At the end of Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, King George III sings of President George Washington stepping down, and John Adams, the incumbent Vice President, winning election.* Adams had met King George years before when serving as the first American ambassador to Great Britain in 1785. George III reminisces about his memory of meeting the “little guy” and then blurts out in falsetto: “President John Adams – Good Luck!”

Adams inherited the Presidency from Washington, one of our greatest Presidents. He was filling the shoes of a natural born leader who fit the part straight out of central casting, a General who had used his immense personal strength and abilities to fight the British and bring all Americans together. Adams, on the other hand, was not out of central casting. He was considered short at 5’7” (not that short – I am only 5’6”), squat, cantankerous, and loud. But Adams was also seen as a man of immense principles – he was honest, straight spoken, and a man of both immense wisdom and character. Ben Franklin, who served with Adams in the Second Continental Congress, on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, and with him as a diplomat in France, once wrote of Adams that “he means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.” After reading David McCullough’s Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Adams, I have an image of Adams in my mind of a sage, proud, loud, and slightly grumpy grandfather, who strives to do what is best for his nation, and who ultimately succeeds, but never received real recognition for all he has done.

McCullough initially set out to write a joint biography of Adams and Thomas Jefferson, however, he felt that Adams, looking back through history, outshined his peer. Adams spent his entire adult life building the foundations of America. He believed in the ideals of republicanism: the rule of law, the separation of powers as a form of checks and balances, and the inherent rights of man. Jefferson, Adams’ one-time friend and virtual arch-nemesis once in office, once called Adams the “Colossus of Independence” for all he had done to help bring America into existence. Adams believed that “Government is nothing more than the combined force of society…for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people,” and he spent his life, until his defeat in the Presidential election of 1800, trying to provide these virtues for the people of America.

Adams grew up firmly in what we would call the middle class. He did not come from wealth, and he definitely did not have the type of social skills that would have ingratiated him with the wealthy. McCullough notes that “he was not a man of the world. He enjoyed no social standing. He was an awkward dancer and poor at cards. He never learned to flatter.” Instead, Adams had a keen intellect and a firm sense of morals. He became a lawyer, and rose to fame in Massachusetts opposing the Stamp Act and serving as the defense counsel for the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. Despite the strong risk to personal his reputation and law practice, Adams felt that the soldiers deserved the right to counsel, and won the case (though the two soldiers who had fired into the crowd were convicted of manslaughter). The trial won him fame, and led to his election to the Massachusetts legislature, and eventually the First and Second Continental Congresses.

In the Congresses, Adams quickly joined all the important conversations; he proved to be a work horse sitting on 90 committees and chairing 25 of them. In 1775, it was Adams who nominated George Washington to serve as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental army. While in the Congress, he published the pamphlet Thoughts on Government, which laid out a framework for divided government, much of which was adopted by numerous states and eventually the Federal government.** He was also selected to serve on the Committee of Five, which was charged with drafting a declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson, also on the Committee, asked Adams to write the document, but Adams declined and laid out three reasons in a letter to Jefferson: “Reason first: you are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: You can write ten times better than I can.” Adams did help edit the document and led the oral arguments within the Congress to adopt it, and with Jefferson, signed the Declaration when it was adopted.

In 1778, Adams sailed for France to serve as a commissioner alongside Benjamin Franklin and others. In France, he strongly urged the French to utilize their Navy to support American forces on land, a strategy that ultimately proved successful at the Battle of Yorktown. He later served as the Ambassador to the Netherlands, where he secured a loan for the young American government. McCullough argues that this loan may have saved the Republic, though the loan was not actually granted till nine months after the Battle of Yorktown, when the outcome of the war was mostly decided. Adams then traveled back to France where he helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris, formally ended the Revolutionary War. It was during this time that he became close friends with Thomas Jefferson, another commissioner to the peace talks. At one point in 1787, Adams and his wife Abigail even cared for Jefferson’s daughter for a period of many months. In 1785, Adams became the first American Ambassador to Great Britain, where he, as mentioned above, personally met King George III.

