and self-righteous spirit of their
Puritan ancestors. It would be interesting to inquire to what issue the
quarrel with England would have been conducted had it been left to Mr.
Cushing and Mr. Hancock. Half the persistent opposition of the brace of
Adamses to British legislation was inspired by the commanding position
of a few families in Boston--the Hutchinsons and Olivers, who "will rule
and overbear in all things." As a youngster John Adams had confided to
his _Diary_: "I will not ... confine myself to a chamber for nothing.
I'll have some boon in return, exchange: fame, fortune, or something."
Laborious days had gained him little. "Thirty seven years, more than
half the life of man, are run out," he complains in 1773, "and I have my
own and my children's fortunes to make." Yet there was his boyhood
friend, Jonathan Sewall, already attorney-general, "rewarded ... with
six thousand pounds a year, for propagating as many ... slanders against
his country as ever fell from the pen of a sycophant." And the
Hutchinsons and Olivers! With what concentrated bitterness does the
young lawyer write of these men who, he is convinced, had submitted to
be ministerial tools for the aggrandizement, of their families. His
bitterness is the greater, and his conscious rectitude the more
obtrusive, because he also, the virtuous Adams, might have sat in that
gallery. For the wily Hutchinson had offered him the lucrative post of
solicitor-general--the open road to power; but he had declined it; he
could not be bought by the man "whose character and conduct have been
the cause for laying a foundation for perpetual discontent and
uneasiness between Britain and the colonies, of perpetual struggle of
one party for wealth and power at the expense of the liberties of this
country, and of perpetual contention in the other party to preserve
them." Not in England was the plot hatched, but in Boston itself; and
much brooding on his injuries and his abnegations had brought Adams to
the pass, in 1774, that he could set down the names of the three
"original conspirators."

It was this opposition of interests in America that chiefly made men
extremists on either side. Adams would have been less radical had
Hutchinson and Jonathan Sewall been more so; and perhaps Hutchinson and
Sewall might have been more loyal patriots had the brace of Adamses been
less bitter ones. Most of those who in the end became Loyalists were men
who had once been opposed to th