“To become a Keeper of the Light House on Bald Head”

Commonplace published David E. Paterson’s article “Jefferson’s Mystery Woman Identified.”

It begins:

Historians have long wondered what prompted President Thomas Jefferson’s cryptic sentence in a note dated January 13, 1807, to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin: “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”

Given Jefferson’s opinion explicitly expressed elsewhere that women were best suited to domestic roles, not to boisterous public political forums, and not as actors in the halls and offices of government, scholars of the early republic and popular authors alike, since at least 1920, have tried to reconstruct the specific context in which the president made this comment. For the last twenty years, the consensus explanation has been that Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, unable to find enough qualified men to fill federal government jobs, proposed hiring women for those positions.

However, while Jefferson’s statement may reflect his thoughts on women as office holders in general, my recent research in federal records proves that Jefferson wrote the sentence in reaction to Gallatin’s proposal to appoint a specific woman to a specific job.

As Paterson says, Gallatin’s letter to the President and other pertinent documents don’t survive, so he had to work with other sources. One key bit of news:

The Wilmington (N.C.) Gazette of October 21, 1806, reported that five days earlier, a man named Joseph Swain, hunting deer and wild hogs on Bald Head Island, fired at a noise he heard in the bushes—only to find that he had killed his father-in-law, light-keeper Henry Long.

Paterson’s research also indicates that Gallatin; Timothy Bloodworth, the federal Customs Collector at Wilmington; and twelve local men were all willing to see a woman appointed to the office in question. Only President Jefferson deemed that “the public” wasn’t prepared for that.

Nineteen years later, President John Quincy Adams made the opposite call in regard to the same type of federal office.

For additional reading, here’s Kevin Duffus’s article for Coastal Review on the slain lighthouse keeper, Henry Long. It turns out he was born in the Palatinate in 1743. At the age of ten his family emigrated to Maine, the same region where Christopher Seider’s family first settled. His father, a schoolteacher also named Heinrich Lange, was still there in 1767, according to Jasper Jacob Stahl’s History of Old Broad Bay and Waldoboro.

As a young man, Henry Long moved to North Carolina, which had German-speaking Moravian communities. He became a river pilot, married, and had children. Entering his fifties, Long seems to have wanted a more stable job. In 1794 the Hooper family—who also had roots in the Massachusetts colony—recommended him to the federal government to tend the lighthouse off Cape Fear. And that went well for twelve years.

“This is a great day with the Roman Catholics”

On Saturday, 25 Dec 1779, John Quincy Adams was in the coastal town of La Coruña.

He and his younger brother Charles were accompanying their father on his second diplomatic mission to Europe. Aiming for France, their ship had run into trouble, and the captain had chosen to dock in allied Spain instead.

That provided the occasion for John Quincy to experience another culture. Which his diary shows him doing with characteristic primness:

This is a great day with the Roman Catholics. “Fete de Nouailles” Christmas. However I find they dont mind it much. They dress up and go to mass but after that’s over all is. So if they call this religion I wonder what is not it; after Mass, almost all the Shops in town are open’d.

But stop. I must not say any thing against their religion while I am in their country but must change the subject.

This forenoon Madame Lagoanere [wife of the American consul] sent us some sweetmeats: for my part I was much obliged to her for them, but I shall diminish them but little.

John Quincy’s idea of a proper religious holiday involved closing the shops. That was how people observed fast days in New England, after all. And the gift of sweets seems to have puzzled him. I suspect Charles wasn’t so bothered.

“One of the skulls was that of a British soldier”

Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr. (1828–1908), was the son of the Unitarian minister at Scituate. Both father and son bore the surnames of two of Massachusetts’s eminent families.

The Rev. Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr., had studied for the ministry with the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley in Concord. There he had met his wife, introduced by two members of the Thoreau family.

At the age of nine, Edmund started keeping a journal, on the advice of Bronson Alcott. He kept up this habit for his whole adult life but, as with John Quincy Adams, had trouble maintaining the momentum at first.

In the spring of 1840 Edmund started to attend a boarding school in Concord, living with his teachers: the brothers John and Henry David Thoreau. They reenergized his journal-keeping for that season.

The American Antiquarian Society has shared transcripts of Edmund’s childhood journals, including this entry from 1840:

April 1st. I had a nice sail on the river yesterday after school. Messrs John and Henry T[horeau]. rowed and Jesse [Harding] and I were passengers.

We went up the river against the wind and then sailed down to the monument where we got out with the intention of all embarking again, but Mr. J and Jesse being near the monument and Mr H. and I near the boat we jumped in and went across to the abutment of the former bridge on the opposite side.

I suppose that we should have come back for them if they had staid but they went off with the sail which we had left on the bank. Mr. H. rowed up the river a little way and got out. We had not the keys of the boat and should have been obliged to leave her without being securely fastened or have hauled her up on the shore if Joseph had not come down with the keys. He got two wet feet for his pains.

Three years after Concord had dedicated its monument to the 19 Apr 1775 fight, that obelisk and the nearby “abutment of the former bridge” were landmarks for boaters. But because there was no longer a bridge nearby, once the Thoreau brothers and their pupils disembarked on opposite sides they couldn’t easily get back together.

That same entry in Edmund’s diary reported:

We then went to the Lyceum expecting that a Phrenologist would lecture. His apparatus was there but the lecturer had not arrived. A man there set out his casts and several real skulls on the desk but immediately put them back again.

One of the skulls was that of a British soldier who fell in the Battle of Concord. It was dug up in Lincoln. It was only the upper half of the head. There was the bullet hole through which the ball which killed him had passed.

A Mr. Haskins lectured on Roger Williams the founder of Rhode Island—a description of his life. Bought 2 cents worth of burnt almonds going home.

In one busy spring day, young Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., had seen the gravesite of two British soldiers and the half the skull of a third. Plus, burnt almonds!

TOMORROW: A walk to Lincoln.

Charles Pinckney in Hindsight and the Supreme Court

Yesterday I was struck by Pema Levy’s article at Mother Jones about a false document being cited to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Levy based her article on September essay at Politico by Ethen Herenstein and Brian Palmer, and by briefs that have been filed with the court since.

Levy writes:

Three decades after the Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams set about assembling the government’s official Journal of the Convention. Missing from the records was the proposal submitted by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina [shown here]. So Adams wrote him to request a copy. Pinckney replied with an extraordinary document: a draft that so closely resembled the final Constitution that he would have to have been clairvoyant to have written it. . . .

