John Adams by McCullough

1 use

In a matter of days, Congress abrogated the French-American treaties of 1778, created a permanent Marine Corps, passed the Sedition Act, and approved the nomination of Washington as supreme commander.†

3 uses

All this was transpiring when the amorous spirits of the whole group appear to have been at a pitch.†

2 uses

Keep up the circulation of his blood for years to come, and excite aphorism and anecdotes and dreams for the instruction and amusements by the action of his brain upon his mind.†

8 uses

"I take vast satisfaction in the general approbation of the Massachusetts Constitution," he would tell a friend.†

1 use

Congress ordered that the document be authenticated and printed.†

5 uses

An American assault on Quebec led by Colonels Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold had failed.†

4 uses

Nor did he feel obliged "to suffer my character to lie under infamous calumnies because the author of them with a pistol bullet in his spinal marrow, died a penitent."†

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3 uses

He thought public officials should not only be paid, but that their salaries should be commensurate with their responsibilities and necessary expenses.†

2 uses

A huge, red-faced young man of inexhaustible energy, Chase refused to accept the dictum that Maryland's delegates must vote down independence.†

2 uses

Like Washington and many others, Adams had become increasingly distraught over the rise of political divisiveness, the forming of parties or factions.†

3 uses

Jefferson's aide, William Short, came on errands from Paris, and the duplicitous Dr. Edward Bancroft showed up, affable as always.†

2 uses

Unlike Jefferson, Adams had not composed his own epitaph.†

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Indeed, to behold this distinguished man .... occupying the chair of the Senate in the morning, and afterwards walking home through the streets and taking his seat among his fellow citizens as their equal, conversing amicably with men over whom he had just presided .... was a singular spectacle, and a striking exemplification of the state of society in America at this period.†

2 uses

It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me—[to] fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.†

3 uses

He himself, he insisted, had no say on patronage.†

2 uses

To many on both sides of the Atlantic, it presaged a quick end to the war.†

3 uses

He felt privileged, blessed in his profession, he told Jonathan Sewall: Now to what higher object, to what greater character, can any mortal aspire than to be possessed of all this knowledge, well digested and ready at command, to assist the feeble and friendless, to discountenance the haughty and lawless, to procure redress to wrongs, the advancement of right, to assert and maintain liberty and virtue, to discourage and abolish tyranny and vice?†

2 uses

But then neither did he oppose them, and their passage and his signature on them were to be rightly judged by history as the most reprehensible acts of his presidency.†

2 uses

But now he felt no such restraint, and in a series of letters he unleashed his wrath as he seldom had, demonstrating, just as Mercy Warren had said, that his passions could at times overcome his sagacity, but also how deeply she had hurt him.†