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John Adams (October 30,1735 – July 4, 1826) was the first Vice President of the United States (1789–1797), and the second President of the United States (1797–1801). He was a major sponsor of the American Revolutionary War in Massachusetts, and a key diplomat in the 1770s. He was a driving force for independence in 1776—the "Colossus of Independence" declared Thomas Jefferson. As a statesman and author Adams helped define republicanism as the core American political value, meaning overthrow of monarchy and, especially, rule by the people, hatred of corruption, and devotion to civic duty. Regarded as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he became the founder of an important family of politicians, diplomats and historians, and his reputation has been rising in recent years. Historian Robert Rutland concludes, ''"Madison was the great intellectual ... Jefferson the ... unquenchable idealist, and Franklin the most charming and versatile genius... but Adams is the most captivating founding father on most counts." p 230.

Early life

John Adams was born the eldest of three brothers on October 30, 1735 (October 19 by the Old Style, Julian calendar), in Braintree, Massachusetts, though in an area which became part of Quincy, Massachusetts in 1792. His birthplace is now part of Adams National Historical Park. His father, a farmer, also named John (1690-1761), was a fourth-generation descendant of Henry Adams, who immigrated from Barton St David, Somerset, England, to Massachusetts Bay Colony in about 1636.

Young Adams graduated from Harvard College in 1755 and, for a time, taught school in Worcester and studied law in the office of James Putnam. He also had a tutor. In 1758, he was admitted to the bar. From an early age, he developed the habit of writing descriptions of events and impressions of men. The earliest known example of these is his report of the 1761 argument of James Otis in the superior court of Massachusetts as to the legality of Writs of Assistance. Otis’s argument inspired Adams with zeal for the cause of the American colonies. Years later, when he was an old man, Adams undertook to write out, at length, his recollections of this scene.

In 1764, Adams married Miss Abigail Smith (1744–1818), the daughter of a Congregational minister, at Weymouth, Massachusetts. Their children were Abigail Amelia (1765-1813); future president John Quincy (1767-1848); Susanna Boylston (1768-70); Charles (1770-1800); Thomas Boylston (1772-1832); and Elizabeth who was stillborn (1777).

Adams had none of the qualities of popular leadership of his second cousin, Samuel Adams; instead, his influence emerged through his work as a constitutional lawyer. Impetuous, intense and often vehement, Adams often found his inborn contentiousness to be a handicap in his political career. These qualities were particularly manifested at a later period, for example, during his term as president.

Politics

Adams first rose to influence as an opponent of the Stamp Act of 1765. In that year, he drafted the instructions which were sent by the inhabitants of Braintree to its representatives in the Massachusetts legislature, and which served as a model for other towns to draw up instructions to their representatives. In August 1765, he anonymously contributed four notable articles to the Boston Gazette (republished separately in London in 1768 as A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law), in which he argued that the opposition of the colonies to the Stamp Act was a part of the never-ending struggle between individualism and corporate authority. In December 1765, he delivered a speech before the governor and council in which he pronounced the Stamp Act invalid on the ground that Massachusetts, being without representation in Parliament, had not assented to it.

In 1768, Adams moved to Boston. After the Boston Massacre in 1770, several British soldiers were arrested and charged with the murder of four colonists, and Adams joined Josiah Quincy II in defending them. The trial resulted in an acquittal of the officer who commanded the detachment and most of the soldiers; but two soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter. These men claimed benefit of clergy and were branded in the hand and released. Adams' conduct in taking the unpopular side in this case resulted in his subsequent election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives by a vote of 418 to 118.

Adams was a member of the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1778. In June 1775, with a view to promoting the union of the colonies, he nominated George Washington as commander-in-chief of the army. His influence in Congress was great, and almost from the beginning, he sought permanent separation from Great Britain. On October 5, 1775, Congress created the first of a series of committees to study naval matters. From that time onward, Adams championed the establishment and strengthening of an American Navy and is often referred to as the father of the United States Navy.

On June 7, 1776, Adams seconded the resolution introduced by Richard Henry Lee that "these colonies are, and of a right ought to be, free and independent states," acting as champion of these resolutions before the Congress until their adoption on July 2, 1776.

