John Adams had an enduring legacy. The 2nd President, he wrote, April 26, 1777:
"Posterity!
You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve
your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it
If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it."
His son,
John Quincy Adams, the 6th President, stated, March 4, 1825:
"'Except
the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh in vain,' with fervent
supplications for His favor, to His overruling providence I commit with
humble but fearless confidence my own fate and the future destinies of
my country."
John Quincy Adams' son,
Charles Francis Adams,
was a Congressman from Massachusetts who Lincoln appointed U.S.
Minister to Britain, where he helped England stay neutral during the
Civil War.
He published the letters of his grandmother, Abigail Adams, and
The Works of John Adams, Esq., Second President of the United States.
Charles Francis Adams' son,
Henry Adams, was a historian who wrote from his unique perspective of being related to some of America's founders.
In his 9-volume work,
History of the United States (C. Scribner's Son, 1889),
Henry Adams wrote:
"The
Pilgrims of Plymouth, the Puritans of Boston, the Quakers of
Pennsylvania, all avowed a moral purpose, and began by making
institutions that consciously reflected a moral idea."
Get the book, America's God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations
Henry Adams recorded
Thomas Jefferson's attitude toward the Federal Government:
"Not three years had passed since
Jefferson himself penned...the Kentucky Resolutions, in which he declared
'that
in cases of an abuse...where powers are assumed which have not been
delegated, a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy...
Each State has a natural right...to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits;
that
without this right they would be under the dominion, absolute and
unlimited, of whosoever might exercise this right of judgment for
them.'"
Henry Adams wrote further regarding
Jefferson:
"He
went so far as to advise that every State should forbid, within its
borders, the execution of any act of the general government 'not plainly
and intentionally authorized by the Constitution'...
Kentucky
and Virginia...acted on the principle so far as to declare certain laws
of the United States unconstitutional, with the additional understanding
that whatever was unconstitutional was void...
Jefferson
and his followers held that freedom could be maintained only by
preserving inviolate the right of every State to judge for itself what
was, or was not, lawful."
Henry Adams became a professor at Harvard in 1870.
Henry Adams had tickets for the Titanic's return voyage to Europe in 1912. He suffered a stroke when he heard that it sank.
Henry Adams died MARCH 27, 1918.
Henry Adams taught a student at Harvard named
Henry Cabot Lodge, who later edited Henry Adam's autobiography.
Henry Cabot Lodge
became U.S. Senator Majority Leader, being noted for thwarting Woodrow
Wilson's efforts to have the United States submit to the League of
Nations.
Henry Cabot Lodge co-wrote with Theodore Roosevelt
Hero Tales from American History, 1895, stating in the Preface:
"No people can be really great unless they possess...heroic virtues...
America
will cease to be a great nation whenever her young men cease to possess
energy, daring, and endurance, as well as the wish and the power to
fight the nation's foes....
He must also be able and willing to
stand up for his own rights and those of his country against all
comers...resisting either malice domestic or foreign levy."
Henry Cabot Lodge addressed the New England Society of Brooklyn, 1888:
"Let every man honor and love the land of his birth and the race from which he springs...
But let us have done with British-Americans and Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and so on, and all be Americans...
If
a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any
qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something else, let him
drop the word American from his personal description."
Henry Cabot Lodge was quoted in the
Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah, August 8, 1891:
"Within the last decades the character of the immigration to this country has changed...
The
immigration of the people who have settled and built up the nation
during the last 250 years, and who have been, with trifling exceptions,
kindred either in race or language or both is declining...
while the immigration of people who are not kindred...is increasing with frightful rapidity.
The
great mass...come here at an age when education is unlikely if not
impossible and when the work of Americanizing them is in consequence
correspondingly difficult.
They also introduce an element of
competition in the labor market which must have a disastrous effect upon
the rate of American wages."
Henry Cabot Lodge warned the U.S. Senate, August 12, 1919, in a speech regarding the Treaty of peace with Germany:
"The
United States is the world's best hope, but if you fetter her in the
interests and quarrels of other nations...you will...endanger her very
existence.
Leave her to march freely through the centuries to come...strong, generous, and confident...
Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance; this great land of ordered liberty.
For if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin."
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