Eevolution. In his concluding chap- 
 ter he has deemed it necessary to excuse the conduct of the popular 
 branch towards the Crown and its representatives. But this deiDends. If 
 the people of Massachusetts, between 1692 and 1774, their original charter 
 having been taken away and another forced upon them, regarded them- 
 selves as within the realm, entitled to all the rights and immunities of 
 British subjects, and bound to bear their share of the burdens imposed 
 by the imperial policy, it is not difficult to understand why, in the eyes 
 of the government and people of Great Britain, and even those of the 
 neighboring colonies, tlaeir conduct was regarded as captious and }-ebel- 
 lious. Compared with the burdens borne by their fellow-subjects within 
 the three kingdoms, their own were light, and their condition prosperous. 
 People understand the operations of governmental policy. They know 
 how unequally tariffs and navigation laws aifect different sections, 
 classes and interests ; and yet they submit to them for reasons satisfac- 
 tory to the majority. Our ancestors neither liked nor submitted to this 
 policy ; they obstructed, disobeyed and evaded its operation so far as was 
 consistent with their safety. 
 
 IsTor could they endure with patience, or treat \^T.th decent respect, the 
 governors sent to rule over them, and still less the natives raised to that 
 high but most uncomfortable position. From one point of view it is 
 difficult to see why; for these representatives of the Crown, in ability, 
 learning, character and good dispositions, would compare favorably with 
 those chosen by themselves under the Constitution, and were angels of 
 light compared with those we have inflicted on our territories. Except 
 that they were royal governors, it is not easy to find any insuperable objec- 
 tion to Bellomont, Shute, Burnett, Shirley, or even Bernard. 
 
 But, on the other hand, if we find, as I think the colonists found, in 
 the repeal of the first charter, and the imposition of a royal government 
 upon a people essentially free and independent, the justifying cause of 
 irreconcilable hostility, and an invincible determination to throw it off on 
 
45 
 
 pendent in their civil and ecclesiastical aftairs ; that with the 
 first monition of danger in the days of Charles the First, 
 they determined to maintain their independence at all haz- 
 ards ; that the contest, thus begun, continued with varying 
 fortunes until the final decision of the questions involved 
 was referred to arms ; and, finally, that during these hun- 
 dred and fifty years of contention, the colonial constitution 
 was growing and developing itself into a free republican 
 constitution, as the basis, measure and protection of all 
 their rights. 
 
 JOHN ADAMS'S ATTITUDE TO THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 Against this background of civil and ecclesiastical his- 
 tory, in the Massachusetts-Bay colony, John Adams ap- 
 peared on the Revolutionary stage. He had studied this 
 history carefully, and its significance in relation to coming 
 events he fully appreciated. It was revolution, and had 
 been revolution from the overthrow of the first charter. 
 That he so regarded it, he has expressly told us. From the 
 outset, with his first public utterance, he placed himself 
 squarely on this basis of the provincial constitution, and 
 there he stood, constant, consistent, to the end. This is his 
 great distinction. From it he overthrew Hutchinson and 
 
 favorable occasion, then their ninety years of strife, obstruction and 
 hostility towards the Crown and its representatives, and final appeal to 
 arms, become clear, reasonable, patriotic, and worthy of perpetual remem- 
 brance and benediction — and, least of all, demand apology. 
 
 The people out of New England, except the Virginians, had no similar 
 experience, and but little knowledge of the real situation of the Massa- 
 chusetts Puritans. Hence it is not strange that they, in common with 
 those of the British Islands, had come to regard the Yankees with preju- 
 dice and dislike ; or that with reluctance they finally placed themselves 
 on the Massachusetts grounds, as they did under the lead of John 
 Adams. 
 
46 
 
 Leonard, otherwise unassailable. Any other position was 
 full of logical pitfalls ; this was sound, clear, tenable, and 
 on it the contest was decided in Massachusetts. 
 
 Had the history of the other colonies been the same as 
 that of Massachusetts, with its formative influence upon the 
 people and their leaders, the decision of the question would 
 have been the same as hers, and the consummation of the 
 Revolution would have been comparatively easy. Had Mas- 
 sachusetts with New England finally stood alone, the day of 
 her deliverance must have been postponed. But with Vir- 
 ginia and Massachusetts in alliance — and, notwithstanding 
 a general dissimilarity, there were facts common to their 
 history which brought them shoulder to shoulder — the 
 Revolution, though difficult, was not impossible. 
 
 It was this difficulty which John Adams encountered and 
 overcame at the head of the national party which he, more 
 than any other man, gathered, inspired and led. 
 
 For the American Revolution, like all epochal movements 
 in the direction of nationality and freedom, depended upon 
 the movement of parties. These now demand our notice. 
 
 THE EEVOLUTION INEVITABLE. 
 
 When the Revolutionary struggle in Massachusetts, which 
 had been suspended during the events which culminated in 
 the destruction of the French power in America, broke 
 out anew with the Stamp Act of 1765, there seems to have 
 been a feeling, common to all the colonies, that growth, 
 situation and conflicting interests would in time sever the 
 political relations which existed between the mother country 
 and her colonies ; and this opinion, if such that may be 
 called which so vaguely existed in their minds, was the opin- 
 ion of Hutchinson and Oliver no less than of James Otis and 
 
47 
 
 Samuel Adams. It is true they disclaimed this, sometimes 
 with vehemence. John Adams did so.' 
 
 He said that at no time before the,Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence was he averse to reconciliation, and that he had no 
 desire to see the relations with Engfland severed. There 
 is abundant similar testimony. The talk of the warmest of 
 the patriots was full of loyalty to the king, and of affection 
 for the mother country. Nor were they insincere. They 
 gloried in the name of Britons. Ties of blood, and attach- 
 ment to the old home, were strong, and their pulse quickened 
 with memories of Pepperell before the l)astions of Louisburg, 
 and of Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham. 
 
 But beliefs are not necessarily desires, and we recognize as 
 inevitable many things which we deprecate. Could the col- 
 onists have been blind to facts and tendences which all the 
 world saw ? The testimony on this point is clear and decisive. 
 The following are only a few of the observations which have 
 been collected by writers on this period of our history : " In 
 his notes upon England, which were probably written about 
 1750, Montesquieu had dilated upon the restrictive character 
 of the English commercial code, and had expressed his belief 
 that England would be the first nation abandoned by her 
 colonies.^ A few years later, Argenson, who has left some 
 of the most striking political predictions upon record, fore- 
 told in his memoirs that the English colonies in America 
 would one day rise against their mother country ; that they 
 would form themselves into a republic, and that they would 
 astonish the world by their prosperity. In a discourse deliv- 
 ered before the Sorbonne in 1750, Turgot compared the colo- 
 
 ^ And yet he has told us that long before the war broke out, he and 
 Jonathan Sewall, the loyalist, agreed in their sentiments respecting 
 public affairs, and both were of the opinion that the British ministry and 
 Parliament would force the colonists to appeal to arms. Works, ii. 78. 
 
48 
 
 nies to fruits which only remain on the stem till they have 
 reached the period of maturity, and he prophesied that America 
 would some day detach herself from the parent tree. Still 
 earlier than Turgot's prophecy, Kalm, the Swedish traveller, 
 contended that the presence of the French in Canada, by mak- 
 ing the English colonists depend for their security on the sup- 
 port of the mother country, was the main cause of the sub- 
 mission." ' 
 
 But more decisive as to the prevalence of this belief among 
 the colonists are some of their own words. Dr. Andrew 
 Eliot, writing to Hollis, in England, December, 1767, says, 
 " We are not ripe for disunion ; but our growth is so great, 
 that in a few years, Great Britain will not be able to compel 
 our submission;"^ and in 1772, Dr. Charles Chauncy said, 
 "that in twenty-five years, there would be more people here 
 than in the three kingdoms, the greatest empire on earth." ^ 
 
 But no one, save John Adams, expressed this under-cur- 
 rent of thought so clearly as William Livingston, in 1768. 
 "Americans, the finger of God points out a mighty empire 
 to your sons. . . . The day dawns in which this mighty 
 empire is to be laid by the establishment of a regular Amer- 
 ican Constitution. . . . Peace or war, famine or plenty, 
 poverty or afi[luence, — in a word, no circumstance, whether 
 prosperous or adverse, can happen to our parent ; nay, no 
 conduct of hers, whether wise or imprudent — no possible 
 temper of hers, whether kind or cross-grained — will put a 
 stop to this building. There is no contending with omnipo- 
 tence ; and the predispositions are so numerous and well 
 
 ^ Lecky's Hist. Eighteenth Century, iii. 291. Bancroft has also treated 
 this question in Hist. U.S. ; and see Frothingham's Else of the Eepublic, 
 245. 
 
