INTRODUCTION T the Time of His Death, in April I8I3, Benjamin Rush Was a at the Zenith of His Fame and Influence

Home , Alexander Biddle, Richard Rush

INTRODUCTION T the time of his death, in April I8I3, Benjamin Rush was A at the zenith of his fame and influence. Long regarded by everyone except himself and perhaps a few other Philadelphians as the leading citizen of Philadelphia, the recipient of uncounted honors from his countrymen and from European courts and learned societies, Rush had achieved a reputation not surpassed by that of any other American physician for a century or more to come. If eulogists are to be distrusted, we have the testimony of a pupil, who was himself to become a great physician, writing a few months before his teacher died. In January I8IJ Charles D. Meigs re ported to his father in Georgia: "Dr. Rush looks like an angel of light, his words bear in them, and his looks too, irresistable per suasion and conviction :-in fact, to me he seems more than mortal. If ever a human being deserved Deification, it is Dr. Rush.m Rush's fame sprang from his own vigorous and magnetic person ality; from his substantial accomplishments in medicine, psychiatry, education, and social reform; from the great body of his published writings; from his gifts as a teacher and lecturer; and, finally, from the letters he wrote to scores of friends, relatives, patients, pupils, and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. In I 8 I 6 a former puyil, Dr. James Mease of Philadelphia, was happily inspired to gather and publish cca volume or more of the letters of my late friend Dr Rush to various persons on political, religious, and mis cellaneous subjects." For this purpose Mease solicited the aid of two of Rush's intimate correspondents, ex-Presidents Adams and Jefferson. Both men promptly consulted Rush's son Richard. Rich ard replied to Adams that he thought ccthere may be more good intention than good judgment" in the proposal, and a little later he added, with finality, cci find it to be as decidedly the opinion of my mother and brothers, as I confess it was my own, that my fathers letters should not be given up to the press." To Jefferson, Richard wrote much the same thing, and thus the earliest attempt to collect Rush's letters ended before it was well started. 2 This decision was in accord with the family's stand on the pub-

1 Extract furnished to the Rush family by A. Emlen Meigs, I903; Rush Family Papers, deposited in Princeton University Library. 2 Mease to Jefferson, 7 Aug. I8r6, L.C., Jefferson Papers; Jefferson to Mease, I 7 Aug. I 8r6, same; Richard Rush to Adams, 29 Sep. and 31 Oct. r8 I 6, PMHB, LXI (1937), I53-5; Adams to Richard Rush, 13 Nov. 1816, Hist. Soc. Penna., Gratz Coli.; Richard Rush to Jefferson, I 3 Nov. 18 I 6, Mass. Hist. Soc., Jefferson Papers. [ lxi ] INTRODUCTION lication of Rush's "Travels through Life," the charming and re vealing autobiography he had composed in I 8oo as a sort of memoire justificatif of his career. It was public knowledge at the time of Rush's death that he had left an autobiography, and the highest expectations were entertained regarding its publication. But after preparing the manuscript for the press, Richard and James Rush reconsidered. The work was not published; access to it was steadily denied to historians; and it did not reach print until the present century.3 The brothers rested content with the biographical account of their father in David Ramsay's Eulogium (Philadelphia, 1 8 I 3), a work more substantial and useful than most works of its class, but uniformly laudatory. They had furnished information from the family papers to Ramsay, but this courtesy was not re peated for others, and it was to be long before the public would learn anything further about Dr. Rush from the voluminous papers he had left. 4 The principal reason for the family's reticence was Rush's quar rel, during his service as physician general in the Continental army, with his commander, George Washington. Though Rush's papers contained indisputable and overwhelming evidence of his patriot ism, it simply seemed best to James, who had inherited the papers, and to Richard, who had attained eminence in public life, to keep silent. This policy certainly in jured rather than enhanced Rusf!.'s reputation while the history of the Revolution was being written, for it allowed free range to speculation and gossip. If Washington was an immaculate hero, the savior of his country, what then was Rush, who had criticized and opposed him? The almost automatic answer to this question explains why Rush, for all his stature, waited well over a century for an adequate biography.5 A large proportion of the materials essential to Rush's biogra pher or to the editor of his letters had meanwhile become available by the terms of James Rush's will. James, who had married Phoebe Ridgway, heiress of one of Philadelphia's great mercantile fortunes, 5 See G. W. Corner's Introduction to Rush's Autobiography as definitively edited (Princeton University Press for the American Philosophical Society, I 948), p. 3-8. 