JOHN ADAMS
2nd President, 1797–1801
Overall Rank: 19
Total Score: 604
Of the first five presidents—the founders—John Adams has consistently had the lowest overall ranking. Like the other founders, historians assign him a high rank in moral authority (11th). He scores relatively high in pursued equal justice for all (15th), but his overall rank suffers from low rankings in administrative skills (21st), public persuasion (22nd), and relations with Congress (24th).
Party: Federalist
b. October 30, 1735, Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts
d. July 4, 1826, Quincy, Massachusetts
First Lady: Abigail Smith Adams
Age entering office: 61
Historian: Gordon S. Wood
Gordon Wood is a professor of history emeritus at Brown University and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. He was interviewed for Q & A on November 15, 2017, about his book, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
[Living in Massachusetts] made me a fan of John Adams because he was a good old Yankee. [I hadn’t heard of him] until probably high school, but I didn’t know very much about him until college. And I hadn’t gotten to see his home until after college, so it was really a long time before I got to know him. Now, because I did three volumes for the Library of America of his writings, I really got to know him. I think I know him better than I know most of my friends. And, he’s really something.
First of all, he’s an old Puritan, although he’s not a Congregationalist, he’s not a serious Puritan, but he came out of that tradition. They kept diaries. He needed to write out his emotions, his feelings; he put everything into that diary as a young man. He said things about himself that most people would not say even in their diaries. He talked about his own vanity, and he talked about every intimate feeling he had; really expressed himself. That’s not something Thomas Jefferson would do. Jefferson was very reserved.… He had a very different temperament. They couldn’t differ more in temperament.
… Adams came out of a middling background, and whatever wealth he acquired, he acquired through his law practice. He did not inherit much from his father, who was not a wealthy man. Adams never became one of the rich men of Massachusetts, and he always resented that because he was always regarded as having a middling background, and he suffered a little bit of contempt from some of the wealthy Massachusetts men for that reason.
Adams would always be talking and razzing people; he had a sharp sarcastic tongue. Thomas Jefferson was restrained, reserved. He kept his arms folded in front of him when he talked, which is a sign of his reserve. Adams made mistakes because he said what he thought, and he offended a lot of people. Jefferson was the opposite, very polite—obsessed by politeness.… Part of being enlightened was to be polite; civility was very important to Jefferson. Adams knew about this [concept], but he just couldn’t help it. He said, “I don’t have the gift of silence,” which is what Washington had or Jefferson had.
… Adams grew up in Braintree, Massachusetts, with… none of the connections that Jefferson had. Jefferson’s mother was a Randolph, one of the most prestigious families in the whole colony of Virginia. He had, in a sense, a silver spoon from the outset, whereas Adams did not. So, there’s a big difference in their backgrounds. And, of course, Massachusetts was a relatively egalitarian state compared to the hierarchical state of Virginia. There were a few slaves in Massachusetts, but nothing comparable to the 40 percent of Virginia which was enslaved. So, the worlds they grew up with could not have been more different.
They were both smart, bright, right from the outset. Jefferson probably knew more about more things than any single man in North America, and I include Benjamin Franklin in that, who would be his only rival.… John Adams was smart, but he did not have the breadth. He had some depth in history and in law that Jefferson didn’t have; Jefferson just wasn’t as interested in the law as Adams. In fact, although Jefferson became a lawyer, he really didn’t think of it as a career, and he came to hate the law and hate lawyers. Adams loved the law, the mystery of the common law, and he was a superb counsel. He was one of the best lawyers, and certainly the busiest lawyer, in the colony of Massachusetts.
Adams is eight years older.… When Jefferson joined the Continental Congress in 1775, Adams had already been there, and he was in the lead in pushing for independence. Jefferson saw him as his senior, and Adams certainly saw him as his prodigy. Adams took Jefferson under his wing, this younger man. There’s only eight years difference, but that can be a lot when you’re young. That is how Adams and Jefferson played that role. In other words, Jefferson listened to Adams’s opinion and probably said the right things to him because Jefferson was very keenly aware of people. He was always sensitive to people’s feelings. I think that’s where the friendship started. He deferred to Adams, and that was important.
Adams was a realist; he did not believe that all men are created equal. He thought all men are created unequal. He did not believe in American exceptionalism. We Americans are no better, no different from other nations; we’re just as vicious, just as corrupt—these are the things he’s saying. This is not the American myth; this is not the American dream. He took on every single dream or myth that Americans live by. We couldn’t live by Adams’s message. It would be too much to bear. Jefferson said what we needed to hear, in some respects, because you can’t have a nation based on the notion that we’re all unequal from birth. In other words, Adams… didn’t know about genetics or DNA, but he believed that people are unequal from birth. He was all into nature, not nurture.
