06/09/2026
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=992626766845593&id=100082948371895
On June 9, 1776, from Philadelphia where he was serving in the Continental Congress, John Adams wrote his friend, attorney William Cushing, replying to Cushing’s letter congratulating Adams on his appointment as a judge. Consider this remarkable paragraph from that letter:
“It would give me great pleasure to ride this Eastern Circuit with you, and prate before you at the bar, as I used to do. But I am destined to another fate, to drudgery of the most wasting, exhausting, consuming kind, that I ever went through in my whole life. Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, measures in which the lives and liberties of millions, born and unborn are most essentially interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a Revolution, the most compleat, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of nations. A few matters must be dispatched before I can return. Every colony must be induced to institute a perfect government. All the colonies must confederate together, in some solemn compact. The colonies must be declared free and independent states, and Embassadors, must be sent abroad to foreign courts, to solicit their acknowledgment of us, as Sovereign States, and to form with them, at least with some of them commercial treaties of friendship and alliance. When these things shall be once well finished, or in a way of being so, I shall think that I have answered the end of my creation, and sing with pleasure my Nunc Dimittes, or if it should be the will of Heaven that I should live a little longer, return to my farm and family, ride circuits, plead law, or judge causes, just as you please.”
