ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the careers of Adams and Sewall in politics and law. Politically they appear to have been on opposite trajectories heading toward Patriotism (in Adams’s case) and Loyalism (in Sewall’s). But their legal careers brought them into confrontation (especially during the Hancock Trial of 1768-69 in which Adams and Sewall were opposing counsel) and thence to anticlimax, for Sewall, as province attorney general, was inexplicably absent from the Boston Massacre Trials of 1770 when Adams successfully defended the British soldiers accused of murder. This chapter finds that throughout these travails, Sewall tried and failed to bring Adams into the government camp, a story hitherto unresolved. Friendship, as an analytical category, enables us to think of the Adams-Sewall friendship as heroic in its yearning for reconciliation from the darkest gulf of repudiation yet also rendering Adams vulnerable to the prey of the false friend. As Adams’s star rose, Sewall retained the means to destroy his integrity and reputation, while Adams reserved the lesser power to blacken Sewall’s character. Neither risked playing these hands in the game of politics.
