The Rediscovery of John Adams in Historiographical Context

November 200 1 Historically Speaking 23 The Rediscovery of John Adams in hlstoriographical context by Charles W. Akers the spectacular pubWith lishing success ofDavid McCullough'sJohn Adams following close on the heels of Joseph Ellis's Passionate Sage and Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers, the second president's stock seems to have taken a dramatic rise, especially in comparison to his rival-turned-friendly correspondent, Thomas Jefferson. Essayists have pounced on the John Adams phenomenon to comment on such things as the state of popular history and contemporary American intellectual culture, as well as how Americans remember and commemorate their past. Often lost in the hoopla is the indispensable work of the editors of the massive Adams Papers, which has made the recent rediscovery ofJohn Adams possible. When John Adams lost the close presidential election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson, his reputation as a major founder of the United States began to dim. Few would remember or fully appreciate that Adams had been the leading advocate of independence in the Second Continental Congress, that this New Englander pushed the Virginian George Washington into leading the American army, that in Europe he had led the diplomatic struggle for a favorable peace treaty with Great Britain, or that his presidency had held the new nation together at a time when it might easily have been shattered. In the next two centuries political leaders often divided into ideological camps of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democrats and Hamiltonian economic nationalists, but there were few if any Adamsonians. When in the decade before the Civil War Charles Francis Adams published ten volumes of selections of his grandfather's manuscripts and a biography, the thought and career of John Adams appeared largely irrelevant to Americans engaged in taming the continent , ending slavery, and building the economy.1 Much more interest had been created a decade earlier by this grandson's publication of letters of his grandmother, Abigail Adams.: Today, at last, with a definitive publication ofhis papers in progress, a major evaluation ofJohn Adams's contributions to the United States is underway. Once again, the dependence of historians on the availability ofsources becomes clear. John Adams insisted that his papers be preserved, and his heirs largely complied with his wishes and followed his example. The result was that by 1889 the Adams manuscripts constituted the largest and most important collection of papers of any American family. Use of the original manuscripts remained under the family's strictest control, but at the beginning of the next century the collection was removed from the Adams homestead in Quincy and given to the Massachusetts Historical Society in trust for fifty years. Only a very limited access was available to a few scholars approved by the heirs. Not until 1956 did the Society receive full title to the papers and open them to historians in a microfilm edition (1954-1959) of 608 reels, which if spread out would extend for five miles.' At the same time the Society began a definitive publication of Adams manuscripts from all sources that to date has produced thirty-six volumes in several series. In time, several generations of editors will have published as many as one hundred volumes, perhaps thirty alone devoted to the diary of John Quincy Adams. Once the Adams Papers were opened, the late Page Smith accepted the daunting task of preparing a comprehensive biography of John Adams. His two volumes of 1140 pages, published in 1962 and 1963, became the standard source for the next three decades.4 Smith saw the Adams Papers project as marking "John Adams's re-entry into American history." He recognized that the inner history ofthe family, so richly revealed in the manuscripts, made it essential for a biographer to present Adams "with his foibles and eccentricities, his blemishes as well as his virtues, so that he may be seen in his full humanity." Although the second president exhibited contradictions and paradoxes in his views and opinions, he remained, in Smith's view, "remarkably steadfast" in his "fundamental convictions." Thus his life became a "tract for the times" in 1960s America. Smith sought to correct Adams's detractors without exaggerating the three principal roles of his...