To John Adams from Richard Price, 8 February 1787
From Richard Price
Newington: Green Feb: 8th: 17871
Dear Sir
When I writ to you last week to return you my thanks for the instruction and pleasure given me by your Defence of the American Constitutions I had no reason to expect that you Should give yourself the trouble of making any reply to it.2 I am therefore the more obliged to you for your letter; and I cannot make myself easy without Sending you a few lines of acknowledgmt:— The circumstance you mention that your Book was written and the materials for it collected Since Septr: last makes me think more highly of the ability that produced it; and I cannot be Sorry that I have given occasion for it by the publication of Mr Turgot’s letter. At the time of this publication I was entirely ignorant that you had deliver’d any opinion with respect to the Sentiment in the passage to which you have objected. I have lately writ Several letters to America, and in Some of them I have taken occasion to mention your publication, and to Say that you have convinced me of the main point which it is intended to prove, and that I wish I had inserted a Note to Signify the difference of opinion between Mr Turgot and me on that point. The Subject of civil governmt:, next to religion, is of the highest importance to mankind. It is now, I believe, better understood than ever it was. Your book will furnish a help towards farther improvemt; and your country will, I hope, give Such an example of this improvemt as will be useful to the world.
With Sincere wishes that you and Mrs Adams may enjoy all that can make you most happy, and under a grateful Sense of her and your kind attention and civility, I am, Sr, respectfully and affectionately / Yours
Richd: Price
RC (Adams Papers).
1. As he explained in letters to JA the previous autumn, Price withdrew from public life in London and relocated to Sydenham, England, in order to mourn the 20 Sept. 1786 death of his wife, Sarah Blundell Price, from palsy and the aftereffects of a “paralytick stroke” that she had suffered two years earlier. Price temporarily left his nonconformist church, Gravel-Pit Meeting Place in Hackney, where JA and AA worshipped, in the care of Rev. Thomas Taylor of Carter Lane Meeting-House (vol. 17:533; The Correspondence of Richard Price, eds. W. Bernard Peach and D. O. Thomas, 3 vols., Durham, N.C., 1983–1994, 3:61, 66–67; , 7:179, 370; William Urwick, Nonconformity in Worcester, London, 1897, p. 111).
2. Price’s 2 Feb. 1787 letter has not been found, but throughout the spring and summer of 1787, Price widely praised the work in letters to Arthur Lee, William Bingham, and Benjamin Rush. “Fully convinced” by JA’s arguments, Price declared the to be the final renunciation of criticisms against American government first launched by Anne Robert Jacques, Baron de Turgot, in a 22 March 1778 letter to Price. In his 4 Feb. 1787 reply to Price, JA reasserted that he wrote the Defence since “it is well known that Mr Turgot’s crude idea is really a personal attack upon me, whether he knew it or not, and therefore very proper that the defence should come from me” (vol. 18:546–550; The Correspondence of Richard Price, 3:120; , 2d ser., 17:364–365 [May 1903]).