 2 Mass. Hist. Coll. 420, xxxiv. 
 
 3 Works, ii. 304. 
 
49 
 
 adapted to the rise of America, that our success is indubi- 
 table." • 
 
 No one can read the history of the colony in its original 
 sources without meeting evidence of the existence of the 
 belief that the time would come when the colonies would 
 grow into a great and independent empire. Not that they 
 wished to set up for themselves at once. On the contrary, 
 quite apart from any sentiment of loyalty, it is not improb- 
 able that they were too fully sensible of the advantages of 
 their position as appendages of the crown, with the privilege 
 of drawing upon the imperial resources in warding off the 
 attacks of the French, which, as independent colonies, they 
 would be obliged to meet with their own men and money. Nor 
 did they look forward to any definite time when it would be 
 for their advantage to terminate these relations, nor to any 
 specific course of action which would hasten that event. 
 Nevertheless, their political action tended to render that re- 
 sult inevitable ; nor was the feeling which inspired this action 
 allow^ed to subside ; for, from the earliest days down to the 
 war, whenever they showed restiveness under the British 
 rule, they were charged with aiming at independence.^ 
 
 The Massachusetts colonists may not, as they said, have 
 aimed at an independence, yet they steadily, and seemingly 
 not unconsciously, j)ursued a course which would inevitably 
 lead to it. 
 
 From the first, it seems to have been inevitable that the 
 political relations between Great Britain and her colonies in 
 America should be finally severed ; but not the time nor the 
 mode. When and how — whether by the silent influence of 
 
 ^ The American IVhig, quoted with variations by Boucher, View, xxvi. i 
 and by Frothingham, Eise of the Republic, 244. 
 
 "^ See Evelyn's Diary, May 26, 1671, et seq. Also a letter from Dummer 
 to the House, quoted in Palfrey, iv. 407, n. 
 
50 
 
 growth, or as the result of violence — were questions in 
 abeyance, and subject to chance. The lots were cast, and it 
 was war. 
 
 THE REVOLUTION PRECIPITATED BY PARTY ACTIOX. 
 
 But war was not resorted to merely as the solution of dif- 
 ficulties which arose from the growth and development of the 
 colonies. They had not reached that stage — in time sure 
 to come — when union made subjugation impossible. Un- 
 dertaken solely on that ground, the war, as we now see, was 
 premature. The colonies were not ripe for it. Nor were 
 they strong enough for it. Unaided, they would have 
 failed, as fail they did until aided. The war was preci- 
 pitated by party action in Massachusetts. The opposite 
 view, which has led to infinite misconception of the revolu- 
 tionary struggle, finds countenance only in the general and 
 apparently spontaneous uprising of the continent in re- 
 sistance to the Stamp Act. But that demonstration was 
 utterly deceptive, as afterwards appeared, so far as it seemed 
 to indicate any settled conviction and determination. It w^as a 
 commercial protest, backed hy no ulterior purpose of for- 
 cible resistance. The repeal of the Act, notwithstanding 
 the re-affirmance of the principle in the Declaratory Act, ap- 
 parently satisfied the public mind everywhere out of New 
 England — perhaps out of Massachusetts. It seems to have 
 been so even in Virginia. Jefferson's statement on this point 
 is clear, and it is decisive. In Virginia, between 1769 and 
 1773, he says, "Nothing of particular excitement occurring 
 for a considerable time, our countrymen seemed to fall into 
 a state of insensibility to our situation ; the duty on tea, not 
 yet repealed, and the Declaratory Act of a right in the Brit- 
 ish Parliament to bind us by their laws in all cases whatso- 
 ever, still suspended over us." And John Adams, as late as 
 
51 
 
 1772, writes, "Still quiet tit the southward; and at New 
 York, they laugh at us." 
 
 This doubtless correctly represents the apathy everywhere 
 prevailing out of Massachusetts. The real state of the case 
 seems to have been, if the colonies are regarded as a whole, 
 that the opposition to the British acts was based on pecuni- 
 ary interests rather than on deeply seated political convic- 
 tions ; and when the immediate danger of taxation passed 
 away, the popular hostility subsided, as Jefferson says. 
 But the situation in Massachusetts was peculiar. In the 
 first place, the ecclesiastical question, instead of being one 
 of tithes, and of yesterday, as in Virginia, was as old as 
 the colony, and laid hold on the deepest and most sacred 
 convictions of the people ; and, as we have seen, it was 
 a burning question, entirely independent of any question 
 of parliamentary taxation, and wholly unaffected b}^ the re- 
 peal of the Stamp Act, or the modifications of the other 
 revenue measures. And in the next place, as we have also 
 seen, there had always existed in Massachusetts, as in no 
 other colony, tAvo distinctly arrayed parties divided on 
 questions directly leading up to colonial independence. And 
 in these circumstances, rather than in any exclusive virtue 
 or intelligence of this colony — I speak this with bated breath 
 — is to be found the reason why Massachusetts was earliest 
 and most persistent in the war to which she furnished nearly 
 one third of the troops brought into the field, although her 
 territory, before the close of the first year, was freed from 
 the foot of the invader. 
 
 The war began in Massachusetts. It was brought on by 
 the action of parties. These parties, the radicals and the con- 
 servatives,* were as old as the race, and will survive with it. 
 
 ^ Adams to Jefferson: "You say our divisions began AAith Federalism L- 
 and anti-Federalism. Alas ! tliej" began with human nature ; they have 
 
52 
 
 They came over with Winthrop. At first, these graduates of 
 old Cambridge were sufficiently, though somewhat incon- 
 gruously, occupied in framing ordinances respecting yoking 
 and ringing of swine, party fences, and the laying out of 
 townways and highways ; but these affairs, with some others 
 of more importance, attended to, and inter-state affairs, after 
 the subsidence of Laud's demonstrations, being in abeyance, 
 they divided on theological polemics, and thus preserved the 
 civilization which was imperilled in a frozen, savage wilder- 
 ness. But the arrival of Charles's commissioners in 1664 
 made hot work for both parties ; and the historian of New 
 England has recorded, "that before the close of the first 
 century, political parties had arrayed themselves not only 
 upon local questions, but also upon questions of the relation 
 of the Colonies to the Emj)ire." 
 
 With the inauguration of the new government in 1692, 
 party strife was renewed and continued, with intervals of 
 repose, through the entire provincial period. Party ques- 
 tions were somewhat in abeyance through the French wars 
 to the treaty of peace in 1763, but became grave during the 
 period of commercial torpidity which ensued, and rancorous 
 upon the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765. Nor are we 
 permitted to believe that the magnitude of the interests in- 
 volved, or the serious consequences likely to flow from 
 erroneous action, preserved the discussion from intemper- 
 ance, or that conclusions were reached with sole reference 
 to the public weal. Contemporaneous newspapers and 
 pamphlets, and the published proceedings of the people in 
 
 existed in America from its first plantation. ... A Court and Country 
 party have always contended. "Whig and Tory disputed very sharply 
 before the Revolution, and in every step during the Revolution. Every 
 measure of Congress, from 1774 to 1787, inclusively, was disputed with 
 acrimony, and decided by as small majorities as any question is decided 
 in these days " [1812]. Works, x. 23. 
 
53 
 
 town meeting assembled, and of their representatives in the 
 General Court, contain ample evidence that the party heats, 
 personal interests and mob violence, to which many of those 
 now living were witnesses in the late civil war, had their 
 prototypes in the Revolutionary era. 
 
 At both epochs and in both parties were found radicals and 
 conservatives, statesmen and politicians, patriots and self- 
 seekers, intelligent adherents and blind party devotees. At 
 both epochs and in both parties, in the name of liberty and 
 under the guise of patriotism, against persons whose only 
 offence was a silent adherence to their own convictions, were 
 committed acts of violence, instigated in the phrensy of 
 party by those whose names and character should constitute 
 denial, and recorded without disapprobation by historical 
 partisans. 
 
 In the Revolution, parties were outlined by the general 
 principles of their respective adherents, but were by no means 
 homogeneous. There were those in the governmental or Tory 
 party, as it then began to be called, who doubted neither the 
 omnipotence of Parliament over the colonies, nor the wisdom 
 of its exercise in levying a tax ; while others were satisfied 
 with the affirmation of the right. And in the patriotic party 
 many deprecated a resort to forcible resistance who strenu- 
 ously denied the British pretensions. Of these, Franklin and 
 Dickinson were the most eminent ; and as late as 1776, their 
 opinions were the opinions of the majority out of New Eng- 
 land.' 
 
 Adams writes to Plumer, " You inquire whether every mem- 
 ber of Congress did, on the 4th of July, 1776, in fact, cor- 
 dially approve of the Declaration of Independence. I then 
 believed, and have not since altered my opinion, that there 
 
 ' See Franklin's Letters in Tudor's Otis, 392, n, and Mag. of Amer. Hist. 
 Sept. 1883, article Dickinson ; also Hildreth, iii. 45, 57, 77. 
 
54 
 
 were several who signed with regret, and several others 
 with many doubts and much lukewarmness." ' 
 
 With the exception of the clergy, the party affiliations of 
 no class could be accurately predicted. Parents and chil- 
 dren, brothers and sisters and life-long friends found them- 
 selves arrayed in hostile ranks, as religious and political 
 convictions, marriage, social relations, interest,^ or even acci- 
 dent, dictated. 
 
