Leadership Quote by John Adams

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact; if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defence; if it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snow-balls, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind; this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offence of killing, down to manslaughter, in consideration of those passions in our nature, which cannot be eradicated. (Vol. 3, Rex v. Wemms; in the Annual Register printing, page not shown on the MHS digital transcription). Earliest identifiable publication of the full sentence (in this exact extended form) is in the contemporaneous printed account of the Boston Massacre soldiers’ trial (Rex v. Wemms) in The Annual Register for the year 1770 (published in 1771). The Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Papers digital edition reproduces the text and explicitly links this trial section to the Annual Register printing (see its navigation note: “Charges to The Jury as Printed In the Annual Register”). The line is from John Adams’s closing/summing-up argument in the trial of the soldiers (Wemms et al.), delivered in late 1770 (the proceedings were in Nov. 1770; the quoted summation occurs near the end of the printed trial narrative).