John Adams

by David McCullough

he had nonetheless recognized at an early stage that happiness came not from fame and fortune, “and all such things,” but from “an habitual contempt of them,” as he wrote.

He prized the Roman ideal of honor, and in this, as in much else, he and Abigail were in perfect accord.

He read Cicero, Tacitus, and others of his Roman heroes in Latin, and Plato and Thucydides in the original Greek, which he considered the supreme language.

He was a second cousin of Samuel Adams,

The day was Wednesday, January 24, 1776.

For though British troops were bottled up in Boston, the British fleet commanded the harbor and the sea and thus no town by the shore was safe from attack.

The day of the battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775, the thunder of the bombardment had been terrifying, even at the distance of Braintree.

the First Continental Congress in the summer of 1774.

“We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune—in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety.”

“It is to be a school of political prophets I suppose—a nursery of American statesmen,”

August 10, 1774,

Adams’s youngest brother, Elihu, a captain of militia, camped beside the Charles River at Cambridge, was stricken and died, leaving a wife and three children.

Heartsick, searching for an answer to why such evil should “befall a city and a people,” Abigail had pondered whether it could be God’s punishment for the sin of slavery.

AT CAMBRIDGE THE MORNING of the bitterly cold first day of the new year, 1776, George Washington had raised the new Continental flag with thirteen stripes before his headquarters and announced that the new army was now “entirely continental.”

The first fifteen years of his life, he said, “went off like a fairytale.”

A small textbook edition of Cicero’s Orations became one of his earliest, proudest possessions,

“I was as light when I came home, as I had been heavy when I went,” Adams wrote.

in an age when educated men took particular pride in the breadth of their reading, he became one of the most voracious readers of any.

At commencement ceremonies, as one of the first three academically, he argued the affirmative to the question “Is civil government absolutely necessary for men?” It was to be a lifelong theme.

but to become a lawyer required that he be taken into the office of a practicing attorney who would charge a fee,

if conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value.

It was the time of the French and Indian War, when Americans had begun calling themselves Americans rather than colonists.

If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways.

By late summer of 1756 Adams had made up his mind about the future. On August 21, he signed a contract with a young Worcester attorney, James Putnam, to study “under his inspection” for two years.

“the amazing concave of Heaven

But greatest of all, he wrote, was the gift of an inquiring mind.

“I then rejoiced that I was an Englishman, and gloried in the name of Britain,” he would recall to a friend.

IN THE FALL OF 1758,

Adams was admitted to the bar in a ceremony before the Superior Court at Boston on November 6, 1759, and in a matter of weeks, at age twenty-four, he had taken his first case, which he lost.

The case was the talk of the village.

Adams was so shaken, he had to leave the room and take up his Cicero again in order to compose himself.

It was 1760, the year twenty-two-year-old George III was crowned king and Adams turned twenty-five.

“Friendship,” Adams had written to his classmate and cousin, Nathan Webb, “is one of the distinguishing glorys of man. . . . From this I expect to receive the chief happiness of my future life.”

He was lively, pungent, and naturally amiable—so amiable, as Thomas Jefferson would later write, that it was impossible not to warm to him. He was so widely read, he could talk on almost any subject, sail off in almost any direction. What he knew he knew well.

Colonel Quincy, as an officer in the militia and possibly the wealthiest man in Braintree, was its leading citizen, but also someone Adams greatly admired for his polish and eloquence.

Yet, when he met Abigail Smith for the first time later that same summer of 1759, he would not be greatly impressed, not when he compared her to Hannah.

THE HEAVIEST BLOW of his young life befell John Adams on May 25, 1761, when his father, Deacon John, died at age seventy, the victim of epidemic influenza that took a heavy toll in eastern Massachusetts and on older people especially.

October 25, 1764,

THE FIRST NEWS of the Stamp Act reached the American colonies during the last week of May 1765 and produced an immediate uproar, and in Massachusetts especially.

Starting in November, nearly everything written or printed on paper other than private correspondence and books—all pamphlets, newspapers, advertisements, deeds, diplomas, bills, bonds, all legal documents, ship’s papers, even playing cards—were required to carry revenue stamps, some costing as much as ten pounds.

A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law.

Years later Adams would say the Revolution began in the minds of Americans long before any shots were fired or blood shed.

Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments . . .

There must be “no taxation without representation”—a phrase that had been used in Ireland for more than a generation.

he concluded that it was his older, second cousin, Samuel Adams who had “the most thorough understanding of liberty.”

“The year 1765 has been the most remarkable year of my life,”

WITH THE REPEAL of the Stamp Act by Parliament in the spring of 1766,

(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.”)

But above all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books.”

ON THE COLD MOONLIT EVENING of March 5, 1770, the streets of Boston were covered by nearly a foot of snow.