John Adams

In the hard, colorless light of a New England winter, a man rides toward the crucible of revolution. He is John Adams of Braintree - a farmer, a lawyer, a known talker, and a man of uncommon ability and force. Though verging on portly, with the round, ruddy face of his English forebears, he is surprisingly solid, his hands those of a man accustomed to splitting his own firewood. He is ambitious to excel, yet prizes honor above fame. He is passionate, quick to anger, and all-forgiving; a devout Christian and an independent thinker. Above all, he is devoted to his “Dearest Friend,” his wife, Abigail, who knows his heart and shares his spirit. “You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator,” she writes from their Braintree farm, the sounds of war already at her doorstep. “We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.”

The path to revolution is neither straight nor swift. As a young lawyer, Adams first distinguishes himself not by defying the Crown, but by defending it, representing the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. It is an act of profound courage, born of his conviction that no man in a free country should be denied the right to a fair trial. But as the Crown's injustices mount, his patriotism burns like a blue flame. At the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, he emerges as a leader, his voice ringing with logic and fervor. While others hesitate, he drives relentlessly toward a final break. He is, as his colleague Thomas Jefferson would recall, the “colossus of Independence” on the floor of Congress, the man who, “by the force of his reasoning,” demonstrates not only the justice but the expediency of the great measure. When the Declaration is finally passed on July 2, 1776, he writes to Abigail in a state of transport, prophesying that the day will be celebrated by succeeding generations with “pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.”

His service to the cause then takes him across the sea, on a perilous winter voyage aboard the frigate *Boston*. With his young son, John Quincy, at his side, he endures a terrifying storm that splits the mainmast and a running battle with a British privateer, during which he takes up a musket among the marines. He arrives in France to find a diplomatic mission plagued by discord. The celebrated Benjamin Franklin, living in splendor at Passy, seems indolent and indifferent to the commission's chaotic affairs, while the suspicious Arthur Lee is impossible to work with. Feeling himself a mere clerk amid the glittering but frivolous salons of Paris, Adams finds his Puritan soul and republican principles tested at every turn. He is a man made for action, not for the subtleties and intrigues of an Old World court.

Frustrated and feeling his talents wasted, he embarks on a new mission of his own making to the Netherlands. It is a venture of “militia diplomacy,” a direct appeal for recognition and, most critically, for a loan to save his struggling country from financial ruin. He is met with maddening Dutch caution, shunned by officials, and nearly succumbs to a nervous fever in the damp Amsterdam air. But with news of the American victory at Yorktown, the tide turns. In what becomes one of the great triumphs of his life, he secures both recognition and the vital loan. “Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right,” he writes, having succeeded where no one thought he could.

His diplomatic odyssey continues. At the peace negotiations in Paris, he, Franklin, and John Jay defy their instructions from Congress and secure a treaty with Great Britain of astonishingly favorable terms, doubling the size of the new nation. Later, as the first American minister to the Court of St. James's, he stands before King George III, the monarch he had defied and reviled. In a moment thick with emotion, he speaks not as a rebel but as a representative of a sovereign nation, expressing his hope to restore “the old good nature and the old good humor” between two peoples of kindred blood. The King, visibly moved, replies, “I was the last to consent to the separation; but the separation having been made... I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.”

Returning home, he is elected the first Vice President, an office he finds to be “the most insignificant... that ever the invention of man contrived.” For eight years he serves Washington with unwavering loyalty, though he feels himself a man apart, sidelined from the real work of government and increasingly alarmed by the rise of partisan fury. The animosity between his old friend Jefferson and the brilliant, ambitious Alexander Hamilton seems to poison everything. His own stubborn insistence on proper titles for the new government makes him a target of ridicule, and he feels the sting of being misunderstood and unappreciated, a recurring trial in his life.

His own presidency is a tempest. Inheriting a nation on the brink of war with France, he is caught between the pro-French Republicans, led by Vice President Jefferson, and the war-hawk Federalists in his own cabinet, secretly led by Hamilton. After French agents in the notorious XYZ Affair demand a bribe to begin negotiations, the country is swept by war fever. “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!” becomes the cry. Adams, the “old oak,” as Abigail calls him, stands firm. He builds up the navy - his beloved “wooden walls” - but refuses to be swept into a full-scale war that he knows would be disastrous for the young republic. In one of the bravest acts of his career, he breaks with his own party and sends a second peace mission to France, a decision that costs him his friendship with many, and ultimately, his reelection. It is a lonely, thankless, but heroic performance.

Defeated by Jefferson in the bitter election of 1800, Adams retires to his farm in Quincy, a private citizen at last. The long years of separation from Abigail are over. He is Farmer John of Stoneyfield, surrounded by his books, his grandchildren, and the familiar sights and sounds of his native ground. The anguish of losing his daughter, Nabby, to cancer and his son Charles to alcoholism is immense, but in his old age, he finds a measure of peace he has never known. “Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments,” he writes to a friend. “What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”

In retirement, a new chapter opens. Through the quiet encouragement of their mutual friend Benjamin Rush, he and Thomas Jefferson renew their correspondence. Across hundreds of miles, the two old revolutionaries, the North and South Poles of the American founding, once again take up their pens to exchange thoughts on history, philosophy, religion, and their shared past. “You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other,” Adams writes. For fourteen years, their letters fly back and forth, a dialogue that is a monument to their friendship and to the enduring questions of their age.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches, the two patriarchs are fading. Adams, at ninety, is nearly blind and can barely stand, but his mind remains undimmed. Jefferson, at eighty-three, is confined to his bed at Monticello. Both men are determined to live to see the jubilee. On the morning of July 4, 1826, Adams, told the day, whispers, “It is a great day. It is a good day.” At Monticello, Jefferson dies peacefully just after noon. A few hours later in Quincy, Adams breathes his last. His final words are, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” He is mistaken, but in a way more profound than he could know, he is right.