Adams entered Harvard College at the age of fifteen in the fall of 1751, following in the footsteps of his uncle, who had studied there to become a minister. Although he excelled as a student, Adams began to have doubts about his suitability for the life of cleric, and after graduating third in the class of 1755, he decided to become a teacher to give him time to think about his future goals.
Adams entered Harvard College at the age of fifteen in the fall of 1751, following in the footsteps of his uncle, who had studied there to become a minister. Although he excelled as a student, Adams began to have doubts about his suitability for the life of cleric, and after graduating third in the class of 1755, he decided to become a teacher to give him time to think about his future goals.
The second president of the United States, John Adams played a major role in the colonial movement toward independence. He wrote the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 and served as a diplomatic representative of Congress in the 1780s.
Background
Adams was born in Braintree, now Quincy, Massachusetts, on October 30, 1735. The Adams family remained thrifty but unknown farmers until John Adams, John's father, married Susanna Boylston, a member of a prominent New England family. John grew up in a Puritan household, following simple ceremonies and strict religious discipline. The Adams family belonged to the Unitarian branch of the Congregational church, which has a form of organization used by the Puritans, with self- governing local congregations. Both his mother, Susanna, and his father, John - a church deacon, farmer, and local elected official - had forceful personalities.
Education
A talkative boy who loved the outdoors, young Adams despised school. When he wasn’t cutting class to hunt and fish in the nearby woods and skate on frozen ponds, Adams studied classical languages, logic, and rhetoric. He informed his father that all this was an unnecessary expense, because he planned to become a farmer, and wouldn’t need this learning. The elder Adams responded by forcing the boy to spend an entire day, sunrise to sunset, alongside him at work. Exhausted but still prideful, Adams refused to admit that farming involved backbreaking work, but his father settled the question by sending him back to class the next day.
Adams entered Harvard College at the age of fifteen in the fall of 1751, following in the footsteps of his uncle, who had studied there to become a minister. Although he excelled as a student, Adams began to have doubts about his suitability for the life of cleric, and after graduating third in the class of 1755, he decided to become a teacher to give him time to think about his future goals.
Adams decided that he had a future as a lawyer, and he studied with a Worcester attorney for two years before he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1758.
For about a year he taught school in Worcester. Adams was admitted to the Boston bar in 1758. While developing his legal practice, he participated in town affairs and contributed his first essays to the Boston newspapers.
By 1765 Adams had achieved considerable distinction at the Boston bar. With the Stamp Act crisis he moved into the center of Massachusetts political life. He contributed an important series of essays, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, to the Boston Gazette and prepared a series of anti-Stamp Act resolutions for the Braintree town meeting, which were widely copied throughout the province.
In April 1768 Adams moved to Boston. He defended John Hancock against smuggling charges brought by British customs officials and acted as counsel for Capt. Thomas Preston, the officer in charge of British troops at the Boston Massacre. Adams was elected representative from Boston to the Massachusetts Legislature.
In the spring of 1771, largely for reasons of health, Adams returned to Braintree, where he divided his attention between farming and the law. Within a year, however, professional and political considerations drew him back to Boston. In 1773 he celebrated the Boston Tea Party as a dramatic challenge to British notions of parliamentary supremacy. The next year he was one of the representatives from Massachusetts to the First Continental Congress, where he took a leading role in developing the colonists' constitutional defense against the Coercive Acts and other British measures. Upon his return to Massachusetts, Adams was chosen for the governor's council but was negatived. During the winter of 1774-1775, he carried on, under the pseudonym Novanglus, an extended debate with Daniel Leonard over the proper constitutional relations between the Colonies and Parliament. Adams's recommended solution at this point was a commonwealth system of empire, with a series of coequal parliaments joined by common allegiance to the Crown.
After the battles of Lexington and Concord, Adams returned to Congress, carrying the welcome instructions from the General Court for measures to establish American liberties on a permanent basis, secure from attack by Britain. He now believed that independence would probably be necessary. Congress, however, was not yet willing to agree, and Adams fumed while still more petitions were sent off to England. Replying to petitions from several provinces seeking advice on their governments (petitions which Adams and others had solicited), he recommended that they adopt new governments modeled on their colonial regimes and framed by special conventions.
By February 1776 Adams was back in Congress. Adams was at last fully committed to American independence. In May, Congress finally passed a resolution that, where no adequate governments existed, measures should be taken to provide for the "happiness and safety" of the people. For this resolution, Adams wrote a preamble which in effect asserted the principle of independence. A month later he seconded Richard Henry Lee's resolution for the formal declaration of independence, the contracting of foreign treaties, and the construction of a continental confederation. A member of the committee appointed to bring in the formal statement, Adams contributed little to the content of the Declaration of Independence but served, as Thomas Jefferson later reported, as "the pillar of its support on the floor of the Congress." On another committee, Adams drew up a model treaty that encouraged Congress to enter into commercial but not political alliances with European nations. Exhausted by his duties, he temporarily left Philadelphia in mid-October for Massachusetts. For the next year or so he continued to serve in Congress.
