John Adams

by David McCullough

Dismounted, he stood five feet seven or eight inches tall—about “middle size” in that day—and

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.”

“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.

“Reputation,” wrote Adams, “ought to be the perpetual subject of my thoughts, and aim of my behavior.”

“Why have I not genius to start some new thought?” he asked at another point in his diary. “Some thing that will surprise the world?” 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?

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 love and vanity be extinguished and the great passions of ambition, patriotism, break out and burn,” he wrote.

Besides, she chided him, “a gentleman has no business to concern himself about the legs of a lady.”

Soon afterward Adams drafted what became known as the Braintree Instructions—instructions from the freeholders of the town to their delegate to the General Court, the legislative body of Massachusetts—which, when printed in October in the Gazette, “rang” through the colony. “We have always understood it to be a grand and fundamental principle of the [English] constitution that no freeman should be subject to any tax to which he has not given his own consent.” There must be “no taxation without representation”—a phrase that had been used in Ireland for more than a generation.

The crisis came in March of 1770, a year already shadowed for John and Abigail by the loss of a child. A baby girl, Susanna, born since the move to Boston and named for John’s mother, had died in February at a little more than a year old. Adams was so upset by the loss that he could not speak of it for years.

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.”

No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men.

Fifty years earlier, when young Benjamin Franklin arrived from Boston with a single “Dutch” (German) dollar in his pocket, Philadelphia had been a town of 10,000 people. By 1776 its population was approaching 30,000. Larger than New York, nearly twice the size of Boston, it was growing faster than either.

Were not the likes of Edmund Burke speaking out in Parliament for American rights, it was said.

Because of his Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, an early pamphlet on the evils of British policy, Dickinson had become a hero. He was “the Farmer,” his name spoken everywhere, though he was hardly the plain man of the soil many imagined.

“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.”

“Powder and artillery are the most efficacious, sure and infallible conciliatory measures we can adopt,” Adams wrote privately.

Such was the support for Dickinson and the Olive Branch Petition that Adams and his colleagues were left no choice but to acquiesce. The petition was agreed to—only to be summarily dismissed by George III, who refused even to look at it and proclaimed the colonies in a state of rebellion.

The more he thought about it, the less he admired Common Sense. The writer, he told Abigail, “has a better hand at pulling down than building.”

Adams’s Thoughts on Government, as it would be known, was first set forth in a letter to a fellow congressman, William Hooper, who, before returning home to help write a new constitution for North Carolina, had asked Adams for a “sketch” of his views.

“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.

A government with a single legislative body would never do. 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.” The executive, the governor, should, Adams thought, be chosen by the two houses of the legislature, and for not more than a year at a time. Executive power would include the veto and the appointment of all judges and justices, as well as militia officers, thus making the executive the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. 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 ind...

“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.”

wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me—[to] fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”

—and by the way in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands.

“Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of yours as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as vassals of your sex. Regard us then as being placed by providence under your protection and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.

But I fear that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence by noise not sense.

Jefferson was devoted to the ideal of improving mankind but had comparatively little interest in people in particular. Adams was not inclined to believe mankind improvable, but was certain it was important that human nature be understood.

Rarely would he object to a point or disagree with anyone to his face.

A departure from Jefferson’s prevailing silence in Congress came late that summer when he stood in opposition to a proposal for a fast day, and in so doing appeared to cast aspersions on Christianity, to which Adams reacted sharply. Benjamin Rush reminded Adams of the incident in a letter written years later. You rose and defended the motion, and in reply to Mr. Jefferson’s objections to Christianity you said you were sorry to hear such sentiments from a gentleman whom you so highly respected and with whom you agreed upon so many subjects, and that it was the only instance you had ever known of a man of sound sense and real genius that was an enemy to Christianity. You suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the chair next to you.

To Jefferson, Adams was “not graceful nor elegant, nor remarkably fluent,” but spoke “with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.” Recalling the moment long afterward, Adams would say he had been carried out of himself, “ ‘carried out in spirit,’ as enthusiastic preachers sometimes express themselves.” To Richard Stockton, one of the new delegates from New Jersey, Adams was “the Atlas” of the hour, “the man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independency. . . . He it was who sustained the debate, and by the force of his reasoning demonstrated not only the justice, but the expediency of the measure.”

