MR. ADAMS ON HIS LITTLE FARM-DECLINES TO WRITE AN ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE-FAMILY HISTORY-QUINCY LIFE, ADMINISTRATION, AND TIMES OF JOHN ADAMS, FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT AND SECOND PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. March 4, 1797, to March 4, 1801. CHAPTER I. EARLY HISTORY OF THE ADAMSES JOHN ADAMS-GRAD- N the latter part of the thirteenth century, and early in the succeeding century, Lord Ap Adams (Sir John Ap Adams) figured as a Welsh member of the British Parliament, but the Adams family' is more directly of English origin, and a record of some of its members as looking to a settlement in this country is found as far back as 1628. Not long after this date the name first appears at Braintree, now Quincy, Massachusetts, a point which has become historic from being the residence of this distinguished family. The early Massachusetts Adamses were small landowners and tradesmen. Some of them held trifling town offices; and, although one of them, Joseph Adams, was especially educated for the ministry, and held the position of pastor in one Church at Newington, New Hampshire, for sixty-eight years, and Hannah Adams became noted among the early historical writers of the country, they were mainly people of plain manners and circumstances, little being known of them until the appearance of Samuel and John in the affairs of the Revolution. In 1848, in speaking of John Quincy Adams, the Rev. William P. Lunt said :— "Mr. Adams's ancestors on the paternal side were worthy specimens of the Puritan emigrants who settled this northern portion of the American continent, who had left 'dear England,' as they affectionately called their native land, only for the sake of what to them was still dearer, freedom of the mind and soul. And if we separate into distinct parts the aggregate of the blessings which have accrued to the world, from the Christian enterprise, into the wilderness, of those heroic men and women who, more than two centuries since, ventured their all here for God and for posterity, it is not perhaps too much to say that no richer, riper fruit has dropped from the tree of the Pilgrims' planting, than that which has now, alas! been plucked by insatiate death." John Adams, the President, was the son of John Adams the son of Joseph Adams, who was the son of Joseph Adams the son of Henry Adams, who was the father of this old Massachusetts family. To the memory of these ancestors, many years before his death, and during his long period of early and somewhat obscure retirement, Mr. Adams erected. four plain monuments in the little burying-ground at Quincy, and on them still may be read the following inscriptions: |