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How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

It took a lifetime of study and reflection for John Adams to come up with his religious credo. In the end, the self-styled church going animal boiled it down to just four words.

He was an elderly ex-president, free of the public spotlight’s glare, when he finally confessed the essence of his faith to an old rival.

Church going Animal

John Adams spent his decades of rural retirement exchanging rich letters with friends and devouring key volumes on foreign faiths. A descendant of Puritan immigrants, he saw the world while serving as an American statesman in revolutionary Europe. Between his diplomatic tasks, Adams grew fascinated with comparing different religious beliefs. Frequent travel heightened his interest.

Adams was a lifelong student of church and state. He took notes on sermons, looked up biblical references, and explored aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Writing to old colleague Dr. Benjamin Rush in the summer of 1811, Adams reflected on the pivotal role of religion in his life.

“It is notorious enough, that I have been a Church going Animal for Seventy Six years, i.e. from the Cradle,” he wrote.

John Adams, Church going Animal

A Providential Turn

Like one of his beloved oak trees, Adams’s faith had deep roots in New England culture. As a young man, he studied theology at Harvard College and considered becoming a Congregationalist minister. Back in Braintree, his family parish (now the United First Parish Church of Quincy, Unitarian Universalist), was battling through a controversy.

In John Adams’ words, the church’s new pastor Lemuel Briant was “a jocular and liberal scholar and divine.” A teenaged John Adams heard plenty of Briant’s radical theology. Shedding older Puritan ways, Briant told his community that practicing a Christian life–rather than repeating dogma–would open up a path to salvation, but only if they chose it.

Briant’s sermons sent a ripple. This idea was a fairly new one for worshippers to weigh.

Several local clergy took issue with Briant’s message. As the controversy unspooled, the preacher’s wife left him, after claiming that he had committed “several scandalous sins.”

Scandalous Sins

Church officials launched a full investigation into Briant’s moral character. From 1749 to 1753, Adams kept an eye on the pamphlets that supported or criticized Briant’s beliefs.

“I may say I was born & bred in the centre of Theological & Ecclesiastical controversy,” he recalled. “It broke out like the eruption of a volcano and blazed with portentious aspect for many years.”

Though he agreed with Briant’s spiritual outlook, Adams was troubled by the way that society had treated the minister. Lemuel Briant made it through the inquiry, but his health was broken, and he died in 1754.

To Adams, the whole debate bred a “Spirit of Dogmatism and Bigotry.” He was convinced that pursuing a career in the pulpit would “involve me in endless Altercations and make my Life miserable, without any prospect of doing any good to my fellow Men.” Far better, he thought, to study law.

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Where John Adams started out as a church-going animal. The United First Parish Church of Quincy, Mass.

Puritan Echoes

By 1765, John Adams had opened his practice and begun a family with wife Abigail. New England’s unique religious history ran alongside his commute between Boston and Braintree.

Take the rows of locust trees lining Salem’s “Witchcraft Hill,” which reminded him of the Puritans’ fiery witchcraft trials, and of “that memorable Victory over the Prince of the Power of the Air.”

He knew little for certain about his own Puritan ancestors, but John Adams was proud to invoke them and their legacy of dissent. When he sat down to write his Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law that summer, Adams harkened back to family history. He was anxious to show that “ordinary” men and women could overturn tyranny, no matter the conditions they inherited.

“Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the scriptures, and a government of the state more agreable to the dignity of humane nature, than any they had seen in Europe: and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it, for ever,” Adams wrote.

The Cost of Freedom

According to John Adams, harnessing Providence’s will with a liberal education had emboldened the Puritans’ Great Migration. He applauded their drive to reform the Church of the England, and to seek out new streams of profit in the early American colonies.

Adams had a political lesson for his peers of 1765, too. He drew on the actions of the “vexed” Puritans to ignite the revolutionary imagination of his family and friends. Adams reminded readers that Puritan colonists had laid their faith in American success, opening schools and carving out towns. Their freedom, he wrote, came at great cost.

“Be it remembred, however, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker,” he wrote. “But if we had not, our fathers have earned, and bought it for us, at the expence of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”

A World Within

John Adams spent much of the 1770s and the 1780s on the road, traveling first to the Continental Congress, and then serving as an American minister to Europe. As he moved around the Continent, Adams sought out diverse religious experiences in France, the Netherlands, and England. He recorded foreign rituals and new beliefs, and he grew to appreciate the sensory impact of religion.

