Thomas Boylston Adams to William Smith Shaw, 7 December 1800
Thomas Boylston Adams to William Smith Shaw
Philadelphia 7th: December 1800
Dear William
I thank you for your favor of the 3d: instt: and the newspapers enclosed.1 I will endeavor to comply with your request, that I communicate with you more frequently, but I will be free to confess to you, that every year of my life, I grow more selfish & less disposed to write letters, merely of friendship. You will experience the same thing in a few years, & I believe you assigned the true cause of it when you attributed it to “commerce with the world.” I would not be understood, as subscribing to the force of your comparison & its application; for I do not find that the “concerns of life” have at all weakened my friendships, though they have destroyed that relish for epistolary correspondence, which youthful ardor generally feels. So long as professions of friendship will pass for common civility they may be made without risk, but a man should be very cautious in pledging himself upon paper, where the utmost confidence does not exist between the parties. It is better to be wanting in profession than in performance & sincerity. Our friend Mr: T Johnson will subscribe to this truth, which he was so fond of calling to my memory, I know not exactly why.
I am as you conjectured, again seated in my Office, though not full of business—a small portion nevertheless falls to my share, and I look to time & perseverance for a moderate increase. Since my return I have spoken once in the Court of Oyer & terminer, by appointment of the Judges, in behalf of a man, who was indicted for high-way robbery, and had the good fortune to obtain a verdict of not guilty, directly against the charge from the bench. The Attorney Gen: & one of the Judges told me I had great luck, and I was much of their opinion.2
I was joined by Forbes & Sumner at Baltimore, and the latter came on with me hither, where he remained several days.3 Mr: Rogers told me he had seen you & the family a few days since.
Your young male friends here are all well—several of them have within a few days assumed the dignity of professional advancement. Rush, Peters, Ewing & Bird, are of the number.4 Your friends of the other sex, are, I believe, likewise well.
I enclose at the request of my friend Mrs: Rutter a sample of Cotton, which you will give to my Mother and request her to write to New England, for two pounds, (or one pound, if she think there will be a difficulty in sending so much as two pounds) of Cotton, of the same quality and to direct that it be sent to me, by some private hand.5 It is a commission for a lady to whom I am greatly obligated for numerous acts of kindness, I shall therefore be the more anxious to have this performed to her satisfaction. My mother is my sole resort in such cases.
I share your apprehensions on the score of Southern faith; if the failure of the federal ticket shall lie at the door of So Carolina, there will never be any future confidence on the part of N England in that State. I believe the elections of several of their City members is contested for no other purpose than to lessen, perhaps entirely take away the federal majority.6
We have no news from New York yet.— I am sorry to hear that my Mother had taken a severe cold— There must be Dutch stoves put up in the great Hall, or you will all be sick.
Please to offer my congratulations to Miss Caroline Johnson upon her happy recovery. I hope she will have her health confirmed. present me kindly to all the family & to our own—to Mr: Cranch & his lady—
Your’s sincerely
T B Adams.7
RC (MWA:Adams Family Letters); addressed: “W. S Shaw / City of Washington”; endorsed: “Phila 7 Dec / T B Adams / rec 10th 1800 / An 12 De.”
1. Not found.
2. Pennsylvania’s Court of Oyer and Terminer sat in Philadelphia on 27 Nov. and was presided over by the Pennsylvania chief justice Edward Shippen and associate justices Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Thomas Smith, and Jasper Yeates. The attorney general of Pennsylvania was Joseph Borden McKean, who was appointed on 10 May by his father, Gov. Thomas McKean (Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser, 27 Nov.; John Hill Martin, Martin’s Bench and Bar of Philadelphia, Phila., 1883, p. 23, 27; Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy, rev. edn., Phila., 1999, p. 128).
3. TBA’s companions were possibly Ralph Bennet Forbes and William Hyslop Sumner (1780–1861), Harvard 1799. Sumner was the son of former Massachusetts governor Increase Sumner and Elizabeth Hyslop Sumner; he would become a Boston attorney (vol. 13:266; , 3:68; William H. Sumner, Memoir of Increase Sumner, Boston, 1854, p. 58; Joseph B. Felt, Memorials of William Smith Shaw, Boston, 1852, p. 128).
4. Richard Rush, Richard Peters Jr., and John Ewing Jr. (1776–1816), University of Pennsylvania 1792, had all recently been admitted to the Delaware County bar. Bird Wilson (1777–1859), University of Pennsylvania 1792, had been admitted to the bar in Northampton County (The Twentieth Century Bench and Bar of Pennsylvania, 2 vols., Chicago, 1903, 2:632, 733; University of Pennsylvania: Biographical Catalogue of the Matriculates of the College, Phila., 1894, p. 33, 36).
5. The enclosure has not been found; it was probably supplied by Sarah Jones Rutter (1760–1830), the wife of Samuel Rutter and the aunt of Sarah Wister. In the spring and summer of 1799, TBA recorded in his Diary socializing with several members of the Rutter family (vol. 13:526; Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, ed., The Journal and Occasional Writings of Sarah Wister, Madison, N.J., 1987, p. 75–76; Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 Aug. 1830; TBA, Diary, 1798–1799, 17 May, 30 July, 19 Aug. 1799).
6. During the Oct. 1800 elections to the South Carolina legislature, Federalists claimed eleven of the fifteen seats for Charleston only to have the results challenged by seven of the Democratic-Republican candidates, who claimed that “a number of men were admitted to vote, who were either not citizens or not entitled to vote.” The unsuccessful candidates petitioned the state legislature to invalidate the election results, thereby lessening Federalist strength before the state’s presidential electors were chosen on 2 December. Although the legislature referred the issue to committee and no decision was made prior to 2 Dec., all of the state’s electors voted for Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr (, 32:215, 256–258; Charleston City Gazette, 19 Nov.).
7. TBA had also written to Shaw on 2 Dec., reporting on his journey from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia and outlining Joseph Dennie Jr.’s plans for the Port Folio (MWA: Adams Family Letters).
8. The Republican Rush-Light, [1800], , No. 1236, was an imitation of Peter Porcupine’s The Rush-Light, a series of five essays by William Cobbett attacking Benjamin Rush that was published in New York between February and April. The aim of The Republican Rush-Light was “to illuminate the future path of patriotic Americans” in the wake of the presidential election, and it condemned JA as an “ignus fatuus … continually leading the good citizens of this country from one delusion to another” (, 2:1216–1217; The Republican Rush-Light, p. 2).
9. TBA sought information about whether U.S. Supreme Court justice Bushrod Washington was the author of an essay in the Augusta Herald, 5 Nov., which discussed judicial conduct and was signed “B.,” and he suggested that Shaw write to Josiah Sturges (1773–1852), Harvard 1795, an Augusta, Ga., merchant (, 1:101; Joseph Palmer, Necrology of Alumni of Harvard College, 1851–52 to 1862–63, Boston, 1864, p. 3).