Adams Papers
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Thomas Boylston Adams to Abigail Adams, 10 March 1803

Thomas Boylston Adams to Abigail Adams

Philadelphia 10th: March 1803.

Dear Mother.

I have received your favors of the 18th: ult: and 2d: instant, the latter enclosing a valuable communication from my father; for which please to express my thanks.1 I have taken note of those “thoughts on the times,” and will make use of them. I hope Mr: Ames, will continue to expand his thoughts on those topics.2 The Port Folio begins to get into some favor all over the Country, and the coldness which prevailed for a considerable time towards it, in consequence of what was conceived, even by its best friends to be rashness & intemperance, which no party in this Country, dared to countenance, is now gradually wearing away. The politics of the paper, are not changed, but ameliorated; the public judgment & feeling is not now insulted by arrogant contrasts & odious comparisons. The vices and the wildness of democratic councils, are exposed with boldness unmixed with rancour. The main design of the paper is literature, not politics, but there is such an abundance of political fervor throughout the Country; such an avidity to read skilfull strictures upon men & things, that the political department must not be neglected.

I received some-time since, a letter from Mr: van der Kemp, my father’s old acquaintance, accompanied by a voluminous manuscript, purporting to be an history of the Achæan Republick—dedicated to “the genius of France,” to wit the Emperor of the Gauls. The letter expressed a wish that I would undertake to revise the manuscript, which is written in English, such as a Dutchman might be supposed to write. Had it been written in the author’s mother-tongue, the task of translating it into English would have been much easier to me, though I would not have undertaken even that labour for an hundred pounds—poor as I am; so that I shall, after having kept the sheets, a decent length of time, very civilly transmit them to the proprietor.3

I enclose you a small paper, printed at Georgetown (Ptmk) which contains the first part of JQA—s Oration, extracted from the Charlestown Courier, a paper of promise lately established at the Capital of So Carolina. A favorable review of it has appeared at New York and will be republished here.4

I hope the inflamation in your eye, is gone ere this. Present me kindly to my father & the rest of the family, and believe me ever your’s

T B Adams.

RC (Adams Papers); internal address: “Mrs: A Adams.”

1AA’s 18 Feb. letter to TBA is partially extant in two fragments comprising the dateline, AA’s signature, and three half-sentences pertaining to AHA: “to give the Lady reason to think [. . . .] altho I did not think consider myself [. . . .] not having been consulted. Yet I” (Adams Papers, Adams Office Manuscripts). In her letter of 2 March (MB: Ch.M.1.7 [64]), AA informed TBA that she was troubled by an inflammation of the eyes and that she was sending the first extracts of JA’s translation of Antoine Marie Héron de Villefosse, Essais sur I’histoire de la Révolution française, par une société d’auteurs latins, Paris, 1799, which denounced the French Revolution as “a delirium of terror.” The translation was printed anonymously in the Port Folio, 3:90 (19 March), 114–115 (9 April), 121–122 (16 April), 129–130 (23 April), 138–139 (30 April), 145–147 (7 May), but the enclosure has not been found (François Adriaan Van der Kemp to JA, 15 Dec. 1802, Adams Papers; Kerber and Morris, “The Adams Family and the Port Folio,” description begins Linda K. Kerber and Walter John Morris, “Politics and Literature: The Adams Family and the Port Folio,” WMQ, 3d ser., 23:450–476 [July 1966]. description ends p. 476).

2AA in her letter of 2 March 1803 recommended that TBA read a two-part series of “Thoughts on the Times” in the New-England Palladium, 25 Feb., 1 March. The unsigned articles, which AA attributed to Fisher Ames, warned that the “vilest excesses” of the French Revolution could occur in the United States if a “mob” comprised of a “one hundredth part of our population” was not reined in.

3Letter and enclosure not found. Dutch anti-Orangist Patriot François Adriaan Van der Kemp (1752–1829), who immigrated to the United States in 1788 and settled in Oneida County, N.Y., wrote to JA on 24 March 1802 (Adams Papers), asking him to critique his “A Sketch of the Achaian Republic,” in which Van der Kemp considered how the Netherlands and the United States could avoid the factionalism that splintered the classical Achaean League. JA responded on 24 July, calling the work “a valuable Addition to American Litterature,” and he wrote again on 3 Jan. 1803 (both PHi:John Adams’ Papers) to suggest that Van der Kemp send the manuscript to TBA, who might edit it and give it to Joseph Dennie Jr. for publication in the Port Folio. Van der Kemp did so, but TBA returned it with the message that Dennie declined to publish it. When Van der Kemp informed JA of TBA’s message in a letter of 15 July (Adams Papers), he also reported that he sent the manuscript to Leyden printer Jean Luzac. Van der Kemp continued to circulate copies of the work, inquiring of JA as late as 12 Sept. 1824 (Adams Papers) whether JQA had read a copy he had sent. The work was never published, and a manuscript copy is at NUtHi:Van der Kemp Papers.

The dedication quoted by TBA was a phrase that Napoleon reportedly used in 1800 to describe himself, though the extant version of Van der Kemp’s work is dedicated to George Washington instead (vol. 4:267; JA, D&A description begins Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield and others, Cambridge, 1961; 4 vols. description ends , 2:456; Harry F. Jackson, Scholar in the Wilderness: Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, Syracuse, N.Y., 1963, p. 176–183; Peter Van Cleave, Revolt, Religion, and Dissent in the Dutch-American Atlantic: Francis Adrian van der Kemp’s Pursuit of Civil and Religious Liberty, Arizona State Univ., Ph.D. diss., 2014, p. 144–148; “Foreign Intelligence,” Edinburgh Magazine, 15:498 [Dec. 1800]).

4The enclosure, which has not been found, was the Georgetown, D.C., Olio, 4 March 1803, which printed part of JQA’s Forefathers’ Day address, for which see TBA to JQA, 5 Jan., and note 9, above. The newspaper called the address a “happy combination of the perspicuous, the majestic, the nervous and the pathetic.” The 11 March issue printed the remainder. Both were reprinted from the Charleston Courier, 10, 11 Feb., which was founded on 10 Jan. by Loring Andrews, a native of Hingham, Mass., who in the first issue declared it a Federalist newspaper. Notices of JQA’s oration were also printed in the New York Evening Post and the New-York Gazette, both 31 Dec. 1802 (A. S. Salley Jr., comp., Marriage Notices in Charleston Courier, 1803–1808, Columbia, S.C., 1919, p. 3).

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