Born at Braintree (in present Quincy), Mass., Oct. 30, 1735: died at Quincy, Mass., July 4, 1826. The second President of the United States, 1797–1801. He was graduated at Harvard in 1755, studied law, took a leading part in opposing the Stamp Act, was counsel for the soldiers charged with murder in connection with the “Boston massacre” of 1770, and became a leader of the patriot party. In 1774 he was chosen a member of the Revolutionary congress of Massachusetts. He was a delegate to the first and second Continental Congresses, proposed Washington as commander-in-chief, signed the Declaration of Independence, was appointed commissioner to France in 1777 (arriving at Paris in 1778), negotiated a treaty with the Netherlands in 1782, was one of the negotiators of the treaties with Great Britain, 1782–83, negotiated a treaty with Prussia, was appointed minister to London in 1785, and was recalled in 1788. He was Federal Vice-President 1789–97, and was elected as Federal candidate for President in 1796. In 1800 he was the unsuccessful Federal candidate for President, and retired to Quincy in 1801. “Life and Works,” edited by C. F. Adams (10 vols., 1850–56); life by J. Q. and C. F. Adams (1871), by J. T. Morse (1885).

Personal

  This day, dearest of friends, completes thirteen years since we were solemnly united in wedlock. Three years of this time we have been cruelly separated. I have, patiently as I could, endured it, with the belief that you were serving your country and rendering your fellow-creatures essential benefits. May future generations rise up and call you blessed, and the present behave worthy of the blessings you are laboring to secure to them, and I shall have less reason to regret the deprivation of my own particular felicity. Adieu, dearest of friends, adieu.

  It is confidently affirmed that Adams an aristocratic Lawyer in favor of British Dignities, manners and Government will be President.

  Mr. Adams had a great mind, quick, comprehensive, analytical, not easily satisfied save with ultimate causes, tenacious also of its treasures. His memory did not fail until he was old. With the exception of Dr. Franklin, I think of no American politician in the eighteenth century that was his intellectual superior. For though Hamilton and Jefferson, nay, Jay and Madison and Marshall surpassed him in some high qualities, yet no one of them seems to have been quite his equal on the whole. He was eminent in all the three departments of the Intellect—the Understanding, the practical power; the Imagination, the poetic power, and the Reason, the philosophic power…. At the age of forty he was the ablest lawyer in New England, perhaps the ablest lawyer in America. He was the most learned in historic legal lore, the most profound in the study of first principles.

  In figure John Adams was not tall, scarcely exceeding middle height, but of a stout, well-knit frame, denoting vigor and long life, yet as he grew old, inclining more and more to corpulence. His head was large and round, with a wide forehead and expanded brows. His eye was mild and benignant, perhaps even humorous, when he was free from emotion, but when excited, it fully expressed the vehemence of the spirit that stirred within. His presence was grave and imposing, on serious occasions, but not unbending. He delighted in social conversation, in which he was sometimes tempted to what he called rodomontade. But he seldom fatigued those who heard him; for he mixed so much of natural vigor, of fancy, and of illustration with the stores of his acquired knowledge, as to keep alive their interest for a long time. His affections were warm, though not habitually demonstrated, towards his relatives. His anger, when thoroughly roused, was, for a time, extremely violent, but when it subsided, it left no trace of malevolence behind. Nobody could see him intimately without admiring the simplicity and truth which shone in his action, and standing in some awe at the reserved power of his will. It was in these moments that he impressed those around him with a sense of his greatness. Even the men employed on his farm were in the habit of citing instances, some of which have been remembered down to the present day. At times his vehemence would become so great as to make him overbearing and unjust. This was most apt to happen in cases of pretension or any kind of wrong-doing. Mr. Adams was very impatient of cant, of sciolism, or of opposition to any of his deeply-established convictions. Neither was his indignation at all graduated to the character of the individuals who might happen to excite it. It had little respect of persons, and would hold an illiterate man, or a raw boy, to as heavy a responsibility for uttering a crude heresy as the strongest thinker or the most profound scholar.