“At the distance of nearly thirty two Years it is impossible for me now to say which of the 4 or 5 draughts I have was the one,” he replied to Adams’ request in 1818, “but enclosed I send you the one I believe was it.” Oddly, the document was written on paper with a 1797 watermark, matching his accompanying letter. Nonetheless, Adams published it.

The debunkings came fast. James Madison, the convention’s most meticulous notetaker, soon wrote to friends that the draft was inaccurate. Years later, Madison discredited Pinckney’s fraud in writing, explaining the document contained language that had only been arrived at after weeks of debate and could not have been divined before the convention began. Madison, convinced it was a fake, detailed how Pinckney’s supposed draft contradicted a more contemporaneous account of the South Carolinian’s actual proposal.

Max Farrand included the Pinckney document in his comprehensive twentieth-century compilation of documents related to the U.S. Constitution, but with a note and additional documents making quite clear that it was not a reliable historical source. A genuine contemporaneous copy of Pinckney’s actual plan survived in the papers of James Wilson and was published in 1904.

Advocates for the “Independent State Legislature” theory have seized on one small detail in the post-Constitution Pinckney document, arguing that it shows the Framers (not just Pinckney) planned at the start of the Constitutional Convention (not two to four decades later) to give states unlimited power over federal elections.

Levy says:

there is no evidence that the framers of the Constitution intended to give legislatures such authority over federal elections. Nor is there any record this interpretation was accepted in the republic’s early years. In fact, history shows that the independent state legislature theory is a modern invention. . . .

It’s possible that the lawyers…who cited the version of the document in Farrand’s 1911 compendium, simply failed to read past the plan to the historian’s conclusion that it was a fake, and that they likewise failed to read Madison’s public takedown or his private letters expressing doubts, all of which were included by Farrand. Whether they meant to or not, they hung their argument on a fake document because it offered a glimmer of originalist evidence to back up their case.

Historians and legal scholars, including some on the political right, have filed briefs arguing against reliance on this document in particular and the theory being espoused in general.

The response has been legal tap-dancing:

the lawyers filed a new brief defending their use of the Pinckney plan. They argued that the plan was not technically “a fake” because it is “undisputed” that Pinckney wrote it, and allege that the generations of historians who discredited the document were hoodwinked by Madison’s “campaign to diminish the significance of [Pinckney’s] role at the convention.”

Justices on the Supreme Court today have been willing to deny photographic evidence and ignore decades of legal and historical precedent in order to reach the verdicts they want. In this case, a majority could adopt the “Independent State Legislature” theory without mentioning one problematic document. But if the final decisions do mention Pinckney, that will be yet more evidence that the “originalists” on the court aren’t interested in the original Constitution at all.

Planning for a Presidential Center

Earlier this week the mayor of Quincy, Thomas Koch, announced the creation of a board for the nonprofit Adams Presidential Center.

This seems to be the current form of the ”Adams Presidential Library” that Koch floated last year and Boston 1775 discussed starting here.

I read articles in the Quincy Patriot Ledger and Boston Globe to try to figure out what’s changed.

A lot of this plan is still very nebulous. It’s not clear where the center will be, though two buildings near the Adams Academy are slated to be cleared away.

It’s not clear what documents or artifacts from Presidents John and John Quincy Adams would go into this building. The Adams Family Papers are at the Massachusetts Historical Society. John Quincy Adams’s book collection is at the Adams National Historical Park.

Mayor Koch has expressed a desire for John Adams’s book collection, originally willed to the town as discussed here but over one hundred years ago transfered to the Boston Public Library.

None of those institutions have showed interest in giving this “Presidential Center” large parts of those collections. Maybe a few documents or books for specific exhibits, but that still leave the new institution short of its own assets.

The Patriot-Ledger reported:

The city has spent $50,000 in American Rescue Plan Act money to hire two museum consultants: M. Goodwin Museum Planning and Luci Creative. The two contractors will work with the board members and Koch to draw up plans for a building.

In addition, the first three members of what might eventually be a board of two dozen were appointed.

Whose Handprint Is on the Declaration?

Fontana Micucci’s article at Boundary Stones focused my attention on something I’d seen for years without thinking about—there’s a handprint on the corner of the Declaration of Independence.

By “Declaration of Independence” in this case, I mean the engrossed copy written out by scribe Timothy Matlack in the summer of 1776.

(I think we’ve come to equate that physical document too closely with the Declaration and forget that for the first generations of Americans it was a set of words, not an object they ever saw, even in facsimile. The Declaration was originally a text, not a textile. But I digress.)

The National Archives, current custodian of the engrossed copy, has a detailed article on its preservation over the years. Perhaps because that agency was put in charge of the Declaration only after World War 2, it’s candid about earlier missteps.

I remember reading that the handwritten Declaration is so faded today because the first facsimiles of it, authorized in 1823 by John Quincy Adams as secretary of state, had been produced using a “wet transfer” process that removed some of the ink. With great irony, the reproductions that made that handwritten document into a national icon left the original permanently damaged. All legible copies of the Declaration today are actually reproductions of the early copperplate engraving because the original has faded so much.

The National Archives article upended my understanding a bit. While time and the wet transfer process did cause some fading in the Declaration’s first century, a series of photographs starting in 1883 shows that most of the damage to the words happened in the early 1900s.

A 1903 photo shows “a text that is completely legible and free of water stains.” And back then, there was no handprint.

The Library of Congress commissioned more photos in 1922, but those images can’t be located. The next surviving photographs therefore come from 1940.

By then, the Declaration had suffered noticeable damage in several areas. The ink was more faded. Some of the words no longer looked as crisp as they had four decades earlier. New marks on the parchment included the imprint of a left hand at lower left and water stains near the center.

Most significant, the National Archives article reports, “Some signatures, such as John Hancock’s, were enhanced while others were rewritten in efforts to make them more visible.” The H in Hancock was overwritten to be taller, for example.

People probably tried to clean or restore the Declaration in the early twentieth century, and that effort (or series of efforts) went awry. But evidently no U.S. government records survive to say when and how that happened. And the handprint, while obviously on the document today, isn’t clear enough to identify the responsible party.

The Once and Future Abigail Adams Statues

Thanks to an alert from Boston 1775 friend Patrick Flaherty, I started following a story out of Quincy about the city’s statue of Abigail Adams.