 The number of the people in each of these parties is not sus- 
 ceptible of precise determination, and varied somewhat with 
 the changing fortunes of the contest. Many of those who 
 finally adhered to the crown were among the most earnest 
 denunciators of the Stamp Act. John Adams has recorded 
 it as his opinion that "in 1765, the colonies were more 
 unanimous than they have been since, either as colonies or 
 states." From 1760 to 1766 was the purest period of pat- 
 riotism, from 1766 to 1776, was the period of corruption. 
 This agrees with the opinion of Jefferson, so far as he refers to 
 the same period. Nor is there anything unusual in this phase 
 of parties. So long as dissatisfaction was expressed by 
 declarations of rights, or even mob violence, patriotism was 
 cheap ; but when it became apparent that affairs were drift- 
 ing to armed resistance, uncertain in its issue, many who had 
 been conspicuous as patriots drew back, and finally entrusted 
 their fortunes to the government as the stronger party. 
 
 ' Works, X. 35. See Frothingham, Eise of the Republic, 514 et seq. 
 
 - " The managers of our public affairs, like those on your side of the 
 Atlantic," writes Dr. Eliot to Thomas HoUis, 10 December, 1767, "are 
 governed by private views and the spirit of a party. Few have any 
 regard to the good of the public. Men are patriots till they get in place 
 and then they are! ! ! anything." Mass. Hist. Coll. xxxiv. 414. 
 
00 
 
 THE PARTY OF THE LOYALISTS. 
 
 Of the barristers in Boston and its immediate vicinity, 
 Thacher died in 1765, Otis became incapacitated in 1771. 
 Five were loyalists, and John Adams alone lived through the 
 Revolution as the advocate of American independence. 
 Twenty-four of the principal barristers and attorneys in the 
 colony, and one hundred and twenty-three merchants and 
 traders, including a few others, in Boston, signed the address 
 to Gov. Hutchinson, 30 May, 1774 ; and similar addresses 
 to Gov. Gage, as late as 14 October, 1775, were signed 
 by the same class of people, and in still larger proportion to 
 the population, in Salem and Marblehead. Plymouth County 
 was the stronghold of the loyalists. On the evacuation of 
 Boston, 17 March, 1776, Sir William Howe was accompanied 
 by fifteen hundred of these people ; and in September, 1778, 
 the General Court specified, in an act forbidding their return, 
 the names of more than three hundred citizens in the severa[ 
 counties. These numbers include only those who were con- 
 spicuous as landed proprietors or in the mercantile and pro- 
 fessional classes. The Tories were in possession of the prin- 
 cipal offices in the gift either of the crown or the people. 
 As the conservative party, and having something to lose,' 
 
 ^ John Adams gives the impressions which the wealthy delegates from 
 the other colonies to the Congress of 1774 had received in respect to those 
 of Massachusetts. It had been represented to them that Hancock was 
 fortunately sick, and Mr. Bowdoin's relations thought that his large 
 estate ought not to be put to hazard. So they sent Mr. Gushing, who was a 
 harmless kind of man, but poor and wholly dependent on his popularity 
 for his subsistence ; Mr. Samuel Adams, who was a very artful, designing 
 man, but desperately poor, and wholly dependent on his popularity with 
 the ■ lowest vulgar for his living, and John Adams and Robert Treat 
 Paine, who were two young lawyers of no great talents, reputation or 
 weight, who had no other means of raising themselves into consequence 
 than by courting popularity. xVnd they were all suspected of having 
 
5G 
 
 they were satisiiecl with the existing order of things, and 
 in that state of mind found it easy to indulge the sentiment 
 of loyalty which inheres in the British subject, in all lands, 
 so long as he is allowed to do as he pleases. Not that 
 the Tories were fonder of paying taxes than were the pa- 
 triots, 1)ut they were content when the obnoxious tax was 
 repealed, and were disinclined to make an issue on the De- 
 claratory Act of the parliamentary right to tax. To these 
 political sentiments was united the profouudest conviction 
 that the colonists, unaided, could never withstand the power 
 of the empire when put forth in its might, and that the hope 
 of friendly intervention by the continental powers of Europe 
 was a dream sure to be interrupted by a rude awakening. 
 As the event showed, this was their fatal mistake. 
 
 Such was the party of the government, or the Loyalists. 
 Such was the formidable party, intrenched in wealth, office 
 and social influence, which confronted John Adams and his 
 associates ; and it is his and their glory to have overthrown 
 it. 
 
 THE PATRIOTIC PARTY. 
 
 The patriotic party is less easily described, feince it con- 
 tained many heterogeneous elements. As a whole, it was the 
 party of the opposition, such as is always found under all 
 forms of government. In Massachusetts, its formation on 
 well-defined issues antedates by more than a hundred years 
 the resistance to the Stamp Act, and was coeval with 
 the inauguration by Charles II. of those measures designed 
 to reduce the colonies to subjection. The real purpose of 
 this party, though seldom avowed, was, from the first, sub- 
 independence in view. Works, ii. 512. This, of course, is John Adams's 
 state^nent, and it contains so much of truth and significance as to enhance 
 our estimate of liis candor. 
 
57 
 
 stantial independence of the Crown of England. At no time 
 was it troubled with scruples. It hoped immunity from the 
 chastisement threatened by the king in his embroilment in 
 foreign wars.' It resisted the abrogation of the old charter ; 
 it imprisoned Andros and Dudley ; and when resistance 
 proved unavailing, it sought to save the liberties of the 
 people by neutralizing the anti-democratic elements in the 
 new charter of 1692. The struggle thus begun never 
 changed its character, and, as we have already seen, never 
 ceased until the peace of 1783. Two things must never 
 be lost sight of. First, that this resistance was the resist- 
 ance of a party. From the first stage of the contest to the 
 last, there was a Tory party which counselled submission ; 
 and this party was proportionally more numerous in its early 
 than in its later stage. Secondly, that, from first to last, the 
 action of the patriotic party was resistance and obstruction. 
 It was not the attitude of slaves seeking their freedom, but 
 of freemen resisting subjugation. The diflerence is immense, 
 and on its perception depends a knowledge of the real char- 
 acter of the American Revolution, which was the final victory 
 in a hundred years of party strife, with unbroken continuity 
 of unvaried purpose, — the maintenance of independence 
 rather than its acquirement, — originating in a province, but 
 at length, and mainly through the influence of John Adams, 
 enkindling the heart of a continent. 
 
 Besides reasons of state which embittered the colonists 
 were some of a personal nature, affecting those especially 
 who sufiered under the usurpation of Andros, or were dis- 
 
 1 " They say," writes a commissioner in 1665, '• thej^ can easily spin 
 out seven years by writing, and before that time a change may come ; 
 nay, some have dared to say, who knows what the event of this Dutch 
 war maybe?" Calendar of State Papers, quoted by Prof . Seeley, Ex- 
 pansion of England, 68, n. 
 
■58 
 
 placed by Dudley. This personal element was never absent 
 from the contest in any of its stages, and finally became one 
 of the most potent forces in arraying the Massachusetts 
 colonists in armed hostility to British authority. 
 
 The lull of political excitement during the French war 
 was only temporary. With the restoration of peace the 
 people, no longer distressed by the anxieties occasioned by 
 war and irritated by the operations of the Anglican hierarchy, 
 were ready to give ear to the whisperings concerning the 
 ministerial purpose to raise a revenue in America. The 
 passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 left no doubt on that 
 subject. This was the occasion for the re-opening of old 
 party questions, and party strife ensued, which continued with 
 scarcely any mitigation until the war. 
 
 But this was true chiefly of Massachusetts. In the colonies 
 to the southward the repeal of the Act was followed by the 
 general apathy which so much alarmed and disgusted 
 Jefferson. The facts verified the conjecture of Franklin. 
 In his examination before the Commons in 1766, he was 
 p.sked if the Americans Avould be satisfied with the repeal of 
 the Stamp Act, notwithstanding the resolutions of Parliament 
 as to the right ; and his answer was, "I think the resolutions 
 of Right will give them very little concern if they are never 
 attempted to be carried into practice." 
 
 Additional reasons for the apparent change in public senti- 
 ment may be conjectured. At first it seems not to have 
 been generally understood that all sums raised in America 
 by taxation were to be expended there in the defence and 
 government of the country. To this there doubtless were good 
 practical and constitutional objections ; but these would not 
 be likely to strike the common mind with the same force as 
 a project to replenish the British exchequer from the pockets 
 of the colonists. Nor was it unlikely that the acts of violence 
 
59 
 
 which everywhere accompanied the popular expression of 
 disapprobation of the measure, should, on second thought, 
 cause some apprehension in the minds of those friendly to 
 law and order. Property also became alarmed. 
 
 But whatever may have been the reasons for the popular 
 falling off, there can be no question as to the fact ; and if it 
 had been true in the same degree in Massachusetts as in the 
 other colonies, it is doubtful whether the conflict would have 
 occurred when it did. 
 