4 Ramsay to James Rush, 5 May and IO July I8I3 (Libr. Co. Phila., James Rush Mss); Richard Rush to James Rush, I7 July I8I3, Rush Mss, XLIV. 5 Dr. Corner has summarized the protracted controversy over Rush's reputation that was part of "the War of the Grandfathers"; see Rush's Autobiography, p. 7-8, I 24. Appendix I in the present work is an attempt to present Rush's relations with Washington in the light of all the evidence now available. I have written more fully on the history of Rush's reputation in general in an article entitled "The Reputation of Benjamin Rush," Pennsylvania History, XVII (I95o), 3-22. [ lxii ] INTRODUCTION

died in I 869 and left his estate to build a library as a memorial to his wife. His purpose was realized a decade later in the opening of the great granite building on South Broad Street in Philadelphia known as the Ridgway Branch of the Library Company of Phila delphia. Therein were deposited, in further accord with the terms of James' will, his own books and papers "and also those of my father, Dr. Benjamin Rush (in my possession)."6 The Benjamin Rush MSS, amounting to perhaps IO,ooo pieces, comprise the great bulk of the letters he received throughout his lifetime, drafts and copies of some of the letters he wrote, his lecture notes, literary manuscripts, business papers and ledgers, memorandum books, diplomas, &c., &c. Probably no comparable body of records for an eighteenth-century medical practitioner and teacher's career exists elsewhere in the world. Even so, these records are not complete. At some undetermined time before the transfer of the main body of Rush's archives to the Library Company, a large and valuable segment was selected and removed from them. This segment in cluded the manuscript of Rush's autobiography, a run of his com monplace books, most of the surviving letters Rush wrote his wife, and most of the letters written to Rush by the statesmen and gen erals of the early republic. As was afterwards to appear (though the explanation of this circumstance is not known to the present writer), the selected group had come into the possession of Julia Williams Rush (1832-1898), the only surviving daughter of Sam uel Rush (!795-1859), seventh son of Dr. Benjamin Rush. Julia Rush in 1855 had married Alexander Biddle (1819-I899), and the papers thereafter descended in the Biddle family until 1943, when they were dispersed in a series of auction sales in New York City.1 Viewed at large, their dispersal was a tragedy, but it was not with out some good effects. For a moment at least, these long-hidden letters and documents were brought out into the open; some of them have since been published; and their exceptional importance and literary quality, both collectively and individually, have caused a marked revival of interest in Benjamin Rush. Evidently he was a man of much greater gifts, achievement, and attractiveness than one could gather from the meager and usually unfavorable notices of him in the histories of his age. From time to time members of the Biddle family had seen fit to select portions of the Rush papers in their possession and to

6 James Rush's Last Will and Testament, as published, Phila., I 869, p. I4. 7 See The Alexander Biddle Papers: American Historical Autographs, N.Y.: Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc., I 943, pts. i-iii. [ lxiii ] INTRODUCTION print them in small editions for private circulation. One of the volumes so issued bore the title Old Family Letters Relating to the Yellow Fever (Philadelphia, 1892). It contained the long series of daily letters Rush wrote to his wife while he kept his post in Philadelphia during the murderous epidemic of yellow fever in 1793. In spite of its scarcity and its editorial defects, this slight volume achieved a sort of underground celebrity, for Rush's letters written that fall provide the most graphic record of the city's agony that survives. 