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Front Page  Titles (by Subject) TO BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE. - The Works of John Adams, vol. 10 (Letters 1811-1825, Indexes)
TO BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE. - 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 BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE.
Quincy, 30 January, 1818.
As “the accurate Jefferson” has made the Revolution a game of billiards, I will make it a game of shuttle-cock. Henry might give the first impulse to the ball in Virginia, but Otis’s battle-dore had struck the shuttle-cock up in air in Massachusetts, and continued to keep it up for several years before Henry’s ball was touched. Jefferson was but a boy at college, of fifteen or sixteen years of age at most, and too intent on his classics and sciences to know, think, or care about any thing in Boston. When Otis first fulminated against British usurpation, I was but twenty-five years and three months old. Jefferson is, at least, nine, I believe ten years younger than I, and, consequently, could not be more than fifteen or sixteen. He knew more of the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites than he did of what was passing in Boston.
You presume that I “am certain as to the date.” You need not take my word. Look into Judge Minot’s History of Massachusetts Bay, anno 1761; search the records of the Superior Court of Judicature, Court of Assize and General Gaol Delivery, at Salem term, 1760, and Boston term, 1761; look up the newspapers of 1761; ascertain the time when Chief Justice Stephen Sewall died; call for Dr. Mayhew’s printed sermon on his death; search the date of Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson’s commission as Chief Justice; ascertain the time when the bench and the bar assumed their scarlet and sable robes, and you will not find much reason to call in question my veracity or memory. If ever human beings had a right to say, - “Hos ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honores;
- Sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis apes,”
they were James Otis and Samuel Adams; and to them ought statues to be erected, and not to
John.
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