 In Massachusetts, however, there was to be no peace. 
 The Stamp Act was repealed, but the Declaratory Act re- 
 mained, and the Bishop of London did not stay his hand. 
 The Puritan pulpit rang with unceasing alarm until its voice 
 was drowned in the clangor of arms. Not one of the causes 
 which had kept the royal governors in contention for sixty 
 years was settled or in abeyance. New causes were con- 
 stantly arising, — often made ; and it was the evident deter- 
 mination of the patriotic party that they should be settled 
 only in one way — with substantial independence of British 
 authority in all matters of domestic policy. To these causes 
 must be added the personal hostility, which had become 
 deadly, between Bernard and Hutchinson on one side, and 
 James Otis, Jr., and Samuel Adams on the other. 
 
 The last-mentioned causes kept the contest alive in Mas- 
 sachusetts, which seemed to be in a state of collapse in other 
 colonies, until the arrival of the East India Company's teas 
 revived colonial interest in public affairs. 
 
 SAMUEL ADAMS THE GREAT PARTY LEADER. 
 
 In the early stages of the controversy, international as 
 well as local, James Otis, Jr., was the leader; but after a 
 while his light began to flicker, and in 1771 went out and 
 was seen no more. Thacher, less to be pitied than Otis, had 
 
60 
 
 found an early grave. Joseph Hawley and Samuel Adams 
 remained ; but Hawley's residence was remote from the scene 
 of immediate conflict, and occasional fits of despondency 
 rendered unreliable for sudden exigencies one of the most 
 able and interesting, but little-known, patriots of the Revo- 
 lution. Samuel Adams remained, and in all local, religious, 
 political and personal relations, the Revolution in Massachu- 
 setts found in him its greatest leader. ' 
 
 If his colony was not quite ripe for armed resistance, nor 
 all of them strong enough, unaided, to carry through the 
 contest if entered upon ; or if, as was the judgment of 
 Hawley,* and as later events seemed to indicate, there was 
 danger, on one hand, that the conflict would be precipi- 
 tated without adequate preparation, and on the other, that the 
 people would grow weary of the strife, — it was Samuel Adams 
 who kept alive the spirit of resistance, and Avith infallible 
 sagacity piloted the bark of liberty through these dangerous 
 seas. Apathy might prevail elsewhere, but in Massachusetts 
 it was not allowed to prevail. At one time there seemed to 
 be danger ; but never was an exigency in human afiairs more 
 clearly discerned nor more resolutely met. Never was oppo- 
 sition more thoroughly organized, nor led with more consum- 
 mate skill. To this work Samuel Adams gave his time with- 
 out stint, his whole heart, and his admirable ability. His 
 
 ^ " Adams, I believe, has the most thorough understanding of liberty 
 and her resources in the temper and character of the people though not 
 in the law and constitution, as well as the most habitual, radical love of 
 it, of any of them, as well as the most correct, genteel and artful pen. 
 He is a man of refined policy, steadfast integrity, exquisite humanity, 
 genteel erudition, obliging, engaging manners, real as well as professed 
 piety, and a universal good character, unless it should be admitted that 
 he is too attentive to the public, and not enough so to himself and his 
 family." John Adams in 1765. Works, ii. 163. 
 
 ^ See a remarkable letter on this point, written from ISTorthampton, 
 February 22, 1775, to Thomas Gushing, in Mass. Hist. Coll. sxxiv. 393. 
 
61 
 
 convictions of the justice of the cause were founded on the 
 rock. His faith in its ultimate triumph was as the faith of 
 the martyrs. He was the last of the Puritans, with the zeal 
 of the first of the Puritans.' He hated kings, but most of 
 all, popes and bishops. The crown and the crozier were 
 alike detested symbols of tyranny. The king was an ofience 
 far away ; Hutchinson was an ofience near at hand. He 
 gathered, united and led the patriotic party of his day. 
 Into it he infused his own courage, zeal and constancy. 
 He was the unrivalled politician of the Eevolution. With- 
 out him it would never have occurred when it did, nor as it 
 did. In this work Samuel Adams was the foremost and 
 greatest man. 
 
 NATIONALIZATION OF THE EEVOLUTION. 
 
 But the Revolution needed a statesman. Beginning in a 
 colony, it was provincial. It required to be nationalized. 
 It began on a party basis of local politics ; it needed a con- 
 stitutional basis. It had enlisted the sympathies and re- 
 sources of a colony. It needed the sentiment of nationality 
 and the resources of a continent. To supply these needs was 
 the work of John Adams. 
 
 The country needed — and, as the ill-starred campaigns of 
 1776 showed, it was one of its sorest needs — one who could 
 enlist the sympathies of continental Europe in behalf of the 
 hard-pressed colonists, shield them from hostile intervention, 
 and secure for them material assistance. For this work, no 
 less by the happy constitution of his mind than by the varied 
 experiences of his life, of all men, Franklin was best fitted. 
 
 ' Adams to Morse : " If James Otis was Martin Luther, Samuel Adams 
 was John Calvin . . . cool, abstemious, polished and refined, though 
 more inflexible, uniform and consistent." 
 
.62 
 
 Finally, the Revolution needed a leader for its armies : it 
 needed Washington. 
 
 Of these men, all required for the initiation and successful 
 issue of the Revolution, each could do his own work su- 
 premely well, but neither, that of the others. In complete- 
 ness and grandeur of character, Washington stands alone. In 
 mass of intellect, Franklin is accounted first, and John Adams 
 second ; but if amount and variety, as well as importance 
 of service as statesmen, be taken into the account, Franklin 
 and Adams might change places. 
 
 Under such circumstances of colonial history, John Adams 
 appeared on the theatre of public affairs. Before we can 
 rightly estimate his career we must know in what character 
 he appeared. Of course he was not a Tory, nor was he a 
 Son of Liberty, though elected as such. He neither repre- 
 sented nor did 'he ally himself to any merely political party. 
 He put himself at the head of that great movement of the 
 race in America towards nationality, visible to the discerning, 
 as we have seen, everywhere except to those who were in it. 
 John Adams himself was only vaguely conscious of it, or of 
 his relations to it. In this he was like the monk of Erfurth 
 and the son of the brewer of Huntingdon. But no less than 
 Luther or Cromwell, he was elected to lead and direct the 
 movement of an age. 
 
 At the age of twenty he said, " Soon after the Reformation 
 a few people came into this new world for conscience' sake. 
 Perhaps this apparently trivial incident may transfer the 
 great empire of Europe into America. It looks likely to 
 me ; for if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our peo- 
 ple, according to exactest computation, will in another cen- 
 tury become more numerous than England itself. The way 
 to keep us from setting up for ourselves, is to divide us." 
 This was in 1755, four years before Wolfe's victory on the 
 
63 
 
 Plains of Abraham, and five years before James Otis argued 
 against the Writs of Assistance. 
 
 This divination of nationality in the future empire of 
 America was not, as it has been regarded, the work of a 
 meditative mind turned politician, but an intuition of that 
 historic imagination already spoken of which led him in later 
 years to head the movement that realized the prophetic 
 vision of his youth. No two characters in our revolution- 
 ary period are more strongly contrasted than Benjamin 
 Franklin and John Adams. Natives of the same colony, 
 and in some respects representative of the spirit of its peo- 
 ple, in others they differed as widely from it as they did 
 from each other. Franklin's intellect was of the first order, 
 under the supreme control of common sense, of which he was 
 the incarnation. This determined his attitude to the Revo- 
 lution. He was opposed to it so far as its promoters con- 
 templated armed resistance to Great Britain. Always averse 
 to war, he would have patiently waited until time and 
 growth should sever the colonies from the mother country. 
 He did not believe the colonies were strong: enousfh to fiffht 
 the king ; but when Samuel Adams forced the hand of the 
 minister, and war became inevitable, Franklin threw his great 
 influence with the patriotic party. As matter of judgment, he 
 was right. The colonists were not strong enough to with- 
 stand even the feeble generals of the king. At the time of 
 French intervention the orarae of war had orone against 
 them, and the last two years were fought largely with 
 French troops and French money. Franklin's judgment 
 was controlled by his great reason. He had no imagination. 
 This is where he differed from John Adams. As Adams 
 said of himself, " It had always been his destiny to mount 
 breaches and lead the forlorn hope." He had faith in it. He 
 had seen it all as:es in the victorious van, and his imao-ination 
 
64 
 
 was kindled by the historic review. It was just this sublime 
 intuition of nationality which distinguished him among his 
 contemporaries ; and this, united with great abilities and high 
 courage, made him the first statesman of the Revolution. 
 
 The value of this gift to the cause which John Adams came 
 to represent, or to himself personally, can hardly be over- 
 estimated. He had said that "by looking into history we 
 can settle in our minds a clear and comprehensive view of 
 the earth at its creation ; of its various changes and revo- 
 lutions ; of the growth of several kingdoms and empires ; 
 and that nature and truth, or rather truth and right, are in- 
 variably the same in all times and in all places." This in- 
 tuition enabled him to discern in race tendencies, situation 
 and growth, the inevitable result of the approaching contest ; 
 and when the hour for choice came, he cast his fortunes not 
 with the governmental party as might have been expected 
 from his constitutional and professional conservatisai, but 
 with those ready to battle for freedom and nationality. And 
 this faith in the prophetic movements of events left no 
 room for doubt as to the justice of the cause, or of its ulti- 
 mate success. And so he never quailed in the face of dan- 
 ger, never was disheartened by disaster, and every step was 
 a step forward. 
 
