John Adams was an 80-year-old former President and still constant patriot when his beloved wife wrote these words, as reported in McCullough's masterful biography: "Your father's zeal for books will be one of the last desires which will quit him," Abigail observed to [son] John Quincy in the spring of 1816, as Adams eagerly embarked on a sixteen volume French history.
It is most fitting, then, that this founder, who has no monument in Washington, DC to mark his place in the pantheon of patriots, is memorialized in McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. Lest you think perhaps that Adams' forgotten status is overstated you need only do two things to correct your view:
1. Quick list the Founding Fathers in the order you recall them! Franklin, Jefferson, Washington . . . . Adams--and even then you might ask John, or Sam (John has no microbrew named for him, either). John seemed fated to be overlooked by his
- personality (alternately New England granite and prickly self-defensive),
- role (years spent out sight/out of mind in Europe participating in arduous negotiations),
- geography (Virginians were the aristocrats, Pennsylvanians the populists),
- family (while the Adams family became the first great family in American politics, John Adams is the progenitor, not the beneficiary, of that family prominence),
- and politics (Adams was consistently his own man and no party's man, even as the American two-party system was building to predominance with startling rapidity).
2). Read this biography, where you will learn how often his contemporaries at best took Adams for granted or at worst blamed him for various degrees of failure, corruption, or even insanity. McCullough never flinches from showing the real Adams (amply revealed in voluminous letters) who was at times
- perhaps too virtuous to a fault in his refusal to play politics,
- too self-defensive to accept and deflect criticism in instructive exchanges with his opponents,
- but also too incorruptible to bow to temptations that were available and diverted the abilities of some his contemporaries like Jefferson, Hamilton, and Burr.
His Presidency wasn't brilliant, but he did steer a steady course between corrupt parties at home and certainly disastrous war with the stunningly unstable superpower France. And his honest and honorable negotiation style earned him begrudging respect during his diplomatic service in Paris, Amsterdam, and London. It was this thankless, powerful and personally painful service (he was separated: from his much beloved partner in marriage and letter writing Abigail for most of seven years) that literally founded and saved America.
And in McCullough's model narrative style, you will not only learn to overlook Adams at your peril, you will also meet an amazing man of humor, learning, curiosity, science, law, and passion. His letter exchanges with Abigail hint at their marital passion and love for their children, grandchildren, and wide and expanding extended family. Surely he was a rock-ribbed New Englander, but he was also a great friend, traveler, and ultimately joyful and optimistic observer of the fallen world he inhabited with grace--a grace perhaps most visibly displayed in the powerful correspondence he picked up with his fellow founder Jefferson in the last 15 years of their lives. Despite their geographic and political differences Jefferson had been a one-time friend in Continental Congress in Philadelphia and in the diplomatic courts of Paris, but became a bitter political enemy of President Adams, attacking him viciously through direct and indirect channels of party and journalistic communication, stooping to the level of paying for false witness against Adams' presidential policies, actions, and character. While open to the charge of petulant self-defensiveness, few then or now would have shown the forbearance of Adams. Then, with both men in retirement, Franklin began, through mutual friend and founder Benjamin Rush, the great letter-writing campaign that left an irreplaceable record of the conception of the American experiment, and its tenuous survival in those founding years. When both great men died within hours on July 4, 1826 at the 50th anniversary of this birth, they were forever linked as comrades in liberty.
So spend a few precious hours with this great man (who of all the fathers seems likely to have been the best friend we all would want) in this deserving monument to his greatness.