As shown here, it’s actually a statue of Abigail and her second child, John Quincy Adams, about 1777. It was created by the late Lloyd Lillie and installed near the Church of the Presidents in 1997. It faced a matching statue of John Adams across the street, symbolizing the years the couple spent apart.

About ten years ago, Quincy mayor Thomas Koch and nonprofits aligned with him set about refurbishing that area, which is also near city hall. New statues of John Adams and John Hancock by Sergei Eylanbekov now stand at entrances of the resulting park, called the Hancock-Adams Common.

In 2013 the mayor stated that the statue of Abigail and John Quincy Adams would not be removed, but as work progressed it was, and it remains in storage.

The big issue with restoring that sculpture appears to be that the new figures of Hancock and John Adams are on a larger scale, and elevated. The old statue of Adams’s wife and child wouldn’t make a good match with them.

There was a plan to put the older Adams statues in Merrymount Park, which the Adams family once owned and donated to the city. That’s the city’s largest and most visited park, but it’s not at the city center, and the size means individual monuments can be lost in it. (In fact, there was a marker with a bas-relief honoring the two President Adamses, and I can’t tell if it’s still there.) Another idea is moving the Lillie statues into Adams National Historical Park, which makes sense if Congress grants the park enough resources to install and maintain them.

The idea of naming a new performance arts center after Abgail Adams and her daughter-in-law, Louisa Catherine Adams, has also been floating around. Originally that venue was to abut the Hancock-Adams Common, but now it’s been moved down the street.

In March some Quincy residents rallied to bring a sculpture of Abigail Adams back to the city center. That prompted local press and a Boston Globe editorial in April. Notably, this attention highlighted Adams as a politically minded woman, not primarily (as the earlier statue showed her) a wife and mother. 

A couple of weeks later, Mayor Koch announced that the city (or its nonprofit partner) was commissioning a new statue of Abigail Adams from Eylanbekov, in size and style fitting with those already there. (The Boston Globe quoted one Abigail advocate as favoring a more “approachable” figure, “not being as high up on a pedestal”—though others might interpret putting her at ground level as lowering her status.)

Meanwhile, the city is also planning statues of the adult John Quincy Adams and his wife, Louisa. Plus there was an older stone statue of John Adams down the street. And what about John Hancock’s wife Dorothy? Josiah Quincy, Jr., and the other Quincys? Christopher Seider? They all came from that area.

Filling the New England Seat on the U.S. Supreme Court

For more than a century the U.S. Supreme Court had a seat reserved for New Englanders.

The early Presidents had two good reasons for that. First, by appointing justices equally from all regions of the country those Presidents—especially all those Virginians—avoided charges of favoring their home region.

Second, in its early years the Supreme Court justices also rode circuit, hearing federal cases in their districts. So a New Englander covering the northeastern states wasn’t so far away from home.

For the first two decades, that New Englander was William Cushing, formerly chief justice in Massachusetts. In 1795 President George Washington promoted him to be the chief justice, and the Senate confirmed him. But Cushing declined the commission. Being chief justice just wasn’t as prestigious and powerful as the job has become.

Justice Cushing remained on the bench longer than any of the other original court. He was also the last to wear the full judicial wig inherited from the British system. When Cushing died in 1810, President James Madison needed a replacement from New England. He also wanted someone from his own Republican party. Which was difficult because most New England lawyers were Federalists.

Madison’s first choice was Levi Lincoln of Hingham—former U.S. attorney general under Thomas Jefferson, former lieutenant and acting governor of Massachusetts (shown above). The Senate voted its approval. But Lincoln declined, citing bad eyes. Again, being a Supreme Court justice wasn’t that great.

Madison then nominated Alexander Wolcott of Connecticut, mentioned in yesterday’s posting. Wolcott had practiced law, but he was primarily known as the leader of his state’s Republicans. He engaged in harsh political disputes and oversaw patronage appointments. The closest he’d gotten to judicial experience was in his own patronage position as a Customs inspector. The Federalist Columbian Centinel called Wolcott’s nomination “abominable.”

Nonetheless, the Republicans were firmly in charge of the U.S. Senate, 28 votes to 6, and Supreme Court nominees usually got approved within a week. In Wolcott’s case, the Senators referred the court nomination to a committee for the first time. Then they didn’t take a vote until nine whole days later, on 14 Feb 1811.

The U.S. Senate rejected Alexander Wolcott’s nomination to the Supreme Court by a vote of 24 to 9. This was the largest percentage against any court nominee ever. Even Republican Senators voted against the nomination by a margin of at least 2:1.

Wolcott went back to Connecticut politics. President Madison looked around for another New Englander to nominate to the high Court. Again, he needed a prominent Republican—but one with a less partisan history.

Madison’s third choice was John Quincy Adams, former Federalist Senator from Massachusetts. Adams had bucked his party’s foreign policy on several issues under President Thomas Jefferson and ended up a politician without party backing. In 1809 Madison appointed him the U.S. minister to Russia, a country Adams had first visited as a teen-aged secretary for the Continental Congress’s envoy, Francis Dana.

As with Lincoln, the Senate gave their advice and consent in favor of President Madison’s nominee. And as with Lincoln, the nominee declined the job. Adams would go on to be U.S. Secretary of State, President, and a long-time Representative from Massachusetts.

Once again President Madison scanned the New England legal landscape. The best candidate he could find was a lawyer from Marblehead, only thirty-two years old, with one term in the U.S. House of Representatives under his belt. This was Joseph Story, still the youngest person ever nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Story was confirmed and served thirty-three years. As an associate justice, law professor, and author, he exercised more influence over the U.S. legal system than anyone else in the early 1800s but Chief Justice John Marshall.

When Story died in 1845, President James K. Polk nominated Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire to succeed him. After Woodbury, the justices in that line were Benjamin Curtis of Watertown; Nathan Clifford of Maine; Horace Gray of Boston; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., of Boston. The replacement for Holmes was Benjamin Cardozo of New York, though by that time Louis Brandeis—a native of Kentucky who had established his legal career in Boston—was representing New England on the high bench.

“Walk’d with Mr: English, as clerk of the market”

For evidence of what the job of clerk of the market in Boston actually entailed, we need to find a man not only conscientious enough to accept that job but also dedicated to write down and preserve his daily activities.

Fortunately, in 1792 the Boston town meeting elected “John Q. Adams” to be a clerk of the market.