 Besides the faculty by which John Adams divined the end 
 and every intermediate step, from the beginning, in the logi- 
 cal order of events, he possessed another of scarcely less 
 value to the cause. By constitution of mind, as well as by 
 special education, he was constructive; and in this order; 
 before he tore down, he planned reconstruction. Govern- 
 ments were not the results of accident, but growths from 
 germs, maturing, as the oak from the acorn, by laws of race, 
 situation and the facts of national life. His reconstruction, 
 therefore, as we shall see, was in accordance with these laws. 
 
65 
 
 Familiar as he was with the theories of government from the 
 republic of Plato to those of his own times, and not un- 
 willing- to adopt whatever would incorporate itself into that 
 system which his race had found most serviceable, he had 
 no faith in systems which lacked the sanction of proved 
 utihty. His work was new. To disrupt an empire was not 
 new. It w^as not new to overthrow governments. But to 
 overturn thirteen roj^al provinces, and, without intervenino' 
 anarchy, to set up in their stead thirteen independent gov- 
 ernments ; to loose t'i3 bands of an empire, and re-form the 
 contiguous parts into an united whole with such coherence 
 as enabled it to maintain itself against formidable odds, — 
 this was something new in history, and to many seemed 
 impossible. 
 
 Samuel Adams represented the Puritan element in the 
 contest in Massachusetts. To him the Revolution was the 
 last in a series of events reaching back through a hundred 
 years, to resist the imposition of the Anglican hierarchy on 
 the descendants of the Puritans. Civil and religious liberty 
 w^ere indissolubly united in his aflections, but his inspiration 
 was religion. This fervor, which gave him power among his 
 own people, detracted from his influence in those colonies 
 in Avhich the people regarded the iNIassachusetts Puritans as 
 bigoted fanatics. 
 
 John Adams was also a believer in religion, but he had 
 read Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke ' and Hume. To him, religion 
 had its place, — the first place in natural order in every 
 well-regulated mind. But he was no bigot, and had no in- 
 vincible repugnance to any form of religious belief. 
 
 And so, in civil government, he believed in orderly, con- 
 
 ^ Adams to Jefferson : "I have read Bolingbroke through more than 
 fifty years ago, and more than five times in my life, and once within five 
 years."' 
 
66 
 
 stitutional subordination. But, in his scheme, it was a sub- 
 ordination to laws, not men. He believed in laws. As a 
 lawyer he admitted the supremacy of law ; but as a states- 
 man he recognized the distinction between those rules which 
 in judicial tribunals determine the rights of persons, and 
 those general maxims applicable only to legislation. In con- 
 struing the British Constitution, or that of his own colony, it 
 was not with him a question of original theory, but of pres- 
 ent fact. " When Massachusettensis says that the king's do- 
 minions 7nust have an uncontrollable power. I ask whether 
 they have such a power or not," is his way of reasoning. 
 What, by growth, development and actual operative force, 
 have these several constitutions come to be, as matter of 
 fact, to-da}' ? Parliamentarj^ supremacy is doubtless a con- 
 stitutional mnxim in England, and the supremacy of the 
 Great and General Court, in all internal affairs, civil as well 
 as ecclesiastical, is, and always has been, a constitutional 
 maxim in the province of Massachusetts Bay. And in both 
 cases the validity of these maxims is to be determined, not 
 by the declarations or admissions of past ages, but by the 
 potentiality of a present declaration. To the assumed right 
 of Parliament to tax the colonies, as a corollary of parlia- 
 mentary omnipotence, he offered no theory of constitutional 
 construction, but answered, "Our provincial legislatures are 
 the only supreme authorities in our colonies." Colonial con- 
 stitutions, like the British Constitution, he assumed, were 
 flexible,- readily adapting themselves to changed circum- 
 stances, subject to growth and development, and the sole 
 ' measure of the rights of the people, whenever, as matter 
 of fact, they had come to rely upon them as such. Nor did 
 he f'A\\ to perceive, nor shrink from the conclusion, that, 
 when time and circumstances brought on the inevitable con- 
 flict, force would be the final arbiter. To the acceptance of 
 
67 
 
 this doctrine he led the national mind, as represented in the 
 Declaration of Rights by the Congress of 1774, and inspired 
 it at a later date with the audacity to defy a power greater 
 than its own. 
 
 Such seems to have been John Adams's theorj^ of the pro- 
 vincial constitutions, though nowhere expressly formulated 
 in words, and perhaps not even in his own mind ; but every- 
 where evinced by his conduct, not otherwise consistent or 
 intelligible. He frequently met his antagonists, such as 
 Hutchinson and Leonard, on their own ground, and some- 
 times overthrew them by skilful fence ; but his strength and 
 his power were in his practical recognition of the American 
 constitutions. And if, as has been suggested, he has nowhere 
 given us a complete statement of his constitutional views 
 during the controversial period, but left them to be inferred, 
 as in the Declaration of Eights, he is not peculiar in this 
 respect. Great leaders, especially if, like John Adams, 
 they are men of action, are seldom the formulators of their 
 oAvn principles of conduct, and are not always conscious of 
 them. They are men of intuitions ; and their chief distinc- 
 tion is, that they are the first to feel the movement of the 
 age, recognize its significance, and give it beneficent direction. 
 
 Excepting the year 1770, when John Adams was a 
 member of the General Court, he had no official relation to 
 public afiairs. In the vulgar strife between those who had 
 place and those who wanted place, he felt no interest. Poor, 
 ambitious, conscious of great powers, he doubtless desired 
 opportunities for their exercise. He saw positions of power 
 and emolument in his profession engrossed by the old his- 
 toric families which adhered to the Crown. Into this 
 charmed circle he gazed, he tells us, not without envy. But 
 he was a man of principle, with a just sense of honor, and 
 no demagogue. Poorly adapted for the game of politics, 
 
68 
 
 and lacking the faculty Avhich moulds the sentiments of 
 numbers into some definite form of action, he made a poor 
 figure as a politician. By the constitution of his mind, by 
 taste and education, he was fitted for statesmanship; and 
 when that career was open to him, he entered upon it with 
 such success that he soon became recognized as the most 
 commanding statesman of the country. 
 
 The Eevolution encountered difficulties apart from the 
 evident determination of the ministry to sustain the parlia- 
 mentary authority. As a domestic question, it was to be 
 rescued from party squabbles, and placed on such constitu- 
 tional grounds as would satisfy the sound judgment of those 
 on whom it depended for support, as well as the fervid 
 patriotism of those whose obstreperous demonstrations were 
 silenced by the first call to less noisy duty. It also required 
 to be nationalized ; for unless Massachusetts was to stand 
 alone, and standing alone, to fail, it was essential that all 
 the colonies, of diverse nationalities, histories and religions, 
 and without special good-will to Massachusetts, should never- 
 theless unite with her on common ground, make her cause 
 their cause, and count the work done only when a free, 
 independent empire should rise out of the ruins of thirteen 
 royal governments. The cause in Massachusetts did not 
 stand exactly on the right basis. It was too local and 
 personal. It was too largely a question between the ins and 
 the outs to excite interest in the other colonies, and in the 
 ecclesiastical contention they had no sympathy with the 
 Massachusetts Puritans. 
 
 To one of less abundant resources, or less confidence in 
 them ; to one with less faith in the future empire of America, 
 grounded on the historical development of nationality and 
 constitutional government by the Anglo-Saxon race, the 
 magnitude and difficulties would have been appalling. But 
 
69 
 
 John Adams brought ability, courage and devotion to the 
 cause, and he gained it. When he entered Congress in 
 1774, he found the representatives of the thirteen colonies 
 brought together chiefly by commercial considerations, 
 having no principle of cohesion, and no purpose of imited 
 iiction, except peaceful resistance to parliamentary taxation.^ 
 But before he left Congress in 1777, and more through his 
 instrumentality than any other, these colonies had become 
 independent states, some with constitutions for which he 
 constructed the plan, and united states with the germ of a 
 constitution which, took shape under the Constitution of the 
 United States, in which were embraced the essential features 
 of the Constitution of Massachusetts, the work of his own 
 hands. Such an opportunity has seldom presented itself to 
 a statesman in any age or country ; seldom has such oppor- 
 tunity been so successfully improved. 
 
 CONSTITUTIONAX, QUESTIONS. 
 
 The period between 1765 and 1775 was prolific of party 
 pamphlets in which the parliamentary pretensions and 
 colonial rights were discussed with zeal, and often with 
 great ability. Massachusetts contributed her full share of 
 this literature to the common cause, and added a series of 
 state papers comprising messages from the royal governors, 
 and answers from the two houses, together with resolutions 
 from conventions and popular assemblies, probably unsur- 
 passed in volume by similar productions emanating from any 
 other colony. Owing to her peculiar situation, and the fre- 
 
 ' In the Congress of 1774, " after the first flush of confidence was over, 
 suspicions and jealousies began to revive. There were in all the Colonies 
 many wealthy and influential men who had joined, indeed, in protesting 
 against the usurpations of the mother country, but who were greatly 
 disinclined to anything like a decided rupture." Hildreth, iii. 45. 
 
