Overshadowed by more celebrated Founders, John Adams has long been reduced to a reputation he scarcely deserved. Yet his insistence on truth, his love of argument as a path to clarity, and his steady political leadership were vital to our nation’s founding. This post revisits Adams as he was: clear-eyed, principled and essential.
by Chris Mackowski, Ph.D.
Of all the Founders, John Adams tends to be the most overlooked. We might easily conjure George Washington, Ben Franklin, or Thomas Jefferson. True fans of the Constitution will invoke James Madison. But Adams seldom rolls off the tongue in anyone’s first “roll call.”
Adams knew it would be so. “How is it that I, poor ignorant I, must stand before Posterity as differing from all the other great Men of the Age?” he lamented.
In fact, there would be no “United States” if not for Adams’s work on the political side of events, matched only by Washington’s work on the military side.
If we remember Adams at all, it’s often because of a stereotype perpetuated by the Tony Award-winning musical 1776 (well before the days of Hamilton!). In one of the songs, Adams sings about being “obnoxious and disliked” as he tries to convince Jefferson, Franklin and others to write the Declaration of Independence. He himself can’t do it because he is “obnoxious and disliked,” which would make people vote against the declaration simply as a knee-jerk response.
Unfortunately, that stereotype has stuck, although Adams’s biographer David McCullough has debunked that idea. “If he was thought ‘obnoxious,’ it would have been only by a few,” McCullough contended, “and only he himself is known to have used the word.” No contemporaneous account exists of anyone describing Adams in such negative terms, and even Adams only described himself that way years after that fact.
It is true, says historian Joseph Ellis, that “For [Adams], the only meaningful kind of conversation was an argument.” That might reinforce the idea of Adams as obnoxious or contentious, but in fact, Adams loved argument as a way to test ideas and sharpen thought. If he was argumentative, it was as a form of intellectual enlivenment, not contentiousness. He was a lawyer, after all!
But as a lawyer, Adams felt bound by the truth. “Facts are stubborn things,” he once said during a trial. He felt duty-bound and constitutionally inclined to tell people the truth even as other Founders told people what they wanted to hear (like Jefferson) or they didn’t speak much at all (like the famously silent Washington). Being a realist doesn’t win many points when the Romance sounds so much better.
But we have much to learn from Adams and from his remarkable wife, Abigail. We would do well to remember them and what they have to teach us.
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.
This blog post is the second of a three-part series. Read the first blog post: A Heart Formed for Friendship: John Adams and the Bonds that Shaped a Revolution.