John Adams: Inaugural Address

About the Author

A successful Boston lawyer, leading member of both Continental Congresses, and prominent diplomat, John Adams concluded his public service as the first vice president and then second president of the United States. His career in national public office, extending from 1774 to 1801, was the longest of any prominent early leader of the American Revolution. Yet Adams had a second, parallel political career that was just as important as his first and of even longer duration. From 1763 until 1814 he wrote newspaper essays, pamphlets, and a multivolume historical study, all devoted to political, constitutional, and diplomatic questions, in addition to an elaborate framework for his state's government. The quantity of Adams's published work far exceeds that of any other Revolutionary leader, and at the height of his intellectual powers in the 1770s his conceptual originality made him the leading penman of the Revolution.

John Adams was born in October 1735 in Braintree, Massachusetts, the eldest son of an established farmer and local officeholder. He attended Harvard College, graduating in 1755, and three years later began practicing law in Braintree and Boston. In 1764 he married Abigail Smith and within a decade had five children, including his oldest son, John Quincy Adams, later the sixth president of the United States. By 1770 Adams was one of the most successful and certainly the most learned lawyers in Massachusetts.

The principles and conduct of politics fascinated Adams from his early twenties, and he soon began addressing the issues of the day in Boston newspapers. In 1765 he wrote his first essays destined for fame, published as his Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, which celebrated the moral and political superiority of New England over the mother country. In 1766 he began two terms as a Braintree selectman and wrote essays praising the British constitution. Beginning in the spring of 1771, Adams took a break from all political activity and began thinking deeply about liberty and power, about America and Britain. At the beginning of 1773 he agreed to draft the Massachusetts House of Representatives' reply to Governor Thomas Hutchinson's argument that the British parliament must reign supreme over the whole empire. Writing anonymously for the House, Adams responded that the colony owed no allegiance to Parliament but only to the king, a daring argument that no American legislature had ever advanced. At the end of the year, when local Patriots ignited the series of events that led quickly to rebellion against Britain by throwing taxed East India Company tea into Boston Harbor, Adams praised the Boston Tea Party and declared his confidence that it would open a new era for America.

In June 1774, upon learning that he had been elected by the Massachusetts House to the First Continental Congress, Adams had one last moment of doubt, not in the justice of America's cause but in the ability of some two million unsophisticated colonials to face down the world's most powerful empire. But after he reached Philadelphia, Adams never looked back. His personal diary is the only surviving source for what many delegates actually said in support of the momentous resolves reported so dryly in Congress's journals. When Adams returned to Massachusetts at the end of the year and saw Congress roundly attacked in the Boston press by anonymous Loyalist writers, he leapt to the defense. His “Letters of Novanglus,” published in 1775, was the longest and most learned argument for colonial autonomy mounted anywhere in America.

When the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775, Adams moved quickly into the top leadership. In the meetings to advise the several colonies on restructuring their governments, Adams was quickly recognized as a constitutional authority and asked by one congressman and then another to write a letter that each delegate could send to friends and supporters back home. By the spring of 1776, tiring of this duplication, Adams wrote his shortest and most effective pamphlet, Thoughts on Government. In the fall of 1777 Adams resigned from Congress to resume his law practice. Shortly after his return to Braintree, however, Congress appointed him to join Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee on America's three-man diplomatic commission in Paris. Adams brought much-needed order to the commission's daily business, but he could not persuade the French government to increase its naval activity in American waters. In early 1779 word reached Paris that Congress had appointed Franklin to succeed the commission. Adams, cut adrift with no new assignment, returned to Massachusetts, deeply discouraged.

As Adams again sought to resume his law practice, Braintree elected him to the state's constitutional convention, and by September he was drafting the constitution for that body. Before he even finished this task, Congress appointed him America's sole commissioner to negotiate peace with Britain. In November, Adams departed again for Europe. In two years of energetic lobbying in the Netherlands, Adams won recognition of America, then a loan, and finally a treaty of amity and commerce (October 1782). He followed up his triumph by returning to Paris to join Benjamin Franklin and John Jay in negotiating a highly advantageous preliminary peace with Britain (November 1782), which became the Peace of Paris in September 1783.

Adams's constitutional thought had appeared in many publications from as early as the 1760s. During his brief return home from Europe in 1779, Adams, elected to his state's constitutional convention, was delegated to draft Massachusetts's new frame of government. In October 1779, he completed the longest, most detailed, and most carefully structured of America's early constitutions—and the most durable. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, although repeatedly and substantially amended, has never been superseded; it is the oldest written constitution in the world still in operation. For the next five years Adams's diplomatic obligations took precedence, but in 1786 he began writing A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America in defense of republican forms of government.

In the spring of 1788, stymied by Britain's refusal to negotiate a commercial treaty, Adams returned home. As the most senior and accomplished Revolutionary leader after Washington who was still young enough for public service, he was well positioned to secure the new office of vice president. Yet Adams's eight years at this post (1789–1797) would become the most tedious chapter in his long public career. He steadfastly supported George Washington by casting more tie-breaking votes in the small Senate chamber than any of his successors, but he found the obligation to preside over that body without taking part in its deliberations highly frustrating.

In September 1796 Washington announced his intention to retire from public office, and America's first contested presidential election began. Adams and his old, now-estranged friend Thomas Jefferson soon emerged as the front-runners. In December, Adams was elected America's second president, with Jefferson, under provisions of the Constitution in effect at that time, taking the vice presidency. At his inauguration in March 1797, Adams delivered an address in which he briefly recounted America's embrace of republican government, expressed his admiration for the Constitution, and pledged to follow the policies of Washington during his term in office. During Washington's second term, national politics had grown increasingly polarized, pitting merchants against planters, New England against Virginia, and the supporters of close relations with traditional Britain against the ardent admirers of revolutionary France, which went to war with Britain in 1793. The first of each pair had coalesced as Federalists, and the second as Republicans (also called Democratic-Republicans) by the mid-1790s, and both Washington and Adams, while sincerely deploring factionalism, supported most Federalist positions. In leaning more toward Great Britain, America had alienated France, and by Adams's inauguration the French government had dismissed America's diplomatic minister and began seizing American ships trading with Britain.

For the next four years, the crisis with France shaped the chief executive's every move. The Quasi War with France, an undeclared naval war in which France attacked American naval and merchants shipping, extended through most of Adams's presidency. In 1799 Adams saw a new opening for diplomacy in France, and his envoy signed a peace accord with that country in October 1800. For Adams himself, however, peace came too late. In the fall of 1800 he lost his bid for reelection, and in March 1801 he turned the executive chair over to Thomas Jefferson. Some two centuries later most historians have concluded that in skillfully avoiding a full-scale war with France, Adams was in fact one of America's stronger and better chief executives.

In his long retirement, Adams continued to write, defending his public career in letters to the Boston Patriot and resuming his long-suspended correspondence with Jefferson. This correspondence is a national treasure, full of perceptive pronouncements on politics, culture, and society. John Adams lived long enough to see his son John Quincy Adams become president in 1825 and to outlive every other signer of the Declaration of Independence except Maryland's Charles Carroll. He died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of Congress's approval of the Declaration, the same day as Jefferson himself.