On November 28, 1777, Congress elected Adams a commissioner to France, replacing Silas Deane, and in February Adams embarked from Boston for what was to prove an extended stay. Upon arrival, Adams found that France had already granted diplomatic recognition to the United States and contracted treaties of commerce and amity. With nothing specific to do, Adams spent the next year and a half trying to keep busy: attempting to secure badly needed loans for Congress, transmitting lengthy letters on European affairs, and learning with mixed fascination and repugnance about the ways of the French court and national life.
When he learned that Benjamin Franklin, one of his fellow commissioners, had been appointed sole American plenipotentiary in France, Adams returned to Boston, where in the fall of 1779 he was elected from Braintree to the state constitutional convention. For the next few months, he devoted his time to the convention, preparing what became the basic draft of the new Massachusetts constitution.
In the meantime, Adams had been tapped by Congress for another diplomatic post, this time as commissioner to contract peace and then a commercial treaty with Great Britain. He embarked in mid-November and arrived in Paris on February 9, 1780. Again he found his situation frustrating, largely because he had been instructed to make no significant moves without the prior approval of the Comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister. Between Adams and Vergennes there quickly developed a mutual dislike - duplicated in Adams's relations with Franklin, a man more flexible and less demanding in his relations with the French foreign minister. In the face of all this, Adams spent considerable time writing his friends in Congress to complain of his difficult position. Having been further commissioned minister plenipotentiary to the United Provinces, Adams finally secured recognition by The Hague in the spring of 1782, and in October he signed the first of several desperately needed loans with a group of Dutch bankers.
He returned to Paris to negotiate the terms of peace with the British representatives. Adams and the other two American commissioners, Franklin and John Jay, ignored their instructions to make no agreement without first consulting Vergennes; they feared (correctly) that France wished to pressure the United States into peace arrangements inconsistent with national interest (for example, leaving certain coastal areas in British hands). The American commissioners concluded provisional articles of peace and sent the results home to Congress. These were duly signed as the definitive treaty of peace on September 3, 1783.
The Dutch loans and the treaty of peace were the major products of the diplomatic phase of Adams's public career. Before returning permanently to the United States, however, he spent 3 frustrating years as the American envoy to the Court of St. James in London, attempting without success to negotiate a commercial treaty and to clear up various diplomatic issues carried over from the Revolution. Rebuffed by British officials and unsupported by a weak Congress, Adams finally asked to resign. Formal letters of recall were sent in February 1788. During the last year and a half of his stay, he composed his three-volume Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, an extended attempt to defend the American concept of balanced government against the criticisms of the French statesman A.R.J. Turgot.
With his return to Boston, Adams began the final stage of his public career. He was chosen vice president in 1789 under the new Federal constitution, a position he was to fill, again with considerable frustration because of its powerlessness, during both of Washington's administrations.
As the election of 1796 approached, the Jeffersonian Republicans began forming an opposition to the Federalists' financial program and seemingly pro-British foreign policy. The Republicans presented Jefferson as their presidential candidate. The Federalists split into two factions, with Adams as one candidate and Thomas Pinckney (backed by Alexander Hamilton) as the other. In spite of Hamilton's efforts, Adams ran well ahead of Pinckney and became the second president of the United States. Jefferson, a scant three electoral votes behind, became vice president. Adams took office on March 4, 1797.
By 1800 Adams dismissed the main Hamiltonians from his Cabinet, and Hamilton openly opposed Adams for reelection. But the President's peace initiatives were both enlightened statesmanship and good politics. The young nation was unprepared for any major external war, and the possibility of serious internal conflict if the war program was continued seems to have been real. The Federalist split no doubt weakened his chances in 1800, but the Jeffersonians were already scoring heavily in their attacks on Federalist policies. Continued defense of such policies would almost certainly have led to political disaster. In the end, Adams lost the election to Jefferson by a narrow margin.
Adams left the capital, however, bitterly disappointed over his rejection by the American people, so distressed that he even refused to remain for Jefferson's inaugural in 1801.
Adams spent the remainder of his life in political seclusion, though he retained a lively interest in public affairs, particularly when they involved the rising career of his son, John Quincy Adams. John Adams divided his time between overseeing his farm and carrying on an extended correspondence concerning both his personal experiences and issues of more general political and philosophical significance. He died at the age of 91, just a few hours after Jefferson's death, on July 4, 1826.
Achievements
John Adams played a major role in the American Revolution and the country’s independence movement. He was among the influential men who persuaded Congress to declare independence and assisted Thomas Jefferson in drafting the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
He is credited to have largely written the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780. The constitution which was organized into a structure of chapters, sections, and articles served as a model for the Constitution of the United States of America, drafted seven years later.
Adams is commemorated as the namesake of various counties, buildings, and other items.
Adams was raised a Congregationalist since his ancestors were Puritans. According to biographer David McCullough, "as his family and friends knew, Adams was both a devout Christian, and an independent thinker."
