Adams Family Correspondence, volume 14
th:December 1800
I thank you for your favor of the 3d: instt: and
the newspapers enclosed.1
I will endeavor to comply with your request, that I communicate with you
more frequently, but I will be free to confess to you, that every year
of my life, I grow more selfish & less disposed to write letters,
merely of friendship. You will experience the same thing in a few years,
& I believe you assigned the true cause of it when you attributed it
to “commerce with the world.” I would not be understood, as subscribing
to the force of your comparison & its application; for I do not find
that the “concerns of life” have at all weakened my friendships, though
they have destroyed that relish for epistolary correspondence, which
youthful ardor generally feels. So long as professions of friendship
will pass for common civility they may be made without risk, but a man
should be very cautious in pledging himself upon paper, where the utmost
confidence does not exist between the parties. It is better to be
wanting in profession than in performance & sincerity. Our friend
Mr: T Johnson will subscribe to this
truth, which he was so fond of calling to my memory, I know not exactly
why.
I am as you conjectured, again seated in my Office,
though not full of business—a small portion nevertheless falls to my
share, and I look to time & perseverance for a moderate increase.
Since my return I have spoken once in the Court of Oyer & terminer,
by appointment of the Judges, in behalf of a man, who was indicted for
high-way robbery, and had the good fortune to obtain a verdict of not guilty, directly against the charge
from the bench. The Attorney Gen: & one of the Judges told me I had
great luck, and I was much of their opinion.2
I was joined by Forbes & Sumner at Baltimore, and
the latter came on with me hither, where he remained several days.3 Mr: Rogers told me he had seen you & the family a few days
since.
Your young male friends here are all well—several of them have within a few days assumed the dignity of professional advancement. Rush, Peters, Ewing & Bird, are of the number.4 Your friends of the other sex, are, I believe, likewise well.
I enclose at the request of my friend Mrs: Rutter a sample of Cotton, which you
will give to my Mother and request her to write 469 to New England, for two pounds,
(or one pound, if she think there will be a difficulty in sending so
much as two pounds) of Cotton, of the same quality and to direct that it
be sent to me, by some private hand.5 It is a commission for a
lady to whom I am greatly obligated for numerous acts of kindness, I
shall therefore be the more anxious to have this performed to her
satisfaction. My mother is my sole resort in such cases.
I share your apprehensions on the score of Southern
faith; if the failure of the federal ticket shall lie at the door of
So Carolina, there will never be any
future confidence on the part of N England in that State. I believe the
elections of several of their City members is contested for no other
purpose than to lessen, perhaps entirely take away the federal
majority.6
We have no news from New York yet.— I am sorry to hear that my Mother had taken a severe cold— There must be Dutch stoves put up in the great Hall, or you will all be sick.
Please to offer my congratulations to Miss Caroline
Johnson upon her happy recovery. I hope she will have her health
confirmed. present me kindly to all the family & to our own—to Mr: Cranch & his lady—
Your’s sincerely
I shall send you the Rush light, though a spurious one, I believe.8 Did Judge Washington write those strictures in the Augusta paper? If you write to Sturgiss he will inform you.9
RC (MWA:Adams Family Letters); addressed: “W. S
Shaw / City of Washington”; endorsed: “Phila 7 Dec / T B Adams / rec
10th 1800 / An 12 De.”
Not found.
Pennsylvania’s Court of Oyer and Terminer sat in
Philadelphia on 27 Nov. and was presided over by the Pennsylvania chief
justice Edward Shippen and associate justices Hugh Henry Brackenridge,
Thomas Smith, and Jasper Yeates. The attorney general of Pennsylvania
was Joseph Borden McKean, who was appointed on 10 May by his father,
Gov. Thomas McKean (Philadelphia American Daily
Advertiser, 27 Nov.; John Hill Martin, Martin’s Bench and Bar of Philadelphia, Phila., 1883, p. 23,
27; Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial
Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy, rev.
edn., Phila., 1999, p. 128).
TBA’s companions were possibly Ralph
Bennet Forbes and William Hyslop Sumner (1780–1861), Harvard 1799.
Sumner was the son of former Massachusetts governor Increase Sumner and
Elizabeth Hyslop Sumner; he would become a Boston attorney (vol. 13:266; Madison, Papers, Retirement Series
, 3:68;
William H. Sumner, Memoir of Increase
Sumner, Boston, 1854, p. 58; Joseph B. Felt, Memorials of William Smith Shaw, Boston,
1852, p. 128).
Richard Rush, Richard Peters Jr., and John Ewing Jr.
(1776–1816), University of Pennsylvania 1792, had all recently been
admitted to the Delaware County bar. Bird Wilson (1777–1859), University
of Pennsylvania 1792, had been admitted to the bar in Northampton County
(The Twentieth
470
Century Bench and Bar of Pennsylvania, 2
vols., Chicago, 1903, 2:632, 733; University of
Pennsylvania: Biographical Catalogue of the Matriculates of the
College, Phila., 1894, p. 33, 36).
The enclosure has not been found; it was probably
supplied by Sarah Jones Rutter (1760–1830), the wife of Samuel Rutter
and the aunt of Sarah Wister. In the spring and summer of 1799,
TBA recorded in his Diary socializing with several
members of the Rutter family (vol. 13:526; Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, ed., The Journal and Occasional Writings of Sarah
Wister, Madison, N.J., 1987, p. 75–76; Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 Aug. 1830;
TBA, Diary, 1798–1799,
17 May, 30 July, 19 Aug. 1799).
During the Oct. 1800 elections to the South Carolina
legislature, Federalists claimed eleven of the fifteen seats for
Charleston only to have the results challenged by seven of the
Democratic-Republican candidates, who claimed that “a number of men were
admitted to vote, who were either not citizens or not entitled to vote.”
The unsuccessful candidates petitioned the state legislature to
invalidate the election results, thereby lessening Federalist strength
before the state’s presidential electors were chosen on 2 December.
Although the legislature referred the issue to committee and no decision
was made prior to 2 Dec., all of the state’s electors voted for Thomas
Jefferson and Aaron Burr (Jefferson, Papers
, 32:215, 256–258; Charleston City Gazette, 19 Nov.).
TBA had also written to Shaw on 2 Dec.,
reporting on his journey from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia and
outlining Joseph Dennie Jr.’s plans for the Port
Folio (MWA:
Adams Family Letters).
The Republican
Rush-Light, [1800], Shaw-Shoemaker, No. 1236, was an
imitation of Peter Porcupine’s The
Rush-Light, a series of five essays by William Cobbett
attacking Benjamin Rush that was published in New York between February
and April. The aim of The Republican
Rush-Light was “to illuminate the future path of patriotic
Americans” in the wake of the presidential election, and it condemned
JA as an “ignus fatuus …
continually leading the good citizens of this country from one delusion
to another” (Rush,
Letters
, 2:1216–1217; The Republican Rush-Light, p. 2).
TBA sought information about whether
U.S. Supreme Court justice Bushrod Washington was the author of an essay
in the Augusta Herald, 5 Nov., which
discussed judicial conduct and was signed “B.,” and he suggested that
Shaw write to Josiah Sturges (1773–1852), Harvard 1795, an Augusta, Ga.,
merchant (Washington,
Papers, Presidential Series
,
1:101; Joseph Palmer, Necrology of Alumni of
Harvard College, 1851–52 to 1862–63, Boston, 1864, p. 3).