John Adams

By David McCullough

He could be high-spirited and affectionate, vain, cranky, impetuous, self-absorbed, and fiercely stubborn; passionate, quick to anger, and all forgiving; generous and entertaining.

He was a man who cared deeply for his friends, who, with few exceptions, were to be his friends for life, and in some instances despite severe strains. And to no one was he more devoted than to his wife, Abigail. She was his “Dearest Friend,” as he addressed her in letters – his “best, dearest, worthiest friend in the world” – while to her he was “the tenderest of husbands,” her “good man.”

John Adams was also, as many could attest, a great-hearted, persevering man of uncommon ability and force. He had a brilliant mind. He was honest and everyone knew it. Emphatically independent by nature, hardworking, frugal – all traits in the New England tradition – he was anything but cold or laconic as supposedly New Englanders were. He could be high-spirited and affectionate, vain, cranky, impetuous, self-absorbed, and fiercely stubborn; passionate, quick to anger, and all forgiving; generous and entertaining. He was blessed with great courage and good humor, yet subject to spells of despair, and especially when separated from his family or during periods of prolonged inactivity.

Ambitious to excel – to make himself known – 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. Fame without honor, in her view, would be “like a faint meteor gliding through the sky, shedding only transient light.”

As his family and friends knew, Adams was both a devout Christian and an independent thinker, and he saw no conflict in that. He was hard-headed and a man of “sensibility,” a close observer of human folly as displayed in everyday life and fired by an inexhaustible love of books and scholarly reflection. 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. But in his need to fathom the “labyrinth” of human nature, as he said, he was drawn to Shakespeare and Swift, and likely to carry Cervantes or a volume of English poetry with him on his journeys. “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket,” he would tell his son Johnny.

(McCullough 2001, pp. 18-19)

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.

(McCullough 2001, pp.26)

He made the sixty-mile journey from Braintree to Worcester by horseback in a single day and, though untired and untrained as a teacher, immediately assumed his new role in a one-room schoolhouse at the center of town. To compensate for his obvious youth, he would explain to a friend, he had to maintain a stiff, frowning attitude.

(McCullough 2001, pp.37)

“A puffy, vain, conceited conversation never fails to bring a man into contempt, although his natural endowments be ever so great, and his application and industry ever so intense … [And] I must own myself to have been, to a very heinous degree, guilty in this respect.”

“Honesty, sincerity, and openness, I esteem essential marks of a good mind,” he concluded after one evening’s gathering. He was therefore of the opinion that men ought “to avow their opinions and defend them with boldness.”

Vanity, he saw, was his chief failing. “Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly,” he wrote, vowing to reform himself.

By “vanity” he did not mean he had an excessive pride in appearance. Adams was never one to spend much time in front of a mirror. Rather, in the eighteenth-century use of the word, he was berating himself for being overly proud, conceited.

“A puffy, vain, conceited conversation never fails to bring a man into contempt, although his natural endowments be ever so great, and his application and industry ever so intense … [And] I must own myself to have been, to a very heinous degree, guilty in this respect.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.42)

His mother’s uncontrolled responses, her “scolds, rages,” were a grievous flaw, he felt. He knew the sudden, uncontrollable rush of his own anger, almost to the point of bursting. He must observe more closely the effects of reason and rage, just as he must never again undertake a case without command of the details. “Let me never undertake to draw a writ without sufficient time to examine and digest in my mind all the doubts, queries, objections that may arise,” he wrote. And he never did. The painful lesson had been learned.

Henceforth, he vowed, he would bend his whole soul to the law. He would let nothing distract him. He drew inspiration from his Roman heroes. “The first way for a young man to set himself on the road towards glorious reputation,” he read in Cicero, “is to win renown.” “Reputation,” wrote Adams, “ought to be the perpetual subject of my thoughts, and aim of my behavior.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.46)

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. The new law, the first British attempt to tax Americans directly, had been passed by Parliament to help pay for the cost of the French and Indian War and to meet the expense of maintaining a colonial military force to prevent Indian wars. Everyone was affected. The Boston Gazette reported Virginia in a state of “utmost consternation.” In August, Boston mobs, “like devils let loose,” stoned the residence of Andrew Oliver, secretary of the province, who had been appointed distributor of the stamps, then attacked and destroyed the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, wrongly suspecting him of having sponsored the detested tax.

(McCullough 2001, pp.59)

Soon afterward Adams drafted what became known as the Braintree Instructions – instructions from the freeholders of the town to their delegate to the General Court, the legislative body of Massachusetts – which, when printed in October in the Gazette, “rang” through the colony. “We have always understood it to be a grand and fundamental principle of the [English] constitution that no freeman should be subject to any tax to which he has not given his own consent.” There must be “no taxation without representation” – a phrase that had been used in Ireland for more than a generation. And in rejecting the rule of the juryless Admiralty Court in enforcing this law, the instructions declared that there must be a trial by jury and an independent judiciary.

(McCullough 2001, pp.61)

On the cold moonlit evening of March 5, 1779, the streets of Boston were covered by nearly a foot of snow. On the icy, cobbled square where the Province House stood, a lone British sentry, posted in front of the nearby Custom House, was being taunted by a small band of men and boys. The time was shortly after nine. Somewhere a church bell began to toll, the alarm for fire, and almost at once crowds came pouring into the streets, many men, up from the waterfront, brandishing sticks and clubs. As a throng of several hundred converged at the Custom House, the lone guard was reinforced by eight British soldiers with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, their captain with drawn sword. Shouting, cursing, the crowd pelted the despised redcoats with snowballs, chunks of ice, oyster shells, and stones. In the melee the soldiers suddenly opened fire, killing five men. Samuel Adams was quick to call the killings a “bloody butchery” and to distribute a print published by Paul Revere vividly portraying the scene as a slaughter of the innocent, an image of British tyranny, the Boston Massacre, that would become fixed in the public mind.

