John Adams – David McCullough, 2001 ★★★

Looking Out for Number Two

Popular historians need more than get their facts straight; they must entertain while they edify. Few did this better than David McCullough, whose biography on John Adams won him his second Pulitzer Prize. 

Often overlooked for his contributions to the American Revolution and its aftermath, or else depicted as duller or plainer than his fellow Patriots, Adams was due for a reappraisal. But in rebalancing Adams’s legacy as a selfless prime mover of his nation’s birth, did McCullough push too hard in the other direction?

Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: You don’t mind it so much when the case presented – however dubious in several particulars – is this engaging, humorous, and enjoyable to read. Adams at times seems to breathe through these pages.

“He was a known talker,” McCullough writes on Adams. “There were some, even among his admirers, who wished he talked less. He himself wished he talked less, and he had particular regard for those, like General Washington, who somehow managed great reserve under almost any circumstance.”

Adams grew up in the Braintree, Massachusetts home depicted on the right, then, after graduating from Harvard, lived with wife Abigail on the house on the left while practicing law. Of his childhood years, McCullough quotes Adams saying they "went off like a fairytale."
Image from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/adams-biography/

For people who know Adams just for being the second American president, McCullough offers some needed context. The book is divided neatly into three sections: the first covering Adams as revolutionary, the second Adams as diplomat, the third Adams as politician. Much of the time, his life is set against those of two others, his wife Abigail and his friend and rival Thomas Jefferson.

Abigail was his best friend and one constant ally. Their relationship is described by McCullough as one of deep mutual dependence:

It was the paradox of their lives that, as much as his public role kept them apart, he always needed to be with Abigail and she with him. They would never become accustomed to being separated… Each worried incessantly about the other’s health and well-being, at times to the point of making themselves ill.

Jefferson meanwhile ends up McCullough’s chief claim for Adams’s greatness, as someone Adams could not help but shine against:

Jefferson was devoted to the ideal of improving mankind but had comparatively little interest in people in particular. Adams was not inclined to believe mankind improvable, but was certain it was important that human nature be understood.

Adams (seated) depicted with Thomas Jefferson during deliberations on the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote it, while Adams championed the document in Congress. According to McCullough, the key vote happened on July 2, 1776; the signing a month later. "Indeed, to all appearances, nothing happened in Congress on July 4, 1776," McCullough writes.
Image from https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Adams-president-of-United-States/Continental-Congress

Dunking on Jefferson is easy sport; does McCullough really need that to make his pro-Adams case? Actually, yes. Adams by himself, it turns out, is not that interesting, despite his propensity to be at important places while living a very long life. At least the written record he left behind is not all that detailed.

He was a letter writer, yet only briefly started an autobiography. Much of his day-to-day life was recorded only briefly. He is said to have made a great speech to rally support for the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but no record of that speech exists. Adams’s earliest moment of greatness, defending British soldiers after they killed five Americans in Boston in 1770, is presented almost as if Adams were a relativist:

Better that many guilty persons escape unpunished than one innocent person should be punished. “The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.”

Jefferson is much more enjoyable to read about, at least for the way he gets turned into an unsympathetic foil. The wonder is how the two of them ever got along.

Abigail and John Adams, as they were around 1800, the year he was elected President. When Abigail learned her husband was elected, she had a coat-of-arms painted on her carraige. John had her remove it. "They shall have a Republican president in earnest," he declared.
Image from https://www.instagram.com/p/DQO7jDijSH_/

Adams, of proud Puritan stock, was a man of firm and deep convictions he spoke of loudly and often. Jefferson, so mild of manner in McCullough’s account that he never argued, was a hypocritical slaver and ideological gadfly who ran himself into debt buying fancy trifles and annoyed Abigail enough for her to call him out in private correspondence for his low associations.

Yet McCullough devotes a great chunk of the final chapters to detailing the rekindling of their unlikely friendship. “[O]ne of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history – indeed, in the English language – was under way” is how he puts it when they reconnect in 1812 after a long separation. Which is a stretch.

Did McCullough start this book as a dual biography on Adams and Jefferson, only to pull it back? It reads that way.

Anyway, the book needs Jefferson. Without him, it would be too pious and respectful. Hagiography is too strong a term, but in the ballpark.

Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti portrayed Abigail and John Adams in a 2008 HBO miniseries based on McCullough's book. Much admired in its own right, it presents the couple as devoted to each other. "How lonely are my days," she wrote him when he was in France negotiating peace with Britain. "How solitary are my nights."
Image from https://carlyjbrown.com/2019/10/14/madeira-mondays-the-john-adams-miniseries/

About Adams’s writing Massachusetts’s state constitution, McCullough writes: It was, in all, a declaration of Adams’s faith in education as the bulwark of the good society, the old abiding faith of his Puritan forebears. The survival of the rights and liberties of the people depended on the spread of wisdom, knowledge, and virtue among all the people, the common people, of whom he, as a farmer's son, was one.

