Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. | Page 5

Series, vol. xv., pp. 218, 219.

While waiting for professional employment, he was instinctively drawn
into political discussions. Thomas Paine had just then published his
"Rights of Man," for which Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State,
took upon himself to be sponsor, by publishing a letter expressing his
extreme pleasure "that it is to be reprinted here, and that something is at
length to be publicly said against the political heresies which have
sprung up among us. I have no doubt our citizens will rally a second
time round the standard of Common Sense."
Notwithstanding the weight of Jefferson's character, and the strength of
his recommendation, in June, 1791, young Adams entered the lists
against Paine and his pamphlet, which was in truth an encomium on the
National Assembly of France, and a commentary on the rights of man,
inferring questionable deductions from unquestionable principles. In a
series of essays, signed Publicola, published in the Columbian Centinel,
he states and controverts successively the fundamental doctrines of
Paine's work; denies that "whatever a whole nation chooses to do it has
a right to do," and maintains, in opposition, that "nations, no less than
individuals, are subject to the eternal and immutable laws of justice and
morality;" declaring that Paine's doctrine annihilated the security of
every man for his inalienable rights, and would lead in practice to a
hideous despotism, concealed under the parti-colored garments of
democracy. The truth of the views in these essays was soon made
manifest by the destruction of the French constitution, so lauded by
Paine and Jefferson, the succeeding anarchy, the murder of the French
monarch, and the establishment of a military despotism.
In April, 1793, Great Britain declared war against France, then in the
most violent frenzy of her revolution. In this war, the feelings of the
people of the United States were far from being neutral. The seeds of
friendship for the one, and of enmity towards the other belligerent,
which the Revolutionary War had plentifully scattered through the
whole country, began everywhere to vegetate. Private cupidity openly
advocated privateering upon the commerce of Great Britain, in aid of
which commissions were issued under the authority of France. To
counteract the apparent tendency of these popular passions, Mr. Adams
published, also in the Centinel, a series of essays, signed Marcellus,

exposing the lawlessness, injustice, and criminality, of such
interference in favor of one of the belligerents. "For if," he wrote, "as
the poet, with more than poetical truth, has said, 'war is murder,' the
plunder of private property, the pillage of all the regular rewards of
honest industry and laudable enterprise, upon the mere pretence of a
national contest, in the eye of justice can appear in no other light than
highway robbery. If, however, some apology for the practice is to be
derived from the incontrollable law of necessity, or from the imperious
law of war, certainly there can be no possible excuse for those who
incur the guilt without being able to plead the palliation; for those who
violate the rights of nations in order to obtain a license for rapine
manifestly show that patriotism is but the cloak for such enterprises;
that the true objects are plunder and pillage; and that to those engaged
in them it was only the lash of the executioner which kept them in the
observance of their civil and political duties."
After developing the folly and madness of such conduct in a nation
whose commerce was expanded over the globe, and which was
"destitute of even the defensive apparatus of war," and showing that it
would lead to general bankruptcy, and endanger even the existence of
the nation, he maintained that "impartial and unequivocal neutrality
was the imperious duty of the United States." Their pretended
obligation to take part in the war resulting from "the guarantee of the
possessions of France in America," he denied, on the ground that either
circumstances had wholly dissolved those obligations, or they were
suspended and made impracticable by the acts of the French
government.
The ability displayed in these essays attracted the attention of
Washington and his cabinet, and the coïncidence of these views with
their own was immediately manifested by the proclamation of
neutrality. Their thoughts were again, soon after, attracted to the author,
by a third series of essays, published in November, 1793, in the
Columbian Centinel, under the signature of Columbus, in which he
entered the lists in defence of the constituted authorities of the United
States, exposing and reprobating the language and conduct of Genet,
the minister from the French republic, whose repeated insults upon the

first magistrate of the American Union, and upon the national
government, had been as public and as shameless as they had been
unprecedented. For, after Washington, supported by the highest judicial
authority of the