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The Education of John Adams R The Education of John Adams R. B. Bernstein "Drawn & Engraved by H. Houston / His Excellency John Adams President of the United States / Respectfully Dedicated to the Lovers of their Country and Firm Supporters of its Constitution / Published by D. Kennedy 228 Market St. Philad". (ca. 1797) Please do not cite or quote without permission of author. Book scheduled to be published on 4 July 2020 by Oxford University Press Prof. R. B. Bernstein Department of Political Science North Academic Center, Room 4/138A 160 Convent Avenue New York, New York 10031 TEL: 212.650.7385 15 August 2019 EMAIL: rbernstein@ccny cuny edu To the Colloquium: I am honored to start off our semester – honored and apprehensive. The Education of John Adams has made more than one appearance before this group, as part of its gestation, which has taken fourteen (yes, 14) years. In the past year, I have had to edit the manuscript severely when its 126,000 words exceeded the contracted-for length by 26,000 words.. Repeated reviews of the text have cut it by approximately 26,500 words. In addition, I have severely edited it to make it as clear and concise as possible. Thus, there is no longer any need for further editorial advice. What I do need and ask of you, please, is that you assess the book’s argument in general and as to particular subjects. The particular subjects have to do with John Adams, slavery, and race. The appearance in 2018 of Arthur Scherr’s combative monograph John Adams, Slavery, and Race (Peraeger/Greenwood) has spotlighted issues that previous students of Adams’s life and work have overlooked or neglected. I have tried to benefit from Scherr’s work while avoiding his tendency to mock and beat up previous Adams scholars. (Sometimes it seems that he is more intent on beating up such people as David McCullough and Joseph Ellis than in examining Adams.) Have I addressed these subjects adequately for a book of this compressed size? Have I connected the pieces scattered through the book? Also, have I managed to explain the technical aspects of Adams’s political thought, set them in context, and so written the book that it brings readers unfamiliar with Adams and his world into the conversation? My approach here is like that of my Thomas Jefferson (Oxford UP, 2003), to which this is a companion volume, though standing on its own. I neither love nor hate Adams or Jefferson; I am simply trying to understand them. (Bill Nelson disagrees, but that’s Bill.) I look forward to your comments, suggestions, and observations of whatever kind. THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE SACRED MEMORY OF MY DEAR FRIEND MARILEE B. HUNTOON (1955-2011), THE BEST AND WISEST PERSON WHOM I HAVE EVER KNOWN. Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. George Eliot Middlemarch (last paragraph) 1871 THE EDUCATION OF JOHN ADAMS Chronology Preface: “Let us dare to read, think, speak and write”: 1. “Something should be said of my origin”: From Braintree to Harvard (1735-1755) 2. “It is my Destiny to dig Treasures with my own fingers”: Law and Marriage (1755-1765) 3. ”Britain and America are staring at each other”: Revolutionary Advocate (1761-1774) 4. “We must for the future stand upon our own Leggs or fall”: Continental Congress and Independence (1774-1777) 5. “May the Design of my Voyage be answered”: Revolutionary Diplomat, Polemicist, and Constitution-Maker (1777-1783) 6. “every phenomenon that occurs in the history of government”: American Minister and Constitutional Commentator (1783-1788) 7. “The most insignificant office”: Vice President (1788-1797) 8. “May none but wise and honest Men ever rule under this roof”: President John Adams (1797-1801) 9. “In dogmatizing, laughing, and scolding I find delight”: Retirement (1801-1812) 10. “What was the Revolution?” The Sage of Quincy (1812-1826) Epilogue: “Whether you or I were right Posterity must judge.”: The Legacies of John Adams Further Reading A Note on Sources Notes Acknowledgments Index PREFACE: “Let us dare to read, think, speak and write….” In 1765, John Adams, a twenty-nine-year-old Massachusetts lawyer, pondered the crisis engulfing Great Britain and her North American colonies. In his view, the dispute’s focus was how the British Empire was to be governed under the unwritten English constitution. To address that problem, Adams drafted a pamphlet, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law.” He likened Britain’s abuse of its authority over the colonists to the enslavement of medieval Europe by kings and lords allied with the Roman Catholic Church. Juxtaposing dangers past and present, he warned that a new tyranny was on the horizon, but, he added, the colonists had means to resist it. Knowledge of American rights under the English constitution, he maintained, would bolster American resistance: “This spirit [of liberty], however, without knowledge, would be little better than a brutal rage. Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.” 1 Adams’s exhortation to his readers illuminated his life, his part in the American Formatted: Line spacing: Double Revolution, and his role in the evolution of American constitutionalism. In the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers fought in different ways and using different means. Adams marshaled words and arguments in the American revolutionary cause. As lawyer, politician, legislator, constitution-maker, diplomat, and executive, he mobilized legal and historical knowledge for the greater good, drawing on the best of the past to save the future: Let every order and degree among the people rouse their attention and animate their resolution. Let them all become attentive to the grounds and principles of government, ecclesiastical and civil. Let us study the law of nature; search into the spirit of the British RBBernstein,m The Education of John Adams – LHC version -- Preface Page 1 constitution; read the histories of ancient ages; contemplate the great examples of Greece and Rome; set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests, in short, against the gates of earth and hell. Adams lived with books at his elbow and a pen in his hand. Insatiably curious about the world around him, he educated himself and sought to teach his contemporaries and posterity what he had learned. These lifelong processes of learning and teaching constitute the education of John Adams.2 Previous studies of Adams use one of two competing approaches to Adams, neither capturing his life’s complexity or significance. Dazzled by his colorful personality, his self- awareness, and his revealing himself on paper, most biographers stress Adams’s character, some reducing his constitutional and political advocacy and analysis to mere products of his internal conflicts.3 The competing biographical school spotlights him as a constitutional and political thinker, rooted in an intellectual tradition extending from Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment – but pushing his nonpolitical life into the background.4 Deciding between character without ideas (reducing Adams to an idiosyncratic volcano but ignoring his intellectual depth) and ideas without character (seeing Adams as a learned intellectual but shortchanging his humanity) is a false choice. Juxtaposing his ideas with his character, this book sets him within intersecting contexts – personal, regional, lawyerly, political, and intellectual – that shaped his vision of the world and of his place in it.5 Setting Adams in context deepens our understanding of his life’s personal dimension. Adams’s resentments, explosions of temper, and paroxysms of vanity become more RBBernstein,m The Education of John Adams – LHC version -- Preface Page 2 comprehensible when we grasp why he felt and expressed himself that way. His outbursts, voicing his sense of his virtues and failings, had roots in and resonated with his intellectual and cultural contexts. Given, for example, that he and his contemporaries saw fame as this world’s just reward for service to the public good, and that his sense of fame resonated with the moral heritage of his Calvinist roots, he had reasons to take personally efforts to denigrate his labors. Those seeking to deny him fame, he thought, were trying to take away what he had earned. By denigrating him, they rejected the worth of his labors and his arguments.6 His battles with Benjamin Franklin, with Alexander Hamilton, and with Thomas Jefferson were clashes of personality and of principled intellectual disputes about political theory and practice. Attention to Adams’s personal dimension illuminates interactions between his private and family life and his intellectual and public life. Heeding character and ideas gives us a clearer sense of his marriage to Abigail Smith Adams, for example, showing it as an intellectual and political partnership as well as a loving relationship.7 It also suggests why he so often sacrificed his and his family’s happiness to his sense of duty and his obligation to public service, and why he expected his family to understand the choices that he made. Adams’s regional origins also helped to shape him and to explain his political behavior.
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