John Adams

October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826

Champion of independence and second President of the United States.

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John Adams was born on October 30, 1735, in Braintree, Massachusetts, into a family of modest farmers; his father was a shoemaker and a deacon in the Congregational church. He entered Harvard at fifteen, thought about becoming a minister, and instead chose the law, opening a practice in Boston in 1758. In 1764 he married Abigail Smith, whose sharp mind and hundreds of surviving letters make the two of them one of the best-documented partnerships in early American history. Adams was blunt, ambitious, and deeply honest, qualities that made him respected but not always liked. His principles were tested early. After British soldiers fired into a Boston crowd in the Boston Massacre of 1770, killing five colonists, Adams agreed to defend the soldiers in court, convinced that everyone deserved a fair trial. He won acquittals for most of them, and though the choice was unpopular, he later called it one of the finest things he ever did. Even so, Adams was no friend of British policy; he had already spoken out against the Stamp Act of 1765 and the taxes that followed. As a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, Adams became one of the loudest and most effective voices for breaking with Britain. He nominated George Washington to command the Continental Army in 1775, and in 1776 he pushed Congress toward independence with such energy that Thomas Jefferson called him its 'colossus' on the floor. He served on the committee that produced the Declaration of Independence, insisting the younger Jefferson do the actual writing. You can follow the whole story in the American Revolution journey. For much of the war Adams was overseas as a diplomat, securing loans in the Netherlands and, with Benjamin Franklin, negotiating the Treaty of Paris of 1783 that ended the Revolution and recognized American independence. He then became the first United States minister to Britain, standing before the very king he had helped rebel against. Because he was abroad in these years, he took no part in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, though he supported the Constitution from across the ocean. Adams served two terms as Washington's Vice President, a job he found frustrating and famously called the most insignificant office ever invented. In 1796 he was elected the second President in a close contest against Jefferson. His single term was stormy. A crisis with France known as the XYZ Affair dragged the country into an undeclared naval conflict, the Quasi-War, and Adams built up the young navy while resisting pressure to declare all-out war. The darkest mark on his presidency came in 1798, when Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, laws that made it easier to deport immigrants and, alarmingly, to jail newspaper editors who criticized the government. Historians still debate how much blame he deserves, since he did not write the laws or push hard for them, but he signed them, and they remain a warning about how fear can erode free speech. His refusal to expand the war with France split his own party and helped cost him reelection in 1800, when Jefferson defeated him. Adams left office bitterly but peacefully, an early example of power passing from one party to another without bloodshed. In his last hours in office he made a set of judicial appointments, including naming John Marshall Chief Justice, a choice that shaped the Supreme Court for decades. In retirement he and Jefferson, once rivals, rebuilt their friendship through a remarkable exchange of letters. In one of the strangest coincidences in American history, both men died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration. Adams's reported last words were 'Thomas Jefferson survives,' not knowing his old friend had died only hours earlier.

John Adams

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