John Adams

by David McCullough

Daughter! Get you an honest man for a husband, and keep him honest. No matter whether he is rich, provided he be independent. Regard the honor and moral character of the man more than all other circumstances. Think of no other greatness but that of the soul, no other riches but those of the heart. An honest, sensible, humane man, above all the littleness of vanity and extravagances of imagination, laboring to do good rather than be rich, to be useful rather than make a show, living in modest simplicity clearly within his means and free from debts and obligations, is really the most respectable man in society, makes himself and all about him most happy.

If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world, and obtaining a knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book but it has been supplied to you, that your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have been a blockhead.

He believed, with all his heart, as he had written to Jefferson, that no effort in favor of virtue was lost.

But how does one properly acknowledge the pleasure one finds in such books? Or in the works of those front-rank historians who have written with such extraordinary insight on the nation’s founding time—Edmund Morgan, Gordon Wood, Bernard Bailyn, Pauline Maier, Richard Ketchum, David Hackett Fischer, to name only a few? Or how to describe adequately the delight of immersing oneself, as I have tried to do, in the writing of the eighteenth century—to read again after long years, or for the first time, the writers John Adams read and loved—Swift, Pope, Defoe, Addison, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, Johnson, and Voltaire?