RC and LbC (Adams Papers). For the complicated story of early printings of this letter, in conjunction with JA's letter to AA written later on the same day, see note 9 on the letter that immediately follows.

Mary Palmer to JA, 15–17 June, above. As frequently in JA's letters and Diary, “Mrs.” (i.e. Mistress) stands for “Miss.”

Katharine Quincy (1733–1804), sister of Dorothy (Quincy) Hancock. See Adams Genealogy.

On 28 June “the committee appointed to prepare a declaration, &c. brought in a draught, which was read and Ordered, To lie on the table” until after the question of independence 29itself (the first of the Lee or Virginia resolutions of 7 June) was dealt with ( JCC , 5:491; see note 2 on JA's letter to Cotton Tufts, 23 June, above). That momentous question came up, as had been agreed, on Monday, 1 July, and Congress in a committee of the whole debated it and reported favorably on it; but “at the request of a colony” (South Carolina), the final determination was postponed until the 2d, when the delegates of twelve Colonies (those of New York, being bound by old instructions, abstaining) “Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and, of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connexion between them, and the state of Great Britain, is, and ought to be, totally dissolved”—the precise wording of the first of the Lee resolutions of 7 June ( JCC , 5:504, 505, 506–507; Jefferson's Notes of Proceedings, in his Papers, ed. Boyd, 1:313–314; letters of JA and others, 1 and 2 July, in Burnett, ed., Letters of Members , 1:519–526; also printed in Papers of John Adams ).

It will be noted that JA's present version of the resolution of independence varies markedly from that in the Journal, but he was writing without a text to copy from. For his part in the debates of 1–2 July as he remembered them, see his Diary and Autobiography , 3:396–397, and references there. On 1 July the text of the Declaration as reported by the committee on 28 June was referred to a committee of the whole house, and debate on it in committee of the whole began on the 2d, as soon as the vote of independence passed. This debate continued during the day on which the present letter was written and was resumed on the 4th, until the committee of the whole and the Congress were satisfied with the text to be given to the world, whereupon the text as revised and adopted was ordered “authenticated and printed” and distributed to the new states and the army ( JCC , 5:504, 505–507, 509, 510–516; Jefferson's Notes of Proceedings, in his Papers, ed. Boyd., 1:314–319; various letters of 4 July in Burnett, ed., Letters of Members , 1:527–528). Thus, as scarcely needs to be pointed out any longer, though it once did, the present letter and the next one of the same date were written between the act of independence itself and the adoption of the statement designed to “justify it, in the Sight of God and Man.”

The foregoing sentence is not in RC and has been supplied from LbC. Its omission from RC was unquestionably inadvertent, a result of mere haste in copying, because it is an essential and revealing element in the flow of JA's thought at this point. CFA printed this letter (or the critical portion of it) at least five times between 1841 and 1876, but since he used the RC exclusively and did not compare it with the text of the LbC, this sentence has been omitted in all subsequent printings and quotations of this famous letter.

RC and LbC (Adams Papers). Since this is a celebrated letter, several small but characteristic stylistic revisions made by JA when preparing his fair copy (the RC) from his draft (the LbC) have been recorded in the notes below. For the early celebrity and textual garbling of this letter, in conjunction with the preceding letter of this date, see note 9.

Here and below, suspension points are in MS.

LbC: “shortsighted.”

Preceding three words added in RC.

Preceding three words added in RC.

This word added in RC.

This word added in RC.

Preceding five words added in RC.

LbC: “altho you and I may rue.”

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.