While he embraced the idea of religious toleration, Adams did not always find it easy to practice. An early experience at a Catholic mass in Philadelphia left him dazzled by the organ music but choking on incense. The “Grandmother Church” had “Every Thing which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant,” John told Abigail. “I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.” He remained curious about beliefs beyond his own, acquiring books and writing to clergy.

Adams spent his final years at Peacefield, immersed in reading about foreign faiths and cultures. When he and Thomas Jefferson renewed their correspondence in 1812, religion became a favorite subject. “I have been a diligent Student for many years in Books whose Titles you have never Seen,” Adams teased his former rival.

At Jefferson’s request, and after a lifetime of seeking, John Adams unveiled his religious credo: “Be Just and Good.”

End Notes

Notes on the author of How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

Sara Georgini, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., earned her doctorate in history at Boston University. She is the series editor for The Papers of John Adams, part of the Adams Papers editorial project based at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019). Follow her on Twitter: @sarageorgini. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: John Adams. Portrait, pastel on paper by Benjamin Blyth, ca. 1766. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and United First Parish Church (Unitarian Universalist), Quincy, Massachusetts.

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The Tempestuous Life of Tobias Lear, George Washington’s In-Law

Col. Tobias Lear V, known as Toby to his friends, left his mark on the early history of the United States as an in-law and the personal secretary to George Washington. He also authored the only firsthand account of the death of the nation’s first president.

His journal is his legacy, but his story is one of determination, failure, upheaval, poor judgment and eventual self-destruction.

Young Tobias Lear

Tobias Lear

Tobias Lear was born on Sept. 19, 1762, to the respectable Portsmouth, N.H., couple of Capt. Tobias Lear IV and Mary Stillson Lear. As a young man, Toby attended the Dummer Charity School and then Harvard College.

Capt. Lear was a prosperous Portsmouth farmer and sea-trader until 1776, when the British Navy confiscated his ship, the Polly. Capt. Lear had paid for the Polly’s cargo, a consignment of New England goods and lumber bound for Antigua. The total loss of the Polly nearly bankrupted the Lears.

But despite their financial hardship, the captain and his wife made paying for Toby’s Harvard College tuition a priority. He graduated in 1779.

Tragic Figure

Historian P. Bradley Nutting, emeritus at Framingham State College, considered Tobias Lear a tragic figure. Wrote Nutting:

He had the natural inclinations of a diplomat, preferring negotiation to confrontation. While ambitious, Lear was also compassionate, deeply affected by human suffering.

Tobias Lear also liked being seen as a person of importance. For example, he used his title of colonel, one that he received when President John Adams appointed Washington as commander in chief of the army in preparation for war with France. Lear never saw combat nor did the nation go to war with France, yet Lear used the title the rest of his life.

Lear’s historic relationship with George Washington began when he came to Mount Vernon in 1785. The general, four years after the Revolutionary War ended, needed a new secretary. As an active citizen on the young nation’s stage, the future first president was flooded with correspondence and requests.

So Washington reached out to his friend Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln for help. Lincoln, who became the namesake of Lear’s son, recommended his 23-year-old friend Tobias Lear. Washington wrote in a letter to Gen. Lincoln:

I have at last found a Mr. Lear, who supports the character of a gentleman and a [Harvard] scholar. He was educated at Cambridge, Mass. He has been to Europe and in different parts of this continent. It is said he is a good master of languages. He reads French and writes exceedingly good letters.

Mount Vernon

Lear’s primary duties were letter writing, but he also helped Washington manage the day-to-day operations of Mount Vernon. According to author Stephen Decatur, in the Private Affairs of George Washington,

Besides handling all the financial details, supervising the instruction of the [Washington] children, and managing the household, he was in charge of correspondence, penning most of the personal and confidential letters that the President did not write himself, issuing invitations for the weekly dinners, and superintending the necessarily voluminous files.

In addition to Lear’s time at Mount Vernon as an employee, his second and third marriages brought him into the Washington family.

Tobias Lear’s first wife was his childhood sweetheart Mary “Polly” Long. They married in 1790. Together they had a son named Benjamin Lincoln Lear.

