Papers of John Adams, volume 19
th.1788
Give me leave to congratulate you on your happy arrival in your native Country; & on the respectable reception that has attended it. I beg the favor of you to present my congratulations in the same account to Mrs. Adams.
Tho’ I am not an Admirer of the new Constitution, yet as you approve of it & as a great many wise & good men expect much honor & advantage to our Country from the adoption of it, I congratulate you also on the accession of Virginia, to its adoption.
Our latest Accounts from the Convention of this State inform us that notwithstanding the ratification of Virginia a great majority continues firm against adoptn.
1 The Packet from England, arrivd yesterday, but I do not hear She brought any thing new.2
I have the honor / to be, with very great esteem, / dear Sir, Yr. most / Obedt. Servt
RC (Adams Papers); endorsed: “Hon. A. Lee. July 4. / ansd. 18. 1788.”
The Virginia ratification convention met on 2 June in Richmond. The 170 delegates assembled as a committee of the whole and planned to discuss the U.S. Constitution, clause by clause. However, for ten days of the convention, Patrick Henry hijacked the debates in a series of long speeches attacking the document and demanding a bill of rights. On 25 June the Virginia delegates voted 89 to 79 for ratification. Two days later, the convention also approved a bill of rights, which was essentially a revised version of the 1776 Virginia Bill of Rights, and twenty amendments to be sent to Congress (Maier, Ratification
, p. 255, 259, 267, 284–285, 300, 305, 307–309). See also Samuel Allyne Otis’ 7 July 1788 letter, and note 1, below.
The packet Roebuck, Capt. Britton, sailed from Falmouth, England, to New York City on a 64-day voyage (Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer, 9 July).
th:1788
The public papers anounce your return with your family to your native land, and I cannot refrain my congratulations particularly as to the season in which so favorable a revolution has mervelously taken place without the direful concomitants universally attendant on such Events in profund peace. The experience I have had since I had the honor of seeing you in Europe1 furnishes the most irrefragable proof that our earlier Ideas of Government were very foreign from the truth, as they were grounded (at least mine) upon an unwarrantable opinion of the virtue of mankind. This delusion was
316
created by the coertion of war, which produced assimilating effects, which inclined to a mode of government congenial with the ostensable brotherly love that then abounded, more than to energetic means. The rueful fall of man and his degenerate state too soon glared in full evidence “That man is to man the surest sorest Evil.”2 The contrast so shocking to a benevolent mind must occasion much rejoicing to every honest man, that the new System of government will take place to restrain the vile and encourage the virtuous.
I hope your Country will not forget your services and that she will be benefited by marking a line for you under the new system that will be more productive of usefulness, than all your former labours, and in the line of your professional Character.
I have the promise of Mr. John Lowell Lawyer of a reply to a letter written to him some time ago, you’ll oblige me by interesting yourself in the answer, which, with my Compliments you’ll be pleased to inform him I rely upon.3 I desire to salute Mrs: Adams as well as yourself on this grand annaversary, with most cordial Congratulations, for all the blessing with which the day abounds which are neither few or small I am with affectionate regard / Dear Sir / Yr. obedt. friend and very / humble. servant
RC (Adams Papers).
Gen. Daniel Roberdeau, a Philadelphia merchant, represented Pennsylvania in the Continental Congress from 1777 to 1779. Between sessions, JA stayed with the Roberdeau family, observing to AA, “We are highly favoured. No other Delegates are so well off.” After the Revolutionary War, Roberdeau relocated to Alexandria, Va. Roberdeau reunited briefly with JA in late 1783, when he visited London to enroll his son, Isaac, in engineering school. He likely saw the news of JA’s 18 June 1788 return in the 3 July edition of The Maryland Gazette (vol. 4:197;
AFC
, 2:350, 352;
ANB
; Roberdeau Buchanan, Genealogy of the Roberdeau Family, Washington, D.C., 1876, p. 89).
Edward Young, The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts, Night III, line 217.
Roberdeau referred to JA’s longtime friend, federal judge John Lowell (1743–1802), of Newburyport, who moved to Boston in 1777. Roberdeau likely met him in Philadelphia during one of Lowell’s visits there, between 1778 and 1782 (vols. 4:246, 18:25;
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates
, 14:655–656).