Adams, John

Adams, John (1735–1826), second President of the United States.As a young man in pre‐Revolutionary Boston, John Adams summed up his hopes: a modest fortune, and officer's rank in the militia, and election to the upper house of the Massachusetts assembly. He never grew wealthy or soldiered, but he succeeded in public life beyond his wildest expectations.

Born in Braintree, Massachusetts, to parents of modest means, Adams graduated from Harvard College in 1755, studied law, and in 1758 opened a legal practice in Boston. He had only one client during his first year and did not win a case before a jury for three years. In 1764, Adams married Abigail Smith of nearby Weymouth, a formidable figure in her own right. Four of their five children survived to adulthood, including the future President John Quincy Adams.

In 1770, representing the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre, Adams won significant legal victories for his clients and himself. At first he remained in the background of the protest movement against British imperial policies, writing anonymous essays and covert propaganda. After 1773, however, now convinced of a British conspiracy to suppress colonial liberties, he played an open and active role in the protest campaign, and emerged as a leader in the Continental Congress. He not only chaired the Board of War and Ordnance, but served on more than sixty other committees, including one that prepared guidelines for America's first diplomats and another that drafted the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson called him “our colossus” in the independence struggle.

Adams also gained a reputation as an expert on political theory. His pamphlets Novanglus (1774) and Thoughts on Government (1776) furthered the independence cause and influenced the earliest state constitutions. As U.S. Commissioner to France during the Revolutionary War, Adams battled tenaciously to induce France to make greater military contributions to the American cause, while also securing recognition and an urgently needed loan from Holland. As a member of the U.S. delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Paris ending the war, Adams was instrumental in gaining boundary and fishing‐rights concessions from the British.

After serving as U.S. minister to Great Britain (1785–1788) and as vice President under George Washington, Adams defeated Jefferson in the 1796 Presidential election. His presidency was consumed with the so‐called Quasi‐War with France, an undeclared naval war involving violations of U.S. shipping rights arising from the general European conflict spawned by the French Revolution. Fearing that war would be disastrous for the fragile American union, Adams pursued peace with honor, a policy that rankled many bellicose members of his own Federalist party. Although Adams was grudgingly respected even by his political enemies for his integrity and stubborn honesty, his identification with the Federalists, and with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (repressive measures about which he had personal reservations), stirred growing animosity among Thomas Jefferson's followers.

Adams's peace initiatives, plus his long‐standing feud with Alexander Hamilton, so divided the Federalist party that Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800. Yet his policies kept the peace, leading him to characterize his Presidential diplomacy as the “most splendid diamond in my crown.”

Retiring to his farm in Braintree, Adams wrote his memoirs and essays on his wartime diplomacy and conducted a voluminous correspondence with Thomas Jefferson and others on political theory and the American Revolution. Like Jefferson, he died on the fiftieth anniversary of Independence, 4 July 1826.
See also Adams, Abigail; Early Republic, Era of the; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; Revolution and Constitution, Era of.

Bibliography

John Ferling , John Adams: A Life, 1992.
Joseph J. Ellis , Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, 1993.

John Ferling