John Adams February 3, 1821 John Adams antagonism to Catholicism reappeared in old age: “I have long been decided in opinion that a free government and the Roman Catholick religion can never exist together in any nation or Country” Dear Sir I have just read a sketch of the life of Swedenborg, and a larger work in two huge volumes of Memoirs of John Westley* by Southery, and your kind letter of January 22d came to hand in the nick…
John Adams February 21, 1765 Found in his diary, this was a draft of a longer essay on cannon and feudal law. It was a Resolution formed by a sensible People almost in despair. [The Puritans’ decision to leave England and settle in America.] They Puritans had become intelligent in general, and some of them learned but they had been galled, and fretted, and whipped and cropped, and hanged and burned. In short they had been so worried by Plagues…
John Adams 1765 Patriots equated the practices of the Church of England with that of the Catholic Church. On August 12, 1765, the Boston Gazette published an essay again linking both churches to each other, and to tyranny. The essay argued that religious canon law – “extensive and astonishing” — was created by the “the Romish clergy for the aggrandizement of their own order.” Church law enslaved people by “reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity” and…