70 
 
 quent occasion she gave for interference in her affairs by the 
 king or his representatives, few constitutional questions of 
 colonial import failed of exhaustive discussion. John Adams's 
 contribution to this revolutionary literature was considerable 
 in amount, and the direction he gave to it was followed by 
 consequences of importance to the patriotic party in Massa- 
 chusetts, and later, to the national party in Congress. 
 
 The Stamp Act, and other colonial measures which 
 proceeded from the British ministry, became party questions 
 on both sides of the water, and were discussed in Parliament 
 with the heat which characterizes party declamation at all 
 times. In those days, as well as in later days, and in grave 
 histories, these declamatory utterances were regarded and 
 cited as statesmanlike determinations of constitutional ques- 
 tions. Nothing can be more misleading. They were mainly 
 party cries of the opposition, similar to those with which we 
 became familiar in the congressional debates which preceded 
 the late civil war. Chatham's splendid eloquence gave 
 currency to declarations which had no foundation in consti- 
 tutional law, and Camden, from whose judicial mind more 
 caution might have been expected, conceded, and not long 
 after denied, the American position ; nor was either utter- 
 ance without suspicion of political or personal motive. 
 Their object was not to support the rights of the colonists, 
 but to overthrow their opponents. There were those among 
 the colonists at the time who held these partisan declara- 
 tions at their just estimate. John Adams said, "I know very 
 well that the opposition to ministry was the only valid ground 
 on which the friendship for America that was professed in 
 England rested." Camden, who had asserted with the colo- 
 nists that taxation and representation were inseparable, 
 later, in 1767, declared that his doubts were removed by 
 the declaration of Parliament itself, and that its authority 
 
71 
 
 must be maintained. But this attitude of tlie opposition in 
 England, though not generally understood in America, was 
 of great advantage to her cause. It encouraged the colo- 
 nists in their resistance, and led to a feeble and vacillating 
 policy in the ministry, which showed itself in the inefficient 
 conduct of the war. (See Quar. Rev. Jan., 1884, p. 7.) 
 
 The questions of constitutional law raised by the parlia- 
 mentary revenue measures affecting the colonies, neither at 
 the time, nor since, have received a satisfactory solution. 
 Regarded as questions of law determinable in courts of jus- 
 tice, or of the legislative power under the British Constitu- 
 tion, in which aspect a lawj^er would at lirst be likely to 
 regard them, John Adams might well have hesitated in 
 forming an opinion. Otis at the outset took the ground that 
 Acts of Parliament were not binding on the colonies : but 
 on fuller consideration of the subject, in his work on the 
 "Rights of the Colonies," he conceded the claim of parlia- 
 mentary supremacy. This was Chatham's doctrine, coupled 
 with a distinction between external and internal taxes ; and 
 Franklin had incautiously admitted " that an adequate repre- 
 sentation in Parliament would probably be acceptable to the 
 colonists." John Quincy Adams quotes Jefferson's statement, 
 "that in the ground which he took, that the British Parlia- 
 ment never had any authority over the colonies, any more 
 than the Danes and Saxons of his own age had over the people 
 of England, he never could get anybody to agree with him but 
 Mr. Wythe. It was too absurd." He then adds, "In truth, 
 the question of right as between Parliament and the colonies 
 was one of those upon which it is much easier to say who 
 was wrong than who was right. The pretension that they 
 had the right to bind the colonies in all cases whatever, 
 and that wdiich denied them the right to bind in any case 
 whatever, were the two extremes equally unfounded; and 
 
72 
 
 yet it is extremely difficult to draw the line where the 
 authority of Parliament commenced and where it closed.'' ' 
 
 John Adams drew the line against the authority of Par- 
 liament in any case whatever, except by the colonial con- 
 sent ; and this position, taken in the earliest stages of the 
 controversy, he consistently maintained to the end. And 
 this was the only tenable ground. Once admit the suprem- 
 acy of the British Constitution in regulating the internal 
 affairs of the colonies, and there was no ground for consti- 
 tutional resistance to an}^ acts affecting them, as distin- 
 guished from the people within the three kingdoms. On that 
 ground neither Hutchinson nor Leonard was answered.^ It 
 was a question of fact, and chiefly as to time. When the 
 colonial charters were the evidence of corporate existence 
 within the realm for extra-territorial purposes, they, like all 
 domestic charters, were subject to alteration or repeal ; but 
 when, by lapse of time, growth and usage, they had become 
 governments proper, regulating their own internal affairs, 
 they then became colonial constitutions which excluded all 
 other authority. This I understand the position of John Adams 
 to have been. Burke recomiized the effect of usao-e in deter- 
 mining constitutional rights. "Do not burden them with 
 taxes ; you were not used to do so from the beginning. Let 
 this be your reason for not taxing." Of course the British 
 
 ^ Life and Works, viii. 282. 
 
 ^ General political maxims never have had, and probably never will 
 have, practical force, either in courts or legislative bodies. To quote the 
 maxim that taxation and representation were insei^arable, as a guide to 
 legislation, or as a ground for legal resistance to a law already passed, 
 while five sixths of the people of England, whole counties, large towns, 
 and many of the Channel Islands, were, or had been, wholly unrepre- 
 sented, though fullj^ taxed, was practically as absurd as for a fugitive 
 slave to quote the Declaration of Independence or the preamble to the Con- 
 stitution in a court of law. or for a legislator, in either House of Congress. 
 
73 
 
 Parliament were quite at liberty to take an entirely diflferent 
 view of the question, as they did, and its practical solution 
 depended on the relative strength of the parties. 
 
 John Adams was brought face to face with this question, 
 and took his position in regard to it, before the Governor 
 and Council in 1765, on the petition of the town of Boston 
 for re-opening the Courts, which had been closed for the want 
 of stamps required by the Act. A few days before he had 
 written in his diary, "It is my opinion that by this inactivity 
 we discover cowardice, and too much respect for the Act. 
 This rest appears to be, by implication at least, an acknow- 
 ledgment of the authority of Parliament to tax us. And if 
 this authority is once acknowledged and established, the ruin 
 of America will be inevitable." This was on the 18th of 
 December. On the 20th is the following: "I grounded my 
 argument on the invalidity of the Stamp Act, it not being in 
 any sense our act, having never consented to it." 
 
 On the validity of this position John Adams staked his legal 
 reputation, his hopes, his fortunes and the weltiire of his 
 people. 
 
 It is one of the highest claims of Washington to the 
 gratitude of mankind that he carried the country through a 
 long war in strict subordination to the civil authority ; and 
 it raises our respect for John Adams, that, his position once 
 taken on the fundamental law of his colony, he maintained 
 it with courage and fidelity, without swerving from principle, 
 and without recourse to the arts of a demagogue. He began 
 his career as a statesman, and such he remained to the end. 
 
 After the death of Thacher and the retirement of James 
 Otis, Jr., John Adams became the trusted adviser of the 
 patriot leaders on all legal and constitutional questions. 
 They had need of him, for the party which adhered to the 
 Crown was led by very able men, who carried with them 
 
74 
 
 he influence of wealth, social position and official station. 
 A cause supported by such men as Hutchinson, Sewall and 
 Leonard could be overthrown only by powerful assailants. 
 Better than any man of atfairs save Hutchinson, John Adams 
 understood the history, legislation and constitutional law of 
 his colony ; and probably no man of his day, on either side 
 of the Atlantic, had more carefully considered the founda- 
 tions of government, or the formative process by which con- 
 stitutions adapt themselves to the changing circumstances of 
 national life. He recognized their present validity only so 
 far as they conformed to the laws of national growth ; and 
 he saw that they retained their identity only as the oak is 
 identical with the acorn from which it sprung. 
 
