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John Adams by David McCullough 

Reviewed by Mark Webster  (8-27-01)

          David McCullough’s biography of John Adams is an enjoyable book about a common, hard working man who had the good fortune to be born at a great time in history.  Unfortunately, his fame is justifiably over-shadowed by the greatness of his contemporaries. 

          Adams was a Yankee through and through.  His ancestors had been in Massachusetts since 1640.  His father was a shoemaker and a farmer who sold a piece of land to send his son to Harvard.  After a short stint as a schoolteacher in Worcester, Adams studied law with a lawyer in Boston.  Although he lost his first case because of a technical error in a pleading, he became a successful lawyer through hard work.  As a lawyer, he was fearless.  He convinced a Boston jury to find British captain Thomas Preston not guilty of killing five men in what we now call the Boston Massacre.  In a second trial a few days later, he successfully defended Preston’s soldiers. 

          When his father died in 1761, he received forty acres and a house next to the house he was born in.  I visited both those houses in Quincy, Massachusetts this past June.  They are very modest.  It didn’t matter.  Unlike the spendthrift Jefferson, Adams sought responsibility and work and was suspicious of leisure and luxury.  He was tight fisted and always lived below his means. 

          McCullough claims Adams was the only founding father not tainted with the ownership of or trafficking in slaves.  Some of his fellow Bostonians, such as John Hancock, owned slaves.  I did not realize slavery was an accepted part of life in all thirteen colonies.  Even Franklin owned two black house servants and speculated in the slave traffic. 

          Adams was short, vain, irritable, and reserved.  Some of his contemporaries thought him emotional and mentally unstable.  But in Philadelphia in the early summer of 1776, he was the “colossus of freedom.” At one point, he gave such a good speech in support of Richard Henry Lee’s motion for independence that the motion passed.  His speech was so good that when some New Jersey delegates came in late, the members of the convention demanded he give the speech a second time.   In nine hours of debate, Adams spoke for over two hours.   

          During and after the Revolutionary War, Adams traveled across the ocean several times to obtain financial and military backing from France and the Netherlands.  As commissioner to France, he fought with his countrymen, Franklin and Lee.  Although the French admired Franklin, Adams did not think he was working hard or smart enough.  Franklin, the author of the phrase about “early to bed, early to rise,” liked to party late and sleep very late.  The French used Franklin, but Adams refused to play along.  He eventually was sent off to the Netherlands, where he convinced the Dutch to finance the war.  In 1785, he became the first U.S. minister to Great Britain, a true common man in the Court of St. James.      

          When he returned from Europe, he was considered for governor, Senator, Vice President, Chief Justice, everything but President.  He became Vice President and spent eight miserable years in that political limbo.  He had trouble adjusting to the ceremonial role of presiding over the Senate.  He often intruded in the Senate debate and made a fool of himself in the debate over what to call the chief executive.  For over a month, Adams and Sen. McLay took up the Senate’s time with the issue.  Adams wanted titles to dignify federal office holders.  McLay preferred “Sir” or “Mr. President.”  One Senator suggested the proper title for Adams: “His rotundity.”  Adams was suspected of favoring an American monarchy.  As Vice President, he cast votes which supported the president and the national government.  Washington rarely sought his advice. 

          As President, the rotund Yankee had the misfortune of serving between two of our greatest presidents, the tall, lanky, quiet Virginians, Washington and Jefferson.  Although he had never served as a chief executive or military commander, he was elected President in 1796.  In a sense, he was our first president, because he did not waft into office on clouds of glory as Washington had but crawled through the mud wrestling of politics.  He bickered with his Vice President and was betrayed by his own mediocre cabinet.  He supported the un-American Alien and Sedition laws and left the country with a mill stone around the neck of states’ rights by making the nationalist John Marshall Chief Justice.  Over the next thirty-five years, Marshall almost single-handedly enlarged the scope of the federal government.  Adams’ one accomplishment was to keep the country out of war with France.  In 1800 it was time for him to go. 

          Americans are lucky that our first several presidents were homebodies who longed to return to private life.  After Adams left public office, he matured as a man.  He directed his farm operations, survived the deaths of several of his children and his wife, read many books, and wrote many letters, some to his old enemy, Jefferson.  He and Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 

           McCullough’s biography of Adams is reminiscent of his biography of Truman, both common men of small physical stature who were overwhelmed by their big jobs. Both favored national security over individual rights.  But then again, both lived in dangerous times.   

          McCullough makes the reader feel what it must have felt like to be Adams or to be around Adams.  For example, in September of 1776, Adams and Franklin had to share a bed in a stuffy room in a small inn. Adams, afraid of the evening air, quarreled with Franklin about sleeping with the window open.  Adams lost the argument but fell asleep while Franklin lectured him about the benefits of fresh air.  When his first grandson was born, John Quincy named the boy George, not John.  Adams never got the respect he felt he had earned.

          Many of his accomplishments are unknown.  Perhaps his most important accomplishment was to marry Abigail, a woman of uncommonly good sense, who deserves a remembrance as one of our Founding Mothers.   Adams claims he suggested that Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence.  While Washington is the father of the American army, Adams is the father of the American navy, which proved its value in the War of 1812.  Although Adams was not present at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, his presence was felt.   The drafters relied heavily on the Massachusetts constitution that Adams had drafted in October of 1779.  It contained a Preamble, a Declaration of Rights, and a Constitution, the ideas for which had been taken from many sources, especially Adams’ treatise Thoughts on Government, in which Adams called for a “government of laws, not of men.”  Massachusetts claims its constitution is the oldest constitution still in use in the world today. 

As we all do, Adams suffered from anxiety, vanity complicated by lack of confidence, and anger at any hint of criticism.  McCullough paints Adams as an everyman living among demigods.  We can’t touch the greatness of Washington or Jefferson, but we all have some of John Adams in us.