8 The sole collection of Rush's letters that has hither to appeared in print, this volume was an earnest of what was in store for the reader of Rush's letters at large. Benjamin Rush was a major letter writer in a letter-writing age. Writing letters was almost as natural a function for him as eating, and on the whole he preferred the former activity to the latter. He once put forward the suggestion that eating clubs should be prohibited by law, but the circulation of his thoughts through the channels of conversation and composition was, for him, a physical necessity. When he told his students that their minds should always be, like plants, "in an absorbing state,"9 he was describing his own mental habit. Impelled by both temperament and training to store up everything he saw, read, or heard about that might sometime prove useful to someone, he admitted that he talked and wrote for relief of mind, just as he prescribed bleeding to reduce plethora in the body. This analogy was not meant playfully by Rush, nor is it meant disparagingly here. The spontaneity and the copious flow of mingled fact and reflection so characteristic of his letters are owing to his keen sense of well-being as he wrote. Advising his son James, then at Princeton College, about letter-writing, Rush said: "Never write in a hurry. Even a common note upon the most common business should be written as if it were one day to be read in a court or published in a newspaper" (25 May 1802). His own letters were seldom so studied. They were usually written in a hurry, sometimes even at meals in order to save time. Since he did not usually make drafts or copies, his letters were sent off unrevised, with all the 8 The only attention given to the texts of the letters in this volume was to their detriment. Alexander Biddle apparently sent the manuscripts to the printer as copy, and instructed him to substitute blanks for the names of all physicians mentioned by Rush. (Many of the physicians were spoken of in uncomplimentary terms.) This protective gesture had some _curious results, for doctors of divinity were swept away along with doctors of medicine. 9 "On the Means of Acquiring Knowledge," Sixteen Introductory Lectures, p. 355· [ lxiv ] INTRODUCTION freshness of the writer's first thoughts upon them and with all the gusto of a mind that delighted in communing with other minds. Since, moreover, Rush held decided opinions about men and measures, his letters are marked by an indiscreetness that was greatly relished by his correspondents then and that makes them agreeable reading now. It seems to have been early notorious. Abigail Adams reported to Mercy Warren on 8 January J78I: "I saw by the last pensilvania paper under York News, that [the British] had got a Letter of Dr. Rush's which they have promissed to print in the Next paper in which say they, he treats the Rebel Senate with great freedom. that both you and I can believe, from former Specimens. Rush will care as little as any body.mo Rush believed in telling his friends something really worth hear ing when he wrote them, and if, as happened more than once, the enemy intercepted a letter-why, let them make the most of it. For one of his epistolary indiscretions (his unsigned letter to Pat rick Henry of 12 January 1778) he was to pay a heavy penalty, but that experience did not substantially alter his habits. "Pru dence," he early observed, "is a rascally virtue" (to Gates, I2 June I7 8 I). He always believed this, but as he grew older he grew a little more careful about whom he confided his thoughts to. Opportunity as well as inclination helped make Rush's letters instructive and entertaining. Schooled under Calvinist clergymen, he narrowly missed becoming one himself: the earliest letter in the present collection shows him hesitating between physic and divinity; the latest reveals his lifelong connoisseurship of pulpit oratory. Had he entered the ministry, he would have become a major figure in American religious history, but his choice of a medical career led to European study and travel and to captivation by the scientific developments of the age. In the letters written from abroad, few as they are, the reader can follow the process of Rush's intellectual growth step by step as he encountered the men and the ideas of the Enlightenment. After his return to America Rush seldom left Philadelphia; he almost never did so by choice, for he never took vacations and would not have known what the word meant. But Philadelphia was the political and cultural center of the new nation, and Rush, who in 1774 had ridden out to greet the Massachusetts delegates to the first Continental Congress, made the most of his opportunities to find out, and in turn to transmit to his correspond ents, what went on everywhere in America. In describing his regi men in the Autobiography, Rush said that he by no means depended

