AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE was then and there born.

Every man of an unusually crowded audience, appeared to me to go away ready to take up arms against Writs of Assistance." Speaking on the same subject, on another occasion, John Adams said that "James Otis there and there breathed into this nation the breath of life." From that day John Adams was an enthusiast for the independence of his country.
In 1764 he married Abigail, daughter of the Reverend William Smith, of Weymouth.

The mother of John Quincy Adams was a woman of great beauty and high intellectual endowments, and she combined, with the proper accomplishments of her sex, a sweetness of disposition, and a generous sympathy with the patriotic devotion of her illustrious husband.
In 1765, the British Parliament, in contempt of the discontent of the Colonies, presumptuously passed the Stamp Act; a law which directed taxed stamped paper to be used in all legal instruments in the Colonies.

The validity of the law was denied; and while Patrick Henry was denouncing it in Virginia, James Otis and John Adams argued against it before the Governor and Council of Massachusetts.
The occasion called forth from John Adams a "Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Laws,"-- a work, which although it was of a general character in regard to government, yet manifested democratic sentiments unusual in those times, and indicated that republican institutions were the proper institutions for the American People.
The resistance to the stamp act throughout the Colonies procured its repeal in 1766.

But the British Government accompanied the repeal with an ungracious declaratory act, by which they asserted "that the Parliament had, and of right ought to have, power to bind the Colonies, in all cases whatsoever." In the next year a law was passed, which imposed duties in the Colonies, on glass, paper, paints, and tea.