Adams, John 1735-1826
2nd President of the USA

Born in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, the son of a farmer, he studied at Harvard, was admitted to the Bar in 1758, and settled in Boston in 1768. Of strongly colonial sympathies, he declined the post of advocate-general in the Court of Admiralty, and led the protest against the Stamp Act (1765). Despite failing health, he was sent as a delegate from Massachusetts to the first Continental Congress. He proposed the election of George Washington as Commander-in-Chief, and was the 'colossus' of the debate that resulted in the Declaration of Independence. President of the Board of War, and a member of around 90 committees (and chairman of 25 of them), he worked incessantly. He retired from Congress in 1777, only to be sent to France and Holland as commissioner from the new republic. One of the commissioners who in 1783 negotiated and signed the Treaty of Paris, he was Minister to Great Britain in 1785-88. While in London, he published his Defence of the Constitution of the United States (3 vols, 1787). In 1789 he became Vice-President of the USA under Washington. They were re-elected in 1792, and in 1796 Adams succeeded Washington as President, with Thomas Jefferson as Vice-President. Although a leader of the Federalist Party, he resisted Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists who called for war with France after the bribery scandal known as the XYZ affair, instead defusing the crisis through diplomacy. This and his signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) eroded his popularity, and on being defeated by Jefferson in the election of 1800, he retired to his home in Quincy. He was for many years estranged from Jefferson, but in old age they were reconciled and carried on a correspondence that became a classic of American historical literature; they died on the same day - 4 July 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Bibliography: Page Smith, John Adams (2 vols, 1962)