John Adams, July 6, 1774

Falmouth,¹ 6 July, 1774.

Mobs are the trite topic of declamation and invective among all the ministerial people far and near. They are grown universally learned in the nature, tendency, and consequences of them, and very elegant and pathetic in descanting upon them. They are sources of all kinds of evils, vices, and crimes, they say. They give rise to profaneness, intemperance, thefts, robberies, murders, and treason. Cursing, swearing, drunkenness, gluttony, lewdness, trespasses, maims, are necessarily involved in them and occasioned by them. Besides, they render the populace, the rabble, the scum of the earth, insolent and disorderly, impudent and abusive. They give rise to lying, hypocrisy, chicanery, and even perjury among the people, who are driven to such artifice and crimes to conceal themselves and their companions from prosecutions in consequence of them.

This is the picture drawn by the Tory pencil; and it must be granted to be a likeness. But this is declamation. What consequence is to be drawn from this description? Shall we submit to Parliamentary taxation to avoid mobs? Will not Parliamentary taxation, if established, occasion vices, crimes, and follies infinitely more numerous, dangerous, and fatal to the community? Will not Parliamentary taxation, if established, raise a revenue unjustly and wrongfully? If this revenue is scattered by the hand of corruption among the public officers and magistrates and rulers in the community, will it not propagate vices more numerous, more malignant and pestilential among them? Will it not render magistrates servile and fawning to their vicious superiors, and insolent and tyrannical to their inferiors? Are insolence, abuse, and impudence more tolerable in a magistrate than in a subject? Are they not more constantly and extensively pernicious? And does not the example of vice and folly in magistrates descend and spread downwards among the people?

Besides, is not the insolence of officers and soldiers and seamen, in the army and navy, as mischievous as that of porters, or of sailors in the merchant service? Are not riots raised and made by armed men as bad as those by unarmed? Is not an assault upon a civil officer, and a rescue of a prisoner from lawful authority, made by soldiers with swords or bayonets, as bad as if made by tradesmen with staves?

Are not the killing of a child by R.,² and the slaughter of half a dozen citizens by a party of soldiers, as bad as pulling down a house or drowning a cargo of tea, even if both should be allowed to be unlawful? Parties may go on declaiming, but it is not easy to say which party has excited most riots, which has published most libels, which has propagated most slander and defamation? Verbal scandal has been propagated in great abundance by both parties; but there is this difference, that one party have enjoyed almost all public offices, and therefore their defamation has been spread among the people more secretly, more maliciously, and more effectually. It has gone with greater authority, and been scattered by instruments more industrious. The ministerial newspapers have swarmed with as numerous and as malicious libels as the antiministerial ones. Fleet's paper, “Mein's Chronicle,” etc., etc., have been as virulent as any that was ever in the province. These bickerings of opposite parties, and their mutual reproaches, their declamations, their sing-song, their triumphs and defiances, their dismals and prophecies, are all delusion.

We very seldom hear any solid reasoning. I wish always to discuss the question without all painting, pathos, rhetoric, or flourish of every kind. And the question seems to me to be, whether the American colonies are to be considered as a distinct community so far as to have a right to judge for themselves when the fundamentals of their government are destroyed or invaded, or whether they are to be considered as a part of the whole British empire, the whole English nation, so far as to be bound in honor, conscience, or interest by the general sense of the whole nation. However, if this was the rule, I believe it is very far from the general sense of the whole nation, that America should be taxed by the British parliament. If the sense of the whole of the empire could be fairly and truly collected, it would appear, I believe, that a great majority would be against taxing us against or without our consent. It is very certain that the sense of parliament is not the sense of the empire, nor a sure indication of it.

But, if all other parts of the empire were agreed unanimously in the propriety and rectitude of taxing us, this would not bind us. It is a fundamental, inherent, and unalienable right of the people, that they have some check, influence, or control in their supreme legislature. If the right of taxation is conceded to Parliament, the Americans have no check or influence at all left.

This reasoning never was nor can be answered.

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¹ The ancient name of Portland, in Maine, at this period a part of the province of Massachusetts Bay.

² Ebenezer Richardson. The affair happened on the 22d February, 1770, a few days before the other and more serious disturbance here alluded to, commonly known as the Boston massacre. A man of the government side, by the name of Lillie, who kept a shop in Hanover Street, finding the non-importation agreement not universally observed, ventured to offer his stock of goods for sale. As a consequence, his shop was at once marked out in the street as infringing the agreement, and a board set up on which a hand was drawn for the purpose of arresting attention and deterring all persons from purchasing. Richardson, well known as an informer attached to the custom house, who lived close by, came out and attempted to get rid of the board. A struggle took place. The mob drove him back to his house, and attacked it with stones. He then fired a musket twice, killing a German boy eleven years old, by the name of Christopher Snyder, and wounding another very severely.

SOURCE: Charles Francis Adams, Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams, During the Revolution, p. 14-16