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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 658-659



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John Adams and the Founding of the Republic. Edited by Richard Alan Ryerson (Boston, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2001) 294pp. $60.00


Compared with the other founding fathers, Adams appears to fall short. He did not possess the commanding dignity of George Washington, the intellectual brilliance of Thomas Jefferson, the personal flash of Alexander Hamilton, or the political savvy of James Madison. Just as Adams feared, generations of historians have maligned him as a prickly man with aristocratic pretensions whose support for the nefarious Alien and Sedition Acts tainted his other achievements as president. In the Founders' firmament, his star has shone only dimly.

Adams, however, would be pleased to witness the current resuscitation of his political reputation. Like David McCullough's John Adams (New York, 2001) and Joseph Ellis' Founding Brothers (New York, 2001), Ryerson's book does much to rescue Adams from the shadow of the other founders. The most scholarly of the three works mentioned, Ryerson's collection of essays offers the most original new evidence on Adams' life and career. A new generation of historians portrays him as [End Page 658] the workhorse of the Continental Congress, whose high-minded support for the American cause never flagged, even as he faced intractable diplomatic problems abroad. As the second president, he staved off war with France, even at the expense of his own political career. Unlike Washington, he was truly a president above party. Surprisingly modern in his support for women's education, his relationship with Abigail appears affectionate and close. Throughout his life, she was his partner and confidante.

Although all of the essays in the volume fall squarely within the traditional bounds of political and intellectual history, they provide fresh perspectives that help support the claim that Adams deserves greater recognition than he has received. Some of the most provocative essays, in fact, revisit traditional subjects with new eyes. Gregg L. Lint's discussion of diplomatic history is incisive. Although Adams' brash negotiating posture infuriated the French and irritated Benjamin Franklin, his colleague, his boldness, Lint suggests, protected American interests far better than more delicate behavior would have. Jack D. Warren, Jr., examines the working relationship between Adams as vice president and Washington as president. Stripping away preconceptions, he observes that "the precedents set during the Washington presidency were as important as the Constitution itself in giving substance to the office" (119). Originally, he shows, Adams may have hoped to act as an intermediary between the executive and the Senate. Although Washington initially did consult with Adams on a variety of matters, for a host of reasons he eventually froze Adams out of the loop, thereby rendering the vice presidency irrelevant. Thus was the pattern for future vice presidents set.

C. Bradley Thompson's essay, "John Adams and the Science of Politics," takes on the vexing question of consistency in Adams' political thought. Historians have frequently lamented that Adams' thinking, though expressed in monumental tomes such as A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1787) and the Discourses on Davila (Boston, 1805), lacked rigor and intellectual coherence. Thompson has a different view. By analyzing Adams' corpus as an attempt "to synthesize the classical notion of mixed government with the modern teaching of separation of powers" (246), he reveals the second president to be not only a consistent thinker but also an innovator. Whereas classical republican writers "tended to construct their mixed polities on the bases of entrenched socio-economic or legally established hereditary orders, Adams saw the differences between the one, the few, and the many as determined by and inherent in the constitution of human nature" (257). Although Adams' theories still may not place him in Jefferson's or Madison's league, Thompson, like the other contributors to this uniformly excellent collection, shows that there is more to Adams than we may have assumed.

 



Rosemarie Zagarri
George Mason University

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