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Updated: June 21, 2025
Adams would have been less radical had Hutchinson and Jonathan Sewall been more so; and perhaps Hutchinson and Sewall might have been more loyal patriots had the brace of Adamses been less bitter ones. Most of those who in the end became Loyalists were men who had once been opposed to the ministerial policy, and many remained so to the end of their lives.
He saw only the necessary stages that had led to it, and to him they seemed natural; but to Adams, still living in the atmosphere of Palmerston and John Russell, the sudden appearance of Germany as the grizzly terror which, in twenty years effected what Adamses had tried for two hundred in vain frightened England into America's arms seemed as melodramatic as any plot of Napoleon the Great.
Gage on the 12th of June had consigned Samuel Adams and Hancock to the gallows, but Hancock was serving as president of the Congress, while the Adamses were important members of committees. They watched and waited for the growth of a sentiment which should support New England in its resistance. The position of the Congress was without precedent.
The same wise provision of Nature was to be observed in the Adamses' apple, it being, ef he mout be pardoned for using such a figger of speech, at sich a time, the bowlder, and the chin whiskers, the vine. "'It's the size that counts, said Colonel Bud Crittenden.
Many of the Federalists saw this; and to many of them, the Adamses, for instance, and Jay and Pinckney, the West owed more than it did to most of the Republican statesmen; but as a whole, the attitude of the Federalists, especially in the Northeast, toward the West was ungenerous and improper, while the Jeffersonians, with all their unwisdom and demagogy, were nevertheless the Western champions.
Palfrey, President Walker, R. W. Emerson, and other Boston ministers of the same school, would have commanded distinction in any society; but the Adamses had little or no affinity with the pulpit, and still less with its eccentric offshoots, like Theodore Parker, or Brook Farm, or the philosophy of Concord.
To his son Henry, the quality that distinguished his father from all the other figures in the family group, was that, in his opinion, Charles Francis Adams possessed the only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name. For a hundred years, every newspaper scribbler had, with more or less obvious excuse, derided or abused the older Adamses for want of judgment.
It was an age of great men, both in this country and England. It could boast of the Pitts, Burke, Fox and Sheridan; of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, the Adamses, Patrick Henry and the Lees. It was an age of useful intelligence, of eminent practical wisdom. The leading minds of a country to some extent represent its general characteristics.
"Virginia has her Madison," they reiterated, "Massachusetts her Adamses and may she keep them and be damned; other States may think they have produced a giant, and those that do not can fall back on Washington; but Hamilton is ours, we adore him, we are so proud of him we are like to burst, and we can never express our gratitude, try as we may; so we'll show him an honour that no other State has thought of showing to any particular man."
He used to caution me how I spoke of his opinions to others, and he would then discuss with freedom politics and the men whose figures were fast rising into distinctness as leaders to be listened to and trusted. Many of them he knew, and thus first I heard clearly what manner of persons were Patrick Henry and the Adamses, Dickinson, Peyton Randolph, and others less prominent.
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