It is in those first frenzied moments of war fever when declarations of patriotism are their most ardent. So it was for the “Young Men of the City of Philadelphia” in the spring of 1798, when the United States stood within a hair’s breadth of war with France.
These young Americans, “anxious to preserve the honor & independence of their Country,” begged leave to assure President John Adams that, “filled with a spirit of friendship towards the whole world” as he was, he could rest assured that he had employed “every just & honorable means of conciliating the friendship of the French Republic,” who in the opposite spirit had responded to his entreaties with a “determined hostility and contempt.”
Adams could also be confident that “The Youth of the American Nation” would eagerly share in the “danger difficulty and glory of its defence,” acting on “every occasion” with all they were capable of, to which they pledged themselves to their president, “to our country, and to the World.”[1]
“Nothing of the kind could be more welcome to me than this address,” Adams wrote in reply. “For a long course of years, I was called to act with your fathers in concerting measures the most disagreeable and dangerous,” all for the sole purpose of preserving “the honor of our country” and to “vindicate the immemorial liberties of our ancestors.”
Deeply grateful and, at the same time, loathe to lecture young men as noble and learned as they, Adams nevertheless begged leave to be “indulged the privilege of a father” in recommending to their “serious and constant consideration, that science and morals are the great pillars on which this country has been raised to its present population, opulence, and prosperity, and that these alone can advance, support, and preserve it.”[2]
Just over fifteen years later, Adams made this address and his reply the main subject of one of his letters to Thomas Jefferson in their renewed correspondence.
Beneath the joy he felt at its resumption, and in spite of the enduring feelings of tenderness and affection he felt towards his former colleague, the second president still seethed at the treatment he had received from his successor and allies. Adams was determined to defend himself —to assure Jefferson that he was as much a proponent and believer in American liberty as he had been since those heady days when they had worked together to declare American independence.
He also knew that he and Jefferson were writing not just to each other, but to future generations, and he was just as interested in defending himself to them as he was to the proprietor of Monticello. To that audience, Adams expressed the hope that they would first “hunt up” that Address from the Young Men of Philadelphia, read it in its entirety, and return to the present epistle.
“Who composed that Army of fine young Fellows that was then before my Eyes?” Adams asked. They all had come from different religious sects, he answered, some of them Roman Catholics, some “Anababtists,” some “Priestleyans,” still others “Horse Protestants and House Protestants,” and so forth. Very few of them adhered to the same sect, yet all of them were “Educated in the general principles of Christianity: and the general Principles of English and American Liberty.” It was these “general principles” upon which Adams, Jefferson, and the rest had achieved independence, and they “were the only Principles in which that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite.”
Adams then avowed that he long believed, “and now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity, are as eternal and immutable, as the Existence and Attributes of God; and that those Principles of Liberty, are as unalterable as human Nature and our terrestrial, mundane System.”
Adams declined the opportunity to expand on what, in his own mind, these general principles of Christianity and English-American liberty were. Perhaps he was wary of boring his audience: “This letter is already too long.”[3]
Or perhaps, in his seventy-eighth year, he was tired of repeating himself, for these “great pillars” of the “general principles” of Christianity and English and American Liberty were among the very first topics he had speculated upon through his pen—topics he had discussed, with others and with himself, decades before in letters, his diary, and public pamphlets.
It had been in his early twenties while working as a schoolmaster in Worcester, Massachusetts—bored, lonely, and unsettled—that he first set out against sectarian Christianity in favor of the general principles thereof. “The Church of Rome has made it an Article of Faith,” he declared, “that no man can be saved out of their Church, and all other religious Sects approach to this dreadfull opinion in proportion to their Ignorance, and the Influence of ignorant or wicked priests.”
Two days later he returned to this idea:
Where do we find a praecept in the Gospell, requiring Ecclesiastical Synods, Convocations, Councils, Decrees, Creeds, Conffessions, Oaths, Subscriptions and whole Cartloads of other trumpery, that we find Religion incumbered with in these days?
Having summarily dismissed the pretensions of any one denomination’s claims to doctrinal truth, four days later he enunciated the essence of Christianity he adhered to and that would constitute the general principles he believed served as the pillar to American independence and prosperity:
Suppos a nation in some distant Region, should take the Bible for their only law Book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. Every member would be obliged in Concience to temperance and frugality and industry, to justice and kindness and Charity towards his fellow men, and to piety and Love, and reverence towards almighty God.
