John Adams

Adams was born on October 30, 1735, in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, into a comfortable but not wealthy farming family; his father was a farmer, shoemaker, and church deacon who hoped his son would become a minister. A healthy boy who often skipped school to hunt and fish, Adams later said he would rather have been a farmer, but he entered Harvard at fifteen and graduated in 1755. He taught school in Worcester to pay for legal training and opened a law office in Boston in 1758 — with only one client in his first year. In 1764 he married Abigail Smith, a minister’s daughter from Weymouth; they had five children, one of whom died in infancy.

By 1770 Adams had perhaps the largest caseload of any lawyer in Boston, and he was chosen to defend the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre. Thanks to his defense, none of them went to jail. He was slow to join the protest movement — he distrusted radical leaders, including his cousin Samuel Adams — but as Britain kept trying to tax the colonies he became an open foe of its policies, writing newspaper essays for the patriot cause.

Adams went to the First Continental Congress in 1774 and soon led the faction pushing for independence. In June 1775 he nominated George Washington to command the new Continental Army, and in June 1776 he was named with Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to the committee that prepared the Declaration of Independence. He served on more committees than any other member — about ninety, chairing twenty — and headed the board that oversaw the army. In 1778 Congress sent him to France, and later to the Netherlands to win a loan; with Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens he negotiated the Treaty of Paris that ended the war. On a brief trip home in 1779 he helped draft the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, and in 1785 he became the first American minister to Britain. Abigail joined him in Europe in 1784, after five years apart.

Adams served eight years as Washington’s vice president, an office devoid of power, and in 1796 won the first contested presidential election, 71 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 68. Under the rules of the time, Jefferson, his opponent, became his vice president. His presidency was consumed by conflict with Revolutionary France, which was seizing American ships. When French officials demanded a $250,000 bribe and a $10 million loan before they would even negotiate — the XYZ Affair — Americans were outraged. Adams strengthened coastal defenses and the navy; Congress created the Navy Department and organized the Marine Corps, and an undeclared naval “Quasi-War” followed. Yet Adams kept seeking an honorable peace, and over the objections of many in his own party he sent a new mission to Paris. The resulting Treaty of Mortefontaine ended the Quasi-War and released the United States from its old alliance with France.

Adams believed that the powers of government must be separated to prevent tyranny, as he argued in Thoughts on Government (1776), and that the greatest dangers to a republic were unbridled democracy and an unchecked aristocracy; the remedy was a strong, independent executive who could act as “father and protector” of ordinary citizens. He counted himself among the natural aristocrats of reason and virtue, distrusted parties and majority rule, and wanted property to remain a requirement for political participation. Contemporaries wrongly suspected that his writings favored a hereditary monarchy. War, he held, should be a last resort after diplomacy.

Adams’s greatest stain is the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, passed by a Federalist Congress and signed by him. Three of the laws targeted immigrants, who tended to vote for Jefferson’s party; the Sedition Act punished “subversive” speech, and it brought fifteen indictments and ten convictions. Jefferson and James Madison answered with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which declared the laws void. New taxes to pay for the military buildup set off Fries’s Rebellion among Pennsylvania farmers; its leaders were sentenced to death for treason, but Adams pardoned them. Stubborn and aloof, he alienated his own cabinet — he fired two secretaries in 1800 — and Alexander Hamilton published a pamphlet arguing that he should not be reelected.

Adams narrowly lost the election of 1800 to Jefferson and retired to Peacefield, his farm in Quincy, where for twenty-six years he wrote prolifically. In 1812 friends brought him and Jefferson back together by mail, and the old rivals exchanged hundreds of letters. Both men were determined to live to see the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and both died on that day, July 4, 1826. Jefferson died shortly after noon; around the same time Adams woke and said, “Thomas Jefferson survives” — his last words. He died that evening. Most historians agree that he was right to keep the Quasi-War from becoming a full war, which might have been fatal to the young union; in the Miller Center’s judgment, his legacy is one of reason, the rule of law, and a cautious but active foreign policy, shadowed by the Sedition Act. His son John Quincy Adams was elected the sixth president in 1824.