Adams Family Correspondence, volume 1
1775-07-31
I do not feel easy more than two days together without writing to you. If you abound you must lay some of the fault upon yourself, who have made such sad complaints for Letters, but I really believe I have wrote more than all my Sister Delegates. Their is nothing new transpired since I wrote you last, but the sailing of some transports, and 5 deserters having come into our camp. One of them is gone I hear to Phyladelphia. I think I should be cautious of him—no one can tell the secret designs of such fellows whom no oath binds—he may be sent with assassinating designs. I can credit any viliny that a Ceasar Borgea would have been guilty of—or Satan himself would rejoice in. Those who do not scruple to bring poverty, Misiry, Slavery and Death upon thousands will not hesitate at the most diabolical crimes—and this is Brittain. Blush o! Americans that ever thou derivest thy origin from such a race.
We learn from one of these Deserters that our ever valued Friend Warren, dear to us even in Death; was
“How much does pagan tenderness put christian Benevolence to shame.” What Humanity could not obtain, the rights and ceremonies of a Mason demanded. An officer who it seems was one of the Brotherwhood requested that as a Mason he might have the body unmangled, and find a decent interment for it. He obtaind his request, but upon returning to secure it, he found it already thrown into the Earth, only 270with the ceremony of being first placed there, with many bodies over him2—
Thus far I wrote and broke of
I had a design to have wrote you something about a talk'd of appointment of a Friend of Mine to a Judicial Department, but hope soon to see that Friend, before his acceptance may be necessary.3 I enclose a complement coppied by a Gentleman from a peice in the Worcester paper signed Lycurgus.4
I can add no more as the good Col. Palmer Waits only my compliments to Mrs. Miflin, and tell her I do not know whether her Husband is safe here. Belona and Cupid have a contest about
Here and below, MS is torn by seal.
AA is reporting only a part of the rumors that circulated then and later about British indignities to Joseph Warren after his death in Bunker Hill battle, where he fought as a volunteer and not as an officer. Their precise extent is now known from a letter, only recently published, written a few days after the battle by the British officer who commanded the burial detachment. This was Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie, who wrote from “Camp on Charles Town Heights” to an unidentified correspondent, 23 June 1775: “Doctor Warren, President of the Provincial Congress, and Captain General, in the Absence of Hancock and [Samuel] Adams, and next to Adams, in abilities, I found among the Slain, and stuffed the Scoundrel with another Rebel, into one hole, and there he, and his seditious principles may remain” (quoted in Sigmund Diamond, “Bunker Hill, Tory Propaganda, and Adam Smith,”
NEQ
, 25:367 [Sept. 1952]). In April 1776, soon after the
British evacuation of Boston, Warren's body was identified, exhumed, and reburied from King's Chapel in the Old Granary with public and Masonic honors; see AA's account in her letter to JA of 7–11 April 1776, below.
This is a hint, well in advance of the fact, that JA was to be appointed to the Superior Court of Massachusetts. In the following October he was appointed chief justice by the Council (under the legal fiction that the Gov-272ernor was “absent”); see AA to JA, 25 Oct., below, and note 5 there.
Not now with the letter. The piece referred to, signed “Lycurgus” in Mass. Spy, 12 July, answered “Democritus,” who had argued that only “men of common understanding” were qualified to be representatives in the General Court. “Lycurgus” pointed out that the principal leaders of the patriot cause were college-educated, many of them being members of the learned professions, and praised highly the Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress, to whom “Democritus'” observations were “affrontive.”
That is, when the ladies return from visits to the American headquarters in Cambridge.