Washington Marriages

Polly went to work for the Washingtons when the family moved to Philadelphia. Sadly, she died in the 1793 yellow-fever epidemic.

Lear then married Frances Bassett Washington, a widow of George Washington’s nephew George Augustine Washington. She died in 1796 of tuberculosis.

His third marriage was to Francis Dandridge Henley, or Fanny, Martha Washington’s niece.

Lear’s second and third marriages transformed him from a key employee to a beloved member of the family. This new connection gave Lear nearly unlimited access to the Washingtons and the Mansion House Farm.

George Washington entertaining French generals at Mount Vernon.

The Death of Washington

When Lear was at Mount Vernon he was able to record in his journal Washington’s last words and his death on Dec. 14, 1799:

“Have me decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.” I bowed assent; for I could not speak. He then looked at me again and said, “Do you understand me? I replied yes! “Tis well” said he.

About ten minutes before he expired (which was between ten & eleven o’clk). he breathing became easier; he lay quietly; he withdrew his hand from mine, and felt his own pulse. I saw his countenance change, – I spoke to Dr. Craik, who sat by the fire; he came to the bedside. The general’s hand fell from his wrist I took it in mine and put it into my bosom. Dr. Craik put his hands over his Eyes and he expired without a struggle or a sigh!

Lear’s Mysterious End

Lear’s life ended quite differently from Washington’s. He died neither in his bed nor surrounded by friends and family. Lear committed suicide.

Tobias Lear and his wife spent his last evening with their friends, Cmdre. and Mrs. Rogers, in the Federal City. The Rogers’ daughter later wrote:

My father and mother had been making a late visit to the Lears [sic] one evening, and, as they were bidding goodbye, Mr. Lear said, “I will walk with you, Commodore, a little way.” He accompanied them, slowly strolling and talking; at last they were home, he stopped and said, “Goodbye, Mrs. Rogers! Goodbye, Commodore!” Pressing my father’s hand warmly.

The next day after breakfast, on a warmer-than-normal morning, Tobias Lear walked into the garden of his home with a loaded pistol and shot himself in the head. He did not leave a note or will. Sometime later his body was discovered by his adult son Benjamin. The Rogers’ daughter added to her description of Lear’s death:

The very next morning my parents were sent for. Something terrible had happened at Mr. Lear’s. He had killed himself soon after leaving my father. My mother always fancied that he wished to say something to my father, which her presence prevented; and they both remembered his farewell to them had been more tender and lingering than usual, [sic] However he died and left no sign. There was not a conjecture even of the cause of his death. He seemed well and vigorous, quiet and self-contained, but not unhappy.

(Ms. Rogers seems to have been confused about the timing of Lear’s death. The Washington City Gazette wrote that Tobias Lear killed himself the following morning in his garden, not after he left her parents that evening.)

Why?

Today, more than 200 years after his tragic end, we do not know what led Tobias Lear to take his own life. But a series of questionable decisions at least offers context.

In an effort to make his own mark after Polly died in 1793, Lear tried to breathe financial life into his company. T. Lear & Co. invested in land and sold staples like flour even as the national economy was collapsing.

During Lear’s financial troubles, he continued to assist with rent collection on Washington’s properties. Yet, in a moment of desperation, Tobias Lear stole Washington’s rent money from an Alexandria property. On discovery of the theft, Washington was livid:

You will perceive buy [sic] the enclosed manner that I am disappointed in receiving the rent for my house in Alexandria. These things put you, the payer and myself in an awkward situation; for it must seem strange what has been paid. I must therefore, request, in explicit terms, that you will receive no more moneys due to me; and I should be glad to have a statement of the A/c [accounts] as it stands between us, since the last was rendered. … I have not the slightest doubt of my being credited for every farthing you receive on my A/c; but that does not remedy the evil. … [It] would be uncandid and inconsistent with the frankness of friendship, no to declare that I have not approved, no cannot approve, of having my money received and applied to uses not my own, without my consent.

Another Scandal

Luckily for Tobias Lear, Washington forgave him, which spoke to the friendship and love that Washington had toward him. Nevertheless, one wonders how this event might have lingered in Lear’s memory.

Another scandal might have contributed to his eventual self-destruction. It was associated with his mentors George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Washington and Jefferson regularly corresponded about a variety of subjects, including the appropriate balance of federal and state power.

