When most Americans are asked about the founding fathers, they ask, "what does that mean?" Among the nerdy minority who can speak to the question, most mention Washington, Jefferson, Franklin. And all are due praise, but John Adams was the closest the American Revolution could ever come to being distilled in a single person.Adams, a Massachusetts man, served as the defense for the British soldiers charged with the "Boston Massacre". He got them acquited by placing facts and reason in their rightful place above passion and prejudice and, in doing so, lent inestimable credit and esteem to the Revolution, even if it did not yet exist.
At the Continental Congress, Adams more than anyone else pressed for a Continental Army and a Declaration of Independence. Massachusetts was the only state bleeding or paying for the nascent Revolution, so Adams had a certain self-interest in pressing these points.
But HOW did he press them? By proposing that Virginians lead the Army (Washington) and write the Declaration (Jefferson). Adams totally disarmed and won over those who assumed that he was like any other great man, after nothing other than personal and local aggrandizement.
Adams spent the Revolution in Europe, pressing the French and Dutch governments for financial and military assistance. He did this for years as a renegade, a terrorist, utterly exposed to the whims of British spies and assassins. And ultimately, French ships and Dutch loans broke the back of the British. Because of John Adams.
When Adams returned home, he "retired" and wrote the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which today is the oldest continual law on Earth. It was the first Constitution to charge the government with "providing for the education" of ALL people, so as to ensure an educated population, which Adams called the "safest guard against tyranny".
John Adams was elected Vice-President under George Washington. In those days, the Vice-President was the candidate who came in second in the election. Adams finished behind Washington only after Washington's doppelganger, Alexander Hamilton, bribed several electors to inflate the margins.
Adams was elected president in 1796. As president his ultimate accomplishment was avoiding war with Napoleon while Congress and the media were pressing for such a course. Adams was the first man in the history of history to leave office willingly and peacefully in favor of a political enemy and on schedule in 1801, when he left the White House to Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was a great mind, but Adams was a great man. Adams never went into debt. He never refused assignments. He built his own barns. He harvested his own crops. Jefferson never worked a day in his life. He owned hundreds of slaves and was coddled to the point where he literally didn't even dress himself. His slaves dressed him. And, presumably, they undressed him before he impregnated them.
Because of Jefferson's spoiled dilettante existence, his great mind was addled and compromised by his lack of real-world experience.
Jefferson, the owner and rapist of dozens of human beings, fancied himself more "revolutionary" than Adams, unreservedly supported the French Revolution, and thrilled in the torrent of blood the way well-off leftists are perpetually prone to.
Adams, nearly alone among great thinkers of his day, predicted dictatorship as the inevitable consequence of the French Revolution.
Adams had a perfect mix of faith and reason, of romance and reality. He was a lover of words, of reading, of writing. He spoke and read fluently in Greek, Latin, French, and Dutch. He wrote millions of words with his own hand long before white-out, never mind computers. Since all men speak best of and for themselves, let me close with two of my favorite quotes from Mr. Adams:
"I damn nobody. I am an atom of intellect with millions of solar systems over my head, under my feet, on my right hand, on my left, before me, and my adoration of the intelligence that contrived and the power that rules the stupendous fabric is too profound to believe them capable of anything unjust or cruel."
"Do justice. Love mercy. That is enough."
John Adams
That is greatness.
1 comment:
Some notable omissions, I think, in Adams' career.
His tendency toward pomp?
His abiding Anglophilia - no less problematic than Jefferson's support of the French? (Do you really think Jefferson relished their bloodshed? Not their cause and ALL things revolutionary, but the bloodshed itself? I have found no evidence of that.)
His own inclination toward tyrannical rule? Though, in his defense, freedom of speech can be rather untidy in practice...
This is a bit of a stacked-deck argument, as much in its repudiation of Jefferson as in its praise of Adams. The notion, especially, that one man's intellect was purified by the gauntlet of real "work" and "experience" (he was classically-trained at Harvard, I might add; hardly the school of hard knocks), while the other was given to contradictory abstraction, is a fancy, revved-up version of the argument we hear so often from politicians regarding their "humble" roots - from disingenuous pricks like John "The Miller's Son" Edwards.
Thoughts and ideas should be considered on their own merit first; before, that is, the source is considered. Unfortunately we always tend to do the opposite. Why was JFK said to have won the televised debate with Nixon, but not the one heard by radio listeners? Because JFK wasn't a swarthy, fat lizard of a man.
To say that Jefferson's brain was obscured by bloodlust only because he never got his hands dirty is a charge you could never prove because it ultimately rests on a faulty proposition: that only those with first-hand experience of something could ever understand its implications. On the contrary, it could easily be argued that a distant observer has a better sense of the "big picture." How well did Tacitus understand the Germans? Or Joseph Conrad understand the Belgians in the Congo? Or Alexis de Toqueville understand us? It's up for debate. But one thing we can know for sure: their insights were qualitatively different from those living IN the circumstances which they described. And that is a welcome body of evidence for those attempting to see the forest AND the trees.
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