The following day thirty-four-year-old John Adams was asked to defend the soldiers and their captain, when they came to trial. No one else would take the case, he was informed. Hesitating no more than he had over Jonathan Sewall’s offer of royal appointment, Adams accepted, firm in the belief, as he said, that no man in a free country should be denied the right to counsel and a fair trial, and convinced, on principle, that the case was of utmost importance. As a lawyer, his duty was clear. That he would be hazarding his hard-earned reputation and, in his words, “incurring a clamor and popular suspicions and prejudices” against him, was obvious, and if some of what he later said on the subject would sound a little self-righteous, he was also being entirely honest.

(McCullough 2001, pp.65-66)

“Do you expect he should behave like a stoic philosopher, lost in apathy?”
…
“Facts are stubborn things,” he told the jury, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Adam’s closing for the second and longer trial, which was recorded, did not come until December 3, and lasted two days. The effect on the crowded courtroom was described as “electrical.” “I am for the prisoners at bar,” he began, then invoked the line from the Marchese di Beccaria. Close study of the facts had convinced Adams of the innocence of the soldiers. The tragedy was not brought on by the soldiers, but by the mob, and the mob, it must be understood, was the inevitable result of the flawed policy of quartering troops in a city on the pretext of keeping the peace:

We have entertained a great variety of phrases to avoid calling this sort of people a mob. Some call them shavers, some call them geniuses. The plain English is, gentleman, [it was] most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jacktars. And why should we scruple to call such a people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them. The sun is not about to stand still or go out, not the rivers to dry up because there was a mob in Boston on the 5th of March that attacked a party of soldiers … Soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one. They are wretched conservators of the peace.

He described how the shrieking “rabble’ pelted the soldiers with snowballs, oyster shells, sticks, “every species of rubbish,” as a cry went up to “Kill them! Kill them!” One soldier had been knocked down with a club, then hit again as soon as he could rise. “Do you expect he should behave like a stoic philosopher, lost in apathy?” Adams asked. Self Defense was the primary canon of the law of nature. Better that many guilty persons escape unpunished than one innocent person should be punished. “The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.”

“Facts are stubborn things,” he told the jury, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.67-68)

He could speak extemporaneously and, if need be, almost without limit. Once, to give a client time to retrieve a necessary record, Adams spoke for five hours, through which the court and jury sat with perfect patience. At the end he was roundly applauded because, as he related the story, he had spoken “in favor of justice.”

At home, he filled pages of his journal with observations on government and freedom, “notes for an oration at Braintree,” as he labeled them, though the oration appears never to have been delivered.

Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good and happiness of the people … There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all others, by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors, in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike …

The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved …

Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable …

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

(McCullough 2001, pp.69-70)

One Sunday, “led by curiosity and good company,” which included George Washington, Adams crossed a “Romish” threshold, to attend afternoon mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Fifth Street, an experience so singular that he reflected on it at length both in his journal and in a letter to Abigail. Everything about the service was the antithesis of a lifetime of Sabbaths at Braintree’s plain First Church, where unfettered daylight through clear window glass allowed for no dark or shadowed corners, or suggestion of mystery. For the first time, Adams was confronted with so much that generations of his people had abhorred and rebelled against, and he found himself both distressed and strangely moved. The music, bells, candles, gold, and silver were “so calculated to take in mankind,” that he wondered the Reformation had ever succeeded. He felt pity for “the poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood,” he told Abigail.

The dress of the priest was rich with lace – his pulpit was velvet and gold. The altar piece was very rich – little images and crucifixes about – wax candles lighted up. But how shall I describe the picture of our Savior in a frame of marble over the altar at full length upon the Cross, in the agonies, and the blood dropping and streaming from his wounds?

Yet Adams stayed through all of the long service. The music and chanting of the assembly continued through the afternoon, “most sweetly and exquisitely,” and he quite approved of the priest’s “good, short, moral essay” on the duty of parents to see to their children’s temporal and spiritual interests. The whole experience, Adams concluded, was “awful and affecting” – the word “awful” then meaning full of awe, or “that which strikes with awe, or fills with reverence.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.84)

The business of Congress had become tedious beyond expression, he told Abigail.

This assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every man in it is a great man – an orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism, and his political abilities.

The consequence of this is that business is drawn and spun out to immeasurable length. I believe if it was moved and seconded that we should come to a resolution that three and two make five, we should be entertained with logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics, and mathematics concerning the subject for two whole days, and then we should pass the resolution unanimously in the affirmative.

(McCullough 2001, pp.86)

The art of persuasion, he held, depended mainly on a marshaling of facts, clarity, conviction, and the ability to think on one’s feet. True eloquence consisted of truth and “rapid reason.”

Rarely did he prepare his remarks in advance other than in his mind, so that once on his feet he could speak from what he knew and what he strongly felt. He had tried writing his speeches but found it impossible. “I understand it not,” he would tell Benjamin Rush. “I never could write declamations, orations, or popular addresses.”

He had no liking for grand oratorical flourishes. “Affection is as disagreeable in a letter as in conversation,” he once told Abigail, in explanation of his views on “epistolary style,” and the same principle applied to making a speech. The art of persuasion, he held, depended mainly on a marshaling of facts, clarity, conviction, and the ability to think on one’s feet. True eloquence consisted of truth and “rapid reason.” As a British spy was later to write astutely of Adams, he also had a particular gift for seeing “large subjects largely.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.98-99)

“It has been the will Heaven,” the essay began, “that we chould be thrown into existence at a period when the greatest philosophers and law-givers of antiquity would have wished to live…

a period when a coincidence of circumstances without example has afforded to thirteen colonies at once an opportunity of beginning government anew from the foundation and building as they choose. How few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children? How few ever had anything more of choice in government than in climate?

He was looking beyond independence, beyond the outcome of the war, to what would be established once independence and victory were achieved. Much as he foresaw the hard truth about the war to be waged, Adams had the clearest idea of anyone in Congress of what independence would actually entail, the great difficulties and risks, no less than the opportunities. When arguing cases in court, he liked to draw on the fables of La Fontaine and to quote the line “in every thing on must consider the end.”

