TO ELBRIDGE GERRY. - John Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. 10 (Letters 1811-1825, Indexes) [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. 10.
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TO ELBRIDGE GERRY.
Quincy, 14 April, 1813.
I have received your favors of the 8th and 10th, and the volume of Benjamin Edes’s Gazettes, printed at Watertown between the 5th of June, 1775, and the 9th of December, 1776.
I am much obliged to you and to Mr. Austin for the loan of this precious collection of memorials.
I read last fall and winter The Scottish Chiefs, Thaddeus of Warsaw, and The Exiles of Siberia, and Scott’s Lay, Marmion, and Lady, I must say, with much interest and amusement; but this volume of gazettes, and the journals of Congress for the same period, which I have lately run over, have given me much more heartfelt delight. If these volumes appear to you as they do to me, how can we wonder at the total ignorance and oblivion of the revolution, which appears everywhere in the present generation? All the Boston orations on the 4th of July that I have ever read or heard, contain not so much of “the manners and feelings and principles which led to the revolution,” as these two volumes of gazettes and journals.
The act printed in the Gazette of November 13th, 1775, “In the sixteenth year of the reign of George the Third, king, &c., an act for encouraging the fitting out of armed vessels to defend the sea-coast of America, and for erecting a court to try and condemn all vessels that shall be found infesting the same,” is one of the most important documents in history. The declaration of independence is a brimborion in comparison with it. Why may not the Chronicle or the Patriot reprint this law? Surely, this could be no libel. Neither editors nor printers need consult lawyers, to know whether Chief Justice Parsons could find any expression in it, to give in charge to a grand jury.
The best care shall be taken of this volume, and it shall be returned to Mr. Austin with thanks.
Commodore Williams’s “record of our earliest privateers and prizes” will be received with gratitude; but I should be glad to see them in the Chronicle and Centinel. Had I not been in Congress at the time, and as anxious as Martha about many things, I should be ashamed to acknowledge that I am unacquainted with his person, character, and residence.
I can conceive of no possible objection against the publication of these things at this time, except that they do too much honor to Vice-President Gerry and to the memory of the late Governor Sullivan. “Quorum pars magna fui” might be assumed by them with more propriety than by your assured friend.
This act was drawn by Mr. Gerry and Mr. Sullivan, for the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts.
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