Jefferson was the opposite. He’s into nurture, and that is what most Americans believe.… In other words, we’re all born equal, and the differences that emerge are due to different experiences, different environments. That’s why education is so important to us Americans, as it was important to Jefferson. Now, Adams didn’t disparage education because [he felt] that it’s not going to make that much difference. He told Jefferson in their later years, “I went to a foundling hospital in Paris, and I saw babies four days old, and already they were unequal. Some were smart, some were dumb, some were beautiful, some were ugly.” He says those differences were right there at four days. That’s not an American message. I think that’s why we honor Jefferson in the way we do because we certainly honor the two men very differently. Jefferson has a beautiful memorial on the Tidal Basin in Washington. There’s nothing [in Washington, DC] for Adams. Jefferson’s Monticello is a World Heritage Site visited by hundreds of thousands of people from all [over] the world. I don’t know how many people come to Quincy, Massachusetts, to the Adams’s home, a very modest house relative to Monticello. He’s got a fraction of the visitors.
Adams was not in the same league, in the celebrity league if you will.… Their friendship broke up, but they came back together in 1812, and they exchanged about 158 letters, with Adams writing three to every one of Jefferson’s. But that’s understandable because, at one point, Adams says to Jefferson, “How many letters do you get in a year for yourself? How many do you receive?” This is about 1820. Jefferson says, “I get 2,000-something.” Adams says, “I only get 200.” Ten to one, and Jefferson felt obligated to answer them. Jefferson is corresponding with [Alexander von] Humboldt, the great naturalist; he’s corresponding with the czar of Russia; he’s corresponding with all sorts of great people. Adams is not in that league at all. So, Adams says, “I’ll write more than you because I know you’re busy writing to other people.” They were in a different league then,… and they still are, in our consciousness. There is no way that Adams can compete with Jefferson because Jefferson stands for America. Now, unfortunately, he’s a slaveholder and that has tainted him very badly in these days.
Adams had been in the First Continental Congress; Jefferson didn’t make that one. I think he became ill, but he sent along instructions, which got printed as a pamphlet. It was a review of the contest between Britain and their colonies, and it established his name in 1774. This was a very radical pamphlet, as radical as any pamphlet written until Thomas Paine because he takes on the king in his pamphlet. This is 1774, two years before the Declaration, and it anticipates the Declaration because he goes through a series of things that the king and the government have been doing. Jefferson comes to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, where Adams already had been in both congresses, and he’s already in the leadership. Adams is serving on about twenty-some committees and is the chair of many of them, including the committee on the war. When the Declaration of Independence committee is formed, Adams and Jefferson are both on it. Adams is happy to have this young guy take on the drafting of the Declaration because he’s so busy doing, in his mind, more important things, like running the war against Great Britain. Little did Adams realize… how important that Declaration would become. Later, of course, Adams becomes quite jealous of the fame that Jefferson is getting.
[During the Constitutional Convention in 1787 in Philadelphia, both men] were abroad—Jefferson as minister to France and Adams as minister in London. Adams had a profound effect on the Constitution, on the kind of government [it created], because he had written the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780. There, he’d set forth a kind of structure that gets copied by the federal government—a strong executive with veto power. What Adams had wanted was an absolute veto over all legislation, but he had to bend to his colleagues, and they gave a limited veto. The reason… all of our governors have limited vetoes, including the president, is because of Adams.… [Because] the two of them are away, they don’t know about the outcome until about two months later. Adams loves it because it seems to fit his own description of what good government should be. Jefferson is appalled by the power of the president [in the Constitution]. He thinks it is much too great. He sees the president as a version of a king that was elected for life, he has served for life, and then he would die, and the aristocrats will elect the new king. That’s how Jefferson thought the president of the United States would be.
… Adams was obsessed by oligarchy, he had a kind of iron law about oligarchy. He believed that there inevitably will be oligarchs who… attempt to run things. He feared the aristocracy more than he feared a monarchy or a single ruler. He was willing to give much more power to a president or to a governor than Jefferson [wanted]. Adams says at one point, “You fear the one, Mr. Jefferson; I fear the few.” He is obsessed by aristocracy, although he has emerged himself as an aristocrat. Jefferson’s notion of an aristocrat would be the talented and the virtuous man like himself. He assumed that the people, once educated, will elect people like himself. Jefferson was confident of the populace. He did not fear that demagoguery would take place. Adams is much more doubtful of democracy. Adams comes to doubt American elections. He thought they would soon become so corrupt, so partisan, that we would have to adopt the British technique—we would have to adopt, first, a lifetime tenure for the president, and for the Senate we would eventually have to make them hereditary. The question is: Have we reached that point yet in our elections? Because Adams would certainly [say], “I told you so. This is what happens when you have too much democracy.” Jefferson had none of those doubts, none of those fears.