The happiness of the people was the purpose of government, he wrote, and therefore that form of government was best which produced the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number. And since all “sober inquirers after truth” agreed that happiness derived from virtue, that form of government with virtue as its foundation was more likely than any other to promote the general happiness.

The greatest minds agreed, Adams continued, that all good government was republican, and the “true idea” of a republic was “an empire of laws and not of men,” a phrase not original with Adams but that he had borrowed from the writings of the seventeenth-century philosopher James Harrington. A government with a single legislative body would never do. There should be a representative assembly, “an exact portrait in miniature of the people at large,” but it must not have the whole legislative power, for the reason that like an individual with unchecked power, it could be subject to “fits of humor, transports of passion, partialities of prejudice.” A single assembly could “grow avaricious … exempt itself from burdens … become ambitious and after some time vote itself perpetual.” Balance would come from the creation of a second, smaller legislative body, a “distinct assembly” of perhaps twenty or thirty, chosen by the larger legislature. This “Council,” as Adams called it, would be given “free and independent judgment upon all acts of legislation that it may be able to check and correct the errors of the others.”

The executive, the governor, should, Adams thought, be chosen by the two houses of the legislature, and for not more than a year at a time. Executive power would include the veto and appointment of all judges and justices, as well as militia officers, thus making the executive the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Essential to the stability of government and to an “able and impartial administration of justice,” Adams stressed, was separation of judicial power from both the legislative and executive. There must be an independent judiciary. “Men of experience on the laws, of exemplary morals, invincible patience, unruffled calmness on the laws, of exemplary morals, invincible patience, unruffled calmness and indefatigable application” should be “subservient to none” and appointed for life.

Finally and emphatically, he urged the widest possible support for education. “Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.”

Little that Adams ever wrote had such effects as his Thoughts on Government. Yet he felt it was too rough, “crude” in execution. He regretted insufficient time to write “more correctly.”

(McCullough 2001, pp. 102-103)

From Abigail came long letters filled with news from home – of family, of politics, of her day-to-day struggle to manage expenses, cope with shortages, and keep the farm going, a responsibility for which little in her background had prepared her. “Frugality, industry, and economy are the lessons fo the day,” she confided to a friend, “at least they must be so for me or my small boat will suffer shipwreck.” To John she pleaded repeatedly for more news of his health and his outlook, and filled pages with her own feelings for all that was transpiring at Philadelphia.

She was particularly curious about the Virginians, wondering if, as slaveholders, they had the necessary commitment to the cause of freedom. “I have,” she wrote, “sometimes been ready to think that the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creature of theirs.” What she felt about those in Massachusetts who owned slaves, including her own father, she did not say, but she need not have – John knew her mind on the subject. Writing to him during the First Congress, she had been unmistakably clear: “I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me – [to] fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.103-104)

Behind closed doors of Congress the current of events seemed also to turn with the season as the delegates of three southern colonies, South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina, received instructions freeing them to vote for independence. Even among the opposition, there was growing agreement on the need for unanimity, “harmony,” a healing of disputes. “It is a true saying of a wit,” wrote Carter Braxton of Virginia, referring possibly to Benjamin Franklin, “we must hang together or separately.”

(McCullough 2001, pp. 107-108)

The importance of the moment was understood by everyone in the room.

Resolved [Lee began]: … 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.

Adams immediately seconded the motion and the day following, Saturday, June 8, the debate began. Speaking in opposition, John Dickinson, James Wilson, Robert Livingston, and Edward Rutledge declared, according to notes kept by Jefferson, that while “friends of the measure,” they opposed any declaration of independence until “the voice of the people” drove them to it. Further, should Congress proceed before hearing the “voice,” then certain colonies “might secede from the union.” It was the threat Dickinson in his anger had used earlier against Adams, but whether it was Dickinson speaking now, Jefferson did not record. Nor did he record what Adams, Lee, and George Wythe said, only that they declared public opinion to be ahead of Congress: that “the people wait of us to lead the way,” that the European powers would neither trade nor treat with the colonies until they established independence, that “the present [military] campaign may be unsuccessful, and therefore we had better propose an alliance while our affairs wear a hopeful aspect.” And that it was essential “to lose no time.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.118)

Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike … The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man [kings included] to endanger public liberty.”

He borrowed readily from his own previous writing, particularly from a recent draft fro a new Virginia constitution, but also from a decoration of rights for Virginia, which appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on June 12. It had been drawn up by George Mason, who wrote that “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights … among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty.” And there was a pamphlet written by the Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson, published in Philadelphia in 1774, that declared, “All men are, by nature equal and free: no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent: all lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it.”

But then Mason, Wilson, and John Adams, no less than Jefferson, were, as they all appreciated, drawing on long familiarity with the seminal works of the English and Scottish writers John Locke, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, an dHenry St. John Bolingbroke, or such English poets as Defoe (“When kings the sword of justice first lay down, / They are no kings, though they possess the crown. / Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things, / The good of subjects is the end of kings”). Or, for that matter, Cicero. (“The people’s good is the highest law.”)

Adams, in his earlier notes for an oration at Braintree, had written, “Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike … The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man [kings included] to endanger public liberty.” The purpose of government, he had said in his recent Thoughts on Government, was the “greatest quantity of human happiness.”

What made Jefferson’s work surpassing was the grace and eloquence of expression. Jefferson had done superbly and in minimum time.

I was delighted with its high tone and flights of oratory with which it abounded [Adams would recall], especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly would never oppose. There were other expressions which I would not have inserted, if I had drawn it up, particularly that which called the King tyrant … I thought the expression too passionate; and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards, I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it, and do not now remember that I made or suggested a single alteration.

A number of alterations were made, however, when Jefferson reviewed it with the committee, and several were by Adams. Possible it was Franklin, or Jefferson himself, who made the small but inspired change in the second paragraph. Where, in the initial draft, certain “truths” were described as “sacred and undeniable,” a simpler, stronger “self-evident” was substituted.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…

(McCullough 2001, pp.121-122)

That the hand of God was involved in the birth of the new nation he had no doubt. “It is the will of heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever.” If the people now were to have “unbounded power,” and as the people were quite as capable of corruption as “the great,” and thus high risks were involved, he would submit all his hopes and fears to an overruling providence, “in which unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe.”