10 Warren-Adams Letters (Mass. Hist. Soc., Colls., LXXI, 1925), rr, 164. [ lxv ] INTRODUCTION "exclusively upon books" in acquiring knowledge. "I made, as far as was in my power, every person I conversed with contribute to my improvement. I was visited by many literary strangers, and I kept up a constant intercourse with several of the most distinguished philosophical characters who resided in, or occasionally visited Philadelphia.m1 The records of this intercourse are scattered abun dantly through his letters and commonplace books. The diaries and notebooks that proliferated on the shelves of his study were one of the means, incidentally, by which Rush was able, over the years, to present fresh materials to his students and to the townspeople and tourists in Philadelphia who attended his medical lectures in ever-increasing numbers. As for Philadelphia itself, whose streets Rush traversed for half a century as physician and professor, little of interest occurred there that he did not know about, look into, and record. As a chronicler of manners he cannot compete with the greatest of his English con temporaries, partly because his duties as teacher and practitioner were always heavy; but it is doubtful if any other American has furnished so many vivid pictures of city life in that era. These may be the merest glimpses: the convict in a street-repairing gang fon dling his dog; the crowd of suppliant patients in Rush's back parlor during the height of the yellow fever epidemic; a hundred vi gnettes of family life in his own always crowded household. Or they may be more or less set pieces, such as his accounts of the "Federal Procession" in q88, a wedding in a Jewish home, the first balloon flight in the United States, the raising of the roof of the first Negro church in Philadelphia. His letters on events like these glow with the pleasure he always felt in an experience both new to him and promising for the future of his country. His patriotic moralizing, if na"ive, is wonderfully redolent of the hopes of the infant republic, and it is always accompanied by a wealth of sharp, significant detail. With Rush, as with Franklin and Jefferson, writing was a utili tarian art, for, like them, he wrote principally to explain things. He therefore avoided rhetoric and sought simplicity. In his letter proposing a plan for a federal university he declared, indeed, that "The present is the age of simplicity in writing in America. The turgid style of Johnson, the purple glare of Gibbon, and even the studied and thickset metaphors of Junius are all equally unnatural and should not be admitted into our country" (29 October 1788). Though he drew easily on the whole range of English literature to

11 Page 92. [ lxvi ] INTRODUCTION illustrate his ideas, the stylistic models he repeatedly commended were Hume and Swift. He had of course been well indoctrinated in classical languages and literature, but in middle age he turned violently against them, saying (among more sensible things) that Americans would do better to teach their children the languages of the Indian natives than Greek and Latin. Here he clashed with many friends, not least with John Adams, who insisted that Rush's own skill as a writer was partly owing to his classical training. To this Rush replied that he owed "nothing" to that training except "the turgid and affected style of my youthful compositions and a neglect of English grammar." At the age of twenty-two, he went on to say, he had deliberately taken up Lowth's Grammar and the works of Swift and Hume in order to learn "to put words to gether" in his own language (21 July 1789). Whatever the cause, it is certainly true that a notable improvement in Rush's epistolary style may be seen after the interval of 1770-1772 for which almost no letters survive. During that interval both his handwriting and his manner of expression were greatly simplified, and they scarcely changed at all thereafter.12 The vigor and clarity of his mature style will be conceded by all readers, and its quotableness will sur prise and delight those who have not read him before. Rush belongs to that generation of versatile Americans who con tributed to several fields of knowledge and who were interested in all. Apart from clinical medicine, his letters deal with subjects as diverse as psychiatry and forestry, veterinary science and the venti lation of ships, penology and chemistry. As his writings and lectures spread his fame, he was called upon for opinions on a vast variety of subjects: the proper mode of training children in the home, health measures for the Lewis and Clark expedition, the liberation of the Spanish provinces in South America, the curriculum at Prince ton, the origin of the prehistoric mounds in the Ohio country, and how a young woman should comport herself after marrying a widower with five children. On these, and it might be added on al most any subject, Rush was glad to give an opinion, and he did so in an always lively and often instructive manner. Most of Rush's correspondence naturally dealt with medical topics, though medical letters do not preponderate in the present 12 Among other artifices dropped at this time was the use of Latin tags and quotations. Many years later Rush resumed their use, especially in his letters to Adams. Both early and late, however, he displayed as much inaccuracy in quoting the Roman writers as he did familiarity with their works. His quotations, in whatever language, were always from