Jefferson had contempt for organized religion.… He mocked Christianity and thought that the Trinity was a joke. He would say this in private to his friends, that he didn’t really care much about organized religion at all and he didn’t think religion was all that important to people. John Adams believes quite the contrary, although he is a Unitarian like Jefferson, that is to say they did not believe in the divinity of Jesus. But, Adams has tremendous respect for religious feelings and for religion. He thinks it’s useful, it’s necessary, that people need to have religion. He never mocked it; he never made fun of it. So, he’s very different in that respect from Jefferson.
The French Revolution was a momentous event, and Jefferson sees it as being influenced by our Revolution. He sees a worldwide revolutionary wave, beginning with us, that’s going to spread eventually and revolutionize the world. Ten years later [than ours], you had the French Revolution, and that seemed to be the first of what’s going to be many revolutions. Jefferson’s a complete ideologue; he’s so caught up in the French Revolution. At one point his successor as minister to France writes to him, this is 1793 right in the middle of the terror, and says, “Mr. Jefferson, your friends are being guillotined by the thousands.” Jefferson writes back, “Well, so be it.” He said, “If only an Adam and Eve are left alive but left free, it will be worth it.…”
That’s how Jefferson appears in letters. Now, it’s very doubtful he would have behaved that way because he tended to exaggerate, but that’s the feeling he had about this revolution, that it was worth so many deaths.… He was as far in the vanguard of radical thinking as you could be and still be an elected official.
[By contrast] Adams is committed to the English constitution from the beginning, [which he thought was] the finest in the world. He wants the American republican government to be a republican model of the English [system]. He’s completely taken with the English. Of course, when the revolution breaks out, England and France are in a titanic struggle for supremacy over a ten-year period of warfare. Adams’s sympathy is totally with England, and Jefferson’s is totally with France. That’s the source of their ultimate break because the two parties that emerge—the Federalists are pro-English, and the Jeffersonian Republicans are pro-French. And, the two men are caught as leaders of these two parties by the end of the 1790s.
The Federalists of New England are frightened of democracy because when they see it in operation, people [they support] are not being elected. In Virginia, you’ve got all these slaveholding aristocrats who are the leaders of the Republican Party.… It’s a paradox seemingly, but these [aristocratic] people have more confidence in democracy because there are none of the problems that the leaders are having in Massachusetts. [In] Massachusetts, the more egalitarian society, the so-called aristocrats are more vulnerable to challenge; it’s easier to enter the aristocracy in New England. And so, they are much more frightened of democracy even though they’re more democratic.
[In the presidential election of] 1796, there are only three electoral votes that separate [Adams and Jefferson]. Adams was appalled by that. He had been vice president to Washington, and he expected, “I should be acclaimed like Washington,” who had gotten every single electoral vote. Well, it wasn’t the same with Adams. He squeaked in by three votes, and if it had gone the other way, then Jefferson would have been the president and Adams would have been the vice president. Adams said he would never serve under Jefferson. He’s not happy. He feels he’s been humiliated by that close election. Then, when it comes to the election of 1800, he loses—and that is just beyond belief for him.
John Adams was the only president in our history who was defeated who did not stay around… to attend the inauguration of his successor. [The year] 1801 is the inauguration of Jefferson. It was 1812 [when the two of them finally resolved their grievances]. That really occurred only because of Dr. Benjamin Rush, who worked two years at it. He knew… Adams much better, and he felt that the nation needed to hear these two men talk to each other, that posterity required their correspondence. He used that argument over and over to each of them. Rush played it beautifully because he would report back to each. He would say to Adams, “Jefferson said he loves you,” and then he goes to Jefferson and says, “Adams says he loves you.” He really set them up—and it took him two years to do it. Finally, they break through. Then, once the correspondence starts, Adams, of course, is much more blunt, and he says things; he’s razzing, he’s sarcastic, he jokes, he’s facetious.… He’s pushing a little bit too much. Some more sensitive soul [than Jefferson] might have said, “Enough is enough. I’m not going to put up with that.”
I have a chapter in my book entitled “The Great Reversal” because in their correspondence Adams develops a kind of confidence;… he just feels better about himself and about the country. Jefferson is going the other way. Adams’s son, John Quincy, becomes president in 1825. Jefferson congratulates Adams, but deep down he thinks that it’s a mistake. He’s frightened to death of what John Quincy is proposing because Quincy is coming in with internal improvements, infrastructure, if you will. The federal government is going to build bridges, canals, do all that kind of stuff. Jefferson and his fellow planters, slaveholders, are frightened to death because if the federal government can do that, then they can encroach, and they can get involved in slavery. He becomes a “fire-eater.” He’s concerned about the federal government’s power to do something about the nature of the institution of slavery.
All of these founders who lived into the nineteenth century are appalled by what they’ve wrought. They are disappointed by the revolution; they are scared. It hasn’t worked out the way they thought. It’s too democratic. It’s too wild. And certainly, Adams and Jefferson both have second thoughts. Not that they want to reverse it, but they just say, “This is not the world we wanted.”