One hundred and seventy-five years after his death, John Adams, that short, stout, irascible and talkative “Colossus of Independence,” has suddenly popped up as America’s hottest president.
Adams died on the 4th of July in 1826, 50 years after he signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. Traditionally, his last words were: “Jefferson still survives.” But Thomas Jefferson had already died a few hours earlier at Monticello, his Virginia home.
For 200 years, Adams has been overshadowed by Jefferson — and most of the rest of the Founding Fathers. The second president, sandwiched between the towering figures of George Washington and Jefferson, Adams has sometimes seemed neglected or even disrespected.
Adams has no monument in Washington. He’s not on any of the currency in your wallet. He was on the 2-cent stamp in the 1938 presidential series. Jefferson got the 3-cent stamp, which was first-class postage in 1938. That about summed up the conventional view of their relative historic importance.
But Adams has vaulted ahead in the six weeks since the publication of David McCullough’s biography, which is titled simply “John Adams.” McCullough’s 751-page tome leaped to No. 1 on practically everybody’s best-seller list. Adams’ reputation zoomed with it.
`The second shall be the first’
And the House of Representatives now has passed a bill to create an Adams monument in Washington, maybe near the Jefferson Memorial.
Lobbying Congress in support of an Adams memorial, Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer quoted Adams: “I never shall shine till some animating occasion calls forth all my powers.”
American independence became that animating force, Roemer believes.
And with McCullough’s help, Adams is certainly shining these days.
Sparked frequently by McCullough’s book, editorialists and commentators from the Beaufort (S.C.) Gazette to the Rocky Mountain News in Denver to the San Francisco Chronicle cited Adams in their Independence Day tributes. (The Adams-to-Jefferson ratio this 4th was 103 to 38 in the hit parade of the Nexus.com news database. George Washington was No. 1 at 127.)
Even the Times of London noted punningly “the second shall be first.”
Perhaps America’s most popular historian, McCullough has been awarded the National Book Award twice, notably for his 1992 biography “Truman,” which also received the Pulitzer Prize. He’s the host of public television’s “Smithsonian World” and “The American Experience,” and he narrated Ken Burns’ widely praised documentary, “The Civil War.” His mastery of narrative is all but universally praised.
McCullough found Adams “high-spirited and affectionate, vain, cranky impetuous, self-absorbed and fiercely stubborn, passionate, quick to anger and all-forgiving; generous and entertaining. He was blessed with great courage and good humor, yet subject to spells of despair.”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Pauline Maier, a distinguished historian of the Revolutionary War generation in her own right, says that “above all McCullough’s appreciation for Adams depends on an adherence to old-fashioned moral guidelines, which is to say on strength of character.”
Adams was scrupulously honest, “a stranger to dissimulation,” in the words of his contemporary Benjamin Rush, and shared a powerful sense of public duty with his beloved wife, Abigail, a wise, brilliant woman who was his partner in life, love, politics and patriotism, Maier writes in a review of the Adams biography.
The Harvard-educated son of a Massachusetts farmer and deacon, Adams lived modestly and within his means (which were mainly supplied by the farm Abigail managed, often alone). Unlike the profligate spender Jefferson, who died $100,000 in debt, Adams left an estate of $100,000.
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The Adams upsurge comes, as Jefferson is somewhat in decline, mostly because of his ambivalence about owning slaves while he wrote of the rights of man. DNA research shows that quite probably he could have fathered several children with the young slave, Sally Hemings.
Against slavery
Against slavery on principle, Adams was one of only a few of the Founding Fathers who was not a slaveowner. Of the first seven presidents, only Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams, did not own slaves.
Adams and Jefferson had a long and complicated relationship. Both were ardent American patriots. With Benjamin Franklin and others, Adams and Jefferson worked together on the committee of the Continental Congress that brought forth the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote it, with some editing by Franklin and Adams; Adams shepherded it through Congress. It was Jefferson who called him the “Colossus of Independence.”
They were acrimonious opponents when both fought for the presidency. Adams, the man of modest origins, was a conservative Federalist in favor of strong central government and cautious about the democratic mob. He was suspicious of the French Revolution. McCullough credits him with keeping the United States out of a war with France during his presidency.
The patrician Jefferson was a Republican — in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not George W. Bush — champion of the common man who admired the French Revolution.
Late in life they renewed their friendship with a remarkable series of letters that reflected their admiration for each other and their pride in having established the nation.
Greatness in government
McCullough finds greatness in Adams’ ardent appeals for support for U.S. independence, his writing of the Massachusetts constitution that became a model for the U.S. Constitution, his missions to Europe to raise loans for the new country and his part in negotiating the very favorable peace treaty with Britain.
During his presidency, he avoided a war with France, which many Americans favored, and he appointed John Marshall, his secretary of state, chief justice of the United States in a “midnight appointment” at the end of his term. Marshall virtually established constitutional law and judicial review in the United States.
“The proudest act of my life,” Adams said.
Some reviewers have treated McCullough’s book as if Adams had been missing from American history for 200 years. “The Founder Time Forgot,” the New York Times said.
But biographies have appeared regularly over the years. Joseph Ellis, another best-selling historian, published “Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams” in 1993; John Ferling’s “John Adams, A Life” came out in 1992; John R. Howe and Edward H. Tebbenhoff published a two-volume biography in 1987.
The Enoch Pratt Library lists 398 entries for Adams and 558 for Jefferson. Both max out at 10,000 on the Library of Congress Web site.
Not everybody is totally enamored by Adams. In a letter to the New York Times, Nat Hentoff, the columnist who writes frequently about free speech issues, for example, says that with the Alien and Sedition Acts, Adams and the Federalist Congress “nearly eviscerated the 1st Amendment.”
The Sedition Act, passed in 1798 while war with France threatened, essentially banned any grousing about the U.S. government, Congress or the president. About 25 journalists, mostly editors of republican newspapers, were arrested, including Ben Franklin’s grandson.
Tom Jefferson freed them all when he became president three years later.