(McCullough 2001, pp. 130)

Beyond its stirring preamble, most of the document before Congress was taken up with a list of grievances, specific charges against the King – “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns … He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny…” 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. Now it was removed in its entirety because, said Jefferson later, South Carolina and Georgia objected. Some northern delegates, too, were a “little tender” on the subject, “for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers…”

In truth, black slavery had long since become an accepted part of life in all of the thirteen colonies. Of a total population in the colonies of nearly 2,500,000 people in 1776, approximately one in five were slaves, some 500,000 men, women, and children. In Virginia alone, which had the most slaves by far, they numbered more than 200,000. 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 neat as can be determined from his personal records, was about 200, which was also the approximate number owned by George Washington.

(McCullough 2001, pp.131)

In time, Adams and Jefferson would each denounce slavery. Jefferson was to write of the degrading effects of the institution on both slave and master. Adams would call slavery a “foul contagion in the human character.” In years past, as an attorney, Adams had appeared in several slave cases for the owner, never the slave, but he had no use for slavery. 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.

But neither he nor any other delegate in Congress would have let the issue jeopardize a declaration of independence, however strong their feelings. If Adams was disappointed or downcast over the removal of Jefferson’s indictment of the slave trade, he seems to have said nothing at the time. Nor is it possible to know the extent of Jefferson’s disappointment, or if the opposition of South Carolina and Georgia was truly as decisive as he later claimed. Very possibly there were many delegates, from North and South, happy to see the passage omitted for the reason that it was so patently absurd to hold the King responsible for horrors that, everyone knew, Americans – and Christians no less than the King – had brought on themselves. Slavery and the slave trade were hardly the fault of George III, however ardently Jefferson wished to fix the blame on the distant monarch.

(McCullough 2001, pp.134)

Congress ordered that the document be authenticated and printed. But it would be another month before the engrossed copy was signed by the delegates. For now, only the President, John Hancock, and the Secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, fixed their signatures.

With passage of the Declaration of Independence thus completed, and having thereby renounced allegiance to the King and proclaimed the birth of a new United States of America, the Congress proceeded directly to other business. Indeed, to all appearances, nothing happened in Congress on July 4, 1776. Adams, who had responded with such depth of feeling to the events of July 2, recorded not a word of July 4. Of Jefferson’s day, it is known only that he took time off to shop for ladies’ gloves and a new thermometer that he purchased at John Sparhawk’s London Bookshop for a handsome 3 pounds, 15 shillings.

But by the following morning, the fifth, printer John Dunlap had broadside editions available and the delegates were busy sending copies to friends. On July 6, the Pennsylvania Evening Post carried the full text on its first page.

The great day of celebration came Monday, July 8, at noon in the State House Yard, when the Declaration was read aloud before an exuberant crowd. With drums pounding, five battalions paraded through the city and “on the common, gave us the feu de joie [thirteen cannon blasts], notwithstanding the scarcity of powder,” as Adams recorded. Bells rang through the day and into the night. There were bonfires at street corners. Houses were illuminated with candles in their windows. 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.

(McCullough 2001, pp.136-137)

Whether Benjamin Franklin quipped “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall hang separately” is impossible to know, just as there is no way to confirm the much-repeated story that the diminutive John Hancock wrote his name large so the King might read it without his spectacles. But the stories endured because they were in character, like the remark attributed to Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island. Hopkins, who suffered from palsy, is said to have observed, on completing his spidery signature, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.138)

While the board of War consumed much of Adam’s time and energy, he was nonetheless in the thick of discussion and debate over the most pressing issue before Congress, the proposed “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.” With independence proclaimed, confederation – a working union of the colonies – had become the focus of “spirit” animating the delegates. Union was as essential as independence, nearly all contended – indeed, more important in the view of many – and the issues to be resolved were formidable.

Strict secrecy prevailed, much to Adam’s disapproval. There was theory and there was practice in government, and Adams, the delegate who, as Rush said, could see “the whole subject at a glance,” was determined that with theory now so eloquently proclaimed, practice be attended with equal diligence, and he wanted nothing about the deliberations to be concealed. In Massachusetts the idea of galleries for the public to watch the legislature was the custom. When Wilson of Pennsylvania, who agreed with him, moved that the doors be opened, galleries erected, or that Congress adjourn to some public building where the people might be accommodated, Adams enthusiastically seconded the motion, but to no avail.

As things were, Congress had no real legal authority. It could only pass resolutions, not laws. Having thus far dealt primarily with the “minutiae” of a plan for confederation, the delegates, by the late July, had gotten down to the “great points of representation, boundaries, and taxation,” in Jefferson’s words; and as Josiah Bartlett wrote with New Hampshire understatement, “the sentiments of the members [were] very different on many of the articles.” Nor was progress ever easy. “I find,” wrote Rush, who had been in Congress all of a few weeks, “there is a great deal of difference between sporting a sentiment in a letter, or over a glass of wine upon politics, and discharging properly the duties of a senator.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.146)

As it stood, according to Article 17 of the proposed plan, each colony, irrespective of population or wealth, was to have one vote in deciding all questions concerning the confederation. Thirteen separate states would have thirteen equal votes, a concept Adams strongly opposed. He advocated voting in proportion to population, which was not surprising for someone from Massachusetts, one of the most populated and wealthy states. But he spoke more as an American than a New Englander. The individuality of the colonies was “a mere sound,” he said, according to Jefferson’s notes. “The confederacy is to make us one individual only; it is to form us, like separate parcels of metal, into one common mass. We shall no longer retain our separate individuality, but become a single individual as to all questions submitted to the confederacy.”

Speaking for the small colonies, Hopkins of Rhode Island pointed out that the four largest would contain more than half the inhabitants of the confederacy and would thus govern the others as they pleased. But Benjamin Rush, in an eloquent first speech in Congress, declared, “The more a man aims at serving America the more he serves his colony.” “We have been too free with the word independence. We are dependent on each other – not totally independent states … When I entered that door, I considered myself a citizen of America.”

