John Adams

by David McCullough

Adams, who had earlier joined a new law club in Boston started by Jeremiah Gridley, had, at Gridley’s suggestion, been working on an essay that would become A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law. It was his first extended political work and one of the most salient of his life, written at the age of thirty. Now, at the height of the furor, he arranged for its publication as an unsigned, untitled essay in the Gazette. (It would be published in England later, in a volume titled The True Sentiments of America.) It was not a call to arms or mob action—with his countryman’s dislike of the Boston “rabble,” Adams was repelled by such an “atrocious violation of the peace.” The Stamp Act was hardly mentioned. Rather, it was a statement of his own fervent patriotism and the taproot conviction that American freedoms were not ideals still to be obtained, but rights long and firmly established by British law and by the courage and sacrifices of generations of Americans. Years later Adams would say the Revolution began in the minds of Americans long before any shots were fired or blood shed.