Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams | Page 5

of the Reverend William Smith, of Weymouth. The mother of John Quincy Adams was a woman of great beauty and high intellectual endowments, and she combined, with the proper accomplishments of her sex, a sweetness of disposition, and a generous sympathy with the patriotic devotion of her illustrious husband.
In 1765, the British Parliament, in contempt of the discontent of the Colonies, presumptuously passed the Stamp Act; a law which directed taxed stamped paper to be used in all legal instruments in the Colonies. The validity of the law was denied; and while Patrick Henry was denouncing it in Virginia, James Otis and John Adams argued against it before the Governor and Council of Massachusetts.
The occasion called forth from John Adams a "Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Laws,"--a work, which although it was of a general character in regard to government, yet manifested democratic sentiments unusual in those times, and indicated that republican institutions were the proper institutions for the American People.
The resistance to the stamp act throughout the Colonies procured its repeal in 1766. But the British Government accompanied the repeal with an ungracious declaratory act, by which they asserted "that the Parliament had, and of right ought to have, power to bind the Colonies, in all cases whatsoever." In the next year a law was passed, which imposed duties in the Colonies, on glass, paper, paints, and tea. The spirit of insubordination manifested itself throughout the Colonies, and, inasmuch as it radiated from Boston, British ships of war were stationed in its harbor, and two regiments of British troops were thrown in the town, to compel obedience. John Adams had now become known as the most intrepid, zealous, and indefatigable opposer of British usurpation. The Crown tried upon him in vain the royal arts so successful on the other side of the Atlantic. The Governor and Council offered him the place of Advocate General in the Court of Admiralty, an office of great value; he declined it, "decidedly, peremptorily, but respectfully."
At this interesting crisis, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS was born, at Quincy, on the 11th of July, 1767. A lesson, full of instruction concerning the mingled influences of piety and patriotism in New England, at that time, is furnished to us by the education of the younger Adams. Nor can we fail to notice that each of those virtues retained its relative power over him, throughout his long and eventful life. He was brought into the church and baptized on the day after that on which he was born.
John Quincy Adams, in one of his letters, thus mentions the circumstances of his baptism:
"The house at Mount Wollaston has a peculiar interest to me, as the dwelling of my great-grandfather, whose name I bear. The incident which gave rise to this circumstance is not without its moral to my heart. He was dying, when I was baptized; and his daughter, my grandmother, present at my birth, requested that I might receive his name. The fact, recorded by my father at the time, has connected with that portion of my name, a charm of mingled sensibility and devotion. It was filial tenderness that gave the name. It was the name of one passing from earth to immortality. These have been among the strongest links of my attachment to the name of Quincy, and have been to me, through life, a perpetual admonition to do nothing unworthy of it."
It cannot be doubted that the character of the person from whom, in such affecting circumstances, he derived an honorable patronymic, was an object of emulation. John Quincy was a gentleman of wealth, education, and influence. He was for a long time Speaker of the House of Representatives in Massachusetts, and during many years one of His Majesty's Provincial Council. He was a faithful representative, and throughout his public services, a vigorous defender of the rights and liberties of the Colony. Exemplary in private life, and earnest in piety, he enjoyed the public confidence, through a civil career of forty years' duration.
The American Revolution was rapidly hurrying on during the infancy of John Quincy Adams. In 1769, the citizens of Boston held a meeting in which they instructed their representatives in the Provincial Legislature to resist the usurpations of the British Government. John Adams was chairman of the committee that prepared these instructions, and his associates were Richard Dana and Joseph Warren, the same distinguished patriot who gave up his life as one of the earliest sacrifices to freedom, in the battle of Bunker Hill.
Those instructions were expressed in the bold and decided tone of John Adams, and they increased the public excitement in the province, by the earnestness with which they insisted on the removal of the British troops from Boston.
The popular irritation increased, until on the 5th of March, 1770, a collision