thesis for john adams

Part of: The Works of John Adams, 10 vols. The Works of John Adams, vol. 6

• Charles Francis Adams (editor)
• John Adams (author)

A 10 volume collection of Adams’ most important writings, letters, and state papers, edited by his grandson. Vol. 6 contains (Defence of the Constitutions Vol. III cont’d, Davila, Essays on the Constitution.

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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. 6.

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John Adams and Cicero: From Inspiration to Confidant Open Access

Hanson, ashley michelle (2010).

Abstract John Adams and Cicero: From Inspiration to Confidant By Ashley M. Hanson This Thesis asks to what extent did a classical influence exist during America's earliest days. The scope of this thesis is narrowed by looking at the unique relationship between a founding father of America and a great orator of antiquity. The two men used for the comparison are John Adams and Marcus Tul ius Cicero. The central idea of this thesis is that John Adams looked to Cicero in times of uncertainty. The friendship that Adams establishes between him in Cicero takes place continuously over his lifetime. While other historians have compared Adams to Cicero at distinct moments in his life, this thesis wil show that Adams chose Cicero to be an inspiration, companion, and source of solace at many times during his life. The argument traces the progression of the friendship from Adams's earliest days as student, through his professional life, and into his retirement. Special care has been taken to emphasize primary resources. Most examples come directly from John Adams's diary, autobiography and letters. Cicero's speeches are also used to help establish the connection between these two men as well.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Cicero: A First Friend in Uncertainty Pg. 15

Chapter Two

Adams and Cicero: Partners at Law Pg. 27

Chapter Three

Marcus Tullius Cicero: A Source of Solace Pg. 42

Conclusion Pg. 51

About this Honors Thesis

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John Adams and American foreign policy : the struggle to maintain neutrality, 1797-1800

• Masters Thesis
• Cox, Janna K.
• Humboldt State University
• McBroome, Delores Nason
• Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
• Social Science
• California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt
• Foreign policy
• Humboldt State University -- Theses -- Teaching American History
• Humboldt State University -- Theses -- Social Science
• 2006-05-18T22:34:21Z
• http://hdl.handle.net/2148/54
• Thesis (M.A.)--Humboldt State University, Social Science, American History, 2006
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Master's Theses and Capstones

The use of john adams as a historical character 1789--1874.

Heather Baures , University of New Hampshire, Durham

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Master of Arts

John Adams was central to the founding of the United States and has held enduring interest among many generations including his own. The foundation of Adams as a historical character was constructed both by people he interacted with personally and by the turmoil of politics, casting him in roles with conflicting results. After his death, Adams was placed in a variety of roles as a historical character as people struggled to make sense of the contentious decades leading up and including the Civil War. After the Civil War, a more sophisticated "warts and all" portrayal of John Adams as a historical character as American historical identity was reexamined. The ways Adams was constructed and used as a historical character illuminates issues surrounding cultural history, historiography and conceptualization of the American Revolution by historians. That use also highlights recent interest in John Adams.

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Baures, Heather, "The use of John Adams as a historical character 1789--1874" (2007). Master's Theses and Capstones . 57. https://scholars.unh.edu/thesis/57

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U.S. Presidents / John Adams

1735 - 1826

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power. Letter to John Taylor

Before becoming President in 1797, John Adams built his reputation as a blunt-speaking man of independent mind. A fervent patriot and brilliant intellectual, Adams served as a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress between 1774 and 1777, as a diplomat in Europe from 1778 to 1788, and as vice president during the Washington administration.

Life In Depth Essays

• Life in Brief
• Life Before the Presidency
• Campaigns and Elections
• Domestic Affairs
• Foreign Affairs
• Life After the Presidency
• Family Life
• The American Franchise
• Impact and Legacy

Chicago Style

Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. “John Adams.” Accessed April 25, 2024. https://millercenter.org/president/adams.

C. James Taylor

Mr. Taylor is the former editor-in-chief of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

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• My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams

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Natural Rights, Liberty, and Freedom: A look at John Adams 1765, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law.

Jan 3, 2021 | 2 comments

This terse paper will examine the 1765, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law , by John Adams. His essay is an argument against the March 22, 1765, Stamp Act , issued to the American colonies, by King George III and the British Parliament. By using a lens focused on Adam’s use of philosophical ideals, natural rights, liberty, and freedom, it will be demonstrated these concepts are derived by, and have life breathed into them via education, which in turn can be used to establish and govern civil societies, in essence power; both individual and civil. Thus, it is through education that society can create rational laws and legislate the necessary powers to restrain oppressive tactics of their governing rulers. This paper will also examine how Adams was inspired by a few of his political influences, Cicero (106-43 BC), John Locke (1632), The Whig Party, and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826).

A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law

Adams feared the Stamps Act’s true measure was to usurp the existing legal system within the colonies and instill a type of European feudal system. He started his essay with “Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.” [1] He also dictates, “the canon and the feudal law” … [are] the two greatest systems of tyranny.” [2] Moreover, he stressed, the Act denies “liberty and the rights of mankind”, and stated men have divinely given natural rights to “life”, “property”, “freedom”, and “that liberty must at all hazards be supported”. [3] Additionally, he highlighted this law was intended to “strip… great measures [of] knowledge” of her citizens by placing “restraints” on the press and the education system. Furthermore, he indicated the law “wrest … the knowledge of their rights and wrongs” [keeping them] in a state of total ignorance of every thing [sic] divine and human.” [4] [5]

Furthermore, he emphasized,

“ liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. ” [6]

He explained the lack of education within the general populace would deny them a basic understanding of their rights; natural or civil, thus they would be compelled to accept any wrongs committed by the king or others with similar powers Adams strongly proclaimed,

“RIGHTS… undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government… cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws… derived from the great Legislator of the universe.” [7]

Consequently, he declared, these rights are of a divine origin which no earthly power can rightly strip from another human being. By attempting to do so, it would subjugate the weaker individual or community into a state of slavery, thus a state of feudalism. Moreover, he compared how the Stamp Act is similar to the laws that caused the Puritans to flee their homeland, implying, “they detested all the base services and servile dependencies of the feudal system.” [8]

Additionally, he claimed, many of the leading Puritan men, “laity and clergy”, were men of “sense and learning”, who had read and understood the Greek and Roman “historians, orators, poets, and philosophers… and era, of “enlightenment “and “wisdom.” [9]

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and other founding fathers, including some of the Puritans, were well versed in the philosophies of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Adams said in a letter to Jefferson, July 16, 1813,

“I should first take a general View of the moral doctrines of the most remarkable of the ancient Philosophers, of whose Ethicks We have sufficient information to make an estimate; say of Pythagoras, Epicurus, Epictetus Socrates, Cicero, Seneca, Antoninus. I should do justice to the branches of Morality they have treated well, but point out the importance of those in which they are deficient.” [10]

It is clear from this statement that both Adams and Jefferson were well read in the Greek and Roman philosophers. Moreover, Adam in another letter to Jefferson on Sept. 03, 1816, discussed how Mark Anthony, after the tyrant Caesar’s death, set out to “destroy the Republick, to establish the Empire, and to proscribe Cicero.” [11] Thus, implying the Greek educated Cicero and his political thinking was a danger to the new Caesar and his recently created Empire, one which replaced the 500-year-old Republic.

Jefferson writes to Adams, Dec. 10, 1819,

“Your intimacy with their history, antient, middle and modern, your familiarity with the improvements in the science of government at this time, will enable you, if any body [sic], to go back with our principles and opinions to the times of Cicero, Cato, and Brutus, and tell us by what process these great and virtuous men could have led so unenlightened and vitiated a people into freedom and good government..” [12]

Additionally, in the same letter, Jefferson stated, “I ask myself What was that government which the virtues of Cicero were so zealous to restore, and the ambition of Caesar to subvert? [13]

One of Cicero’s writings which many political thinkers have read, including Adams, is De Officiis – On Duties , a letter of instruction to his son at university in Athens. In it, he explained he was a follower of Socrates and Plato, and he emphasized a proper education is needed to be a good citizen and civic leader and it was through his own studies of histories, laws and language, he learned to speak with “propriety, clearness, and elegance.” Additionally, he explained education would allow him to take heed against the

“ambition for glory; for it robs us of liberty, and in the defense of liberty a high-souled man should stake everything”. [14]

In his Republic, he stated,

“nature has given to mankind such a compulsion to do good, and such a desire to defend the well-being of the community, that this force prevails over all the temptations of pleasure and ease.” [15]

Moreover, in On the Commonwealth and On the Laws , Cicero dictated,

“the character of any commonwealth corresponds to the nature or the desire of its ruling power. And so in no other state than that in which the people has the highest power does liberty have any home… which nothing can be sweeter, and which, if it is not equal, is not even liberty.” [16]

And in his essay, The Nature of the Gods , he writes,

“I assert then, that the universe, with all its parts, was originally constituted, and has, without any discontinuance, been ever governed by the providence of the gods… it must follow the world is governed by their wisdom…everything is under the direction of an intelligent nature, which has produced that beautiful order in the world.” [17]

Based on these excerpts, it is not a stretch to see how Cicero’s writings on divine natural rights, liberty, and education, would have affected Adams and other political thinkers, thus causing them to trust in divinely inspired inalienable rights, along with an understanding that a proper education was needed to unlock the power within these ideas.

James Farrell, in his article, New England’s Cicero: John Adams and the Rhetoric of Conspiracy , considered Adams to be New England’s very own Cicero. [18] According to R. B. Bernstine, in his book, The Education Of John Adams, indicated Adams considered himself an intellectual colleague of Cicero, Aristotle, and other ancient philosophers in the “great enterprise—“ the divine science of politicks.” [19] Moreover, in another letter between Adams and Jefferson, Adams wrote on June 28th. 1813,

“In favour [sic] of these general Principles in Phylosophy[sic], Religion and Government, I could fill Sheets of quotations from Frederick of Prussia, from Hume, Gibbon, Bolingbroke, Reausseau and Voltaire, as well as Neuton and Locke: not to mention thousands of Divines and Philosophers of inferior Fame.” [20]

These brief excerpts indicate Adams was indeed well educated and influenced by the great political philosophers of the past. Of these great men, he mentioned John Locke, whom according to David McCullough in his book, John Adams , surmised John Locke was a man whom “Adams, Jefferson, and other American patriots drew inspiration”. [21] And Jon Hersey on his web page, John Locke: The Father of Liberalism, phrasing C. Bradley Thompson’s book, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty,

“John Adams cited Locke as an inspiration for his ‘revolution-principles,’ which he said were ‘the principles of nature and eternal reason’ and constituted a rational alternative to docile obedience and bloody anarchy.” [22]

Additionally, Adams said in his Novanglus Essay No. 1 .,

John Lock had his own dissertation against tyranny, titled, Two Treaties of Government. The second of these treaties was titled, The Second Treatise: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government. Locke states,

“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” [24]

This statement is reminiscent of Cicero’s thinking,

“nature has given to mankind such a compulsion to do good, and such a desire to defend the well-being of the community, that this force prevails over all the temptations of pleasure and ease …” And, “a man may harm no one except first provoked by injury…” [25]