Washington, who held the Continental Army together under the weak Articles of Confederation, saw the need for unified states under a federal umbrella. Jefferson, on the other hand, wanted a government resting on strong state and limited federal power.

Historians hypothesize that Jefferson rebuked Washington for his overly monarchical presidency, and Washington more than likely defended himself, but we do not know for certain. For some reason their letters after the summer of 1796 have not been found.

The Missing Letters

One clue about where the letters went came from Tobias Lear:

A few days since Colo Humphreys called upon me, and informed me that in a public company, dining at Mr Ames’ at Dedham, on Saturday, the Revd Mr. Krikland of Boston said he had been informed that I had suppressed certain papers belonging to the late Genl Washington, and [were] in my charge for some time after his decease, particularly some of the Genls’ Diaries, for the period when Mr Jefferson was Secy of State, and that those papers were essential to the History of the Generals’ Life now preparing for the press.

Firestorm

Historian Ray Brighton believes Tobias Lear destroyed multiple letters in order to protect Washington’s and Jefferson’s reputations. A letter from Lear to Alexander Hamilton supports this hypothesis. He wrote, “There are, as you well know, among the sev[eral] letters and papers many which every public and private consideration should withhold from further inspection.”

When Washington’s papers were found to be missing, Lear was accused of theft. The scandal—an early American version of a relentless social media attack—seemed endless. Massachusetts state Sen. Timothy Pickering, a fanatic Federalist and secretary of state to both Washington and Adams, wanted to destroy Tobias Lear,

…as part of the bitter rearguard action the Federalists were fighting against the march of Jeffersonism; that he was still persisting as late as 1829….”

In order to protect and help Lear, President Jefferson appointed him to be the US envoy to Saint-Domingue, modern-day Haiti. Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison also appointed him to be the nation’s peace envoy to North Africa during the Barbary Wars of the early 1800s.

No Pinnacle

Tobias Lear should have reached the pinnacle of his diplomatic career after negotiating and signing the Tripoli peace treaty with the country’s ruler, Bashaw Yousef Caramanli. The treaty ended the Barbary War—but again Lear set himself up for scandal.

Lear agreed to a secret protocol left out of the final June 4, 1805, draft giving Yousef four years to comply. Nutting notes:

Writing to Madison on July 5, Lear made no mention of the gentleman’s agreement, only commenting ambiguously that it was a “condition that time be allowed for the delivery of the family [American hostages].” … Regardless of Lear’s motives, which he never explained, this clandestine understanding when combined with the agreement to lay ransom [for the American prisoners] would ultimately demolish his reputation in the United States.

Man Without A Party

When the provision was discovered, the Federalists branded him a turncoat and the Democratic Republican Party disowned him. Tobias Lear was then a scandalous—and partyless—man with little chance for a lucrative political appointment or high-profile diplomatic post.

The Tobias Lear house in Portsmouth, N.H.

As a result, he could only get a job with the War Department as an accountant, a position beneath his experience and talents. Lear’s awareness that his professional career would never be what it once was must have contributed to his death.

In the end, historians have a handful of unanswered questions that, if known, would tell us why Tobias Lear committed suicide.

Why did Lear think that stealing from Washington was prudent, and why did he destroy Washington’s and Jefferson’s letters? Why did Lear keep a key part of his North African treaty a secret? And how did he feel about his menial job?

Taken individually, these are difficult issues and powerful experiences for anyone to live with. Throughout his life, Tobias Lear tried to muster his talents to make his name in finance and public service, despite his failures. He tried to build a fortune, maintain a respectable reputation and grasp fame, though he never succeeded.

Conceivably, these might have been factors in his death, but historians can only speculate. Nevertheless, on that September morning in 1816, Tobias Lear gave in and in a time of emotional and mental confinement chose not to embrace the new day.

End Notes

The author of this story about Tobias Lear, Cameron L. Kline is an educator, lecturer, and communications professional living in Philadelphia, PA. In partnership with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, he was the first scholar to annotate the complete Tobias Lear Journal.

Note: The material about the death of Washington is from The Tobias Lear Journal, housed in the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. It was first fully annotated by the author of this essay. The 70-pages detail the death of Washington, the president’s final wishes, perpetrations and funeral, entombment, plan to reanimate his corpse, the possible publishing of his papers, love for his family, his appointment and voyage to be Council to St. Domingo.

