Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer

David McCullough: John Adams

Of American historians, David McCullough is the most gifted and accomplished storyteller. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he has written books about great achievements of engineering: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, monumental endeavors which take learning, courage, and the labor of many hands. In his latest book, John Adams, he writes about the making of America, an abstraction that became real, took on shape, produced a government with enduring structures, which, at its beginning, was very much a work in progress, and one that remains so today. McCullough is present at the creation through the long life (1735–1826) of Massachusetts born and bred John Adams, our second president, “the ‘voice’ of independence,” as Adams was known to his contemporaries. The entire Adams family is a gift to historians. As McCullough writesinhisacknowledgments,“Thereisnocomparablewrittenrecord of a prominent American family.” During an age of limited literacy, John Adams was hyper-literate. Among the many astounding feats McCullough’s majestic account describes–amazing ocean crossings, startling encounters, momentous events–the constant movement of Adams’s quill pen upon the page is perhaps the most dumbfounding. David McCullough: John Adams 182 183 Any writer would be impressed by such productive labor, and McCullough is no exception. His 1993 Pulitzer-Prize-winning volume, Truman, was criticized by some for the author’s evident fondness for its subject: Harry Truman. Happily, McCullough likes John Adams, too,and,givenhisvividportraitofAdams,itisdifficultforareadernot to share his admiration and regard. Every generation should have its own accounts of historic figures, eventhosewhohavebeenwell-examinedpreviously.Thelifeandtimes of these personages need to be passed through the contemporary filters of our own age. McCullough does this splendidly. His depiction of eighteenth century America is stereoscopic. It blends into one image , two pictures: the historic facts of the 1700s and early 1800s seen through the point of view of the late twentieth century. It allows us to view it afresh in three dimensions. It’s better than the movies. And what scenes! The Continental Congress gathering, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the tumult and the tedium accompanying the birth of a nation. As John Adams asserted, he lived “in serious times.” McCullough uses the towering Thomas Jefferson and Adams as contrasting figures throughout. In a letter to Adams, by his old friend Benjamin Rush, Rush wrote, speaking of Adams and Jefferson, “I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution.Sometalked,somewrote,andsomefoughttopromoteand establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.” Indeed,theywereNorthandSouthPoles.HereisMcCulloughon that difference: “By 1776, with the addition of the land inherited from his father-in-law, Jefferson reckoned himself a wealthy man and lived like one. With the inheritance also came substantial debts and still more slaves, but then in Virginia this was seen as a matter of course. The whole economy and way of life was built on slaves and debt, with 184 tobacco planters in particular dependent on slave labor and money borrowedfromEnglishcreditorsagainstfuturecrops.JohnAdams,by contrast, had neither debts nor slaves and abhorred the idea of either.” Adams did inherit the farm he was born on, some forty acres, after his father,DeaconJohn,died;owningthelandmadeAdamsa“freeholder, and thus the equal of anyone.” McCullough walks us through the steamy streets of Philadelphia insummer,sitsusatthetables,andletsuseatthefareservedinAdams’ home (“a pudding of corn meal, molasses, and butter”), has us attend a mastectomy (yes, a mastectomy) performed on Adams’s forty-six year old daughter, Nabby, puts us bedside at many an affecting death scene, places us in cities beset by pestilence. He also guides us through the intricacies of the political factions and arguments that followed the nation’s founding, the Federalists (pro-British, favoring strong central government), the Anti-Federalists (pro-French, championing states’ rights), the Republicans, and their subsets. InalongbookaboutoneofAmerica’sfoundingfathers,somereaders will be surprised to spend such a large part of it in France, England and Holland. Adams was our country’s most significant ambassador, and there are more details of diplomacy within McCullough’s pages than descriptions of the military encounters of the Revolution, more time spent in the salons of the powerful than on the sacrificial battlefields of the common soldier. McCullough, without calling attention to them, describes many contemporary parallels, some profound, some amusing. Adams complains about the need for eighteenth century “spinmeisters,” the fact a politician “must get his picture drawn, his statue made, and must hire all the artists...