March 5, 1773 (The third anniversary of the Boston Massacre): "I. . .devoted myself to endless labour and Anxiety if not to infamy and death, and that for nothing, except, what indeed was and ought to be all in all, a sense of duty. In the Evening I expressed to Mrs. Adams all my Apprehensions: That excellent Lady, who has always encouraged me, burst into a flood of Tears, but said she was very sensible of all the Danger to her and to our Children as well as to me, but she thought I had done as I ought, she was very willing to share in all that was to come and place her trust in Providence. "Before or after the Tryal,
Preston sent
me ten Guineas and at the Tryal of the Soldiers afterwards Eight
Guineas
more, which were. . .all the pecuniary Reward I ever had for fourteen
or
fifteen days labour, in the most exhausting and fatiguing Causes I ever
tried: for hazarding a Popularity very general and very hardly earned:
and for incurring a Clamour and popular Suspicions and prejudices,
which
are not yet worn out and never will be forgotten as long as
the History of this Period is read...It
was
immediately bruited abroad that I had engaged for Preston and the
Soldiers,
and occasioned a great clamour.... "This however is no Reason why the Town should not call the Action of that Night a Massacre, nor is it any Argument in favour of the Governor or Minister, who caused them to be sent here. But it is the strongest Proofs of the Danger of Standing Armies." From Adams, John. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (1815). L.H. Butterfield, Editor. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961. |