John Adams

Counsel for the British: Boston Massacre

Britain's passage of the Townshend Acts in 1767 revived tensions, and an increase in mob violence led the British to dispatch more troops to the colonies. On March 5, 1770, when a mob accosted a lone British sentry, eight of his fellow soldiers reinforced him, and the crowd around them grew to several hundred. The soldiers were struck with snowballs, ice, and stones, and in the chaos the soldiers opened fire, killing five civilians, in the infamous Boston Massacre. The accused soldiers were arrested on charges of murder. When no other attorneys would come to their defense, Adams decided to do so despite the risk to his reputation. He believed no person should be denied the right to counsel and a fair trial. The trials were delayed so that passions could cool.

The week-long trial of the commander, Captain Thomas Preston, began on October 24 and ended in his acquittal, because it was impossible to prove that he had ordered his soldiers to fire. The remaining soldiers were tried in December when Adams made his famed argument regarding jury decisions: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence". Adams won an acquittal for six of the soldiers. Two, who had fired directly into the crowd, were convicted of manslaughter. Adams was paid a small sum by his clients.

According to biographer John E. Ferling, during jury selection Adams "expertly exercised his right to challenge individual jurors and contrived what amounted to a packed jury. Not only were several jurors closely tied through business arrangements to the British army, but five ultimately became Loyalist exiles." While Adams's defense was helped by a weak prosecution, he "performed brilliantly." Ferling surmises that Adams was encouraged to take the case in exchange for political office; one of Boston's seats opened three months later in the Massachusetts legislature, and Adams was the town's choice to fill the vacancy.

The prosperity of his law practice increased from this exposure, as did the demands on his time. In 1771, Adams moved his family to Braintree, Massachusetts, but kept his office in Boston; he noted "Now my family is away, I feel no Inclination at all, no Temptation, to be any where but at my Office." After some time in the capital, he became disenchanted with the rural and "vulgar" Braintree as a home for his family—in August 1772, he moved them back to Boston. He purchased a large brick house on Queen Street, not far from his office. In 1774, Adams and Abigail returned the family to the farm due to the increasingly unstable situation in Boston, and Braintree remained their permanent Massachusetts home.

American Revolution

Adams, who had been among the more conservative of the Founding Fathers, persistently held that while British actions against the colonies had been wrong, open insurrection was unwarranted and peaceful petition with the view of remaining part of Great Britain was preferable. His ideas began to change around 1772, as the British Crown assumed payment of the salaries of Governor Thomas Hutchinson and his judges instead of the Massachusetts legislature. Adams wrote in the Gazette that these measures would destroy judicial independence and place the colonial government in closer subjugation to the Crown. After discontent among members of the legislature, Hutchinson delivered a speech warning that Parliament's powers over the colonies were absolute and that any resistance was illegal. John Adams, Samuel, and Joseph Hawley drafted a resolution adopted by the House of Representatives threatening independence as an alternative to tyranny. The resolution argued that the colonists had never been under the sovereignty of Parliament: their charter, as well as their allegiance, was exclusive to the King.

The Boston Tea Party, a demonstration against the Tea Act and the British East India Company's tea monopoly over American merchants, took place on December 16, 1773. Protestors demolished 342 chests of tea worth about ten thousand pounds on the British schooner Dartmouth, anchored in Boston harbor. The Dartmouth owners briefly retained Adams as legal counsel regarding their liability for the destroyed shipment. Adams applauded the destruction of the tea, calling it the "grandest Event" in the history of the colonial protest movement, and writing in his diary that it was an "absolutely and indispensably" necessary action.

Religious views

Adams's views on religion are considered complex as he took a middle course between Deism and Calvinism that led him towards Unitarianism, which denied the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus Christ. In Quincy, the Unitarian faction was dominant and included Adams and his father. In 1825, the Unitarians split off as a separate denomination, which included John Adams. According to biographer David McCullough, "Adams was both a devout Christian and an independent thinker, and he saw no conflict in that."

Adams was raised in the Congregational church. Adams's family descended from Puritans. Strict Puritanism had profoundly shaped New England's culture, laws, and traditions, and Adams praised the historical Puritans as "bearers of freedom, a cause that still had a holy urgency". He believed that regular church service was beneficial to man's moral sense. Some scholars describe Adams as Christian Deist.

Fielding argues that Adams's beliefs synthesized Puritan, deist, and humanist concepts. Frazer notes that while he shared many perspectives with deists and often used deistic terminology, "Adams clearly was not a deist." In 1796, Adams denounced Thomas Paine's deistic criticisms of Christianity in The Age of Reason, noting that Christianity was "above all religions" and a "religion of wisdom, virtue, equity, and humanity". While both Jefferson and Adams denied the miracles of the Bible and the divinity of Christ, historian Gordon S. Wood notes that "Adams always retained a respect for the religiosity of people that Jefferson never had".

