Mary Newbury Adams

“ Now however potent may be the influences in the future, that shall take up each successive generation to a higher and higher plane, who will say that anything of restraint is thereby imposed upon man's moral freedom? And in that other future, where no circling planets measure the revolving years, nor generations come nor go, but where the individual survives the race, who shall presume to estimate the inborn possibilities of the immortal spirit, or explain its laws, as it shall be ever unfolding in that world of life and love? ”

“ Each family expected that at least one child should have a college education. The winter he was eight years old his uncle, Franklin Austin, taught and gave him an idea of the unity of knowledge, how geography helped history, mathematics astronomy, how all sciences aided each other. This gave him an enthusiasm for all knowledge, which in after life he saw was a light that many lacked, who in childhood had not had teachers with philosophic and poetic application of generalization. ”

“ We have come to consecrate it to the graces of manner which courts and cities can not monopolize, but which spring up as well in the country and in the wildwood. We have come to consecrate it to the graces of the mind, and finally to the graces of life and spirit, found only in religion. ”

“ Judge Adams was an earnest advocate of the benefit which women would acquire from the study of the law, and the good to society to have women, particularly teachers and mothers, trained and informed by familiarity with the principle and methods adopted to secure justice and peace in the community and state. He always welcomed them to the lecture room when lecturer at the Iowa State University, and was the first chief justice to admit a woman to practice in the Supreme Court of Iowa, and often praised the manner in which she tried a case, at the time she was admitted. ”

“ Courts he knew had no right to set aside laws upon their own motives of propriety, if they are constitutional, neither could they decide what was not constitutional to be a law. Every unconstitutional law which is made to stand, creates a permanent and mischievous evil by overturning the only safe-guards which we possess against public usurpation. He felt that the courts must prevent the ignorant and impetuous from destroying the stability of the very system that gave ability to advance with safety. ”

“ The world is full of these precious influences and how carefully and sacredly we garner and cherish them. How we call into requisition the canvas, the marble, and the granite. How patiently the muse of history broods over the high places of the earth to commit to her immortal page the record of all great thoughts and deeds. ”

“ Austin Adams' definition of religion was: "The conscious effort of the finite to realize the Infinite." It was the rebinding of the individual will to what was true and good: the motive force of life. In a circular written in 1871 to aid in forming a society free from sects, but religious, he wrote: "Believing in all that is good in the different forms of religion, but regretting the restrictions that are imposed upon it by limiting it to times and places, and historic names," etc. ”

“ We sometimes come in contact with a person of so exalted a nature that the noblest impulses of our hearts are quickened and virtue and duty acquire a new attractiveness. We find ourselves elevated to a higher moral plane. We become capable of better thoughts and better deeds. For the time, and perhaps evermore, we live a truer, nobler and freer life. Yet the inspiration thus received involves the will, and it is because we voluntarily choose the higher life that the inspiration is of any value to us. ”

“ So year by year the world grows richer in all that can elevate, inspire and ennoble. And the world is and evermore shall be elevated, inspired and ennobled. This is our faith. This is our religion. No one shall set limits to this blessed progression. ”

“ His interest in scientific and metaphysical researches, his desire to multiply advantages for culture and to stimulate ambition in progress grew from his earnest religious faith. It was the meeting reverently with minds that gave him power to quicken and inspire them with spirit, which is the testimony of many noble men and women who were his scholars—now scattered from ocean to ocean, from Florida to Oregon. They agree in their testimony that he made life seem worth living, and an integral part of the higher life. ”

“ All science may be regarded as sacred. It reveals the creative energy through which God expresses himself. Dreamy contemplation not founded upon knowledge can not attain to Him. We can not reach Him immediately in his absoluteness, we can only know Him as expressed in actual creation. ”

“ In 1868 The Ladies Literary Society of Iowa College asked a lady who had graduated from Troy Female Seminary in 1857 to address them at their commencement, When the trustees found it out one of them, a congregational minister, told the husband of the lady that they had "had the matter under advisement, and were not yet prepared to allow a woman to occupy the college platform at commencement, but that the invitation was not recalled on personal grounds." Judge Adams took the matter into the newspapers for discussion, as he had addressed the gentlemen's literary society the year before. ”

“ He was not one who thought liberality meant indifference to religious belief, but that one should have a definite faith that they could believe and live up to. His love for law shaped his life into methods ethical for the state. ”

“ Regular and temperate in his habits, and an indefatigable worker, by the simplicity of his life and living he proved that the best things could be enjoyed with very little expense, and that all one's energies need not be spent to amass wealth in order to acquire culture or to spend a happy useful life. ”

“ We believe that God is not revealed by the imaginations of men, but in the truths of history, and of the physical and moral world. We are therefore reverently seeking such truth, believing that as we find it we shall find God and that as we find Him He will command our unfeigned worship and love. ”

“ Individuals were aided to best life by calling out their highest qualities, and to self-directing action. That liberating of the mind that comes from scholarship and free inquiry, that knowing the right know how to make it prevail. ”

