Anniversary of the Boston Massacre. -- Dr. Benjamin Church, Orator of the
Day. -- His Character and Public Services. -- Adams defends the Charter
Right of Town Meetings against the Governor. -- Correspondence with
John Dickinson. -- Adams and Dickinson contrasted. -- Virginia organizes
a Continental Committee of Correspondence. -- Adams responds by offering
similar Resolutions in the Massachusetts Assembly. -- Priority of the Idea
established for Massachusetts. -- Adams its Earliest Advocate. -- Elected a
Member of the London Society of the Bill of Rights. -- He proposes John
Adams and Warren for Membership. -- Adams and Richard Henry Lee
commence a Correspondence. -- Dr. Franklin forwards from London the
Secret Letters of Hutchinson. -- Exposure and Disgrace of the Governor.

ON the 5th of March the annual commemoration of the
Massacre was held at the Old South, where the oration was
pronounced by Dr. Benjamin Church. The public interest
in these ceremonies had not abated. The church, as John
Adams recorded in his Diary, "was filled and crowded in
every pew, seat, alley, and gallery, by an audience of several
thousand people, of all ages and characters, and of both
sexes."

Church was one of those whom Samuel Adams had
brought forward into political life as a young man of genius.
Adams saw his abilities, and determined to secure them for
the country, by early imbuing their possessor with his own
ideas of virtue and liberty. His pupil, however, wavered as
circumstances looked promising or the reverse. In 1768
-69, he was engaged upon the Times, a journal devoted
to liberty, and denounced to the Ministry by Bernard. Its
articles were generally republished in New York. He en-
joyed the unlimited confidence of the Whigs, and was con-
sidered as one of the most valuable members of the party.
The first intimation of his backsliding is in one of Hutchin-
son's letters, in which he informs a friend in England that

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