In 1788, while the new Constitution was in the midst of a battle for ratification amongst the States, John Adams returned to New England as a private citizen. In January 1789, he was elected Vice President, based upon his diplomatic successes, his leadership in the Continental Congresses, and the need for a prominent New Englander to balance George Washington, a Virginian. Like many who came after him, Adams found the Vice Presidency relatively boring, though he took the role seriously and personally chaired the Senate every day. He became involved in an early scandal regarding by what title the President and other leaders should be addressed, preferring a lofty address such as Highness; for this many derided his character and accused him of being a closet monarchist for the rest of political life.***

In 1796, after George Washington declined to run again following two successful terms, the nation quickly divided into Federalist and Republican (also later called the Democratic-Republican Party) camps. The Federalists, led by Adams and Alexander Hamilton, generally supported Adams for the top job. The Republicans supported Thomas Jefferson. Neither candidate campaigned directly; Adams won by a narrow margin, with Jefferson coming in second and winning the Vice Presidency (the 12^th Amendment, ratified in 1804, would virtually end the possibility of a split administration between opposing parties). Of the day of his inauguration, the new President Adams later wrote that he caught a look on Washington’s face and “Me Thought I heard him think, ‘Aye! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be happiest!’”

McCullough makes much of the fact that Adams was not the same type of leader as Washington, stating “nor was Adams like George Washington immensely popular, elected unanimously, and all but impervious to criticism. He had no loyal following as Washington had [and] no coterie of friends in Congress. Further, there was the looming reality that America at the moment had no military strength on land or sea [and] French privateers continued to prey on the American merchant fleet at will and there was no way to stop them.” The threat of war with France (known as the Quasi-War) dominated Adams’ Presidency. As a result of the French Revolution and the Jay Treaty, signed between England and America in 1795 that helped resolve many of the lingering issues between the two powers following the Revolutionary War, France became more hostile to the young nation and began seizing American ships on the high seas. Adams called for a peace envoy to France, a national property tax, and a major naval buildup, leading to a Navy of almost 50 ships and 5000 sailors by the time he left office. The peace envoys arrived in France, where massive bribes were demanded of them to begin negotiations (later known as the XYZ Affair). Americans considered this a national insult, much of the country rallied around Adams’ military build-up, and his popularity soared.

At the height of his popularity, Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law in 1798, which allowed the President to imprison and deport non-U.S. citizens deemed to be dangerous or hostile to America and criminalized false statements that were critical of the Federal government. Republicans, led by James Madison and Vice President Jefferson, decried these laws as a way to suppress those opposed to the Federalists. Federalists claimed they were necessary for national security; they were partially created due to the threat of French agents found preparing military plans in France’s Louisiana territory. While the laws were seldom used by Adams, they served as a major catalyst to bring the Republicans together and unite them against the Administration.

In 1799, Adams took “the most decisive action of his presidency.” Siding with Jefferson and the Republicans against Hamilton and the Federalists, he surprised his own Cabinet and his allies in Congress by announcing another peace envoy to France. Adams could have ridden his new-found personal popularity to war with France, a war that likely would have cost thousands their lives and could have ended America before it had yet stood on its own feet. Federalist leadership supported the idea of a potential war, as it likely would have won the support of the people initially and led to their success in the coming election. However, war also would likely have cost thousands of lives and could have been disastrous for the young nation. The decision to pursue peace split the Federalist party, and led to Hamilton opposing Adams’ reelection in 1800.****

The election of 1800 was the first election when “two political parties had come into their own with a vitality and vengeance exceeding anything in the country’s experience,” with Vice President Jefferson running against the President.***** The election quickly turned nasty and personal attacks became routine. McCullough’s witty summary of the various attacks clearly shows that politics has always been a contact sport, even if both men stayed above the fray and let their surrogates do the fighting. Adams was “inevitably excoriated as a monarchist, more British than American, and therefore a bad man. He was ridiculed as old, addled, and toothless.” Jefferson, meanwhile, “was decried as a hopeless visionary, a weakling, an intriguer intoxicated with French philosophy, more a Frenchman than an American, and therefore a bad man.” Jefferson “tagged Adams with being both mentally unsound and a monarchist.” There is significant irony in the fact that Jefferson, an owner of more than 500 slaves and a large plantation, could paint Adams as an aristocrat who “if he could, would enslave the common people.” Adams, in reality, hated slavery and tilled his own (much smaller) New England farm with his family and only hired labor.

