Author R.B Bernstein details the life of John Adams, a serious intellectual, lawyer, and devout patriot.
The Education of John Adams, R. B. Bernstein, Oxford University Press, 311 pages, July 2020.Â
Two accounts of John Adams are current among Americans today. The first, purveyed by popular historian David McCullough in his mega-bestselling John Adams, focused on the Massachusettsianâs peculiarâthough appealingâpersonality. Reading it, one might think that Adams had been a mere character. The other, developed by academic historian Gordon Wood in a chapter of his seminal The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 entitled âThe Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams,â makes Adams an out-of-place if powerful thinker. Richard Bernsteinâs new book joins the personality and political science of the Colossus of Independence.Â
Bernstein, the first lawyer to write an Adams biography, notes in his preface that âAdams lived with books at his elbow and a pen in his hand.â He early set himself the task of âteach[ing] his contemporaries and posterity what he had learned.â Bernsteinâs account would be filled with âclashes of personality,â yes, but also with âprincipled intellectual disputes about political theory and practice.â As the second president put it in a famous missive to his beloved wife Abigail:
I could fill volumes with descriptions of Temples and Palaces, Paintings, Sculptures, Tapestry, Porcelaine, &c. &c. &c.âif I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty. The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine.
Adamsâs earnestness strikes one as his most appealing characteristic. His devotion to the needs of posterity ranks a close second.
As Bernstein explains early on, âDeciding between character without ideasâŚand ideas without characterâŚis a false choice.â He opts instead for âjuxtaposing [Adamsâ] ideas with his character.â Perhaps most people will miss the titleâs allusion to the autobiography that won Henry Adams, Johnâs great-grandson and the very greatest American historian, a Pulitzer Prize. It is a clue that Bernstein will treat each important passage in the Bay State Founderâs extremely long life as both importantâin several cases epically importantâin itself and a formative experience for the man.
We begin our story with John Adamsâs birth into a Congregationalist deaconâs family in Braintree, Massachusetts. Our John was a fifth-generation descendant of Adamses who arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony âin 1632 or 1633â from Braintree, England âwith Rev. Thomas Hooker, the Puritan clergyman who founded the colony of Connecticut,â and he counted two Plymouth Colony Pilgrims among his paternal ancestors. Having been tutored in his ABCs at an early age, John experienced substantial disappointment in his first pass at more advanced schooling. Here we find the famous story of Adamsâs father fulfilling the small boyâs desire for some farming experience and the boyâs realization that there was something to book learning after all.
Placed under the tutelage of an able teacher in his 14th year, Adams proved an enthusiastic student. He came into possession of a set of Ciceroâs writingsâin Latin, of courseâand decided that here was a model for his life. Bernstein notes that this seems to be the oldest surviving book from Adamsâs substantial library. Its inscription says âJohn Adams His Book 1749/50.â
Harvard posed a bit of a puzzle to Adams: though the school that had been established to prepare Puritan ministers retained a religious tinge, young John disbelieved some of Calvinismâs chief doctrines. He therefore aimed to enter upon a lay career. Ranging intellectually well beyond the collegeâs curriculum, Adams exploited the colonyâs largest library. He also launched a family tradition of keeping introspective diaries at this point. As Benjamin Franklin more famously did, Adams used his diary to weigh his behavior by his own idiosyncratic moral standard. Bernstein observes that in departing from Calvinist norms in this respect, Adams here launched upon âsomething new.â
After graduation, young Adams found himself in Worcester, which âseemed to him an intellectual wasteland.â He realized rather quickly that teaching striplings did not satisfy either his active intellect or his ambition. He would soon be an attorney, riding to courthouses in eastern Massachusetts Bay Colony and impressing all and sundry. He married a brainy woman of more important lineage than his. So far as we know, Abigail Adams became in the end a more helpful political confidant than any other wife of her era. Not only did she provide informed counsel, but she proved to be a fierce proponent of Johnâs when times were tough. She also willingly suffered through numerous lengthy separations.
The early event in Adamsâs career for which we remember him nowâhis defense of the British soldiers indicted after the King Street Riotâcould have ruined his career. Devoted as he was to Massachusettsâs English legal inheritance, however, he felt compelled to defend them. Adams and his co-counsel won all seven defendantsâ acquittal on the major charges, though two ended with âMâ (for âmanslaughterâ) branded on their thumbs.
Adams thrilled at the thought of the Boston Tea Party (which, Bernstein notes, he never knew by that name), musing that it would be a major turning point in history. He had become a patriot. Soon enough, he found himself calling for independence in the Continental Congress and writing a pamphlet describing a republican constitution appropriate to an American state. Bernstein asserts that Adams should be considered second only to James Madison among American constitutionalists, though he concedes that federalism remained essentially foreign to Adams. Adamsâs pamphlet did indeed help to shape the earliest state constitutions, but his fixation on the âneedâ to cabin in aristocracy seemed increasingly foreign as time passed. (Madison, having read Adamsâs Defence of the Constitutions of the American States in Philadelphia while serving in the Constitutional Convention, wrote Thomas Jefferson with an acid dismissal of it.) Herein lies the explanation of Gordon Woodâs characterization of Adams as eventually âirrelevantâ to American constitutional thought.
