John Adams Returns

John Ferling. Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xxiv +392 pp. Maps, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. $35.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

Richard Alan Ryerson, ed. John Adams and the Founding of the Republic. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2001. x + 294 pp. Notes and index. $60.00.

In a year of strange and inexplicable events, one of the most remarkable has been the return of John Adams. Two centuries after he was the first president to live in the White House, and the first to be voted out of it, John Adams has returned to the national consciousness. How has this happened?

Partly it is owing to the phenomenal success of David McCullough's John Adams (2001). As I write, more than a million people have bought copies of this masterful biography. Adams also owes a debt to Joseph Ellis, who followed his books on Adams (Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, [1993]) and Jefferson (American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson [1997]) with Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2000), a literary gallery of the founders. From that gallery of heroes and villains—Adams and Jefferson, Burr and Hamilton, Washington and Madison—Adams emerged as the most interesting, the most likable, and, in many ways, the most important. That John Adams, as the hero of McCullough's and Ellis's books, spent the summer of 2001 on the bestseller lists—who could have predicted this extraordinary improbability?

Certainly not John Adams. Even during his long life, he knew he was being written out of history. He predicted to Benjamin Rush that when the history of the revolution is written, "The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislation, and war." ¹

For two centuries we got along well with a myth not far different from this, with the addition of Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. That Adams had nominated Washington to command the Continental Army (Massachusetts's own John Hancock had hoped for the position), had insisted that Jefferson write the Declaration (Adams himself seemed a more logical choice), and had never trusted Franklin, made the ironies for Adams all the more bitter. He would be remembered, if at all, as the proponent of elaborate titles for public officials, supporter of checks against the popular will, and sponsor of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This past summer, an Adams descendant (a namesake of Abigail) lamented to me that "ever since third grade I've had the Alien and Sedition Acts thrown in my face."

But now, the honest John Adams has returned to the public consciousness. He has returned precisely because he never left to become a marble monument. Instead, he has remained the most human of the founders. In his writings we meet an acerbic, witty, passionate, and often prescientcommentator on a contentious political world. His historical reputation has also risen thanks in large measure to his most trusted advisor and confidante, his wife, Abigail. Being married to one of the most interesting, and studied, women in the history of the Republic (there are more books in print about Abigail than about John) has cast a luster on John Adams. It is hard for teachers to paint him as a stuffy monarchist when they are also pointing to Abigail as a fiery feminist. With the reflected glow of his estimable wife, John Adams shines to us from that patriarchal age.

Adams is also unique among the great men of his day on the issues of race and slavery. Like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, John Adams denounced slavery. But unlike them, Adams never owned another human being. And while the others argued that the time was not right to abolish slavery, the constitution that Adams wrote for Massachusetts in...