Harvard Will Publish Legal Papers of John Adams

The legal papers of John Adams, illuminating his experience as a lawyer in the Colonial and early Revolutionary periods, will be published for the first time in 1964. Harvard University will include the two-volume work in its Belknap Press edition of "The Adams Papers."

"The Legal Papers of John Adams" will contain, in full, Adams' defense of the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. Other materials will document the significant aspects of the legal and political--and to some extent the social--history of Colonial America.

Publication of "The Adams Papers" began in September 1961 when the four-volume "Diary and Autobiography of John Adams" appeared. The work is under the editorial sponsorship of the Massachusetts Historical Society, to which the Adams family has given its archives extending from the 17th to the 20th century.

Under the terms of the grant, two legal historians, L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, will become research associates in Harvard Law School for the purpose of editing the legal papers. They will work under the supervision of Mark DeWolfe Howe, professor of Law at Harvard, and L. H. Butterfield, editor-in-chief of "The Adams Papers" at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Though many of the Adamses were trained as lawyers, John Adams was one of the few in this family of statesmen, scholars, and writers who practiced intensively and attained eminence at the Bar. His diary for June 16, 1780 the young lawyer asking: "How many Actions shall I secure this Day? What new Client shall I have? I found at Evening, I had secured 6 Actions, but not one new Client, that I know of."

But this first edition of Adams' legal papers will reveal a diversity of cases in a busy schedule from 1759 to 1777. The records to be drawn on include not only those that he and his descendants preserved but others in the early flies of the Supreme Judicial Court in the Suffolk County Courthouse, Boston, in various local courts in New England, and in other repositories of manuscripts throughout the United States.

Material published for the first time in full and reliable texts includes Adams' defense of Captain Thomas Preston, one of the British soldiers who took part in the Boston Massacre in 1770.

Adams wrote later of his part in the trial: "The Part I took in Defense of Captn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most galant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I eyer rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the verdict of the Jury was exactly right."

Contemporary newspaper and diary accounts, such as this comment from Adams' diary, will accompany the cases, in addition to a short summary of the facts, the pleadings, and selected file papers. Adams' student book, his pleadings form book, and his so-called "Admiralty Book" (notes on his cases in the court of Vice Admiralty) will be printed in full.

A generous election of his other cases will also be included to represent his involvement in such branches of law as procedure and practice, probate, torts, commercial law and contracts, real property, domestic relations, municipal law, criminal law, and equity.

The introductory essay will describe Adams' life in the law and the high points in his practice. There will also be material on the procedure of the Massachusetts courts during the period of Adams' professional career