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part, though in his eighty-sixth year, he was chosen a delegate by his
townsmen. Upon his first appearance, with a form yet erect, though
tremulous with age, in this Convention, which was composed of the very
cream of the great minds with which the State abounded, Mr. Adams was
received by members standing, and with every demonstration of affection
and esteem; and a series of resolutions were forthwith passed, containing an
enumeration and warm acknowledgement of some of his principal public
services, and calling on him to preside. But this, while duly acknowledging
the compliment, he declined, on the score of his age and infirmities. The
same cause also prevented his taking any active part in the proceedings. Yet
he labored to secure a modification of the third article of the bill of rights,
on the subject of public worship and its support, an article which, when
originally drafting the rest of that instrument, he had passed over to other
hands.
But the time had not yet come for such changes as he wished. The old
puritan feeling was still too great to acknowledge the equal rights, political
and religious, of other than Christians. Yet, however it might be with his
colleagues and fellow-citizens, Mr. Adams, in this movement, expressed his
own ideas. One of his latest letters, written in 1825, and addressed to
Jefferson, is a remarkable protest against the blasphemy laws, so-called, of
Massachusetts, and the rest of the Union, as being utterly inconsistent with
the right of free inquiry and private judgment. It is in the letters of Mr.
Adams, of which but few have ever been published, that his genius as a
writer and a thinker, and no less distinctly his character as a man, is
displayed. Down even to the last year of his protracted life, his letters
exhibit a wonderful degree of vitality, energy, playfulness, and command of
language.
As a writer of English—and we may add as a speculative philosopher—
little as he ever troubled himself with revision and correction, he must be

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placed first among Americans of all the several generations to which he
belonged, excepting only Franklin; and if Franklin excelled him in humor
and geniality, he far surpassed Franklin in compass and vivacity. Indeed, it
is only by the recent publication of his letters that his gifts in these respects
are becoming well known. The first installment of his private letters
published during his lifetime, though not deficient in these characteristics,
yet having been written under feelings of great aggravation, and in a spirit
of extreme bitterness against his political opponents, was rather damaging
to him than otherwise. In the interval from 1804 to 1812, Mr. Cunningham,
a maternal relative, had drawn him into a private correspondence in which,
still smarting under a sense of injury, he had expressed himself with perfect
unreserve and entire freedom as to the chief events of his presidential
administration and the character and motives of the parties concerned in
them.
By a gross breach of confidence, of which Mr. Adams, like other
impulsive and confiding persons, often had been the victim, those letters
were sold by Cunningham's heir in 1824, while the writer and many of the