- 46
Adams, John, Second President
Description
Condition
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.
Catalogue Note
An extraordinary letter, whose existence but not precise text was known to the Adams Papers project. It is an apology elevated to an informed disquisition on the common law and the natural rights of men, including references to Adams's own contributions to the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the United States.
John Adams reassures his son Thomas Boylston, a fledgling lawyer in Philadelphia, that he should not misconstrue a suggestion made in an earlier letter as a criticism of his practice: "It was far from my thoughts to assign you a task. I meant only to turn your mind to a subject, which must necessaryly engage much of your contemplations as long as you live. The Folc Right [i.e, folk right, the right of the people which dates back to the Anglo-Saxon period], the Peoples Right, the common law, is the natural Inheritance of us all. It is our Birth Right." However, intuiting that these natural rights could be misinterpreted by the common public, Adams, far more widely read than any public man of his day, insisted that no statesman could act wisely without a deep understanding of the principles of government and the nature of man (Elkins & McKittrick, The Age of Federalism, p. 530). A thorough and applied reading of the law would allow those in the profession to become conversant with the principles governing personal and political liberty. He explains to Thomas: "But precious as it is, and dear as it ought to be to all our hearts, it is likely to be a subject of controversy in this country, untill an examination of it, on a large scale, shall be undertaken by you or some other, whose Industry may be equal to the subject."
Adams modestly claims that he can be of little help to his son as "I have scarcely a Law Book of any kind left in my office. It is almost 30 years since I abandoned my office and Law Library, and now I have none. My Recollections of the contents of Law Books, you may well suppose to be very faint, confused and incorrect." Adams's involvement in politics and the rigors of the judicial circuit (the radius of his travels comprised more than 200 miles in all directions, taking him as far as Martha's Vineyard and the reaches of Maine) decided him to abandon his practice altogether in the 1770s. Oddly enough, about a fortnight after penning this letter to Thomas, Adams wrote several friends that he was toying with the idea of resurrecting his practice.
In spite of his muzzy recollections, Adams cites no fewer than four classic jurists for an in-depth study of common law. "Lord Chief Justice Hale wrote a Book under the Title of An History of the Common Law. I had it and suppose you have it now among my Law Books that I lent you. In this work, an octavo volume well worth your reading you will find much perhaps to your purpose. Fortescue Aland's Reports you have among my Books ... There is the best Deffinition, or description, or History if you will of the common Law, in that Preface, which I remember to have read. Blackstone took his account of the common Law from that preface. Reeves's History of the Law will probably assist you."
John Adams contracted to read law with James Putnam of Worcester in August 1756 for a period of two years. Once his studies were completed, he moved back to Braintree where he continued to prepare for the bar. In between chores on his father's farm, he translated Justinian and slowly read (by his own admission), Sir Geoffrey Gilbert's dense Treatise of Feudal Tenures (McCullough, John Adams, pp. 42-43). After his interview with Jeremiah Gridley, the dean of the Boston bar, Adams was invited to read in Gridley's law library. Shortly thereafter in November 1758 Gridley sponsored Adams's admission to the bar.
After his admittance, Adams forged on with his rigorous reading regimen. As his study intensified, Adams's original attitude toward the law shifted from a pungent deprecation of its tenets and practitioners ("We see him fumbling and raking amidst the rubbish of Writs..."— JA to Charles Cushing, 1 April 1756, Papers, I:12-13) to an unbridled admiration for the spirit of the law. To his friend Jonathan Sewall he wrote: "Now to what higher object, to what greater character, can any mortal aspire than to be possessed of all this knowledge, well digested and ready at command, to assist the feeble and friendless, to discountenance the haughty and lawless, to procure redress to wrongs, the advancement of right to assert and maintain liberty and virtue, to discourage and abolish tyranny and vice?" (Extract of a letter dated October 1759 to Sewall, DJA, I:124).
By the 1760s, Adams's practice in Boston was well-established and flourishing. While the bulk of his cases stemmed from commerce that involved Boston merchants and their trading partners, Adams maintained a varied practice active in all manner of cases—from larceny, assault and battery, murder, rape, and rioting to property disputes, adultery, bastardy, and buggery. The burgeoning success of his practice spurred an interest in assembling a legal library of the first degree. In a diary entry dated 30 January 1768 he records that he is "mostly intent at present upon collecting a library and I find that a great deal of thought and care, as well as money, are necessary to assemble an ample and well chosen assortment of books" (DJA, I:337). McCullough states that for Adams, like Jefferson, "books [were] an extravagance he could no longer curb (with one London bookseller he had placed a standing order for 'every book and pamphlet, of reputation, upon the subjects of law and government as soon as it comes out'" (McCullough, John Adams, p. 64).
His library, comprising some 3,500 volumes, is now housed at the Boston Public Library. Of these, 254 volumes are legal treatises, including three of the works mentioned in the letter to Thomas. Fortescue Aland's Reports bears Adams's ownership inscription and is dated 1770. Reeve's History of the Common Law not only contains Adams's signature but also that of Thomas Boylston's son John Quincy (dated 1853) and the bookplate of his other grandson Charles Francis Adams. Adams also owned two editions of Blackstone's famous Commentaries as well as a set of his law tracts which survive in the collection. As shown from the varied provenance of the books mentioned in the letter, family members apparently continued to provide or reintroduce books after Adams's death, including many previously owned by Adams himself.