In his retirement years, Adams moved closer to more mainstream Enlightenment religious ideals. He blamed institutional Christianity and established churches in Britain and France for causing much suffering, but insisted that religion was necessary for society. In 1813, Adams suggested that the Christian Trinity was likely a "fabrication" derived from Pythagorean and Platonic philosophies rather than divine revelation. He further argued that one's salvation depended on behavior rather than belief. In an 1813 letter to Jefferson, Adams also mentioned reading Hindu texts, and noting the "sublime" concept of Eternal God, that Pythagoras learned in India.

Defence of the Constitutions

Adams's preoccupation with political and governmental affairs, which caused considerable separation from his wife and children, had a distinct familial context, which he articulated in 1780: "I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have the liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine."

While in London, Adams learned of a convention being planned to amend the Articles of Confederation. In January 1787, he published a work entitled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States. The pamphlet repudiated the views of Turgot and other European writers as to the viciousness of state government frameworks. He suggested that "the rich, the well-born and the able" should be set apart from other men in a senate—that would prevent them from dominating the lower house. Adams's Defence is described as an articulation of the theory of mixed government. Adams contended that social classes exist in every political society, and that a good government must accept that reality. For centuries, a mixed regime balancing monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy was required to preserve order and liberty.

Historian Gordon S. Wood maintained that Adams's political philosophy had become irrelevant by the time the Federal Constitution was ratified. By then, American political thought, transformed by more than a decade of vigorous debate as well as formative experiential pressures, had abandoned the classical perception of politics as a mirror of social estates. Americans' new understanding of popular sovereignty was that the citizenry were the sole possessors of power in the nation. Representatives in the government enjoyed mere portions of the people's power and only for a limited time. Adams was thought to have overlooked this evolution and revealed his continued attachment to the older version of politics. Yet Wood was accused of ignoring Adams's peculiar definition of the term "republic", and his support for a constitution ratified by the people.

On separation of powers, Adams wrote that, "Power must be opposed to power, and interest to interest." This sentiment was later echoed by James Madison's statement that, "[a]mbition must be made to counteract ambition", in Federalist No. 51, explaining the separation of powers established under the new Constitution. Adams believed that humans naturally wanted to further their own ambitions, and a single democratically elected house, if left unchecked, would be subject to this error; it needed to be checked by an upper house and an executive. He wrote that a strong executive would defend the people's liberties against "aristocrats" attempting to take it away.

Adams first saw the new United States Constitution in late 1787. To Jefferson, he wrote that he read it "with great satisfaction." Adams expressed regret that the president would be unable to make appointments without Senate approval and over the absence of a Bill of Rights.

Political philosophy and views

Slavery

Adams never owned a slave and declined on principle to use slave labor, saying: I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in such abhorrence, that I have never owned a negro or any other slave, though I have lived for many years in times, when the practice was not disgraceful, when the best men in my vicinity thought it not inconsistent with their character, and when it has cost me thousands of dollars for the labor and subsistence of free men, which I might have saved by the purchase of negroes at times when they were very cheap. Before the war, he occasionally represented slaves in suits for their freedom. Adams generally tried to keep the issue out of national politics, because of the anticipated Southern response during a time when unity was needed to achieve independence. He spoke out in 1777 against a bill to emancipate slaves in Massachusetts, saying that the issue was presently too divisive so the legislation should "sleep for a time." He was against use of black soldiers in the Revolution due to opposition from Southerners. Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts about 1780, when it was forbidden by implication in the Declaration of Rights that John Adams wrote into the Massachusetts Constitution. Abigail Adams vocally opposed slavery.

Monarchism

Adams expressed controversial and shifting views regarding the virtues of monarchical and hereditary political institutions. At times he conveyed substantial support for these approaches, suggesting for example that "hereditary monarchy or aristocracy" are the "only institutions that can possibly preserve the laws and liberties of the people." At other times he distanced himself from such ideas, calling himself "a mortal and irreconcilable enemy to Monarchy". Such denials did not assuage his critics, and Adams was often accused of being a monarchist. Historian Clinton Rossiter portrays Adams as a revolutionary conservative who sought to balance republicanism with the stability of monarchy to create "ordered liberty." His 1790 Discourses on Davila published in the Gazette of the United States warned once again of the dangers of unbridled democracy.

Many attacks on Adams were scurrilous, including suggestions that he was planning to "crown himself king" and "grooming John Quincy as heir to the throne." Adams felt that the great danger was that an oligarchy of the wealthy would take hold to the detriment of equality. To counter that danger, the power of the wealthy needed to be channeled by institutions, and checked by a strong executive.