s had always been with that party. In Massachusetts the
educated and well-to-do classes were almost unanimously of that way of
thinking. The select coterie of gentlemen in the State, who in those
times bore an active and influential part in politics, were nearly all
Hamiltonians, but the adherents of President Adams were numerically
strong. Nor was the younger Adams himself long left without his
private grievance against Mr. Jefferson, who promptly used the
authority vested in him by a new statute to remove Mr. Adams from the
position of commissioner in bankruptcy, to which, at the time of his
resuming business, he had been appointed by the judge of the district
court. Long afterward Jefferson sought to escape the odium of this
apparently malicious and, for those days, unusual action, by a very
Jeffersonian explanation, tolerably satisfactory to those persons who
believed it.

On April 5, 1802, Mr. Adams was chosen by the Federalists of Boston to
represent them in the State Senate. The office was at that time still
sought by men of the best ability and position, and though it was
hardly a step upward on the political ladder for one who had
represented the nation in foreign parts for eight years, yet (p. 029)
Mr. Adams was well content to accept it. At least it reopened the door
of political life, and moreover one of his steadfast maxims was never
to refuse any function which the people sought to impose upon him. It
is worth noting, for its bearing upon controversies soon to be
encountered in this narrative, that forty-eight hours had not elapsed
after Mr. Adams had taken his seat before he ventured upon a display
of independence which caused much irritation to his Federalist
associates. He had the hardihood to propose that the Federalist
majority in the legislature should permit the Republican minority to
enjoy a proportional representation in the council. "It was the first
act of my legislative life," he wrote many years afterward, "and it
marked the principle by which my whole public life has been governed
from that day to this. My proposal was unsuccessful, and perhaps it
forfeited whatever confidence might have been otherwise bestowed upon
me as a party follower." Indeed, all his life long Mr. Adams was never
submissive to the party whip, but voted upon every question precisely
according to his opinion of its merits, without the slightest regard
to the political company in which for the time being he might fin