Book Description

Excerpt from Sketch of the Life of John Quincy Adams: Taken From the Port Folio of April, 1819, to Which Are Added, the Letters of Tell; Originally Addressed to the Editor of the Baltimore American About the year 1630, a man by the name of Henry Adams Came from England, with seven sons, all of whom were married. The father and one of the sons settled in the town of Braintrce, about ten miles from Boston, in the then province of Massachusetts Bay. The other sons, excepting one, who returned to England, fixed their abode in several other parts of the same province. Their descendants have multiplied in the common proportion known to the experience of this country, and the name is one of those most frequently met with, in almost every part of this commonwealth. They were originally farmers and tradesmen; and until the controversies between Great Britain and the colonies arose, scarcely any of them had emerged from the obscurity in which those stations were held. Few of them before that time had possessed the advantages of education. The father of the late governor of Massachusetts, Samuel Adams, was, I believe, the first of the name distinguished in any public character. He was a merchant in Boston, and for some time a representative of that town in the general assembly of the province. Samuel Adams, and Mr. John Q. Adams's father, John Adams, were both descended from the first Henry, but by two of the sons. They were therefore remotely connected in blood; but there is a very early incident in the life of each of them, which seems to indicate, that the spirit of independence, which is so strongly marked in the history of the New England colonies from their first settlement, had been largely shared by the family from which they came, and instilled with all its efficacy into their minds. They were both educated at Harvard college, an institution founded in 1638, and thus coeval with the first settlement of the Massachusetts colony. It is the seminary from which almost every man of any eminence in our history has issued, until the establishment so much more recent of other American colleges. Samuel Adams was many years older than Mr. John Q. Adams's father. He received his degree of master of arts at Harvard college in 1743. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.