RC (Adams Papers); addressed: “To Mrs. Abigail Adams Braintree”; endorsed: “C No 5” (corrected from “No 6”).

Warren's letter was dated at Watertown, 7 May (Adams Papers; Warren-Adams Letters , 1:46–49), and presumably enclosed AA's letter of 4 May, above.

Thomas Young (1732–1777), self-taught son of an immigrant from northern Ireland, was born in Ulster co., N.Y., and after a short apprenticeship commenced the practice of physic in Sharon, Conn. A poet, orator, newspaper scribbler, and militant deist as well as a physician and surgeon, Young was incurably restless and was to be identified with radical political agitation in no fewer than five colonies or states. Despite this perhaps unique distinction, what is recorded of him is scattered and often untrustworthy, and he has never had the biography he deserves. In 1766 he moved to Boston and was soon closely associated with Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren as an ardent Son of Liberty. He delivered the first oration commemorating the Boston “Massacre,” was appointed in 1772 a member of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, and was a leader in the Tea Party proceedings the following year. In the fall of 1774 he prudently left Boston for Newport, but turned up in Philadelphia the next spring. He was promptly welcomed into the circle of radicals who led the movement for independence and a new and democratic constitution for the state. He helped draft the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, which JA later often cited as the very model of political vices; and in the spring of 1777 Young published a letter advising the inhabitants of “Vermont”—a name that he evidently coined and that was here first used—to establish an independent government. In Dec. 1776 he had been appointed senior surgeon to the Continental hospital in Philadelphia and applied the heroic therapy which his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush later made famous to the “cure” of fevers. In the line of duty the following June, he caught a virulent fever and died at once, leaving a wife and numerous children nearly destitute. The efforts of his old friend and reputed literary collaborator Ethan Allen to obtain from the Vermont legislature a grant of land to the widow were unsuccessful.

JA furnished a diverting account of Young's role as a political agitator in a letter to Benjamin Rush, 8 Feb. 1789 (RC unlocated; printed in Biddle, Old Family Letters , p. 30–31). See also Boston Record Commissioners, 16th and 18th Reports , passim; Loring, Hundred Boston Orators , p. 24–26; Henry H. Edes, “Memoir of Dr. Thomas Young, 1731–1777,” Col. Soc. Mass., Pubns. , 11 (1910):2–54; Benjamin Rush, Letters , 1:148–149, and references there.

This word appears in the margin of the letter.