 In the legal and constitutional controversies which pre- 
 ceded hostilities, the dialectical force was by no means 
 wholly on the side of the patriotic party. Hutchinson was a 
 formidable antagonist, and more than once caused anxiety 
 in the camp of the Whigs. And he was surpassed by 
 Daniel Leonard, whose weekly papers, published in the winter 
 of 1774-5, under the signature of "Massachusettensis," raised 
 this anxiety to positive alarm. These celebrated letters, — 
 if such can be called celebrated which no one reads : a classic 
 lost to literature amid the ruins of the cause which brought it 
 forth, — written with evident sincerity of purpose and almost 
 pathetic tenderness of feeling, were likely to afiect the pop- 
 ular mind very powerfully, at a tinie when the colony 
 seemed to be driftino- into war. His constitutional ararument 
 was strong — perhaps unanswerable on the ground on which 
 he put it ; and his appeals to the judgment, good sense and 
 right feeling of the community required an answer. The 
 eyes of the Whigs were turned to John Adams. He had just 
 returned from the Congress at Philadelphia, in which, with 
 infinite difficulty, he had brought the delegates to the true 
 
75 
 
 fiffhtino; around of the Revolution. With the constitutional 
 argument he was perfectly familiar. The answers of the 
 House of Representatives, in January and March, 1773, to 
 Hutchinson's messages, were indebted to him for their legal 
 astuteness, which was adopted by Samuel Adams and used 
 with the skill which characterizes his acknowledged com- 
 positions. I refer to these controversial papers only for 
 the purpose of showing the attitude of John Adams to the 
 main question. The Tory writers, assuming that the colonists 
 were British subjects within the realm, and with rights and 
 duties determinable by the construction ordinarily given to 
 the British Constitution in practical legislation, had little 
 difficulty in making plain that no line could be drawn 
 between absolute parliamentary supremacy in all cases what- 
 ever, and total independence. This was forcing the contro- 
 versy to an issue for which the colonists, as a whole, were 
 not ripe, as John Adams had sorrowfully learned in the 
 recent Congress at Philadelphia. As a Massachusetts issue 
 he could accept it with prompt decision ; but there were 
 other parties to be conciliated, and he necessarily wrote with 
 a view to the state of feeling in the other colonies, and in 
 England as well, where the contest was regarded with 
 intense interest. In discussing the question as one arising 
 on the construction of the British Constitution, he showed 
 both power and learning in attack as well as in defence ; but 
 he was in close quarters with an antagonist worthy of his 
 steel, and as is usual in such cases, he experienced the vary- 
 ing; fortunes of war. 
 
 But on his own ground — the position taken before the 
 governor and council, in 1765, on the petition for opening 
 the courts ; and later, in the fourth article of the Declaration 
 of Rights by the Congress at Philadelphia — he was on firm, 
 constitutional ground, and historically correct, if the general 
 
76 
 
 course of colonial history, rather than isolated facts, is 
 regarded. Some of these positions have been already 
 referred to ; but as he is about to pass from the provincial to 
 the national stage, and as the replies to " Massachusettensis " 
 were the latest and most authentic expression of his views 
 on the colonial constitution, I refer to them again. 
 
 On the parliamentary modification of the charter contem- 
 poraneous wdth the Boston Port Bill, he says, "America will 
 never allow that Parliament has any authority to alter their 
 constitution. She is wholly penetrated with a sense of the 
 necessity of resisting it at all hazards. And she would resist 
 it if the constitution of Massachusetts had been altered as 
 much for the better as it is for the worse." The inviolability 
 of the colonial constitution, and that constitution as the 
 basis and measure of colonial rights, was his doctrine. 
 
 This bold position was the true position. No sounder 
 doctrine ever emanated from any American constitutionalist ; 
 and when John Adams assumed it, defended it, and brought 
 his colony to stand upon it and fight the war upon it, he 
 rendered her a service of statesmanship such as has never 
 been surpassed. It changed the nature of the contest. Acts 
 which would have been rebellion to the British Constitution, 
 and made all participators in them traitors , were no longer 
 such, but justifiable and patriotic defence of their own 
 constitutional liberty. 
 
 The Whigs were no longer fighting against Great Britain, 
 but for the protection of their own rights. The difierence 
 was immense, and so were the consequences. This new feel- 
 ing nerved the arm and fired the hearts of many whom the 
 idea of treason inspired with something of its old terror. 
 Every act of ministerial power designed to coerce the colo- 
 nists was usurpation, and the ministerial troops became an 
 organized mob which might be lawfully resisted. 
 
77 
 
 Important as were the consequences of John Adams's doc- 
 trine of the inviolability of colonial constitutions in affording 
 a good fighting position, other and even more important 
 consequences flowed from it. If the people of the several 
 colonies were living under constitutional governments of 
 their own, and not merely royal charters revocable at the 
 pleasure of the imperial government, it followed that they 
 had a risrht to chano-e their constitutions at will and mould 
 them to their changed circumstances. This was what John 
 Adams incessantly urged in the Congress of 1775, and what 
 was as strenuously resisted by a large party not yet ripe for 
 independence, which, they claimed, and with truth, such a 
 measure would promote more than any other conceivable. 
 Finally Adams prevailed ; and while the war was going on, 
 several of the colonies adopted State governments, on 
 models furnished by him, and notably his own State, the 
 constitution of which he drafted, and from which was 
 adopted the frame of government in the Constitution of the 
 United States. Fifty millions of people to-day live under a 
 constitution the essential features of which are after his 
 model. Thirty-eight states now have constitutions in no 
 essential respect differing from that which he drafted. Thus 
 widely is his influence felt. How permanently, God only 
 knows. But until constitutional government is overthrown 
 on this continent, the work of the Great Constitutionalist 
 will endure. ' 
 
 As an example of his insight and grasp of constitutional 
 principles, may be cited his action in respect to the impeach- 
 ment of the judges who accepted salaries from the crown, 
 instead of the province, in contravention of the provincial 
 constitution. Peter Oliver was chief justice. His brother, 
 the stamp distributor, had been compelled to renounce his- 
 office under the Liberty Tree. But the chief justice was 
 
78 
 
 understood to be of sterner stuff, and probably would have 
 yielded his life, sooner than his office, at the dictation of the 
 mob. The Whigs — and most of all, the Whig lawyers — 
 Avere in doubt. But John Adams had no doubt. The pro- 
 vincial constitution, he claimed, contained the germ of every 
 power which had been developed in the British Constitution 
 in the centuries of its growth ; and now that the exigency 
 had arisen which called forth the latent resources of the 
 provincial constitution, with that promptness, decision and 
 sound judgment which always characterized his action when 
 there was anything to call forth his powers, he proposed the 
 impeachment of the chief justice by the House before the 
 Council. After his professional brethren had recovered 
 from their astonishment at the audacity of this proposal, and 
 come more fully to understand the constitutional basis on 
 which it rested, they fell in with the idea, and proceedings 
 were inaugurated, which were brought to a summary end by 
 the war, and the flight of Oliver to England, on the evacua- 
 tion of Boston by the king's troops. 
 
 When John Adams was transferred from a provincial to a 
 national stage, as one of the delegates from Massachusetts 
 to the Continental Congress, which met at Philadelphia in 
 September, 1774, he became associated with a body of very 
 able men, among whom he at once assumed a leading posi- 
 tion, as he had done in his own colony. He was by con- 
 siderable the ablest man in the body, and in his line of con- 
 stitutional statesmanship, by far the best equipped. 
 
 But his position was one of great difficulty. It is only 
 after a careful study of the proceedings of this Congress, 
 and the subsequent history of some of its members, that 
 we come at its real character. It was a Peace Congress.' 
 
 ^ That such was its character is evident from the final resolutions they 
 adopted : — 
 
79 
 
 Some of the colonies had been compromised by their attitude 
 in respect to tlie East India Company's teas ; and the 
 extreme measures of the British o-overnmeht in closinsf the 
 port of Boston, and altering the charter of the contumacious 
 people of Massachusetts, excited the apprehension of other 
 colonies as to the ulterior purposes of the ministry. While 
 it was the patriotic desire of the Congress to express their 
 sympathies and to stand by the people of Boston in the 
 hour of their sufferings, it was hoped and expected that 
 some conciliatory course would be followed which would 
 allow the ministry and the Massachusetts people to extricate 
 themselves from their difficulties without recourse to war. 
 
 John Adams had no faith in the efficacy of the petition to 
 the king, nor in the addresses to the people of Great Britain 
 and the Canadas. Matters had gone so far in New England 
 that they would be satisfied with no terms short of the with- 
 drawal of the royal troops, the re-opening the port of Boston, 
 and the total repeal of all measures designed to reduce them 
 to obedience. At the same time, not only the British min- 
 istry, but the British people also, were demanding the com- 
 plete submission of the Bostonians, or the infliction of con- 
 dign punishment. So far as Massachusetts was concerned, 
 the war was inevitable. John Adams saw it to be so, and 
 prepared himself for it. 
 
 He endeavored to prepare the Congress for it, and not 
 without valuable results. The great work effected by this 
 Congress was the bringing the colonies on to common ground 
 by a declaration of their rights. Opinions were divided. A 
 
 " We have for the present only resolved to pursue the folio wing- 
 peaceable measures : 1, to enter into a non-importation, non-consump- 
 tion and non-exportation agreement or association." 2 and 3, to address 
 the people of Great Britain, the inhabitants of British America, and to 
 prepare a loyal address to his Majesty. 
 
80 
 
 compromise ensued, and the famous fourth article was the 
 result. It was drawn by John Adams, and carried mainl}'- 
 by his influence, and reads as follows : — 
 
 " That the foundation of English liberty, and of all free 
 government, is a right in the people to participate in their 
 legislative council ; and as the English colonists are not rep- 
 resented, and from their local and other circumstances can- 
 not be properly represented in the British Parliament, they 
 are entitled to a free and exclusive power of legislation in 
 their several provincial legislatures, where their rights of rep- 
 resentation can alone be preserved, in all cases of taxation 
 and internal polity, subject onl}^ to the negative of their sov- 
 ereign, in such manner as has been heretofore used and accus- 
 tomed. But from the necessity of the case, and a regard to 
 the mutual interest of both countries, we cheerfully consent 
 to the operation of such acts of the British Parliament as are 
 bona fide restrained to the regulation of our external com- 
 merce, for the purpose of secin'ing the commercial advan- 
 tages of the w^hole empire to the mother country ; and the 
 commercial benefits of its respective members ; excluding" 
 every idea of taxation, internal or external, for raising a 
 revenue on the subjects in America, without their consent." 
 
