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

TO THE YOUNG MEN OF BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS. - 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.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


TO THE YOUNG MEN OF BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS.

22 May, 1798.

Gentlemen,

It is impossible for you to enter your own Faneuil Hall, or to throw your eyes on the variegated mountains and elegant islands around you, without recollecting the principles and actions of your fathers, and feeling what is due to their example. One of their first principles was to unite in themselves the character of citizens and soldiers, and especially to preserve the latter always subordinate to the former.

With much solicitude for your welfare and that of your posterity, I take the freedom to say that this country never appeared to me to be in greater danger than at this moment, from within or without, never more urgently excited to assume the functions of soldiers.

The state of the world is such, the situation of all the nations of Europe with which we have relation is so critical, that vicissitudes must be expected, from whose deleterious influences nothing but arms and energy can protect us. To arms, then, my young friends,—to arms, especially by sea, to be used as the laws shall direct, let us resort. For safety against dangers, which we now see and feel, cannot be averted by truth, reason, or justice.

Nothing in the earlier part of my public life animated me more than the countenances of the children and youth of the town of Boston; and nothing at this hour gives me so much pleasure as the masculine temper and talents displayed by the youth of America in every part of it.

I ought not to forget the worst enemy we have, that obloquy, which, you have observed, is the worst enemy to virtue and the best friend to vice; it strives to destroy all distinction between right and wrong; it leads to divisions, sedition, civil war, and military despotism. I need say no more.

John Adams.