With Franklin and Wilson, Rush moved that the vote be in proportion to numbers, insisting further that only freemen should be counted and that this would have the “excellent effect” of inducing the colonies to discourage slavery.

Jefferson was among those who remained silent, and the issue was not to be resolved then or for a long time to come. But on the second knotty problem, that concerning Virginia’s claim that her boundaries extended to “the South Sea,” which was debated August 2, the same day as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson did speak up to say he protested the right of Congress to decide upon the right of Virginia.

(McCullough 2001, pp.147)

Low in spirits, feeling misjudged and unappreciated by others in Congress, some of whom, he was sure, mistook his ardor for ambition, he succumbed to brooding and self-pity. Nobody understood him. “I have a very tender feeling heart,” he wrote. “This country knows not, and never can know the torments I have endured for its sake.” He would rather build stone walls upon Penn’s Hill than hold the highest office in government, he told her, as though he believed every word.

His view of the prospects at New York grew steadily darker. “May Heaven grant us victory, if we deserve it,” he prayed, “if not, patience, humility, and persistence under defeat.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.148)

Little that had happened through the summer had distressed Adams quite so much as the behavior of American troops, and especially reports that Massachusetts men had “behaved ill.” “Unfaithfulness” was something he could not abide, and in his spells of gloom he pondered whether the fault was in the times.

Unfaithfulness in public stations is deeply criminal [he wrote to Abigail]. But there is no encouragement to be faithful. Neither profit, nor honor, nor applause is acquired by faithfulness … There is too much corruption, even in this infant age of our Republic. Virtue is not in fashion. Vice is not infamous.

One day, as he and Benjamin Rush sat together in Congress, Rush asked Adams in a whisper if he thought America would succeed in the struggle. “Yes,” Adams replied, “if we fear God and repent our sins.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.160)

“Posterity who are to reap the blessings will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”

“I want a bird of passage,” she declared in early March, still having heard nothing from him. “Posterity who are to reap the blessings will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.169)

“A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man,”

The Board of War was examining reports of atrocities committed by Hessian troops in New Jersey; Adams was sickened by what he heard. He was exasperated, too, by the constant squabbles of American officers. “They worry one another like mastiffs, scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts,” he told Abigail.

I believe there is no one principle which predominates in human nature so much in every stage of life, from the cradle to the grave in males and females, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, high and low, as this passion for superiority.

He wondered if he was sadly miscast in his public role. “I begin to suspect that I have not much grand in my composition. The pride and pomp of war, the continual sound of drums and fifes … have no charms for me.” He would prefer the delights of a garden to dominion of a world. “I have nothing of Caesar’s greatness in my soul. Power has not my wishes in her train.”

He urged Abigail to keep up her cheer. Wondering what was in store for their children, he poured out heartfelt advice and admonitions to each of them.

You have discovered in your childhood a remarkable modesty, discretion, and reserve [he told Nabby]. You are now, I think, far advanced in your twelfth year – a time when the understanding opens, and the youth begin to look abroad into the world among whom they are to live. To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.

“A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man,” he counseled Johnny, while to Charles he expressed the hope that with the war over by and by he would have only to study “the arts of peace.” To Thomas he offered the prospect of a career in medicine, warming so to the subject that he seemed to forget the boy was only five years old. “Would it not please you to study nature on all her wonderful operations, and to relieve your fellow creatures under the severest pains and distress to which human nature is liable?”

(McCullough 2001, pp.169-170)

Adams had written that concealment of one’s dislike for another was not a form of dishonesty or deception, but an acceptable, even wise way of conducting the business of life.

Once, several years earlier, in one of the many passages in his diary in which he worked out his thoughts, Adams had written that concealment of one’s dislike for another was not a form of dishonesty or deception, but an acceptable, even wise way of conducting the business of life.

There are persons whom in my heart I despise, others I abhor. Yet I am not obliged to inform the one of my contempt, nor the other of my detestation. This kind of dissimulation … is a necessary branch of wisdom, and so far from being immoral … that it is a duty and a virtue.

But this, he was quick to add, was a rule with definite limitations, “for there are times when the cause of religion, of government, of liberty, the interest of the present age of posterity, render it a necessary duty to make known his sentiments and intentions boldly and publicly.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.208)

It was titled “A Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Adams having chosen to use the word “commonwealth” rather than “state,” as had Virginia, a decision he made on his own and that no one was to question. A tone of absolute clarity and elevated thought was established in the opening lines, in a Preamble, a new feature in constitutions, affirming the old ideal of the common good founded on a social compact:

The end of the institution, maintenance, and administration of government is to secure the existence of the body politic; to protect it; and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying, in safety and tranquility, their natural rights and the blessings of life; and whenever these great objects are not obtained, the people have a right to alter the government, and to take measures necessary for their safety, happiness, and prosperity.

The body-politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals. It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.

(McCullough 2001, pp.221)

In fundamental ways, the form of government was very like what Adams had proposed in his Thoughts on Government, and again, as in Thoughts on Government, he called for a “government of laws, and not of men.” Founded on the principle of the separation and balance of powers, the Constitution declared in a single sentence that in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts “the legislative, executive and judicial power shall be placed in a separate departments, to the end that it might be a government of laws, and not of men.”

There would be two branches of the legislature, a Senate and a House of Representatives, an executive, the governor, who was to be elected at large annually and have veto power over the acts of the legislature. But it was the establishment of an independent judiciary, with judges of the Supreme Court appointed, not elected, and for life (“as long as the behave themselves well”), that Adams made one of his greatest contributions not only to Massachusetts but to the country, as time would tell.

In addition, notably, there was Section II of Chapter 6, a paragraph headed “The Encouragement of Literature, Etc.,” which was like no other declaration to be found in any constitution ever written until then, since. It was entirely Adams’s creation, his original contribution to the constitution of Massachusetts, and he rightly took great pride in it.

