Presidents' Day 2002

Week of Monday, February 18, 2002

If you want to read an excellent biography about an exceptional life, and in the process to refresh your memory about the birth of our country, by all means read John Adams by David McCullough (who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on Harry Truman).¹ Along with Washington and Jefferson, no one was more instrumental than Adams in America's break with Great Britain, and by many accounts it was he who was the chief architect of the fledgling nation.

Raised in modest New England circumstances (he idolized his father who was a shoemaker), John Adams (1735–1826) attended Harvard when that university was comprised of four buildings, seven faculty and about a hundred students. Eventually he distinguished himself as an accomplished lawyer, a brilliant scholar who was fluent in Latin, Greek and French, and a serious farmer who was as comfortable chopping wood as translating Justinian (43). Unlike the scholar-farmer Jefferson, Adams never accumulated slaves (see below) or massive debt, but instead liked to describe himself as “an old fielder,” which, as he explained to his wife Abigail, “is a tough, hardy, laborious little horse that works very hard and lives upon very little, very useful to his master at small expense” (470). As McCullough points out, this was anything but the leisurely past time of a gentleman-farmer; it was hard work for modest returns (573).

A delegate to the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia, Adams was chosen as one of the Committee of Five to prepare the Declaration of Independence. Almost unbelievably, on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration, he and Thomas Jefferson died only six hours apart the same day. It was Adams above all people who understood that the break with Britain was the easy part, and that the country's really heavy lifting required building a government “of laws and not of men.” As an astute observer of people (48–49), Adams articulated a separation of powers due to his grim view of human nature and its chronic lust for power. His authorship of the Massachusetts constitution and the volume Thoughts on Government would have been a lifetime contribution for most people.

After about ten years as a diplomat in France, Holland and England, Adams served as our country's first vice president for two terms under George Washington. He then succeeded Washington as our second president when America consisted of sixteen states. His vice president, Thomas Jefferson, would in turn succeed him and serve two terms (the only time in presidential history when a vice president ran for office against his president). He then returned to his modest farm, where he spent the last twenty-five or so years of his life. About a year before he died at the age of ninety-one, his son, John Quincy Adams, was elected our sixth president (1825).

Adams had what McCullough calls “an overriding sense of duty” to public service, even at a great personal sacrifice, “an almost superhuman devotion to the American cause” (384). Adams himself would say, “our obligation to our country never ceases but with our lives” (387). But beyond his remarkable political contributions in the early years of our country, what I most admired about Adams, and what McCullough does such a fine job of weaving into the story, is the rich texture of his personal life. After reading the book you are left with the feeling of having encountered a deeply human person who was larger than life.

McCullough portrays Adams as a devout Christian and committed churchman. His reputation for personal integrity, even among his most vicious detractors, was never besmirched. Adams liked to describe his conscience as “neat and easy.” Late in his life he would write to his grandson John,

Have you considered the meaning of that word “worthy”? Weigh it well...I had rather you should be worthy of one thousand pounds honestly acquired by your labor and industry, than of ten millions by banks and tricks. I had rather you be worthy shoemakers than secretaries of state or treasure acquired by libels in newspapers. I had rather you be worthy makers of brooms and baskets than unworthy presidents of the United States procured by intrigue, factious slander and corruption (608–609).

The most important decision Adams ever made, says McCullough, was to marry Abigail, his wife of fifty-four years. Openly affectionate, their devotion to one another was legendary. Adams, for example, would refer to her as his “best, dearest, worthiest, wisest friend in the world” (18). With over 1,000 letters between them surviving, their marriage forms a significant subplot throughout the entire book. Like most marriages, John and Abigail experienced pain and sorrow, trial and temptation. During his long absences, she ran the farm. As a public figure of international prominence, they both endured his own share of vicious criticisms and betrayals (including those by Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson). Of their five children, Susanna died when she was barely a year old, Charles died of alcoholism at the age of 30, Nabby died from cancer at the age of 49, while Thomas struggled through life as an underachieving drinker. Through it all they displayed grace and resolve.

Adams abhorred slavery as “a foul contagion in the human character” and “an evil of colossal magnitude” (134). Slavery, in his view, was also the greatest threat to the unity of the fragile, new nation. He never outlined a plan to solve the problem, although he favored gradual emancipation. Abigail was of the same mind and every bit as articulate: “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” (104).

Despite such enormous accomplishments on the stage of world history, Adams was, finally, a man of wise perspective, given to a rather philosophic disposition toward life. The contrast of the inscriptions for the tombstones of Jefferson and Adams is revealing. Jefferson's is short and simple, identifying his life with three accomplishments: author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia. Adams said nothing at all about his accomplishments, but instead chose to identify his life with an inscription he had composed for the sarcophagus lid of Henry Adams, the first Adams who came to Massachusetts in 1638: “This stone and several others 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” (649).

A final story. When his granddaughter Caroline once expressed her frustrations about the many riddles of life, Adams offered this eminently Biblical and Christian advice: “You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little. 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” (650).