John Adams, Part 1: Defending the Enemy

Charles Thomson

Welcome back to Founding Fathers: Interviews from 1776. I'm Charles Thomson, and for fifteen years I kept the minutes of the Continental Congress. Last time, Benjamin Franklin gave us three episodes of wit and Parisian dinners. Then, on his way out the door, he said you were always an honest man, often a great one, and sometimes, in some things, quite out of your senses. So welcome, John Adams of Braintree, Massachusetts. Which part of that do you dispute?

John Adams

The word "sometimes." But I'm ninety years old, Charles, and I've outlived most of the men who insulted me, so I'll let history argue it out. Honest, I'll take. Great, I'll accept with becoming modesty. As for out of my senses, let me tell you about the time the whole town of Boston was certain of it. March of 1770. And I'll tell you now, it was the proudest act of my life.

Charles Thomson

The Boston Massacre. Start with where you were that night.

John Adams

Snowing, bitter cold. I was at Henderson Inches's house at the South End, with a club I'd belonged to for years. About nine o'clock the bells began ringing, and we assumed a fire, so we grabbed our hats and cloaks and ran out to help. In the street we heard that the soldiers had fired on the people near the Town House. Now, Abigail was alone at home, expecting a child, with only the maids and a boy for company. So I looked over the scene and started home. And the quickest way took me right along the front of a company of regulars drawn up before Dr. Cooper's church, muskets shouldered, bayonets fixed, leaving only a narrow gap for people on foot. I walked straight through. I didn't look at them and they didn't look at me. They might as well have been marble statues.

Charles Thomson

I'd have walked a little faster, I think. What were you thinking, lying awake that night?

John Adams

That it was a dreadful business, and that I'd feared it for months. Mind you, this is my suspicion, I can't prove it. I thought certain busy men had worked for a long time to stir up quarrels between the lower sort of townspeople and the soldiers, and to plant a hatred between them that would never die. And I thought, if these soldiers killed anyone defending themselves, they must be tried. And if truth and law were respected, they must be acquitted. Anything else would corrupt the country's justice at the root.

Charles Thomson

You were a young man with the busiest law practice in the province, and a known critic of the Crown. Then the next morning, a visitor.

John Adams

I was sitting in my office near the Town House stairs, and in comes James Forrest. A merchant, a loyalist, an Irishman. They called him the Irish Infant. And he had tears running down his face. He said Captain Preston was in prison, wanted counsel, and could get none. Josiah Quincy would take it only if I'd join him. Even Robert Auchmuty wouldn't, unless I did. So everything rested on me.

Charles Thomson

And you said yes on the spot?

John Adams

I did, and I'll tell you why, because it matters more than the story. Counsel ought to be the very last thing an accused person lacks in a free country. The bar must be independent, at all times, in every circumstance. If you only defend the popular, you don't have law, you have a mob with better manners. I did warn Forrest it would be as important a cause as any ever tried, and that he'd get no tricks from me, nothing but fact, evidence and law. He said Preston wanted nothing more. He offered me a guinea as a retainer. I took it.

Charles Thomson

Your critics said you took bags of British gold.

John Adams

Calumny! By my own count, ten guineas from Preston and eight later from the soldiers, for fourteen or fifteen days of the most exhausting work I ever did. I'll say this too. I knew it would cost me. I was risking a popularity that had been very hard to earn. Charles, the memory of malice is faithful, and it keeps adding to its stock, while kindness is frail. I told Abigail all my fears, ruin, infamy, worse. She wept. But she said I'd done what duty required, and she was willing to share whatever came, and trust in Providence. I've never forgotten that.

Charles Thomson

Let's teach the trials, because people think it was one big courtroom drama. It was two.

John Adams

Two, and I insisted on it. Preston first, alone, in late October. If you try the captain with his men, their defenses collide. The men say he ordered them to fire, he says he never did, and they hang each other. Separate, he could stand on the evidence. And the evidence couldn't prove he gave the order. Witnesses put him in front of his soldiers, not behind them shouting commands. One of them was Newton Prince, a free Black man of Boston, which I always liked. Acquitted. It was the first trial in the colonies to run past a single day, I'm told.

