John Adams

by David McCullough

Only once before their marriage, when the diary was still active, did Adams dare mention her in its pages, and then almost in code: Di was a constant feast. Tender, feeling, sensible, friendly. A friend. Not an imprudent, not an indelicate, not a disagreeable word of action. Prudent, soft, sensible, obliging, active.

Di for Diana

Open in their affections for one another, she and John were also open in their criticisms. “Candor is my characteristic,” he told her, as though she might not have noticed. He thought she could improve her singing voice. He faulted her for her “parrot-toed” way of walking and for sitting cross-legged. She told him he was too severe in his judgments of people and that to others often appeared haughty. Besides, she chided him, “a gentleman has no business to concern himself about the legs of a lady.”

But you who have always softened and warmed my heart, shall restore my benevolence as well as my health and tranquility of mind. You shall polish and refine my sentiments of life and manners, banish all the unsocial and ill natured particles in my composition, and form me to that happy temper that can reconcile a quick discernment with a perfect candor.

John to Abigail

HIS MARRIAGE to Abigail Smith was the most important decision of John Adams’s life, as would become apparent with time. She was in all respects his equal and the part she was to play would be greater than he could possibly have imagined, for all his love for her and what appreciation he already had of her beneficial, steadying influence.

She was and would remain a thoroughgoing New England woman who rose at five in the morning and was seldom idle. She did everything that needed doing. All her life she would do her own sewing, baking, feed her own ducks and chickens, churn her own butter (both because that was what was expected, and because she knew her butter to be superior).

For Adams, life had been made infinitely fuller. All the ties he felt to the old farm were stronger now with Abigail in partnership. She was the ballast he had wanted, the vital center of a new and better life. The time he spent away from home, riding the court circuit, apart from her and the “little ones,” became increasingly difficult. “God preserve you and all our family,” he would write.

“I am . . . under all obligations of interest and ambition, as well as honor, gratitude and duty, to exert the utmost of abilities in this important cause,” he wrote, and with characteristic honesty he had not left ambition out.

“Be it remembered,” he wrote in his Dissertation, “that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we have not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.

But besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

The true source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think. . . . Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. . . . Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments . . . that many of our rights are inherent and essential, agreed on as maxims and established as preliminaries, even before Parliament existed. . . .

Let us recollect it was liberty, the hope of liberty, for themselves and us and ours, which conquered all discouragements, dangers, and trials.

A lifetime later, Adams would vividly describe Otis as he had been in his surpassing moment, in the winter of 1761, in argument against writs of assistance, search warrants that permitted customs officers to enter and search any premises whenever they wished. Before the bench in the second-floor Council Chamber of the Province House in Boston, Otis had declared such writs—which were perfectly valid in English law and commonly issued in England—null and void because

He handled every kind of case—land transfers, trespass, admiralty, marine insurance, murder, adultery, rape, bastardy, buggery, assault and battery, tarring and feathering. He defended, not always successfully, poor debtors, horse thieves, and smugglers. He saw every side of life, learned to see things as they were, and was considered, as Jonathan Sewall would write, as “honest [a] lawyer as ever broke bread.”

“My good man is so very fat that I am lean as a rail,” Abigail bemoaned to her sister Mary.

He acquired more and more books, books being an acknowledged extravagance he could seldom curb. (With one London bookseller he had placed a standing order for “every book and pamphlet, of reputation, upon the subjects of law and government as soon as it comes out.”) “I want to see my wife and children every day,” he would write while away on the court circuit. “I want to see my grass and blossoms and corn. . . . But above all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books.”

he could also admit now, if obliquely, to seeing himself as a figure of some larger importance. After noting in one entry that his horse had overfed on grass and water, Adams speculated wryly, “My biographer wi...