And it was the King, “the Christian King of Great Britain,” Jefferson had emphasized, who was responsible for the horrors of the slave trade. As emphatic a passage as any, this on the slave trade was to have been the ringing climax of all the charges. Now it was removed in its entirety because, said Jefferson later, South Carolina and Georgia objected. Some northern delegates, too, were a “little tender” on the subject, “for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers. . . .”

When Samuel Adams and his wife were presented with a black slave girl as a gift in 1765, they had immediately set her free.

In 1773, Rush had published a pamphlet attacking slavery, and in 1774, the year the First Congress convened, he had helped organize the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. He had appealed to the clergy to recognize slavery as a sin, and urged all legislators, “ye advocates for American liberty,” to work for the liberty of blacks as well. The eyes of the world were watching, Rush charged. Yet he himself owned a slave.

Adams and Rush were of the same mind on slavery. Adams was utterly opposed to slavery and the slave trade and, like Rush, favored a gradual emancipation of all slaves.

In New York the next day, the Declaration was read aloud to Washington’s assembled troops, and it was that night, at the foot of Broadway, that a roaring crowd pulled down the larger-than-life equestrian statue of George III.

Strongly opposed to the existing policy of short-term enlistments, Adams declared himself adamantly in favor of a regular army.

What expressions of worry or affection or frustration, what details of his own health he confided in the privacy of his letters to Martha Jefferson, or she to him, were not to be known, as he would one day, for reasons he never expressed, burn all their correspondence.

So the two eminent bedfellows lay side-by-side in the dark, the window open, Franklin expounding, as Adams remembered, “upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep.”

To this Adams immediately responded: “Your Lordship may consider me in what light you please,” Adams said, “and indeed, I should be willing to consider myself, for a few moments, in any character which would be agreeable to your Lordship, except that of a British subject.”

Years afterward Adams would better understand the gloomy look on Howe’s face, when he learned that before leaving London, Howe had been given a list of those American rebels who were to be granted pardons. John Adams was not on the list. He was to hang.

Later, Rush would say of Adams, “Every member of Congress in 1776 acknowledged him to be the first man in the House.” Jefferson was to remember Adams as “our colossus on the floor.”

He did not believe all men were created equal, except in the eyes of God, but that all men, for all their many obvious differences, were born to equal rights.

The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world.

“It is interest alone which does it,” he had once told Congress, “and it is interest alone which can be trusted.”

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

“The charge of vanity is the last resort of little wits and mercenary quacks, the vainest men alive, against me and measures that they can find no other objection to. . . . I have long since learned that a man may give offense and yet succeed.”

“It is impossible to exceed this,” Adams continued in an effusive account in his diary that he was to regret having written. Somehow, perhaps by his own error, these pages from the diary, or “Peace Journal,” as he called it, would be included with a report that went off to Philadelphia and were later read aloud in Congress to mock Adams for his abject vanity.

Then, just as agreement seemed near, Henry Strachey proposed to amend the line specifying the American “right” of fishing to read “liberty” of fishing, to which young Fitzherbert declared the word “right” to be “an obnoxious expression.” The moment was one made for Adams. Rising from his chair, smoldering with indignation, he addressed the British: Gentlemen, is there or can there be a clearer right? In former treaties, that of Utrecht and that of Paris, France and England have claimed the right and used the word. When God Almighty made the Banks of Newfoundland at 300 leagues distant from the people of America and at 600 leagues distance from those of France and England, did he not give as food a right to the former as to the latter. If Heaven in the Creation have a right, it is ours at least as much as yours. If occupation, use, and possession have a right, we have it as clearly as you. If war and blood and treasure give a right, ours is as good as yours. We have been constantly fighting in Canada, Cape Breton, and Nova Scotia for the defense of the fishery, and have expanded beyond all proportion more than you. If then the right cannot be denied, why then should it not be acknowledged? And put out of dispute?

In effect, the Americans had signed a separate peace with the British. They had acted in direct violation of both the French-American alliance and their specific instructions from Congress to abide by the advice of the French foreign minister. To Adams there was no conflict in what they had done. The decision to break with the orders from Congress, and thus break faith with the French, had been clear-cut, the only honorable course. Congress had left them no choice. Congress had “prostituted” its own honor by surrendering its sovereignty to the French Foreign Minister. “It is glory to have broken such infamous orders,” Adams wrote in his diary. “Infamous I say, for so they will be to all posterity.”