Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 8
1839-04-16
Cleared very fine. Distribution as usual. Afternoon, Athenaeum. Evening to Mr. Brooks’.
I intended to have gone on with Burr this morning vigorously but I only did enough to convince me I must go backward and write over a 218sheet, and in the mean time go down to the Athenaeum to get some more information in which I am deficient.
Several applications. Among others Mr. Freeman Hunt who is about publishing a new Magazine of Commerce in New York and who wishes to procure contributions from persons of reputation. He comes to me upon the recommendation of Henry Lee. I told him I would help him with pleasure but I had to finish first an article for the North American Review. He said his first number was to come out on the first of June. I told him that I might get an article ready in time for it, but could not promise as I must first get through Burr and must get my information. He promised to procure for me what I wanted and would see me again.
Winch here too, the new tenant from Weston, so I lost my hour for Ajax but made it up in the Afternoon. Against my custom I went to the Athenaeum and supplied to myself the facts which I wanted to know. Fell upon the Cunningham Correspondence there and looked over the letters which are curious enough,1 they however tell the truth, which has always been very unsavoury in America. Evening to Mr. Brooks’ where were the family together.
The partisan and impolitic letters written by JA between 1803 and 1810 to his cousin William Cunningham were published after Cunningham’s death by his son as Correspondence between the Hon. John Adams and the late William Cunningham, Esq., Boston, 1823. Publication opened old wounds and reopened bitter controversies; see vol. 1:146 and JA, Works
, 1:628–629.
1839-04-17
Rain again. Distribution as usual. Evening at home.
Stormy days are favorable for me. I worked over the bad part of the last Sheet so as to please me much better, but did not after all quite get up to the place where I had left off. At this rate I do not know when I shall finish. The rain is very provoking. It puts back all my work prodigiously.
The Great Western has at last arrived and quieted the panic that has been raised about War. The accounts are not at all decisive however of the course which the British Government may pursue.
Ajax about one hundred and twenty lines. Afternoon the remainder of Spanheim’s Second Dissertation, and part of a pamphlet treatise upon the system of coining in Great Britain. This is a subject which I must look into rather more fully than I have yet done. Evening, Tucker’s Jefferson.