John Adams: The American Presidents Series: The 2nd President, 1797-1801

by John Patrick Diggins, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (Editor)

Overview

A revealing look at the true beginning of American politics

Until recently rescued by David McCullough, John Adams has always been overshadowed by Washington and Jefferson. Volatile, impulsive, irritable, and self-pitying, Adams seemed temperamentally unsuited for the presidency. Yet in many ways he was the perfect successor to Washington in terms of ability, experience, and popularity.

Possessed of a far-ranging intelligence, Adams took office amid the birth of the government and multiple crises. As well as maintaining neutrality and regaining peace, his administration created the Department of the Navy, put the army on a surer footing, and left a solvent treasury. One of his shrewdest acts was surely the appointment of moderate Federalist John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Though he was a Federalist, Adams sought to work outside the still-forming party system. In the end, this would be his greatest failing and most useful lesson to later leaders.

"Diggins's slim volume offers a reconsideration of Adams, a thoughtful study of American politics of the period and Adams's legacy for today. " - Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429998413
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/11/2003
Series:	American Presidents Series
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	308 KB

About the Author

John Patrick Diggins is distinguished professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of numerous books, including On Hallowed Ground, The Proud Decades, The Lost Soul of American Politics, The Rise and Fall of the American Left, and Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy. He lives in New York City.

John Patrick Diggins was distinguished professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was the author of numerous books, including On Hallowed Ground, The Proud Decades, The Lost Soul of American Politics, The Rise and Fall of the American Left, and Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., (1917-2007) was the preeminent political historian of our time. For more than half a century, he was a cornerstone figure in the intellectual life of the nation and a fixture on the political scene. He won two Pulitzer prizes for The Age of Jackson (1946) and A Thousand Days (1966), and in 1988 received the National Humanities Medal. He published the first volume of his autobiography, A Life in the Twentieth Century, in 2000.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

From "Senseless Turpitude" to Stately Duty

FATHER AND SON

John Adams was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, on October 19, 1735, the fourth-generation descendant of Henry Adams, who arrived in America with his wife, Edith, about 1636. Of yeoman stock, pious, frugal, and hardworking, Henry died a decade after settling in Braintree, leaving eight sons and a daughter, a house with two rooms, a farm of forty acres on which ranged a cow, heffer, and swine, and a modest library of treasured books. One son, Joseph, followed in his father's footsteps and, married to Abigail Baxter, had no less than twelve children. Their son Joseph Adams Jr. married Hannah Bass, great-granddaughter of John and Priscilla Alden of the Plymouth landing and Mayflower epic. Their son, the first John Adams, married Susanna Boylston, the daughter of a family in Massachusetts medical history. Into the Adams-Boylston marriage was born John Adams, the eldest of the three sons.

The dwelling in which young Adams grew up was plain, simple, severe. On the farm of hay fields sat a two-story clapboard house with a single chimney that served to heat four dimly lit rooms. The sloping roof made the two upstairs bedrooms into a low cubbyhole under which the boys had to stoop to turn in to bed. As with much of the rest of Puritan New England, the Adams family experienced life as a challenge to moral character, an austere, demanding existence without the luxury of servants or slaves.

Although lacking material comfort and often enduring drearyweather, the Adams household enjoyed a wealth of books, ideas, and stimulating conversation. A theological atmosphere weighed down upon New England, with citizens worrying about the fate of their souls while debating the inscrutability of God's purposes and the meaning of evil. Adams senior took his son to a barnlike meetinghouse to hear sermons asking the congregation to turn to faith, and then to the town meeting to hear public issues discussed that asked citizens to rely upon reason. The father hoped his eldest son would enter college and study for the ministry. But young Adams was not the bookworm that one might assume in view of his later life as a learned intellectual. He relished the outdoors; knew every trail, pond, and woods in the neighborhood; and took pride in his physical prowess despite his small size. Well into adulthood he would retain a passion for tracking and hunting. His father, however, a farmer and outdoorsman himself, wanted his son to study Latin to prepare for Harvard College. When he protested that he hated the subject, his father replied: "Well, John, if Latin-grammar does not suit you, you may try ditching, perhaps that will; my meadow yonder needs a ditch, and you may put by Latin and try that." Young John looked forward to the "delightful change," only to discover after a day and a half of hard, backbreaking work that he preferred Latin to labor. But he felt too humiliated to admit it to his father. Finally at nightfall "toil conquered pride, and I told my father, one of the severest trials of my life, that, if he chose, I would go back to Latin-grammar. He was glad of it; and if I have since gained any distinction, it has been owing to the two days' labor in that abominable ditch."