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

(McCullough 2001, pp.222-223)

In the end, the convention approved nearly all of his draft, with only a few notable changes. Preferring what Jefferson had written in the Declaration of Independence, the convention revised the first article of the Declaration of Rights, that all men were “born equally free and independent,” to read that all men were “born free and equal,” a change Adams did not like and would like even less as time went on. He did not believe all men were created equal, except in the eyes of God, but that all men, for all their many obvious differences, were born to equal rights.

The reference to freedom of speech was removed, not to be reinstated until much later, and the worship of God was declared a right of all men, as well as a duty. The legislature was also given power to override the governor’s veto, another change Adams regretted, as it was contrary to his belief in a strong, popularly elected executive.

None of the alterations, however, diminished his overall pride in what he and the convention had achieved, and the acclaim it brought. “I take vast satisfaction in the general approbation of the Massachusetts Constitution,” he would tell a friend. “If the people are as wise and honest in the choice of their rulers, as they have been in framing a government, they will be happy, and I shall die content with the prospect for my children.”

As time would prove, 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.

(McCullough 2001, pp.224-225)

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

(McCullough 2001, pp.226)

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

The conflict between the appeal of the arts and the sense that they were the product of a luxury-loving (and thus corrupt) foreign society played heavily on his mind. Delightful as it was to stroll the gardens of Paris, enticing as were science and the arts, he, John Adams, had work to do, a public trust to uphold. The science of government was his duty; the art of negotiation must take precedence.

Then, in a prophetic paragraph that would be quoted for generations within the Adams family and beyond, he wrote:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

(McCullough 2001, pp.236-237)

Brief as it was, he got through the speech only with difficulty, his voice at times quaking, and the King, too, was greatly moved. “The King listened to every word I said, with dignity but with apparent emotion,” Adams would report to Foreign Secretary John Jay. “Whether it was in the nature of the interview, or whether it was my visible agitation, for I felt more than I did or could express, that touched him, I cannot say. But he was much affected, and answered me with more tremor than I had spoken with.

The circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper, and the feelings you have discovered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurance of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad that the choice has fallen upon you to be their minister. I wish you, sir, to believe, and that it be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought myself indispensable bound to do by the duty which I owed to my people. I will be very frank with you, I was the last to consent to separation; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.

He could not vouch that these were the exact words, Adams cautioned in his letter to Jay, for the King’s manner of speaking had been so odd and strained. (It was Adam’s first encounter with the famous stutter of George III.) “He hesitated some time between his periods, and between the members of the same period. He was indeed much affected.”

Smiling, the King changed the subject. “There is an opinion among some people that you are not the most attached of all your countrymen to the manners of France,” he said.

Adams, embarrassed, replied, “I must avow to your Majesty, I have no attachment but to my own country.”

“An honest man will never have any other,” the King said approvingly, and with a bow signaled that the interview was ended.

(McCullough 2001, pp.336-337)

“That government is best which governs least.”

Besides, the country had no tradition of union. Indeed, Americans were long accustomed to putting the interests of region or state ahead of those of the nation, except during war, and not always then. Following the Revolution, General Nathanael Greene had written to Washington from South Carolina that “many people secretly with that every state be completely independent and that as soon as our public debts are liquidated that Congress should be no more.”

North and South, the new Constitution had been vehemently opposed as a threat to the rights of the states and thus to individual liberty. Two sides had formes, 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.” And the outcome had been anything but certain. Not until June 1788, the week the Adamses were unpacking at Braintree, had the Constitution been finally secured, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify.

“The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us,” young schoolmaster Adams had written in his percipient letter to Nathan Webb, and to Adams now, as to others, dissolution remained the greatest single threat to the American experiment. “The fate of this government,” he would write from New York to his former law clerk, William Tudor, “depends absolutely upon raising it above the state governments.” The first line of the Constitution made the point, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.397)

He had left home not knowing where he and Abigail might live, not knowing what salary Congress would provide, and worries over money troubled him exceedingly. Adams had strong views on the matter of recompense for officholders. 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. Were a law to be made “that no man should hold should hold an office who had not a private income sufficient for the subsistence and prospects of himself and family,” Adams had written earlier while in Lindon, then the consequence would be that “all offices would be monopolized by the rich; the poor and the middling ranks would be excluded and an aristocratic despotism would immediately follow.” He thought public officials should not only be paid, but that their salaries should be commensurate with their responsibilities and necessary expenses. And as one of the “middling ranks” himself, he viewed with great concern the expenses of living in New York.

Having had no word from Washington, he knew nothing of what might be on the General’s mind, and one wonders how much worse he might have felt had he known. “May Heaven assist me,” Washington had written privately, “for at present I see nothing but clouds and darkness before me.” If Adams was concerned about making ends meet, Washington had had to arrange a loan to cover personal debts and the expense of moving to New York. Greatest was his worry that the country would expect too much of him.

(McCullough 2001, pp.400)

As so often before when feeling battered and unappreciated, Adams poured out his fury and frustration on paper. To Rush he insisted he was as much a republican as ever. Still, he did not see hereditary monarchy and aristocracy as necessarily contrary to human nature. Nor was it beyond reason to imagine that the time could come when America, of necessity, might have to resort to something of the kind – as “an asylum against discord, seditions, and civil war” – in order to preserve the laws and liberties of the people. He did not expect to see anything like this happen in his lifetime. He was only saying it was conceivable.

“I am a mortal and irreconcilable enemy to monarchy,” he would later tell Rush, after Rush expressed worry that Adams had abandoned the ideals of 1776. “I am no friend to hereditary limited monarchy in America,” Adams wrote explicitly. “Do not, therefore, my friend, misunderstand me and misrepresent me to posterity.

I deny an “attachment to monarchy,” and I deny that I have “changed my principles since 1776.” … The continent is a kind of whispering gallery and acts and speeches are reverberated around from New York in all directions. The report is very loud at a distance when the whisper is very gentle in the center.

But this was written later, when the new government, as well as Adams’s own role in it, had become more stable. In the meanwhile, even Rush conceded that he was equally distraught over the moral temper of the times and the long-range prospects for America. “A hundred years hence, absolute monarchy will probably be rendered necessary in our country by the corruption of our people,” wrote the usually optimistic physician. He asked only that the republican ideal be given a fair chance, which Adams was not only willint, but determined, to do.