The election was close. Adams received 65 Electoral College votes, in third place behind Jefferson’s and Aaron Burr’s 73 votes each. While the news arrived too late to affect the election, his peace envoy to France had been a success, leading to the Convention of Mortefontaine and ending the Quasi-War. While serving as a lame duck, Adams still took significant actions that he felt were right, such as nominating Secretary of State John Marshall as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Marshall would go on to serve 34 years on the Court, uphold the principle of Judicial Review, and set many of the precedents followed by the Court still today. On March 4, 1801, Jefferson’s inauguration day, Adams rode of our Washington before dawn. He was proud of his accomplishments, writing that he had left his former friend and current nemesis a nation “with its coffers full” and “fair prospects of peace with all the world smiling in its face, its commerce flourishing, its navy glorious, its agriculture uncommonly productive and lucrative.”

After leaving office, Adams returned to his farm in Massachusetts and worked the land. Eventually, he and Jefferson reconciled in 1812, beginning a voluminous correspondence between the two. While they rarely discussed politics, they did rekindle their friendship. Following the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which allowed Maine to enter the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, Adams wrote a foreboding letter to Jefferson warning of the possibility of a war over slavery that might “rend this mighty [American] fabric in twain.” Adams had always hated slavery, calling it an “abhorrence” and “foul contagion in the human character.” He thought he and Jefferson should do something, but he didn’t know what they should do. Jefferson never responded to the letter.

Adams lived to see his son inaugurated as the 6^th President in 1825. With John Quincy in office, the elder Adams passed away on the 4^th of July, 1826, fittingly on the 50^th Anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence which he had helped write, argued in support of, and signed. His last words, not knowing that Jefferson had passed away a few hours earlier, were “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

President John Adams was a complicated man. He was not a solider, but he was a fighter. He fought for what he believed in. He helped organize and lead the Revolutionary War, even when it seemed there was no hope of winning. He tried to do the right thing, even if it cost him politically and personally. He raised taxes and sued for peace as President, despite both actions being unpopular; yet in the lens of history, both actions were the right ones. He made mistakes, such as signing the Alien and Sedition Acts despite their inherent contradiction with First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech. When weighed against the test of time, Adams was a great, yet imperfect, man, and a strong, yet imperfect, president.

McCullough has written a testament to Adams life. He paints Adams in a favorable light, despite his seemingly irascibility, prideful temperament, and sense of intransigence. The book reads almost as a novel, bringing the 18^th century to life with both a love story between Adams and Abagail (though they rarely living together due to his extensive political travels) and tales of intrigue and hardship as Adams dutifully tried to find ways to make government succeed. The best parts, for me, were the juxta-positioning of Adams and Jefferson, two lions of their day, who were friends, were torn apart by politics, and then reunited as friends again before passing in to history books on the same historic day. However, there were contradictions that I wish McCullough more deeply explored, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts. McCullough shows that Adams, like all our founding fathers and most of our leaders, was a complex man and wrestled with doing what he believed was the right thing. The book has helped rebuild Adams’ reputation – it is worth your time.

Score: 8 – maybe a few too many long winded quotes (possibly like Adams), but a great biography worth the time.

 

* I am a huge Hamilton fan; the George III songs are amazing. Also, I was told this introduction didn’t really fit the tone of this review – but I like the musical too much. I had to include it.

** This pamphlet included the memorable phrase “Fear is the foundation of most governments.”

*** An example of how an early political misstep can haunt someone for the rest of their career.

**** I am an Alexander Hamilton fan as well; he is the father of the Coast Guard after all. Adams once said of Hamilton: “[Either] the man is stark mad or I am.”

***** In a strangely coincidental turn of events, the ensuing Presidential elections would remain relatively pacific until John Quincy Adams was running for reelection as President after just one term and was defeated by Andrew Jackson in 1828.

 

All quotes are from John Adams by David McCullough.