Locke also stated ,

“THE Natural Liberty of Man is to be free from any Superior Power on Earth, and not to be under the Will or Legislative Authority of Man, but to have only the Law of Nature for his Rule. The Liberty of Man, in Society, is to be under no other Legislative Power, but that established, by consent, in the Common-wealth, nor under the Dominion of any Will, or Restraint of any Law, but what the Legislative shall enact, according to the Trust put in it.” (§ 22). [26]

Locke, also wrote, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, indicating education was a primary concern of his. In it he remarks,

“The well educating of their children is so much the duty and concern of parents, and the welfare and prosperity of the nation so much depends on it, that I would have every one lay it seriously to heart…” [27]

This statement can be tied to Adams, Canon and Feudal Law , where he expressed ,

”…the wisdom and benevolence of our fathers…. made an early provision by law, that every town consisting of so many families, should be always furnished with a grammar school…”

Furthermore , he expressing the king had “ imported statesmen ” who professed,

“…the education of our youth… whose time and attention… ought to be devoted to labor, and not to public affairs, or to examination into the conduct of their superiors.” [28]

What is more, Locke, in the realm of education, indicated there are two books students should read, the Bible for ethics, and Cicero’s De Officiis for “principles and precepts of virtue for the conduct of his life.” [29]

Paul Meany, on the website, Libertarianism.org., expounds in his article, Cicero was Locke’s Greatest Inspiration,

“One of the most significant thinkers who shaped Locke’s philosophy, despite preceding him by eighteen centuries, is Marcus Tullius Cicero… Cicero influenced Locke’s thinking on natural law, property rights, and mixed government.” [30]

According to Meany, it was discovered after Locke’s death, he owned nine editions of Cicero’s De Officiis.

The Whig party

In 1869, the Whigs created and passed their Bill of Rights in the British Parliament . This act was a fallout from the “Glorious Revolution” [31] . According to Lois Schwoerer, “Locke and his Lockean ideas” played some part in the creation of that revolution. [32] Caroline Robbins, in her book, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, stated , “Locke was [a] determined Whig,” [33] while Ronald Hamowy, in The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, stated, “ The Whig party supported the supremacy of Parliament and toleration for Protestant dissenters and was adamantly opposed to a Catholic on the throne.” [34]

Moreover, to the Whigs, the Pope and the Catholic church represented oppression and reduced liberties, which is what Adams feared was hidden within the Stamps Act, and he voiced his concern in his dissertation,

“the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law… was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandisement of their own order. All the epithets I have here given to the Romish policy are just, and will be allowed to be so when it is considered, that they even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven.” [35]

The Bill of Rights was a landmark Act to the constitutional law of England. It provided direction on how the Crown could be passed on, including basic civil rights, such as the right of the Protestants to bear arms for their own defense. Furthermore, the Act set limits on the monarch’s powers along with the expressed privileges of Parliament, including freedom of speech and free elections. [36]

Moreover, Carl J. Richard, in his book, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment , indicated America’s founding fathers were intellectually obligated to the philosophies of the Whigs, and in turn, the Whigs were intellectually obligated to the philosophies of the ancients. [37] Furthermore, Richard implied the founding fathers often quoted the Stoics to shore up their theories, yet he pointed out, they favored Cicero and Seneca, as well as other Roman historians. [38] Additionally, Richard indicates Adams, in 1759, writes in his diary,

“study Seneca, Cicero, and all other good writers… Labour to get distinct Ideas of Law, Right, Wrong, Justice, Equity. Search for them in your own mind, in Roman, grecian [sic], French, English Treatises of natural, civil, common, Statute Law.” [39]

Trevor Colbourn in his book, The Lamp Of Experience , expressed colonists in the eighteenth-century thought the study of history to be “prestigious…practical,” and he indicates, the Whigs were devoted to liberty. [40] Furthermore, he remarks, Adams believed that it was necessary for American statesmen to have “ a comprehensive Knowledge of Law and History.” [41]

Furthermore, Adams realized the new country needed to groom young statesmen, along with the general populous, to secure the countries survival and stave off tyrants. According to McCullough, Adams expounded on the need for a national education policy when he remarked,

“The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.” [42]

According to David McCullough, in his inauguration speech March 4, 1797, Adams voiced his support for state rights, along with the need for “expanded education for all the people, both to enlarge the happiness of life and as essential to the preservation of freedom.” During his speech, he also indicated, “What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?… And [the] great threats to the nation [are] “sophistry, the spirit of party, and ‘the pestilence of foreign influence.’” [43]

Lastly, Adams forewarned in his dissertation,

“Thus, as long as this confederacy lasted, and the people were held in ignorance, liberty, and with her, knowledge and virtue too, seem to have deserted the earth, and one age of darkness succeeded another.” [44]

This brief essay demonstrated how early political thinkers such as Cicero, John Locke, and the Whigs, influenced John Adams and his 1765, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law . His essay was an argument against the March 22, 1765, Stamp Act. This law was created by King George III and the British Parliament. Adam’s penned the essay fearing the king’s edict would subvert the colonies existing decrees and introduce a form of the European Feudal Laws. He stated these laws were derived from the Pope and the Catholic church, thus he professed he believed these edicts were, “the two greatest systems of tyranny.” He thought the citizens would be greatly oppressed if the Stamp Act were implemented, hence, denying freedom, liberty, and education. Education, as expressed by Adams, Locke, The Whigs, and Cicero, is the one thing needed to understand and implement the concepts of natural rights, liberties, and freedoms. Undeniably, these great political thinkers indicated that without an education, these philosophies would never develop, and men would remain ignorant and in the servitude of tyrants in perpetuity.

Adams, John. Novanglus, and Massachusettensis: Or Political Essays. Boston: Hew & Gross, 1819.

Adams, John, Thomas Jefferson, ed. Lester J. Cappon. The Adams-Jefferson Letters. Renewed 1987. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Cicero, ed. James E. G. Zetzel, Nell Singer, Herbert M. Singer. On the Commonwealth and On The Laws. Cambridge U.K. ; New york: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Cicero, Niall Rudd, Trans. Cicero; The Republic and the Laws. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1998.

Cicero, trans. Thomas Francklin, D.D. M. Tullius Cicero of the Nature Of The Gods. London: William Pickering, 1829.

Laslett, Peter ed. Locke; Two Treatises of Government. Student Edn. 22nd printing. Cambridge, New York,: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Locke, John, and Quick, Robert Herbert, Rev., M.A. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. London: C. J. Clay and Sons Cambridge University Press, 1889.

Taylor, Robert J. ed. The Adams Papers Volume I. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univrersity Press, 1977.

Bernstine, R. B. The Education Of John Adams. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition, 2020.

Colbourn, Trevor. The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution. Carmel, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1998.

Diggins, John, Patrick. The Portable John Adams. New York: Penguin Books , 2004.

Farrell, James M. New England’s Cicero: John Adams and the Rhetoric of Conspiracy . Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 104 , 1992: 55-72.

Hamowy, Ronald. Whiggism. In The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism , by Ronald. Hamowy, 543. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2008.

Hersey, Jon. John Locke: The Father of Liberalism. 08 19, 2019. https://theobjectivestandard.com/2019/08/john-locke-the-father-of-liberalism/#_edn7).

McCullough, David. John Adams. New York ; London ; Toronto : Simon & Schuster , 2001.

Meany, Paul. Cicero was Locke’s Greatest Inspiration . 03 25, 2020. https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/cicero-was-lockes-greatest-inspiration).

Richard, Carl J. The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass. London.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Robbins, Caroline. The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman. New York: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1968.

Schwoerer, Lois G. Locke, Lockean Ideas, and the Glorious Revolution. Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 4, 1990: 531-48.

Wikipedia. Bill of Rights 1689. 08 16, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689.

• John Patrick Diggins. The Portable John Adams. (New York: Penguin Books, 2004),233. ↑
• Ibid. 234. ↑
• Ibid. 240. ↑
• John Patrick Diggins. The Portable John Adams. (New York: Penguin Books, 2004),241. ↑
• Ibid. 249. ↑
• John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, ed. Lester J. Cappon. The Adams-Jefferson Letters. Renewed 1987. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 359. ↑
• Ibid. 488. ↑
• Ibid. 33. ↑
• Cicero, Niall Rudd, Trans. Cicero; The Republic and the Laws. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),3. ↑
• Cicero, ed. James E. G. Zetzel, Nell Singer, Herbert M. Singer. On the Commonwealth and On The Laws . (Cambridge U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 787-789. ↑
• Cicero, trans. Thomas Francklin, D.D., M. Tullius Cicero of the Nature Of The Gods. (London: William Pickering, 1829)109. ↑
• James M. Farrell, New England’s Cicero: John Adams and the Rhetoric of Conspiracy . (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 104 , 199), 55-72. ↑
• R. B. Bernstine, The Education Of John Adams . (Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition, 2020),8. ↑
• John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, ed. Lester J. Cappon. The Adams-Jefferson Letters. Renewed 1987. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 340. ↑
• David McCullough, John Adams . (New York; London ; Toronto : Simon & Schuster , 2001), 245. ↑
• Jon Hersey, John Locke: The Father of Liberalism . ( 2019). ↑
• John Adams , Novanglus, and Massachusettensis : Or Political Essays . (Boston: Hew & Gross, 1819),12. ↑
• John Locke, The Second Treatise: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government. In In Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration , by John, ed. Shapiro Ian, John Dunn, Ruth W. Grant Locke, (New Haven; London: Yale University Pres.),102. ↑
• Ibid. 42. ↑
• Peter Laslett, ed . Locke; Two Treatises of Government . Student Edn. 22nd printing. (Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012), 86. ↑
• John Locke, and Robert Herbert Quick, Rev., M.A. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. (London: C. J. Clay and Sons Cambridge University Press, 1889), lxiii. ↑
• John, Patrick Diggins. The Portable John Adams. (New York: Penguin Books, 2004),241. ↑
• John Locke, and Robert Herbert Quick, Rev., M.A. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. (London: C. J. Clay and Sons Cambridge University Press, 1889),160. ↑
• Paul Meany, Cicero was Locke’s Greatest Inspiration , ( 2020). ↑
• Lois G. Schwoerer, Locke, Lockean Ideas, and the Glorious Revolution. (Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 4, 1990), ↑
• Ibid. 532. ↑
• Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman . (New York: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1968.) 54. ↑
• Hamowy, Ronald. Whiggism. In The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism , (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2008) 543. ↑
• John Patrick Diggins. The Portable John Adams. (New York: Penguin Books, 2004),235. ↑
• Wikipedia. Bill of Rights 1689 (2020). ↑
• Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment. (Cambridge, Mass. London.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 2. ↑
• Ibid. 175. ↑
• Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution . (Carmel, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1998),5. ↑
• David McCullough, John Adams. (New York; London; Toronto: Simon & Schuster , 2001),354. ↑
• Ibid. 468. ↑
• John Patrick Diggins. The Portable John Adams. (New York: Penguin Books, 2004),236. ↑

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Library Of Congress.  https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/pga.10244/

Proof read. Glorious Revolution Bill of Rights 1669. Correct in footnote. Some awkward sentences. Thomas Jefferson was no influence on JA in 1765. Overall enjoyed. Good luck with orals.

