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In 1765, Adams was summoned to Boston to help plead Massachusetts' case against the Stamp Act before the British governor. Three years later, on the advice of his jackanapes genius cousin, Sam Adams, who had the workingmen of Boston in his political pocket, John moved to the city. In short order he was the leading legal light in that litigious colony, and the legal brains of the native Whigs.
Glory in the Gloom. Yet John was no truckling politico. When he thought that the partisans were at fault in the Boston Massacre and that the accused British soldiery would not get a proper defense, he fearlessly risked his life and career to defend them against the charge of murdering five colonists in cold blood. By hard lawyer logic Adams forced the jury to acquit all except two, who were found guilty of manslaughter. Meanwhile, despite the side he had taken in the case, his townsmen elected him as representative to the legislature, even though he did not bother to campaign.
Soon, when even greater events were toward, Massachusetts sent John Adams as a representative to the Continental Congresses. There Adams put his thick shoulder to the wheel, and his powerful legal intelligence, no longer like roiled water but clear and cold as a New England winter night, to the problems of building a nation. And there, with the Declaration of Independence rammed through the opposition (after a powerful summation of the case for it by Lawyer Adams), Author Bowen leaves her common-sense hero to the cabbage he was to cultivate for the rest of his life—the United States of America.
"I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration," he said in 1776. "Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will triumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which," added John very sensibly, "I trust in God We shall not." "
*Other illustrious descendants of John and Abigail: grandson Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln's Civil War minister to the Court of St. James's; great-grandsons Henry Adams and Brooks Adams, historians; great-great-grandson Charles Francis Adams III, yachtsman, banker, and Secretary of the Navy (1929-33).