Adams was then twenty-five years old, a young lawyer. He had seen a lot of Europe as a teenager working for his father and Francis Dana, the U.S. of A.’s minister to Russia. His father was now Vice President. He had just started to serve on town committees. And it was time for him to inspect bread.

Adams was not one of the twelve men chosen as clerks of the market in the first session of Boston’s big town meeting on 12 March. But some of those men begged off, and he was elected last among five new men on the afternoon of 27 March.

Adams didn’t record that election in his diary. In fact, he wasn’t even in town, having ridden out that morning to Worcester. (“Dined at How’s Marlborough. Singular couple he 6 1/2 feet long. She as much round.”) So I have no record of how he took the news. Maybe he was chosen because he wasn’t present to object.

Nonetheless, John Quincy embarked on his civic duty. The first mention appeared in his diary for 23 April:

Walk towards Eveg: Clerks of the market met at Coleman’s [tavern], but were interrupted by a cry of fire. Adjourned till to-morrow. fire soon extinguished.

The next day he wrote:

At Court all day. No business of much consequence done. Met the clerks of the market as by adjournment. Agreed upon our proceedings. To walk with Mr: [Thomas] English.

This tells us a couple of things. First, it took almost a month after election for the new clerks of the market to get organized. Second, they paired off to “walk,” or patrol the Faneuil Hall Market and the area surrounding it.

Adams made his first patrol on Tuesday, 1 May, and it was eventful:

Walk’d with Mr: English, as clerk of the market at 6. A.M. before breakfast, and again at 11. Seized a quantity of bread. A busy forenoon.

Clerks of the market were empowered to seize loaves of bread they deemed underweight for their prices. Sometimes this led to conflicts, as in this notice in the selectmen’s minutes for 29 Nov 1769:

Mr. [Joseph] Barrel, [Joseph?] Calf & [Benjamin] Andrews, a Committee from the Clerks of the Market Complain of Mr. Harris the Baker & his Servant Robert Davis, as having abused Mr. Barrel & Andrews, by charging the former with stealing their Bread & other ill Language & also Mr. Sircombs man named Cook—abused Mr. John Bernard.

The selectmen summoned all three of those bakers and presumably admonished them. (John Bernard was the son of the highly unpopular departed governor, but he was also a duly chosen town officer.)

John Quincy Adams didn’t record such friction. It’s tempting to think he and English took strict action on their first day to make sure the bakers understood their authority.

Adams never mentioned his market duty again until 2 November:

Eve & supper with Clerks of the market. Dull time.

And then on Wednesday, 28 November:

Snow almost gone. Walk’d with [Simon] Elliot as Clerk of the Market. 

Such sporadic references suggest that a clerk of the market didn’t patrol every day or even every week. Of course, it’s possible Adams did walk by the market stalls more regularly, but he was pretty thorough in recording his daily activities.

In March 1793 the Boston town meeting chose twelve new men to be clerks of the market for the following year. Again, John Quincy Adams didn't mention that election in his diary. His next remark about the position suggests that a year later he felt a little nostalgia for it, enough to attend an event on 28 March 1794:

Dinner of the Clerks of the market. Convivial; but too numerous; attended electioneering meeting.— returned to C[oncert?]. Hall. Stayed not long there. 

But only a little nostalgia.

The Road to Concord through the Other Quincy

The latest episode of the History Ago Go podcast features host Rob Mellon and me talking about The Road to Concord and the Battle of Lexington and Concord that followed.

Here are links to this episode through various platforms:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• I Heart

Rob Mellon is the executive director of the Historical Society of Quincy & Adams County, Illinois. This Quincy has the last syllable pronounced “see” and not “zee,” as we do here in Massachusetts.

After we finished recording, I told Rob about how I’d tried to visit Quincy during one of my first vacations as a working adult, when I attended Tom Sawyer Days in Hannibal, Missouri. Quincy is just across the river. But in that year of 1993, the river was in flood, and the bridges were all closed. So it’s still on my list.

Rob informed me that Quincy was named after John Quincy Adams. In fact, when the settlement originally called Bluffs took that new name in 1825, the people honored the incoming President in three ways. They named their county Adams, their town Quincy, and their central intersection John Square.

Since then, though, they renamed the town square after Washington. The Adams family would no doubt say that was typical.

“There to pursue their Studies of Latin and Greek”

John Adams wasted no time in reacting to Benjamin Waterhouse’s 13 Dec 1780 letter about educational opportunities in Leyden, quoted yesterday.

Five days later, the American diplomat packed his eldest sons, John Quincy and Charles, off to that Dutch university town with their occasional tutor, John Thaxter.

Even before knowing that they had settled in, Adams wrote home to his wife Abigail in Braintree:

My dearest Portia

I have this morning sent Mr. Thaxter, with my two Sons to Leyden, there to take up their Residence for some time, and there to pursue their Studies of Latin and Greek under the excellent Masters, and there to attend Lectures of the celebrated Professors in that University. It is much cheaper there than here: the Air is infinitely purer; and the Company and Conversation is better.

It is perhaps as learned an University as any in Europe.

I should not wish to have Children, educated in the common Schools in this Country, where a littleness of Soul is notorious. The Masters are mean Spirited Writches, pinching, kicking, and boxing the Children, upon every Turn.

The last paragraph looks like a comment on the Latin School on the Singel, where John Quincy had had such a poor experience in September and October.

This letter is our first sign that part of the pedagogy, and part of the problem, at that school was corporal punishment. Or, probably more accurately, even more corporal punishment than a New England family like the Adamses thought was just.

As Adams wrote, he and his wife were staying on friendly terms with James Lovell, a former usher at Boston’s South Latin School whose method of beating boys on the hand with his ruler was legendary. But whatever happened in Amsterdam was supposedly worse.

Another implication of this letter is that John Adams had not told Abigail anything about John Quincy’s problems at the Latin School. She may never have learned about those difficult fifty days and how her eldest son reportedly misbehaved to force his removal.

Fortunately, John Quincy liked the new arrangements in Leyden. The day after the party arrived, he told his father, “we went to hear a Medicinal lecture by Professor Horn, we saw several experiments there. In the afternoon we went to Hear a Law lecture by Professor Pessel.” The next day he reported: 

I have this day seen the master who is to teach us greek and Latin. He is to come to us twice a day; from twelve to one oclock and from five to six in the afternoon, so that I shall be two hours occupied with our master an hour at each lecture is two more and the rest of my time I shall be writing from Homer, the Greek testament, of Grammar, and learning lessons for our Master.