The following day thirty-four-year-old John Adams was asked to defend the soldiers and their captain, when they came to trial. No one else would take the case, he was informed. Hesitating no more than he had over Jonathan Sewall’s offer of royal appointment, Adams accepted, firm in the belief, as he said, that no man in a free country should be denied the right to counsel and a fair trial, and convinced, on principle, that the case was of utmost importance.

Criticism of almost any kind was nearly always painful for Adams, but public scorn was painful in the extreme. “The only way to compose myself and collect my thoughts,” he wrote in his diary, “is to set down at my table, place my diary before me, and take my pen into my hand. This apparatus takes off my attention from other objects. Pen, ink, and paper and a sitting posture are great helps to attention and thinking.”

Close study of the facts had convinced Adams of the innocence of the soldiers. The tragedy was not brought on by the soldiers, but by the mob, and the mob, it must be understood, was the inevitable result of the flawed policy of quartering troops in a city on the pretext of keeping the peace:

Soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one. They are wretched conservators of the peace.

He could speak extemporaneously and, if need be, almost without limit. Once, to give a client time to retrieve a necessary record, Adams spoke for five hours, through which the court and jury sat with perfect patience. At the end he was roundly applauded because, as he related the story, he had spoken “in favor of justice.”

Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable. . . . There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

On an evening with the Cranches, when a visiting Englishman began extolling the English sense of justice, Adams exploded, taking everyone by surprise, and Adams as much as any. “I cannot but reflect upon myself with the severity of these rash, inexperienced, boyish, raw and awkward expressions,” he wrote afterward. “A man who has not better government of his tongue, no more command of his temper, is unfit for everything but children’s play and the company of boys.” There was no more justice in Britain than in hell, he had told the Englishman.

“We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial,” he told Abigail. Shut off from the sea, Boston was doomed. It must suffer martyrdom and expire in a noble cause. For himself, he saw “no prospect of any business in my way this whole summer. I don’t receive a shilling a week.” Yet she must not assume he was “in the dumps.” Quite the contrary: he felt better than he had in years.

In his diary Adams had grieved that his best friend in the world had become his implacable enemy. “God forgive him for the part he has acted,” Adams had written, adding, “It is not impossible that he may make the same prayer for me.”

As long as they lived, neither man would forget the moment. Adams told Sewall he knew Great Britain was “determined on her system,” but “that very determination, determined me on mine.” The die was cast, Adams said. “Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, [I am] with my country . . . You may depend upon it.”

America, Adams warned, could face subjugation of the kind inflicted on Ireland. Unless America took action, and at once, Adams wrote, they faced the prospect of living like the Irish on potatoes and water.

Then, making a slight but definite dash mark with her pen before continuing, as if to signify her own break from the past, she said, “Let us separate, they are unworthy to be our brethren.”

Indifference was a quality Adams found difficult to tolerate.

This assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every man in it is a great man—an orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism, and his political abilities. The consequence of this is that business is drawn and spun out to immeasurable length.

I believe if it was moved and seconded that we should come to a resolution that three and two make five, we should be entertained with logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics, and mathematics concerning the subject for two whole days, and then we should pass the resolution unanimously in the affirmative.

“Politics are a labyrinth without a clue,” he wrote, but he had come to understand the makeup of Congress. He knew the delegates now as he had not before, and they had come to know him. That he was repeatedly chosen for the most important committees was a measure of his influence and of the respect others had for his integrity, his intellect, and exceptional capacity for hard work.

Since his first involvement in the “Cause of America,” he had known the crisis would never be settled peaceably and this, he told her in confidence, had been a source of much “disquietude.” The thought that we might be driven to the sad necessity of breaking our connection with G[reat] B[ritain], exclusive of the carnage and destruction which it was easy to see must attend the separation, always gave me a great deal of grief.

The rich, the poor, the high professor and the prophane, seem all to be infected with this grievous disorder, so that the love of our neighbor seems to be quite banished, the love of self and opinions so far prevails. . . . The [Tory] enemies of our present struggle . . . are grown even scurrilous to individuals, and treat all characters who differ from them with the most opprobrious language.

