John Adams

by David McCullough

“Facts are stubborn things,”

Boston Tea Party in December 1773,

reprisal, the British closed the port of Boston,

Boston Tea Party and reprisal

summarily dismissed by George III, who refused even to look at it and proclaimed the colonies in a state of rebellion.

Attempts to avoid war

Adams who drafted the first set of rules and regulations for the new navy,

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands.

Abigail

thirty-three Thomas Jefferson was the youngest of the Virginia delegates.

Jefferson had been raised and educated as the perfect landed gentleman of Virginia. He knew no other way. His earliest childhood memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave and in countless ways he had been carried ever since by slaves, though they were never called that, but rather “servants” or “laborers.”

Much detail contrasting Jefferson from Adams

John Adams, by contrast, had neither debts nor slaves and all his life abhorred the idea of either.

As would be said, each felt the value of the other in the common task.

July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence.

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”

Slavery a source of conflict

nearly 2,500,000 people in 1776, approximately one in five were slaves,

There was no member of the Virginia delegation who did not own slaves, and of all members of Congress at least a third owned or had owned slaves. The total of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves in 1776, as near as can be determined from his personal records, was about 200, which was also the approximate number owned by George Washington.

He never owned a slave as a matter of principle, nor hired the slaves of others to work on his farm, as was sometimes done in New England. He was to declare unequivocally in later years that “Negro slavery is an evil of colossal magnitude,” and like Abigail, he felt this at the time.

Adams never owned a slave

was Jefferson who had written them for all time: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

smallpox inoculation

to safeguard the territorial integrity of the new United States,

France was needed militarily, but feared and distrusted

Adams made the Declaration of Independence happen when it did. Had it come later, the course of events could have gone very differently.

’Tis a constant remembrancer of an absent friend, and excites sensations of tenderness which are better felt than expressed.”

Abigail on her pregnancy

appeared to be a very fine babe,

On November 27, Congress named Adams a commissioner to work with Franklin and Arthur Lee in negotiating a French alliance.

1777

She would remain at home, but ten-year-old Johnny was to go with his father, as the boy ardently wished.

On his mission to France

Tuesday, February 17, 1778,

Departure by sea to France

Father and son both worked on their French,

twenty-four-year-old Louis XVI, who was indeed kindhearted and robust, if painfully nearsighted and awkward, and who had it in his power to determine the fate of the United States of America.

In the year and a half of her husband’s absence,

In France

The scarcities, inflation, taxes, and profiteering, the incessant worries and enmities of war, were all ever-present.

Mid 1779 on return

picked Adams to draw up the state’s constitution.

establishment of an independent judiciary, with judges of the Supreme Court appointed, not elected, and for life (“as long as they behave themselves well”), that Adams made one of his greatest contributions not only to Massachusetts but to the country, as time would tell.

Supreme Court

declaration of Adams’s faith in education as the bulwark of the good society,

“duty” of government not only to provide education but to “cherish” the interests of literature and science—indeed,

he had written one of the great, enduring documents of the American Revolution. The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world.

His purpose, first, last, and always, was to weaken and humble Britain and, at the same time, expand French trade in America.

Motive of Vergennes

General Benedict Arnold had conspired to commit treason, to turn over the fortress at West Point to the British,

1780

All professions of Dutch friendship for America were but “little adulations to procure a share of our trade,”

Esp when war was going badly

HE HAD BEEN AWAY from home now for more than a year,

Quite possibly Adams had fallen victim to malaria,

In Holland

subsequent depression or “melancholia” is also characteristic of the disease,

AT THE END OF NOVEMBER came sensational news. On Friday, October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, Virginia, by Chesapeake Bay, the British General Cornwallis had surrendered his army to a combined American and French force under Washington and Rochambeau.

Turn in the war

is General Washington at Yorktown who did the substance of the work, the form only belongs to me.”

May, Adams took up residence and put out a flag at the United States House, as he called it, the first American embassy anywhere in the world.

Finally recognized

don’t mean by this that I have exerted any abilities here, or any action, that are not very common, but I don’t believe that any other man in the world would have had the patience and perseverance

To wife

“Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.”

late the following summer that the final, or definitive, Treaty of Paris was signed,

we were indeed a very happy family once more met together after a separation of four years.”

If only the cleanliness of the British could be joined with the civility of the French,

Abigail

Benedict Arnold led a sudden, daring raid on Richmond, and with the advance of spring, the British under Cornwallis swept through the state almost at will, scattering the legislature to the hills

1781 Virginia

Jefferson learned that he was indeed to replace Franklin as minister to France,

Indeed, in England as in Europe it was generally thought that the experiment in democracy across the water had little chance of success.