Thanks also to “Colonel Tobias Lear and the Tripolitan Hostage Crisis,” by Bradley P. Nutting in the New England Journal of History and “Private Affairs of George Washington,” by Stephen J. Decatur.

Image of Tobias Lear House: By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15203288.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Notorious Tom Bell – Minister, Teacher, Pirate, Thief . . .

In 1742 Tom Bell was probably the most well known product of Harvard College in America. Everyone knew how he dressed, what he looked like, where he traveled and how he lived. Because he was one of the most wanted criminals in the North American British colonies.

Bell was born in 1713 to a shipowner, Capt. Thomas Bell, and his wife, Joanna. They lived in Boston’s North End. The family sent the precocious Thomas to Boston Latin School, where he received a classical education. He was headed toward Harvard when, in 1729, his father died. The family found itself in debt, but it struggled to pay for Thomas to attend Harvard as planned.

Tom Bell entered the college in the fall of 1730, but by 1733 his college career reached an unceremonious ending. Sanctioned for stealing letters and lying, the final straw came when he stole a chocolate cake from a fellow student. Far behind in his studies, the college had grown tired of his promises to reform and pitched him out in the street.

Colonial engraving, Harvard College

Hearing the news that Harvard expelled Bell, his creditors pounced on him for unpaid bills. They sued him, winning judgments against him for unpaid debts, including 30 pounds to his tailor for silk suits. With his name dragged through the mud, Bell followed in his father’s footsteps and went to sea. He boarded a ship bound for England.

A Stroller is Born

For the next several years Bell would work at sea, returning to America from time to time. He gradually realized his education and exposure to the wealthier classes at Harvard had not gone to waste. Bell could speak Latin and read Greek, which put his education well ahead of most people in the colonies. He could pass himself off as a gentleman, and no one would suspect he wasn’t.

So Tom Bell simply became Francis Partridge Hutchinson or Thomas Wentworth Bell or Gilbert Burnet or John Rowland or William Bowdoin or whatever name suited him as he traveled up and down the colonies from New England to North Carolina. He gained notoriety as the Boston “Stroller” — a con man who strives to stay one step ahead of the law.

He was not terribly successful, however. In 1738 he was sentenced to be whipped in New York City for defrauding a merchant of 50 pounds. The next year in Philadelphia, he was spotted by a man from North Carolina who he had robbed years earlier. That episode landed him in prison. But Bell also gained some expertise in breaking out of jail — a skill that would serve him well.

Travels in Barbados

With his names and description widely circulating in North America, in 1739 Bell left for the Caribbean. In Speightstown, Barbados he undertook one of his more notorious escapades.

He had passed himself off as Gilbert Burnet, son of Massachusetts’ former governor.

A Jewish family invited the well-spoken governor’s son to a family wedding. But when Bell stole some of the wedding gifts, the young men of the family beat him up. This incensed the Christian residents of Speightstown, and they retaliated by destroying the Jewish synagogue and driving out the Jewish families.

Lord Fairfax

Bell nearly escaped Barbados unscathed. However, a merchant came forward and charged Bell with impersonating the brother of Virginia’s Lord Fairfax and running up an extensive tab. Again Bell was sentenced to a public whipping, but the governor of the island suspended a second sentence to brand Bell with an R on each cheek.

Tom Bell Becomes Rev. Rowland

In 1741 Bell returned to America and made his way to Princeton, N.J. Here a local man stopped Bell in the street and inquired if he wasn’t the Rev. John Rowland, a Presbyterian minister arriving from New England to preach. Bell corrected the man, who still insisted he looked exactly like Rev. Rowland. This presented Tom Bell with a golden opportunity. He proceeded to the next town and introduced himself as the Rev. Rowland. A local family invited Bell/Rowland to their home and offered him a horse to accompany them to the nearby church, where he was to preach.

The grateful “minister” accepted the use of the horse. But after traveling a ways toward the church he announced that he had left his notes behind at the house. He would return to collect them, and he asked the family to ride ahead and explain the delay. Naturally, Bell ransacked the house for any valuables and rode off, stealing the family’s horse.