He was appointed on a committee with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston and Roger Sherman, to draft a Declaration of Independence. Although that document was largely drafted by Jefferson, John Adams occupied the foremost place in the debate on its adoption. Many years later, Jefferson hailed Adams as, "The Colossus of that Congress--the great pillar of support to the Declaration of Independence, and its ablest advocate and champion on the floor of the House." & Bergh, ed. Writings of Thomas Jefferson 13:xxiv Adams served as the head of the Board of War and Ordinance, as well as many other important committees.

Before this work had been completed, he was chosen as minister plenipotentiary for negotiating a treaty of peace and a treaty of commerce with Great Britain, and again he was sent to Europe in September 1779. The French government, however, did not approve of Adams’ appointment and subsequently, on Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes’ insistence, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay and Henry Laurens were appointed to cooperate with Adams. Since Jefferson did not leave the United States for the task and Laurens played a minor role, Jay, Adams and Franklin played the major part in the negotiations. Overruling Franklin’s vote, Jay and Adams decided to break their instructions, which required them to "make the most candid confidential communications on all subjects to the ministers of our generous ally, the king of France; to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without their knowledge or concurrence; and ultimately to govern yourself by their advice and opinion.” Instead, they dealt directly with the British commissioners without consulting the French ministers.

Throughout the negotiations, Adams was especially determined that the right of the United States to the fisheries along the British-American coast should be recognized. Eventually, the American negotiators were able to secure a favorable treaty, which was signed on November 30, 1782. Before these negotiations began, Adams had spent some time in the Netherlands (the Netherlands were then the only well functioning Republic in the world). In July 1780, he had been authorized to execute the duties previously assigned to Laurens. With the aid of the Dutch patriot leader Joan van der Capellen tot den Pol, Adams secured the recognition of the United States as an independent government at The Hague on April 19, 1782 (in February 1782 the Frisian states were the first that recognized the United States). During this trip, he also negotiated a loan and, in October 1782, a treaty of amity and commerce, the first of such treaties between the United States and foreign powers after that of February 1778 with France. Moreover, the house that Adams purchased during this stay in The Netherlands became the first American embassy on foreign soil anywhere in the world.

In 1785, John Adams was appointed the first American minister to the court of St. James's as an ambassador to Britain. When he was presented to his former sovereign, George III, the King intimated that he was aware of Adams' lack of confidence in the French government. Adams admitted this, stating: "I must avow to your Majesty that I have no attachment but to my own country.” While in London, Adams published a work entitled A Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States (1787), in which he repudiated the views of Turgot and other European writers as to the viciousness of the framework of state governments. In this work, he made the controversial statement that "the rich, the well-born and the able" should be set apart from other men in a senate.

Adams held several ambassadorial posts in the early days of the United States. He served as minister to The Netherlands from 1781 to 1788, while he was concurrently minister to the Court of St. James.

Vice Presidency

While Washington was the unanimous choice for president, Adams came in second in the electoral college and became Vice President in the presidential election of 1789. He played a minor role in the politics of the 1790s and was reelected in 1792. As president of the Senate, Adams cast twenty-nine tie-breaking votes—a record that only John C. Calhoun came close to tying, with 28. His votes protected the president's sole authority over the removal of appointees and influenced the location of the national capital. On at least one occasion, he persuaded senators to vote against legislation that he opposed, and he frequently lectured the Senate on procedural and policy matters. Adams' political views and his active role in the Senate made him a natural target for critics of the Washington administration. Toward the end of his first term, as a result of a threatened resolution that would have silenced him except for procedural and policy matters, he began to exercise more restraint in the hope of realizing the goal shared by many of his successors: election in his own right as president of the United States. When the two political parties formed, he joined the Federalist Party and was its nominee for president in 1796, against Thomas Jefferson, the leader of the opposition Republican Party.

Presidency: 1797-1801

Policies

In 1796, after Washington refused to seek another term, Adams was elected president, defeating Thomas Jefferson, who became Vice President. See also: John Adams' First State of the Union Address He followed Washington's lead in making the presidency the exemplar of republican values and stressing civic virtue. He was never implicated in any scandal.

