John Adams Militia Quotes

And as John Adams told the Massachusetts militia in 1789, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” There

It must be made a sacred maxim, that the militia obey the executive power, which represents the whole people in the execution of laws. To suppose arms in the hands of citizens, to be used at individual discretion, except in private self-defence, or by partial orders of towns, counties, or districts of a state, is to demolish every constitution, and lay the laws prostrate, so that liberty can be enjoyed by no man; it is a dissolution of the government.

James Madison, in his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments in 1785, said that man’s duty to honor God “is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation to the claims of civil society. Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the universe.” And as John Adams told the Massachusetts militia in 1789, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Boys on horseback resupplied the militia.31 Militiamen on the way to Lexington and Concord stopped at a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. To their amusement, 8-year-old John Quincy Adams, son of Abigail and John Adams, was executing the manual of arms with a musket taller than he was.

The last officer named was Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island; a man of limited education and military experience limited to two years of peacetime militia duty, he nevertheless was destined to be the best of the lot.27

Most memorably for readers, Hochschild reprints staged photographs taken by the English missionary Alice Seeley Harris and supplied to the anti-Léopold campaign through the English missionary John Weeks. The missionaries knew that showing these fake photos at “lantern shows” in community halls in Britain won more attention and donations than their detailed accounts of cannibalism and sleeping sickness ravaging their areas. Hochschild does not tell the reader that the photographs are staged, nor does he explain that the photographs of people with severed hands were victims of gangrene, tribal vendettas, or cannibalism having nothing to do with rubber. In the most famous photo of them all, a man whom Seeley got to sit on the veranda of her mission station with a severed hand and foot before him, the original caption given by Morel reads: “Sala of Wala and remains of his five year old daughter; both wife and child were eaten by king’s soldiers at a cannibal feast. Until Hochschild, no one had suggested that the girl or her mother were killed for rubber, only that the EIC had failed to control the eating habits of its citizens. Hochschild, however, captions the photo thus: “Nsala, of the district of Wala, looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter, Boali, a victim of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (A.B.I.R.) militia.

In 1798, in an address to the Massachusetts militia, President John Adams said, “We have no government armed in power capable of contending in human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

Our nation is built from the ground up to handle political disagreement. It is not built to endure mass-scale dishonesty and vindictiveness. No less a light than John Adams understood our nation’s unique vulnerability to individual depravity. In his October 11, 1798, letter to the Massachusetts Militia, Adams famously wrote that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Liberty: Freedom from Undue Restraint In America, the founders believed that the heart of liberty was not freedom to do anything we want but freedom to do as we ought. This was a common understanding of the time, as seen in the writings of Edmund Burke (1729–97), a British statesman who late in his life witnessed the bloody French Revolution. He wrote, “But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”3 John Adams, America’s second president, wrote to the Massachusetts Militia in 1798, “Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.