Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 2
1829-02-27
Morning cold and unpleasant. At the Office and in Court. This Controversy has at last excited me very much and I could not avoid writing a short Article for the Patriot, notwithstanding the express injunction of my father to keep quiet.1 The course of the federal Newspapers is too unfair. Nothing going on in Court, so that I continued the examination of my Papers and destroyed a number. Afternoon, read the Trial of Mr. Child for a Libel on Mr. Keyes,2 and a Chapter of Adam Smith. Evening, Pope, Dunciad and his Numbers of the Guardian.
CFA’s article did appear in the Boston Patriot & Mercantile Advertiser on 28 February. Commenting on the JQA-William Plumer correspondence, which the paper was printing (see entry for 25 Feb., and note, above), CFA wrote: “It is not our intention, after the manner of some of our cotemporaries, to ask the public, first to take our word, and read afterwards; nor with others, to show only those parts which have not been published before, out of connextion. . . . All we ask, is the attention of our readers to the whole pamphlet taken together.” See GWA to JQA, 28 Feb. 1829, and JQA to CFA, 8 Mar. 1829, Adams Papers.
CFA’s copy of the Trial of the Case of the Commonwealth versus David Lee Child, for Publishing in the Massachusetts Journal a Libel on the Honorable John Keyes, Boston, 1829, is in the Boston Athenaeum.