John Quincy Adams: “political heresies”

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, in a public letter addressed to Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson had made mention of Edmund Burke’s book Reflections on the Revolution in France , and had endorsed it as the answer to “the political heresies that have sprung up among us.” (This was an obvious reference to John Adams.)

John Quincy Adams went on the attack for his father, and published a letter anonymously in the newspaper:

I am somewhat at a loss to determine what this very respectable gentleman means by political heresies. Does he consider this pamphlet of Mr. Paine’s as a canonical book of political scripture? As containing the true doctrine of popular infallibility, from which it would be heretical to depart in one single point? I have always understood, sir, that the citizens of these States were possessed of a full and entire freedom of opinion upon all subjects civil as well as religious; they have not yet established any infallible criterion of orthodoxy, either in church or state … and the only political tenet which they could stigmatize with the name of heresy would be that which should attempt to impose an opinion upon their understandings, upon the single principle of authority.