Horse theft was a serious crime in 1741. Unfortunately for the real Rev. John Rowland, he was in Pennsylvania at the time delivering fiery sermons at religious revival meetings. When Rowland crossed into New Jersey he went to jail, accused of horse stealing. Rowland was eventually cleared of the charges, but the case was another prize for Tom Bell’s trophy case.

Tom Bell, Author

By 1742 Bell had returned to New England, this time to Newport, R.I. But by now the list of victims he had duped was a long one. No sooner had he arrived in the city than he got thrown into jail again, accused by a man he had swindled on a previous visit.

Painting of Newport, R.I. in 1818

From jail in Newport, Bell issued a public plea for forgiveness. He pledged to reform and promised to write a memoir to help others avoid his criminal path. It was yet another con. By 1743 he had returned to Philadelphia and was thrown in jail again for theft. By now his name was notorious and newspapers from New Hampshire to Virginia carried warnings that Tom Bell might be traveling again, looking for his next victim.

Bell continued his crimes and his sentences got more severe. A Massachusetts court convicted him of theft and sentenced him to be whipped and sold into servitude. Yet Bell always managed to escape. In one case he joined the militia, probably in lieu of jail, but he soon fled. A New Jersey court convicted him of counterfeiting. And later he was sentenced to death in Massachusetts. But he managed to escape the gallows.

Final Chapters

In between legal scrapes, Bell made a living as a schoolmaster or tutor. In 1752 he again announced, this time in Virginia and South Carolina, that he planned to publish “The Travels and Adventures of the Famous Tom Bell,” but he never did. Instead, Tom Bell returned to the Caribbean and took up piracy.

The final chapter of Bell’s life came in 1771 in Kingston, Jamaica. Bell had served as chief mate on a pirate ship that had attacked a Spanish schooner, robbing it of $14,000. Bell was arrested and convicted, along with the ship’s captain, and sentenced to hang. Tom Bell repented one last time and killed himself before he went to the gallows.

Thanks to Early Americans by Carl Bridenbaugh.

If you enjoyed this article, you might like: Stephen Burroughs Counterfeiter – A Revolutionary Success Story. This story was updated in 2022.

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John Adams Gets Into Harvard, Barely

As a terrified applicant to Harvard, 15-year-old John Adams showed few signs of becoming a Founding Father, diplomat, statesman and president of the United States.

He left his childhood home in Braintree, Mass., with a heavy heart. His tutor, Joseph Marsh, had promised to go with him on the 15-mile ride to Harvard, where he would take his entrance exams.

But on the day they planned to leave, Marsh took ill and told young John Adams he had to go on his own.

“Terrified at the Thought of introducing myself to such great Men as the President and fellows of a College, I at first resolved to return home,” wrote Adams.

He screwed up his courage, though, and rode on to Cambridge, alone. There he received another fright.

To enter Harvard, he had to translate a long passage of English into Latin. At first, though, he saw several words he didn’t know in Latin.

“Thinking that I must translate it without a dictionary, I was in a great fright and expected to be turned by, an Event that I dreaded above all things,” he wrote. But Mr. Mayhew, his examiner and future teacher, brought him into his study and showed him a dictionary, a book of grammar, pen, paper and ink. He then told John Adams to take his time. Adams did and got into Harvard, with a scholarship, no less.

John Adams at Harvard

The Massachusetts Puritans established Harvard to prepare young men for the ministry and for government.

Colonial engraving, Harvard College

Deacon John Adams wanted his smart eldest son to attend Harvard so he could become a minister. John Adams wanted none of it, thinking the ministry would make his life miserable. Instead, he found his calling at Harvard, though only tentatively.

He studied hard, joined a speaking club and made many friends among Harvard’s 100 students. One of his friends, John Wentworth, later served as a Loyalist governor of New Hampshire until patriots sent him to England.

John Wentworth.

Harvard

The college was tiny back then, with one president, two professors and four tutors. Each class had one tutor who until graduation taught them everything but theology, mathematics and natural philosophy.

That John Adams graduated in the middle of his class had to do with the Puritans’ caste system rather than his academic accomplishment. Until 1770, the school ranked students according to their social standing. John Adams would have ranked lower than 15^th out of 25 had his mother not belonged to the prominent Boylston family of Brookline. His father, a pious farmer who made shoes in the winter, never owned more than 200 acres.