Greetings and thanks for the comment. I will read Glorious Revolution Bill of Rights 1669. As to your comment on proof read. I agree, but I post these articles as I write them for class. I don’t always have the time needed to proof read them. If I will to submit them for publication I will do a closer reading of them and correct any problems. Thanks again, Kev

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John adams’ discourses on davila, no. 33, [ca. 16 march 1791], john adams’ discourses on davila , no. 33.

[ ca. 16 March 1791 ] 1

Discourses on Davila. N. 33.

It seems by the Discourse of Boetius, that there was a strong Inclination, in some to destroy Monarchy and Aristocracy in France, as long ago as the rign of Charles the ninth and some of his Predecessors. had this been done, they must either have had no Government at all , would probably have adopted, a Government in one Center like the present national Assembly. In some former discourse an Idea was hinted at, of throwing together a few Thoughts upon the Question whether a Sovereignty in a single Assembly, could have answered the Ends of Government in the sixteenth Century or whether it will do better now in the Eighteenth, for such a nation as France. This question may be answered by a few Remarks upon a Work, which has not been much read in America, as yet but as it is a part of American Literature and will be preserved in the Cabinets of the Curious, it will not misbecome Us to look into it.

In 1788 were published in Paris four Volumes under the Title of Researches historical and political, concerning the United States of America North America, in which is are treated their Relations and Contentions with Great Britain and of their Governments before and after the Revolution, by a Citizen of Virginia; with four Letters from a Burgher of New Heaven concerning the Unity of Legislation. As these Letters from a Citizen of New Heaven to a Citizen of Virginia, are become a Part both of French and American Literature, they will descend to Posterity, as one monument of the Principles and Opinions of this important Period. Posterity therefore will be, as the present Generation both in france and America are interested in a candid investigation of the Truths or Errors they contain: and especially as the Author of them is announced to be one of the greatest Men of this Century. When the Work first appeared in public It was conjectured that the Word “Heaven” was an Error of the Press and that New Haven was meant, and M r Trumbull the satiric Poet of humble Virtue but independent Spirit and, immortal Fame, who was Supposed imagined, by some who knowing he belonged to connecticut knew not that he was a Citizen of Hartford, to have attempted in prose to ridicule of a Government in one Assembly. But upon considering the concluding part of the dedication, and after reading the four Letters themselves it was conjectured that the New Jerusalem was meant, and the Plan of Government imagined for the Millennium only. 2 It now appears however that this Work has been followed by several others published with the Names of the Duke de la Rochefaucault and the Marquis of Condercet, referred to as serious Argument in the national Assembly, and that that assembly has itself adopted the Idea of Mr Turgot it must therefore now be given Up, that this Work was designed to delineate a Government for Men, before the coming of the New Heavens and the New Earth.

These Letters in 1788 were probably written in Answer to the Defence of the American Constitutions the three Volumes of which were all printed and some of them dispersed in France before the End of 1787. This would be probable enough, from the known Friendship of the Writer for M r Turgot, which induced him formerly to write his Life and his Panegyrick: but it is certain, from many passages in the Letters themselves, in which the Defence, tho not named is so clearly alluded to that it cannot be mistaken. The Writer is a Man of science, but no Experience; of Letters of some kinds, but unacquainted with History as well as the Writings on Government; little acquainted with skilled in the human heart, not at all conversant with the World. This is all demonstrated by his Letters: and what is more whimsical Still, it appears manifest enough that he has undertaken to answer a Book Work without reading it.

A Desire of Reformation in Government, as well as in morals, and Religion, is a proof of an amiable disposition, and benevolent Wisdom. a Passion, for improvements in Arts and discoveries in science, is always laudable and where it is accompanied with Talents, merits and Seldom fails to obtain the Admiration of mankind. But it should be remembered that many a Man feigns a passion which he never felt: others pretend to Talents they never possessed.

There is an Italian proverb of sterling Sense, Se Sta bene non se move. If you Stand well, dont move. A maxim of Wisdom generally just and universally so with this Addition, Unless you have good reason to believe you can Stand better. Before We attempt Reformation We Should be Sure of two Points. 1. That there are Errors, and Abuses, or at least imperfections, which can be corrected. 2. What those Errors, abuses or imperfections are. Before We attempt Discoveries and improvements, We should consider, whether the whole of a Subject is not already known: and whether it is not already as perfect as We can make it: and better than it would be with Such Innovations and alterations as are projected.

As all Things are best illustrated by Examples, it may not be amiss to alledge one or two.

Suppose an Architect should arise and sett up Pretentions to matchless Genius, intuitive Knowledge, and exalted Invention beyond all others who had ever lived in any part of the World. He tells us gravely “Mankind have as yet discovered nothing in the Art of Building. Corinthian Pillars and all the other orders are aukward and clumsy Incumbranes. Dividing an house into various Appartements and Offices, according to the old Architecture, is all Ignorance and Empiricism. I, will teach you a new method; A method of perfect Unity and Simplicity. Pull down to the foundation, all your houses, cutt to pieces all your Pillars and orders, and I will build you new houses habitations, but at your expence however, all in one Center. Houses in which the Garrett and the Cellar, the Kitchen and the Parlour Dining Room, Dressing Room and Lodging Rooms shall all be but one Apartment. This will be Simple: all the Complications and Quackeries of the Old Architecture will be avoided by this device.”

Proud as the World is there is more superiority in it, given than assumed, and a bold Pretender generally gains Attention and Obtains disciples. It is probable that our Architect would make impressions on some, for We have good Authority to say that there is no Opinion so absurd but some Philosopher has been found to mantain it. But would Mankind in General, especially the more judicious and thinking part and those who have already comfortable Dwellings, consent to destroy so much Property, waste so much labour, and turn themselves out into the open air, for the sake of Improvements So precarious and problematical.?

Another Example, equally apposite may be taken from Musick. Suppose a Person should appear and tell Us with an Air of solemnity, “that Gluck and Picini, Haydn and Handel were all quacks. Their Complications of Tenor Treble and Base were all ridiculous. But I have discovered a new Science of Musick and invented a new method of practice. a Theory and Practice of mere simplicity. reduce all your Fiddles to one String and your Organs to one Pipe. It is now discovered and made certain that Monotony Is the Perfection of the musical Art. And this is the new Musick and at present all the Tone.” Would all the World, the Performers and Composers as well as Lovers And Hearers at once agree to this.? Would not some be found to say that all the great Masters of Antiquity, as well as of modern times and the present Age, before You, have thought differently. All the Examples are against you. But suppose He should reply. “Dont tell me of Examples. Examples have nothing to do in this matter. Improvement and Discovery must and shall be made. The old Musick was execrable. A better We must and will have. Away with all your Symphonies and Harmonies, your Compositions your Concords and Discords; your flatts and sharps: One simple, unique thorough bass shall bellow in your Ears forever: And then you will have no discords.” “Musicians by Profession are interested to make their Science intricate and their practice complex.” Must Mankind at once resign their Pleasures and Amusements to Such a decisive Pretender, without consulting their own Ears and Taste?

Another Example may be drawn from Grammar. Why should We have so complicated a system, for the ordinary conversation, and daily Intercourse of Life? Why should our Alphabets consist of so many as four and twenty Letters? cannot We do without Eight Parts of Speech? must our Pronouns have so many Cases, our nouns so many declensions, and our Verbs so many Conjugations, Voices, Moods Tenses, Numbers and Persons? Cannot a little Unity and Simplicity be introduced into this Art. The old Grammar consumes a great deal of time.— And while I am writing the federal Gazette is put into my hand with full proof that the Spirit of Unity and Symplicity is becoming epidemical. A new and universal Language is announced, invented by Professor Wolf of Petersbourg, destitute of Words that immediately expresses Ideas and fills the Imagination with Images and Perceptions. 3 it does not take up the fifth of the Space of any known Language. it has no Irregularities no declensions, and only one extremely simple Conjugation. Proper Names of Persons and Places may be accurately expressed by it, without the help of Words or Letters and it may be commonly read from left to right, or from right to left at pleasure. it is not unpleasant to the Ear. And may be easily taught in any Country where there are Jews, Turks or Christians, or where the Bible or Koran is read.

What Shall We say to this discovery? or Invention? It is a Wonder, and therefore will attract Attention. But will Professor Wolf insist that We should burn all our Grammars, and cease to teach our Children any Language, till We shall be informed what his secret is? We need not contradict his Pretensions. Let him publish his Art and We shall judge. Till then We shall Use what We have and already know.— But his is a very different situation from that of our modern Legislators. Their pretended Nostrum; their Sublime Invention is nothing new. it is as old as nations and has been tried in almost every nation Country. There is Scarcely any nation which has not in some period of its duration, made an Essay of a Government in a single Assembly: sometimes larger and sometimes smaller in point of numbers: and they have been found to operate alike: as uniformly as the Union of fire Conjunction of fire and Gunpowder, has produced explosions. We need not hesitate then to pronounce the Pretension to be an Imposition. The Discovery to be nothing but a renovation of an old and very gross Error. The Invention to be nothing new, any more than Savage Life.

Naval Architecture may furnish Us with another Example. Why should a ship have three Masts? Such a multitude of Ropes and rigging and such a Variety of Sails? Unity and Simplicity, would be more conspicuous in one Mast, and in one sail.

MS (Adams Papers); notation by CFA : “never published.”

1 .  The dating of this MS is based on JA ’s mention of the Philadelphia Federal Gazette , 16 March 1791, for which see note 3, below.

2 .  As a supplement to later editions of his four-volume Recherches historiques et politiques , Paris, 1788, Philip Mazzei inserted the Marquis de Condorcet’s Quattre lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven sur l’unité de la législation , which advocated a unicameral form of government and outlined a complex electoral process. In his preface, Mazzei lauded Condorcet but stood firmly alongside JA in upholding bicameralism as the more democratic system ( Mazzei, Writings description begins Philip Mazzei: Selected Writings and Correspondence , ed. Margherita Marchione and others, Prato, Italy, 1983; 3 vols. description ends , 1:560).

3 .  JA likely referred to the classical philologist Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), of Hainrode, Prussia, who taught philosophy at the University of Halle rather than in St. Petersburg, Russia, and whose academic interests reached the American press. Wolf advocated a holistic approach to humanities scholarship that focused on recovering “the science of antiquity” (Joseph Thomas, Universal Pronouncing Dictionary of Biography and Mythology , 3d edn., 2 vols., Phila., 1908; James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities , Princeton, N.J., 2014, p. 118–119; Philadelphia Federal Gazette , 16 March 1791).

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Week 6: The Stamp Act Controversy

John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law

A dissertation on the canon and feudal law, (on man’s standing in the order of creation).

“Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.” This is an observation of Dr. Tillotson, with relation to the interest of his fellow men in a future and immortal state. But it is of equal truth and importance if applied to the happiness of men in society, on this side the grave. In the earliest ages of the world, absolute monarchy seems to have been the universal form of government. Kings, and a few of their great counsellors and captains, exercised a cruel tyranny over the people, who held a rank in the scale of intelligence, in those days, but little higher than the camels and elephants that carried them and their engines to war.

By what causes it was brought to pass, that the people in the middle ages became more intelligent in general, would not, perhaps, be possible in these days to discover. But the fact is certain; and wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people, arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion. Man has certainly an exalted soul; and the same principle in human nature, — that aspiring, noble principle founded in benevolence, and cherished by knowledge; I mean the love of power, which has been so often the cause of slavery, — has, whenever freedom has existed, been the cause of freedom. If it is this principle that has always prompted the princes and nobles of the earth, by every species of fraud and violence to shake off all the limitations of their power, it is the same that has always stimulated the common people to aspire at independency, and to endeavor at confining the power of the great within the limits of equity and reason.

The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, —  Rights , that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws —  Rights , derived from the great Legislator of the universe.

Since the promulgation of Christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny that have sprung from this original, are the canon and the feudal law. The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind. But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.

By the former of these, the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the mind of man was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandisement of their own order. All the epithets I have here given to the Romish policy are just, and will be allowed to be so when it is considered, that they even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure; with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality; with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes; with a power of deposing princes and absolving subjects from allegiance; with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven and the beams of the sun; with the management of earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to him, and his subordinate tyrants, who, it was foretold, would exalt himself above all that was called God, and that was worshipped.

In the latter we find another system, similar in many respects to the former;1which, although it was originally formed, perhaps, for the necessary defence of a barbarous people against the inroads and invasions of her neighboring nations, yet for the same purposes of tyranny, cruelty, and lust, which had dictated the canon law, it was soon adopted by almost all the princes of Europe, and wrought into the constitutions of their government. It was originally a code of laws for a vast army in a perpetual encampment. The general was invested with the sovereign propriety of all the lands within the territory. Of him, as his servants and vassals, the first rank of his great officers held the lands; and in the same manner the other subordinate officers held of them; and all ranks and degrees held their lands by a variety of duties and services, all tending to bind the chains the faster on every order of mankind. In this manner the common people were held together in herds and clans in a state of servile dependence on their lords, bound, even by the tenure of their lands, to follow them, whenever they commanded, to their wars, and in a state of total ignorance of every thing divine and human, excepting the use of arms and the culture of their lands.

1 Rob. Hist. ch. v. pp. 178-9, &c.

But another event still more calamitous to human liberty, was a wicked confederacy between the two systems of tyranny above described. It seems to have been even stipulated between them, that the temporal grandees should contribute every thing in their power to maintain the ascendency of the priesthood, and that the spiritual grandees in their turn, should employ their ascendency over the consciences of the people, in impressing on their minds a blind, implicit obedience to civil magistracy.

Thus, as long as this confederacy lasted, and the people were held in ignorance, liberty, and with her, knowledge and virtue too, seem to have deserted the earth, and one age of darkness succeeded another, till God in his benign providence raised up the champions who began and conducted the Reformation. From the time of the Reformation to the first settlement of America, knowledge gradually spread in Europe, but especially in England; and in proportion as that increased and spread among the people, ecclesiastical and civil tyranny, which I use as synonymous expressions for the canon and feudal laws, seem to have lost their strength and weight. The people grew more and more sensible of the wrong that was done them by these systems, more and more impatient under it, and determined at all hazards to rid themselves of it; till at last, under the execrable race of the Stuarts, the struggle between the people and the confederacy aforesaid of temporal and spiritual tyranny, became formidable, violent, and bloody.

It was this great struggle that peopled America. It was not religion alone, as is commonly supposed; but it was a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror, of the infernal confederacy before described, that projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America.

It was a resolution formed by a sensible people, — I mean the Puritans, — almost in despair. They had become intelligent in general, and many of them learned. For this fact, I have the testimony of Archbishop King himself, who observed of that people, that they were more intelligent and better read than even the members of the church, whom he censures warmly for that reason. This people had been so vexed and tortured by the powers of those days, for no other crime than their knowledge and their freedom of inquiry and examination, and they had so much reason to despair of deliverance from those miseries on that side the ocean, that they at last resolved to fly to the wilderness for refuge from the temporal and spiritual principalities and powers, and plagues and scourges of their native country.

After their arrival here, they began their settlement, and formed their plan, both of ecclesiastical and civil government, in direct opposition to the canon and the feudal systems. The leading men among them, both of the clergy and the laity, were men of sense and learning. To many of them the historians, orators, poets, and philosophers of Greece and Rome were quite familiar; and some of them have left libraries that are still in being, consisting chiefly of volumes in which the wisdom of the most enlightened ages and nations is deposited, — written, however, in languages which their great-grandsons, though educated in European universities, can scarcely read.2

2 “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”

Thus accomplished were many of the first planters in these colonies. It may be thought polite and fashionable by many modern fine gentlemen, perhaps, to deride the characters of these persons, as enthusiastical, superstitious, and republican. But such ridicule is founded in nothing but foppery and affectation, and is grossly injurious and false. Religious to some degree of enthusiasm it may be admitted they were; but this can be no peculiar derogation from their character; because it was at that time almost the universal character not only of England, but of Christendom. Had this, however, been otherwise, their enthusiasm, considering the principles on which it was founded and the ends to which it was directed, far from being a reproach to them, was greatly to their honor; for I believe it will be found universally true, that no great enterprise for the honor or happiness of mankind was ever achieved without a large mixture of that noble infirmity. Whatever imperfections may be justly ascribed to them, which, however, are as few as any mortals have discovered, their judgment in framing their policy was founded in wise, humane, and benevolent principles. It was founded in revelation and in reason too. It was consistent with the principles of the best and greatest and wisest legislators of antiquity. Tyranny in every form, shape, and appearance was their disdain and abhorrence; no fear of punishment, nor even of death itself in exquisite tortures, had been sufficient to conquer that steady, manly, pertinacious spirit with which they had opposed the tyrants of those days in church and state. They were very far from being enemies to monarchy; and they knew as well as any men, the just regard and honor that is due to the character of a dispenser of the mysteries of the gospel of grace. But they saw clearly, that popular powers must be placed as a guard, a control, a balance, to the powers of the monarch and the priest, in every government, or else it would soon become the man of sin, the whore of Babylon, the mystery of iniquity, a great and detestable system of fraud, violence, and usurpation. Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the Scriptures, and a government of the state more agreeable to the dignity of human nature, than any they had seen in Europe, and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it forever. To render the popular power in their new government as great and wise as their principles of theory, that is, as human nature and the Christian religion require it should be, they endeavored to remove from it as many of the feudal inequalities and dependencies as could be spared, consistently with the preservation of a mild limited monarchy. And in this they discovered the depth of their wisdom and the warmth of their friendship to human nature. But the first place is due to religion. They saw clearly, that of all the nonsense and delusion which had ever passed through the mind of man, none had ever been more extravagant than the notions of absolutions, indelible characters, uninterrupted successions, and the rest of those fantastical ideas, derived from the canon law, which had thrown such a glare of mystery, sanctity, reverence, and right reverend eminence and holiness, around the idea of a priest, as no mortal could deserve, and as always must, from the constitution of human nature, be dangerous in society. For this reason, they demolished the whole system of diocesan episcopacy; and, deriding, as all reasonable and impartial men must do, the ridiculous fancies of sanctified effluvia from episcopal fingers, they established sacerdotal ordination on the foundation of the Bible and common sense. This conduct at once imposed an obligation on the whole body of the clergy to industry, virtue, piety, and learning, and rendered that whole body infinitely more independent on the civil powers, in all respects, than they could be where they were formed into a scale of subordination, from a pope down to priests and friars and confessors, — necessarily and essentially a sordid, stupid, and wretched herd, — or than they could be in any other country, where an archbishop held the place of a universal bishop, and the vicars and curates that of the ignorant, dependent, miserable rabble aforesaid, — and infinitely more sensible and learned than they could be in either. This subject has been seen in the same light by many illustrious patriots, who have lived in America since the days of our forefathers, and who have adored their memory for the same reason. And methinks there has not appeared in New England a stronger veneration for their memory, a more penetrating insight into the grounds and principles and spirit of their policy, nor a more earnest desire of perpetuating the blessings of it to posterity, than that fine institution of the late Chief Justice Dudley, of a lecture against popery, and on the validity of presbyterian ordination. This was certainly intended by that wise and excellent man, as an eternal memento of the wisdom and goodness of the very principles that settled America. But I must again return to the feudal law. The adventurers so often mentioned, had an utter contempt of all that dark ribaldry of hereditary, indefeasible right, — the Lord’s anointed, — and the divine, miraculous original of government, with which the priesthood had enveloped the feudal monarch in clouds and mysteries, and from whence they had deduced the most mischievous of all doctrines, that of passive obedience and non-resistance. They knew that government was a plain, simple, intelligible thing, founded in nature and reason, and quite comprehensible by common sense. They detested all the base services and servile dependencies of the feudal system. They knew that no such unworthy dependencies took place in the ancient seats of liberty, the republics of Greece and Rome; and they thought all such slavish subordinations were equally inconsistent with the constitution of human nature and that religious liberty with which Jesus had made them free. This was certainly the opinion they had formed; and they were far from being singular or extravagant in thinking so. Many celebrated modern writers in Europe have espoused the same sentiments. Lord Kames, a Scottish writer of great reputation, whose authority in this case ought to have the more weight as his countrymen have not the most worthy ideas of liberty, speaking of the feudal law, says, — “A constitution so contradictory to all the principles which govern mankind can never be brought about, one should imagine, but by foreign conquest or native usurpations.” Rousseau, speaking of the same system, calls it, — “That most iniquitous and absurd form of government by which human nature was so shamefully degraded.” It would be easy to multiply authorities, but it must be needless; because, as the original of this form of government was among savages, as the spirit, of it is military and despotic, every writer who would allow the people to have any right to life or property or freedom more than the beasts of the field, and who was not hired or enlisted under arbitrary, lawless power, has been always willing to admit the feudal system to be inconsistent with liberty and the rights of mankind.

To have holden their lands allodially, or for every man to have been the sovereign lord and proprietor of the ground he occupied, would have constituted a government too nearly like a commonwealth. They were contented, therefore, to hold their lands of their king, as their sovereign lord; and to him they were willing to render homage, but to no mesne or subordinate lords; nor were they willing to submit to any of the baser services. In all this they were so strenuous, that they have even transmitted to their posterity a very general contempt and detestation of holdings by quitrents, as they have also a hereditary ardor for liberty and thirst for knowledge.

