John Adams

Who Was John Adams?

John Adams was the second President of the United States, the first Vice President, and one of the principal architects of the American founding — a man whose intellect, stubbornness, and moral seriousness shaped the republic in ways that have been consistently underestimated. Born in Braintree, Massachusetts, the son of a Congregationalist deacon, Adams was educated at Harvard and trained as a lawyer. The law — its procedures, its evidentiary standards, its insistence on arguing from fact rather than feeling — formed his characteristic cast of mind.

His political philosophy was rooted in a deep Calvinist suspicion of human nature. Where Jefferson inclined toward optimism about human perfectibility, Adams insisted on the persistence of human self-interest and the necessity of institutional checks against its expression. His Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States is the most systematic political theory produced by any founder, and its argument — that mixed government is necessary precisely because human beings are not angels — is a political application of the doctrine of original sin.

His correspondence with Jefferson, resumed after their long estrangement and continuing until both men died on the same day — July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration — is one of the great intellectual exchanges in American letters. In those letters Adams wrestled openly with questions of God, immortality, and the moral foundations of the republic he had helped to create.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States — 1787–1788
• Thoughts on Government — 1776
• The Adams-Jefferson Letters — posthumous collection