The primary documents from Adams's early years — 1755 to 1774 — begin with his diary entries as a young lawyer in Braintree and end at the First Continental Congress. The diary, the Braintree Instructions, the Boston Massacre defence, and the Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law are all at Founders Online and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
John Adams was born October 30, 1735, in Braintree, Massachusetts — the eldest son of John Adams Sr., a farmer and deacon, and Susanna Boylston Adams. The family had been in Braintree since the 1630s. His father wanted him to be a minister. He was admitted to Harvard College in 1751 at age fifteen and graduated in 1755 at age twenty.
After graduation Adams taught school in Worcester, Massachusetts, while reading law in the office of James Putnam, one of Worcester's leading lawyers. He recorded his thoughts on law, religion, and his own ambitions in his diary throughout this period. He was admitted to the bar in 1758 and returned to Braintree to begin practice.
The first surviving diary entries date from 1755 and 1756, written while Adams was teaching school in Worcester and studying law under Putnam. The entries record his reading, his observations on law and theology, and his self-assessments. The January 14, 1756 entry is at Founders Online.
I am not without Apprehensions, that I have not sufficient Genius, or sufficient Literature, to qualify me for the Law. But I believe I shall try. I find, upon a careful Examination, that my Faculties are not so good, as I had flattered myself with the Belief that they were. But I must and will be a Lawyer. However, it is a little unlucky, that I have read so few, in Comparison to what I have a Curiosity, to read. I am not able to determine, what is the best Course of Studies for a Lawyer.
Two years later, after completing his legal apprenticeship under Putnam, Adams returned to Braintree and was admitted to the bar. He wrote to his friend John Wentworth in October 1758 describing his return and his prospects. That letter is at Founders Online.
In 1765 — the same year as the Stamp Act — Adams published "A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law" in the Boston Gazette, in four installments. It was his first major political publication. He argued that the colonists' resistance to Parliamentary taxation was rooted in their inheritance of English liberties and their tradition of self-governance, and that the Stamp Act was part of a broader pattern of clerical and feudal tyranny throughout history. The full text is at Founders Online.
Be it remembered, however, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood. And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers.
When the Stamp Act passed in 1765, Adams drafted instructions for Braintree's representative to the Massachusetts General Court — directing him to oppose the Act on constitutional grounds. The Braintree Instructions, adopted by the town meeting on September 24, 1765, argued that Parliament had no authority to tax the colonies without their consent and no authority to deny them trial by jury. Forty towns in Massachusetts adopted the Instructions or similar language. Adams recorded the episode in his Autobiography.
We have always understood it to be a grand and fundamental principle of the British constitution, that no freeman should be subject to any tax to which he has not given his own consent, in person or by proxy; and the maxims of the law, as we have constantly received them, are to the same effect, that no man can be taxed, or bound in conscience, to obey any law, to the making of which he has not consented by himself or by his representative.
Adams described the drafting of the Instructions in his Autobiography — written decades later but drawing on his diary entries from the period. The Autobiography is at Founders Online at founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-03-02-0016-0012.
On March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd on King Street in Boston, killing five people. The event became known as the Boston Massacre. The soldiers were arrested and charged with murder. Adams agreed to defend them. He was thirty-four years old. He later wrote in his Autobiography that he considered the defence, whatever the personal and professional cost, as good a service as he ever rendered his country — that a man who had argued for American rights was now arguing that those rights extended to unpopular defendants before an impartial jury.
The trial took place in October and November 1770. Adams secured acquittals for six of the eight soldiers and manslaughter verdicts for two. His closing argument addressed the jury directly on the principle that facts, not popular sentiment, govern the law.
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, 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 snowballs, 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.
In January 1775 — after years of building his legal practice, serving in the Massachusetts legislature, and writing on colonial rights — Adams began publishing a series of newspaper essays under the pseudonym "Novanglus" (New Englander), arguing the constitutional case for colonial self-governance against the Loyalist writer "Massachusettensis." The Novanglus letters are among his most sustained political arguments before the Revolution and are at Founders Online.
Before the Novanglus letters, Adams had been elected as a Massachusetts delegate to the First Continental Congress, which met in Philadelphia in September and October 1774. He attended alongside Samuel Adams, Robert Treat Paine, and Thomas Cushing. His diary entries from the Congress document his observations of the other delegates, the debates, and the condition of the colonial cause. The diary entries from 1774 are at Founders Online.
The objects of the most pleasing contemplation, to an American — the honor of his country, the happiness of its inhabitants — are to be pursued, in these times of difficulty and danger, with great caution and circumspection, as well as with spirit and activity. The Congress is an assembly of the wisest and most virtuous men of the Continent. I hope their deliberations will produce something great and noble.