OK--I guess we're doing this, huh. After reading Alexis Coe's biography of George Washington, here we are reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams. It's the second McCullough book I've read this year, after his book on the Johnstown Flood, and it shows the popular historian in full form: a big honking tome, well-written. John Adams can take credit for a renewed interest in the second president, who McCullough clearly suggests is underappreciated relative to his predecessor and successor, and resulted in the HBO miniseries starring Paul Giamatti. But McCullough's position is, I would argue, not just that Adams is underappreciated when set amidst larger personalities, but that there is a political valence to that underappreciation--that our historiography has been shaped by Jacksonian Democrats whose rhetoric of "liberty" and "states' rights" have prevented us from fully appreciating Adams as an advocate for a strong central government and opponent of slavery.
McCullough is a great writer, so in saying I was persuaded, perhaps I am saying that his style worked on me. But I do actually think McCullough's case is compelling. Firstly, he depicts Adams as the "voice" of the Declaration of Independence, advocating stormily for its passage during the Continental Congress during a time when loyalists reluctant to shake the wrath of Great Britain might still have won the day. As a diplomat, Adams secured loans and treaties from European powers in the face of powerful contempt. As president, Adams has the benefit of being a staunch opponent of slavery when every other president of his era, outside of his son John Quincy, either supported the institution's expansion or waffled on it hypocritically, as Washington and Jefferson did. (A nice detail here is that, by inviting a representative of Haiti's Toussaint to the White House, Adams was the first president to host a Black guest.)
I had a vague sense of all that before reading the book, but what I did not realize is that Adams successfully managed the "Quasi-War" with Napoleon's France and kept it from blowing up into a full-blown war of the kind that saw the White House burned just a decade later. This gained Adams no friends, because his own Federalist party (like Hamilton, who comes off here as an absolute conniving piece of shit that everyone hates) was drumming the beat for war and accused Adams of being cowardly, whereas the Jeffersonian Republicans were Francophiles who failed to see the extent of French provocations. This is sort of a key to understanding McCullough's vision of Adams, who successfully navigated both sides of the political arena, which kept the country safe and thriving but made him personally unpopular.
Adams was, it seems, kind of annoying on a personal level. His chief sin, in his own words, was "vanity," though one might add stubbornness, a short temper, and a rusticness inappropriate to the grand courts of Europe. But one person adored him--his wife Abigail, whose eloquence and intelligence set her apart among the First Ladies of the first American century, if not beyond. Adams is unique in that we have a huge trove of his writings, including the letters he and Abigail sent each other, giving us a sense of Adams' own perspectives and thought processes we don't have for other presidents. I was charmed by the thread of Abigail's love for this weird little man that most people seemed to have found unlovable, and it is one of two personal threads that undergird the book, the other being the close friendship with Jefferson that was sundered by their political differences, then stitched back together after both were out of office.
If John Adams has a flaw, it's that the book doesn't seriously deal with the Alien and Sedition Acts, an affront to the right of free speech that marked the low period of Adams's presidency. McCullough explains it away as a kind of product of the political pressures of the time, and shows that Adams later regretted it, but it's not clear exactly what those pressures were, nor why Adams, who seems to have such an iron spine when it came to doing unpopular things, embraced it. And yet, despite this, I came away with a renewed respect for the forgotten second president, "His Rotundity."
