Thomas Boylston Adams to John Quincy Adams, 30 November 1802
Thomas Boylston Adams to John Quincy Adams
Philadelphia 30th: November 1802.
Dear Brother
The Eastern Mail brought your letter of the 23d: this morning.1 The business part of it stands thus. Dr: Woodhouse has been in the habit of putting up chemical equipage at various prices, and when our friend Quincy wrote for one, last year I communicated the order to the Dr: Professor himself, who promised to attend to it. This promise no doubt escaped his memory, as he has since been twice across the Atlantic and lately arrived. As my proud spirit will not suffer me to make another man’s business my own, where he alone is to be benefited, I will make no more applications to the Dr: Professor, himself, but have already engaged a brother Chemist to apply for the apparatus, who being a sort of Chemical experimentalist, will see that things are as they should be.2 The expence, which Quincy authorised me to encounter upon his order, was, I think, from 30 to 50 Dls: so that your few shillings is but a scanty bid and will not command the article. If I incur expence in this transaction, I shall look to some of you philosophers for repayment, since the articles would be of no manner of use to one who is not a philosopher & never will be, any more than he will be, a free-mason. I have a mortal antipathy to the term, since it has been perverted to the strange use of modern times, when it means any thing but a lover of wisdom. My father disclaims one species or sect of philosophers, in his answer to the birth day addressers;3 but I think the drift of his meaning in that disclaimer has not been discovered, except at the seat of government, by the Sophist of Thetford.
The Ode was copied by me and headed with an extract;4 then enclosed to the temporary some-time editor of the Port Folio, who, you will be surprised to hear, is a small, sly Deist, a disguised, but determined jacobin; a sort of Sammy Harison Smith, “in shape and make the same”; his name is Brown, & he criticised your translation of Gentz in the New York magazine called American Review, whereof he is a coadjutor.5 Well, this fellow suppressed the ode for four or five weeks, and until I made a noise about it, there was no chance of its coming out. I thought like you, that I had “lost an Ode of charming praise”;6 I had never any real intention of sending it to Richmond, but the truth was, that I knew this Browne so well as to foresee what would be the fate of the piece, if it came to him. I took the Editor-ship of the paper upon myself, and by this mail you will see the fruits of it. The two last numbers are revised, by me, and I shall continue my superintendance until Dennie returns to the City, which I think will be in a few days.7 I have passed the Summer and part of the Autumn, in his society; by my advice and recommendation he took up his abode at & about the yellow-springs, and if the first breaking out of the yellow-fever had not dispersed the subordinate workmen, the PF. would have been regularly printed, though possibly not so punctually transmitted. The great fault of the establishment and a principal cause of its slender support, is irregularity. Dennie has never had a man of business, either as a partner or a
subordinate; the detail of the concern has consequently been neglected, shamefully and many think unpardonably. His contracts have been loosely made & as negligently performed. Notwithstanding all this, his patrons have been numerous, and though many have fallen off, many are daily added to the list of his subscribers. After the backward numbers are brought up, which there is some expectation they will be, at the end of the year, I have engaged to take upon myself the detail, or, if you will, the drudgery of the establishment, and in order to facilitate this connection, (which is entirely of a private nature, and as such made known only to you, as a friend & powerful patron,) Mr: Dennie is to dwell under the same roof & have a chamber contiguous to mine. You know some of my qualifications for the detail of business, and I know very well, that the mechanical employment appurtenant to the punctual transmission &ca: of the Port Folio, is not, by odds, so great as fell to my lot, while in your employ as a Secretary. Whether I shall have your approbation in this scheme, I know not, but I feel anxious to obtain it, for I think it will owe much of its success to your generous contribution; not in funds, but in the means of raising them. I feel no complacency in avowing that this measure is the dictate rather of necessity than choice; the law will not support me here alone, and if I can do any thing, in concert with the profession, which will enable me to turn to account, the little cultivation of intellect, I ought to be supposed to possess; I shall feel that I have less reason than I have had to repine at my lot in life. Complaints against fortune are as common with those, who have thrown off her embrace or madly frowned her away when she smiled with bewitching fondness, as they are with those that never saw her face; and it is hard for disinterested spectators & auditors, to discriminate between the murmur that is just, and the complaint that is groundless. In general, however, they are alike disregarded. If I repine at my fate, it is because I see no prosperity attendant on those pursuits which education has familiarized to me, and which if I am compelled to abandon, I shall be thrown upon an ocean of unexplored and therefore dangerous navigation. The dread too of abandoning, in disgrace the profession, which one has chosen is a powerful draw-back upon the facility of change, which is never scarcely reputable, unless when made to avoid greater evils. These and other considerations, too much my own to be imparted, have induced me to try my luck as a Co-adjutor in the management of a public print. I have pledged myself, according to my means, to commence profit & loss, with the new year, and though prospects are
less brilliant than could be wished, they are not so dark as some may conjecture. The only contribution I ask or wish from you towards this undertaking, is your pen-service, to which myself & co-associate have long paid & will continue to pay homage. Another favor will be to furnish such selections or an index to them, as you deem worthy of perpetuity. Lastly to keep my secret, without which I shall be more less benefited than injured.
Mr: Dobson has furnished the missing sheet and a second volume of Supplement, which shall be sent by the first opportunity.8
Please inform my mother, that two barrils of flour have already been Shipped and two more ordered on her account.
Can you procure for me the first number of Dumas précis des evènements militaires. My first was sent to Quincy and I never got it, but it is now wanted to be bound up.9 You have many of my books among yours—when shall I see them again?
