He addressed fourteen questions to his Cabinet officers in regard to Fries' rebellion and the legal questions involved in the charge of treason. The Secretaries were unanimous in recommending that the sentence of death for treason be carried out on the three accused and Charles Lee concurred; but the more Adams thought about it the more convinced he was that it would be a disservice to the nation to extend the definition of treason so far. Fries' "rebellion" was to him no more "than a riot, highhanded, aggravated, daring, and dangerous indeed," but hardly treason. "Is there not great danger in establishing such a construction of treason as may be applied to every sudden, ignorant, inconsiderable heat among a part of the people wrought up by political dispute?"12
12. AA/TBA, October 12, 1800, APm.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, August 29, 2022
Hardly Treason
Page Smith, John Adams, Vol. II: 1784-1826 (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962), p. 1033, with note on p. 1152: