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John and Abigail Adams also waited anxiously for news from Massachusetts. As American minister to the Court of St. James’s, Adams presided over a large house in Grosvenor Square near Hyde Park, which Abigail pictured to her relatives back home as rather like Boston Common, only “much larger and more beautified with trees.” Maddening weeks passed without word from home, across thewayward Atlantic; then a fever of excitement took over the house when the butler or a footman brought a tray full of letters to the little room, off the formal drawing room, that Abigail Adams had made into a parlor. Tea and toast would turn cold as the family tore open their letters and drank in family and political news.
    The political news seemed more and more clouded. Not only was Congress as irresolute and slow-moving as ever, but the unrest in Massachusetts appeared to be getting out of hand. What in earlier letters had been termed “disturbances” now were verging on anarchy and civil war. The state authorities seemed helpless to put down the commotion; the legislature dawdled, and the governor, reported Adams’ son John Quincy from Harvard, was called the “Old Lady.” His friends left John Adams in no doubt about the true nature of the rebels. They were violent men who hated persons of substance, especially lawyers. Some were of the most “turbulent and desperate disposition,” moving from town to town to enflame the locals. They would annihilate the courts, and then all law and order. Among the leaders there were no persons of reputation or education. Not one of Adams’ correspondents sympathized with the rebels, or even explained their hardships, except as the result of speculation and prodigality.
    Isolated in London’s winter smoke and fogs, Adams seethed in his frustration. This was his state that was setting such a bad example; it was the state, in fact, of whose constitution he was the main author. But there was something he could do, even in London; he could warn his countrymen of the dangers ahead. “The Sedition in Massachusetts,” Abigail Adams wrote John Quincy at Harvard, “induced your Poppa to give to the World a book” contending that “salutary [?] restraint is the vital Principal of Liberty,” that turbulence could bring only coercion.
    A sense of desperate urgency possessed Adams. He had to rebut the erroneous notions of such men as Tom Paine and the French thinker Turgot; he had to demolish false ideas before his fellow Americans made further decisions about their system of government. Snatching every available minute from his official duties, barring his study door to all but his wife, surrounding himself with the works of the greatest philosophers and historians, he scribbled so quickly that his hand turned sore, so fast that his work was disorganized, strewn with errors, packed with badly translated quotations. But it was also a powerful argument that the new institutions in America must be built properly to last thousands of years; that free government, with all its woes, was superior to even the wisest monarchy; that the tendency of republics to turbulence could be curbed by a system of checks and balances within government; and that men were equal in theeyes of God and under the law but manifestly unequal—and always would be—in beauty, virtue, talents, fortune.
    Aware that he himself, with his medium height, balding pate, and pointed features set oddly in a soft and rounded head, hardly met the popular image of the leader, Adams had no doubt that he possessed the wisdom and virtue necessary to the natural aristocracy that republics too must zealously protect.
    In Paris, in the spacious town house that he had rented on the Champs-Elysées, just within the city wall, the American minister, Thomas Jefferson, pondered early reports of the disturbances in Massachusetts. He felt not so much alarmed as mildly embarrassed, for he did not expect independent farmers to disrupt law courts and abolish