If he reveled in having been born when he was due to his opportunity to participate in the American Revolution, John Adams proved extremely unfortunate by the end of the 1780s. Bernstein gives him more credit for his role in negotiating the Treaty of Paris than he deserves (the masterstroke yielding a western boundary at the Mississippi instead of the Appalachians resulted from John Jayâs inspired decision, in which Adams had no role, to ignore Congressâs instructions), and Our Hero had no role in drafting or ratifying the U.S. Constitution. He did however have a touching exchange with his former king upon presenting his credentials as American minister to the Court of St. James, matched by another such conversation at the time of his departure for America. (If his American enemies had knownâŚ.)
Upon his return from Europe, Adams found in the new office of vice president good evidence that the old Chinese saying âMay all your dreams come trueâ is indeed a curse: senators proved unwilling to be led in debate by the vice president, and he soon sulkily resigned himself to presiding more or less silently over their debates. His one substantial initiative, to have a fancy honorific title worthy of some minor Ottoman potentate attached to the president, earned Adams lasting mockery as âHis Rotundity.â Adams believed that such frippery, like the ceremonial sword he wore on state occasions and the fancy carriage in which he rode to his presidential inauguration, must be brandished for the purpose of impressing the Europeans that the new American government merited respect.
Bernstein tells us that Abigail Adams grew as defensive of her husband as he was of himself during his single presidential term. We read of Adamsâs error in retaining George Washingtonâs cabinetâwhom he did not for a long time recognize as essentially a gaggle of mouthpieces of Alexander Hamiltonâand of Adamsâs fine performance in heading off a war with France. The recent discovery by Wendell Bird that the Adams administration prosecuted far more people under the Sedition Act than had previously been known goes unmentioned.
Bernstein claims that not pique or humiliation, but plain logistics accounted for Adamsâs absence from his presidential successorâs inauguration. By this point, the reader wants to believe it. The end of the first Adams presidency, coming after a narrow Electoral College defeat (due to Aaron Burrâs machinations, John Jayâs compunction, or slave statesâ built-in advantage under the Three-Fifths Clause), had significant long-run consequences. John Quincy Adams, an important player in his fatherâs diplomatic career during the Revolution and fit political heir thereafter, would devote his post-presidential career to getting even with the slaveholders he blamed for his and his fatherâs political defeats.
One place where Bernstein does John Adams an injustice is in regard to his record concerning slavery. John Adams not only served as chief author of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, the only constitution Massachusetts has known, which a Massachusetts court three years later read as having banned slavery in Massachusetts, but he chaired the congressional committee that drafted a Declaration of Independence vaunting the âself-evident [truth] that all men are created equalâ and defended the section of that draft decrying the African slave tradeâand indeed the fact that African slavery had ever been brought to the United States at all. One might have thought his antislavery record a substantial one.
But no. Bernstein says that Adamsâs statement that he had long left resolving this problem in the South to Southerners rested on âunconscious racism,â and that, âHis posthumous reputation as a foe of slavery and an advocate of equal rights regardless of race is open to serious question.â Perhaps interestingly, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, another member of the five-man committee that wrote the Declaration of Independence and the sole author of the statute that banned slavery in the Nutmeg State, made a similar statement about not interfering with Southern slavery in the Philadelphia Convention. One infers that Bernstein would read that comment the same way. If the man whose constitution banned slavery in Massachusetts and the man whose statute banned slavery in Connecticut had antislavery records too slight to justify sparing them aspersions based on their racial records, we are a censorious generation indeed.
Bernsteinâs account of the famous twilight decade of correspondence between Adams and Thomas Jefferson, once an ex-friend and now a friend again, is a delight. Here Adams shines to his best advantage, impishly poking at the trite sophistries dear to his Virginian friendâand matching the younger Founding Fatherâs brilliant, flowing turns of phrase with equally brilliant, but oh so much different, letters of his own. Bernstein describes the excitement in the Adams household at the news that a letter from Mr. Jefferson has arrived, and various Adamses sitting around the table to listen to their patriarchâs enchanted reading of the newest of them.
Like his short biography of Thomas Jefferson, which I recommended in these pages 16 years ago (Review of R.B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, in The American Conservative (July 5, 2004), 28-30) as a well-wrought view of its subject, this short version of the life of John Adams by Richard Bernstein should long be a first resort for people who want a learned, fluent appraisal of our nationâs most important Yankee Founding Father. John Adams remains the most endearing of the New Englanders who won our independenceâperhaps as flinty as the rest, yet so irresistibly human, ingenuous, AmericanâŚan optimist in spite of himselfâa man who wanted to be remembered for a lifetime of trying to do us, you and me, all the good he couldâabove all, a patriot.Â
Kevin Gutzman is author most recently of Thomas JeffersonâRevolutionary: A Radicalâs Struggle to Remake America.
This post originally appeared on and written by:
Kevin R.C. Gutzman
The American Conservative 2020-07-05 04:01:00