memory. [ lxvii ] INTRODUCTION collection. Many hundreds of his letters to patients or to patients' relatives who appealed to him from a distance for advice have been lost beyond recovery. Enough have been gathered and printed here, however, to show the extent and character of his mail-order practice. Perhaps the most revealing among them is the series written to Walter Stone early in I79I, in which Rush appears as physician, psychiatrist, and friend all at once, as he must often have done. The letter to Richard Bushe (29 December 1798) indicates how Rush handled the problem of fees when inquirers were unknown to him. Several letters illustrate the heroic nature of his therapy (e.g., to Nathan Benjamin, I5 April I8I2, and to Edward Harris, I I July I 8 I 2) ; and many others, addressed to colleagues and former pupils, furnish medical news of the day and expound his famous if short lived theory of the "unity of disease." As diverting as anything else in these volumes are the letters Rush addressed to President Jeffer son after Jefferson had reported that he was suffering from a com plaint of the bowels (I 2 March and 5 May 1 803). The diversion lies less in the long list of remedies proposed than in Rush's at tempt to circumvent Jefferson's medical skepticism. It is a pleasing reflection that Jefferson kept these letters by him in later years, so that he could refer to them in case of need. "There is nothing more common," Rush declared in a public statement early in 1787, "than to confound the terms of American revolution with those of the late American war. The American war is over; but this is far from being the case with the American revo lution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed." The great work of bringing "the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens" into conformity with republican institutions remained to be done. 13 Into this task Rush plunged with an energy that is almost appalling to witness. His letters during the decade following the peace of 1783 fully document what was, in effect, a one-man crusade to remake America. He wrote dozens of public letters, broadsides, and pamphlets attacking strong drink, slavery, war, capital punishment, public punishments, test laws, tobacco, oaths, and even country fairs; and, on the other hand, advocating beer and cider, free schools, education for women, a college for the Pennsylvania Germans, a national university, the study of science rather than Greek and Latin, free postage for newspapers, churches for Negroes, and the cultivation of the sugar-maple tree. Writing John Montgomery in Carlisle, Rush informed him that Hall, the

13 "Address to the People of the United States," Amer. Museum, I, 9 (Jan. 1787). [ lxviii ] INTRODUCTION printer, would soon send on "a new pamphlet written by that turbu lent spirit Dr. Rush, who I hope will never be quiet while there is ignorance, slavery, or misery in Pennsylvania" (4 January 1785). When he fell ill and had a premonition of death, Rush redoubled his efforts, for fear, as he told Jeremy Belknap, that he might not complete his "quota of services to [his] fellow creatures" (2 March 179 I). He urged his correspondents to join in all his campaigns, but they could only marvel at him from a distance. Belknap wrote him in I790: "Dear Doctor I can compare you to nothing better than Mr. Great Heart in Bunyan who attacks without mercy all the Giants, Hydras, Hobgoblins &c. which stand in the way of his Pilgrims & conducts them thro' all opposition to the celestial City.m4 It was an apt comparison. All of this activity rested on a base as fundamentally religious as it was patriotic. In middle age, it is true, Rush gradually parted company with his Presbyterian teachers and associates. This was partly because he had found in some of his reform campaigns that "The clergy and their faithful followers of every denomination are too good to do good" (to Mrs. Rush, I6-q July I79I), partly because he had quarreled with certain Presbyterian political leaders, but mainly because Calvinist dogmas now appeared to him in humane and anti-republican. All the same, he continued to denounce all forms of "natural religion," never even sported with Unitarian ism, and eventually found a resting place in the theology of El hanan Winchester, the evangelist of Universalism. In later life Rush attended Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Baptist church serv ices with equal satisfaction. He appears in fact to have assimilated something from most of the religious leaders and ideas of his time, and he spoke truly when he told John Adams that his creed was "a compound of the orthodoxy and heterodoxy of most of our Chris tian churches" (5 April I8o8). Despite the materialistic implications of Rush's treatise on Dis eases of the Mind and of some of his philosophical discourses, it