  In this rapid survey of the men assembled at Philadelphia a hundred years ago to-day, I began with Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, and I end with John Adams, of Massachusetts; and no one can hesitate to admit that, under God, they were the very alpha and omega of that day’s doings,—the pen and the tongue,—the masterly author, and the no less masterly advocate, of the Declaration.

  In nearly every respect John Adams was a typical New Englander of the times; at least it may be said that in no one individual did the colonial character find a more respectable or a more comprehensible development than in him, so that to understand and appreciate him is to understand and appreciate the New England of his day; and to draw him is to draw the colonists in their best form.

  In integrity he was an ancient Roman. He had more force than play of character, and though his experience was wide, for he had been ambassador as well as statesman, more knowledge of books than of men. He was somewhat dogmatic, somewhat pedantic, and from his childhood too self-conscious and too laboriously self-trained, as his methodical diary shows.

  John Adams was the father of the public school, the State University, the State College, and the normal school. He realized when he inserted the educational clauses in the constitution of Massachusetts that he was departing from precedent and feared lest all would be struck out. Save in New England, the idea lay dormant until the national government began to make donations of public lands exclusively for school purposes. The State constitutions then introduced an administrative article on education. This act of the general government strengthened the national idea. In our day, the right to education, in popular estimation, ranks as a civil right.

Statesman

  I am persuaded, however, that he means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.

  There never was, perhaps, a greater contrast between two characters than between those of the present President and his predecessor; although it is the boast and prop of the present that he treads in the steps of his predecessor. The one, cool, considerate, and cautious; the other, headlong, and kindled into flame by every spark that lights on his passions: the one, ever scrutinizing into the public opinion, and ready to follow, where he could not lead it; the other, insulting it by the most adverse sentiments and pursuits. Washington a hero in the field, yet ever weighing every danger in the Cabinet: Adams without a single pretension to the character of a soldier, a perfect Quixote as a statesman.

  President Adams has written a very long letter to General Varnum on our national affairs. He speaks with great approbation of the Administration, and goes the whole length with them in vindication of our national rights. I assure you, that I read his letter with the greatest delight, and regretted that for a moment I had ever doubted his patriotism. The letter would do honour to any man living. He, Mr. Gray, and Mr. John Quincy Adams, have deserved highly of their country; and I venture to predict, that when party spirit has passed away, their memories will be revered by every honest and honourable American, with the greatest enthusiasm.

  He was an eminently honest, brave, and humane man…. Adams was an able and an honest man, and as he had been commissioner at Paris on the recall of Silas Deane, he was not quite unaccustomed to European ways, but he appears to have been singularly wanting in the peculiar tact and delicacy required in a diplomatist.

  Adams had been sent as ambassador to England. The choice was a most happy one. Of all the men in the service of the republic, he alone was, by nature and by experience, fitted for the place…. Diligent, cautious, painstaking, he was an excellent man of business and a careful observer of events. His mind was in no danger of being drawn aside to investigate the ascent of balloons, to examine the pretensions of Mesmer, or to write up pamphlets on emigration to America. He was constantly intent on matters of state, and was as familiar with public opinion in England touching American affairs as with public opinion in Holland. He had indeed given it as his belief, long before the appointment was made, that the post of Minister to England would be far from a pleasant one, and that whoever should occupy it would find himself in a thicket of briers from which he could barely expect to escape without tearing his flesh.

  John Adams possessed two faculties in a degree which distinguished him among his countrymen, and made him pre-eminently serviceable in a period of revolution,—the historic imagination which develops nationality from its germ, and clear intuitions of organic constitutional law. In these faculties he has never been surpassed by any American statesman, nor equalled save by him whose name needs no mention in this presence…. If we now look at some of those moral characteristics which marked him as a statesman, we shall find certain race traits which he seems to have inherited immediately from his British ancestry, rather than by transmission through his colonial progenitors. He possessed the pluck, courage and bull-dog tenacity which we call English, and which all through their history has stood them in such stead in desperate civil and military encounters, often changing lost fields to fields of victory, and, on the other hand, there was no trace in his composition of the craft, cunning, or selfishness which narrow circumstances and a hundred years of contest with a treacherous and skulking foe are supposed, justly or unjustly, to have engrafted on the New England character of his day.