Adams' four years as president (1797–1801) were marked by intense disputes over foreign policy. Britain and France were at war; Adams and the Federalists favored Britain, while Jefferson and the Republicans favored France. An undeclared naval war between the U.S. and France, called the Quasi-War, broke out in 1798. The humiliation of the XYZ Affair led to serious threat of full-scale war with France. Adams and the moderate Federalists were able to avoid a war through various measures, some of which proved unpopular. The Federalists built up the army under George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, built warships, such as the USS Constitution, and raised taxes. They cracked down on political immigrants and domestic opponents with the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were signed by Adams in 1798. Those Acts, and the high-profile prosecution of a number of newspaper editors and one Congressman by the Federalists, became highly controversial. Some historians have noted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were relatively rarely enforced, as only 10 convictions under the Sedition Act have been identified and as Adams never signed a deportation order, and that the furor over the Alien and Sedition Acts was mainly stirred up by the Republicans. However, other historians emphasize that the Acts were highly controversial from the outset, resulted in many aliens leaving the country voluntarily, and created an atmosphere where opposing the Federalists, even on the floor of Congress, could and did result in prosecution. Regardless of the perspective taken, it is generally acknowledged that the election of 1800 became a bitter and volatile battle, with each side expressing extraordinary fear of the other party and its policies.

Adams was a poor negotiator and, indeed, never fully controlled his own Cabinet. Adams and Hamilton became alienated, and senior officials began to look to Hamilton, rather than to the president, as their political chief. For long stretches, Adams sequestered himself at home in Massachusetts, letting his Cabinet in Philadelphia run national affairs. In February 1799, Adams suddenly roused himself, stunning the country by sending diplomat William Vans Murray on a peace mission to France. Napoleon was now in power in Paris; realizing the animosity of the United States was doing no good, he signaled his readiness for friendly relations. The Treaty of Alliance of 1778 was superseded and the United States could now be free of foreign entanglements. Adams avoided war, but deeply split his own party in the process. He brought in John Marshall as Secretary of State and demobilized the emergency army.

The death of Washington, in 1799, weakened the Federalists, as they lost the one man who symbolized and united the party. Adams lost what little support that he had from high ranking Federalists when he granted pardons to participants in Fries's Rebellion. In the presidential election of 1800, Adams ran and lost the electoral vote narrowly (note that in the six states where popular votes occurred, they were votes for electors, though Jefferson's and Burr's electors won those votes handily, with over 61% of the popular vote). Among the causes of his defeat was distrust of him in his own party, a scathing pamphlet written by Alexander Hamilton that further split his party support, the popular disapproval of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the popularity of his opponent, Thomas Jefferson, and the effective politicking of Aaron Burr and others in New York, where the legislature statewide shifted from Federalist to Republican on the basis of a few wards in New York City controlled by Burr's Tammany Hall machine.

As his term was expiring, he appointed a series of judges, who were nicknamed "Midnight Judges" because most of them were formally appointed just before John Adams' presidential term expired at midnight. Most of the judges were eventually unseated when the Jeffersonians repealed their offices. But John Marshall remained, and his long tenure as Chief Justice of the United States represents the most lasting influence of the Federalists, as he refashioned the Constitution into a nationalizing force and made the Supreme Court powerful.

Major presidential acts

Speeches

Inaugural Addresses
State of the Union Address

Administration and Cabinet

OFFICENAMETERM
PresidentJohn Adams1797–1801
Vice PresidentThomas Jefferson1797–1801
Secretary of StateTimothy Pickering1797–1800
 John Marshall1800–1801
Secretary of the TreasuryOliver Wolcott, Jr.1797–1800
 Samuel Dexter1800–1801
Secretary of WarJames McHenry1797–1800
 Samuel Dexter1800–1801
Attorney GeneralCharles Lee1797–1801
Postmaster GeneralJoseph Habersham1797–1801
Secretary of the NavyBenjamin Stoddert1798–1801

Supreme Court appointments

Adams appointed the following Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States:

States admitted to the Union

None

Post Presidency

Following his 1800 defeat, Adams retired into private life. He went back to farming in the Quincy area.

In 1812, Adams reconciled with Jefferson and sent a brief note to Jefferson. This resulted in a resumption of their friendship, and initiated a correspondence which lasted the rest of their lives. Their letters are rich in insight into both the period and the minds of the two Presidents and revolutionary leaders.

