Free John Adams - SA by David McCullough Page B

for fees of 10 pounds sterling. “What shall I do with two clerks at a time?” Adams speculated in his diary, adding that he would do all he could “for their education and advancement in the world,” a pledge he was to keep faithfully. When Billy Tudor was admitted to the bar three years later, Adams took time to write to Tudor's wealthy father to praise the young man for his clear head and honest heart, but also to prod the father into giving his son some help getting started in his practice. Adams had seen too often the ill effect of fathers who ignored their sons when a little help could have made all the difference.
    With the death of Jeremiah Gridley the year before and the mental collapse of James Otis, John Adams, still in his thirties, had become Boston's busiest attorney. He was “under full sail,” prospering at last, and in the Adams tradition, he began buying more land, seldom more than five or ten acres of salt marsh or woodland at a time, but steadily, year after year. (Among his father's memorable observations was that he never knew a piece of land to run away or break.) Eventually, after his brother Peter married and moved to his wife's house, John would purchase all of the old homestead, with its barn and fifty-three acres, which included Fresh Brook, to Adams a prime asset. In one pasture, he reckoned, there were a thousand red cedars, which in twenty years, “if properly pruned,” might be worth a shilling each. And with an appreciative Yankee eye, he noted “a quantity of good stone in it, too.”
    He was becoming more substantial in other ways. “My good man is so very fat that I am lean as a rail,” Abigail bemoaned to her sister Mary. He acquired more and more books, books being an acknowledged extravagance he could seldom curb. (With one London bookseller he had placed a standing order for “every book and pamphlet, of reputation, upon the subjects of law and government as soon as it comes out.”) “I want to see my wife and children every day,” he would write while away on the court circuit. “I want to see my grass and blossoms and corn.... But above all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books.”
    In the privacy of his journal, he could also admit now, if obliquely, to seeing himself as a figure of some larger importance. After noting in one entry that his horse had overfed on grass and water, Adams speculated wryly, “My biographer will scarcely introduce my little mare and her adventures.”
    He could still search his soul over which path to follow. “To what object are my views directed?” he asked. “Am I grasping at money, or scheming for power?” Yes, he was amassing a library, but to what purpose? “Fame, fortune, power say some, are the ends intended by a library. The service of God, country, clients, fellow men, say others. Which of these lie nearest my heart?
What plan of reading or reflection or business can be pursued by a man who is now at Pownalborough
[Maine]
, then at Martha's Vineyard, next at Boston, then at Taunton, presently at Barnstable, then at Concord, now at Salem, then at Cambridge, and afterward Worcester. Now at Sessions, then at Pleas, now in Admiralty, now at Superior Court, then in the gallery of the House.... Here and there and everywhere, a rambling, roving, vagrant, vagabond life.
    Yet when Jonathan Sewall, who had become attorney general of the province, called on Adams at the request of governor Francis Bernard to offer him the office of advocate general in the Court of Admiralty, a plum for an ambitious lawyer, Adams had no difficulty saying no.
    Politically he and Sewall were on opposing sides, Sewall having become an avowed Tory. Yet they tried to remain friends. “He always called me John and I him Jonathan,” remembered Adams, “and I often said to him, I wish my name were David.” Both understood that the office, lucrative in itself, was, in Adams's words, a “sure introduction to the most profitable business in the