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ADAMS, John
(1735–1826), second president (1797–1801)
and first vice-president (1789–1797) of the U.S., and leader
in the movement for independence. His presidency was marked by rivalry
with fellow-Federalist Alexander Hamilton, controversy over government
measures taken to curb political opposition, and a crisis in U.S.
relations with France.
Adams was born on Oct. 30, 1735, in Braintree (now Quincy),
Mass., a town in which Adamses had lived since 1638. His father
had married into a wealthy Boston family, the Boylstons, and was
thus able to send his son to Harvard College, from which young Adams
graduated in 1755. He then selected law and soon found that in the
courtroom his acquired erudition and intellectual precision overcame
his natural timidity, and he became a powerful speaker and an adroit
advocate. At the age of 29 Adams married Abigail Smith, a woman who
was clearly his intellectual and psychological equal.
The controversy that preceded the American Revolution catapulted
Adams into a position of political leadership. His Braintree
Instructions (1765) was a powerful denunciation of the
Stamp Act, and his oddly titled Dissertation on the Canon
and Feudal Law (1765) was a prescient analysis of the emotional
and ideological demands facing the colonists. Chosen as a lawyer
for several British soldiers charged with the death of five colonists
in the Boston Massacre (1770), Adams successfully defended his clients
by justifying their use of force out of fear for their lives. In
his essays Novanglus (1774–75), he defended
colonial resistance and argued that the British Empire was in reality
a league of nearly autonomous entities; thus, he anticipated 19th-century
self-government of British overseas possessions.
In the First and Second Continental Congresses, Adams emerged
as a powerful exponent of the historic rights of the English and
the natural rights of humankind. Along with his cousin Samuel Adams,
he initiated (1775) the effort to secure the appointment of George
Washington as commander of the new Continental army. Adams served
on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence, but when
Thomas Jefferson later claimed that Adams had given him a free hand
in composing it, Adams responded indignantly that the document was “a
theatrical show” in which “Jefferson ran away
with the stage effect. . . and all the glory of it.” Thus
began a rivalry between the two men that continued for more than
a decade.
More clearly perhaps than any other leading patriot of his
day, Adams expressed the fear that he and his fellow revolutionaries
might fail in summoning forth the virtue and objectivity required
to avoid loss of nerve and internal factionalism. His Thoughts
on Government (1776), in which he elaborated on these warnings, became
a handbook on the writing of early state constitutions and particularly
influenced the preparation of those documents in Virginia, North
Carolina, and Massachusetts.
In 1778 Congress sent Adams and John Jay to join Benjamin
Franklin as diplomatic representatives in Europe. Franklin remained
the American envoy to France; Adams went to the Dutch Republic and
had the responsibility for opening negotiations with Britain; Jay
traveled to Spain. In 1782 and 1783, the three men together negotiated
the Treaty of Paris, ending the 8-year war with Great Britain.
In 1785 Adams was appointed diplomatic envoy to Great Britain,
a position he held until 1788. His duties in England caused him
to miss the Constitutional Convention and the ratifying debates.
He had played a crucial role earlier, however, in drafting the Massachusetts
Constitution of 1780. While in London he wrote the three-volume Defence
of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. This
work rebutted a French critic of American politics and reiterated
Adams’s belief that only formal restraints on the exercise
of power and on the impulses of the populace could militate against
human evil and societal weaknesses.
Because he ran second to Washington in electoral-college balloting
in both 1788 and 1792, Adams became the nation’s first
vice-president. In that capacity, he limited himself to presiding
over the Senate.
In 1796 Adams was chosen to succeed Washington as president, winning
over Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Pinckney. The threat of war with
France, along with the resulting passionate debate over foreign
policy and the limits of dissent, dominated the politics of his
administration. The war scare was sparked by American indignation
over French attempts to extort money from U.S. representatives in
the so-called XYZ Affair. A conflict arose over the measures to
be taken in preparation for possible hostilities. Adams favored
strengthening the navy and building coastal fortifications, but
an opposing group led by former secretary of the treasury Alexander
Hamilton persuaded Congress to create a large standing army, with
Hamilton himself as inspector general. Because the possibility of
a French invasion of the U.S. was remote, the clear implication
of this policy was the creation of an army the size and strength
of which could intimidate opposition of the Republican voters.
The Hamilton Federalists added substance to those fears by
pushing through Congress laws restricting the rights and privileges
of aliens (presumed to be potential Republican voters or, worse
yet, French radicals) and punishing as sedition the printing of
false attacks on the dignity or integrity of high government officials.
Adams found enough merit in these bills to sign them, and he acquiesced
in 14 prosecutions under the Sedition Act. The Alien Acts, however,
he refused to enforce.
One of Adams’s most fateful decisions was to retain
the cabinet he had inherited from Washington, several members of
which were personally loyal to Hamilton. Together with Hamilton’s
supporters in Congress, they engineered the creation of the new
army, which Hamilton in actuality controlled.
Adams did, however, demonstrate the power of the presidency
to confront challenges to executive leadership. In February 1799,
he appointed new peace commissioners to go to France and reopen
negotiations. Adams’s timing and judgment were acute: The French
foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord,
had sent a diplomatic signal that he wanted peace with the U.S.
When Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, a Hamilton follower,
tried to sabotage the peace mission, Adams fired him; shortly thereafter
the two nations came to terms.
The peace initiative enabled Adams to dismantle the new army,
much to Hamilton’s embarrassment. Adams’s foreign
policy, however, split the Federalist party on the eve of the 1800
election and contributed significantly to the election of Thomas
Jefferson as well as to Republican victories in both houses of Congress.
Adams lived for a quarter century after he left the presidency,
during which time he wrote extensively. His guiding principles were
embodied in a Whig philosophy to which he clung stubbornly. Ill-suited
to adapt to the transition to 19th-century romantic culture, he
was nevertheless a magnificent exponent of the pessimistic view
of human society. He died in Quincy, Mass., on July 4, 1826.