They were convinced, by their knowledge of human nature, derived from history and their own experience, that nothing could preserve their posterity from the encroachments of the two systems of tyranny, in opposition to which, as has been observed already, they erected their government in church and state, but knowledge diffused generally through the whole body of the people. Their civil and religious principles, therefore, conspired to prompt them to use every measure and take every precaution in their power to propagate and perpetuate knowledge. For this purpose they laid very early the foundations of colleges, and invested them with ample privileges and emoluments; and it is remarkable that they have left among their posterity so universal an affection and veneration for those seminaries, and for liberal education, that the meanest of the people contribute cheerfully to the support and maintenance of them every year, and that nothing is more generally popular than projections for the honor, reputation, and advantage of those seats of learning. But the wisdom and benevolence of our fathers rested not here. They made an early provision by law, that every town consisting of so many families, should be always furnished with a grammar school. They made it a crime for such a town to be destitute of a grammar schoolmaster for a few months, and subjected it to a heavy penalty. So that the education of all ranks of people was made the care and expense of the public, in a manner that I believe has been unknown to any other people ancient or modern.

The consequences of these establishments we see and feel every day. A native of America who cannot read and write is as rare an appearance as a Jacobite or a Roman Catholic, that is, as rare as a comet or an earthquake. It has been observed, that we are all of us lawyers, divines, politicians, and philosophers. And I have good authorities to say, that all candid foreigners who have passed through this country, and conversed freely with all sorts of people here, will allow, that they have never seen so much knowledge and civility among the common people in any part of the world. It is true, there has been among us a party for some years, consisting chiefly not of the descendants of the first settlers of this country, but of high churchmen and high statesmen imported since, who affect to censure this provision for the education of our youth as a needless expense, and an imposition upon the rich in favor of the poor, and as an institution productive of idleness and vain speculation among the people, whose time and attention, it is said, ought to be devoted to labor, and not to public affairs, or to examination into the conduct of their superiors. And certain officers of the crown, and certain other missionaries of ignorance, foppery, servility, and slavery, have been most inclined to countenance and increase the same party. Be it remembered, however, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood. And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees for the people; and if the cause, the interest and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed, and to constitute abler and better agents, attorneys, and trustees. And the preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks, is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country. It is even of more consequence to the rich themselves, and to their posterity. The only question is, whether it is a public emolument; and if it is, the rich ought undoubtedly to contribute, in the same proportion as to all other public burdens, — that is, in proportion to their wealth, which is secured by public expenses. But none of the means of information are more sacred, or have been cherished with more tenderness and care by the settlers of America, than the press. Care has been taken that the art of printing should be encouraged, and that it should be easy and cheap and safe for any person to communicate his thoughts to the public. And you, Messieurs printers,3 whatever the tyrants of the earth may say of your paper, have done important service to your country by your readiness and freedom in publishing the speculations of the curious. The stale, impudent insinuations of slander and sedition, with which the gormandizers of power have endeavored to discredit your paper, are so much the more to your honor; for the jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. And if the public interest, liberty, and happiness have been in danger from the ambition or avarice of any great man, whatever may be his politeness, address, learning, ingenuity, and, in other respects, integrity and humanity, you have done yourselves honor and your country service by publishing and pointing out that avarice and ambition. These vices are so much the more dangerous and pernicious for the virtues with which they may be accompanied in the same character, and with so much the more watchful jealousy to be guarded against.

4 Edes and Gill, printers of the Boston Gazette.

“Curse on such virtues, they’ve undone their country.”

Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with the utmost freedom, whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country; nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberty by any pretences of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice. Much less, I presume, will you be discouraged by any pretences that malignants on this side the water will represent your paper as factious and seditious, or that the great on the other side the water will take offence at them. This dread of representation has had for a long time, in this province, effects very similar to what the physicians call a hydropho, or dread of water. It has made us delirious; and we have rushed headlong into the water, till we are almost drowned, out of simple or phrensical fear of it. Believe me, the character of this country has suffered more in Britain by the pusillanimity with which we have borne many insults and indignities from the creatures of power at home and the creatures of those creatures here, than it ever did or ever will by the freedom and spirit that has been or will be discovered in writing or action. Believe me, my countrymen, they have imbibed an opinion on the other side the water, that we are an ignorant, a timid, and a stupid people; nay, their tools on this side have often the impudence to dispute your bravery. But I hope in God the time is near at hand when they will be fully convinced of your understanding, integrity and courage. But can any thing be more ridiculous, were it not too provoking to be laughed at, than to pretend that offence should be taken at home for writings here? Pray, let them look at home. Is not the human understanding exhausted there? Are not reason, imagination, wit, passion, senses, and all, tortured to find out satire and invective against the characters of the vile and futile fellows who sometimes get into place and power? The most exceptionable paper that ever I saw here is perfect prudence and modesty in comparison of multitudes of their applauded writings. Yet the high regard they have for the freedom of the press, indulges all. I must and will repeat it, your paper deserves the patronage of every friend to his country. And whether the defamers of it are arrayed in robes of scarlet or sable, whether they lurk and skulk in an insurance office, whether they assume the venerable character of a priest, the sly one of a scrivener, or the dirty, infamous, abandoned one of an informer, they are all the creatures and tools of the lust of domination.

The true source of our sufferings has been our timidity.

We have been afraid to think. We have felt a reluctance to examining into the grounds of our privileges, and the extent in which we have an indisputable right to demand them, against all the power and authority on earth. And many who have not scrupled to examine for themselves, have yet for certain prudent reasons been cautious and diffident of declaring the result of their inquiries.

The cause of this timidity is perhaps hereditary, and to be traced back in history as far as the cruel treatment the first settlers of this country received, before their embarkation for America, from the government at home. Everybody knows how dangerous it was to speak or write in favor of any thing, in those days, but the triumphant system of religion and politics. And our fathers were particularly the objects of the persecutions and proscriptions of the times. It is not unlikely, therefore, that although they were inflexibly steady in refusing their positive assent to any thing against their principles, they might have contracted habits of reserve, and a cautious diffidence of asserting their opinions publicly. These habits they probably brought with them to America, and have transmitted down to us. Or we may possibly account for this appearance by the great affection and veneration Americans have always entertained for the country from whence they sprang; or by the quiet temper for which they have been remarkable, no country having been less disposed to discontent than this; or by a sense they have that it is their duty to acquiesce under the administration of government, even when in many smaller matters grievous to them, and until the essentials of the great compact are destroyed or invaded. These peculiar causes might operate upon them; but without these, we all know that human nature itself, from indolence, modesty, humanity, or fear, has always too much reluctance to a manly assertion of its rights. Hence, perhaps, it has happened, that nine tenths of the species are groaning and gasping in misery and servitude.

But whatever the cause has been, the fact is certain, we have been excessively cautious of giving offence by complaining of grievances. And it is as certain, that American governors, and their friends, and all the crown officers, have availed themselves of this disposition in the people. They have prevailed on us to consent to many things which were grossly injurious to us, and to surrender many others, with voluntary tameness, to which we had the clearest right. Have we not been treated, formerly, with abominable insolence, by officers of the navy? I mean no insinuation against any gentleman now on this station, having heard no complaint of any one of them to his dishonor. Have not some generals from England treated us like servants, nay, more like slaves than like Britons? Have we not been under the most ignominious contribution, the most abject submission, the most supercilious insults, of some custom-house officers? Have we not been trifled with, brow-beaten, and trampled on, by former governors, in a manner which no king of England since James the Second has dared to indulge towards his subjects? Have we not raised up one family, in them placed an unlimited confidence, and been soothed and flattered and intimidated by their influence, into a great part of this infamous tameness and submission? “These are serious and alarming questions, and deserve a dispassionate consideration.”

This disposition has been the great wheel and the mainspring in the American machine of court politics. We have been told that “the word  rights  is an offensive expression;” “that the king, his ministry, and parliament, will not endure to hear Americans talk of their  rights ;” “that Britain is the mother and we the children, that a filial duty and submission is due from us to her,” and that “we ought to doubt our own judgment, and presume that she is right, even when she seems to us to shake the foundations of government;” that “Britain is immensely rich and great and powerful, has fleets and armies at her command which have been the dread and terror of the universe, and that she will force her own judgment into execution, right or wrong.” But let me entreat you, sir, to pause. Do you consider yourself as a missionary of loyalty or of rebellion? Are you not representing your king, his ministry, and parliament, as tyrants, — imperious, unrelenting tyrants, — by such reasoning as this? Is not this representing your most gracious sovereign as endeavoring to destroy the foundations of his own throne? Are you not representing every member of parliament as renouncing the transactions at Runing Mede, (the meadow, near Windsor, where Magna Charta was signed;) and as repealing in effect the bill of rights, when the Lords and Commons asserted and vindicated the rights of the people and their own rights, and insisted on the king’s assent to that assertion and vindication? Do you not represent them as forgetting that the prince of Orange was created King William, by the people, on purpose that their rights might be eternal and inviolable? Is there not something extremely fallacious in the common-place images of mother country and children colonies? Are we the children of Great Britain any more than the cities of London, Exeter, and Bath? Are we not brethren and fellow subjects with those in Britain, only under a somewhat different method of legislation, and a totally different method of taxation? But admitting we are children, have not children a right to complain when their parents are attempting to break their limbs, to administer poison, or to sell them to enemies for slaves? Let me entreat you to consider, will the mother be pleased when you represent her as deaf to the cries of her children, — when you compare her to the infamous miscreant who lately stood on the gallows for starving her child, — when you resemble her to Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare, (I cannot think of it without horror,) who

“Had given suck, and knew

How tender ‘t was to love the babe that milked her,”

but yet, who could

“Even while ‘t was smiling in her face,Have plucked her nipple from the boneless gums, And dashed the brains out.”

Let us banish for ever from our minds, my countrymen, all such unworthy ideas of the king, his ministry, and parliament. Let us not suppose that all are become luxurious, effeminate, and unreasonable, on the other side the water, as many designing persons would insinuate. Let us presume, what is in fact true, that the spirit of liberty is as ardent as ever among the body of the nation, though a few individuals may be corrupted. Let us take it for granted, that the same great spirit which once gave CÊsar so warm a reception, which denounced hostilities against John till Magna Charta was signed, which severed the head of Charles the First from his body, and drove James the Second from his kingdom, the same great spirit (may heaven preserve it till the earth shall be no more) which first seated the great grandfather of his present most gracious majesty on the throne of Britain, — is still alive and active and warm in England; and that the same spirit in America, instead of provoking the inhabitants of that country, will endear us to them for ever, and secure their good-will.