But Harvard rewarded exceptional students by giving them speaking parts at graduation, regardless of their social rank. John Adams got to speak, which in turn earned him a job as a teacher in Worcester. That, in turn, allowed him to save enough money to study law, which his friends and teachers at Harvard had urged him to do.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The 1755 Earthquake Shakes Up John Adams and All of New England

The great 1755 earthquake was part of a series of earthquakes (probably related to each other) that wracked both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It destroyed major parts of Lisbon in Portugal when a fissure as wide as 16 feet opened up in the city’s center, followed by a tsunami and fires.

In America a series of aftershocks jolted New Englanders, with one prompting a debate that would last for weeks over the causes of earthquakes.

Allegory of the 1755 Earthquake, by João Glama Strobërle

The jolt that shook up New England on November 18 was particularly jarring. Twenty-year-old John Adams in Quincy, future president and patriot, noted the earthquake in the very first entry in his legendary diaries:

“We had a severe Shock of an Earthquake. It continued near four minutes. I was then at my Fathers in Braintree, and awoke out of my sleep in the midst of it. The house seemed to rock and reel and crack as if it would fall in ruins about us. Chimnies were shatter’d by it within one mile of my Fathers house.”

John Adams

The 1755 Earthquake

Known as the Cape Ann earthquake because it was centered off the coast of Cape Ann, the 1755 earthquake was felt from Nova Scotia to Maryland. The strongest earthquake ever recorded in Massachusetts, it toppled thousands of chimneys and did extensive damage to homes and property.

Elsewhere, it prompted a debate about the theological implications of an earthquake. A similar debate broke out in 1727 when ministers had explained a large earthquake as God showing his wrath. The Massachusetts Bay Colony followed up with orders for fasting.

By 1755, however, a new technology would be swept up into the debate. In the 1740s Benjamin Franklin and others had advanced the study of lightning and electricity. As a result of their discoveries many buildings were fitted with lightning rods to safely direct lightning that might strike a building into the ground, avoiding damage to people and property.

Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky c. 1816 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, by Benjamin West

But following the 1755 earthquake, Boston Congregational minister Thomas Prince put forward a new theory of earthquakes. Prince had strongly argued in 1727 that God punished wicked mankind with the earthquake. In 1755 he updated his thinking. Surely, he conjectured, the use of lightning rods could cause earthquakes.

Lightning Rods

“The more Points of Iron are erected round the Earth, to draw the Electrical Substance out of the Air; the more the Earth must needs be charged with it,” he wrote in a pamphlet he published. “It seems very likely that this Electrical Substance . . . is a principal Instrument in producing Earthquakes.”

Prince suggested that Boston had experienced a more violent shaking from the earthquake because it had more lightning rods than other areas. (Damage was actually felt worst in buildings constructed on filled land.) All in all, the earthquake showed the folly of trying to outsmart God.

Thomas Prince by Joseph Badger

“O! there is no getting out of the mighty Hand of GOD! If we think to avoid it in the Air, we cannot in the Earth: Yea it may grow more fatal; and there is no Safety anywhere, but in his Almighty Friendship through CHRIST the Mediator, and by heartily Repenting of every Sin and hearty embracing the Saviour in all his Offices, and uprightly Living to HIM.”

The charge would not go unanswered. Just as the 1727 earthquake had inspired a debate over science vs. God in the matter of earthquakes, the 1755 quake did too.

John Winthrop Disagrees

John Winthrop, a Harvard College professor of mathematics and science, published a rebuttal to Prince’s proposition:

“The reigning mode of late has been, to explain everything by ELECTRICITY. . . Now, it seems, it is to be the cause of earthquakes,” he wrote. Winthrop argued that scientific inquiry was needed to better explain the causes of earthquakes, not reliance on fear.

Harvard’s second Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, John Winthrop. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums.

But Winthrop wrote and lectured on the topic because of his concern that Rev. Prince’s tract would discourage the use of lightning rods to protect buildings. The inspiration for lightning rods, he argued, might have come as a gift from God to spare people the effects of lightning strikes.

I cannot believe, that in the whole town of Boston, where so many iron points are erected, there is so much as one person who is so weak, so ignorant, so foolish, or, to say all in one word, so atheistical, as ever to have entertained a single thought that it is possible, by the help of a few yards of wire, to “get out of the mighty hand of GOD.”

