Adams, John (1735-1826)

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John Adams (1735-1826)

Lawyer and statesman

Background. John Adams was born on 19 October 1735, the first of three sons of John and Susanna Boylston Adams. His father was a shoemaker and farmer in Braintree, Massachusetts. Adams graduated from Harvard in 1755, taught school for a year, and then, in order to avoid family pressure to study for the ministry apprenticed himself to James Putnam, a prominent Worcester lawyer. For two years he did routine clerical work in Putnam’s office and bore “the disadvantage of Putnam’s insociability, and neglect of me.” However, Putnam had a good library, and Adams had enough free time for extensive reading of legal texts. At the end of his two-year apprenticeship, Adams sought admission to the Suffolk County bar.

Making the Grade. Admission to the bar in 1758 was not yet a formal procedure—an application to the bar simply had to be endorsed by several members. Adams asked James Gridley and James Otis (then two of the most prominent lawyers in Boston) for such endorsements. Each questioned him extensively on the classics of Roman law and were sufficiently impressed so that Adams was admitted in November. Adams sought to model himself after these elite members of the bar and to distance himself from the common colonial lawyers, the “pettifoggers and dirty dablers in the law,” as he called them. In 1761, when he was invited to join a new bar association that intended to regulate the practice of law, he did so. The group proposed in 1763 to limit practice before the lower courts to “sworn attorneys,” but the proposal was not adopted. When a more stringent set of rules was proposed in 1766, Adams was again an enthusiastic supporter.

Civil Cases. Several of the legal cases Adams handled reflected his classical scholarship. In 1766 he represented a whaling-ship captain in a dispute about the ownership of a whale. Adams’s client had harpooned a whale, and shortly thereafter men aboard another ship also harpooned it. The custom in the whaling trade was that if the first harpoon’s line was still attached to the boat when the second harpoon struck, the first boat was entitled to the whale. If the first boat’s harpoon line was not still attached when the second ship hit the whale, the second boat was entitled to it. Adams prepared an argument in which he traced the development of the rules about property rights in wild animals, going back to Roman law. Seventy-four witnesses testified. Unfortunately no one seems to have recorded whether or not Adams won the case. Another civil case he handled was a divorce in which Adams was able to convince the court to apply English ecclesiastical law. The result was an unusually large alimony judgment for his client.

Criminal Cases. Three criminal cases that Adams handled between 1768 and 1770 gave him great visibility in the community and connected him with the resistance leaders. In 1768 Adams represented John Hancock in admiralty court for a lengthy dispute with customs authorities about his ship, Liberty. The issue in that case was whether Hancock might forfeit his ship for failure to pay some import duties. While Adams quoted extensively from the classical authorities about how the differences between the common law and the admiralty rules were being used to his client’s detriment, he was not successful. Later that same year Adams defended a sailor who, in resisting being impressed into the Royal Navy, killed a British officer. Adams was able to convince an admiralty court that the common-law notion of justifiable homicide was applicable. Adams also represented the British Army captain and the eight soldiers accused of killing five townspeople in the Boston Massacre.

Public Official. Adams represented Massachusetts in both Continental Congresses. When independence was declared and Massachusetts established its new government, Adams was named chief justice. His activities in Congress, however, prevented him from taking the seat. He served as one of Congress’s three commissioners to France at various times between 1777 and 1783. He also represented the colonies in Spain and Holland during these years, and in 1783 he negotiated the peace treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. Adams attended the Massachusetts constitutional convention and was the principal draftsman of the state’s constitution (1780). In later years Adams served as ambassador to Britain (1785-1789) and as vice president (1789-1796) and president of the United States (1796-1800).