Thaxter engaged this man, an usher at the town’s high school, for thirty Guilders per month. The lessons were in French, as the boys had prepared for.

In addition, in January 1781 the university registered Thaxter, John Quincy, and Charles as students, the first two to study law and the youngest to study letters. Thaxter reported: “Ils travaillent avec beaucoup d’ardeur, et ils avancent très bien.” They work with lots of ardor and they progress very well.

Thus ended the only significant blot on John Quincy Adams’s scholastic career.

“Send my Children to me this Evening”

As I quoted yesterday, on 10 Nov 1780 Latin School rector Heinrich Verheyk sent American diplomat John Adams a letter stating that his eldest son, John Quincy Adams, was misbehaving in an attempt to get expelled.

John Adams responded immediately:

Sir

I have this moment received, with Surprise and Grief, your Billet.

I pray you Sir, to send my Children to me this Evening and your Account, together with their Chests and Effects tomorrow. I have the Honour to be, with great Respect, Sir, your humble servant,

He whisked both John Quincy and younger son Charles out of the Latin School at the Singel.

We don’t know what conversations took place in the Adams house that night. We do know that Adams already disagreed with how the school was placing John Quincy in a class with younger boys instead of letting him study Greek. So, while he may have been mortified at his son’s reported misbehavior, he sympathized with the motive behind it.

Adams cast about for a way for his boys to continue their education. John Quincy was thirteen, a year away from the age when many elite Massachusetts boys went to Harvard, and Charles was ten. They needed Latin and Greek for college. Adams was too busy trying to convince the Dutch republic to recognize the U.S. of A. to teach them himself. John Thaxter, who had tutored the boys in Braintree and aboard the ship to Europe, was still in Paris helping the American diplomats there.

Somehow Adams learned about another possible source of information: a young man from Newport, Rhode Island, named Benjamin Waterhouse (1754-1846, shown above as painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1775). He had started studying medicine as an apprentice at age sixteen and then sailed to Britain for more advanced training in March 1775, just before the Boston Port Bill took effect. Though Waterhouse spent the next three years in wartime Britain, he supported the independent U.S. of A.

In 1778 Waterhouse went to study at the University of Leyden, reportedly disconcerting the authorities by declaring himself a citizen of the free American states, which Holland had yet to recognize. After finishing a medical degree in 1780, he went back to Britain to visit his mentor there, then returned to Leyden to attend lectures on law and history. Perhaps on that trip he passed through Amsterdam, a little over twenty miles north of Leyden, and met the American minister.

Sometime in November or early December Adams asked Waterhouse if there were educational opportunities for his sons in Leyden. On 13 December the young doctor wrote back:

It so happened that I could not see the persons of whom I wished to enquire concerning the Schools, mode of education &c. untill yesterday, otherwise I should have written before.—

The Gentlemen from whom I have my information have each of them a young person under their care about the age of your eldest, and are well acquainted with every thing appertaining to education in this City, from conversing with them I am able to inform you that besides the publick-school which is a good one, there are private masters in the latin and greek, who at the same time they teach these languages, teach the greek and roman History. With boys who are far advanced in greek they read and explain Euripides, Sophocles and others.

The same person will if required repeat any of the Law-lectures to the pupil, and that indeed is what they are principally employed for, by those whose wives are to be Mevrouws [i.e., ladies].— There is a teacher of this kind in Leyden who is both an elegant schollar and a gentleman, such a one asks 20 ducats a year. . . .

In regard to living I am persuaded they can live here for much less than at Amsterdam. Three furnished rooms would probably cost 20 guilders a month. We find our own tea, sugar, wine, light and fire, and give one ducat a week for dinner, it is always the same price whether we go to the public-house, or have it brought from thence to our own rooms . . .

In respect to their being Americans or Sons of Mr. Adams they will never meet with any thing disagreeable on that head, where any profit is like to accrue little do the Dutchmen care for their political, or even religious principles—Turk, Jew, or Christian make no difference with them. I beleive we may say of them as they said of themselves at Japan when the Japonese enquired if they were christians—they answered, they were Dutchmen.

If the Gentlemen should come, I can insure them an agreeable Society and a genteel circle of acquaintance. If they should not, I hope at least they will come and pay us a visit, and I think I need not add how ready I should be to render them any service in my power.

Meanwhile, Adams had summoned Thaxter from Paris.

TOMORROW: A new arrangement.

“The disobedience and impertinence of your eldest son”

John Quincy Adams signed off his 30 Sept 1780 diary entry with: “End of My Journal.”

It’s not clear whether he meant the end of that month, the end of one little volume, or the end of his resolve to write daily entries about his life. But no journals from John Quincy survive until June 1781, when his life was quite different.

Back on 6 September John Quincy recorded that at the Latin School on the Singel: “Brother Charles and Myself Study in a little chamber apart because we dont understand the Dutch.” And on 9 September he wrote:

At about twelve o clock [family servant Joseph] Stevens came here for us, as we were going we met our Dutch Master who was coming to give us a Lesson.

The Adams brothers didn’t stay for that lesson; they were at their father’s home well before one o’clock. It’s also notable that John Quincy didn’t put the name of his Dutch teacher or any other teacher at the Latin School into his journal. He wasn’t connecting with them.

After September, our evidence about John Quincy’s life at the Latin School come from his father John Adams’s correspondence. First, on 18 October he wrote out a letter to the heads of the school:

Mr. Adams presents his Compliments to the Rector and the Preceptor, and acquaints them that his eldest Son is thirteen Years of Age: that he has made considerable progress already in Greek and Latin: that he has been long in Virgil and Cicero, and that he has read a great deal for his Age, both in French and English; and therefore Mr. Adams thinks it would discourage him to be placed and kept in the lower Forms or Classes of the School; and that it would be a damage to interrupt him in Greek, which he might go on to learn without understanding Dutch. Mr. Adams therefore requests that he may be put into the higher Forms, and put upon the Study of Greek.

In the end, however, Adams didn’t send that letter. He continued to defer to the teachers’ judgments about his eldest son.

That presumably left John Quincy stuck as a teenager in a class with little boys just starting their Latin, still struggling with rudimentary Dutch even though he could speak French.

