Charles C. Adams

“Coolidge noted, they preserved “teaching,” which after all amounted to “leading,” and had given it the “same safeguards and guaranties as freedom and equality.” The state’s constitution had insisted, he pointed out, that “wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, are necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.”46 In those “days of reverence and of applied reverence,” the alumni of Harvard – John Adams and Bowdoin chief among them – “knew that freedom was the fruit of knowledge””

“In the first two centuries of colonization, the border between natives and newcomers was porous, almost nonexistent. The two societies mingled in a way that is difficult to imagine now. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society. “Aaron Pomham the Priest and Moses Pomham the Kind of the Punkapaug and Neponsit Tribes were frequent Visitors at my Father’s House …,””

“In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society. “Aaron Pomham the Priest and Moses Pomham the Kind of the Punkapaug and Neponsit Tribes were frequent Visitors at my Father’s House …,” he wrote nostalgically.””