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Subject Area: Political Theory
Topic: The American Revolution and Constitution

TO O. WOLCOTT, SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY. - John Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. 9 (Letters and State Papers 1799-1811) [1854]

Edition used:

The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856). 10 volumes. Vol. 9.

Part of: The Works of John Adams, 10 vols.

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TO O. WOLCOTT, SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY.

Quincy, 6 August, 1800.

Dear Sir,—

In answer to your letter of the 26th of July, I have to inform you that although you omitted to inclose to me the letter from John Cowper, Esquire, as you intended, yet as there are no candidates for the office, that I know of, that ought to excite any hesitation, I am well satisfied that you should apply to the Secretary of State for commissions for Mr. Claude Thompson, to be collector of the customs, for the district of Brunswick in Georgia, and inspector of the revenue for said port, provided you are satisfied with Mr. Cowper’s recommendation.

To show you the passions that are continually excited by the appointments and dismissions we are so often obliged to make, I inclose a letter I received last night from Mr. Jabez Bowen at Augusta. Such are the reproaches to which the most upright actions of our lives are liable!1

[1 ]Just at this time, the officer to whom this letter was addressed, was engaging in the preparation of the materials for the use of Mr. Hamilton in the deliberate attack he was meditating upon Mr. Adams. Mr. Hamilton’s letter inviting him to execute this task, and his reply, disclose the motives of the actors not less than their sense of the moral obstacles in their way. They also establish the fact that the shape of the attack was the result of cool and concerted hostility, rather than the impulse of self-defence under which it is declared to have been made. Gibbs’s Federal Administrations, vol. ii. pp. 397, 416.