John Adams

by David McCullough

IN LATE 1820, at age eighty-five, Adams found himself chosen as a delegate to a state convention called to revise the Massachusetts constitution that he had drafted some forty years before. “The town of Quincy has been pleased to elect me a member of the Convention—and wonderful to relate—the election is said to be unanimous. . . . I am sufficiently advanced in my dotage to have accepted the choice,” he reported to Louisa Catherine. “I feel not much like a maker or mender of constitutions, in my present state of imbecility. . . . But I presume we shall not be obliged to carry windmills by assault.” But in what was to be his last public effort, in a speech considered “very remarkable” for its energy and conviction, Adams boldly offered an amendment guaranteeing complete religious freedom in the commonwealth. As he believed that all were equal before God, so he believed that all should be free to worship God as they pleased. In particular, he wanted religious freedom for Jews,