Sold – Adams on Liberty, Mortality, Culture and the Glory of English Civilization

Abigail Adams had no formal schooling, but her self-education included reading works by well known British writers, among them William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Her favorite was John Milton, author of “Paradise Lost”, a giant on the British literary scene during the 17th century. His era was a time of social and religious confrontation, war and transition, and he sided with Parliament and approved of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. After the Restoration and triumph of the royal party, it became somewhat unseemly in Britain to speak well of Milton or advocate his work. But the same was not true in New England, whose inhabitants were descendants of those who made common cause with Milton. As for the Adamses of Massachusetts, love of Milton was a family trait.  “If the Adamses had a culture hero,” writes Henry Wasser, “it was surely John Milton…as Charles Francis Adams said, ‘Milton was essentially the poet laureate of the Puritans…’”  John Quincy Adams would later reflect on the familial partiality for Milton, “I was mortified even to the shedding of tears that I could not even conceive what it was that my father and mother admired so much in the book….I was nearly thirty when I first read the Paradise Lost with delight and astonishment.”  The Adams family was famously fond of classics in English and Latin. John Adams would often accompany his correspondence with reference to civilizations and languages of old. John Quincy was a poet and literary scholar.  To them, the span of Western Civilization was an arc that extended from Greece through England to the United States, a vision of culture and of freedom that had great context and texture.

On whatsoever portion of the globe the language of England shall be the mother tongue and a trace of Roman Liberty shall remain, they will be remembered and sink deep into the Souls of the virtuous and the free.

In the Revolution, Americans as a whole had taken the position that there were fundamental liberties of Englishmen to which they were entitled, and that the present government of Britain had veered off the path and become a destroyer of liberties instead of a guaranteer of them. So both father and son had spent their lives fighting Britain, or rather the British King and Ministry and their supporters who were putting out the lights of freedom in their own homeland and in the colonies. But with the Napoleonic Wars long over, the difficulties between Britain and America mainly in the past, and a young new Queen and spirit in England, friendly ties began to again build.

Lord Wellesley was the brother of the Duke of Wellington.  From 1797 to 1805, he served as chief administrator for the Crown in India, and later as ambassador to Spain, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.  At the end of his distinguished life, he returned to his childhood lessons in and love of Latin and published “Primitiae et Reliquiae”, which included some thoughts demonstrating his love also of Milton.  The work was in Latin, including some translations from English and other original works.  As the New York Review wrote in 1841, “That a man of Lord Wellesley’s rank and character, whose whole life, and that a very long one, has been spent in his country’s service, and so spent as to call forth from the present premier a declaration in the House of Lords, that ‘never were services rendered by subject to sovereign in any state equal to those of the Marquess Wellesley’; that such a man should have preserved not only his fondness for the studies of his youth, but also his attainments in them undiminished to fourscore, is no inconsiderable proof, we think, both of the excellence of the system of instruction in the great public schools of England, in one of which he was educated, and of the pre-eminent adaptation of the studies themselves to create and fix in the mind a love for letters.” John McTavish, the British consul at Baltimore, was the grandson-in-law of Signer Charles Carroll of Carrollton.  He sent Adams a copy of the privately printed book. Adams enjoyed both the work and what it said about England today that such a book on Milton would find favor, and he did some translations from the book’s Latin into English. McTavish informed Wellesley about these, and he was delighted and wanted to read them and include them in later editions.

Autograph Letter Signed, two pages, Washington, December 16, 1841, to McTavish, speaking of England’s glory, Roman liberty, his joy at the rebirth of Milton’s popularity, and his belief that the virtuous and free would long remember such work. “Conformably to the obliging permission in your letter of the 20th ult, I enclose herewith my answer to the Marquess of Wellesley which I had recently the pleasure of receiving from you. And with it, in compliance with his Lordship’s request, I add a copy, in my own handwriting and certified by myself, of that version of his beautiful Latin verses upon Milton which he has honored with his approbation. There spoke to my heart, in that small number of the original lines, the spirit of England’s glory in the language of Roman liberty. There is in them a concentrated volume of history at the most portentious period of modern times. It was not random praise or blame that I saw in Lord Wellesley’s estimate of the character of Milton and of the age in which he lived. The rescue of the poet’s moral character from the shade which detraction had cast over it, claimed my gratitude, and desirous of conveying to you my sense of your kindness in the present of the volume, I knew not how better to express it, than in the attempt to interpret the voice of his Lordship’s Roman Muse in the native Anglo-Saxon of the bard himself. With the hope that this effort would be acceptable to you I did not anticipate that you would think it worthy of being communicated to Lord Wellesley, and little expected that he would confer upon it, by his indulgent reception of it, a value which I was far from attributing to it myself.

This letter is a work in itself and contains the very spirit of John Quincy Adams. It has political, cultural, linguistic, literary, educational and social aspects, and ends with the poetry of the elderly man’s ruminations on his own mortality.