Page:Familiar Letters of John Adams and his Wife, Abigail Adams, During the Revolution.djvu/22

xiv The father of Mrs. Adams was a pious man, with something of that vein of humor not uncommon among the clergy of New England, which ordinarily found such a field for exercise as is displayed in the pages of Cotton Mather. He was the father of three daughters, all of them women of uncommon force of intellect, though the fortunes of two of them confined its influence to a sphere much more limited than that which fell to the lot of Mrs. Adams. Mary, the eldest, was married in 1792 to Richard Cranch, an English emigrant, who had settled at Germantown, a part of Braintree, and who subsequently became a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas in Massachusetts, and died, highly respected, in the early part of the present century. The late William Cranch. of Washington, who presided so long, and with so much dignity and fidelity, over the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, was the son of this marriage. Elizabeth, the youngest, was twice married; first to the Reverend John Shaw, minister of Haverhill, in Massachusetts, and, after his death, to the Reverend Mr. Peabody, of Atkinson, New Hampshire. Thus much is necessary to be stated in order to explain the relations, which the parties mentioned in many of the letters bore to each other. It is an anecdote told of Mr. Smith, that upon the marriage of his eldest daughter he preached to his people from the text in the forty-second verse of the tenth chapter of Luke, "And Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Two years elapsed, and his second daughter, the subject of this notice, was about to marry John Adams, then a lawyer in good practice, when some disapprobation of the match appears to have manifested itself among a portion of his parishioners. The profession of law was, for a long period in the colonial history of Massachusetts, unknown ; and after circumstances called it forth, the prejudices of the inhabitants, who thought it a calling hardly honest, were arrayed against those who adopted it. There are many still living who can remember how strong they remained, even down to the time of the adoption of the present Federal Constitution; and the records of the General Court will show that they had not quite disappeared even much later. Besides this, the family of Mr. Adams, the son of a small farmer of the middle class in Braintree, was thought scarcely good enough to match with the minister's daughter, descended from so many of the shining lights of the Colony. It is probable that Mr. Smith was made aware of the opinions