John Quincy Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, 19 August 1803
John Quincy Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams
Boston 19. August 1803.
I have received two or three letters from you, which I have not answered for want of a conveyance—1 My objection to the Post Office, you know— I have two or three pieces by me, in a state of preparation for you; which I purpose sending by the first convenient private opportunity.— Mr: Hichborn brought me last week a letter from you; but I have not been able to see him since, having been all the time at Quincy.— My first object in writing you now, is to let you know the situation of your dear mother; who is dangerously ill— I would not, on the one hand excite in your mind a needless alarm; nor on the other leave you so uninformed of our apprehensions, that the event we fear should come upon you altogether suddenly and unawares. She has been these ten days in great pain, and is very weak— Dr: Warren who saw her yesterday, speaks of her situation as very precarious, though not desperate—2 It will be as painful to you to read as it is to me to write these particulars; yet it is best you should know them
I was not surprized at the indictments against Dennie & Bradford, for a speculative paragraph upon Democracy— As you appear in your letters confident that it is impossible a Jury should convict them, I am in hopes the contagion is not so deep and universal as I have been apt to suspect—3 But you see what a Judge and a Jury both, have done with Croswell in New-York;—4 If truth, consistency, Justice or Law could were any restraint upon democracy, and party spirit, I should join with you in thinking your client perfectly safe— As it is—I hope you are not too sangwine— When Democracy has the upperhand, it is like all other tyranny “Its power is as terrible, as its arguments are contemptible.”5 Now that democracy has the upperhand in Pennsylvania, is apparent by its excesses— It now feels strong enough to commence its career of oppression, and it has selected Dennie, as one of its victims— I have so little confidence in
the security to life, liberty, or property in the State of Pennsylvania, that I most sincerely wish you would shake the dust from your feet, and come where there is yet some sense of right, and some government to protect a citizen, in his person, character and property, against highwaymen and Jacobins.
If you have not a greater attachment to that residence, than I can see reason that you should have, I think you could make a much more comfortable, and agreeable one, in your native State— I have made arrangements to make my future abode, at Quincy; in the old paternal mansion; and if you could prevail upon yourself to exchange the noise and bustle of a great city for rural retirement, I have a project in my head, by which you could turn your time to account, better than I believe it possible where you are— But, as I expect to see you at Philadelphia, in about six weeks from this, I purpose to converse with you freely on this subject, and to submit my plan to your con[sideration]
It is my intention to take my family with me to Washington this Winter— And I shall endeavour to reach Philadelphia about the 5th: of October— Pray let me know whether I shall be able to get lodgings at Mrs: Roberts’s, for one or two days?
We are all well here, and the town is hitherto healthy.
Ever faithfully your’s.
RC (Adams Papers); addressed: “Thomas B. Adams Esqr / Philadelphia.”; internal address: “Mr: T. B. Adams.”; endorsed: “J. Q Adams Esqr: / 18th. August 1803 / 22d: Recd: / Ansd:”; docketed by JQA: “Boston 19. August 1803.”; notation by JQA: “Post paid.” Some loss of text where the seal was removed.
1. TBA’s most recent extant letters to JQA were dated 10 and 18 July (both Adams Papers), in which he commented on Fourth of July festivities in Philadelphia, discussed JQA’s contributions to the Port Folio, and noted that Joseph Dennie Jr. faced a sedition trial, for which see note 3, below. In the first letter TBA also congratulated JQA on JA2’s birth and LCA’s health: “My opinion of her grows more favorable in proportion to the increase of the male branch of her family, and by the time She is prepared to name her fourth boy I hope she will remember, that the joyless State of celibacy to which her husbands brother is condemned, should recommend him to the compassionate regard of his prolific fruitful relatives, so far at least as to perpetuate his name.”
2. That is, Harvard’s Hersey Professor of Anatomy and Surgery, Dr. John Warren.
3. Dennie and Philadelphia True American editor Thomas Bradford appeared in Philadelphia Mayor’s Court on 4 July to answer an indictment for seditious libel. The charge stemmed from the publication of an unsigned paragraph in the Port Folio, 3:135 (23 April), and reprinted in the True American, 6 May, which opined: “A democracy is scarcely tolerable at any period of national history. Its omens are always sinister, and its powers are unpropitious. … It is on trial here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation and anarchy.” TBA commented to JQA that he doubted a jury would find the paragraph seditious: “They dare not meet this American question, even in the jacobin tribunals of Pennsylvania— at least such is my opinion.” The prediction ultimately proved correct, though the case took more than two years to resolve, after the charge against Dennie alone was transferred to the Pennsylvania supreme court in December as Respublica v. Dennie. The case remained there until Judge Jasper Yeates delivered a charge to a jury in Nov. 1805, calling on them to decide whether the U.S. Constitution allowed such speech, but cautioning, “It is no infraction of the law to publish temperate investigations of the nature and forms of government.” The jury acquitted Dennie (Burton Alva Konkle, Joseph Hopkinson, 1770–1842: Jurist, Scholar, Inspirer of the Arts, Phila., 1931, p. 141–142; TBA to JQA, 18 July 1803, Adams Papers; Jasper Yeates, Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, 3d edn., 4 vols., Phila., 1889–1890, 4:266–271).
4. Harry Croswell, editor of the Hudson, N.Y., Wasp, was indicted for seditious libel by a New York grand jury in January. Croswell attacked Thomas Jefferson the previous summer, writing that the president had paid James Thomson Callender to smear JA as “a hoary headed incendiary.” During a trial in New York Circuit Court begun on 11 July, Chief Justice Morgan Lewis ruled against numerous defense motions before a jury found Croswell guilty in September. The case pivoted on whether the truth of an allegation was an absolute defense against libel, a position argued forcefully by Alexander Hamilton in an unsuccessful appeal of People v. Croswell in Feb. 1804. In 1805 New York legislators swayed by Hamilton’s argument enshrined the truth defense in state law, an important milestone in American legal precedent (Julius Goebel Jr., ed., The Law Practice of Alexander Hamilton, 5 vols., N.Y., 1964–1981, 1:775–797, 844–848).
5. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, London, 1790, p. 159.