John Adams

He was supposed to be a minister. His father — a deacon who farmed in summer and made shoes in winter — had saved for exactly that, and Harvard at 16 undid the plan within a year. Adams came out in 1755, taught school in Worcester without enjoying a day of it, read law under James Putnam instead, and reached the Massachusetts bar in 1759. What survives from those years is a diary in which he graded himself: on his vanity, his idleness, his hunger for praise, his habit of talking too much in a room. He was 28 when he married Abigail Smith, his third cousin, over her mother's objection that a country lawyer was beneath the family.

Then the public half — two Continental Congresses, the committee that produced the Declaration, nine years abroad prying loans and treaties out of the Dutch and the British, and eight years as the first vice president in a job he called the most insignificant office ever contrived by the imagination of man. One term of his own followed, consumed by an undeclared war and by the sedition laws that ended it. BriefHistory runs that term straight through to the defeat in 1800. The quarter century after it is the part that gets skipped.

He never owned a human being, and said so pointedly in a country where most of his colleagues did. What he could not govern was his own house. His son Charles drank himself into ruin, was disowned by his father, and died in New York in November 1800, at 30, while Adams was still president — Abigail told John Quincy it was dropsy of the chest. His daughter Nabby submitted in 1811 to a mastectomy performed at her parents' house without anesthesia, and the cancer killed her two years later anyway. Thomas drank too. Abigail died of typhoid in October 1818. Adams outlived her by nearly eight years in the same rooms, with the letters.

He died at Peacefield on July 4, 1826, at 90, and lies in a crypt beneath a granite church in Quincy with Abigail, his son and his son's wife. What carried him forward was paper. The family kept everything and sealed it, and the full archive did not open to scholars until the 1950s, which is why the marriage correspondence now reads like a novel nobody had to write. A doorstop biography in 2001 and a television series in 2008 followed. Congress authorized a national memorial to the Adams family in Washington in 2001 and has been reauthorizing the commission ever since. The ground is still empty.

John Adams's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Thoughts on Government book
  A pamphlet written as advice and used as a blueprint by several states 1776
• Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts law
  He drafted nearly all of it — the oldest functioning written constitution in the world 1780
• Dutch recognition and the five-million-guilder loan other
  He talked Amsterdam bankers into financing a country that had not yet won 1782
• A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America book
  Three volumes, written in London and read at the Philadelphia convention 1787
• Department of the Navy company
  Established under Adams to fight an undeclared war at sea 1798
• The Adams-Jefferson letters other
  The correspondence he restarted after 11 years of silence and kept up for 14 1812

• 1751 aged ~16 Enters Harvard at 16 and abandons the ministry His father had saved for a preacher.
• 1759 aged ~24 Admitted to the Massachusetts bar after reading law in Worcester
• October 25, 1764 aged 28 Marries Abigail Smith, his third cousin Her mother thought a country lawyer beneath the family.
• 1780 aged ~45 Writes the Massachusetts constitution almost single-handed It is still in force.
• 1782 aged ~47 Wins Dutch recognition and a loan of five million guilders
• April 21, 1789 aged 53 Sworn in as the first vice president of the United States He spent eight years presiding over a body that could not stand him.
• November 30, 1800 aged 65 His disowned son Charles dies in New York at 30 Abigail attributed it to dropsy of the chest.
• October 28, 1818 aged 82 Abigail dies of typhoid at Quincy They had been married 54 years.
• July 4, 1826 aged 90 Dies at Peacefield on the 50th anniversary of independence

• Abigail Adams 1744–1818
  Correspondent and presidential spouse whose letters urged legal consideration for women in the new republic. married to
• John Marshall 1755–1835
  Chief justice who established judicial review and strengthened the Supreme Court and federal government. appointed
• Alexander Hamilton 1755–1804
  Founding Father who established the nation's financial system and co-authored the Federalist Papers. rival
• Benjamin Franklin 1706–1790
  Polymath who invented the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among many other creations. served with in Paris
• Samuel Adams 1722–1803
  Revolutionary organizer who helped mobilize resistance to British rule and build support for independence. second cousin
• John Quincy Adams 1767–1848
  Diplomat, sixth president, and later congressman who opposed slavery’s expansion and shaped early American foreign policy. father of