John Adams

by David McCullough

More than this, however, Adams was to remember the King’s graciousness toward him.

To Adams the journey was punishment for sins unknown. The single consolation was that Jefferson was to meet him at Amsterdam.

THE AMERICAN MINISTER, his wife, and two American servants departed London for the last time on Sunday, March 30, 1788, by coach for Portsmouth, where they were to sail on the American ship Lucretia, bound for Boston.

As Abigail fervently wished, she and John were never to see England or Europe again.

Henceforth, she wrote on board in her diary, she would be quite content to learn what more there was to know of the world from the pages of books.

There live, there to die, there to lay my bones, and there to plant one of my sons in the profession of law and the practices of agriculture, like his father.”

John Adams was fifty-two.

he had been away for ten years.

With his success obtaining Dutch loans at the critical hour of the Revolution, he felt, as did others, that he had truly saved his country.

ON THE CRYSTAL-CLEAR MORNING of Tuesday, June 17, 1788,

For John and Abigail, who in their long absence had often felt unappreciated or forgotten, such an outpouring was inexpressibly gratifying, but also difficult to take in.

To Abigail’s great disappointment, the new house, the “old Vassall-Borland place,” once thought an elegant country seat, was found to be in poor repair and distressingly small and cramped after what she had known in Europe.

But another French traveler would be astonished to find a man of such consequence as Adams living in a house so small that, as he wrote, “no Paris lawyer of the lowest rank would choose [it] for a country seat.”

observed that he happened also to be “providentially” unemployed.

The makeup of political leadership in the country had greatly changed in Adams’s absence.

They cannot deprive me of comfort without gratifying my vanity.”

Adams was humiliated by the news, his pride deeply hurt, but of Hamilton’s part, he knew nothing.

Yet the fact remained that at age fifty-three, he, John Adams, the farmer’s son from Braintree, had been chosen to serve as the first Vice President of the United States, the second-highest office in the land.

April 13, 1789,

ONCE, IN THE MIDST of negotiations for the Paris Peace Treaty, John Adams had predicted that thirteen United States would one day “form the greatest empire in the world.”

and it remained a faith no less in 1789, for all the skepticism and derision he had heard expressed abroad, and despite the many obstacles confronting the new nation.

New England shipping and ocean trade were reviving after a slump that followed the war.

“Grand Federal Procession”

From 2 million or so in 1776, the population had grown to nearly 4 million by 1789, and this despite seven years of violent war, the departure of perhaps 100,000 Loyalists, and comparatively little immigration during the war years.

Of the thirteen states, Virginia remained the richest and most populous, and thereby maintained the greatest political influence.

The whole country, concluded one visitor, was “a vast wood.”

With people spread so far and communication so slow and unreliable, what was to hold the nation together? Such republics of the past as Adams had written about in his Defence of the Constitutions were small in scale—so what hope was there for one so inconceivably large?

Two sides had formed, the Federalists, who wanted a strong federal government, and the Anti-Federalists, who held to the sentiment of Thomas Paine, “That government is best which governs least.”

The first line of the Constitution made the point, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

“I find men and manners, principles and opinions, much altered in this country since I left it,” he confided to her. But this only made his dedication to union all the stronger.

He was adamantly opposed to the notion espoused by some that in the ideal republican government public officials should serve without pay—an idea that had been supported by both Franklin and Washington, two of the wealthiest men in the nation.

On the day of his inauguration, Thursday, April 30,

Fourteen years earlier, it had been Adams who called on the Continental Congress to make the tall Virginian commander-in-chief of the army.

He was convinced that the modest compensation and heavy burdens of public service—the disruption of family life, the criticism and insults one was subjected to—must be compensated for, if ever people of ability were to take part.

But there was no popular support for grand titles. Adams was woefully out of step with the country.

On May 14, exactly as the House had done, the Senate voted that Washington’s title be simply and only “The President of the United States.”

Privately, Adams knew what a bad start he had made, and to be the butt of jokes, after all he had been through, was hurtful.

In the meantime, he was desperate for books to be sent—Hume, Johnson, Priestley, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero, “and a Plutarch in French or English.”

Of all that had been going on in the Senate and his part in it, he said only that he had survived largely through prayer.

Writing Madison from Paris, Jefferson dismissed the Senate’s proposed title for Washington as “the most superlatively ridiculous thing” he had ever heard of, and called Adams’s part in such business “proof” that Franklin’s characterization of Adams as “sometimes absolutely mad” was the right one.

the charge that he had been corrupted by his years in Europe,

After Paris and London, however, she found New York extremely dull.

Such was his regard for Hamilton at this point, he arranged for young Charles to clerk in Hamilton’s Wall Street law office until Hamilton commenced his duties as Secretary of the Treasury, when Charles moved on to another firm.

news came of revolution in France.

France, friend and ally in America’s struggle for freedom, was now herself taking up the cause, and nearly everywhere in America the news was greeted with enthusiasm.

France seems travailing in the birth of freedom [wrote William Maclay]. Her throes and pangs of labor are violent. God give her a happy delivery!

In revolutions, he warned, “the most fiery spirits and flighty geniuses frequently obtained more influence than men of sense and judgment;

France was “in great danger.”

“In one summer they have done their business . . . they have completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufacturers.”

With the death of Franklin on April 17, Philadelphia staged the greatest public homage that had ever been given a deceased American.