Politics
From the first, John's presidency was a stormy one. His Cabinet, inherited from Washington and dominated by Hamilton's followers, proved increasingly difficult to control. Foreign policy problems, generated by the outbreak of war between revolutionary France and a counterrevolutionary coalition of European nations, created internal political crises of magnitude. The outbreak of revolution in France had tended to polarize political discussion in the United States as well as in Europe between "aristocratic" and "democratic" positions. More particularly, the war between England and France raised questions of whether the United States would maintain a strict neutrality - in fact impossible because of efforts by both England and France to control American trade - or align itself, at least sympathetically, with one of the countries. While most Americans professed the desire to remain neutral in the contest, the Jeffersonians were sympathetic with France and the Federalists with England. Adams found himself caught in the middle.
In 1797 French diplomats attempted to bribe the three-man commission sent by the United States to negotiate various points in dispute between the two nations. The immediate result was an outburst of anti-French sentiment, which the Hamiltonians worked hard to inflame. Adams became caught up in the furor as well, making numerous statements during the spring and summer of 1798 that fanned emotions even higher. Taking advantage of the situation, the Federalists in Congress, with Adams's tacit approval, developed a war program consisting of substantial increases in the American navy, a large provisional army, the Alien and Sedition Acts (aimed at controlling potential subversives within), and a system of tax measures to finance the entire program. The Federalist goals were two: to prepare for an expected war with France and to attack the Jeffersonian opposition.
For a while, it seemed that the Federalist measures would carry the day. But during the late summer and fall of 1798 the prospect of peaceful accommodation with France increased, and public discontent with the Federalist war program (helped along by the cries of the Jeffersonians) broke through the surface. President Adams, at home in Massachusetts during much of this time, became convinced that war with France was not necessary and that the Federalist policies, if continued, were likely to result in serious internal disorder. Early in 1799, he committed himself to a plan of peaceful accommodation with France - a decision that enraged most of the Hamiltonians and left them sitting far out on a political limb, with a military establishment and no foreign invader to fight.
Views
Adams was an abolitionist who vehemently opposed slavery.
Quotations:
"Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases."
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy."
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
"Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order."
"Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide."
"Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people."
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
Personality
"There are few people in this world with whom I can converse," Adams once admitted. "I can treat all with decency and civility, and converse with them, when it is necessary, on points of business. But I am never happy in their company." This confession sums up the paradox of Adams’s personality; he genuinely loved and had deep compassion for humanity but never learned to deal with individual human beings. To his immediate family, he was a warm, generously loving man; to outsiders, he appeared cold, aloof, conceited. As a youth, he was driven by ambition. He was determined to be a man of substance and if circumstances afforded the opportunity, a great man. Throughout his life, he wrestled with his passions. From his mother, he inherited his pugnacity, drive, ready temper, and broad mood swings. He frequently fell to black despair, fits of depression that were usually triggered by the onset of some illness, public criticism, or lack of recognition of his achievements. Some historians believe that he may have been manic-depressive. Somewhat paranoid, too, he was quick to see in his unpopularity a plot by others to discredit him and steal credit for themselves.
A proper Puritan, he was shocked by the open sexuality of eighteenth-century France. At a dinner party in Bordeaux in 1778, a Madame de Texel, addressing Adams with innocent frankness, wondered aloud how Adam and Eve ever learned how to have sex, for no one else was around to explain the facts of life to them. Adams was thoroughly embarrassed, having never before heard a woman discuss such matters. He blushed but quickly regained his composure to explain with mock seriousness. "There was a physical quality in us resembling the power of electricity or of a magnet, by which when a pair approached within a striking distance they flew together like the needle to the pole or like two objects in electric experiments."
Physical Characteristics:
Adams was short, about 5 feet 6 inches, stocky in his youth, and portly in middle age. He had quick blue eyes and fine brown hair. Ironically, Adams, the longest-living president, was beset by a train of maladies throughout his 90 years. "My constitution is a glass bubble," he once said. He caught cold at the slightest draft; Boston’s air gave him acute chest pains; headaches, heartburn, and general weakness slowed him down. His eyes were weak from his youth. In Amsterdam in 1781 he contracted a severe fever and lapsed into a five-day coma before shaking off this "Dutch complaint," which lingered three months. By the time he became president, his hands shook with palsy, and most of his teeth had fallen to pyorrhea. He refused to wear the ill-fitting dentures of the period and thus from this time talked with a lisp.
Quotes from others about the person
"He saw the whole of a subject at a single glance, and by a happy union of the powers of reasoning and persuasion often succeeded in carrying measures which were at first sight of an unpopular nature." - Benjamin Rush
"He is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him. He is as disinterested as the Being who made him. He is profound in his views and accurate in his judgment, except where knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment. He is so amiable that I pronounce you will love him, if ever you become acquainted with him. He would be, as he was, a great man in Congress." - Thomas Jefferson
Interests
Political Philosophy
Connections
In 1764 he married Abigail Smith of Weymouth, who brought him wide social connections and was to share with sensitivity and enthusiasm in the full life that lay ahead.
