Adams, John (1735–1826)

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ADAMS, JOHN (1735–1826)

Massachusetts lawyer and revolutionary leader, first vice-president and second President of the United States, John Adams was also a distinguished political and constitutional theorist. Born in 1735, the descendant of three generations of hardy independent farmers in Braintree, Massachusetts, near Boston, he attended Harvard College and after graduation studied law for several years, gaining admission to the bar in 1758. The practice of a country lawyer held no charms for him. He took delight in the study of law and government, however, and this scholarly pursuit merged imperceptibly with the polemics of the revolutionary controversy, which probed the nature and history of the English constitution. Adams made his political debut in 1765 as the author of Braintree's protest against the Stamp Act. Increasingly, from the pressures of politics as well as of business, he was drawn to Boston, moving there with his young family in 1768. Unlike his cousin samuel adams, he was not an ardent revolutionist. He worried about the "mischievous democratic principles" churned up by the agitation; he braved the popular torrent to defend Captain Thomas Preston and the British soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre. For several years he was torn between Boston and Braintree, and the different worlds they represented. Only in 1773 did he commit himself fully to the Revolution.

The next year, during the crisis produced by the Intolerable Acts, Adams was elected one of the Massachusetts delegates to the first contintental congress, in Philadelphia. Events had shaken his lawyerlike stance on the issues, and he championed the patriots' appeal to "the law of nature," as well as to the English constitution and colonial charters, in defense of American liberties. He wrote the crucial fourth article of the congress's declaration of rights denying the authority of Parliament to legislate for the colonies, though acquiescing in imperial regulation of trade as a matter of convenience. Back in Boston he expounded his views at length in the series of Novanglus letters in the press. treason and rebellion, he argued, were on the other side—the advocates of parliamentary supremacy abroad and the Tory oligarchy at home. He had no quarrel with George III, and he lauded the English constitution with its nice balance between king, lords, and commons and its distinctly republican character. Unfortunately, the constitution was not made for colonies. Denied representation in Parliament, they were deprived of the constitution's best feature. The proper relationship between the colonies and the mother country, Adams said, was the same as Scotland's before the Act of Union, that is, as an independent government owing allegiance to a common king. Had America been conquered, like Ireland, imperial rule would be warranted; but America was a discovered, not a conquered, country, and so the people possessed the natural right to make their own laws as far as compatible with allegiance to the king.

In the Second Continental Congress Adams lost all hope of reconciliation on these terms, and he became a leading advocate of American independence. Although a member of the committee to draft the declaration of independence, he made his greatest contribution when it came to the floor for debate. Before this he co-authored and championed the resolution—"a machine to fabricate independence" in opposition eyes—calling upon the colonies to form new governments. Nothing was more important to Adams than the making of new constitutions and the restoration of legitimate authority. He had read all the political theorists from Plato to Rousseau; now he reread them with a view to incorporating their best principles into the foundations of the polity. Government was "the divine science"—"the first in importance"—and American independence opened, in his eyes, a grand "age of political experiments." It was, he declared, "a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live. How few of the human race have ever enjoyed an opportunity of making an election of government—more than of air, soil, or climate—for themselves or their children!" To aid this work Adams sketched his ideas in an epistolary essay, Thoughts on Government, which was destined to have wide influence. Years later, in his autobiography, Adams said that he wrote to counteract the plan of government advanced by that "disastrous meteor" thomas paine in Common Sense. Paine's ideas, which gave shape to the new pennsylvania constitution of 1776, were "too democratical," mainly because they concentrated all power in a single representative assembly without mixture or balance. Adams, by contrast, proposed a "complex" government of representative assembly, council (or senate), and governor, each endowed with a negative on the others. The people would glide easily into such a government because of its close resemblance to the colonial governments they had known. It possessed additional merit for Adams as a thoroughly republican adaptation of the idealized balance of the English constitution. Even as he challenged the work of constitution-making, however, Adams was assailed by doubts. The new governments might be too free to survive. The essence of republics was virtue, that is, selfless devotion to the common weal, but Adams, still a Puritan under his republican skin, clung to a theory of human nature that emphasized man's capacity for selfishness, ignorance, and vice. The popular sovereignty that was the basis of republican government possessed the power to destroy it.

