Browsing: Papers of John Adams, Volume 1

Minister of the West Church in Boston and an outspoken supporter of the whigs, Jonathan Mayhew (1720–1766) was the author of the famous A Dissertation Concerning Unlimited Submission and Nonresistance to the Higher Powers, 1750, and of The Snare Broken, 1766, a sermon on the repeal of the Stamp Act. John Adams admired particularly the Dudleian Lecture that Mayhew delivered in May 1765, which attacked the Catholic Church for its threat to liberty, a theme congenial to Adams' “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law.” See the notes to the “Dissertation,” May – 21 October 1765, under Nos. I, IV, and V, below. The portrait is thought to have been painted about 1750.