John Adams once had a heart “formed for friendship," but the American Revolution tested that ideal. Through his bond with Loyalist Jonathan Sewall and other key relationships, this post explores the personal ties that shaped Adams’s character and the course of history.
by Chris Mackowski, Ph.D.
This blog uses John Adams’s friendship—and eventual estrangement—with Loyalist Jonathan Sewall as a compelling entry point into Adams’s character and the human cost of the American Revolution. Framed around the idea that Adams had a “heart formed for friendship,” the piece explores how personal relationships shaped his political life and historical legacy.
Drawing on themes from Atlas of Independence, the post positions Adams not as a distant Founding Father, but as a complex, deeply human figure navigating loyalty, conflict, and reconciliation. By highlighting his relationships with key Revolutionary figures—including Abigail Adams—the blog offers readers a relational lens through which to better understand both Adams and the broader story of the Revolution.
John Adams had a heart “formed for friendship,” or so said one of his closest friends, Jonathan Sewall. By the time Sewall said that, though, the two men had been estranged for more than a decade because of the American Revolution. Adams, of course, became one of the principal leaders of the Revolution while Sewall remained a Loyalist and eventually went into exile.
The two had started together as young lawyers in Boston’s legal scene in the 1760s. They remained personally close even as their careers took them on divergent paths. Sewall eventually became the Massachusetts colony’s attorney general; Adams eventually turned down the lucrative position of advocate general on the Court of Admiralty—a position Sewall offered to him on behalf of the Crown. “I could not place myself in a situation in which my duty and my inclination would be so much at variance,” Adams told him.
By 1775, their break was total. Adams considered Sewall “the most bitter, malicious, determined and implacable Enemy I have. God forgive him the Part he has acted, both in public and private Life!” It was not without bitter regret, though. Adams noted, “It is not impossible that he may make the same Prayer for me.”
After the Revolution, as Adams served as the Minister to the Court of St. James’s, he paid a visit to Sewall, by then living in London. The two met warmly. “Adams has a heart formed for friendship, and susceptible of its finest feelings,” Sewall declared afterwards; “he is humane, generous and open—warm in his friendly Attachments tho’ perhaps rather implacable to those whom he thinks his enemies. . . .”
This was the lens I wanted to use as I looked at Adams in my new book, Atlas of Independence: John Adams and the American Revolution. As I traced Adams through these years, I keyed in on relationships that put him in partnership or rivalry with various other important figures of the time: Sam Adams, John Dickinson, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Ben Franklin. The most important of these, of course, was his relationship with his wife and lifemate, Abigail.
John Adams’s relationships with these and other figures helped me tell the larger story of the Revolution as it unfolded from the “shot heard round the world” at Concord’s North Bridge to the Treaty of Paris that ended the war (negotiated, in large part, by Adams). Not only did it provide an illuminating lens for looking at seminal events of American history, they helped me show Adams as being very much human—something we don’t necessarily think of when we think of the Founding Fathers. Too often, we look at them as “marble men” and not as human beings like you and me, with “hearts formed for friendship.”
About the Author
Chris Mackowski, Ph.D., is a writing professor in St. Bonaventure University’s Jandoli School of Communication. He is an award-winning author of more than twenty-five books and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Emerging Civil War (ECW), a digital platform that provides a voice for “emerging” voices and perspectives in Civil War history. He is also advisory editor for ECW's sister site, Emerging Revolutionary War.