The Triumph of John Adams
Forget Jefferson. This Fourth of July let’s shine a spotlight on the overlooked Founding Father.
It’s July 4, 1826—exactly 50 years since the announcement of the Declaration of Independence—and John Adams is dying.
He had been declining for several weeks, and on the morning of the Fourth he awoke and commented, “It is a great day. It is a good day.” By the late afternoon he was slipping in and out of consciousness. Aware of his imminent death, he whispered to those in the room, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” Then, at 6:20pm, his heart stopped.
But, Adams was wrong. Thomas Jefferson died six hours earlier at his house in Monticello.
Historians of early American history and biographers of the Founding Fathers love to draw comparisons between these two men. They go to great lengths to set them up as foils: comparing the youth of Jefferson with age of Adams, the reticence of Jefferson with the garrulousness of Adams, the restraint of Jefferson with the temper of Adams, the achievements of Jefferson with the relative obscurity of Adams. Somehow, in these comparisons, it seems that Thomas Jefferson always comes out on top.
After all, Adams doesn’t have a monument settled firmly by the Potomac River. He doesn’t have his name associated with the Declaration of Independence. In the popular imagination he’s probably best known for jokes such as those Jonathon Groff, playing King George III, sings in Lin Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton.
I know him That can't be That's that little guy who spoke to me. All those years ago, What was it? '85? That poor man they're going to eat him alive...
When Adams whispered the words, “Thomas Jefferson survives,” he was right in one sense—Jefferson’s legacy has overshadowed, outlived, and outlasted Adam’s legacy.
On this July the Fourth, I think it’s time to set the record straight.
You’ve Got the Wrong Guy
In an era when we’re casting down the statues and memories of those who fail to meet our modern moral standard, maybe we can raise up a few people as well. John Adams is the epitome of the American Dream, a thoroughbred New Englander, son of a cobbler and farmer, he worked hard, attended Harvard, taught in a small school in Worcester, read the law, and then became one of the best known lawyers in the Northeast.
His family didn’t own slaves. In fact, he abhorred the practice, refusing to even hire the slaves of other farmers to cultivate his land. And when he and Abigail, his wife, were posted to England during the 1880s for a diplomatic tour, they rented their home to a former slave and his wife. It’s unfathomable to imagine Jefferson willing to allow a former slave to take possession of his beloved Monticello. But the comparisons don’t stop there.
John Adams was integrated as a human and as a man in a way that I envy. He didn’t run from himself. He knew his principles, his foibles, his follies, and his feats. He was supremely self-aware. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was a man who hid even from himself. Joseph J. Ellis in the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Sphynx describes Jefferson as a master at creating labyrinthine passages within himself to compartmentalize his beliefs, separate conflicting viewpoints, and cognitively disassociate his own mind on the most important issues of the day. How else could a man write that all men are created equal while forcing those supposedly equal men to labor under chattel slavery? Ellis describes this compartmentalization as necessary for Jefferson, allowing him to live in a plane of abstraction.
But Jefferson’s abstraction was often divorced from reality. If more Jeffersonian ideals thrived, then America would be an agrarian society of small-time farmers and townships characterized by local autonomy. Moreover, he proposed forgiving all debts and rewriting all laws each generation, a radical view, to say the least, both then and now.
Adams, on the other hand, was the supremely practical man.
He woke up each morning and started the day with a gill of cider, and then worked on his own farm beside the free laborers that he hired and paid. As a lawyer, he rode the circuit from 1766-1768, quickly becoming one of the best known lawyers in the Northeast. Where Jefferson lived in an ethereal, disconnected realm, Adams lived in a practical, earthy, action-oriented sphere.
To top things off, Jefferson died $100,000 in debt (equivalent to $3 million dollars in today’s currency) because he lacked self-control and frugality. He simply was unable to live inside his own (substantial) means. Meanwhile Adams, in an ironic financial coup de grâce, left that same amount as an inheritance to his children, although he started with far less. However, Adams was never a rich man by the standards of the day, and he constantly worried about providing for his wife and children and sustaining his farm in Braintree. But this is also where his character shines through the most.
On March 5, 1770, a mob provoked and attacked a group of British soldiers in Boston, “shouting, cursing” and pelting the soldiers with “snowballs, chunks of ice, oyster shells, and stones”. The soldiers fired into the crowd, killing five men. The next day, John Adams was asked to defend the soldiers because no other lawyer would do so. He accepted, saying, “that no man in a free country should be denied the right to counsel and a fair trial.” As a result, he lost half of his law clients, a severe financial setback. He knew this might be the result when he took the case. He took it anyway.
But Adams weathered that storm, and his profile as a public figure took off.
“Our colossus on the floor”
In 1774 he was selected as one of the five delegates from Massachusetts to the First Continental Congress. In 1775, he was elected to the Second Continental Congress where he was described “as without equal” by Benjamin Rush and “our colossus on the floor” by none other than Thomas Jefferson himself. He was 39 years-old.