You threaten to dream, “odes, sonnets or legendary tales,” and I cannot but hope you many a vision. Such stuff is rare & in demand. Tell me what you think of “another imitation,” of our Ode. It was dream’t here; by a worthy wight whose Ancestors were Welsh. He may plead prescription for his Bard-ship. Look to your Terence. Adelphi Act 3. Scen 4 and mark the passage, which begins—“Sed quis illic est quem video procul? Estne Hegio— Tribulis noster? Si satis cerno, hercle’is est. Homo amicus nobis”— Such is our Cadwalader; the very Hegis of our school.10
Vale.
RC (Adams Papers); addressed: “J. Q. Adams Esqr: / Boston”; internal address: “J. Q Adams Esqr:”; endorsed: “Thomas— 30. Novr: 1802. / 8. Decr: recd: / 12. Do: Ansd:.”
1. Not found.
2. Dr. James Woodhouse (1770–1809), University of Pennsylvania 1787, earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1792 and was a chemistry professor and founder of the Chemical Society of Philadelphia. Woodhouse traveled to England and France in 1802 to collect minerals and meet prominent scientists, including British chemist Humphry Davy. The “brother Chemist” was likely Robert Hare Jr., who attended Woodhouse’s chemistry lectures from 1798 to 1803 (vol. 13:25; ; Edgar F. Smith, James Woodhouse: A Pioneer in Chemistry, Phila., 1918, p. 72–73, 183–185).
3. On 30 Oct. 1802 “a large number” of residents of Quincy and surrounding towns visited JA at Peacefield and presented him with a birthday address. The memorial praised JA’s presidency “at a crisis of peculiar difficulty and danger,” which “vindicated the national honour, accommodated serious differences with two of the most powerful nations of Europe, and left the United States with the means of a speedy extinction of the public debt, a full treasury, and a flourishing commerce, to cultivate the arts of peace.” In his response of the same date (both Adams Papers), JA wrote that a president must be “more of a modern Epicurean Phylosopher, than I ever was or ever will be” to have borne “the Continual provocations, breaking and pouring in upon me from unexpected as well as expected quarters, during the two last years of my Administration” (Boston Commercial Gazette, 4 Nov.).
4. JQA called Thomas Paine the “Sophist of Thetford” in his “Horace, Book II, Ode 4. To Xanthia Phoceus,” for which see his letter to TBA, 5 Oct., and note 2, above. The extract that TBA included was from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia: “Young as we are, and with such a country before us to fill with people and with happiness, we should point in that direction the whole generative force of nature, wasting none of its efforts in mutual destruction.” TBA added a sentence noting that the sentiment was repeated in Jefferson’s 8 Dec. 1801 annual address to Congress, for which see Hannah Phillips Cushing to AA, 18 Dec., and note 4, above. TBA concluded with a Latin phrase from Horace, along with an English translation: “That he had no occasion to be ashamed at being in love with his maid; for that had been the case with many great men” (Port Folio, 2:344 [30 Oct. 1802]; Horace, Odes and Epodes, Book II, Ode 4, lines 1–2).
5. Philadelphia novelist and historian Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) served briefly as editor of the Port Folio in 1802. Brown’s anonymous review of JQA’s translation of , was published in the inaugural issue of the American Review and Literary Journal, 1:55–64 (Jan.–March 1801). Brown devoted only one sentence to comment on the quality of JQA’s work: “We cannot much applaud the perspicuity or elegance of the translation” (; , p. 145; Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond; or, the Secret Witness, with Related Texts, ed. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro, Indianapolis, Ind., 2009, p. 246, 248).
6. Peter Pindar, “Lyric Odes for the Year 1785,” Ode XX.
7. The two most recent issues of the Port Folio were 20 and 27 November. On Joseph Dennie Jr.’s return to Philadelphia, TBA assumed the role of business manager of the Port Folio and remained in the post until he returned to Quincy in late 1803 ( p. 463–464).
8. Philadelphia bookseller Thomas Dobson drew upon the third edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica to produce the first American encyclopedia: Encyclopædia; or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature, 18 vols., Phila., 1790–1798. In the coming years Dobson added Supplement to the Encyclopædia; or, A Dictionary’ of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature, 3 vols., Phila., 1800–1803. JQA in a 13 Oct. 1802 letter to TBA (NjP:Andre De Coppet Coll.), wrote that JA’s volume 18 of the original work was imperfect and asked TBA to request that Dobson rectify the problem and also find out when he would complete the run of supplementary volumes. JQA informed TBA in a 22 May 1803 letter (Adams Papers) that the second supplementary volume had arrived and reminded TBA to purchase the third, which he had recently seen advertised ().
9. Comte Guillaume Mathieu Dumas, Précis des évènemens militaires, Hamburg, 1799, for which see vol. 14:11, 265, 267.
10. Thomas Cadwalader (1779–1841), University of Pennsylvania 1795, was a Philadelphia lawyer who was admitted to the bar in 1801. Cadwalader was probably the author of the other piece on Jefferson that was an imitation of Horace, Book II, Ode 4, that was published in the same issue of the Port Folio as JQA’s ode. TBA quoted from Terence, Adelphi, Act III, scene 5, lines 4–6: “But who is that whom I see at a Distance? Is it not Hegio one of our Ward? If my Eyes fail me not, ’tis he by Hercules: ah! we have been Friends” (, 1:583; Port Folio, 2:344 [30 Oct. 1802]; Terence, Adelphi, transl. Thomas Cooke, London, 1755).