It appears that John Quincy then took action on his own to resolve his situation. On 10 November the school’s rector, Heinrich Verheyk, wrote to John Adams (as translated from the French by Google and me):

The disobedience and impertinence of your eldest son, who does his best to corrupt his amiable Brother, is no longer to be suffered, since he himself seeks by his insolence to attract the punishment he Merits, in hopes of leaving the school under this pretext.

I beg you, therefore, to have the goodness to withdraw him from here, rather than to see public discipline rendered laughable, since at the end I shall be obliged to treat him according to the laws of our school.

I have the honor to be Monsieur Your Most Humble Servant,

As I wrote before, John Quincy rarely broke rules. He liked doing well in school, and he craved his parents’ approval. He tried to fit in at the Latin School when he arrived. But he apparently didn’t make friends among the Dutch boys, and the teachers held him back. So, at least according to the rector, he changed his usual behavior and set out to get himself expelled.

TOMORROW: What did Pappa and Momma say?

[The picture above is the title page of an edition of Antoninus Liberalis’s Metamorphoses, edited and published in 1774 by rector Heinrich Verheyk. A handsomely bound edition of this book was one of the prizes given to top boys at the Latin School.]

“I shall have but very few things to put down”

On 1 Sept 1780, his second full day at his new school in Amsterdam, John Quincy Adams warned readers of his diary that he would soon be too busy to write much in it:

As I shall have but very few things to put down I shall keep a Journal only the days when there will be something Extraodinary.

We don’t have John Quincy’s diary from that spring when he attended a school in Passy, France, alongside other American boys like Silas Deane’s son Jesse (shown here at age two) and Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. Maybe that journal didn’t survive, but his comment in September suggests he hadn’t seen a reason to keep a diary when he was busy studying and playing day after day.

As it turned out, John Quincy wrote in his diary every day in September 1780. Even when he reported, “Nothing very remarkable to day,” he took the time to write that. On several evenings he copied poetry from The Spectator, The Tatler, The Guardian, and other old volumes into his notebook, making it a commonplace book.

John Quincy’s longer entries reported his and his younger brother Charles’s moves between the school and the house where their father was staying. Classes ended at midday on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the brothers always went home as soon as they could, returning on Wednesday evening or Monday morning. 

Three weeks of school vacation began on 22 September. John Quincy and Charles slept at the school, but they still spent every day with their father and his colleagues, often seeing local sites before getting walked back in the evenings.

The highlight of the month came just before that vacation:

To day I went with all the scholars to see the promotion and the proemiums given. It was in the old Church. There were present two burgermasters the inspector of the school the rector the Conrector, the Praeceptors and the professors, and all the scholars.

In the first place three scholars spoke Orations one after the other and then the rector named those who were to receive the praemiums and they Went and received them from the Hand of one of the Burger master’s. The praemiums of the first and Second Classes were folio Volumes magnificently bound, those of the 3d and 4th’s Quarto Volumes and the fifth and sixth Octavo Volumes.

John Adams wrote about his eldest son’s response to that prize ceremony in a letter to Abigail on 25 September:

My two Boys are at an excellent Latin School, or in the Language of this Country, Den de Latÿnche School op de Cingel by de Munt. The Scholars here all speak French.

John has seen one of the Commencements when the young Gentlemen delivered their Orations and received their Premiums, and Promotions which set his Ambition all afire.

Charles is the same amiable insinuating Creature. Wherever he goes he gets the Hearts of every Body especially the Ladies.

One of these Boys is the Sublime and the other the Beautifull.

John Quincy may not have been as naturally amiable as Charles, but he had made friends his own age on the ship to Europe and in Passy. He exchanged letters with those schoolmates after he had to leave.

On his first day at the Latin School on the Singel, John Quincy wrote down the names of the other boarders. One of those boys, “young Mr. Brants,” visited the Adamses the next weekend. But Brants never appeared in the diary again, and John Quincy never mentioned any other schoolmate by name. After that 22 September ceremony he described “three scholars” orating and others receiving prizes, but he didn’t note who those scholars were.

All the boarders had their own bed chambers, so John Quincy wasn’t thrown in with a roommate to get to know. Furthermore, despite expecting everyone to speak French, the Adams boys were taught separately: “Brother Charles and Myself Study in a little chamber apart because we dont understand the Dutch.” As a result, John Quincy wasn’t making friends.

John Quincy’s September 1780 diary suggests that he spent his free time alone in his room, copying stuff from magazines and waiting for his next opportunity to go home.

TOMORROW: The language barrier.

“One of the schools which I was in when I was here before”

In considering how John Quincy Adams reacted to his new school in Amsterdam in the fall of 1780, it’s useful to recognize how deeply he wanted to please his parents.

Back in the spring of 1780, John Quincy returned to a small school in Passy, France, taught by a man named Péchigny. In 1771 that gentleman had issued a prospectus for an “école de mathématiques, de belles-lettres, d’arts libéraux et cours de langues”—a school of mathematics, belles-lettres, liberal arts, and language courses. 

Soon after starting, the twelve-year-old sent a report to his father listing “My Work for a day”:

Make Latin,
Explain Cicero
   Erasmus [Colloquia]
   Appendix [Appendix de Diis et Heroibus ethnicis]
Peirce [i.e., parse] Phaedrus [Fables]

Learn greek Racines [i.e., roots]
   greek Grammar

Geography
geometry
fractions

Writing
Drawing

“Writing” meant handwriting practice, not composition. “Drawing” was likewise an exercise in penmanship, and John Quincy demonstrated by bridging the page with an ornamental design.

But this letter wasn’t just showing off. John Quincy finished by humbly asking his father for advice on what subjects to concentrate on:

As a young boy can not apply himself to all those Things and keep a remembrance of them all I should desire that you would let me know what of those I must begin upon at first.

I am your Dutiful Son,

When you asked John Adams what you should do, you got an answer. On 17 March he told Johnny to keep at the Latin and Greek as M. Péchigny told him. “Writing and Drawing are but Amusements and may serve as Relaxations from your studies.” And as to the mathematical subjects, he wrote, “I hope your Master will not insist upon your spending much Time upon them at present”; even elite New England schools left off geography and geometry until college.

John Adams didn’t stop there, though. He also critiqued his eldest son’s letter-writing technique. “You should have dated your Letter,” he wrote at the top. And a postscript added, “The next Time you write to me, I hope you will take more care to write well. Cant you keep a steadier Hand?”