  All admit his abilities, his honesty, and his patriotism; but it is only Massachusetts that ranks him among the demi-gods. As a young man he was among the greatest, if he were not the very greatest of his country. As a man of middle age he did not attain the high standard which his youth led his contemporaries to predict. He was a respectable, a useful, a zealous public servant, and an average diplomatist, with small opportunities of distinction, which he made the most of. In later life, and when he had attained the highest summit of his ambition, and wielded, as far as a President could wield, the destinies of his country, he offended the party by whose suffrages he was elected, and never conciliated in any appreciable degree the party that had opposed him. The adopted of Federalism, he threw back the cause of the Federalists for sixty years. “Whom the gods love, die young,” said the ancients. Perhaps, and most probably, if John Adams had died immediately after the Declaration of Independence, his name, next to that of Washington, might have stood highest and brightest in the long muster-roll of American worthies.

  The credit of having originated the measures which led to building up the United States Navy—in the face of formidable opposition—can not properly be withheld from Adams…. Of Adams it may be most truthfully said that not one among the most illustrious statesmen of this country was more devoted to the Cause of the American Colonies, or displayed more zeal or ability in their defense. In all the varied scenes through which he passed, his patriotism never faltered and was never called in question.

General

  The various political works of the elder President Adams, published during his lifetime, have been long out of print, and are, for the most part, to be found only in libraries formed in the last generation. They exercised a very powerful influence over public opinion at the time when they appeared. No thorough knowledge of our constitutional history can be acquired without a careful perusal of them.

  There are few eminent persons who have drawn so lifelike a portrait of themselves as he has done…. Had he never emerged from the obscurity of his first estate, and lived and died an unknown man, his Diary, unearthed a century after it was written, would have been a most interesting and valuable contribution to psychology as well as to history.

  Mr. Adams lived in an age of action, and had little time for rhetorical arts. But few of his speeches have been preserved. His letters form the most valuable part of his published works, and are among the best in our literature. Those addressed to his wife, in particular, are delightfully frank, tender, and manly.

  The character of Mr. Adams is clearly visible in his own papers. Ardent, vehement in support of what he believed to be right, easily roused to anger by opposition, but sincere, placable, and generous, when made conscious of having committed the slightest wrong, there is no individual of his time about whom there are so few concealments of either faults or virtues.

  As a writer of English, John Adams in many respects surpassed all his American contemporaries; his style was crisp, pungent, and vivacious.

  Like his son, John Quincy, he was an inveterate diarist, from 1755 to 1785, and his records of some important transactions are not only valuable as history but picturesque in language…. Adams could turn a phrase neatly enough, and there was matter as well as manner in his phrases…. Adams must write, but he had no literary end in view, and spent as much honest care upon a home letter as upon a state document or a newspaper article to stir the patriots.

  The Puritan temperament was strongly emphasized in this son of Massachusetts, but its fearless and indomitable energy was in him addressed to politics instead of to religion. He could not be at ease either in the pulpit or at the bar; but the obvious dangers threatening his country drew him to its defence as inevitably as the magnet attracts iron…. As a writer, he was copious, careful and weighty. His diary, kept from 1755 to 1785, contains the record of many important events, graphically described; and his private letters show a largeness of view and a force of expression that recall the style of the historian. He was a contributor to the newspapers of the time, and was the author of several essays or pamphlets on matters of public moment.

  Known in literature chiefly from the charming correspondence that passed between him and his wife during the most stirring period of our history. These letters, which have been given to the world by Charles Francis Adams, are singularly frank and tender. Besides revealing two rare personalities, and an almost ideal domestic life, they possess a literary merit of very high rank. Adams, aside from the inevitable public documents and messages incident to his position, produced several powerful pamphlets of contemporary interest, and kept a journal which is now of great value to the student of our early national life.