In 1779, after returning to the United States from the first of two diplomatic missions abroad, Adams had the opportunity to amplify his constitutional theory, indeed to become the Solon of his native state. Massachusetts continued to be governed by a revolutionary body, the provincial congress, without legitimate constitutional authority. Only in the previous year the citizenry had rejected a constitution framed by the congress. Now they elected a constitutional convention for the specific purpose of framing a fundamental law, which would then be referred back to them for approval. (When the process was completed in 1780, the massachusetts constitution exhibited, for the first time anywhere, all the means by which the theory of "constituent sovereignty," one of the foundations of the American republic, was put into practice.) Elected Braintree's delegate, Adams was assigned the task of preparing a draft constitution for consideration by the convention, and this became, after comparatively few changes, its final product. The preamble reiterated the contractual and consensual basis of government. It was followed by a declaration of rights, derivative of the Virginia model but much more elaborate. Adams was not responsible for Article III—the most disputed provision—making it the duty of the legislature, and thus in turn of the various towns and parishes, to support religion; yet this was consistent with the aim of the constitution as a whole to keep Massachusetts a Christian commonwealth. For Adams religion was as essential to virtue as virtue was to republicanism. Thus he proposed a religious test for all elected officials. (The delegates voted to confine the test to the office of governor.) The strength and independence of the executive was an unusual feature of the constitution. Reacting against monarchy, most of the new state constitutions weakened and shackled the governors; but Adams believed that a kingly executive was necessary to control the conflicting passions and interests in the legislature. Accordingly, he proposed to vest the Massachusetts governor with an absolute negative on legislation. The convention declined to follow him, however, conferring a suspensive veto only. Adams ever after felt that the trimming of the governor's legislative power was the one serious error of the convention. Otherwise, with respect to the legislature, his principles were fully embodied in the constitution. Representation in the lower house was based upon population, while representation in the upper house, being proportioned to the taxable wealth of the several senatorial districts, was based upon property. This system of giving representation to property as well as numbers had its principal source in the philosophy of James Harrington, whose axiom "power always follows property," Adams said, "is as infallible a maxim in politics as that action and reaction are equal in mechanics." Property was further joined to office by requiring wealth on an ascending scale of value to make representatives, senators, and governors eligible for their offices. Finally, the constitution retained the freehold qualification for the franchise. In these features it was a distinctly conservative document, and it would, Adams later complained, give him "the reputation of a man of high principles and strong notions in government, scarcely compatible with republicanism."

Adams was in France when the Massachusetts Constitution was ratified in 1780. After helping negotiate the treaty of peace, he was named by Congress the first minister of the United States to Great Britain. He did not return home until 1788. He had, therefore, no direct part in the formation of the United States Constitution. Of course, he took a keen interest in that event. Observing it from his station abroad, he was inevitably influenced by Europe's perception of the terrible weakness of the American confederation and by the tide of democratic revolution that, in his own perception, threatened to inundate the European continent.

Like many of the Americans who would attend the constitutional convention of 1787, Adams was alarmed by shay ' s rebellion in Massachusetts, and he took up his pen once again to show the way to constitutional salvation. His three-volume work, Defence of the American Constitutions (1787), was devoted to the classical proposition that the "unum necessarium" of republican government is the tripartite division of the legislative power, each of the branches embodying a distinctive principle and power—the one, the few, and the many, or monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—and the dynamics of the balance between them securing the equilibrium of the whole. The book's title was misleading. It was not actually a defense of the state constitutions, most of which Adams thought indefensible, but rather a defense of the true republican theory against the criticism of those constitutions by the French philosophe Robert Jacques Turgot and his school, who held that instead of collecting all authority at one center, as the logic of equality and popular sovereignty dictated, the American constitutions erred in dividing power among different social orders and principles of government in pale imitation of the English king, lords, and commons. Adams sought to demonstrate, of course, that this balanced government was founded in the law of reason and nature. He ransacked European history, carving huge chunks from the writings of philosophers and historians—about eighty percent of the text—and adding his own argumentative comments to prove his point. All societies are divided between the few and the many, the rich and the poor, aristocrats and commoners; and these two orders, actuated by passion and ambition, are constantly at war with each other. The only escape, the only security, is through the tripartite balance. It involves, primarily, erecting a third power, a monarchical executive, to serve as a balance wheel and umpire between the democracy and the aristocracy. It involves also constituting these two great orders in insulated chambers, wherein each may flourish but neither may dominate or subvert the other. Vice, interest, and ambition are rendered useful when these two orders are made to control each other and a monarchical executive is installed as the presiding genius over the whole.

With the publication of the Defence, Adams's political thought hardened into a system that placed him at odds with democratic forces and opinion in both Europe and the United States. In 1789 the French National Assembly rejected his doctrine. At home he was alienated from many former political friends. The subject of his apostasy from republicanism became, it was said, "a kind of political phenomenon." He denied any apostasy, of course, and his use of such galvanizing abstractions as "monarchy" and "aristocracy" undoubtedly opened him to misrepresentation. Nevertheless, the character of his thought had changed. During his sojourn abroad Adams became the captive of Old World political fears, which he then transferred to the United States, where they did not belong. Here, as he sometimes recognized, all men were of one order. Yet for several years after his return to the United States, Adams did not disguise his belief that hereditary monarchy and aristocracy must eventually prove as necessary to the American republic as they had to every other. They were, he said, the only institutions that could preserve the laws and liberties of the people against discord, sedition, and civil war.

