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The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people. ~John Adams
I have heard of one Mr. Adams but who is the other? ~King George III
He was John Adams of Braintree and he loved to talk. He was a known talker. There were some, even among his admirers, who wished he talked less. He himself wished he talked less, and he had particular regard for those, like General Washington, who somehow managed great reserve under almost any circumstance.
And to no one was he more devoted than to his wife, Abigail. She was his “Dearest Friend,” as he addressed her in letters—his “best, dearest, worthiest, wisest friend in the world”—while to her he was “the tenderest of husbands,” her “good man.”
“You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket,” he would tell his son Johnny.
His desire for “distinction” was too great. Patriotism burned in him like a blue flame. “I have a zeal at my heart for my country and her friends which I cannot smother or conceal,” he told Abigail, warning that it could mean privation and unhappiness for his family unless regulated by cooler judgment than his own.
“He saw the whole of a subject at a glance, and . . . was equally fearless of men and of the consequences of a bold assertion of his opinion. . . . He was a stranger to dissimulation.”
Benjamin rush
Her determination that he play his part was quite as strong as his own. They were of one and the same spirit.
“You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator,” she wrote at her kitchen table. “We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.”
“I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate,” he wrote in the seclusion of his diary. “We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune—in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety.”
pondering
She had begun signing herself “Portia,” after the long-suffering, virtuous wife of the Roman statesman Brutus. If her “dearest friend” was to play the part of a Roman hero, so would she.
But such waves of self-pity came and went, as Abigail knew, and when in need of sympathy, it was to her alone that he would appeal.
He was not a man to back down or give up, not one to do anything other than what he saw to be his duty. What in another time and society might be taken as platitudes about public service were to both John and Abigail Adams a lifelong creed.
In truth, he was extremely proud of his descent from “a line of virtuous, independent New England farmers.” That virtue and independence were among the highest of mortal attainments, John Adams never doubted. The New England farmer was his own man who owned his own land, a freeholder, and thus the equal of anyone.
“Let frugality and industry be our virtues,” John Adams advised Abigail concerning the raising of their own children. “Fire them with ambition to be useful,” he wrote, echoing what had been learned at home.
Taught to read at home, the boy went first and happily to a dame school—lessons for a handful of children in the kitchen of a neighbor, with heavy reliance on The New England Primer. (“He who ne’er learns his ABC, forever will a blockhead be.”)
But later at the tiny local schoolhouse, subjected to a lackluster “churl” of a teacher who paid him no attention, he lost all interest. He cared not for books or study, and saw no sense in talk of college. He wished only to be a farmer, he informed his father.
At night at home, he said, “Well, John, are you satisfied with being a farmer?” Though the labor had been very hard and very muddy, I answered, “I like it very well, sir.” “Aya, but I don’t like it so well: so you will go back to school today.” I went but was not so happy as among the creek thatch.
In little more than a year, at age fifteen, he was pronounced “fitted for college,” which meant Harvard, it being the only choice.
THE HARVARD OF JOHN ADAMS’S undergraduate days was an institution of four red-brick buildings, a small chapel, a faculty of seven, and an enrollment of approximately one hundred scholars.
To his surprise, he also discovered a love of study and books such as he had never imagined. “I read forever,” he would remember happily, and as years passed, in an age when educated men took particular pride in the breadth of their reading, he became one of the most voracious readers of any.
Having discovered books at Harvard, he was seldom ever to be without one for the rest of his days.
At commencement ceremonies, as one of the first three academically, he argued the affirmative to the question “Is civil government absolutely necessary for men?” It was to be a lifelong theme.
Upon common theaters, indeed, the applause of the audience is of more importance to the actors than their own approbation. But upon the stage of life, while conscience claps, let the world hiss! On the contrary if conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value.
England immediately upon this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough to trace) in power and magnificence, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe. Soon after the Reformation a few people came over into the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me.
The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us. Divide et impera. Keep us in distinct colonies, and then, some great men in each colony, desiring the monarchy of the whole, they will destroy each others’ influence and keep the country in equilibrio. Be not surprised that I am turned politician. The whole town is immersed in politics.
Increasingly, however, the subject uppermost in mind was himself, as waves of loneliness, feelings of abject discontent over his circumstances, dissatisfaction with his own nature, seemed at times nearly to overwhelm him. Something of the spirit of the old Puritan diarists took hold. By writing only to himself, for himself, by dutifully reckoning day by day his moral assets and liabilities, and particularly the liabilities, he could thus improve himself.
On July 21, 1756, he wrote: I am resolved to rise with the sun and to study Scriptures on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin author the other three mornings. Noons and nights I intend to read English authors. . . . I will rouse up my mind and fix my attention. I will stand collected within myself and think upon what I read and what I see. I will strive with all my soul to be something more than persons who have had less advantages than myself.