is therefore a serious mistake to classify him with deists like Frank lin, Paine, and Jefferson, even though he worked with these as sociates for certain common objectives. If the contradiction seems glaring between his scientific aims and his Christian piety, it is no more so than some others in his career, notably in his politics. To contemporaries he must have seemed a very weathercock as he veered from radicalism in the early Revolutionary years to arch conservativism in the late I 78o's (when he denounced as absurd 14 7 Oct. 1790; Rush Mss, xxx. [ lxix ] INTRODUCTION the popular demand for a bill of rights in the Constitution), and then, within two or three years, became an ardent supporter of Jefferson. Though they shatter the simplifications of history books, these puzzles are largely resolved by a reading of Rush's letters. If other people were sometimes at a loss to account for his conduct, Rush never was. Possessed of a sense of rectitude that never wavered, he was always sure, as he once wrote to John Montgomery in the midst of a political battle, that "our cause is the cause of virtue and heaven" (14 April 1783; Rush MSS). An early biographer very aptly observed that Rush "exerted himself with a rational vehe mence for the interests of whatever party he thought it his duty to espouse.m5 The remarkable fact is that he was often convincing even after he shifted his ground and argued on the other side of a question. He was certainly one of the most persuasive men who ever put pen to paper, and there is ample evidence-for instance in the history of his negotiations with the Witherspoons in Scotland -to show that he was even more persuasive face to face. Men convinced of their own rectitude are bound to make enemies. Rush made a great many, and numerous letters in these volumes relate to his quarrels. Despite his unchallenged position after the Revolution as Philadelphia's, and eventually America's, leading physician and medical teacher, he thought it worth while to con duct public controversies with one after another of his colleagues, eminent and obscure, for years on end. Toward the end of his life he told his son James about one of his own former professors at Edinburgh, who "used to say 'that nothing could exceed the malice of rival authors except the rancor of rival physicians.' The history of my life," Rush added ruefully, "would furnish a melancholy illustration of the truth of this remark" ( 4 October I 8 IO). The status of medical science itself was in part the reason for the contentiousness of physicians in Rush's day. Certainly doctors quar reled as violently in Boston, Cincinnati, and London as they did in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century. But that considera tion will not account for Rush's frequent embroilment in disputes outside his profession. The truth is that Rush was a pugnacious and domineering man. By far the most familiar portrait, that painted by Sully within a year of Rush's death, presents a sweetly pensive old man. It is a great misfortune that there is no portrait of Rush in his middle years-those embattled years when he advised Noah 15 John Sanderson, Biography of the Signers to the Declaration of Independence, Phila., 1 8zo-1 8z7, IV, 279-80. [ lxx ] INTRODUCTION Webster, "Expect to be persecuted for doing good, and learn to rejoice in persecution" (29 December 1789), and when he confided to John Adams that "during the whole of my political life I was always disposed to suspect my integrity if from any accident I be came popular with our citizens for a few weeks or days" (I 2 Febru ary 1790). Rush frequently made statements like these, but they are fair neither to himself nor to his contemporaries. If he had an unusual capacity for making enemies, his talent for making friends was at least as extraordinary. His letters to John Redman Coxe and John Syng Dorsey (among others) in these volumes help to explain why hundreds of his former pupils remained devoted to him and con tinued to consult him as a friend as well as a physician to the end of his life. With very few exceptions the friendships he made among the political and military leaders of the Revolution thrived in the years that followed. A man who could remain on intimate terms with men of such diverse character and political views as Adams, Jefferson, Pickering, Dickinson, Gates, Greene, Madison, Peters, Wayne, and Rittenhouse did not stand alone against the world. And to this company of his friends and admirers in public life must be added others from the learned world: Price, Priestley, Belknap, Lettsom, Ramsay, Waterhouse, Samuel Miller, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Noah Webster. The collection of letters now published is thus a record also of those amiable traits in Rush's character which his deadly earnestness and his