Gordon says of Samuel Adams, in whose disinterestedness he believes :

He was well qualified to second Mr. Otis, and learned in time to serve his own public views by the influence of the other. He was soon noticed by the House, chosen, and continued their clerk from year to year, by which means he had the custody of their papers, and of these he knew how to make an advantage for political purposes. He was frequently upon important committees, and acquired great ascendency, by discovering a readiness to acquiesce in the proposals and amendments of others, while the end aimed at by them did not eventually frustrate his leading designs. He showed a pliableness and complaisance in these smaller matters which enabled him, in the issue, to carry those of much greater consequence; and there were many favourite points which the Sons of Liberty in the Massachusetts meant to carry, even though the Stamp Act should be repealed.'

Other active politicians will be mentioned in the course of subsequent chapters, such as Josiah Quincy and Joseph Warren, who cannot be designated leaders, as they appear to have been generally followers of Samuel Adams. There was, however, one man who for a time divided the affections of the popular party, but was evidently of too sensitive and honest a nature to keep pace; the contest was unequal. That gentleman, Joseph Hawley, known as Major Hawley, was a native of Northampton, in Hampshire County, where he derived influence from the position of his maternal uncle, and also from his own talent, education, and status as a barrister.

He had a very fair character as a practitioner, and some instances have been mentioned of singular scrupulosity, and of his refusing and returning fees when they appeared to him greater than the cause deserved. He was strict in religious observances. Being upon his return home from a journey, the sun set upon a Saturday evening when he was within a few miles of his home. He remained where he was till the sun set the next day, and then finished his journey. He was, however, violent in his resentments. He had been at the head of an opposition to the minister

'Gordon (William, D.D.), History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America, vol. i. Letter IV.

of the town where he lived, and the chief cause of his leaving the town and removing to another colony. In a few years after, he made a public acknowledgment of his unwarrantable conduct in this affair, which he caused to be published in the newspapers. This ingenuous confession raised his character more than his intemperate conduct had lessened it.1

Unfortunately' he was subject to glooms, which confined him, and rendered him, while they lasted, unfit for business,' so that although he was more attended to in the House than any of the leaders,' he was 'less active out of it.'

12

Hawley's enmity to Hutchinson is accounted for in the History of Massachusetts.' 'He thought he had not been properly treated by the Lieutenant-Governor as Chief Justice in the Court of Common Law, and to revenge himself brought this public abuse against him in the Assembly,' that is, the accusation of ambition and a lust of power.' John Adams came of the same stock as Samuel, their grandfathers being brothers. John's grandfather, who was the eldest grandson of the original settler, remained at Braintree, but though he is described as a labouring farmer,' he was evidently a man of substance. John was sent to Harvard College, apparently with the view of becoming qualified for the Congregational ministry. At that time

the distinction of rank was observed with such punctilious nicety that, in the arrangement of the members of every class, precedence was assigned to every individual according to the dignity of his birth or the rank of his parents. John Adams was thus placed the fourteenth in a class of twenty-four, a station for which he was probably indebted rather to the standing of his maternal family than to that of his father.3

It was not, however, equal to the place assigned to his cousin Samuel.

Hutchinson, Hist. Mass., ch. iii.

2 Ibid. ii.

The Life of John Adams (begun by John Quincy Adams, completed by Charles Francis Adams), ch. i. and ii. (written by J. Q. Adams). The account here given of John Adams is taken from the Life, with some references to Hosmer's Samuel Adams and other books to be mentioned.

The young man was evidently repelled from entering the ministry by the rigidity of the dominant form of faith, and he eventually determined to become a barrister. He read law with Mr. Putnam, supporting himself at the same time as Latin master in a school at Worcester for two years. After being called to the Bar he returned to Braintree, which was only ten miles from Boston, and lived with his own family until his marriage with the daughter of a minister at Weymouth, which introduced him to an influential connection. He served the offices of surveyor of highways, selectman, assessor and overseer of the poor of the town of Braintree, which were almost hereditary in his family, and had just begun to distinguish himself at the Bar by his management of a case at Pownalborough, when the Stamp Act gave him the opportunity of becoming a politician.

