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

OLIVER WOLCOTT TO JOHN ADAMS. - 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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OLIVER WOLCOTT TO JOHN ADAMS.

Middletown, 28 March, 1801.

I embrace the earliest opportunity which I have been able to improve, since your arrival at Quincy, to express my most sincere acknowledgments for the distinguished proof, which I have received, of your confidence, in being appointed a judge of the second circuit of the United States.

My friends have communicated to me the circumstances which attended the appointment; by which I hear, with the highest satisfaction, that I owe the honorable station in which I have been placed, to your favorable opinion, and in no degree to their solicitation. Believing that gratitude to benefactors is among the most amiable, and ought to be among the most indissoluble, of social obligations, I shall, without reserve, cherish the emotions which are inspired by a sense of duty and honor on this occasion.1

I am, &c.

Oliver Wolcott.

[1 ]It is stated in Mr. Gibbs’s work, that this “appointment had been made with a full knowledge of Mr. Wolcott’s political views, which were, indeed, no secret to any one.” Mr. Adams certainly had no suspicion of the spirit betrayed in the letter to Fisher Ames, of the 10th August, 1800. Mr. Wolcott shows conscientious struggles to obtain from his friends the right publicly to declare his opposition; but this they denied him, and therefore he never exercised it. Gibbs’s Memoirs, &c., vol. ii. pp. 400, 431, 496.