Adams entered Harvard at fifteen. To the Puritan founders of New England, the life of the mind was everything; few could forget that the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation were first promulgated in the universities of Europe. Under Harvard's tutorial system, Adams studied Greek and Latin, logic, rhetoric, physics, and, in his senior year, moral philosophy and metaphysics. Not all his classmates buckled down. Some of Harvard's brightest students would be reprimanded for drinking, gambling, rioting, whoring, and, even worse, lapses into infidelity and blasphemy. Adams wasreticent about his college experience. Perhaps his lack of enthusiasm reflected the rote nature of the learning that had students simply copying the contents of books rather than critically analyzing them. In his later years, Adams would do both when subjecting Western political philosophy to his penetrating analysis, quoting long passages from Machiavelli to show where the Florentine political philosopher contradicts himself.

Adams was graduated from Harvard in 1755, and returned to Braintree uncertain of a vocation. The ministry that his father favored Adams found stifling. He had his fill of the doctrinal disputes surrounding "frigid John Calvin," and he could not help remembering the attacks on the liberal theologian Jonathan Mayhew and others who deviated from orthodoxy. He decided to accept an earlier offer of a teaching position at a grammar school in Worcester, and with a horse sent by the town for him to ride, he made the sixty-mile trip from Braintree (later called Quincy) in a single day.

The opportunity to teach young people led Adams to reflect upon what it is that motivates the mind. Who in the class will turn out to be a "hero" or a "rake" or a "philosopher" or a "parasite"? The boredom and daydreaming of the students rubbed off on the schoolmaster, who found his own mind wandering out the window. Schoolteachers were poorly paid, and Adams could only afford to board with families. It was in his first few years as a Worcester instructor that Adams started to keep a diary. The opening pages are full of doubt, self-scrutiny, and intellectual curiosity about God and the nature of the universe and the adequacy of his own character. "Constantly forming but never executing good resolutions," he lamented. "Oh! That I could wear out my mind any mean and base affectation; conquer my natural pride and self-conceit; expect no more deference from my fellows than I deserve; ... subdue every unworthy passion, and treat all men as I wish to be treated by all." What troubled Adams was that his mind flitted with thoughts that seemed to have no object, leaving his mental life all motion and no direction. And his inability to concentrate resulted in many students' dilemma:

What is the Cause of Procrastination? To day my Stomack is Disordered, and my Thoughts of Consequences, unsteady and Confused. I cant study to day but will begin tomorrow. Tomorrow comes. Well, I feel pretty well, my head is pretty clear, but Company comes in. I cant yet study tomorrow, but will begin in Earnest next day. Next day comes. We are out of Wood, I cant study: because I cant keep a fire. Thus, something is always wanting that is necessary.

Adams's experience in the classroom led him to believe that young minds are more likely to be motivated positively than negatively, by expectations of praise instead of fear of punishment. At this point in his life, having turned twenty-one and finding himself still uncertain of his chosen vocation, Adams became preoccupied with motivation. In view of his later social philosophy, which would emphasize the human need for external recognition, his earlier thoughts valued even more the force of inner conviction. In 1756, he wrote to a friend, "Upon common theatres, indeed, the applause of the audience is of more importance to the actor than their own approbation. But upon the stage of life, while conscience claps, let the world hiss." But Adams's conscience was hardly clapping as he sank into idleness, the worst sin for a Puritan. "I am dull and inactive, and all my resolutions, all the spirits I can muster are insufficient to rouse me from this senseless turpitude." He knew he had to leave behind grammar-school teaching, and he thought about the three options available to college graduates: divinity, medicine, or law. Against the advice of family and friends, he chose to study law, then a profession of mixed repute.

