Independence (31 page)

Until he nominated Washington, John Adams had not played a key role in Congress. But when Adams took charge of the creation of the army and the selection of its commander, it signaled that change was in the air. Convinced of his abilities and probably concerned that Samuel Adams’s point of view was too parochial for the epic challenges that lay ahead, John Adams had begun his ascendancy in Congress. During the next twelve months, he would lead those who opposed John Dickinson and his adherents.

John Adams’s background could hardly have been more different from Dickinson’s. Adams had been raised on a small farm in Braintree, just south of Boston. His father, Deacon John Adams, probably never owned more than fifty acres and never produced much for market from his rocky fields. In fact, during the long, cold Massachusetts winters, Deacon Adams worked as a shoemaker to supplement the family’s meager income. Through frugality and industry, Deacon Adams and his wife accumulated the resources to provide a formal education for one son—the eldest child—including four years at nearby Harvard College. John was the firstborn.

Young John acquired a no-nonsense work ethic from his father and a passion for reading from his mother, but he had little idea what he wanted to do with his life when he entered Harvard in 1751. He knew only what he did not want to do. His father hoped he would become a Congregational pastor. John was not enticed. He was put off by hairsplitting theological disputes and, given his gruff and acerbic manner, he understood better than anyone that he was thoroughly ill-suited for providing solace to the troubled. His mother wanted him to become a physician, but in a day when medicine was more art than science, he found the calling unappealing. No one suggested that he pursue a mercantile career and he never gave it a thought. That left the law.
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John was captivated by the prospect of matching wits with other attorneys. He knew too that successful lawyers were held in high esteem throughout Massachusetts, and particularly in Boston. Nor did it escape his attention that by the 1750s increasing numbers of political leaders in the Bay Colony came from a legal background. Alive with ambition, Adams yearned even as an adolescent to gain a “Reputation” and escape the fate of “the common Herd of Mankind, who are to be born and eat and sleep and die, and be forgotten.” Longing for “a Prospect of an Immortality in the Memories of all the Worthy,” he fixed on the law as the surest path toward becoming “a great Man.”

After graduating from Harvard, Adams taught for two years in a Latin school in Worcester to earn the money to pay for his legal apprenticeship, which he completed under that town’s only attorney in 1758. Unlike Dickinson and Galloway, Adams neither started at the top of the legal profession nor soared to its pinnacle. Practicing in terribly competitive Boston, he made excruciatingly slow progress and survived by living at home with his parents for several years. He had only two clients during the first year and did not win a case before a jury until the end of his second. Years passed before his earnings were sufficient to marry Abigail Smith, whom he was courting. In 1764 the twenty-nine-year-old Adams and his patient fiancée, the daughter of a Congregational minister, finally wed.
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Adams owed his success, in part, to his work ethic. After consulting with several leading lawyers in Boston, he mapped out an exacting regimen of postapprentice study. At a time when many attorneys entered practice scant months after beginning their studies, and presumably read little law thereafter, Adams willed himself to learn the law in great breadth and depth. “I will master it.… I will … break thro … all obstructions,” he vowed as he burned the midnight oil. His work paid off. In 1765 a Boston town meeting chose him, together with Jeremiah Gridley and James Otis—the city’s most esteemed lawyers—to speak for it before the royal governor during the Stamp Act crisis. Five years later Adams represented some seven hundred clients, which he thought—probably correctly—made his the largest legal practice in Massachusetts.
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When choosing a career, Adams had been lured to the law partly because it offered access to political office. Yet before 1770—when he turned thirty-five—he shied away from politics, fearing that what he did in politics might harm his law practice and his growing family, which at the time consisted of a daughter and two sons. During the Stamp Act crisis he had represented the Boston town meeting, but in a legal capacity, and he had written Braintree’s protest against the tax, though he had done so anonymously. Adams had penned several essays for Boston newspapers, including some that lashed out at London’s plan to “enslave all America” and accused royal officials of having “trifled with, browbeaten, and trampled on” the colonists. But these too had been unattributed, as he used pseudonyms such as “Clarendon” and “Humphrey Ploughjogger.”
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After 1767, however, with his reputation as a lawyer growing and the imperial crisis in full glow, Adams was increasingly pressured to play an active role in politics. Both sides wanted him. Through an intermediary, Thomas Hutchinson offered him the post of solicitor general of Massachusetts. Adams spurned the offer “in an instant,” he subsequently recalled. By then, Otis, Dr. Warren, and Samuel Adams, his cousin, were working on him to join with them in open opposition to the mother country’s new colonial policies. They wanted him to address Boston town meetings, but he rebuffed their entreaties, remarking privately that the radicals only wished him to “deceive the People,” to “conceal from them … essential truth[s].” Not easily put off, some of the militants told Adams that “many” of their collaborators believed he “was not hearty in the Cause,” and some even supposedly conjectured that he might be a Tory. Adams was so badly shaken that in 1769 he attended a public Sons of Liberty rally. But he would do no more. Although he shared the radicals’ fears of ministerial intent, Adams suspected that Boston’s firebrands had a hidden agenda. He believed that Samuel Adams and his compatriots were plotting American independence. Fearing revolution and war, Adams said privately of his cousin’s designs: “That way madness lies.”
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But Adams was haunted by the whispers of his alleged Toryism, and in 1770, as never before, he contemplated an active role in politics. It was a difficult decision. If he held office, he would make enemies. Yet, if he remained uncommitted, he would fall under a cloak of suspicion that could be even more detrimental.
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The Boston Massacre in March 1770 appears to have been the decisive event in resolving his personal struggle. After several British soldiers were arrested and charged with the killings, Dr. Warren and Samuel Adams pleaded with John to defend the redcoats. The radicals did not want the soldiers to go unpunished and could not imagine that any jury in Boston would exonerate them, but they did not wish the trial to be a sham. They wanted an eminent Boston lawyer to serve as the defense attorney for the soldiers.

