John Adams

by David McCullough

Exiled from their homeland, unappreciated in their adopted country, most Loyalists had a hard life.

To Adams the first priority must be to open British ports to American ships. But his efforts came to nothing, while at home, under the Articles of Confederation enacted in 1781, Congress was without power to regulate commerce. It was thus a sad and humiliating situation.

Commercial relations with France, however, were no more promising than with Britain.

Since the end of the war, the French, for their part, had attained nothing like the flourishing American trade that Vergennes had imagined.

The demand for French goods in America was low and not likely to improve.

JEFFERSON ARRIVED on March 11, 1786, to find London brightened by a light dusting of snow.

The fact that his debts were largely to English creditors may well have had something to do with such feelings.

“This people cannot look me in the face: there is a conscious guilt and shame in their countenances when they look at me. They feel they have behaved ill, and that I am sensible of it.”

In the long, eventful lives of Adams and Jefferson, it was an excursion of no importance to history. But it was the one and only time they ever spent off on their own together, free of work and responsibility, and at heart both were countrymen, farmers, with an avid interest in soils, tillage, climate, and “improvements.”

Stowe, a true eighteenth-century marvel, was the largest, grandest, most famous landscape garden in England.

Finding some of the local residents sadly ignorant of the subject, he gave them an impromptu lecture.

“And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for?” he asked. “Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground, . . . All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.”

Shenstone had ruined himself financially with all he had spent on the farm, and so “died of the heartaches which debt occasioned him.”

It was a lesson that Jefferson, alas, would not heed.

IN LONDON, Jefferson resumed his shopping spree,

Colonel William Smith

“Can there be any pleasure in mixing company where you care for no one and nobody cares for you?”

She dwelled increasingly on the fate of their brother, William, whose drinking and errant ways had been a secret worry for years and who by now, after abandoning his wife and children, had more or less disappeared. In correspondence among themselves the three sisters never referred to William by name, only as “this unhappy connection,” the “poor man,” or “our dearest relative.”

IN THE FINAL DAYS of May 1786, John Adams was called on to hurry to Amsterdam once again, to secure still another desperately needed Dutch loan for the United States.

The impasse over the withdrawal of British troops from the American Northwest and the payment of American debts to British creditors continued.

American reluctance, or inability, to make good on its obligations was a disgrace and politically a great mistake.

To Adams it was particularly offensive that the British thus far had not thought it necessary even to appoint an ambassador to the United States.

Adams had expressed interest in visiting the village of Braintree, expecting they might find some connection with their own Braintree, but poking about in the village graveyard, he found no familiar names and the village itself was sadly disappointing, poor and “miserable.”

Little could have delighted Adams more than the chance to show her the country that meant so much to him, where success had been his, where, as they both appreciated, he had helped change the course of history, and where he was still the accredited American minister, Congress having never bothered to replace him.

“Not a hill to be seen,” she wrote, incredulous. The people were “well-fed, well-clothed, contented,” the women notable for their beautiful complexions.

She saw no poverty such as in Paris and London. The cities were amazingly clean and orderly. “It is very unusual to see a single square of glass broken, or a brick out of place.” Leyden was the cleanest city she had ever seen in her life; and if Braintree in Essex had failed to evoke feelings of ancestral ties, the church of the Pilgrims at Leyden more than made up for it.

The reception they were given by the Dutch was warm and heartening, “striking proof, not only of their personal esteem,” Abigail wrote, “but of the ideas they entertain with respect to the Revolution which gave birth to their connection with us. . . . The spirit of liberty appears to be all alive with them.”

THE AUTUMN OF 1786

Inexplicably, correspondence from Jefferson had dwindled to a standstill.

What Jefferson said nothing of was that he had been spending as much time as possible through August and September with a beautiful young woman named Maria Cosway.

as the news of Shays’s Rebellion grew more alarming, an exchange of views on the subject set Abigail and Jefferson sharply in opposition for the first time.

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is a natural manure.”

ON APRIL 2, 1787,

1787,

He felt an urgency like that of 1776. Great events were taking place at home.

Support for a stronger central government was gaining ground—and largely in reaction to Shays’s Rebellion, as Adams had foreseen.

By early January, 1787,

There must be three parts to government—executive, legislative, and judicial—and to achieve balance it was essential that it be a strong executive, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary.

Cicero’s decided opinion in favor of the three branches of government was founded on a reason that was timeless, unchangeable.

Were Cicero to return to earth, he would see that the English nation had brought “the great idea” nearly to perfection.

Adams adamantly opposed hereditary monarchy and hereditary aristocracy in America, as well as all hereditary titles, honors, or distinctions of any kind—it

A simple, perfect democracy had never yet existed.

He had had enough experience with town meetings at home to know that in order for anything to be done certain powers and responsibilities had to be delegated to a moderator, a town clerk, a constable, and, at times, to special committees.

As the planets were held in their orbits by centripetal and centrifugal forces, “instead of rushing to the sun or flying off in tangents” among the stars, there must, in a just and enduring government, be a balance of forces.

To Adams nothing had changed about human nature since the time of the ancients. Inequities within society were inevitable, no matter the political order. Human beings were capable of great good, but also great evil. Thus it had always been and thus it would ever be.

There were just two aspects of life in Europe that he regretted leaving. One was access to books, the other was “intimate correspondence with you, which is one of the most agreeable events in my life.”

LATE THAT SUMMER of 1787, in Philadelphia, the Constitutional Convention was nearing the completion of its efforts.

WHEN COPIES of the new Constitution of the United States, signed at Philadelphia on September 17, reached London that autumn, Adams read it “with great satisfaction.”

You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.”

if there was a consistent theme in all that Adams wrote and strived for, it was the need for a binding American union.