John Adams

by David McCullough

A decision that could clear the way to independence had at last arrived.

At thirty-three Thomas Jefferson was the youngest of the Virginia delegates. He had not attended the First Congress, when Washington and Patrick Henry had been part of the delegation, and the Virginians with their liveried servants and splendid horses had ridden into the city like princelings.

Jefferson was a superb horseman, beautiful to see.

his interest in and knowledge of science he far exceeded Adams.

Unlike Adams, who, except for books, indulged himself in no expenditures beyond what were necessary, Jefferson was continually in and out of Philadelphia shops, buying whatever struck his fancy.

It was Jefferson’s graciousness that was so appealing. He was never blunt or assertive as Adams could be, but subtle, serene by all appearances, always polite, soft-spoken, and diplomatic, if somewhat remote.

Years later, still puzzling over Jefferson’s passivity at Philadelphia, Adams would claim that “during the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.”

Sensitive to Adams’s seniority and his importance in Congress—and possibly to Adams’s vanity—Jefferson was consistently deferential to him. Clearly, too, for all their differences, they had much in common, not the least of which was their love of words, of books, and serious scholarship.

When Jefferson spoke of “my country,” he usually meant Virginia, as Adams referred to Massachusetts as “my country.” The one was as proudly a Virginian as the other a Yankee.

As Adams had never been farther south than Philadelphia, Jefferson had been no farther north than New York.

to create a palatial country seat of his own design in the manner of the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio.

On his daily rounds by horseback, surveying his crops and fields, where as many as a hundred black slaves labored, Jefferson would commonly ride ten miles, as far as from Braintree to Boston, without ever leaving his own land.

With the inheritance also came substantial debts and still more slaves, but then in Virginia this was seen as a matter of course.

The whole economy and way of life were built on slaves and debt, with tobacco planters in particular dependent on slave labor and money borrowed from English creditors against future crops.

John Adams, by contrast, had neither debts nor slaves and all his life abhor...

Jefferson, for his part, knew little or nothing of New Englanders and counted none as friends.

IF THERE WAS “a tide in the affairs of men,” as Abigail had reminded John, now was “the flood.” “Every post and every day rolls in upon us independence like a torrent,” he wrote on May 20.

That these United Colonies are, and of a right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

JEFFERSON WAS TO DRAFT the declaration.

On June 15, the provincial legislature of New Jersey had ordered the arrest of its royal governor, William Franklin, the estranged, illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, and authorized its delegates in Congress to vote for independence.

The birth of a new nation was at hand, perhaps truly, as Thomas Paine had written, a new world. “Solemn” was Adams’s word for the atmosphere in Congress.

MONDAY, JULY 1, 1776,

To proceed now with a declaration of independence, he said, would be “to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.”

The storm struck with thunder, lightning, and pelting rain.

We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.

That it was the most powerful and important speech heard in the Congress since it first convened, and the greatest speech of Adams’s life, there is no question.

“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.”

What private agreements had been made the night before, if any, who or how many had come to the State House that morning knowing what was afoot, no one recorded.

So, it was done, the break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence. If not all thirteen clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and with the other silent, the effect was the same.

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.

Slavery and the slave trade were hardly the fault of George III, however ardently Jefferson wished to fix the blame on the distant monarch.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

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.

In the Supreme Court Room at the State House, as planned, a half dozen Philadelphians chosen for the honor took the King’s Arms down from the wall and carried it off to be thrown on top of a huge fire and consumed in an instant, the blaze lighting the scene for blocks around.

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.

The fact that a signed document now existed, as well as the names of the signatories, was kept secret for the time being, as all were acutely aware that by taking up the pen and writing their names, they had committed treason, a point of considerably greater immediacy now, with the British army so near at hand.

THE SHIPS FLYING the Union Jack that arrived off New York at the end of June 1776—the fleet from Halifax that one eyewitness described as looking like “all London afloat”—had been only the start of an overwhelming show of British might come to settle the fate of the new United States of America.

By July 3, 9,000 troops led by General William Howe had landed on Staten Island, where hundreds of Tories were on hand to welcome them.

making in all the largest, most costly British overseas deployment ever until that time.

“We are all inexperienced in this business,” he emphasized to Nathanael Greene.

There were the ever-vexing complications of dealing in various colonial currencies of differing value, and the increasing worry over inflation and the fate of the new Continental money, the unbacked paper currency being produced in Philadelphia in steadily greater quantity.

“Jefferson in those days never failed to agree with me in everything of a political nature, and he very cordially concurred in this.”

We are dependent on each other—not totally independent states. . . . When I entered that door, I considered myself a citizen of America.”

Howe’s forces had gone into action filled with contempt for the traitorous American rabble, and numbers of Americans were slaughtered after surrendering.

Was there “no way of treading back this step of independency?”

“Mr. Adams is a decided character,”

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.

The Declaration of Independence had passed a first test. The war would go on.

The war, it was clear, was not to be “the work of a day.”

There must be an army built on “a permanent footing,” a standing army.