when originally
drafting the rest of that instrument, he had passed over to other hands.

But the time had not yet come for such changes as he wished. The old
puritan feeling was still too great to acknowledge the equal rights,
political and religious, of other than Christians. Yet, however it might
be with his colleagues and fellow-citizens, Mr. Adams, in this movement,
expressed his own ideas. One of his latest letters, written in 1825, and
addressed to Jefferson, is a remarkable protest against the blasphemy
laws, so-called, of Massachusetts, and the rest of the Union, as being
utterly inconsistent with the right of free inquiry and private
judgment. It is in the letters of Mr. Adams, of which but few have ever
been published, that his genius as a writer and a thinker, and no less
distinctly his character as a man, is displayed. Down even to the last
year of his protracted life, his letters exhibit a wonderful degree of
vitality, energy, playfulness, and command of language.

As a writer of English--and we may add as a speculative
philosopher--little as he ever troubled himself with revision and
correction, he must be placed first among Americans of all the several
generations to which he belonged, excepting only Franklin; and if
Franklin excelled him in humor and geniality, he far surpassed Franklin
in compass and vivacity. Indeed, it is only by the recent publication of
his letters that his gifts in these respects are becoming well known.
The first installment of his private letters published during his
lifetime, though not deficient in these characteristics, yet having been
written under feelings of great aggravation, and in a spirit of extreme
bitterness against his political opponents, was rather damaging to him
than otherwise. In the interval from 1804 to 1812, Mr. Cunningham, a
maternal relative, had drawn him into a private correspondence in which,
still smarting under a sense of injury, he had expressed himself with
perfect unreserve and entire freedom as to the chief events of his
presidential administration and the character and motives of the parties
concerned in them.

By a gross breach of confidence, of which Mr. Adams, like other
impulsive and confiding persons, often had been the victim, those
letters were sold by Cunningham's heir in 1824, while the writer and
many of the parties referred to were still alive. They were published as
a part of the electioneering machinery against John Quincy Adams.