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

TO BENJAMIN RUSH. - 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 BENJAMIN RUSH.

Quincy, 21 May, 1807.

My not preserving a copy of my letter to Doctor Nathan Webb (for he was a physician) is no wonder, for I never kept a copy of any letter till I became a member of Congress, in 1774. The observation of your son Richard is very shrewd, and, unfortunately for me, very just. There are the same marks of haste, and heedless inattention to style, which have characterized all my writings to this day.

I have always laughed at the affectation of representing American independence as a novel idea, as a modern discovery, as a late invention. The idea of it as a possible thing, as a probable event, nay, as a necessary and unavoidable measure, in case Great Britain should assume an unconstitutional authority over us, has been familiar to Americans from the first settlement of the country, and was as well understood by Governor Winthrop in 1675,1 as by Governor Samuel Adams, when he told you that independence had been the first wish of his heart for seven years. I suppose he dated from 1768, when the board of commissioners arrived and landed in Boston under the protection of nine ships of war and four thousand regular troops. A couplet has been repeated with rapture, as long as I can remember, which was imputed to Dean Berkeley. The first line I have forgot, but the last was,

“And empire rises where the sun descends;1

This was public many years before my letter of 1755 to Doctor Webb. In 1760, Colonel Josiah Quincy, the grandfather of Josiah Quincy, now a member of Congress from Boston, read to me a letter he had then just received from a Mr. Turner, I believe one of the first mercantile houses in London, congratulating him on the surrender of Montreal to General Amherst, and the final conquest of Canada, “as a great event to America, not only by insuring her tranquillity and repose, but as facilitating and advancing your (Colonel Quincy’s) country’s rise to independence and empire.” Within the course of the year before the meeting of Congress, in 1774, on a journey to some of our circuit courts in Massachusetts, I stopped one night at a tavern in Shrewsbury, about forty miles from Boston, and as I was cold and wet, I sat down at a good fire in the bar-room to dry my great coat and saddle-bags till a fire could be made in my chamber. There presently came in, one after another, half a dozen, or half a score, substantial yeomen of the neighborhood, who, sitting down to the fire after lighting their pipes, began a lively conversation upon politics. As I believed I was unknown to all of them, I sat in total silence to hear them. One said, “The people of Boston are distracted!” Another answered, “No wonder the people of Boston are distracted. Oppression will make wise men mad.” A third said, “What would you say, if a fellow should come to your house and tell you he was come to take a list of your cattle, that parliament might tax you for them at so much a head? and how should you feel, if he was to go and break open your barn, to take down your oxen, cows, horses, and sheep?” “What should I say?” replied the first; “I would knock him in the head.” “Well,” said a fourth, “if parliament can take away Mr. Hancock’s wharf and Mr. Rowe’s wharf, they can take away your barn and my house.” After much more reasoning in this style, a fifth, who had as yet been silent, broke out, “Well, it is high time for us to rebel; we must rebel some time or other, and we had better rebel now than at any time to come. If we put it off for ten or twenty years, and let them go on as they have begun, they will get a strong party among us, and plague us a great deal more than they can now. As yet, they have but a small party on their side.” I was disgusted with his word rebel, because I was determined never to rebel, as much as I was to resist rebellion against the fundamental privileges of the Constitution, whenever British generals or governors should begin it. I mention this anecdote to show that the idea of independence was familiar, even among the common people, much earlier than some persons pretend. I have heard some gentlemen of education say, that the first idea of independence was suggested to them by the pamphlet “Common Sense;” and others, that they were first converted by it to that doctrine; but these were men of very little conversation with the world, and men of very narrow views and very little reflection.

Your enemies are only your would-be rivals; they can never hurt you. Envy is a foul fiend that is only to be defied. You read Sully. His memoirs are a pretty specimen. Every honest, virtuous, and able man that ever existed, from Abel down to Doctor Rush, has had this enemy to combat through life. “Envy does merit as its shade pursue.” You need not fear the charge of vanity. Vanity is really what the French call it, amour propre, self-love, and it is a universal passion. All men have it in an equal degree. Honest men do not always disguise it. Knaves often do, if not always. When you see or hear a man pique himself upon his modesty, you may depend upon it, he is as vain a fellow as lives, and very probably a great villain. I would advise you to communicate freely all the compliments you have had or may have from Europe. Defy the foul fiend. Do not infer from this that I think there is no such thing as modesty or decency. On the contrary, it is the duty of every man to respect the self-love of every other man, and not to disgust him by any ostentatious display of his own. But in your case, surrounded as you are with jealous competitors, always intriguing to depress you, it is your right and your duty to mortify their invidious impertinence by a free communication of all your trophies to your friends without any injunctions of secrecy.

I have not seen the pamphlet, entitled “The dangers of the country,” but my mind is deeply impressed with the dangers of our country, and all other countries, of France as well as England. Of all countries, there is none more to be pitied than France. England, in my opinion, is in a still less dangerous situation than her rival.

The ominous dissolution of morality, both in theory and practice, throughout the civilized world, threatens dangers and calamities of a novel species, beyond all calculation, because there is no precedent or example in history which can show us the consequences of it. Perhaps you may say, Tyre and Sidon, Sodom and Gomorrah are examples in point. But we have no relation of their rise, progress, and decline. You may say the old world, when it repented God that he had made man, when it grieved him in his heart that he had made so vile a creature, is a case in point. I know not what to say in answer to this, only that the same authority we have for the fact, assures us that the world shall never be again drowned.

[1 ]So in the copy. It may refer to the Connecticut Governor. But it is probably an error in the third figure.

[1 ]The lines of Berkeley are now familiarly known to all American readers, but they do not contain the words quoted. See the next letter.