The original settlers of New England had no lawyers. But when the visions of commonwealth and love quickly receded, and conflict and distrust took hold, the profession of law emerged to handle suits and litigations. Public as well as personal disputations shaped the life of law, and indeed the controversies between the colonies and mother country that led to the Revolution were legal in nature. Adams would argue the American cause as a lawyer, defending a country whose rights had been violated. Adams carried into his new chosen calling the religious idealism that sprang from his Puritanenvironment. A century later Adams's great-grandson Henry Adams would look upon the legal profession as the hireling of big business. But "honest John Adams" saw law as an instrument of morality, and he dedicated himself to the profession as a cause that fulfilled his need to do right by his conscience.

Adams was cut out perfectly for the profession. He delighted in courtroom drama; enjoyed riding the circuit; had a clear, sonorous manner of speaking, a mind that could cut quickly to the heart of an issue and present effective summations, and a character so open in its convictions that few could suspect him of concealing evidence or manipulating opinion. He valued law as rooted in history, in experience, and in precedent. Admitted to the bar by the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1761, Adams returned to Braintree and out of a small office handled matters dealing with property, taxes, deeds, and wills; while on the circuit he took cases involving theft, libel, rape, and bastardy. In his hometown he also led a crusade against taverns, whose customers took to drinking and brawling. Adams succeeded in getting an ordinance to limit the licensing of these dens of iniquity, appearing in court in his distinguished black robe and white wig.

Adams was particularly impressed by the stirring role of another lawyer. James Otis took to court the case of Boston merchants protesting the breaking into of their ships and warehouses by British customs officials whose actions had been authorized by writs of assistance issued by the English Crown. Otis's speech against the writs deeply moved Adams. The trial itself involved only a petty matter of protecting smugglers, but it would have, Adams reflected, implications for the limitations of British authority in America. From the courtroom resonated the theory of the social compact stipulating the natural rights of citizens and the right of revolution itself.

ABIGAIL AND THE "WILD AND GIDDY DAYS"

Long before he was a practicing attorney, Adams felt himself drawn to the female sex. His wit and charm appealed to village belles, and while he himself remained chaste, Braintree and other towns hadtheir share of unwed mothers and bastard children. Male friends warned him against the tender trap of matrimony, and few rushed into it at an early age. Even so, Adams spent hours "gallanting the girls" and reading Ovid to the wife of the town doctor. He found himself captivated by the enticing Hannah Quincy, who had other young men swarming around her like moths to a flame. On one occasion he almost proposed to her, but friends burst into the room and the embarrassed couple drew apart. When Hannah soon after married another suitor, Adams suddenly knew what it meant to be lovesick, unable to sleep without thinking of her beautiful smiling face, a scene that aroused desires that could not be fulfilled and lingered only to "be grappled to my soul. Wherever I go, whatever I do, asleep or awake, This dear bewitching scene attends me, and takes up all my Thoughts."

One of Adams's best friends married in 1761, two years after he first met Abigail Smith. But Adams put off becoming engaged to Abigail until early 1764. Unlike the flirtatious Hannah, Abigail, then only fifteen and ten years younger than Adams, was too coy to show her feelings to the man who moved her heart, and it took him some time to sense her rare qualities of mind and spirit. He also felt inadequate financially, having no prospects of becoming rich. But with the death of his father he inherited a saltbox cottage on the farm, and after three years he grew confident and pursued her ardently. His instincts proved correct. The forty-five-year marriage between John and Abigail Adams constitutes one of the great romances in the history of the American presidency. The relationship was a rapture of fused souls. They came together, John said, "like magnet and steel." But political duty took John away for long stays in Europe, and during the twelve years when he was vice president and president, Abigail frequently remained in Quincy. Until Adams left office in 1801, he and Abigail had lived apart more often than together. But correspondence between the two sustained an intimacy that age could not wither. Earlier, when Adams was serving as a diplomat in Europe, Abigail expressed her feelings before leaving to join him: "My thoughts are fixed, my latest wish depend / on thee guide, guardian, Husband, lover, Friend." It was the rarest of relationships, one in which husband and wife were exceptionally well mated, and love conquered space and time.

