Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 8
1839-07-26
Fine day. To town. Afternoon at home. Evening at the Mansion.
I went to town this morning and was much occupied in visiting the House in Acorn Street which is still under repair and what is worse which is not yet asked for. Then at the Office. My pain is leaving me. Mr. Brooks did not stay with me as I expected, but returned to town.
I dispatched to Mr. Hunt my last article upon Hamilton’s Pamphlet1 together with the corrected sheets of the other. I feel now as if I would allow myself a little vacation from the labours of composition which have been pretty incessant for six or eight months.
Afternoon, Tacitus, 20 sections of the fourth book of Annals. A little out of door work also. In the evening at my father’s.
Much talk today of a cotton circular issued by Southern men in New York, which is to be sure a curious thing enough.2 Met Mr. Buckingham who spoke of it as if he thought I might be disposed to notice it. I believe not. The people most interested in this subject have left me to work my material as best I could without ever manifesting the smallest sign of sympathy. I have done it as a matter of duty. If they wish for more, they must bow down to their own wooden idols to get it.
This, his third article for
Hunt’s
, would appear in the September issue, vol. 1, p. 214–227, with the title, “Banks and the Currency.”
The text of a “Cotton Circular” signed by fourteen prominent southerners who had met in Macon, Ga., in June and again “accidentally” in New York city on 5 July was printed in the New York Commercial Advertiser on the 25th and reprinted in the Daily Centinel and Gazette on 27 July p. 1, cols. 4–5. The circular was addressed to the “cotton-planters, merchants, factors, and presidents and directors of the several banks in the Southern states” and appealed for the creation of machinery by which a third of the cotton crop would be withheld from the market with financing by the banks. The object sought was a steady and advantageous market in London or Liverpool for American cotton.
1839-07-27
Fine day. At home. Afternoon to visit Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Gray. Evening at the Mansion.
My morning was consumed in a sort of studious idleness. Finished reading the first volume of the Diplomatic Correspondence of the Revolution. Also the second volume of Texier, whose book is a very excellent developement of the Roman polity. I think I have really acquired much information from it. But am I right? or is not my mind a sort of sieve through which all runs but the coarser and less valuable materials of knowledge? Continued Meissner’s Alcibiades.
271After dinner, finish the fourth book of Annals of Tacitus before going over to see Mr. and Mrs. Gray at Dorchester where we took tea. A pretty antique place which belongs to John Welles. Home and brief visit below.