Adams was a ubiquitous, indefatigable figure in the Second Congress. He spoke and debated constantly while in session. He politicked in the pubs and inns in the evenings. He was appointed to a number of committees. As head of the Board of War, Adams oversaw all issues of manning, training, equipping, and funding the nascent Continental Army. In addition to the Board of War, he was also appointed to the Board of Spies which, confusingly, was responsible for drafting the Articles of War that laid out regulations and discipline for the Army. Adams drafted that document as well.
When the British Army wanted to parley with the Continental Congress, Adams was one of the three men selected to meet on Staten Island with Lord Howe in September 1776. Then, shortly after this meeting (where did he find the time?), he presented a plan to the Congress on September 16, 1776, offering each soldier $20 and 100 acres of land as an enticement for enlistment. Earlier that same year he had also drafted the Massachusetts Constitution, which is today the oldest functioning Constitution in the world.
In 1777, Congress appointed him commissioner to France, and he spent the next two years apart from his wife and family. He was only 42. Thus began nearly fifteen years of continuous travel, serving as diplomat to France, Holland, and England. David McCullough writes that Adams journeyed “farther in all, both by sea and land, than any other leader of the American cause.”
There is one contribution that Adams considered to be the most important of his life. While stationed in France, the war effort in the Colonies began to stall, and Adams took it upon himself to secure a much needed loan from Holland. It took him nearly two years, but in 1782, he secured a $2 million loan, setting the “foundation for American credit in Europe.” This was necessary to continue funding the ongoing war effort against Britain, yes, but the loan was also a proxy for recognizing the American colonies as separate from England. It was a vote of confidence in the American cause. We often remember France as the stalwart ally during the fight for American independence, but without Dutch money we likely would have failed. And it was Adams who once again risked his career and single-handedly pulled the whole thing off.
The list of accomplishments and achievements could run on for pages. Here are just a few more examples: He helped negotiate peace at the Treaty of Paris. He was selected as the first diplomat to England. He succeeded Washington as President of the United States and successfully avoided war with France, a conflict that most historians agree would have ruined the young democracy.
In the popular mind, his presidency is often regarded as a failure. In fact, I have a friend who likes to say of Adams, “Great man, bad president”. That thinking, I believe, is a misinformed reading of the situation. Jefferson’s first term is hailed as one of the most successful in American history, but just like today, presidents often reap the rewards or punishments of the policies of their predecessor. And just to reinforce the point, Jefferson’s second term was a train wreck.
Adams did have some shortcomings. Notably, he lacked the ability to cultivate a public image, and this is the thing above all others which hamstrung him throughout his public career. Jefferson successfully played parlor room politics and leveraged the media of the day to control the popular narrative. But Adams felt it was beneath a public figure to defend their own honor. In other words, he was a martyr. And like a martyr, he suffered in silence, never correcting the record, never seeking to shape the public record of himself. As a result, his own party—led by Alexander Hamilton—often attacked him as well.
The Adams Legacy
If Jefferson lent the body of the American cause a voice, and Washington lent the muscle, then Adams lent it a spine, nerve, and connective tissue. It was Adams who stands above the rest, tirelessly working to keep things together.
As early as February 1776, Adams (not Jefferson) was campaigning behind the scenes for a declaration of independence. And then in May of 1776 he returned to Philadelphia—from drafting the Massachusetts Constitution—to propose a resolution on May 10, 1776, declaring the colonies independent from Britain. The Congress approved that resolution on May 15. Then, on June 10, he was appointed—along with Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Thomas Jefferson—to draft the Declaration of Independence.
In later years, as the importance of the Declaration grew, Adams liked to exaggerate his role in crafting the document. However, the best evidence points out that Adams and the others on the committee delegated the task of drafting the Declaration to Jefferson. Most of the committee saw the declaration merely as a pro forma document, while the real work would be the debate in the Congress.
It was Adams who rose on the morning of July 1, 1776, and delivered an impassioned speech persuading the delegates to vote for independence. He had nearly finished when two delegates arrived late and asked to hear the speech again. He was hesitant, joking that he wasn’t an actor there to entertain an audience, but he obliged, speaking in total for two hours. McCullough calls it “the most powerful and important speech heard in the Congress since it first convened, and the greatest speech of Adam’s life.”
The next morning, July 2, twelve colonies voted for independence, with Pennsylvania, who had a divided delegation, abstaining in order to make the vote unanimous. McCullough writes, “If not all thirteen clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and with the other silent, the effect was the same.”
It was Adams, he says, more than anyone else who had made it happen.
In an insightful letter to Abigail directly after the fact, Adams demonstrates a prescience that borders on prophecy. He wrote,
The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.
Yesterday I attended an Independence Eve celebration in Denver’s Civic Center Park. The Colorado Symphony played music, fireworks of every color burst over the government buildings, people cheered, and the crowd sang “God Bless America” with American Idol finalist Melinda Doolittle, and I couldn’t help but think of John Adams in 1776, who saw this moment happening 250 years later, who saw the possibility of moments like it eight full years before the Revolution even resolved. He missed it in only one respect. Obviously it’s the Fourth, not the “Second”, but in all other respects he was right.
So as you’re going about your pomp and parade, and your shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, I hope you also remember John Adams. It’s easy to tear things down. It’s harder, much harder, to build things up. Maybe building an appreciation for an admirable, honest, and faithful Founding Father is a good place to start.
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Well said!