John Adams
By David McCullough
Simon & Schuster, New York, 736 pages
As the host of the PBS American Experience documentaries, David McCullough is the closest thing America has to a public historian. And it is as our public historian that McCullough has written a biography of John Adams, the least understood and least appreciated of the early leaders of the Republic.
It is a task with similarities to McCullough’s previous venture into presidential biography, his 1992 Truman, but also challenging differences. Like Adams, who followed in the footsteps of George Washington, Truman was a president seemingly dwarfed by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Adams, however, was also overshadowed in the national memory by his successor, Thomas Jefferson. And though McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography raised Truman’s popular profile, it was hardly needed to establish his place in history. In contrast, Adams is a more difficult subject to make a star out of. His place among the country’s founding fathers is unquestioned, and as principal author of the Massachusetts state constitution (the model for the US constitution), Adams is properly revered here, but less so outside the Bay State. In making Adams stand out from the Revolutionary pack, McCullough has his work cut out for him.
McCullough has spoken frequently about the genesis of the project. Initially, he was interested in the relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson–wartime comrades, political rivals, and, finally, treasured friends. The book’s publication marks the 225th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, on which they collaborated so closely, and recognizes the extraordinary coincidence of Adams and Jefferson dying within hours of each other on July 4, 1826.
The Adams-Jefferson relationship is a thread that runs through the book. But in the end, this is a biography of the less familiar half of the pair. McCullough’s burden is to make the story of Adams alone as interesting as the subplot of his complicated comradeship with Jefferson.
McCullough begins his case with an opening chapter that has a novelistic feel. Not the feel of a fast-paced, contemporary novel, but of a slow-building, discursive novel of the era, the kind that Adams might have read–and the kind McCullough did read (Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker), not once, but twice, as he wrote the Adams biography. In this way, McCullough not only tells an 18th-century tale, but emulates an 18th-century book.
Adams is first seen on a cold January day in 1776, riding with a young companion along the road from Braintree to Cambridge, where the Continental Army was encamped, a stopover on the 400 miles to Philadelphia where the Continental Congress was meeting. McCullough’s narrative imbues the scene with portent, in part by emphasizing the banality of the Revolutionary moment, and of Adams, the revolutionary. “Nothing about the harsh landscape differed from other winters,” McCullough writes. “Nor was there anything to distinguish the two riders, no signs of rank or title, no liveried retinue bringing up the rear”–no wealthy Virginian, he need not say. Adams himself seemed to revel in his own ordinariness. Much later, at the time of his inauguration as president in 1797, Adams was pleased by the description of him in a Baltimore newspaper as “an old fielder”–a term, he informed his wife and political advisor, Abigail, that meant “a tough, hardy, laborious little horse that works very hard and lives upon very little, very useful to his master at small expense.”
McCullough shows Adams proving himself very useful in moving the debates of the Continental Congress toward secession during the spring of 1776. On May 8, the delegates heard cannon fire from 30 miles down the Delaware as two British ships tried to run the river defenses. “Many in Congress” knew that they were at “a critical juncture,” McCullough writes, and Adams “decided the time was ripe to make his move.” He introduced a resolution to have the individual colonies take over all powers of government. It passed, unanimously, but was followed by three days of heated debate over Adams’s preamble which, as McCullough describes it, “put aside any possibility of reconciliation and all but declared the colonies immediately independent.” Within two months came the Declaration itself.
And what about Jefferson? He finally makes his appearance, on page 111, “at the climax of debate over Adams’s preamble,” portrayed as almost a bystander in the argument over the precursor to his most famous work. At this point, the cautious reader might want to check the author’s pro-Adams tilt. At hand is Joseph J. Ellis’s Founding Brothers, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for history. (Ellis’s personal credibility has come under fire recently, but on Adams his authority is beyond question.) Ellis concurs with McCullough, writing that “Adams had actually led the debate in the Congress that produced [the Declaration’s] passage, as Jefferson sat silently and sullenly while the delegates revised his language.” Ellis also writes of Adams’s dismay in later years that Jefferson had “run away with the stage effect and all the glory of it.”
In sharp contrast to this upstaging, the Adams-Jefferson relationship is most often seen through the elegiac prism of the correspondence they conducted during their later years. McCullough’s account shows how that relationship grew out of the time both were stationed in Europe negotiating post-Revolution treaties–Adams in Paris and then London, Jefferson in Paris. After Abigail Adams joined her husband in Europe in July 1784, there was, McCullough writes, “the bonus of Jefferson and the flourishing of a friendship that under the normal circumstances at home would most likely never have happened.”