(McCullough 2001, pp.410-411)

Like Washington and many others, Adams had become increasingly distraught over the rise of political divisiveness, the forming of parties or factions. That political parties were an evil that could bring the ruination of republican government was doctrine he, with other, had long accepted and espoused. “There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other,” Adams had observed to a correspondent while at Amsterdam, before the Revolution ended. Yet this was exactly what had happened. The “turbulent maneuvers” of factions, he now wrote privately, could “tie the hands and destroy the influence” of every honest man with a desire to serve the public good. There was “division of sentiments over everything,” he told his son-in-law William Smith. “How few aim at the good of the whole, without aiming too much at the prosperity of parts!”

(McCullough 2001, pp.422)

Then, on a morning in June, the historic “compromise of 1790” began to take from, when Hamilton and Jefferson met outside the President’s house and Hamilton, taking Jefferson by the arm, walked him up and down for half an hour, urging him, for the sake of the union, to join in “common cause” and resolve acceptance of the assumption bill. Professing that reasonable men ought to be able to reach a compromise, Jefferson invited Hamilton and Madison to dine at his house the next day. And there, over a bottle of Jefferson’s best wine, the bargain was struck. In return for southern support for the assumption bill, Hamilton agreed to do all he could to persuade the Pennsulvanians to vote for a permanent capital by the Potomac, if it were agreed to move the capital temporarily to Philadelphia. Madison said he would not vote for assumption, but them neither would he be “strenuous” in opposition.

Whether, in fact, the outcome was resolved in this fashion is not altogether clear, but certainly Jefferson believed the bargain had been settled, for on July 1 he wrote William Short in Paris to have his furniture and paintings shipped to Philadelphia.

The crucial vote on residence, however, was made not in the House but in the Senate, where apparently an agreement had already been reached between the Pennsylvanians and the Birginians. When a last-minute motion to keep the capital in New York for two more years resulted in a thirteen-to-thirteen tie, Adams cast a nay vote.

By July 12 both houses of Congress had voted to relocate the capital in Philadelphia for ten years – until the turn of the century – after which it would move to a permanent site on the Potomac. The Pennsylvanians went along with the agreement, convinced that once the capital was located in Philadelphia it would never move. Adams was inclined to agree. A capital, he said, ought to be in a great city, an idea no Virginian would ever have entertained.

With the passage of the assumption bill at the end of the month came cries of “intrigues, cabals, and combinations.” New Yorkers were outraged. Senator Maclay speculated that, if the truth were known, Washington was behind the whole arrangement, which indeed he was, and in the first public criticism of the President, the New York Advertiser charged him with gross ingratitude to the city of New York.

(McCullough 2001, pp.425-426)

Contrary to the expectations of nearly everyone, Adams did not ask for a declaration of war against France. Had he done so, the Congress would assuredly have obliged. Instead, they turned their attention to the enemies at home.

Another Philadelphia summer had arrived. The temperature in the last week of June was in the 90s, “the weather so hot and close, the flies so tormenting,” Abigail wrote, she hardly had energy to move. “Not a leaf stirs till nine or ten o’clock … It grows sickly, the city noisome.” In two sweltering weeks, their popularity and confidence never higher, the Federalist majority in Congress passed into law extreme measures that Adams had not asked for or encouraged. But then neither did he oppose them, and their passage and his signature on them were to be rightly judged by history as the most reprehensible acts of his presidency. Still, the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 must be seen in the context of the time, and the context was tumult and fear.

Adams later spoke of the Alien and Sedition Acts as war measures. It was how he saw them then, and how he chose to remember them. “I knew there was need enough of both, and therefore I consented to them,” he would write in explanation long afterward, and at the time, the majority of Congress and most of the country were in agreement.

There was rampant fear of the enemy within. French emigres in America, according to the French consul in Philadelphia, by now numbered 25,000 or more. Many were aristocrats who had fled the Terror; but the majority were refugees from the slave uprisings on the Caribbean island of San Domingo. In Philadelphia a number of French newspapers had been established. There were French booksellers, French schools, French boarding houses, and French restaurants. The French, it seemed, were everywhere, and who was to measure the threat they posed in the event of war with France?

In addition to the French there were the “wild Irish,” refugees from the Irish Rebellion of 1798 who were thought to include dangerous radicals and in any case, because of their anti-British sentiment, gladly joined ranks with the Republicans. James Callender was sometimes cited as a prime example of this type, apart from the fact that Callender was a Scot.

Beyond that, the United States was at war – declared or not – and there were in fact numbers of enemy agents operating in the country.

(McCullough 2001, pp.504-505)

Let the grumblers wake up to the “brightest, best and most peaceful days they now see,” declared Abigail. Her old delight in being at the center of things had returned in full flower. In unseasonably mild weather, she was out and about taking walks, making calls, receiving visitors, and enjoying the current spectacle of Philadelphia society. For in its last winter as the nation’s capital, the city “intended to sine.” “I have heard of ‘Once a man and twice a child’ and the ladies’ caps are an exact copy of baby’s caps,” Abigail began her report to Mary on “gay attire,” showing no less delight in details – sleeves, buttons, petticoats, hairstyles – than once she had when writing from Paris.

(McCullough 2001, pp.532)

That the contest for the presidency in 1800 was to be unlike any of the three preceding presidential elections was clear at once. For the first (and last) time in history, the President was running against the Vice President. The two political parties had also come into their own with a vitality and vengeance exceeding anything in the country’s experience.

Further, under the Sedition Act anyone openly criticizing the President ran the risk of being fined or sent to prison. Since the first sensational case against Congressman Matthew (“Spitting”) Lyon of Vermont, eleven others had been charged and convicted under the law. In one instance, a New Jersey tavern loafer who had done no more than cast aspersions on the President’s posterior was arrested, prosecuted, and fined $150.

(McCullough 2001, pp.536)

When members of the Massachusetts legislature came to Quincy to present Adams with a tribute to his devoted service to his country, he was moved to tears.