In this idealized “commonwealth,” the common human vices—“gluttony, drunkenness, or lust,” card games and other “trifling and mean” amusements—would be absent; and the citizens thereof would “live in peace and goodwill with all men. . . . What a Utopia; what a Paradise would this region be!”[4]
Adams, even in the flower of his youth, was far too much the skeptic of human nature to believe such a heavenly idyll was remotely possible here on earth. Yet it was the pursuit of a near-enough facsimile, in Adams’ somewhat mythologized understanding at least, upon which the peopling of America by European colonists had taken place over a century before. Then “a few people came over into this new world for Concience sake.”[5]
Edified by a growing knowledge of the universe those first Pilgrims had lived in, Adams would write, but laboring still under the “canon and feudal laws” that had shackled Europeans for centuries, “a struggle between the people and the confederacy . . . of temporal and spiritual tyranny” had become “formidable, violent and bloody.”
This “great struggle” had peopled America. “It was not religion alone, as is commonly supposed, but it was a love of universal Liberty” that had, at long last, resolved Adams’ Puritan forebearers to “fly to the wilderness for refuge.”[6]
Though Adams had no love to lose for the theological pretensions or zealotry of his Puritan forebearers (“Religious to some degree of enthusiasm it may be admitted they were”), it was not upon this ground that they should be deplored by his generation, if for no other reason than “because it was at that time almost the universal character, not only of England, but of Christendom.”
Instead they should be honored, for the principles they had risked their lives venturing into an unknown wilderness for were the ones Adams’ generation of Americans were defending in their disputes with Parliament:
Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the scriptures, and a government of the state more agreable to the dignity of humane nature, than any they had seen in Europe: and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it, for ever.[7]
Not only an exegesis of the Puritans’ mission over a century before, it was one of the first expressions of the “great pillars” Adams mentioned in his letter to the Young Men of Philadelphia, and then expanded upon fifteen years after that in his letter to Jefferson.
The search for, and establishment of, religious and political liberty centered around a fundamental agreement on the basic principles thereof, regardless of differences in doctrines and creed, was the essence of America. As historian John Ferling writes:
A native-born American whose Massachusetts ancestry went back nearly a century, Adams looked upon his America as a revolutionary enterprise. Here, his Puritan ancestors had gained religious freedom. Here, government based on the consent of the governed had achieved a status unimaginable in England. Here, not only his ancestors but he too had enjoyed the opportunity to rise above his birthright. This was the American Revolution of which he spoke.[8]
In his later years, Adams would routinely tackle the question, “But what do we mean by the American Revolution?” In his mind, the “Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People,” beginning with a change “in their religious Sentiments of their Duties and Obligations.” From there the “habitual Affection for England as their Mother Country” was altered in their finding Great Britain to be “a cruel Bedlam willing, like Lady MacBeth, to ‘dash their Brains out.’” Having so found, “it is no wonder their filial Affections ceased and were changed into Indignation and horror.”
From there, one of the most amazing feats in world history had been achieved by his generation:
The Colonies had grown up under Constitutions of Government so different, there was so great a Variety of Religions, they were composed of so many different Nations, their Customs, Manners and Habits had so little resemblance, and their Intercourse had been so rare and their Knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same Principles in Theory and the same System of Action was certainly a very difficult Enterprise. The compleat Accomplishment of it, in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular Example in the History of Mankind. Thirteen Clocks were made to strike together; a perfection of Mechanism which no Artist had ever before effected.[9]
As he had told the Young Men of Philadelphia as president, and then Jefferson and posterity as retired statesman, those thirteen clocks had been made to strike as one because, at the risk of cruelly mangling metaphors, they had all stood upon the “Great Pillars” of the “general principles of Christianity: and the general Principles of English and American Liberty.”
To John Adams, these “Great Pillars” were what put the unum in the United States’ e pluribus.
And what made the United States indivisible.
[1] Young Men of Philadelphia to John Adams, May 7, 1798, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-2449.
[2] Adams to Young Men of Philadelphia, May 7, 1798, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-2450.
[3] Adams to Thomas Jefferson; June 28 1813, in Gordon S. Wood, ed., John Adams: Writings from the New Nation, 1784-1826 (New York: The Library of America, 2016), 554-555.
[4] John Adams, “Diary and Autobiography,” in John Patrick Diggins, ed., The Portable John Adams (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2004), 2-3.
[5] “To Nathan Webb,” in Wood, ed., Writings from the New Nation, 3.
[6] “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law No. I,” ibid., 117.
[7] “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Fedual Law No. II,” ibid., 118-119.
[8] John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 154.
[9] “To Hezekiah Niles,” in Wood, ed., Writings from the New Nation, 629-630.
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THANK YOU FOR THIS GREAT ARTICLE!