Adams the Lawgiver – Richard Alan Ryerson

Adams the Lawgiver – Richard Alan Ryerson

On March 19, 1776—two days after America’s Continental Army forced the British Army to evacuate Boston—John Adams, attending Congress in Philadelphia, wrote to his wife Abigail, at home in Massachusetts, in reply to her inquiry about the public reception of America’s first “best seller,” Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. That anonymous author’s “Sentiments of the Abilities of America, and of the Difficulty of a Reconciliation with Great Britain are g…