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

TO RICHARD RUSH. - 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.

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 RICHARD RUSH.

Quincy, 30 May, 1814.

Your favor of the 20th has given me great pleasure, because it informs me that you are happy. Your visit to Philadelphia must have been delightful, and the company of your excellent surviving parent on your return, and her domestication with you and the fair enchantress, must be more so. This family intercourse cannot be less pleasing to your mother. It will preserve her health and prolong her life, much more important to you, your brothers and sisters, than I dare say she esteems it for herself.

A stock of new law books, next to the renovation of social, domestic, and local feelings, was an object worthy of you. New law books, I hope, improve upon the old, but ought not to supersede them all. I fear you would laugh, if I should say that the Corpus Juris, Vinnius, and Cujacius, ought not to be wholly superseded by Hale and Coke, Holt and Mansfield. No, nor by Parsons, Ingersoll, or Marshall.

Why are we “astonished at the events in Europe”? They are every day occurrences in history. That heroes come to bad ends, has been the experience of all ages. Alexander, Cæsar, Charles XII., and Oliver Cromwell, and millions of others, as wild and delirious as they, have all come to a like catastrophe. Read the histories of our missionary societies. Is there not the same enthusiasm, the same heroism? I scarcely dare to say what I know, that many a kept mistress has dared for her lover as great hazards and sufferings, as any of these sublime heroes, temporal or spiritual. While we know that enthusiasm produces the most sublime and beautiful actions and events in human life, at times, we should always be jealous of it, watch its movements, and be prepared to escape, avoid, or resist its deleterious effects.

Alas! the Massachusetts triumvirate is broken! Judge Paine is no more! An old German doctor, Turner, when I was a little boy, asked me the age of my father. When I told him as well as I knew, “Alas!” said the old gentleman, “your father’s age is so near my own, that, when one dies of old age, the other may quake for fear.” If death were terrible to Gerry or to me, the death of Paine might make us “quake for fear.”

“What would New England say?”1 She will say as she ought to say, and as she always has said on like occasions, “I have been cheated, deceived, deluded. I thought Britain our friend, but find I have been mistaken.” The “intimations” you have had, have been made to me. The tories have “intimated” to me in various secret, confidential, round-about ways, these mighty bugbears. “Mr. Adams saved the fisheries once I hope his son will save them a second time. We have no confidence in Gallatin, Clay, Russell, or even Bayard; we believe they would all sacrifice the fisheries for Canada or even for peace.” My invariable answer has been, “You deceive yourselves with imaginary fears. You know that the men Bayard, Russell, Clay, and even Gallatin would cede the fee simple of the United States, as soon as they would the fisheries.”

Did you ever know a man, or nation, a coalition or alliance that could bear success, victory, and prosperity? Victory has destroyed Napoleon. Victory is in danger of destroying the allies. If not, and the Bourbons are restored, what is their prospect? The Stuarts were restored; for how long a time? and how many plots? how many Sidneys, Russells, Staffords, were beheaded? I know by experience that the swell is as dangerous as the storm. We must learn to know ourselves, to esteem ourselves, to respect ourselves, to confide in ourselves under heaven alone. We must hold Europe at arm’s length, do them justice, treat them with civility, and set their envy, jealousy, malice, retaliation, and revenge at defiance.

The lakes, the lakes, the lakes! shocking, indeed, that we have not the command of the lakes! But I could convince you that it is still more shocking that we have not the command of the ocean, or at least an independent power upon the ocean. But this would lead too far at present. If you have a curiosity upon this subject, I will give you a few hints in a future letter.

[1 ] Mr. Rush had asked this question:—

“What, for example, would New England say to Great Britain talking about excluding us from trade beyond the Cape of Good Hope, from the West Indies, and from the Newfoundland fisheries?”