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

TO THOMAS JEFFERSON. - 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:

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TO THOMAS JEFFERSON.

Quincy, 8 December, 1818.

Your letter of November 13th gave great delight, not only by the divine consolation it afforded me under my great affliction, but as it gave me full proof of your restoration to health.

While you live, I seem to have a bank at Monticello, on which I can draw for a letter of friendship and entertainment, when I please.

I know not how to prove, physically, that we shall meet and know each other in a future state; nor does revelation, as I can find, give us any positive assurance of such a felicity. My reasons for believing it, as I do most undoubtedly, are that I cannot conceive such a being could make such a species as the human, merely to live and die on this earth. If I did not believe a future state, I should believe in no God. This universe, this all, this τὸ πᾶν would appear, with all its swelling pomp, a boyish fire-work. And, if there be a future state, why should the Almighty dissolve forever all the tender ties which unite us so delightfully in this world, and forbid us to see each other in the next?

Trumbull, with a band of associates, drew me, by the cords of old friendship, to see his picture, on Saturday, where I got a great cold. The air of Faneuil Hall is changed. I have not been used to catch cold there.

Sick or well, the friendship is the same of your old acquaintance.

TO WILLIAM TUDOR.

Quincy, 9 February, 1819.

In your last letter you consider me in debt, and I will not dispute it.

You seem to wish me to write something to diminish the fame of Sam Adams, to show that he was not a man of profound learning, a great lawyer, a man of vast reading, a comprehensive statesman. In all this, I shall not gratify you.

Give me leave to tell you, my friend, that you have conceived prejudices against that great character; and I wonder not at it. At present, I shall make only one observation. Samuel Adams, to my certain knowledge, from 1758 to 1775, that is, for seventeen years, made it his constant rule to watch the rise of every brilliant genius, to seek his acquaintance, to court his friendship, to cultivate his natural feelings in favor of his native country, to warn him against the hostile designs of Great Britain, and to fix his affections and reflections on the side of his native country. I could enumerate a list, but I will confine myself to a few. John Hancock, afterwards President of Congress and Governor of the State; Dr. Joseph Warren, afterwards Major-General of the militia of Massachusetts, and the martyr of Bunker’s Hill; Benjamin Church, the poet and the orator, once a pretended, if not a real patriot, but, afterwards, a monument of the frailty of human nature; Josiah Quincy, the Boston Cicero, the great orator in the body meetings, the author of the Observations on the Boston Port bill, and of many publications in the newspapers. I will stop here for the present. And, now, I will take the liberty of perfect friendship to add, that, if your Judge Minot, your Fisher Ames, or your honorable senator, Josiah Quincy the third, had been as intimately acquainted with Samuel Adams, as Hancock, Warren, and Josiah Quincy the second, they would have been as ardent patriots as he was. If Samuel Adams was not a Demosthenes in oratory, nor had the learning of a Mansfield in law, or the universal history of a Burke, he had the art of commanding the learning, the oratory, the talents, the diamonds of the first water that his country afforded, without anybody’s knowing or suspecting he had it, but himself, and a very few friends.

I have much more to say concerning Samuel Adams, but I cannot write, and I am exhausted with dictating, and must content myself with adding that I am, and, I believe, ever shall be, your affectionate friend.