Charles Thomson

And then the soldiers, in late November, with Josiah Quincy and Sampson Salter Blowers beside you. Across the aisle, Robert Treat Paine, and Josiah's own brother Samuel.

John Adams

Brothers on opposite sides, and they still dined together. And between us, I paid attention to the jury. I wanted men from the country towns, Roxbury, Milton, Dedham, not Boston hotheads who'd been marinating in the pamphlets. You pick your jury as you pick your ground, Charles. And then there was Patrick Carr, an Irish leather breeches maker, shot in the belly, who lingered nine days. His surgeon, Dr. Jeffries, told the court what Carr said at the end. He'd seen mobs and soldiers clash in Ireland, but never seen soldiers bear half so much before they fired. And he forgave the man who shot him. A dying man, with nothing to gain, said it. You can't buy that kind of witness.

Charles Thomson

And your closing. "Facts are stubborn things." Now, as keeper of the record, I must note the saying was already old in England and America. You didn't coin it.

John Adams

I never claimed to! I used it. Whatever our wishes, our inclinations, our passions, they cannot change the state of facts and evidence. If the soldiers were attacked and their lives in danger, the law gave them the right to defend themselves. If they were only struck, with snowballs, oyster shells, cinders, clubs, that was provocation, and the law reduces killing under provocation to manslaughter. That's all I asked of those men. Look at the evidence, not at the town.

Charles Thomson

And the verdicts?

John Adams

Six soldiers acquitted outright. Two, Hugh Montgomery and Matthew Killroy, convicted of manslaughter only. They claimed the old benefit of clergy, an ancient English mercy for first offenders, reciting Psalm 51. So no gallows. Instead, they were branded on the thumb with an M, in open court. And three years later, on the anniversary, I wrote in my diary that it had brought me anxiety and abuse enough, but it was one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested things I ever did, and one of the best services I ever gave my country. A death sentence in that fury would have been as foul a stain on us as the executions of Quakers and witches. Vain? Certainly. Wrong? Not once.

Charles Thomson

And Boston's anger? You were elected to the General Court that June.

John Adams

418 of 536 votes. The very town that was cursing me. And I went home feeling I'd dedicated my family to ruin. Honors don't cheer a man who sees the cliffs ahead.

Charles Thomson

You keep returning to Abigail. Tell me about 1776, the letter.

John Adams

Oh, the letter! March, from Braintree, while I was in Philadelphia. She was longing to hear we'd declared independency, and, "by the way," mark that, by the way, in the new code of laws, I should remember the ladies, and be more generous to them than my ancestors. Don't put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. All men would be tyrants if they could. And if the ladies weren't heeded, they'd foment a rebellion, and not be bound by laws in which they had no voice or representation. Charles, she turned our own argument against us, in a postscript!

Charles Thomson

And your reply was...

John Adams

That I couldn't help laughing. Everyone said the struggle had loosened government, apprentices disobedient, schools turbulent, and now her letter was the first hint that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, had grown discontented. I called it coarse, but she was so saucy I wouldn't cross it out. And then I said we dare not give up the name of masters, and hoped General Washington and our heroes would fight rather than submit to the despotism of the petticoat. In practice, I said, men were really the subjects. She wrote back that arbitrary power is easily broken, and the ladies could subdue their masters without violence. She got the last word. She usually did. I never won that argument, and I never wanted to. She was the finest statesman in my house, and I told her she shone as one.

Charles Thomson

She was a better lawyer than the man across the aisle, anyway. So, next time?

John Adams

Next time, Philadelphia, July 1776. Heat, flies, and a Congress that wouldn't quite make up its mind. And me, being a great deal less patient than I was in that courtroom.

Charles Thomson

The debate of your life. Until then.