The friendship flourished through quiet events such as their visit to English country gardens in April 1786, after Jefferson joined Adams in London. “In the long, eventful lives of Adams and Jefferson,” McCullough writes, “it was an excursion of no importance to history. But it was the one and only time they ever spent off on their own together, free of work and responsibility, and at heart both were countrymen, farmers, with an avid interest in soils, tillage, climate, and ‘improvements.’”
Another moment “of no importance to history” gives more evidence of the relationship that developed between the Adamses and Jefferson in the European years. “To boost her spirits” while Adams was on a mission to Amsterdam that spring, Abigail Adams “playfully proposed the idea” that she and Jefferson arrange a marriage between John Quincy Adams and Jefferson’s daughter Patsy, who had accompanied him to Europe. “Suppose you give me Miss Jefferson and in some [fu]ture day take a son in lieu of her,” she wrote in a letter. “I am in favor of strengthening [the] federal union.”
This bond did not survive the men’s return to America and embroilment in political controversies. Ironically, it was events in Europe–the revolution in France–that, McCullough writes, “put the first severe strain on their already cooling friendship.” The proximate cause was Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. Jefferson, then secretary of state, had received an early copy and forwarded it to a printer, endorsing it as an answer to “the political heresies that have sprung up among us.” Jefferson privately confirmed that he was referring to the recent writings of Adams, then vice president, in which Jefferson perceived an “apostasy to hereditary monarchy.” A belated exchange of letters between Adams and Jefferson failed to resolve the dispute. And the “explanation with each other” which Adams sought in one of the letters, McCullough writes, “would have to wait for more than two decades.”
McCullough does not linger long over Adams’s years as president. This most public period in Adams’s life gets barely 100 pages, compared to nearly 600 pages on Truman’s presidency in that McCullough biography. McCullough seems to suggest that after bringing about independence in 1776, spending 10 years as a struggling nation’s chief diplomat in Europe, and such other accomplishments as drafting the Massachusetts constitution, the presidency was anticlimax.
Not that the Adams presidency was without its moments of controversy. There were, of course, the Alien and Sedition Acts–the “red scare” legislation of its day that forever stained Adams’s reputation. These two laws gave the president power to deport any foreigner he considered “dangerous” and made it a crime to write anything against the government or “to excite against them…the hatred of the good people of the United States.” McCullough argues, a bit defensively, that the laws “must be seen in the context of the time, and the context was tumult and fear,” with the country in a state of undeclared war against France. In this, he echoes Adams himself who, in later years, would describe them as war measures.
In contrast, there is McCullough’s barely concealed delight in telling the story of Adams catching the Republican (Jeffersonian) opposition in “a trap of their own making” in the “XYZ” affair. This involved dispatches from American envoys in Paris detailing demands by three French officials–identified as “X, Y, and Z”–for bribes totaling over $10 million to protect American merchant ships from seizure by French privateers. The envoys had refused, causing Adams to call for defense measures. The Republicans believed Adams was inflating this threat for his own purposes and demanded release of the dispatches. “The revelation that the crisis was not less than the administration implied, but far worse,” writes McCullough, “hit the Republicans like a hammer.” Within weeks, Congress appropriated funds for coastal defenses and authorized a national navy of armed vessels built–by local subscription–in coastal cities like Boston and Salem. War was averted, but news of a peace treaty came too late to secure Adams a second term.
This altogether admirable and readable book succeeds in what seems to be its principal goal: to bring back to life a man whose actions in the Revolutionary period made him, in McCullough’s view, one of “few Americans…[who] ever achieved so much of such value and consequence to their country in so little time.”
In doing so, he relied heavily on the Adams Papers, housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society–specifically, the incredible trove of letters, journals, and other writings by John and Abigail Adams. In their thousands of surviving letters, writes McCullough, “they both wrote with such consistent candor and in such vivid detail it is possible to know them to an extent not possible with other protagonists of the time.” No biography like this could be written without these papers. But by their sheer volume, they tend to drown out other voices, both admiring and critical.
Then, there is the voice of David McCullough. The reader encounters sentences, usually of summary declaration, like this one from very early on: “He was 40 years old and he was a revolutionary.” They have the unmistakable sound of David McCullough the public historian of PBS. This is biography with a strong personal voice.
But John Adams may not be the easiest of subjects. He was not glamorous, and McCullough does not try to make him so. Nor has Adams captured the popular imagination as has Jefferson. It remains to be seen whether an admiring biographer will be enough to change that, beyond the new push to give Adams his monument in Washington. But under McCullough’s hand, Adams does emerge as a man who would go anywhere, endure any personal discomfort, for the cause of American liberty. Star material or not, Adams deserves the star treatment McCullough gives him.
Michael Kenney is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.