I'm sharing this fine piece of writing by my good friend and fellow creative (and amazing attorney), Doug Crowder, in celebration of today...
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JULY 4, 1826, A TALE OF TWO LAWYERS
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In
the late afternoon of July 4, 1826, John Adams lay in his bed at his home in Quincy Massachusetts. There was something significant about that date, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Perhaps, as he drifted in and out of consciousness, he knew that today would be his last. But perhaps he also suspected it would be his best.
Looking back over his life, he perhaps remembered what he described as “one of the best Pieces of Service he ever rendered his Country.” In what was known as the Boston Massacre of 1770, British troops had fired into a crowd of American civilians, killing five. Eight soldiers were charged with murder, and had difficulty finding an attorney to represent them. John Adams agreed to, and asked the jury to look beyond the fact the soldiers were British. He argued that if the soldiers were endangered by the mob, they had the legal right to fight back. The jury agreed and acquitted six of the soldiers and found the other two guilty of manslaughter.
Perhaps, as he thought of his legal career, he thought of a younger lawyer he had helped and befriended, who later turned against him. Something about that younger lawyer should make him remember why today’s date was significant.
Maybe he remembered serving as the nation’s first vice president for two terms under George Washington. A time about which he said: "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived."
Maybe he remembered the four years he served as the nation’s second president, and the first to occupy its White House.
His chances for a second term were ruined, however, by the younger lawyer he had thought of earlier. The younger lawyer who engaged in a bitter campaign to defeat him for the presidency.
That lawyer was Thomas Jefferson, who would not have achieved the fame he did without the aid of John Adams. At Adams’ insistence, Jefferson had been the main author of the Declaration of Independence, which declared that the American colonies were now free of British rule. The signing of that document by the Continental Congress, on July 4, 1776, gave birth to the new nation.
