Revolutionary leader John Adams was born on October 30, 1735, in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts. His father was a farmer who had held office as a selectman and militia officer. In 1751 John Adams gained admission to Harvard, becoming the first of his family to attend college. When he graduated in 1755, he accepted a position as a teacher in Worcester, Massachusetts. The life of a provincial schoolmaster did not appeal to Adams, and he began to read law with James Putnam, a prominent Worcester lawyer. In 1758 he returned to Braintree to practice law. During the years when he established his legal practice, Adams began to court Abigail Smith, the daughter of a minister, William Smith, from neighboring Weymouth. They were married on October 25, 1764. John and Abigail Adams enjoyed a long, loving, and happy marriage that lasted for 54 years until Abigail's death in 1818.

Adams's legal work frequently took him to Boston, where he became involved in the movement against British imperial regulations. In 1765 he penned a series of anonymous articles for the Boston Gazette in opposition to the Stamp Act (1765). These articles, which were collected and published as A Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, traced the origin and rise of freedom. Britons derived their rights, Adams argued, from God, not from the Crown or Parliament. Adams also opposed the Stamp Act more explicitly when he drafted the Braintree Instructions, in which he asserted the Stamp Act was unconstitutional because colonial Americans had not consented to it. Through these writings, Adams established himself as an articulate and intelligent critic of British imperial regulations.

As a lawyer, Adams believed in the rule of law. He demonstrated this commitment in 1770 when he agreed to defend the British soldiers tried for murder as a result of the so-called Boston Massacre (March 5, 1770). Adams, along with Josiah Quincy, secured acquittals for the accused soldiers except for two who were convicted of a lesser charge of manslaughter. Radicals criticized Adams in the Boston press for his role in the trial. His defense of the soldiers revealed a willingness to challenge popular sentiment, a position that would characterize much of Adams's later public career.

In the wake of the adoption of the Coercive Acts (1774) in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party (December 16, 1773), Adams concluded that reconciliation between Britain and the colonies was unlikely. In 1774, when he represented Massachusetts in the First Continental Congress, Adams went to Philadelphia as one of the foremost radicals in the revolutionary movement.

Between 1774 and 1777 Adams served in the First Continental Congress and the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. This was probably the most productive and important period in his long public career. In 1775, under the pseudonym Novanglus (New Englander), he published a series of newspaper essays in which he argued that Parliament could only regulate the external trade of the colonies and, therefore, its revenue acts were illegal. He contended that colonial Americans had sought to preserve the British constitution, but it was the British government that had acted in an unconstitutional manner. When fighting broke out in spring 1775, Adams worked tirelessly within Congress and made crucial contributions to the war effort as chair of the Board of War and Ordnance. In June 1775 he successfully advocated the appointment of the Virginian George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental army. Washington's appointment indicated that the rebellion would be a united colonial effort rather than just a New England affair. Adams was also an early and forceful advocate of the creation of a navy to challenge British dominance at sea. By 1778, when he left Congress, he had served on more congressional committees--90--than anyone else, chairing 25 of them. His myriad efforts led the New York congressman John Jay to describe Adams as "the first man in the House."

Adams also contributed to the debate over independence. In January 1776 he published Thoughts on Government, a pamphlet that set out a design as to how the colonies could govern themselves if independent; he recommended republican legislative and executive forms for the state governments. In May 1776 he helped to draft the resolutions debated by Congress that would declare the colonies independent, and in June he served on the committee that assisted Thomas Jefferson in drafting the Declaration of Independence. On July 1 he delivered a speech in favor of independence, which played a crucial role in the next day's congressional vote to declare the colonies free of British rule.

Adams spent most of the decade from 1778 to 1788 abroad on diplomatic missions on behalf of the fledgling United States in France, The Netherlands, and Great Britain. As a diplomat he secured loans from the Dutch to help finance the Revolutionary War (1775-83), chaired the commission that negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1783), and served as the first ambassador from the United States to Britain between 1785 and 1788. Despite these achievements, Adams found his years as a diplomat trying. For much of his time abroad he was isolated from Abigail and their children. Combative, blunt, and sometimes abrasive, Adams was ill-suited for diplomacy. Soon after his arrival in France, he fell out with Benjamin Franklin and offended his French hosts.