Christopher Marshall

Rutledge, the youngest member, was dandified, twenty-six years old, and overflowing with self-confidence. At first, Adams judged him “smart” if not “deep,” but the more Rutledge talked, the more he expressed disagreement with Adams, the more scathing Adams’s assessment became, to the point where, in his diary, he appeared nearly to run out of words. “Young Ned Rutledge is a perfect Bob o’ Lincoln, a swallow, a sparrow, a peacock, excessively vain, excessively weak, and excessively variable and unsteady—jejune, inane, and puerile.”

Adams had come to believe that Dickinson’s real struggle was with his mother and his wife, both devout Quakers who bedeviled him with their pacifist views. “If I had such a mother and such a wife,” Adams would reflect years later, recalling Dickinson’s predicament, “I believe I should have shot myself.”

From the day he saw with his own eyes what the British had done at Lexington and Concord, Adams failed to understand how anyone could have any misconception or naïve hope about what to expect from the British.

Though infuriated by Dickinson’s “magisterial” tone, Adams replied calmly that there were many accommodations he would make in the cause of harmony and unanimity. He would not, however, be threatened. Venting his “fire” in a private letter, Adams portrayed Dickinson as a “piddling genius” who lent a “silly cast” to deliberations.

Like the drake snl skit

Friends in Massachusetts reported to Adams that because of Common Sense the clamor for a declaration of independence was never greater. “This is the time . . . we have never had such a favorable moment,” wrote one.

Power of writing

Almost alone among the members of Congress, he saw no quick victory, but a long, painful struggle. The war, he warned prophetically in a speech on February 22, could last ten years.

The art of persuasion, he held, depended mainly on a marshaling of facts, clarity, conviction, and the ability to think on one’s feet. True eloquence consisted of truth and “rapid reason.” As a British spy was later to write astutely of Adams, he also had a particular gift for seeing “large subjects largely.”

“The middle way is no way at all,” he wrote to General Horatio Gates. “If we finally fail in this great and glorious contest, it will be by bewildering ourselves in groping for the middle way.”

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.

Abigail Adams

“It has been the will of Heaven,” the essay began, “that we should be thrown into existence at a period when the greatest philosophers and lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live. . . . a period when a coincidence of circumstances without example has afforded to thirteen colonies at once an opportunity of beginning government anew from the foundation and building as they choose.

Much as he foresaw the hard truth about the war to be waged, Adams had the clearest idea of anyone in Congress of what independence would actually entail, the great difficulties and risks, no less than the opportunities.

The happiness of the people was the purpose of government, he wrote, and therefore that form of government was best which produced the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number. And since all “sober inquirers after truth” agreed that happiness derived from virtue, that form of government with virtue as its foundation was more likely than any other to promote the general happiness.

There should be a representative assembly, “an exact portrait in miniature of the people at large,” but it must not have the whole legislative power, for the reason that like an individual with unchecked power, it could be subject to “fits of humor, transports of passion, partialities of prejudice.” A single assembly could “grow avaricious . . . exempt itself from burdens . . . become ambitious and after some time vote itself perpetual.” Balance would come from the creation of a second, smaller legislative body, a “distinct assembly” of perhaps twenty or thirty, chosen by the larger legislature. This “Council,” as Adams called it, would be given “free and independent judgment upon all acts of legislation that it may be able to check and correct the errors of the others.”

Essential to the stability of government and to an “able and impartial administration of justice,” Adams stressed, was separation of judicial power from both the legislative and executive. There must be an independent judiciary. “Men of experience on the laws, of exemplary morals, invincible patience, unruffled calmness and indefatigable application” should be “subservient to none” and appointed for life.

“Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.”

She was particularly curious about the Virginians, wondering if, as slaveholders, they had the necessary commitment to the cause of freedom. “I have,” she wrote, “sometimes been ready to think that the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creature of theirs.”