John Adams - SA Read Online Free PDF

discovered a love of study and books such as he had never imagined. “I read forever,” he would remember happily, and as years passed, in an age when educated men took particular pride in the breadth of their reading, he became one of the most voracious readers of any. Having discovered books at Harvard, he was seldom ever to be without one for the rest of his days.
    He lived in the “lowermost northwest chamber” of Massachusetts Hall, sharing quarters with Thomas Sparhawk, whose chief distinction at college appears to have come from breaking windows, and Joseph Stockbridge, notable for his wealth and his refusal to eat meat.
    The regimen was strict and demanding, the day starting with morning prayers in Holden Chapel at six and ending with evening prayers at five. The entire college dined at Commons, on the ground floor of Old Harvard, each scholar bringing his own knife and fork which, when the meal ended, would be wiped clean on the table cloth. By most accounts, the food was wretched. Adams not only never complained, but attributed his own and the overall good health of the others to the daily fare—beef, mutton, Indian pudding, salt fish on Saturday—and an ever abundant supply of hard cider. “I shall never forget, how refreshing and salubrious we found it, hard as it often was.” Indeed, for the rest of his life, a morning “gill” of hard cider was to be John Adams's preferred drink before breakfast.
    “All scholars,” it was stated in the college rules, were to “behave themselves blamelessly, leading sober, righteous, and godly lives.” There was to be no “leaning” at prayers, no lying, blasphemy, fornication, drunkenness, or picking locks. Once, the records show, Adams was fined three shillings, nine pence for absence from college longer than the time allowed for vacation or by permission. Otherwise, he had not a mark against him. As the dutiful son of Deacon John, he appears neither to have succumbed to gambling, “riotous living,” nor to “wenching” in taverns on the road to Charlestown.
    But the appeal of young women was exceedingly strong, for as an elderly John Adams would one day write, he was “of an amorous disposition” and from as early as ten or eleven years of age had been “very fond of the society of females.” Yet he kept himself in rein, he later insisted.
I had my favorites among the young women and spent many of my evenings in their company and this disposition although controlled for seven years after my entrance into college, returned and engaged me too much 'til I was married. I shall draw no characters nor give any enumeration of my youthful flames. It would be considered as no compliment to the dead or the living. This I will say—they were all modest and virtuous girls and always maintained that character through life. No virgin or matron ever had cause to blush at the sight of me, or to regret her acquaintance with me. No father, brother, son, or friend ever had cause of grief or resentment for any intercourse between me and any daughter, sister, mother or any other relation of the female sex. My children may be assured that no illegitimate brother or sister exists or ever existed.
    A student's place in his class being determined on entrance to Harvard by the “dignity of family,” rather than alphabetically or by academic performance, Adams was listed fourteenth of the twenty-five who received degrees, his placement due to the fact that his mother was a Boylston and his father a deacon. Otherwise, he would have been among the last on the list. At commencement ceremonies, as one of the first three academically, he argued the affirmative to the question “Is civil government absolutely necessary for men?” It was to be a lifelong theme.
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    HOW CLOSE ADAMS CAME to becoming a minister he never exactly said, but most likely it was not close at all. His mother, though a pious woman, thought him unsuited for the life, for all that Deacon John wished it