Adams had flaws, McCullough admits, but nothing like those of his critics, whether they were of the Democrat-Republican stripe like Jefferson (whose symbol was a tricolored cockade in imitation of French revolutionists) or Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, repeatedly pummeled for his extramarital affairs and his apparent desire to become an American Napoleon by forming a national army.

As to Adams’s legendary thin skin that led him to such overreactions as the signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 for which his one-term Presidency is most famous now, McCullough is equivocal.

On the one hand, while the Alien and Sedition Acts were “reprehensible” as McCullough puts it for their attempt to prosecute honest dissent, they “must be seen in the context of the time, and the context was tumult and fear.” On the other hand, which is the thrust of much of the book, Adams throughout his career was much traduced and maligned, a victim of willful misunderstanding.

The White House in 1800, just in time for Adams to move in before losing the next election to Jefferson. The President's House, as it was then known, "reeked of wet plaster and wet paint," McCullough writes. "Only a twisting back stair had been built between floors."
Image from https://www.facebook.com/StatuesThePeopleTheySalute/posts/did-you-know-john-and-abigail-adams-held-the-first-christmas-party-at-the-white-/1168973897921312/

“It is my duty to bear everything that I can not help,” Adams wrote while a diplomat in Paris, pleading his young nation’s cause. In John Adams, diplomacy was where he shined the most, not only winning military and material support from the French and others, but also standing up for his country while other envoys like Benjamin Franklin lazily did as they were bid.

But as McCullough admits, Adams’s diplomacy was not a success until the United States began winning decisively on the battlefield. “[Adams] has a rigidity, an arrogance, and an obstinacy that will cause him to foment a thousand unfortunate incidents...” McCullough quotes the French foreign minister, Comte de Vergennes.

While McCullough paints Vergennes as another impossible personality for Adams to maneuver past, there is ample if unamplified evidence that Adams was not a good ambassador. “Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right,” is how Adams himself put it.

Adams was a man of strong opinions, even when reading. According to McCullough, Adams's copy of Mary Wollstonecraft's French Revolution (seen above) contains about 12,000 words of Adams's own writing on the margins. He often took to arguing with authors this way, and much enjoyed it.
Image from https://ateacherswrites.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/becoming-a-margin-man/

Both as a diplomat and a politician, Adams was admirable but not without flaws. John Adams might have been a better book had McCullough explored this more thoroughly. The most he admits is that Adams could be vain, at times irrationally so. “It appeared that the man who put such stress on balance in government was himself a little unbalanced,” McCullough says at one point, then leaves it there.

The author is more comfortable presenting Adams as a victim of over-the-top critics. He quotes a hostile Pennsylvania senator: “I cannot help thinking of a monkey just put into breeches.” James Callender, a particularly slanderous pundit of his day, gets many chances to be heard. Other, more thoughtful contrarian voices are ignored.

While the first two sections are engaging enough, and vividly described, it is only in the final section, centered on Adams the president, that the book settles into a more challenging and invigorating review of who Adams was and what he was about.

It is here McCullough lands on a familiar thesis. As with his prior book, Truman, the central figure is literally that, at the center of a major dispute being vigorously argued on both sides. With the French Revolution in full sway, killing thousands and simultaneously seizing American ships, you have in Jefferson and his fellow Democrat-Republicans fierce supporters of the revolutionaries, and Hamilton and his Federalists pressing for closer ties to Great Britain.

David McCullough excelled at presenting historic figures who occupied a middle ground in the great debates of their time. With Adams, as with Harry Truman, he presents a solitary, virtuous man surrounded by fractious, narrow-minded antagonists. "Adams could rightly claim to have held to the ideals of union and neutrality, but his unrelenting independence...had cost him dearly."
Image from https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/david-mccullough-biography

Adams saw the latter as elitists and the former too willing to tear down things that matter: “Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots,” he wrote.

McCullough avoids the trap of many biographies by not letting his narrative lose steam as it reaches the end. In fact, by the end of the book Adams becomes a mellower and more likeable figure: “This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding,” he writes after enduring a series of tragedies. In McCullough’s hands, you feel the truth in those words.

While John Adams suffers a bit from pushing admiration for its subject too far, McCullough’s clear rooting interest in his subject adds to the period detail and pithy quotations in giving the book a spark of life as well as wit. He may not sell me on the idea Adams is singularly overlooked by history, but he tells a fine story about a good man.