Sixteen months before his death, his son, John Quincy Adams, became the sixth President of the United States (1825–1829), the only son of a former President to hold the office until George W. Bush in 2001. His daughter Abigail was married to Congressman William Stephens Smith.

Death

On July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Adams died at Quincy. He is often quoted as having said "Thomas Jefferson still survives." with some depictions indicating he might have not expressed the entire statement before dying, ie: "Thomas Jefferson… still survi—", but some research indicates that only the words "Thomas Jefferson" were clearly intelligible among his last. Adams did not know that Jefferson, his great political rival—and later friend and correspondent—had died a few hours earlier.

His crypt lies at United First Parish Church (also known as the Church of the Presidents) in Quincy. Until his record was broken by Ronald Reagan on October 10, 2001, he was the nation's longest-living President (90 years, 247 days).

Religious views

Adams was raised a Congregationalist, but later rejected many fundamental doctrines of conventional Christianity, such as the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, becoming a Unitarian at a time when most of the Congregational churches around Boston were turning to Unitarianism. As a youth, Adams' father had urged him to become a minister, but Adams refused, considering the practice of law to be a more noble calling.

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, he wrote:

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!*

He railed against what he saw as overclaiming of authority by the Catholic church:

Since the promulgation of Christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny that have sprung from this original, are the canon and the feudal law. The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind. But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.

By the former of these, the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the mind of man was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandizement of their own order. All the epithets I have here given to the Romish policy are just, and will be allowed to be so when it is considered, that they even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure; with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality; with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes; with a power of deposing princes and absolving subjects from allegiance; with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven and the beams of the sun; with the management of earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to him, and his subordinate tyrants, who, it was foretold, would exalt himself above all that was called God, and that was worshipped. Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765 *

Trivia

  • Adams was the first President to live in the White House.
  • Adams was one of three presidents who died on the Fourth of July, along with Jefferson and Monroe. He and Jefferson both died on the same day, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, in separate states.
  • The Adams Memorial is proposed in Washington, D.C. for John Adams and his family.
  • His inaugural address on March 4, 1797 included a 727-word long sentence.
  • The actress Mary Kay Adams is a descendant of John Adams.

John Adams in popular culture

References

  • Brown, Ralph A. The Presidency of John Adams. (1988).
  • Elkins, Stanley M. and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism. (1994), the leading history of the 1790s.
  • Ellis, Joseph J. Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (2001), interpretive essays
  • Ferling, John. Adams Vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800. (2004), narrative history of the election.
  • Ferling, John. John Adams: A Life. (1992).
  • Grant, James. John Adams: Party of One.(2005)
  • Haraszti, Zoltan. John Adams and the Prophets of Progress. (1952). Examines Adams's political thought by reference to the arguments he waged with authors in the margins of their books.
  • Kurtz, Stephen G. The Presidency of John Adams: The Collapse of Federalism, 1795-1800 (1957).
  • McCullough, David. John Adams. (2002)
  • Miller, John C. The Federalist Era: 1789-1801. (1960).
  • Sharp, James. American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis. (1995), political narrative of 1790s.
  • Smith, Page. John Adams. (1962) 2 volume biography
  • Thompson, C. Bradley. John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty. (1998). Analysis of Adams's political thought.
  • Michael Sletcher, 'John Adams', in James Ciment, ed., Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History, (5 vols., N.Y., 2005).

Primary sources

  • Adams, C.F. The Works of John Adams, with Life (10 vols., Boston, 1850-1856)
  • Butterfield, L. H. et al., eds., The Adams Papers (1961- ). Multivolume letterpress edition of all letters to and from major members of the Adams family, plus their diaries; still incomplete *.
  • Cappon, Lester J. ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (1988).
  • Carey, George W., ed. The Political Writings of John Adams. (2001). Compilation of extracts from Adams's major political writings.
  • Diggins, John P., ed. The Portable John Adams. (2004)

External links

Presidents of the United States | Vice Presidents of the United States | Signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence | Continental Congressmen | Founding Fathers of the United States | United States Federalist Party | Members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives | Ambassadors of the United States | Quasi-War people | Adams family | American Unitarians | people from Massachusetts | 1735 births | 1826 deaths

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