Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/116

96 JOHN ADAMS and Jefferson and kept up for the remainder of their lives. About the same time also Ad- ams opened a correspondence with McKean, his friend and cooperator in revolutionary times, but separated from him in the whirl- pool of subsequent politics ; and he thus drew out from McKean some valuable historical reminiscences. Mr. Adams indeed gave great attention to the subject of American history. His letters to Mr. Tudor (which led to the pub- lication by that gentleman of the " Life of James Otis ") shed great light upon the early history of the revolution in Massachusetts. They contributed not a little to give the first impulse to that study of American history, revolutionary and colonial, which, commenc- ing about that time, has rescued those subjects from the hands of rhetoricians and fabulists, and has produced so many valuable and au- thentic historical works. In his correspon- dence, which appears to have gradually in- creased and extended itself, Mr. Adams loved to recall and to reexplain his theoretical ideas of government, on some points of which he pushed Jefferson rather hard, and which the result of the French revolution so far as then developed seemed to confirm. Another sub- ject in which he continued to feel a great in- terest was that of theology. He had begun as an Arminian, and the more he had read and thought and the older he grew, the freer views he took. Though clinging with tenacity to the religious institutions of New England, it would seem from his correspondence that he had finally curtailed his theology to the ten commandments and the sermon on the mount. Of his views on tins point he gave evidence in his last public act, to which we now approach. Mrs. Adams had died in 1818, but even that shock, severe as it was, did not unsettle the firm grasp of her husband on life, its enjoy- ments and its duties. When, in consequence of the erection of the district of Maine into a separate state, a convention was to meet in 1820 to revise the constitution of Massachu- setts, in the framing of which Mr. Adams had taken so leading a part, though in his 86th year, he was chosen a delegate by his towns- men. Upon his first appearance, with a form yet erect, though tremulous with age, in this convention, which included almost everybody in the state of distinguished intelligence or rep- utation, Mr. Adams was received by the mem- bers standing, and with every demonstration of affection and regard ; and a series of resolu- tions was forthwith offered and passed, con- taining an enumeration and warm acknowl- edgment of some of his principal public ser- vices, and calling upon him to preside. But this, while duly acknowledging the compli- ment, he declined on the score of his age and infirmities. The same cause also prevented his taking any very active part in the proceedings. Yet he labored to produce a modification of the third article of the bill of rights, on the subject of public worship and its support, an article which, when originally drawing the rest of that instrument, he had passed over to other hands. But the time had not yet como for such changes as he wished. The old pu- ritan feeling was still in too great force to ac- knowledge the equal rights, political and reli- gious, of others than Christians. Yet, however it might be with his colleagues or his fellow citizens, Mr. Adams in this movement ex- pressed his own ideas. One of his latest let- ters, written in 1825 and addressed to Jeffer- son, is a remarkable protest against the blas- phemy laws, so called, of Massachusetts and the rest of the Union, as being utterly incon- sistent with the rights of free inquiry and pri- vate judgment. It is in the letters of Mr. Ad- ams, of which but a small part have yet been published, that his genius as a writer and thinker, and no less distinctly his character as a man, most clearly appear. Down even to the last year of his protracted life, his letters exhibit a wonderful degree of vitality, energy, acuteness, wit, playfulness, and command of language. As a writer of English, little as he ever troubled himself with revision and correc- tion, and we may add as a speculative philos- opher, he must be placed first among Ameri- cans of all the several generations to which he belonged, except only Franklin ; and if Frank- lin excelled him in humor and geniality, he far surpassed Franklin in compass, wit, and viva- city. Indeed, it is only by the recent partial publication of his letters that his gifts in this respect are beginning to become known. The first collection of his private letters, published in his lifetime and much against his will, though not deficient in the characteristics above pointed out, yet, having been written under feelings of great aggravation and in a spirit of extreme bitterness toward his politi- cal opponents, was rather damaging to him. This publication was one of the incidents of his becoming for a third time, in his extreme age, an object of hostility, confined now, how- ever, to a few of the more tenacious of his old federalist opponents, in consequence of the coalition of all parties in New England to sup- port his son, J. Q. Adams, for the presidency. In the interval from 1804 to 1812, Mr. Cunningham, a maternal relative, had drawn him into a confidential correspondence, in which, still smarting under a sense of injury, he had expressed himself with perfect unreserve and entire freedom as to the chief events of his presidential administration and the character and motives of the parties con- cerned in them. By a gross breach of confi- dence, of which, like other impulsive and confiding persons, Mr. Adams had been often the victim, those letters were sold by Cun- ningham's heir in 1824, while the writer and many of the parties referred to were still alive, and were published as a part of the electioneering machinery against J. Q. Adams. They called out a violent retort from Col. Pickering, who had been secretary of stato to