“ He thought the public schools were made democratic and educational for the citizens at times to participate with the scholars in exercises, and thus parents and children, the officers of the state and fine society be united in pleasant social and educational associations. When sixteen he taught school where several of the pupils were older than himself. His government was never one of physical force. In one case of insubordination when the pupils were indirectly enlisted with the delinquents, he converted the school into a court and had the subject discussed ”

“ The lives of men coming to Iowa show how that has been done in this state.
Seemingly Austin Adams had everything to attract him to the East, particularly to Boston, and when he left the Harvard Law School to come west, his friends prophesied an early return, believing him unfitted, both by taste and culture, for any settlement beyond the Atlantic states. Later in life when he analyzed the motives for his change, he said: "I wanted more liberty, a society with more variety than I had ever seen in the East." He always disliked to be in a valley, or in a small room, or to have a confined view ”

“ In after years the pupils told him that this court was invaluable. It awoke in them a sense of their responsibility to those who sent them. They learned of their rights as individuals in society, and that the good of the greatest number, not the pleasure of the few, was to be sought. ”

“ On the 8th of September, 1857, Austin Adams was married in Dubuque to Mary K. Newbury, second daughter of the Rev. Samuel and Mrs. Mary Sergeant Newbury. In their home life their aim was, to have some inspiring thought woven into the duties of each day. They recognized that "the ornaments of a house are the friends who frequent it." Their hospitality brought to their home many choice inspiring people. He was fond of the best society and the meeting with congenial friends his delight. ”

“ A man gentle and bending as a steel spring, but not as a willow. He controlled high spirit and active desires which gave dignity in bearing, and to his language force, sharply directed, but restrained to the end sought, refined but strong. ”

“ He never liked to hear tragic or terrorizing tales. He always dwelt on the sunnier phase of life; sought out what led to happiness, especially the power to rise above trouble and unfortunate circumstances. ”

“ Some thoughts as written by Judge Adams in 1869, are here copied to afford an insight to his religious belief:
"That we are moral and responsible beings is attested by our consciousness. If the divine spirit becomes operative in our spirit it is only through a subjective union resulting in a higher freedom. ”

“ Some of the men kindly remembered the boy after he became a man. His knowledge of motives and his love of justice often led some to think that his protection of the seeming guilty was sentimentality, when it was a deeper and farther sight, than the letter of the law permitted. ”

“ Two years ago the writer attended the commencement of Iowa College. The commencement exercises were listened to by an audience two-thirds of which were ladies. The ladies who read essays from the college platform, were equal in number to the gentlemen who spoke from the same place, and were superior in ability by common consent. As I saw one lady after another step upon the platform and gracefully read a well-written essay, I thought it was the handsomest and most ladylike thing that a lady could do. ”

“ He often seemed to see people quite as much in what they might be as in what they were. A struggling intellect or a striving soul had a peculiar charm for him, for the very reason that it needed assistance. ”

“ In the ungraded country school the history, geography and astronomy of the older pupils awakened the young active minds in the primary classes, before they were drilled and confined by their own studies, and took the place to them of travel and lectures. ”

“ Austin Adams was a conservative in his habits and methods, but his thought was radical. It was based on the nature of the human soul, and principles underlying social formation and observations on real life about him. Social forms and governmental laws were to be honored if old. "They must have served some use in the training and educating into social order and aided right living, and must not readily, easily, nor by individuals be set aside." ”

“ Nor was it much less gratifying to observe that while they had been absorbed for years in the most exacting studies they had not overlooked the latest fashions and had abated nothing in their good taste in dress. It was easy to predict for them a happy future. Many, it might be presumed, would become the wives of intellectual men, would be surrounded by books, and move in intellectual society. ”

“ In referring to it in later years Judge Adams wrote: "Some of the pleasantest remembrances which I have of the school are those connected with older pupils, the young men and women. They not only assisted me in my studies, but their presence and example afforded me inspiration." The association of the young with superior people he considered most important. At Dartmouth his friendship with Professors Haddock and Samuel Brown he valued above his study of Latin and Greek, for they introduced him to ancient classic culture and were themselves notable examples of its benefits. ”

“ The citizens of the Eastern states, during the last century, inherited their environment; those of the Western states chose and formed theirs, as did the emigrants to New England two hundred years ago. ”

“ He was then a member of the law firm of Lovell, Adams & Lovell, Virginia gentlemen. So situated he could see the coming conflict. In one address in 1856, he says: "If the day has come that John C. Fremont or any other man in the country cannot be elected president without that election destroying the government then we have no republican government to-day." ”

“ He helped to organize a Young Men's Christian Association in Dubuque in 1857. The year before he delivered an address on "The Study of the Bible as Aiding People to Constitutional Liberty." For three years he had a Bible class of mature persons, while a member and a trustee of the Congregational church, and for two years in the Universalist church. One year he had evenings devoted to the study of physical science in the Young Men's Christian Association. ”

“ He settled in Dubuque, July, 1854. Many parents here urged his opening an academy, as there were no advantages for youth in the higher branches of education. He taught six months with Miss Mary Mann, sister of Horace Mann. In 1855 he became a member of the law firm of Cooley, Blatchley & Adams, but during this year was also active with Rev. Samuel Newbury in holding Teachers' Institutes, working for the establishment of the public school system in Iowa. ”