During Adams's service abroad, significant constitutional developments occurred in the United States, including ratification of the Articles of Confederation and the writing and ratification of the U.S. Constitution, to which he was an indirect contributor. In 1779 he had been the major author of the draft of the relatively conservative constitution for Massachusetts that was eventually adopted in 1780. That constitution created a bicameral legislature, strong executive and judiciary branches, a limited franchise, and a bill of rights. It served as one of James Madison's models when drafting the federal Constitution. Adams also contributed to the debate over the Constitution when he published Defense of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States in three volumes in 1787 and 1788. The work--a wide-ranging (and occasionally rambling) commentary on the history, structure, and functioning of political systems--presented Adams's arguments in favor of a centralized bicameral system such as the one he had designed for Massachusetts. Defense of Constitutions signaled that Adams, the radical of 1776, was, by 1788, more closely identified with the conservative wing of the revolutionary movement.

As early as 1770, when he defended the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre, Adams had expressed skepticism about placing too much faith in the will of the common people. He believed that the public, whose will must be consulted in a republic, could also be fickle, passionate, and unstable. By 1788 he feared, as did many supporters of the Constitution, that excessive democracy was as much a threat to liberty in the United States as royal tyranny in 1776 and parliamentary high-handedness (the Stamp Act) in 1765. Adams believed his concern about popular upheaval was confirmed by the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789-99). In response to civil disorder in Europe and North America, he published a series of essays called Discourses on Davila (1791), which reflected his increasingly conservative views on politics.

Owing to this outlook, Adams was associated with the Federalist Party (though he was not close to the party's leader, Alexander Hamilton). In 1789 he was elected vice president to serve under George Washington. Although he described the vice presidency as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived," Adams served two terms as Washington's deputy. Unfortunately, his years as vice president are most remembered for the debate he initiated over the proper way to address the president. This concern with the dignity of the executive office brought derision as Adams was charged with "noblemania"; referred to as the "Duke of Braintree"; and even ridiculed, because of his weight, as "His Rotundity." During the 1790s, sharp partisan divisions emerged between the Federalist Party, led by Washington and Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Jefferson and Madison. In the first openly contested presidential election in 1796, Adams defeated Jefferson in a narrowly sectional vote by 71 to 68 votes in the Electoral College.

The most urgent issue confronting Adams when he became president concerned relations between the United States and France. Great Britain and France had been at war since 1793. Although the United States pursued a policy of neutrality, Jay's Treaty (1794) had established a close trading relationship between Great Britain and the United States. The French interpreted Adams's victory as an endorsement of the Federalist Party's pro-British policy. In 1796 the French began seizing ships, and in early 1797 they expelled the U.S. ambassador at Versailles. The two nations engaged in an undeclared naval war (the Quasi-War, 1798-1800), and both sides felt that an open declaration of war was inevitable. Indeed, there was tremendous clamor in the United States for war with France in 1798. In anticipation of the conflict, Congress appropriated money to strengthen the nation's defenses and adopted a series of bills known as the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) to restrict citizenship for immigrants, take any necessary punitive measures against enemy aliens, and stifle internal dissent. Despite a brief surge in his own popularity and the pressure to declare war, Adams hesitated. Always one who preferred to be right rather than popular, he pursued long and complex negotiations with the French, which eventually prevented an open breach between the two former allies. However, his policy alienated many within his own party, especially Alexander Hamilton, who supported a war with France.

Adams stood for reelection in 1800 without the full support of his party. When he first assumed office, he had kept most of Washington's cabinet, but these men were more loyal to Hamilton than to Adams. In spring 1800, hearing of Hamilton's schemes to replace him with another candidate on the Federalist ticket, Adams dismissed some of the disloyal cabinet members. Hamilton then openly broke with him by writing a pamphlet declaring that Adams was unfit for the office of the president. Hamilton had intended the essay for private distribution, but it soon was published publicly, much to the joy of the Democratic-Republicans. In the controversial election of 1800, Adams finished third in the Electoral College behind Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Repudiated by the public and his party, he was bitterly disappointed. One of his last official acts was to fill a large number of lifetime judgeships with party jurists. The appointment of these so-called midnight judges angered the Democratic-Republicans because they were made after the election. Adams departed Washington, D.C., without attending the inauguration of his old friend, colleague, and successor, Thomas Jefferson.

Thirty-six years after the Stamp Act crisis, John Adams left public life in 1801. He spent the next 25 years on his farm in Massachusetts, where he also wrote newspaper articles reviewing the American Revolution and his presidency. In 1812 Benjamin Rush mediated the rebirth of the friendship between Adams and Jefferson. The two men carried on a long correspondence during their old age which remains a monument in the history of American letters. Adams lived to see his oldest son, John Quincy Adams, elected president in 1824.

John Adams died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Declaration of Independence. His last words were "Jefferson still survives." Yet Jefferson had died several hours earlier on the same day.

Bibliography:

1)         Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959)

2)         Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York: Norton, 2001)

3)         John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (New York: Owl Books, 1996)

4)         David G. McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001)

5)         Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976)

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