The editors of the Adams Papers published images of John Quincy’s letters before and after this one to show how much more care the boy then took to make his handwriting neat for his father. (He was already being much more neat in letters home to his mother.)

Another glimpse of John Quincy’s attitude toward schooling appears in a letter he wrote to a cousin on 17 March, the same date as his father’s reply.

I am in one of the schools which I was in when I was here before and am very content with my situation. I will give you an account of our hours.

At 7 o clock A.M. we get up and go in to school and at 8 o clock we breakfast which consists of bread and milk. At 9 go into school again, stay till one when we dine, after dinne[r] play till half after two, go into school and stay till half after 4 and then we have a peice of dry bread. At 5 we go into School and stay till 7 when we sup, after supper we amuse ourselves a little and go to bed at 9 o clock.

Thus, John Quincy (and his brother Charles) was at study eight and a half hours of the day in Passy. His afternoon snack consisted of “a piece of dry bread.” And he was “very content.”

This was not a boy to complain about a school for petty reasons.

TOMORROW: At the Latin School on the Singel.

“I will also take down some of the rules of the school”

On 31 Aug 1780, John Quincy Adams woke up in an unfamiliar bed.

As I recounted yesterday, the thirteen-year-old had been left at the Latin School on the Singel in Amsterdam, along with his ten-year-old brother, Charles.

Their father, John Adams, was in Holland as the Continental Congress’s representative to the Dutch government. He didn’t want his boys to fall behind on their schooling.

Earlier in the year, when the Adamses were in Paris, John had sent his two boys to a small academy. There’s no discussion in the family papers of how he made a similar decision in Amsterdam, but presumably it wasn’t a surprise.

In characteristic mode, John Quincy immediately set about to studying his new school and home. His diary for 31 August begins:

This morning we got up and I asked the names of all the scholars who board here. They are as follows.

Roghe, Toelaer, Vander Burgs, Hulft, Slingelandt, Brants, Van Lennep, Koene, de Graft, Genets, Petri, Van der Paul, Clifford.

He added marks to help him pronounce those unfamiliar names.

Then John Quincy wrote, “I will also take down some of the rules of the school.” At least in this recording, that really meant the meal schedule, but it ran to more than 200 words.

At the end John Quincy wrote about his fellow students:

Every one of the young Gentlemen Speak french and it is a general Custom for the Gentlemen to have their sons speak french. Their comes here every day an hundred boys to learn latin.

That was helpful because he couldn’t speak Dutch, but he could read and speak French pretty well.

Indeed, John Quincy then began to write out a history of the school from a 1772 French guidebook that his father had lent him, translating the prose as he went:

This place was formerly a charity house of a Convent of Religious women. I have a book call’d le Guide D’Amsterdam in which this School is spoke of. It is in french but I will translate it as well as I can into English.

That passage came to another 600 words, starting with a count’s permission for the city to found schools in 1342 and ending with new library acquisitions.

The new schoolboy concluded his morning diary entry by writing: “At about 10 o clock our things were brought here by [family servant Joseph] Stevens. Pappa and Mr. [Herman] Le Roi came to see us.”

John Quincy didn’t record any reluctance about staying at this school. He seems to have been really eager to fit in.

TOMORROW: The school day.

Off to a New School in 1780

Here’s a story I’ve had in mind for a while, waiting for back-to-school season. It’s about the time young John Quincy Adams behaved so badly he had to be pulled out of school.

“What?” you exclaim. “John Quincy Adams? The prematurely mature fellow who went to St. Petersburg on a diplomatic mission at the age of fourteen and learned to speak eight foreign languages?

“The disciplined guy who kept a diary for sixty-eight years and served in the House of Representatives for eighteen years until he had a fatal stroke at his desk and was even, to be honest, a bit of a prig? Not our Johnny Quincy! No, no, you must mean Charles.”

Indeed, Charles Adams did rack up a lot of infractions at Harvard College, far more than his older and younger brothers. (See the Boston 1775 investigation starting here.) But in the episode I’m now writing about, reports said Charles was pulled into misbehavior by John Quincy. This story unveils a side of the oldest Adams boy we hardly ever see.

In August 1780, John Adams was the Continental Congress’s envoy to Holland, based in Amsterdam. He had brought his two oldest sons to Europe with him. John Quincy had just turned thirteen, and Charles was ten. John Thaxter had come along as a secretary for the minister and an occasional tutor for the boys, but he was back in Paris, and their father wanted them to have formal schooling.

On 30 August, John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary: ”After supper Mr. Le Roi went with us to a School and left us here. How long we shall stay here I can not tell.”

“Mr. Le Roi” was Herman Le Roy, New York–born son of the Rotterdam merchant Jacob Le Roy. He hosted the Adamses in Amsterdam, particularly the boys, and helped John Adams translate documents. A couple of years later as the war simmered down, Herman Le Roy sailed back to America. He formed a mercantile firm with his in-law William Bayard and made a lot of money from trade and developing land in western New York. Le Roy was also Holland’s consul to the U.S. of A.

As for the school where Le Roy left the two boys, the editors of the Adams Papers explain:

The school was the celebrated Latin School on the Singel (innermost of Amsterdam’s concentric canals), close to what is today one of the busiest sections of the city, marked by the ornate and highly conspicuous Mint Tower in the Muntplein (Mint Square) and across from the Bloemenmarkt (Flower Market). The building then used by the school is now, much altered, occupied by the city police.

The picture above shows that school building painted by Jacob Smies around 1802. Explore that painting more, courtesy of the Rijksmuseum and Google Arts and Culture, here.

TOMORROW: Settling in.

More to See at History Camp America 2021

Yesterday I shared the video preview of my presentation at History Camp America 2021, coming up on 10 July.

There are seven more video previews of sessions at this page, ranging from Fort Ticonderoga in the north to the Buffalo Soldier National Museum in ths south.