This spirit, however, without knowledge, would be little better than a brutal rage. Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. Let every order and degree among the people rouse their attention and animate their resolution. Let them all become attentive to the grounds and principles of government, ecclesiastical and civil. Let us study the law of nature; search into the spirit of the British constitution; read the histories of ancient ages; contemplate the great examples of Greece and Rome; set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests, in short, against the gates of earth and hell. Let us read and recollect and impress upon our souls the views and ends of our own more immediate forefathers, in exchanging their native country for a dreary, inhospitable wilderness. Let us examine into the nature of that power, and the cruelty of that oppression, which drove them from their homes. Recollect their amazing fortitude, their bitter sufferings, — the hunger, the nakedness, the cold, which they patiently endured, — the severe labors of clearing their grounds, building their houses, raising their provisions, amidst dangers from wild beasts and savage men, before they had time or money or materials for commerce. Recollect the civil and religious principles and hopes and expectations which constantly supported and carried them through all hardships with patience and resignation. Let us recollect it was liberty, the hope of liberty for themselves and us and ours, which conquered all discouragements, dangers, and trials. In such researches as these, let us all in our several departments cheerfully engage, — but especially the proper patrons and supporters of law, learning, and religion!

Let the pulpit resound with the doctrines and sentiments of religious liberty. Let us hear the danger of thraldom to our consciences from ignorance, extreme poverty, and dependence, in short, from civil and political slavery. Let us see delineated before us the true map of man. Let us hear the dignity of his nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God, — that consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust, as offensive in the sight of God as it is derogatory from our own honor or interest or happiness, — and that God Almighty has promulgated from heaven, liberty, peace, and good-will to man!

Let the bar proclaim, “the laws, the rights, the generous plan of power” delivered down from remote antiquity, — inform the world of the mighty struggles and numberless sacrifices made by our ancestors in defence of freedom. Let it be known, that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments, but original rights, conditions of original contracts, coequal with prerogative, and coeval with government; that many of our rights are inherent and essential, agreed on as maxims, and established as preliminaries, even before a parliament existed. Let them search for the foundations of British laws and government in the frame of human nature, in the constitution of the intellectual and moral world. There let us see that truth, liberty, justice, and benevolence, are its everlasting basis; and if these could be removed, the superstructure is overthrown of course.

Let the colleges join their harmony in the same delightful concert. Let every declamation turn upon the beauty of liberty and virtue, and the deformity, turpitude, and malignity, of slavery and vice. Let the public disputations become researches into the grounds and nature and ends of government, and the means of preserving the good and demolishing the evil. Let the dialogues, and all the exercises, become the instruments of impressing on the tender mind, and of spreading and distributing far and wide, the ideas of right and the sensations of freedom.

In a word, let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing. The encroachments upon liberty in the reigns of the first James and the first Charles, by turning the general attention of learned men to government, are said to have produced the greatest number of consummate statesmen which has ever been seen in any age or nation. The Brookes, Hampdens, Vanes, Seldens, Miltons, Nedhams, Harringtons, Nevilles, Sidneys, Lockes, are all said to have owed their eminence in political knowledge to the tyrannies of those reigns. The prospect now before us in America, ought in the same manner to engage the attention of every man of learning, to matters of power and of right, that we may be neither led nor driven blindfolded to irretrievable destruction. Nothing less than this seems to have been meditated for us, by somebody or other in Great Britain. There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America. This, however, must be done by degrees. The first step that is intended, seems to be an entire subversion of the whole system of our fathers, by the introduction of the canon and feudal law into America. The canon and feudal systems, though greatly mutilated in England, are not yet destroyed. Like the temples and palaces in which the great contrivers of them once worshipped and inhabited, they exist in ruins; and much of the domineering spirit of them still remains. The designs and labors of a certain society, to introduce the former of them into America, have been well exposed to the public by a writer of great abilities; and the further attempts to the same purpose, that may be made by that society, or by the ministry or parliament, I leave to the conjectures of the thoughtful. But it seems very manifest from the Stamp Act itself, that a design is formed to strip us in a great measure of the means of knowledge, by loading the press, the colleges, and even an almanack and a newspaper, with restraints and duties; and to introduce the inequalities and dependencies of the feudal system, by taking from the poorer sort of people all their little subsistence, and conferring it on a set of stamp officers, distributors, and their deputies. But I must proceed no further at present. The sequel, whenever I shall find health and leisure to pursue it, will be a “disquisition of the policy of the stamp act.” In the mean time, however, let me add, — These are not the vapors of a melancholy mind, nor the effusions of envy, disappointed ambition, nor of a spirit of opposition to government, but the emanations of a heart that burns for its country’s welfare. No one of any feeling, born and educated in this once happy country, can consider the numerous distresses, the gross indignities, the barbarous ignorance, the haughty usurpations, that we have reason to fear are meditating for ourselves, our children, our neighbors, in short, for all our countrymen and all their posterity, without the utmost agonies of heart and many tears.

Political Science 601: Political Theory of the American Revolution Copyright © 2017 by John Zumbrunnen. All Rights Reserved.

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On Statesmanship: The Case of John Adams

May 27, 2012

This article is the first of two parts and is based on a talk delivered to a Colloquium on Statesmanship and the Constitution at the Rochester Institute of Technology, April 13–14, 2012.

W hat kind of person is worthy of being called a “statesman”? What type of character, what accomplishments, what life makes someone a defender of the public good within the sphere of politics and governance? I would like to consider this question in regard to a man whose life and reputation I think most helpful in focusing our attention on what is truly important. John Adams unquestionably was an important public man often derided as unworthy of being termed “great” on account of perceived mistakes, flaws, and even bad acts, but who is, in my view, well worthy of being held up as a model of great statesmanship.

Without John Adams, it is entirely possible that there would be no United States of America. More than any other single delegate at the Continental Congress, he pushed both behind the scenes and on the floor for the colonies to declare their independence from Great Britain. It was Adams who offered the resolution that was, in fact, Americans’ actual declaration of independence, and played a crucial role in its passage, as well to the approval of the document that helped explain that act.

Adams also was the one, before independence, who nominated George Washington, then himself just another delegate, to be commander in chief of the Continental Army. Adams secured Dutch funding for the American cause, played an important role in cementing the American alliance with France that brought massive financial aid and military assistance crucial to victory in the revolution, and negotiated the peace treaty with the British that secured our independence on favorable terms.

There is more, of course. Adams was the principal drafter of the Massachusetts state constitution. One may think this last achievement is not a “great” one because it is not national in scope. But the explicit separation of powers, the explication of fundamental rights and the purpose of government, and the elegance of tone that characterize that document made it the most important single model for the later Constitution of the United States. The Virginia Plan? The New Jersey plan? Other plans for our founding document were just general sketches that disappeared into the bargaining. It was Adams’ model constitution—the oldest constitution still in effect to this day—that provided concrete language and principles for the drafters of our United States Constitution.

In case you have forgotten, Adams also was the second President of the United States. While holding that office he kept the infant nation out of a devastating world war, maintained her honor, built a navy that would serve her well for decades, and stemmed a tide of ideological radicalism. At the end of that time, it also was Adams who ceded power to his rival after only our second seriously contested election (he had won the first) and went into retirement—something still uncommon in many so-called democracies today.

Yet we rarely hear John Adams referred to as a great statesman. Why is that?

A dams has many critics, to be sure. And their charges seem to fall into three categories: First, he was cranky. Second, he was a pompous aristocrat who sought to forestall the burgeoning democratic age. And third, he was a loser. That is, he was a bad politician who mismanaged his Presidential administration, devalued freedom of the press, and made everyone so angry that he suffered a humiliating defeat in his bid for re-election.

George Washington yelled a fair amount. Dwight Eisenhower yelled a lot. Abraham Lincoln suffered classic symptoms of depression, falling into a morose state for long stretches as a time. But such personality issues do not seem to have hurt any of these men’s reputations. I would not say that ill temper (or moroseness) is a good thing. Nonetheless, I have trouble seeing crankiness or depression as disqualifications from greatness, especially in the public service, an area in which one would think the relevant criteria have more to do with service (or harm) done to the public good than personal niceness or cheerfulness. One can be personally unpleasant andpublicly great. The lives and characters of generals, political leaders, and even saints attest to this fact. One should not discount the importance of public men providing good examples of personal conduct, but crankiness hardly seems the sum total of personal conduct.

I bring up this subject, then, not merely to argue that Adams was “nicer” than he is known to be; in one sense, who cares? My more important purpose is to point out what Adams actually was, namely a principled republican. That is, he was an effective supporter of public virtue for the public good.

Despite his personality issues (principally a certain outspokenness and tendency to be blunt) Adams was rather a decent fellow. He paid his debts, he loved his family and, despite his occasional intemperate words, particularly in letters to political adversaries, he generally maintained a decorum and civility that were exemplary, and no doubt played a role in his many diplomatic successes. On a more personal level, Adams knew something of honesty; unlike Thomas Jefferson, the much loved democrat so often pointed to as his better, Adams never secretly funded newspapers attacking political opponents, while publicly serving with them and denying the fact of his involvement.

A h, we are told, but Adams was a snob, who looked down on poor people and wanted to stave off the rise of democracy. Here it is pointed that that Adams even said it would be a good thing to have sumptuary laws. Well, what is a sumptuary law? A law regulating people’s consumption—what kinds of clothing and what kinds of luxury goods should be available to them.

Sumptuary laws give power to the state over commerce and social forms that seem odd today, as well as a very bad idea given the already intrusive nature of the federal government. Moreover, Adams expressed this view in what really was little more than a throw-away line. But it is indicative of his “crankiness,” of what some people mistakenly view as his aristocratic leanings, and, more accurately, of his Calvinist republicanism. Because, you see, the Puritans in New England had had sumptuary laws (at a more local level) for well over a century, and a number of people, especially proponents of republican government, missed them.

At root, Adams wanted to foster people’s devotion to virtue, to acting as they should, and to serving the public good. Only a virtuous people, he noted more than once, could be free. Only if the people were capable of governing themselves in their private lives—for example eschewing fripperies in favor of industry and humility—could they govern themselves as a people, through republican forms of representative government. Did this make him an aristocrat? Hardly. These are classic yeoman, middle-class values at the heart of America’s republican tradition.

This is just one of the many ironies of American history, in which we are told that the great democrat is Jefferson, the fabulously wealthy (but spendthrift) slaveowner, and the aristocrat is the yeoman Adams who farmed his own land. Oh, and who never owned a slave, refused to employ the slaves of others, and consistently condemned the institution of slavery. What we have, in Adams, is a middle-class farmer and lawyer who spent the bulk of his life foregoing the making of money because he felt called to public service. Not such a bad fellow, even if he did speak his mind more than some would have liked. One might even say he was a man with the character of a republican statesman.  

Read Part Two here.

Bruce P. Frohnen is Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University’s College of Law and a Senior Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

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The art of the libretto: john adams.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

John Adams. Photograph by Deborah O’Grady.

This week, a new production of the composer John Adams’s oratorio   El Niño   opened at the Metropolitan Opera, where it will run until May 17. El Niño i s Adams’ rewriting of the Nativity story, and his libretto—cowritten with stage director Peter Sellars, in one their many collaborations—draws on source texts as wide-ranging the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and Mexican poetry written in the sixties. The text of the libretto reminded me of an assemblage poem as much as an opera. I spoke to Adams, who has composed some of the most notable contemporary operas, among them Nixon in China , for our Art of The Libretto series. We talked over Zoom recently about the joys and pains of collaboration, learning and then setting Spanish text to music, his life as a Californian, and his attempt to write his own Messiah.

