9. This and the preceding letter, embodying
JA's reflections in the course of the day after the United States became a nation, acquired
early and deserved celebrity. But the history of their early publication and textual
garbling offers a striking illustration of how difficult it is to overcome popular
errors, or, to invert an idealistic saying, how error, crushed to earth, will rise
again.
Only a summary of that history can be given here, and this summary is drawn largely
from Charles Warren's article, “The Doctored Letters of John Adams,”
MHS, Procs., 68 (1944–1947):160–170, a learned and skillful piece of scholarly detective work.
Warren points out that the two
JA letters to his wife dated 3 July were apparently first printed (the
first of them with an indicated omission at the beginning of the text) in the
Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine for May 1792 (8:313–315) as part of a series of
JA's Revolutionary letters. No explanation of their provenance is given there, and the
identity of the recipient is in both cases disguised by the salutation “
Sir.” (The texts as printed derive ultimately from
JA's letterbook copies, are quite faithful, and were presumably supplied by some member
of his actual or official family who had access to his letterbooks.
JA himself, in a letter to
JQA of 19 Sept. 1795 [
Adams Papers], alluded to the printing of this “Letter,” as he called it, and said he prized it
“above a statue or a Monument—merely as Evidence of my Opinion at that time and of
my Courage to avow it”; but he gave no hint of how publication occurred.) On 4 July
1792 the Philadelphia
Gazette of the United States reprinted these texts, with a brief tribute to the Vice-President's powers as a prophet.
On 1 July 1795 the Federalist
Columbian Centinel of Boston published a letter from “An American,” who argued that his fellow Americans
had all along been celebrating the wrong day (the Fourth of July) as the anniversary
of independence; they ought, he said, to celebrate the Second. As evidence, he quoted
“extracts of two letters, from Mr. JOHN ADAMS to a friend,” consisting of the seventh
paragraph of
JA's first letter of 3 July (“Yesterday the greatest Question . . .”) and the last two
paragraphs of
JA's second letter (“But the Day is past . . .”). “As a friend to propriety,” he concluded,
“I could wish to see the alteration take place.”
Nine years later, in the same paper, 23 June 1804, “Seventy-Six” urged the same point,
though in more sharply partisan terms. “Seventy-Six” cited the same passages from
JA's “letters to a friend” of 3 July 1776 as proof that
JA was the “efficient agent in this glorious work [of independence],” whereas Jefferson
was an “adventitious” agent, merely
{ 32 } “penning a bill, after the principles [had] been decided upon.”
This argument having made little headway, a nameless Federalist writer took a different
tack the next year. In the
Boston Gazette for 4 July 1805 appeared a long, unsigned letter eulogizing the services of Washington
and
JA, and to this were appended the now familiar passages from
JA's letters, run together and treated as if they constituted a single letter in and
of themselves. The direction at the foot of the text reads: “To Mr.——,” which was
by now canonical, but the date at the head of the letter as printed in 1805 reads
“July 5, 1776,” and in the passage on celebrating the national anniversary the second
sentence is altered to read “The Fourth day of July 1776, will be
a memorable epocha,” &c., to square it with the doctored dateline.
This mode of reconciling the two national political parties' differing views on how
(or rather
when) the United States of America was born met with great and altogether undeserved success.
Newspapers and holiday orators happily and frequently printed and quoted
JA's “letter” on celebrating the “Fourth” of July. (In one case the hybrid document
with its erroneous date appeared in the very same issue of a paper to which
JA contributed autobiographical recollections on another subject; see the
Boston Patriot, 4 July 1810.) Not until 1819 was there a clarification forthcoming, and it came
directly from
JA, who after
AA's death late in 1818 had been rummaging among his old papers. On 16 Feb. 1819
JA wrote to Judge Thomas Dawes of Boston, a close friend and a connection by marriage,
reminding him that “Once on a time, upon my Stony field Hill, you interrogated me
concerning that extract
[frequently printed in newspapers from JA's letter or letters of 3 July 1776] in so particular a manner that I thought you felt a tincture of pyrrhonism concerning
its authenticity.” To settle any such doubts,
JA offered to show Dawes the originals in
JA's own hand, but meanwhile he enclosed full texts of the two letters addressed to
AA, “one in the morning, and the other in the evening of . . . the day after the vote
of Independence” (
LbC in an unidentified hand,
Adams Papers). Dawes communicated both enclosures, together with
JA's letter to him and a valuable introductory note of his own, to the
Columbian Centinel, where all of them were printed on 3 July 1819.
Thus were made available, for the first time, complete and substantially faithful
texts of
JA's two famous and prophetic letters, with their correct dates and a correct identification
of their recipient. (These texts were actually drawn from
JA's letterbooks, without comparison with the recipient's copies.) They were given still
wider circulation and made permanently available by being reprinted in Hezekiah Niles'
Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America . . ., Baltimore, 1822, p. 328–330. And yet just two days after they had appeared fully
and correctly in the
Centinel, another Boston paper, the
Independent Chronicle, which held Republican views, printed an extract from one of them under the wrong
date of 5 July 1776, “the day after the passage of the memorable Declaration of Independence”;
and it did so again at the annual returns of the national anniversary in 1822, 1824,
and 1826. Doubtless other papers did so too. What is more, the handsomely printed
and decorated cards of admission to the Fourth of July feasts at Faneuil Hall in Boston
now annually bore the old, telescoped, mangled, and misdated text of
JA's “letter” from Philadelphia; two specimens of these—one directed to
JA in 1821, and the other to
JQA in 1824—are reproduced as
illustrations in the present volume.
By this time even the Federalist
Centinel, which had printed authentic texts and a full
éclaircissement seven years earlier, was ready to cave in under dint of repetition. On 5 July 1826,
the day after
JA's death, it quoted him in support of celebrating “the Fourth of July” with “pomp,
shows, games,” and all the rest. Editor Niles caved in too. His obituary tribute to
JA reprinted the garbled version of the letters that had been in circulation for decades
(
Niles' Register, 30:345 [15 July 1826]. That version remained standard through the first half of
the century, even after correct (though normalized) texts from the recipient's copies
had been printed in
{ 33 } JA's Letters (1841).
In printing these texts,
CFA for some reason did not allude to the corrupt and popular version or versions of
them until he issued the
JA–AA Familiar Letters in 1876. There, at p. 193, he furnished an editorial note that almost apologizes
for having upset a tradition by presenting accurate texts, and explains that the initial
garbling was done by
JA's nephew and sometime secretary, William Smith Shaw (1778–1826), later well known as “Athenaeum” Shaw, on whom see the Adams Genealogy. Presumably
the doctored text published in the
Boston Gazette of 4 July 1805 was the one concocted by Shaw, but the present editors have not found
the evidence on which
CFA attributed it to him.