Here are more scheduled History Camp America sessions with some link to Revolutionary New England:

• Video tour of Fort Ticonderoga
• Video tour of Buckman Tavern in Lexington
• “Reimagining America: The Maps of Lewis and Clark” by Carolyn Gilman
• “The Amphibious Assault on Long Island August 1776” by Ross Schwalm
• “Saunkskwa, Sachem, Minister: native kinship and settler church kinship in 17th and 18th-century New England” by Lori Rogers-Stokes
• “‘Thrown into pits’: how were the bodies of the nineteen hanged Salem ‘witches’ really treated?” by Marilynne K. Roach
• “Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates” by Eric Jay Dolin
• “Inconvenient Founders: Thomas Young and the Forgotten Disrupters of the American Revolution” by Scott Nadler
• “Slaves in the Puritan Village: The Untold History of Colonial Sudbury” by Jane Sciacca
• “Surviving the Lash: Corporal Punishment and British Soldiers’ Careers” by Don Hagist
• “Saving John Quincy Adams From Alligators and Mole People” by Howard Dorre
• “Lafayette’s Farewell Tour and National Coherence – The Lafayette Trail” by Julien Icher
• “Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern: The Headquarters of the Revolution” by Andrew Cotten
• “The Fairbanks House of Dedham: The House, The Myth, The Legend” by Stuart Christie
• “First Amendment Origin Stories & James Madison Interview” by Jane Hampton Cook & Kyle Jenks
• “Historic Marblehead – A Walking Tour” by Judy Anderson
• “The Second Battle of Lexington & Concord: re-inventing the history of the opening engagements of the American Revolution” by Richard C. Wiggin
• “To Arms: How Adams, Revere, Mason, and Henry Helped to Unify their Respective Colonies” by Melissa Bryson

Plus, there are a hefty selection of other sessions about history farther afield, before and after.

Again, registration costs $94.95, and for another $30 folks can receive a box of goodies from History Camp sponsors and participating historical sites. Registrants can watch videos and participate in scheduled live online discussions on 10 July, and will have access to the entire video library for a year.

“Contested Elections” and “Difficult Transitions”

Back on 6 January, both the Massachusetts Historical Society and Revolutionary Spaces had online panel discussions planned about the past examples of difficult Presidential transitions in American history.

That was a timely topic, but no one realized how timely. That morning, the President defeated at the polls and in the Electoral College told a crowd of his supporters:

We’re going to have to fight much harder and Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us. If he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our constitution. Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. . . .

The President then left. He watched on television as his supporters mobbed the Capitol and threatened his Vice President, taking no action to stop the violence for hours. Five people died in that riot.

Understandably, both local historical societies postponed their panel discussions on 6 January. But in the following week they proceeded with those events as Congress finished the ritual of totaling electoral votes and then impeached the President again for his abuse of power.

Now we can watch both discussions online. They cover some of the early transitions as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson contested the Presidency. At that time, politicians still espoused the ideal of not forming political parties but blamed the other side for forming one first. The 1820s contests between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson also get attention.

The most contested U.S. election of all was of course in 1860, when one side refused to accept democratic defeat and started a civil war. That event can be bookended with another contested election in 1876, which led to the federal government ending Reconstruction attempts to protect the rights and persons of black citizens in the former Confederacy.

At the Massachusetts Historical Society, the theme of the panel was “‘At Noon on the 20th Day of January’: Contested Elections in American History” and the participants were:

• Joanne B. Freeman, Yale University
• Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia
• Rachel A. Shelden, Penn State University
• Erik B. Alexander, Southern Illinois University
• Ted Widmer, Macaulay Honors College, moderator

Watch here.

At Revolutionary Spaces, the theme was “Difficult Transitions” and the participants were:

• Joseph Ellis, Mount Holyoke College
• Eric Rauchway, University of California, Davis
• Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
• David Greenberg, Rutgers University
• Matthew Wilding, Revolutionary Spaces, moderator

Watch here.

And let’s make some reforms to lessen the chance of having to go through this again.

A Portrait of Parson Wibird

In the letter discussed yesterday, Mary Cranch wrote about how “mrs P——l——r was brought to Bed” with a mysterious new baby. Cranch heard that news from “mr wibird.”

That was the Rev. Anthony Wibird (1729-1800), the minister for the north precinct of Braintree (later Quincy). He was an excellent gossip, entertaining and careful not to take sides in town feuds.

In fact, he was a better gossip than he was a minister, because he had a tendency to repeat his sermons over and over (though John Quincy Adams felt he did an excellent job reading psalms).

Back in 1759 John Adams tried to assess what made Wibird popular locally:

He plays with Babes and young Children that begin to prattle, and talks with their Mothers, asks them familiar, pleasant Questions, about their affection to their Children. His familiar careless way of conversing with People, Men and Women. He has Wit, and Humour.

The minister’s personal popularity was notable because he also had a neurological condition that affected his posture and gait at a time when many people looked down on such a disability. That same spring Adams wrote uncharitably:

P[arson] W[ibird] is crooked, his Head bends forwards, his shoulders are round and his Body is writhed, and bended, his head and half his Body, have a list one Way, the other half declines the other Way, and his lower Parts from his Middle, incline another Way. His features are as coarse and crooked as his Limbs. . . .

But his Air, and Gesture, is still more extraordinary. When he stands, He stands, bended, in and out before and behind and to both Right and left; he tosses his Head on one side. When he prays at home, he raises one Knee upon the Chair, and throws one Hand over the back of it. With the other he scratches his Neck, pulls the Hair of his Wigg, strokes his Beard, rubbs his Eyes, and Lips.

When he Walks, he heaves away, and swaggs on one side, and steps almost twice as far with one foot, as with the other.

When he sitts, he sometimes lolls on the arms of his Chair, sometimes on the Table. He entwines his leggs round the Leggs of his Chair, lays hold of the Iron Rod of the stand with one Hand. Sometimes throws him self, over the back of his Chair, and scratches his Hed, Vibrates the foretop of his Wigg, thrusts his Hand up under his Wigg, &c.

When he speakes, he cocks and rolls his Eyes, shakes his Head, and jerks his Body about.

Thus clumsy, careless, slovenly, and lazy is this sensible Man.

It is surprizing to me that the Delicacy of his Mind has not corrected these Indecent, as well as ungraceful Instances of Behaviour. He has Wit, and he has Fancy, and he has Judgment. He is a Genius. But he has no Industry, no Delicacy, no Politeness. Tho’ he seems to have a sort of Civility, and Cleverness in his Manners. A civil, clever Man.

Young Adams didn’t get that Wibird’s behavior and appearance weren’t a matter of intellectual or moral choices.

To be sure, Adams may have been feeling sour about the parson because that year they were rivals for the attention of Miss Hannah Quincy.

TOMORROW: Bachelors in Braintree.