But the time had not yet come for such changes as he wished. The old puritan feeling was still too great to acknowledge the equal rights, political and religious, of other than Christians. Yet, however it might be with his colleagues and fellow-citizens, Mr. Adams, in this movement, expressed his own ideas. One of his latest letters, written in 1825, and addressed to Jefferson, is a remarkable protest against the blasphemy laws, so-called, of Massachusetts, and the rest of the Union, as being utterly inconsistent with the right of free inquiry and private judgment. It is in the letters of Mr. Adams, of which but few have ever been published, that his genius as a writer and a thinker, and no less distinctly his character as a man, is displayed. Down even to the last year of his protracted life, his letters exhibit a wonderful degree of vitality, energy, playfulness, and command of language.
As a writer of English--and we may add as a speculative philosopher--little as he ever troubled himself with revision and correction, he must be placed first among Americans of all the several generations to which he belonged, excepting only Franklin; and if Franklin excelled him in humor and geniality, he far surpassed Franklin in compass and vivacity. Indeed, it is only by the recent publication of his letters that his gifts in these respects are becoming well known. The first installment of his private letters published during his lifetime, though not deficient in these characteristics, yet having been written under feelings of great aggravation, and in a spirit of extreme bitterness against his political opponents, was rather damaging to him than otherwise. In the interval from 1804 to 1812, Mr. Cunningham, a maternal relative, had drawn him into a private correspondence in which, still smarting under a sense of injury, he had expressed himself with perfect unreserve and entire freedom as to the chief events of his presidential administration and the character and motives of the parties concerned in them.
By a gross breach of confidence, of which Mr. Adams, like other impulsive and confiding persons, often had been the victim, those letters were sold by Cunningham's heir in 1824, while the writer and many of the parties referred to were still alive. They were published as a part of the electioneering machinery against John Quincy Adams. They called out a violent retort from Colonel Pickering, who had been secretary of State to Washington and Adams, till dismissed from office by the latter; but though Mr. Jefferson was also severely handled in them, they occasioned no interruption to the friendly relation which had been re-established between him and Mr. Adams.