 This was not precisely what John Adams wanted, but it 
 was much. When this declaration went forth, the cause of 
 Massachusetts, in whatever it might eventuate, was the cause 
 of the colonies. It was nationalized. This was John 
 Adams's greatest feat of statesmanship. On it the success- 
 of the impending war, and the Declaration of Independence, 
 rested.^ 
 
 ^ It is interesting to learn that John Adams regarded the declaration of 
 the Congress, on the subject of parliamentary power over the Colonies, 
 merely as the reaffirmance of the old colonial doctrine. '' Thus it ap- 
 pears," he says in Novanglus, "that the ancient Massachusettensians 
 
81 
 
 Congress having completed its work adjourned October 26, 
 1774. This body has been much commended for its moder- 
 jition and ability.* Chatham eulogized the remarkable series 
 of addresses it sent forth ; but neither Samuel Adams nor 
 John Adams, nor some of the Virginians, were satisfied with 
 the results of the Congress. As Bancroft says, "Congress 
 did not as yet desire independence. Had that been their 
 object they Avould have strained every nerve to increase their 
 exports, and fill the country with the manufactures and 
 munitions which they required." On the contrary they 
 agreed upon certain commercial restrictions upon the trade 
 of the mother country and those colonies which should side 
 with her, hoping thereby to coerce the king's government, 
 by the influence of the manufacturing and trading classes at 
 home, to desist from that commercial policy which was the 
 chief ground of their displeasure. As matter of fact, the 
 Revolution had not cast ofiT its commercial phase. It had, 
 however, made one capital declaration of colortial rights. 
 
 The value of this stroke of statesmanship became apparent 
 in the next session of Congress in May, 1775. The events 
 at Lexington and Concord had precipitated the contest which 
 the majority of the people of the colonies wished to avoid. 
 But the die was cast, and one of the delegates at least had 
 measured the magnitude of the struggle that had begun, the 
 necessity of nationalizing it, and of bringing to its support 
 the full powers and resources of a continental government. 
 This sagacity and statesmanship were evinced by the com- 
 
 ancl Virginians had precisely the same sense of the authority of parlia- 
 ment, viz., that it had none at all ; and the same sense of the necessity, 
 that by the voluntary act of the colonies, their free, cheerful consent, it 
 should he allowed the power of regulating trade; and this is precisely 
 the idea of the late Congress at Philadelphia, expressed in the fourth 
 proposition of their Bill of Rights." Works, iv. 112. 
 
82 
 
 pleteness of his plans ; and his practical force, by his final 
 success in carrying them into operation in spite of innumer- 
 able obstacles thrown in his way. "We ought," wrote John 
 Adams to General Warren, July 24, "to have had in our 
 hands, a month ago, the whole legislative, executive and 
 judicial of the whole continent, and have completely modelled 
 a constitution ; to have raised a naval power, and opened all 
 our ports wide." When the intercepted letter which con- 
 tained the above extract was published at Philadelphia, it 
 " displayed him as drawing the outlines of an independent 
 state, the great bugbear in the eyes of members w^ho still 
 cling to the hope that the last resort might be avoided." 
 These views subjected him to animadversion, and even cold 
 treatment, to the extent that he " was avoided in the streets 
 b}^ many, as if it were a contamination to speak with such 
 a traitor." 
 
 We see the magnificence of his plan to create the empire 
 which he foresaw in his youth. We see the sagacity of the 
 measures by which it was to be accomplished. We also see, 
 what those who opposed him were soon to see, the vast re- 
 sources, the untiring labors and indomitable courage which 
 he brought to the execution of these plans. 
 
 His plan w^as to sever at once every political tie which 
 bound the separate colonies to Great Britain in their royal 
 governments, and to lay the basis of their independence by 
 the erection of state governments in their stead ; to nation- 
 alize these state governments by confederation, and to give 
 this new government the substance as well as the form of 
 nationality by adopting the army before Boston, and putting 
 it under national commanders ; by constructing a navy; by 
 issuing bills of credit ; by sending embassadors to foreign 
 nations ; and finally, by declaring the thirteen colonies, the 
 free, independent United States of America. 
 
83 
 
 To the accomplishment of this work of building a nation, 
 no one of all the OTeat men with whom he was associated ad- 
 dressed himself with a clearer comprehension of what it in- 
 volved, or more ably or more assiduously devoted himself 
 to it, than John Adams. 
 
 This was his great work. Before its substantial comple- 
 tion I do not think he could have been spared. I see no 
 one who could have filled his place between 1774 and 1777. 
 But after that period, the Revolution in successful progress, 
 independence declared, and the work of constitutional recon- 
 struction well advanced, he might have retired to well- 
 merited repose. The Congress thought otherwise ; and John 
 Adams, who always heeded the call of his country, embarked 
 for Europe charged with diplomatic duties. He was well 
 informed in matters of public and. international law, but was 
 not, I think, specially adapted for a diplomatic career. He 
 rendered some excellent service, but none which might not 
 have been as well performed by his able associates, unless 
 we may still question whether their zeal for the preservation 
 of the old colonial rights to the fisheries, and for extending 
 the boundaries of the country to their furthest limits, was 
 equal to his own. He certainly had always before his eyes 
 the vision of his youth — the Empire of America. Not even 
 in a later day was Webster's view wider, more national, or 
 more patriotic ; nor in the largeness and liberality of his 
 commercial policy has he ever been surpassed by any of our 
 public men. 
 
 Doubtless there is a tendency to over-estimation when our 
 eyes are fixed somewhat exclusively upon a single actor in a 
 cause which enlists the abilities of other eminent men. But 
 I think we may safely add our own to the according voices 
 of those patriots who were personally cognizant of the 
 services of John Adams, in assigning to him the pre-em- 
 
84 
 
 inent place among the statesmen of the Revolution. He did 
 not bring to "the Revolution so large an understanding as 
 Franklin's. But Franklin lacked some things essential to 
 the cause which John Adams possessed. He lacked youth. 
 At the critical period which was forming an epoch in his- 
 tory, he was an old man, with great interests depending on 
 the existing order of things, averse to extreme measures, 
 especially war, and without special training for constitutional 
 questions. Jay, Jefferson, Wythe, Henry, Lee, Gadsden — 
 not to mention others — were able men, and rendered great 
 services. But, save Franklin, no man in the colonies was so 
 largely endowed as John Adams. His understanding was 
 extraordinary. He planned well, and he executed his plans. 
 There was no other man of so much weight in action as he. 
 There were wise men — some, estimated by conventional 
 standards, much wiser than John Adams ; but none whose 
 judgments on revolutionary affairs have proved more solid 
 or enduring. There were younger men of genius, and older 
 men of great experience in affairs ; but John Adams was just 
 at that period of life when genius becomes chastened by ex- 
 perience without being overpowered by adversity. 
 
 But whatever may have been the value of his services 
 when compared with those of his great compatriots, it is 
 sufficient title to lasting honor and the unceasing benedictions 
 of his countrymen, that John Adams had a conspicuous 
 place among those who builded a great nation, made it free, 
 and formed governments for it which seem destined to en- 
 dure for ages, and affect the political condition of no incon- 
 siderable part of the human race. 
 
 While living, John Adams had no strong hold on the peo- 
 ple, and at one time, as he said, an immense unpopularity, 
 like the tower of Siloam, fell upon him ; and now that he is 
 dead, even the remembrance of his great services seems to 
 
85 
 
 be growing indistinct. He probably kicked many of those 
 qualities which attract popidar favor, and those which he 
 possessed, such as courage and stedfastness, were exhibited 
 on no theatre of public action, but in the secret sessions of 
 the Continental Congress. Passionate eloquence on great 
 themes touches the heart to finer issues ; but no syllable of 
 those powerful utterances which, as Jefferson tells us, took 
 men off their feet, was heard beyond the walls of Independ- 
 ence Hall ; and even the glory of the transaction which made 
 the old hall immortal rests upon the hand which wrote, not 
 upon that which achieved, the great Declaration. This 
 ought not to be altogether so. It matters little to the stout 
 old patriot with what measure of fame he descends to re- 
 mote age, for he will never wholly die ; but to us, and to 
 those who come after us, it is of more than passing conse- 
 quence that w^e and they withhold no tribute of just praise 
 from those unpopular men who deserve the respectful re- 
 membrance of their countrymen. 
 
 In the public squares of the city have been erected 
 statues of those great men, save John Adams, whose services 
 were indispensable to the initiation and successful issue of 
 the Revolution — Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and 
 George Washington ; but our eyes seek in vain for any 
 adequate memorial of him whose life, public and private, 
 was without blemish, whose essential character is worthy of 
 all admiration, and whose services ought never to be for- 
 gotten so long as free, united, constitutional government 
 holds its just place in the estimation of the people. 
 
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
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