contentiousness, hitherto much better known, have obscured. To the deepest and finest of all of Rush's friendships, that with John Adams, this collection is a monument. When these two men, who had known each other for over thirty years, resumed their correspondence in I805, neither had an inkling of what that act would lead to. The tone of Rush's letters remained for a time a little reserved, but Adams' unexpected warmth and candor soon removed every barrier to complete intimacy of mind. The exchanges increased in frequency and length until, as Rush reported, his wife was constrained to remark "that you and I corresponded like two young girls about their sweethearts" (4 June I8I2). Family news, politics, books, reminiscences of men and events of the Revolution ary and Federalist eras, the present and future condition of man kind-these were among the topics covered. Rush was constantly astonished, as well he might have been, by "the wonderful vivacity and imagery" of Adams' letters. "Some men's minds wear well," he exclaimed, "but yours don't appear to wear at all" (I 7 February [ lxxi ] INTRODUCTION I8I2). To which Adams replied that this astonishment was "very just," for he always felt "at least forty years younger" when writ ing Rush.16 He called in his turn for more of Rush's "dreams" such as the delightful letter in which Rush related a vision of him self as President attempting, quite without success, to stamp out alcoholism by law (I 6 September I 808). Rush would have owed much to Adams if he had owed him only the inspiration for some times making fun of himself. Yet he owed Adams much more. From I 790 onward Rush grew steadily more disillusioned about saving the world through any mundane agency. The national party warfare he witnessed during the Federalist regime seemed to him a travesty of the republican principles he had worked to establish. State politics were even more sordid, and after I 8oo they grew worse rather than better. Gloom ily observing these things, Rush asked Adams: "Do you not some times imprecate the same evils upon the day in which you became a politician that Job did upon the day of his birth? ... In looking back upon the years of our Revolution, I often wish for those ten thousand hours that I wasted in public pursuits and that I now see did no permanent work for my family nor my country" ( 22 April I807)· What was happening, of course, was that Rush was retreating, after a long and circuitous course, back to the religiosity of his youth. He had labored many years for the social and intellectual regeneration of his countrymen. Disappointed in his hopes, he put his trust now only in the Scriptural promise of a millennium. Or as David Ramsay said in his Eulo gium on Rush, "As he became less of a politican, he became more of a Christian.m7 Now Adams was sympathetic with all this; he understood the grounds of Rush's pessimism; but he did not intend to let his fellow laborer repudi ate the important public services he had performed. "Now sir, for your Groans," he replied sharply to one of Rush's outbursts.18 "You and I in the Revolution acted from Principle; we did our Duty, as we then believed, according to our best Information, Judgment and Consciences. Shall we now repent of this? God forbid! No! If a banishment to Cayenne, or to Bottany Bay or even the Guillo tine were to be the necessary Consequences of it to us, we ought not to repent. Repent? This is impossible: how can a Man repent of his virtues? Repent of your sins, and Crimes and willfull Follies, if you can recollect any: but never repent of your Charities, of your

16 Old Family Letters, A, p. 296. 18 Old Family Letters, A, p. 184. 17 Page 104. [ lxxii ] INTRODUCTION Benevolences, of your Cures in the Yellow Fever, no, nor of the innumerable hazards of your Life you have run, in the prosecution of your duty." What Adams did for Rush was to help sustain his faith in the nation which both men had helped bring forth. On 20 August I 8 I I Rush sat down and made a proposal to the friend he venerated. Pointing out that neither of them was long for this world, he urged Adams to prepare "a posthumous address to the citizens of the United States, in which shall be inculcated all those great national, social, domestic, and religious virtues which alone can make a people free, great, and happy." Characteristically, Rush went on to enu merate the points that should be included, giving in fact a kind of summary of the cultural and moral program for which he him self had formerly crusaded. Rush's fighting faith still survived. The echoes were perfectly distinct in I 8 I I of the self-dedication in his earliest letter, in which he had said, "To spend and be spent for the Good of Mankind is what I chiefly aim at."

L. H. BuTTERFIELD Princeton, January I95I

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