The argument continued in newspaper letters and personal exchanges for four months before both men made peace with each other and agreed to disagree.

Thanks to: Lightning-Rods and the Earthquake of 1755, Eleanor M. Tilton. This story last updated in 2022.

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Abraham Lincoln in New England – Five Fast Facts

Before he moved into the White House, Abraham Lincoln came to New England twice. Newspapers reported extensively on Abraham Lincoln in New England both in September 1848 and in February 1860, though he had far more fame on his second visit.

Abraham Lincoln

Here are five facts about Abraham Lincoln in New England.

Cooper-Union Fallout

The day after his famed Cooper-Union speech in New York on Feb. 27, 1860, Lincoln stopped in Providence.

At Cooper-Union, Lincoln had carefully articulated his view on why the federal government should stop the spread of slavery into the western states. Further, he riled his opponents. He declared, “[No] part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the federal territories.”

He left the city in a frenzy as newspapers fell over themselves to praise him or attack him. The next day, Feb. 28, 1860, he gave an impromptu speech at Railroad Hall in the Providence train station.

Fifteen hundred cheering supporters attended. He used the critical newspaper coverage both for humor and to reiterate his arguments.

Lincoln on the day of his Cooper-Union speech. Photo by Matthew Brady.

Son Failing College Exams

One of the reasons, and perhaps the main reason, Lincoln traveled to New Hampshire in February 1860 was to visit his son Robert.

Robert was then studying at Phillips Exeter Academy to pass his entrance exams for Harvard College. But he’d failed them previously. Lincoln came to encourage his son as he crammed for his exams.

However, Lincoln’s Cooper-Union speech had been so widely covered people clamored to hear him. He spoke 11 times on the trip, many of them at unscheduled train stops.

Robert Todd Lincoln, ca. 1860.

Lincoln Had a Common Touch

Though an able debater and lawyer, Lincoln had the politician’s gift for relating to working men.

During his trip to New England in February of 1860, Lincoln stopped in Manchester, N.H. Amoskeag Mill manager Ezekiel Straw gave Abraham Lincoln a tour of the mill. He introduced the candidate to the workers.

One of the mill workers hesitated to shake his hand, saying it was dirty from his work. “Young man,” said Lincoln, “the hand of honest toil is never too grimy for Abe Lincoln to grasp.”

Ezekiel Straw

Toured Massachusetts as a Minor Congressman

Abraham Lincoln first visited Massachusetts in 1848 on a tour of the state to promote Whig candidates. The visit lasted from Sept. 12-21, 1848.

The Free Soil party — a single-issue party formed to oppose the expansion of slavery in the western states — was making inroads against the Whigs in the contest with the Democrats that year. Lincoln took to the road to promote Zachary Taylor, the eventual winner.

Thirteen years after giving a speech at Worcester, a visitor to Washington from Massachusetts asked Lincoln if he remembered the trip. Characteristically, Lincoln used the moment to spread some flattery.

He said he recalled that “with hayseed in my hair I went to Massachusetts, the most cultured state in the Union, to take a few lessons in deportment. That was a grand dinner — a superb dinner; by far the finest I ever saw in my life.”

Lincoln in 1845

Skipped Massachusetts in 1860

On his 1860 trip to New England, Lincoln did not speak in Massachusetts. He stopped only in Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire.

But the Bay State tempted him. Lincoln received an invitation to visit Springfield in the summer of 1860, but his advisers talked him out of it. At that time it was considered unseemly for presidential candidates to campaign on their own behalf.

Lincoln’s Democratic opponent, Stephen Douglas, fearing a Lincoln victory, had taken to the campaign trail in a move regarded as desperate and un-presidential.

Republican National Secretary George Fogg wrote to Lincoln: “You could not go to Springfield without your journey being in some measure a political ovation. As such, it would relieve Douglas of the charge of being the only stump candidate for the Presidency. It would also be construed by the Democratic papers into evidence of Republican alarm. In this view, it might ‘hurt.’ Everything east I believe is well. The election is ours now. The triumph is ours.”

And he was right, Lincoln went on to win the presidency, though with only 39 percent of the popular vote.

Thanks to Abraham Lincoln’s Classroom. This story about Abraham Lincoln in New England was updated in 2022.

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