They were reported
imperfectly or not at all, but they can no more be ignored in an
assessment of our national experience than editorials, sermons, or
conversations which have expressed the deepest feelings of a day and
then have perished beyond resurrection.

Yet if natural orators like Otis and Henry be denied a strictly
"literary" rating because their surviving words are obviously inadequate
to account for the popular effect of their speeches, it is still
possible to measure the efficiency of the pamphleteer. When John Adams
tells us that "James Otis was Isaiah and Ezekiel united," we must take
his word for the impression which Otis's oratory left upon his mind.
But John Adams's own writings fill ten stout volumes which invite our
judgment. The "truculent and sarcastic splendor" of his hyperboles
need not blind us to his real literary excellencies, such as clearness,
candor, vigor of phrase, freshness of idea. A testy, rugged, "difficult"
person was John Adams, but he grew mellower with age, and his latest
letters and journals are full of whimsical charm.

John Adams's cousin Samuel was not precisely a charming person. Bigoted,
tireless, secretive, this cunning manipulator of political passions
followed many tortuous paths. His ability for adroit misstatement of an
adversary's position has been equaled but once in our history. But to
the casual reader of his four volumes, Samuel Adams seems ever to be
breathing the liberal air of the town-meeting: everything is as plainly
obvious as a good citizen can make it. He has, too, the large utterance
of the European liberalism of his day. "Resolved," read his Resolutions
of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts in 1765, "that there
are certain essential rights of the British constitution of government
which are founded in the law of God and nature and are the common rights
of mankind." In his statement of the Rights of the Colonists (1772) we
are assured that "among the natural rights of the colonists are these,
First, a right to Life; secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property....
All men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they
please... . When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary consent."
Jean-Jacques himself could not be more bland, nor at heart more fiercely
demagogic.

"Tom" Paine would have been no match for "Sam" Adams in a town-meeting,
but he was an even greater pamphleteer. He had arrived from England in
1774, at the age of thir