Unfaithful to friends, and
only constant in selfishness--unconscious of obligation, and ungrateful
for favors--fanatical only in hatred--pretending to religious morality,
yet pursuing unceasingly, with merciless revenge, those whom he supposed
to be his enemies, he combined all the elements of Puritan bigotry and
Puritan hate in devilish intensity. He deserted the Federal party in
their greatest need, and meanly betrayed them to Mr. Jefferson, whom,
from his boyhood, he had hated and reviled in doggerel rhymes and the
bitterest prose his genius could suggest.
The conduct of Mr. Adams, after he had been President, as the
representative of Massachusetts in Congress, is the best evidence of
the motives which influenced his conduct in the matter of these two
treaties. He never lost an opportunity to assail the interests and the
institutions of the South. He hated her, and to him, more than to any
other, is due the conduct of the Northern people toward the South which
precipitated the late war, and has destroyed the harmony once existing
between the people.
His father had been repudiated by the South for a more trusted son of
her own.
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