INTERVIEWER

How did El Niño begin for you?

I’d been asked by the Châtelet in Paris to create something to celebrate for the millennium. So I began to think about what the millennium was and what was special about the year 2000. It also reminded me that ever since I was a kid, I had always loved Handel’s Messiah , which speaks to that time of year, because it’s also about birth, optimism, and hope. I thought that the millennium as a celebration should have something to do with these emotions. If you want to put it in another way, I wanted to write my own Messiah .

I’m curious about your collaboration with Peter Sellars on the libretto for El Niño . I know you collaborated on operas and other stage works over a period of thirty years, but in this instance, what did that exchange look like?

In this case, we had the framework of the Nativity story, so we didn’t have to worry a great deal about devising a new narrative structure. But what Peter did, which gave the piece its unique flavor, was to suggest a selection of texts, many of which came from the Hispanic poetic tradition. I confess that I was largely untutored in most of that poetry, so I was very grateful to him for turning things in that direction. Over a period of several months, we met several times with piles and piles of books and sketched out what I call a flowchart. Some of the texts I contributed, too. The anonymous early English poem that opens the score—I had seen that, believe it or not, in the London Underground. It’s just wonderful to think that the London Underground would have poetry alongside all the ads for patent medicine and West End shows. So that lovely poem, “I Sing of a Maiden,” stayed in my mind’s eye and beautifully set the tone for opening the piece. I also wanted to include the Martin Luther text that describes the misery of Mary and Joseph trying to find a place to stay in Bethlehem. It was Peter’s idea to draw from the Apocrypha, an imaginative touch that imparts a certain feeling of innocence, especially to the end, because these stories are really like children’s stories. And because it’s more an oratorio than an opera I felt a kind of dramatic liberty to move back and forth through time, having the prophet Isaiah from the Old Testament, and then something as almost shockingly contemporary as the Rosario Castellanos poem “Memorial de Tlatelolco,” which serves here as the Massacre of the Innocents in our narrative.

How did you gravitate toward the poetry of Rosario Castellanos, and how do those poems work within the larger text?

There are two big Castellanos poems that function as the major pivots in parts one and two. The first is “La anunciación,” a portion of a much longer poem by Castellanos, which is fundamentally telling a creation scenario. She evokes a scenario before recorded time in a way that to me suggests something from Einstein’s theory on space and time. She’s also apostrophizing her son, and the poem has extraordinary imagery in it—of the pregnancy and the pain and ecstasy of giving birth. I responded to that poem so strongly because not long before I wrote this our two children were born, and I was there, witnessing the moment of birth. Then, in part two, the Castellanos poem “Memorial de Tlatelolco” is one of bitter irony that addresses the absolute polar end of the spectrum of human violence and the murder of young people.

How did you think about the mixture of languages in this libretto, and moving back and forth between English and Spanish?

I did not speak Spanish when I agreed to do this, but I began learning Spanish—in a hurry! Now when I go back to El Niño , I see a couple of misjudgments in my setting of some words, where I put a stress on the wrong syllable, but I found setting music to Spanish to be a wonderful experience. So in several other later pieces, like The Gospel According to the Other Mary and my more recent Gold Rush opera, Girls of the Golden West , I set quite a few texts in Spanish. I think that’s partly a response to my life as a Californian. We’re almost a bilingual state, and I was ashamed of myself that I’d lived here for so long without learning the language. And I respond very strongly to the sound of the words, to the shape of a phrase, when I’m composing.

In general, how does it feel to collaborate when you’re setting text to music?

I once said that I thought that the two most painful things two human beings can do together are a double-ax murder or an artistic collaboration. It’s difficult, particularly with a librettist. My first operas had brilliant libretti by Alice Goodman. I think that the libretti in Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer are among the greatest libretti of all operas, but the process was very difficult. It was painful because each of us—composer and librettist—brings to the table one’s very best, but in the end a work of musical theater has to obey both the dramatic form dictated by the music. Once I start composing, I have to mostly take over the steering wheel, because the success of a dramatic work really depends on the musical flow. Unfortunately, it’s the composer who often ends up having to make the formal decisions about what has to be cut. It’s possible to have a very passive librettist who says, “Sure, go ahead.” But usually—and certainly with Alice—it was very difficult for her to see what she felt was some of her best work end up on the cutting-room floor, so to speak.

What was the revision process like in the case of El Niño ?

I don’t really recall having any basic struggle with El Niño , nor do I recall having to make any substantial revisions to it—unlike many of my other operas, where after the first or second productions, I’ve had to go back and make cuts or revisions. During the pandemic, I read several biographies of Verdi, and one of the things that struck me was how much of his adult life he spent revising his operas. Given how many operas he wrote, that’s kind of astonishing, but that’s the nature of opera. It has all the problems that a play would have, and then it has all the problems that a piece of music would have, so your chances of getting something that’s absolutely perfect are very slender. I even think of The Marriage of Figaro, which of course is one of the great operas, but for me, it’s too long. Even the greatest composers sometimes can make mistakes on a dramatic level.

Something noticeable about El Niño is how much joy there is in the libretto, which strikes me as rare in opera. How did you think about joy when you were composing this opera, and how do you think about it in your work in general?

As I mentioned, I had the image of the birth of our own children in mind, and I had the same feeling that you do, that so much of not just opera but of so much art in the Western world is very grim and pessimistic now. So many composers are addressing matters that they feel very deeply about, which are also all the dour things that we read about on the New York Times editorial page and the dark clouds we live under. All this work is important, but I wanted to look at these texts and to contemplate birth and rebirth, and to think about how music can truly lift the spirit. I don’t have many pieces that are really emotionally down. The Death of Klinghoffer of course and its general affect is tragic, but not pessimistic. But I guess you could say I’m fundamentally some form of Emersonian American optimist in that I’m really trying to use music to lift the spirit. El Niño for sure is the clearest example of that.

The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of El Niño is directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz and stars Julia Bullock, J’Nai Bridges, and Davóne Tines. Tickets and schedule can be found here .

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

John Adams' Nativity oratorio 'El Nino' gets colorful staging at the Met

NEW YORK — The children crumple and fall to the stage, victims of King Herod’s assassins. Then the Virgin Mary, in a voice brimming with anguish and outrage, memorializes the student protesters who were massacred by Mexican armed forces in 1968.

This is “El Nino,” a retelling of the birth and early life of Jesus through a mix of biblical verses and modern Latin American poetry, medieval texts and apocrypha.

Set to music by John Adams from a libretto compiled by him and Peter Sellars, it is having its Metropolitan Opera premiere nearly a quarter-century after it was first performed in Paris in 2000.

“It contains some of John’s greatest music,” Met general manager Peter Gelb said. “But I had always thought of it as an oratorio,” along the lines of Handel’s “Messiah.” That changed, he said, when he met with Lileana Blain-Cruz, resident director of Lincoln Center Theater, who told him ”her dream was to stage it as a fully realized production.”

Now that dream is taking shape on the Met stage in a vibrant, multi-colored production that uses puppets, projections, dancers, an onstage chorus and even a flying boat to tell the Nativity story through the eyes of Mary.

“This piece has kind of been haunting my consciousness for awhile,” Blain-Cruz said in an interview before a rehearsal for the April 23 opening. “The music is so crazy and complicated, but I find it so life-affirming at the same time. There’s an optimism in it.

“You have darkness happening,” she said, “and then you have the Christmas star and these high soprano notes and you go, ‘Oh it’s going to be OK, the world is so much bigger than us.’ I love that invigoration of life. That feeling of an antidote to loneliness and suffering.”

Taking her cue from Mary and Joseph’s journeying to Jerusalem for Jesus’s birth and then fleeing into Egypt to escape Herod, Blain-Cruz has framed her production as a story of people’s migration from dangerous lands in search of a better life.

Doubling the role of Mary, she has cast the soprano (performed at the Met by Julia Bullock) as “Mary-of-the-land,” and the mezzo (J’Nai Bridges) as “Mary-of-the-sea.”

The set for the first act evokes what Blain-Cruz calls “a greenish-blue floral jungle landscape that might be home to African or Caribbean people,” while the second is dominated by “orangish fiery colors influenced by a more desert vision, like the borderlands of Texas.”

“So we move from verdant, life-giving spaces to a less hospitable land,” she said. “That reflects Herod’s obliviousness to the richness of nature. For me, he is one of these people who violate not only other people but the earth itself.”

Despite the fanciful touches, the set is simpler than many new Met productions. “There’s a two-dimensionality to the visual landscape,” Blain-Cruz said. “It sort of moves like an old panel book.”

For many audiences, the most searing moment will come after the slaying of the children when Bullock sings Adams’s setting of “Memorial de Tlatelolco” by Rosario Castellanos.

“This is the one place in the piece where John and Peter chose to take us out of the centuries-old story and within a few gunshots of music catapult us into the 20th century,” Bullock said. “It’s like, how many times do we need to keep telling these stories of genocide and of sacrifices of precious human lives in order for all of us to say we’re not going to continue on in this cycle of violence against each other.”

Blain-Cruz and Bullock are both making their Met debuts with this production as are bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and conductor Marin Alsop .

Alsop, who has long conducted Adams’ orchestral works, finds “El Nino” distinct from many of his other compositions.

“There’s usually this very driving pulse,” throughout his pieces, but here, she said, those moments of insistent “groove” alternate with “contemplative and pensive” sections.

“And that’s why I’m so impressed with the cast and choir,” she said, “that they’re able to float these beautiful lines over this kind of constantly changing sea underneath them.”

That rapid shifting makes the conductor’s work more challenging as well.

“There’s so much going on,” she said, “There’s rarely a whole page that’s in the same meter. I have to be so totally engaged all the time, because around every corner is something tricky.”

The orchestration calls for many instruments not typically heard in opera, including two guitars, high cowbells, chimes, maracas, gongs known as temple bowls and a synthesizer that plays back a wide variety of recorded sound. As usual in Adams’ operas, he requires electronic amplification for the instruments and singers to be properly balanced and audible.

This will be the fourth Adams work performed by the Met, following “Doctor Atomic,” “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer.” Next season the company will stage his recent “Antony and Cleopatra” (also starring Bullock), extending his record for having the most operas by a currently living composer seen here.

This story was first published April 18, 2024, and was updated on April 19, 2024, to correct the name of bass-baritone Davóne Tines.

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John Adams’ Nativity oratorio ‘El Nino’ gets colorful staging at the Met

Julia Bullock, center, and castmates rehearse for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Performers rehearse for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Julia Bullock rehearses for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

J’Nai Bridges, top, Julia Bullock, bottom right, Davóne Tines and castmates rehearse for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

J’Nai Bridges, right, and castmates rehearse for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Conductor Marin Alsop rehearses for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

J’Nai Bridges, center, and castmates rehearse for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Davóne Tines and Julia Bullock rehearse for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Conductor Marin Alsop poses for a portrait at the Metropolitan Opera on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Julia Bullock, top, and J’Nai Bridges rehearse for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

J’Nai Bridges rehearses for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Julia Bullock, left, and Davóne Tines rehearse for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Davóne Tines, center, and castmates rehearse for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “El Nino,” on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in New York. “El Nino” opens April 23. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

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NEW YORK (AP) — The children crumple and fall to the stage, victims of King Herod’s assassins. Then the Virgin Mary, in a voice brimming with anguish and outrage, memorializes the student protesters who were massacred by Mexican armed forces in 1968.

