John Adams

by David McCullough

For Adams the structure of government was a subject of passionate interest that raised fundamental questions about the realities of human nature, political power, and the good society. It was a concern that for years had propelled much of his reading and the exchange of ideas with those whose judgment he most respected, including Abigail, who had written to him the year before, “I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or few is ever grasping. . . . The great fish swallow up the small [she had continued] and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which human nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.

“In general, our generals were outgeneralled,” Adams would conclude.

Of kings and presidents, Adams said he saw little to distinguish them from other men. “If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle.”

The horror of Nabby’s ordeal brought a marked change in Adams. The old shows of temper were not to be seen again. He became more mellow, more accepting of life, and forgiving. He had felt during Nabby’s agony, he said, as if he were living in the Book of Job.

“DEATH IS SWEEPING his scythe all around us, cutting down our old friends and brandishing it over us,” Adams wrote a year later, in the summer of 1816.

He had read Cicero’s essay on growing old gracefully, De Senectute, for seventy years, to the point of nearly knowing it by heart, but never had it given such joy as on his most recent reading, he told another correspondent.