Republicanism is a word with many shades of meaning. Reared as John Adams had been, it never came in his mind to mean the levelling up' of the inferior classes and submerged 'masses.' He admired prosperity and appreciated its external evidences. The following passage, written long after he had become an agitator, is obviously a sneer at the simplicity, or poverty, as well as at the loyalty of a judge:

'Adams,' who had set out to attend the court at Ipswich, 'overtook,' he says, 'Judge Cushing in his old curricle, and the two lean horses, and Dick his negro, at his right, driving the curricle. This is the way of travelling in 1771-a judge of the circuit, a judge of the Superior Court, a judge of the King's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer, for the province, travels with a pair of wretched old jades of horses, in a wretched old dung-cart of a curricle, and a negro on the same seat with him, driving.'

Adams then turns round to give a thrust in the other direction, against the project of assuring the judges fixed salaries. "But we shall have more glorious times anon, when the sterling salaries are ordered out of the revenue to

1 Flanders (Henry), Lives and Times of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. ii., 'Life of William Cushing.'

the judges, as many most ardently wish, and the judges themselves among the rest, I suppose."'

To return to John Adams's first entry on the field of politics, of which some particulars have been already mentioned incidentally. He found in his cousin Samuel a man willing and anxious to push him into the forefront of the struggle, and on his side readily took advantage of the opportunity thus afforded. John Adams,' writes Hosmer, 'has interesting things to say in his "Diary" about the clubs, at which he met the famous characters of the day.'1 In the beginning of 1765, indeed, the venerable Jeremy Gridley, leader of the Bar, formed a project of a Law Club or Sodality,' which was, no doubt, nationalist in its tendencies, as was its founder. Of this club John Adams was one of the first members. They had only a few weekly meetings, at which they read part of the feudal law, in the Corpus Juris Civilis," and the oration of Cicero for Milo, in the translations of Guthrie and of Davidson. Their readings were intermingled with comment and discussions.' But the utterances quoted by Hosmer relate to a very different sodality:

'This day learned that the Caucus Club meets at certain times in the garret of Tom Dawes, the adjutant of the Boston regiment. He has a large house and he has a moveable partition in his garret, which he takes down, and the whole club meets in one room. There they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from one end of the garret to the other. There they drink flip, I suppose, and there they choose a moderator who puts questions to the vote regularly; and selectmen, assessors, collectors, wardens, fire-wards, and representatives are regularly chosen before they are chosen in the town. Uncle Fairfield, Story, Ruddock, Adams, Cooper, and a rudis indigestaque moles are members. They send committees to wait on the Merchants' Club, and to propose and join in the choice of men and measures.'

It was the successor of this club to which Samuel Adams now introduced John Adams. The new organisation was larger, and

' Hosmer, Samuel Adams, ch. v., 'Parliamentary Representation and the Massachusetts Resolves.'

Life of John Adams, by J. Q. Adams, ch. ii.

the scope of its action, too, instead of being limited to town affairs, now included a wider range in the struggle that was beginning.1

John Adams was often at variance with James Otis the younger, who could, no doubt, be exceedingly provoking. In 1763, when four simple regulations as to fees, etiquette with regard to attorneys, &c., were proposed and assented to by all the rest of the court, Otis delayed their acceptance by his violent denunciation of them as against the province law, against the rights of mankind, &c.' This led to a fierce quarrel with Adams, in whose 'Diary' Otis is described as an ugly, surly, brutal mortal,' and much besides; indeed, every prominent barrister present made some unfavourable comment upon his conduct, according to Adams, and this is likely enough.

Another member-introduced to political life, it is said, by Samuel Adams-who rose to eminence in the revolution, was John Hancock, already mentioned in the last chapter. Of him Mr. Hutchinson wrote:

Mr. Hancock's name has been sounded through the world as a principal actor in this tragedy. He was a young man whose father and grandfather were ministers in country parishes, of irreproachable characters, but, like country ministers in New England in general, of small estates.

His father's brother, from a bookseller, became one of the most opulent merchants in the province. He had raised a great estate with such rapidity, that it was commonly believed among the vulgar that he had purchased a valuable diamond for a small sum and sold it again at its full price. But the secret lay in his importing from St. Eustatia great quantities of tea in molasses hogsheads, which sold at a very great advance; and by importing at the same time a few chests from England, he freed the rest from suspicion, and always had the reputation of a fair trader. He was also concerned in supplying the officers of the army, ordnance, and navy, and made easy and advantageous remittances. ... The uncle was always on the side of Government. The nephew's ruling passion was a fondness for popular applause.2

1 Hosmer, Samuel Adams, ch. v., as above.

2 Hutchinson, Hist. Mass., ch. iii.