This is “El Nino,” a retelling of the birth and early life of Jesus through a mix of biblical verses and modern Latin American poetry, medieval texts and apocrypha.

Set to music by John Adams from a libretto compiled by him and Peter Sellars, it is having its Metropolitan Opera premiere nearly a quarter-century after it was first performed in Paris in 2000.

“It contains some of John’s greatest music,” Met general manager Peter Gelb said. “But I had always thought of it as an oratorio,” along the lines of Handel’s “Messiah.” That changed, he said, when he met with Lileana Blain-Cruz, resident director of Lincoln Center Theater, who told him ”her dream was to stage it as a fully realized production.”

Now that dream is taking shape on the Met stage in a vibrant, multi-colored production that uses puppets, projections, dancers, an onstage chorus and even a flying boat to tell the Nativity story through the eyes of Mary.

“This piece has kind of been haunting my consciousness for awhile,” Blain-Cruz said in an interview before a rehearsal for the April 23 opening. “The music is so crazy and complicated, but I find it so life-affirming at the same time. There’s an optimism in it.

“You have darkness happening,” she said, “and then you have the Christmas star and these high soprano notes and you go, ‘Oh it’s going to be OK, the world is so much bigger than us.’ I love that invigoration of life. That feeling of an antidote to loneliness and suffering.”

Taking her cue from Mary and Joseph’s journeying to Jerusalem for Jesus’s birth and then fleeing into Egypt to escape Herod, Blain-Cruz has framed her production as a story of people’s migration from dangerous lands in search of a better life.

Doubling the role of Mary, she has cast the soprano (performed at the Met by Julia Bullock) as “Mary-of-the-land,” and the mezzo (J’Nai Bridges) as “Mary-of-the-sea.”

The set for the first act evokes what Blain-Cruz calls “a greenish-blue floral jungle landscape that might be home to African or Caribbean people,” while the second is dominated by “orangish fiery colors influenced by a more desert vision, like the borderlands of Texas.”

“So we move from verdant, life-giving spaces to a less hospitable land,” she said. “That reflects Herod’s obliviousness to the richness of nature. For me, he is one of these people who violate not only other people but the earth itself.”

Despite the fanciful touches, the set is simpler than many new Met productions. “There’s a two-dimensionality to the visual landscape,” Blain-Cruz said. “It sort of moves like an old panel book.”

For many audiences, the most searing moment will come after the slaying of the children when Bullock sings Adams’s setting of “Memorial de Tlatelolco” by Rosario Castellanos.

“This is the one place in the piece where John and Peter chose to take us out of the centuries-old story and within a few gunshots of music catapult us into the 20th century,” Bullock said. “It’s like, how many times do we need to keep telling these stories of genocide and of sacrifices of precious human lives in order for all of us to say we’re not going to continue on in this cycle of violence against each other.”

Blain-Cruz and Bullock are both making their Met debuts with this production as are bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and conductor Marin Alsop .

Alsop, who has long conducted Adams’ orchestral works, finds “El Nino” distinct from many of his other compositions.

“There’s usually this very driving pulse,” throughout his pieces, but here, she said, those moments of insistent “groove” alternate with “contemplative and pensive” sections.

“And that’s why I’m so impressed with the cast and choir,” she said, “that they’re able to float these beautiful lines over this kind of constantly changing sea underneath them.”

That rapid shifting makes the conductor’s work more challenging as well.

“There’s so much going on,” she said, “There’s rarely a whole page that’s in the same meter. I have to be so totally engaged all the time, because around every corner is something tricky.”

The orchestration calls for many instruments not typically heard in opera, including two guitars, high cowbells, chimes, maracas, gongs known as temple bowls and a synthesizer that plays back a wide variety of recorded sound. As usual in Adams’ operas, he requires electronic amplification for the instruments and singers to be properly balanced and audible.

This will be the fourth Adams work performed by the Met, following “Doctor Atomic,” “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer.” Next season the company will stage his recent “Antony and Cleopatra” (also starring Bullock), extending his record for having the most operas by a currently living composer seen here.

This story was first published April 18, 2024, and was updated on April 19, 2024, to correct the name of bass-baritone Davóne Tines.

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John Adams: Girls of the Golden West review — can this opera take off?

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

If Benjamin Britten sneezed, the joke used to go, his record company Decca would be ready with the microphone. A similarly close relationship exists between John Adams and Nonesuch, the American composer’s exclusive home since the label issued his orchestral whopper Harmonielehre in 1985. “I want to record every piece you write from now on,” Robert Hurwitz, then Nonesuch’s new president, told him. How could Adams say no? The opera Girls of the Golden West — far from a sneeze at 126 minutes — is the latest result, though it follows six years after the work premiered in 2017.

Critics initially complained that this investigation of California’s gold rush, spotlighting the experiences of three historically documented women, was slow to catch fire and too long,

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Adams Defends His Pick for Top Lawyer Despite City Council Opposition

Mayor Eric Adams praised Randy Mastro’s “impressive” career as he moves to hire him as New York City’s top lawyer. A majority of the Council is believed to oppose his nomination.

By Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Jeffery C. Mays

Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday said he intended to press forward with his expected nomination of Randy Mastro as New York City’s top lawyer despite mounting opposition from the City Council.

Mr. Adams and his top aides defended Mr. Mastro, a former aide to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani who is known for his aggressive tactics representing numerous high-profile interests, arguing that he had been called the “conscience” of the Giuliani administration.

The mayor said it was unfair to attack Mr. Mastro for his clients, which include the former New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, in the investigation of George Washington Bridge lane closings ; the State of New Jersey in an ongoing lawsuit against the federal government over congestion pricing; and the energy company Chevron over pollution in the Ecuadorean rain forest .

The expected nomination of Mr. Mastro as New York’s corporation counsel — the lawyer who represents the city, its agencies and the mayor in civil litigation — comes at a time when the mayor and his top aides are facing a tangle of investigations and lawsuits ahead of his re-election campaign next year.

But Mr. Mastro, a former federal prosecutor, must be confirmed by a majority of the 51-member City Council. And earlier in the day, the Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, which has 34 members, released a statement noting its opposition to his appointment.

“We deserve better than someone who has fought for the interests of top-earners, abusive corporations, and vindictive politicians,” the group said in the statement, adding that the caucus was “firm in its opposition” and urging the Adams administration to reconsider.

In recent days, Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker, spoke with the mayor and told him that Mr. Mastro does not have enough votes to be confirmed. She asked the mayor to work with the Council to find someone who has more support, according to a person who was familiar with the matter and who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive personnel matter.

Mr. Mastro’s nomination seems headed for a contentious showdown at the City Council, just months after the Council fought the mayor in January over two criminal justice bills . The Council prevailed, overriding the mayor’s veto of the bills — the first override of a Democratic mayor since 1991.

Left-leaning Council members have publicly criticized Mr. Mastro and his ties to Mr. Giuliani after The New York Times reported last week that Mr. Adams was moving to hire Mr. Mastro . But more moderate members have also privately shared their concerns with one another.

Mr. Mastro has met with City Hall officials about the corporation counsel job and notified his law firm, King & Spalding, about his likely departure for the position, according to two people who were familiar with the matter.

Mr. Adams credited Mr. Mastro with “a pretty impressive list of things that he has done,” a sentiment shared by other city officials, including Lisa Zornberg, the mayor’s chief counsel.

Ms. Zornberg compared Mr. Mastro to John Adams, the founding father who defended British officers accused of murder after the Boston Massacre, and said that Mr. Mastro had fought for “racial justice issues,” noting his representation of demonstrators who participated in Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020 outside the White House.

If the City Council kills Mr. Mastro’s nomination, it could be a major political loss mirroring Gov. Kathy Hochul’s humiliating defeat last year over her nomination of Hector D. LaSalle to lead the state’s highest court.

The opposition to Mr. Mastro’s appointment rose immediately. As the Council speaker’s office began to reach out to gauge how some members felt about the potential appointment, several contacted Ms. Adams or her aides to voice their opposition.

A majority of the Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus supported releasing the statement opposing Mr. Mastro.

“Given his professional track record representing dubious clients, which has included bringing numerous lawsuits against the City of New York, Mastro is unfit to serve as the city’s chief lawyer,” their statement said.

Sandy Nurse, a councilwoman from Brooklyn who is one of the leaders of the Council’s Progressive Caucus, said she was concerned about Mr. Mastro’s role in Ecuador’s class-action suit against Chevron.

Mr. Mastro lacks “ethical standards and good judgment” about right and wrong, Ms. Nurse said.

The city’s left-leaning public advocate, Jumaane Williams, praised the current corporation counsel, Sylvia O. Hinds-Radix, for representing the city’s vast interests, and questioned if Mr. Mastro would do the same.

“She rightly viewed herself as New York City’s attorney,” Mr. Williams said. “Randy Mastro will most certainly be the mayor’s attorney. ”

Ingrid Lewis-Martin, one of the mayor’s top aides, expressed confidence in a recent television interview that the Council would confirm Mr. Mastro, and cited his accomplishments, including his leadership of the watchdog group Citizens Union.

Ms. Lewis-Martin also called Ms. Adams, the Council speaker, “a really wise woman.”

“I believe that once she reads his résumé, and once she meets him, she will be as impressed with him as the mayor and our team members are,” she said.

Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall Bureau Chief for The Times, covering Mayor Eric Adams and his administration. More about Emma G. Fitzsimmons

Jeffery C. Mays is a Times reporter covering politics with a focus on New York City Hall. More about Jeffery C. Mays

Explore Our Coverage of the Adams Administration

Defending Randy Mastro: Mayor Eric Adams said he intended to press forward  with his expected nomination of Mastro as New York City’s top lawyer despite mounting opposition from the City Council.

Police Oversight Board: Arva Rice,   the interim chairwoman of an independent police oversight panel, who had fiercely criticized the Police Department , will step down at the request of Mayor Eric Adams, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Catch-Basin Trucks: A report by the New York City comptroller’s office found “big gaps” in how the administration of Adams handles emergency preparations , including infrastructure challenges from extreme weather.

A Second Harassment Lawsuit: One of Mayor Eric Adams’s closest confidants was sued for the second time in a month  over accusations that he harassed and retaliated against a New York Police Department sergeant he oversaw.

A New Top Lawyer: With Mayor Eric Adams and top aides facing a tangle of investigations and lawsuits, he is quietly maneuvering to replace New York City’s top lawyer with a veteran litigator known for his aggressive tactics .

Contacting the Mayor’s Office: Adams is now requiring any elected official, including members of Congress , to submit a lengthy online request to speak to an administration official.