Abigail came from the town of Weymouth, born into a well-off ministerial family whose members thought her marriage to a small-town lawyer was beneath her. As a youth, Abigail had suffered from frequent illnesses, although she thought back fondly on a pleasant childhood of "wild and giddy days." Together with her two sisters, she received her education at home with her mother serving as instructor and her father's library as a valuable resource. Well-read, perceptive, witty, Abigail carried on with John Adams as an equal, bringing stability to his dark moods and self-doubts. A painting, rendered around the time of the marriage, shows her with a serenely attractive face from which stare dark, intense eyes; hair pulled back; and lips about to smile but holding the serious look customary in eighteenth-century portraits. Later drawings show her aging gracefully. In some of her letters she took the pen name "Portia," reference to the long-suffering wife of the Roman leader Brutus. But Abigail was whimsical rather than whining. She never complained of marriage and motherhood but instead accepted the conventional code of female behavior while valuing her own privacy and autonomy. With her husband occupied with public life, Abigail took on the responsibility of managing the farm and handling financial matters. She also became a gifted letter writer, carrying on a rich correspondence not only with her husband but with the author Mercy Otis Warren, one of the first historians of the American Revolution.

After the Revolution broke out there were moments when Abigail did become political. In the spring of 1776, she wrote to John: "I long to hear that you have declared an independency," and she then offered the advice, "and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors." She concluded her counsel with sentiments common to colonial women. "Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of the Husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could."

"THE MOST MAGNIFICENT MOVEMENT OF ALL": THE REVOLUTION

In 1763, a seven-year war between England and France for the control of North America came to an end, the so-called French and Indian War that saw native Americans fighting alongside France in the Northeast, where "New France" went down to defeat with the fall of Quebec. "This," said the English statesman Lord Granville, "has been the most glorious war and the most triumphant peace that England ever knew." Granville uttered that thought on his deathbed; fortunately, he would not live to see how wrong he was. In less than two decades, England would be driven out of America, and not by France or Spain but by her own children.

England's victory created two ironic circumstances. While the American colonists no longer felt they needed England for protection against the French and native Indians, England just as strongly believed it needed America to pay for the war and the upkeep of the colonial system as well as the security afforded by the British army and navy. The century-old relationship of America to the mother country had been characterized by charters, laws, and regulations, many of which were so ill defined and ignored that an English historian remarked that his country's relations with the world and the settlement of America took place in a "fit of absence of mind." To rectify the situation, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act of 1765. The legislation, requiring all kinds of printed material, from newspapers to diplomas to legal documents, to carry revenue seals, meant that for the first time in history colonists had been taxed directly. When news of the law reached America in May, Boston exploded in anger. Tax collectors were tarred and feathered, stamp seals seized and burned, effigies hung and bonfires lit, and the house of Peter Oliver, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson's brother-in-law, was stormed and smashed into shambles; soon after, Hutchinson's own luxurious house full of paintings, silver, china, and rare books was gutted.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "John Adams"
by .
Copyright © 2003 John Patrick Diggins.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Introduction: - Plato's Wish,
1 - From "Senseless Turpitude" to Stately Duty,
2 - "The Most Insignificant Office That Ever Man Contrived",
3 - The Prescience of the Political Mind,
4 - The Halo of Washington, the Shadow of Jefferson,
5 - The French: Foe or Friend?,
6 - War Measures, Free Speech, States' Rights,
7 - The American Landscape,
8 - War and Peace,
Conclusion: - The Moralist in Politics,
Editor's Note - THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY,
ALSO BY JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS,
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTS SERIES,
Notes,
Milestones,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
Copyright Page,