11To John Adams from William Tudor, Jr., 10 August 1819 (Adams Papers)
In a short memoir of my Father, prepared for the Volume of the Historical Society now in the press, I have made a few extracts from the letters of his distinguished correspondents. And from among your early letters those which I now inclose for you to see and which I hope you will permit me to print in these Transactions. The one to my grandfather is taken on account of the most kind &...
12To John Adams from William Tudor, Jr., 1 November 1819 (Adams Papers)
Will you receive my respectful congratulations on your having entered the last year of your seventeenth lustrum , with such a fair prospect of reaching the twentieth which I hope your vigor of body & mind may enable you successfully to accomplish— Having lost that kind parent, who was ever ready to oblige me, and through whose medium I have obtained so much important information from you, I...
13To John Adams from William Tudor, Jr., 18 November 1819 (Adams Papers)
I received your favour of yesterday inclosing Judge Sewall’s letter, and the anecdote of Otis, the letter I now return and I will take care of the inclosure to return it hereafter. It strikes me as a curious case, and worthy of being remarked upon, that a great lawyer unhappily subjected to mental derangement, should be admitted in a Court of Justice to give an opinion founded as he remarked...
14To John Adams from William Tudor, Jr., 27 November 1819 (Adams Papers)
I was very highly gratified by your opinion on the subject of slavery in the new States; its tenour was what I anticipated from the principles & actions of your whole life. A meeting is advertised for the next week of gentlemen of this town & vicinity, who are enemies of the trade and the further extension of slavery in the United States. I thought if I addressed some observations to the...
15To John Adams from William Tudor, Jr., 6 December 1819 (Adams Papers)
I received yesterday your kind letter of the 1st instant—Notwithstanding the great weight attached to your name and which each party would be eager to place in their own scale, I am ready to agree that it is most unreasonable to wish to involve you in the subaltern quarrels of our time, when you bore the heat & burden of the day half a century since, in questions of far different magnitude. I...
16To John Adams from William Tudor, Jr., 23 July 1820 (Adams Papers)
I may be almost afraid after so long an interruption that you may have forgot a correspondent, that you have so kindly aided & encouraged. I make some progress with my biography of James Otis, and it is not wholly my fault that I go on so slow—I wish to give some account incidentally of the Liberty Tree in Boston, which was so famous, and which I presume gave growth to all the others,...
17To John Adams from William Tudor, Jr., 29 July 1820 (Adams Papers)
I should not perhaps have troubled you with my thanks particularly for your kind answers to my queries respecting Liberty trees; if you had not mentioned the “Letters on the Eastern States.” The work was published anonymously, and I wished to remain unknown as the author, but this seems to have been an absurd expectation on my part, as most of my acquaintances, insist that they detect me in...
18To John Adams from William Tudor, Jr., July 1821 (Adams Papers)
After waiting nearly in vain to obtain further documents for the biography of James Otis, I have resolved to begin to make the most of the materials, I now possess—I hope in the course of a few days to have completed, the first part of his life, embracing his youth, & what may be called the private part of his professional career—It will all be comprized in a few pages, so few are the...
19To John Adams from William Tudor, Jr., 3 December 1821 (Adams Papers)
I take the liberty of sending you a copy of a Report which is to be acted upon in Town meeting this day week—A chain of circumstances forced me to be a good deal instrumental in getting this affair into its present shape. Several gentlemen of the Committee devoted their great legal knowledge & very sound discretion to the preparation of the Bills, which should furnish the ground work of our...
20To John Adams from William Tudor, Jr., 21 May 1822 (Adams Papers)
I took up in a bookstore this morning a work that has just appeared in two volumes entitled “ The History of the American Revolution by Paul Allen .” Mr Allen is a man of talents and I presume has written a valuable history—but I looked over only one or two pages in his first volume where he is speaking of the Congress at New York in 1765—and which he concludes in the following manner:—“The...