But the next morning he slept until seven and a one-line entry the following week read, “A very rainy day. Dreamed away the time.”
Hits hard
He was twenty years old. “I have no books, no time, no friends. I must therefore be contented to live and die an ignorant, obscure fellow.”
“I can as easily still the fierce tempests or stop the rapid thunderbolt, as command the motions and operations of my own mind,” he lamented. Actual thunderstorms left him feeling nervous and unstrung.
!
Vanity, he saw, was his chief failing. “Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly,” he wrote, vowing to reform himself. By “vanity” he did not mean he had an excessive pride in appearance. Adams was never one to spend much time in front of a mirror. Rather, in the eighteenth-century use of the word, he was berating himself for being overly proud, conceited.
he read law at night moving fast (too fast, he later thought) through Wood’s four-volume Institute of the Laws of England, Hawkins’s Abridgment of Coke’s Institutes, Salkeld’s hefty Reports, Coke’s Entries, and Hawkins’s massive two-volume Pleas of the Crown in a single volume that weighed fully eight pounds. “Can you imagine any drier reading?” he would one day write to Benjamin Rush, heavily underscoring the question.
For the first time, he was on his own with his studies, and he bent to them with the spirit of independence and intense determination that were to characterize much of his whole approach to life. In his diary he wrote of chopping wood and translating Justinian, with equal resolution.
“This small volume will take me a fortnight, but I will be master of it.”
But, as he explained to a friend in Worcester, the appeal of Boston was threefold. I had the pleasure to sit and hear the greatest lawyers, orators, in short the greatest men in America, haranguing at the bar, and on the bench. I had the pleasure of spending my evenings with my Harvard friends in the joys of serene, sedate conversation, and perhaps it is worth my while to add, I had the pleasure of seeing a great many and of feeling some very [pretty] girls.
He must observe more closely the effects of reason and rage, just as he must never again undertake a case without command of the details. “Let me never undertake to draw a writ without sufficient time to examine and digest in my mind all the doubts, queries, objections that may arise,” he wrote. And he never did. The painful lesson had been learned.
“Reputation,” wrote Adams, “ought to be the perpetual subject of my thoughts, and aim of my behavior.”
“I never shall shine, ’til some animating occasion calls forth all my powers.” It was 1760, the year twenty-two-year-old George III was crowned king and Adams turned twenty-five.
Why could he not bring order to his life? Why could he not clear his table of its clutter of books and papers and concentrate on just one book, one subject? Why did imagination so often intervene? Why did thoughts of girls keep intruding?
There was little he enjoyed more than an evening of spontaneous “chatter,” of stories by candlelight in congenial surroundings, of political and philosophic discourse, “intimate, unreserved conversation,” as he put it. And flirting, “gallanting,” with the girls.
He berated himself for being too shy. “I should look bold, speak with more spirit.” In the presence of women—those he wished to impress above all—he was too susceptible to the least sign of approval. “Good treatment makes me think I am admired, beloved. . . . So I dismiss my guard and grow weak, silly, vain, conceited, ostentatious.”
(Nothing so helped one gain command of the language, Quincy advised the young man, as the frequent reading and imitation of Swift and Pope.)
Sensing he was the favorite, Adams was soon devoting every possible hour to her, and when not, dreaming of her. Nothing like this had happened to him before. His pleasure and distress were extreme, as he confided to his friend and rival Cranch: If I look upon a law book my eyes it is true are on the book, but imagination is at a tea table seeing that hair, those eyes, that shape, that familiar friendly look. . . . I go to bed and ruminate half the night, then fall asleep and dream the same enchanting scenes.
“Let no trifling diversion or amusement or company decoy you from your books,” he lectured himself in his diary, “i.e., let no girl, no gun, no cards, no flutes, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness decoy you from your books.” Besides, he had moments of doubt when he thought Hannah less than sincere. “Her face and heart have no correspondence,” he wrote.
Only by a turn of fate had he been delivered from “dangerous shackles.” “Let love and vanity be extinguished and the great passions of ambition, patriotism, break out and burn,” he wrote.
On the evening he invited Adams to go along with him to meet Abigail, the middle sister, it was for Adams anything but love at first sight. In contrast to his loving, tender Hannah, these Smith sisters were, he wrote, neither “fond, nor frank, nor candid.”
OF THE COURTSHIP Adams had said not a word in his diary. Indeed, for the entire year of 1764 there were no diary entries, a sure sign of how preoccupied he was.
She was his Diana, after the Roman goddess of the moon. He was her Lysander, the Spartan hero.
Where others might see a stout, bluff little man, she saw a giant of great heart, and so it was ever to be.