Feelings of dejection and bitterness would come and go for a long time. Nearly six months after the return to Quincy, in a letter to Billy Shaw, Adams would allow that if he had it to do over again he would have been a shoemaker. His own father, the man he admired above all, had been a shoemaker. Joseph Bass, the young neighbor who had ridden with Adams to Philadelphia the winter of 1776, was a shoemaker and a familiar figure still in Quincy, as well liked and respected as ever.

Long before, on his rounds of Boston as a young lawyer, Adams had often heard a man with a fine voice singing behind the door of an obscure house. One day, curious to know who “this cheerful mortal” might be, he had knocked at the door, to find a poor shoemaker with a large family living in a single room. Did he find it hard getting by, Adams had asked. “Sometimes,” the man said. Adams ordered a pair of shoes. “I had scarcely got out the door before he began to sing again like a nightingale,” Adams remembered. “Which was the greatest philosopher? Epictetus or this shoemaker?” he would ask when telling the story.

Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, had said, among other things, “It is difficulties that show what men are.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.570-571)

It is an idea of the Christian religion, and ever has been of all believers of the immortality of the soul, that the intellectual part of man is capable of progressive improvement for ever. Where then is the sense of calling the perfectibility of man an original idea or modern discovery … I consider the perfectibility of man as used by modern philosophers to be mere words without a meaning, that is mere nonsense.

He had himself, he told Rush, “an immense load of errors, weaknesses, follies and sins to mourn over and repent of.” These were “the only affliction” of his present life. But St. Paul had taught him to rejoice ever more and be content. “This phrase ‘rejoice ever more’ shall never be out of my heart, memory or mouth again as long as I live, if I can help it. This is my perfectibility of man.”

The letters sparkled with aphorisms – on the virtue of America standing free from binding involvement with other nations: “We stand well, let us stand still”; on the perils of majority rule: “Absolute power in a majority is as drunk as it is in one”; on lawyers: “No civilized society can do without lawyers.” Of kings and presidents, Adams said he saw little to distinguish them from other men. “If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle.” In a spirited appraisal of the overall folderol of an election year, he wrote:

Our electioneering racers have started for the prize. Such a whipping and spurring and huzzaing! Oh what rare sport it will be! Through thick and thin, through mire and dirt, through bogs and fens and sloughs, dashing and splashing and crying out, the devil take the hindmost.

How long will it be possible that honor, truth or virtue should be respected among a people who are engaged in such a quick and perpetual succession of such profligate collisions and conflicts?

(McCullough 2001, pp.591)

Like countless grandparents in all times, Abigail worried that she might be spoiling the grandchildren under her charge. “I begin to think grandparents not so well qualified to educate grandchildren as parents,” she wrote to Nabby. “They are apt to relax in their spirit of government, and be too indulgent.” It was a thought that appears never to have concerned John Adams.

(McCullough 2001, pp.598)

On June 24 at Monticello, after considerable labor, Jefferson completed a letter to the mayor of Washington declining an invitation to the Fourth of July celebration at Washington. It was his farewell public offering and one of his most eloquent, a tribute to the “worthies” of 1776 and the jubilee that was to take place in their honor. Within days it was reprinted all over the country.

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government … All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind had not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are the grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return to this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

(McCullough 2001, pp.644-645)

Arriving at Quincy on July 13, the President went directly to his father’s house, where suddenly the gravity of his loss hit him for the first time.

Everything about the house is the same [he wrote]. I was not fully sensible of the change till I entered his bedchamber … That moment was inexpressibly painful, and struck me as if it had been an arrow to my heart. My father and mother have departed. The charm which has always made this house to me an abode of enchantment is dissolved; and yet my attachment to it, and to the whole region around, is stronger than I ever felt it before.

(McCullough 2001, pp.648)

Unlike Jefferson, Adams had not composed his own epitaph. Jefferson, characteristically, had both designed the stone obelisk that was to mark his grave at Monticello and specified what was to be inscribed upon it, conspicuously making no mention of the fact that he had been governor of Virginia, minister to France, Secretary of State, Vice President of the United States, or President of the United States. It was his creative work that he wished most to be remembered for:

Here Was Buried
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Author of the Declaration of American Independence,
Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom,
And Father of the University of Virginia

Adams had, however, composed an inscription to be carved into the sarcophagus lid of Henry Adams, the first Adams to arrive in Massachusetts, in 1638.

This stone and several others [it read] have been placed in this yard by a great, great, grandson from a veneration of the piety, humility, simplicity, prudence, frugality, industry and perseverance of his ancestors in hopes of recommending an affirmation of their virtues to their posterity.

Adams had chosen to say nothing of any of his own attainments, but rather to place himself as part of a continuum, and to evoke those qualities of character that he had been raised on and that he had strived for so long to uphold.

(McCullough 2001, pp.649)

“The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know … Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.”

But the accomplished orators who celebrated the two “idols of the hour” had all drawn on the historic record, or what could be gathered from secondhand accounts. They had not known Adams or Jefferson, or their “heroic times,” from firsthand experience. Those who had were all but vanished.

It was among the children of his children that Adams and his words to the wise would live longest in memory. “The Lord deliver us from all family pride,” he had written to John Quincy’s son John, for example. “No pride, John, no pride.”

“You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little,” he had told Caroline, in response to her quandary over the riddles of life. “The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know … Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough. … So questions and so answers your affectionate grandfather.”

Adams had, however, arrived at certain bedrock conclusions before the end came. He believed, with all his heart, as he had written to Jefferson, that no effort in favor of virtue was lost.

He felt he had lived in the greatest of times, that the eighteenth century, as he also told Jefferson, was for all its errors and vices “the most honorable” to human nature. “Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused; arts, sciences useful to man, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any period.”

His faith in God and the hereafter remained unshaken. His fundamental creed, he had reduced to a single sentence: “He who loves the workman and his work, and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of Him.”

(McCullough 2001, pp.650)

References

McCullough, David. 2001. John Adams. N.p.: Simon & Schuster.

ISBN 978-0-684-81363-9