These beliefs did not prevent Adams's election as vice-president in 1788. Long a friend of a national government, he approved of the Constitution and even imagined the Defence had influenced it. He wished the executive were stronger and feared the recurrent shocks to the system from frequent elections and the factions, turbulence, and intrigue they bred. For a time he toyed with the idea of a second convention to overcome these weaknesses. His concern for the authority and dignity of the government led him to propose in the First Congress a high-sounding title ("His Most Benign Highness") for the President and splendid ceremonies of state in order to awe the people. He reiterated those views and continued the argument of the Defence in a series of articles (Discourses on Davila) in the Gazette of the United States, in Philadelphia. Since the articles also denounced the French Revolution, they were an American parallel to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. When the doctrines were publicly labeled "political heresies" by Adams's old friend, thomas jefferson, the secretary of state, the ideological division between them entered into the emerging party conflict. In this conflict Adams proved himself a loyal Federalist. Not wishing to cause further embarrassment to george washington's administration, which the Republicans assailed as Anglican and monarchical, Adams put away his pen in 1791 and withdrew into the recesses of the vice-presidency.

Elected President in 1797, Adams at first sought political reconciliation with his Republican rival, Jefferson, but the effort foundered amidst intense partisanship and foreign crisis. The issue of war and peace with France absorbed his administration. Working to resolve it, Adams was handicapped both by the Republican opposition and by the High Federalists in his cabinet who took their orders from alexander hamilton. The collapse of negotiations with France was followed by frantic preparations for war in the spring of 1798. Adams favored naval defense—and the Navy Department was created. He distrusted Hamilton, who favored a large army, seeing in him a potential Caesar. When General Washington, called out of retirement to command the new army, demanded that the second place be given to Hamilton, Adams resisted, citing his prerogative as commander-in-chief, he but was finally forced to yield. He did not recommend and had no direct responsibility for the alien and sedition acts passed by Congress in July. Yet he contributed as much as anyone to the war hysteria that provoked this repressive legislation. In his public answers to the addresses of loyalty that poured into Philadelphia, Adams repeatedly condemned "the wild philosophy," "domestic treachery," and "spirit of party, which scruples not to go all lengths of profligacy, falsehood, and malignity in defaming our government." Thus branded disloyal by a President whose philosophy made no place for organized political parties, the Republican leaders became easy targets. Moreover, Adams cooperated in the enforcement of these laws. The Alien Law was not fully executed in a single instance, but Adams deserves little credit for this. He apparently approved the numerous prosecutions under the Sedition Law, and showed no mercy for its victims. In retrospect, when the impolicy of the laws was generally conceded, Adams still never doubted their constitutionality.

Despite the prescriptions of his political theory, Adams was not a strong President. Indeed, because of that theory, he continued to consider the office above party and politics, though the conception was already unworkable. In the end he asserted his authority and in one glorious act of statesmanship broke with the High Federalists and made peace with France. The domestic consequences were as important as the foreign. Adams sometimes said he made peace in order to squelch Hamilton and his designs for the army. Standing army, foreign adventurism, mounting debt and taxes—these dangers recalled to Adams the Whig doctrines of his youth. "All the declarations … of Trenchard and Gordon [see cato ' sletters ], Bolingbroke, Barnard and Walpole, Hume, Burgh, and Burke, rush upon my memory and frighten me out of my wits," he confessed. Patriotic, courageous, and wise, Adams's actions nevertheless split the Federalist party and paved the way for Jefferson's triumph in the election of 1800. Before he left office, Adams signed into law the judiciary act of 1801, creating many new federal courts and judgeships, which he proceeded to fill with faithful partisans. In the Republican view the Federalists retreated to the judiciary as a fortress from which to defeat every popular reform. Less noticed at the time but more important for the nation's constitutional development was the nomination and appointment of john mashall as Chief Justice of the United States.

In retirement at Quincy, Adams slowly made peace with Jeffersonian Republicanism and watched his son john quincy adams, who broke with the Federalists in 1808, rise to become the sixth President of the United States. A compulsive and contentious reader, Adams never lost his enthusiasm for political speculation; and although he grew more and more hopeful about the American experiment, he continued to the end to warn the people against their own suicidal tendencies. In 1820 he attended the convention to revise the Massachusetts constitution he had drafted forty years before. When the reformers attacked the "aristocratical principle" of a senate bottomed on property, Adams spoke spiritedly in its defense. And, with most of the original constitution, it survived. The finest literary product of these years—one of the intellectual monuments of the age—was his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, with whom he was reconciled in friendship in 1812. The correspondence traversed an immense field. In politics, the two men discoursed brilliantly on "natural aristocracy," further defining a fundamental issue of principle between them. Interestingly, Adams's political anxieties, unlike Jefferson's, never fixed upon the Constitution. He did not turn political questions into constitutional questions. He was a nationalist, of course, and spoke highly of the Union; but for all his work on constitutional government, Adams rarely uttered a complete thought on the United States Constitution. The amiability and learning, the candor and humor, with the occasional banter and abandon of his letters were all perfectly in character. In the often quoted observation of benjamin franklin, John Adams was "always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses." He died, as did Jefferson, on the fiftieth anniversary of American independence, July 4, 1826.

Merrill D. Peterson
(1986)