"Haec olim meminisse iuvabit" ("The day may dawn when this plight shall be sweet to remember"), quoting from the first book of the Aeneid, Adams reassures his son that the painstaking drudgery of organizing his papers and commonplace notes can and will bear fruit. "A Lawyer should have in his Desk, or Bureau, more pidgeon holes, than a coiner of constitutions... he should deposit, in exact, numerical or alphabetical order, all the effects of his Researches into moot Points, as well as the States of Cases and his notes of Arguments or Authorities relative to them. One of these Apartments in your Scritoire or your Case or Drawers for writings you may dedicate to the common Law, and fill it up with your disquisitions as slowly or as swiftly as you please." He stresses that "... instead of injuring your mind body or estate, it may be of great benefit to the first and last ..." and quotes a motto ascribed to Horace and usually prefixed to works of a general and useful tendency: "Indocti dicant, ament meminisse periti ("Let the unlearned learn, and the learned delight in remembering").
Adams also recommends that his son absorb his own work written in 1774 while serving in the Continental Congress: his "Bill of Rights: a List of Grievances" (Papers, 2:159-163), a preamble which Duane called "a machine for the fabrication of independence." He suggests: "If you look into the Journal of Congress for 1774 you will find a Declaration of the Rights of the Colonies and another of the Violations of those Rights. These declarations or Lists were drawn up by two Committees. I was one of the of the first Committee and drew up the Report in this you will see, not only the rough materials of the Declaration of Independence made two years after, but you will see in what Light the common Law was seen by Congress ... Extracts from these Journals, should go into your common Law Pidgeon hole." Based largely on the tenets of the Magna Carta from which devolved the British Constitution and early colonial charters (most notably Virginia, Massachusetts, and Maryland), Adams's bill called for Americans to retain the exclusive right to legislate in all cases of taxation and internal polity but to consent to parliamentary regulation of trade. Adams also asserted that the colonists were "entitled to life, liberty, and property, and they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent" and that they were "entitled to the common law of England and "more especially to the great and inestimable privilege of being tried by their peers of the vicinage." Other issues mentioned included arbitrary detention and the imposition of martial law.
Adams later chafed at the idea that his Declaration of Rights was overlooked as the cornerstone of the Declaration of Independence, having been eclipsed by Jefferson's authorial contributions. In his own copy of his Discourses on Davila, which recognized the dangers of an unbalanced democracy then unfolding in France, he privately fumes in an annotation: "The Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776 contained Nothing but the Boston Declaration of 1772 and the Congress Declaration of 1774. Such are the Caprices of Fortune. This Declaration of Rights was drawn by the little John Adams. The mighty Jefferson by the Declaration of Independence 4 July 1776 carried away the glory both of the great and the little."
Adams also advises his son to ponder the Boston Declaration which was written by cousin Samuel Adams as a report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, 20 November 1772. "There is a public printed declaration of the Town of Boston some time anterior to the meeting of the first congress which will deserve your attention." Like Adams's Congress Declaration, the document stresses the natural rights of life, liberty, and property.
Thomas Boylston Adams, third son and youngest child of John and Abigail (Smith) Adams, was born 15 September 1772. He graduated from Harvard in 1790 and studied law in the Philadelphia office of Jared Ingersoll for three years. He was admitted to the bar in 1793 but embraced the practice of law with far less enthusiasm than his father or siblings. When the opportunity arose in 1794 to serve as secretary to his brother John Quincy on the latter's first diplomatic mission to The Hague, he seized the moment, returning to Philadelphia four years later in the middle of his father's presidency.
While his parents would have preferred him to settle in Quincy, they both recognized that Philadelphia offered more opportunities for a young lawyer with a recognizable name, but both evidently doubted their son's ability to succeed in the fast world of the capital (Ferling, John Adams, p. 388). He practiced law and contributed to Joseph Dennie's Port Folio in Philadelphia for some years thereafter. He was still in Philadelphia struggling with his practice in 1802.
At the urging of his parents, he moved back to Quincy in 1803 and opened a law office there (Ferling, John Adams, p. 420) and sat in the Massachusetts legislature, 1805-1806. In 1811 he was appointed chief justice of the circuit court of common pleas for the southern circuit of Massachusetts. In spite of his participation in government and judicial appointment, Thomas's law practice never equaled the success of his father's. In later years Thomas sank into alchoholism like his brother Charles before him; and by the 1820s Thomas was employed chiefly as a caretaker for his father and the farm. He died 13 March 1832, in Quincy.
Sotheby's would like to thank Hobson Woodward, Assistant Editor of the Adams Papers, and Elizabeth Prindle, Manager of the John Adams Library Project at Boston Public Library, for their invaluable assistance in the cataloguing of this letter.