Adams always insisted that he agreed to take the case because he believed that every man deserved a fair trial. That doubtless was a factor in his decision, but so too was his intuitive understanding that this would be a historic case that might win him lasting fame. Nevertheless, there was a downside to taking on the assignment. Adams worried that he was “hazarding a Popularity very general and very hardly earned” by “incurring … prejudices” among those who hated the British soldiers. But that concern was mitigated by a bargain that he appears to have struck with Samuel Adams: In return for defending the hated redcoats, Samuel would to see to John’s election as one of Boston’s four representatives in the Massachusetts assembly. From that perspective, taking the case was a win-win deal for John. By defending the king’s soldiers he would gain the approval of the most conservative citizens; as an assemblyman who supported the radical faction in its resistance to the Townshend Duties, still being debated that spring, all suspicions of his Toryism would vanish.
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Adams conceived a masterful defense for the soldiers, winning the acquittal of seven of the nine. Two were convicted of manslaughter, not homicide, and they were set free through a legal artifice. Adams’s reputation as a lawyer soared, and true to his word, Samuel Adams delivered an assembly seat to his cousin. John Adams had hardly assumed his place in the assembly, however, before he realized that he had made a dreadful mistake. Given a behind-the-scenes view of Samuel’s intrigue, John’s suspicions of the sinister motives of the radicals were confirmed. Samuel Adams and other militants engaged in what John soon saw as “a laboured controversy”—a contrived campaign, in other words—to turn public opinion against the Crown officials. Fearing the disapproval of the resistance leaders if he did not participate in “all the disputes” that were part of his cousin’s “disagreeable Causes,” John reluctantly joined in what he saw as their dishonest endeavors. He anguished that the role he was playing would bring his “family to ruin” and that he “was throwing away as bright prospects [as] any Man ever held before him.” It was too much. Already weighed down with anxiety from the recent Boston Massacre trials, and grieving over the recent death of his fifteen-month-old daughter, Susanna, Adams collapsed under the strain. He was too ill to complete his term and did not seek reelection in 1771. John Adams’s political career, which had lasted only a few weeks, appeared to be over.
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Adams later said that he was transformed into a revolutionary partly as a result of having immersed himself in European and English radical thought. He was drawn to the literature of European Enlightenment rationalism, especially the works of Voltaire and Montesquieu. Even more important were the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century essays of John Locke and other Englishmen, writings that historian Caroline Robbins characterized as a veritable “textbook of revolution” for Americans. These tracts not only described an England in which liberties were imperiled by internal corruption, but also warned of a ministerial conspiracy to eradicate the rights of Americans. While influenced by what he read, Adams believed that it was the 1773 publication of Thomas Hutchinson’s purloined letters that pulled together his disparate thoughts and converted him into a dissident. He called those letters his “grand discovery.” The scales fell from his eyes and he at last understood that London’s policies threatened to render Bostonians “more unhappy than the basest Negro in Town.” He now believed that Great Britain’s leaders were “cool, thinking, deliberate Villain[s], malicious, and vindictive, as well as ambitious and avaricious.” Unless stopped, they will “ruin the Country,” he added. What is more, Adams also believed that Hutchinson’s letters confirmed what Samuel Adams and his collaborators had been saying all along: A “profoundly secret, dark, and deep” plot indeed existed among royal officials to quash the rights of the colonists.
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Adams’s retrospective account might have exaggerated the immediate impact of Hutchinson’s letters, but there can be little doubt that the three years that followed his illness, or breakdown, in 1771 was a crucial time for him. Adams turned thirty-seven in October 1772, and he noted on his birthday that he had reached a point when most men’s lives were half over.
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Taking stock, Adams concluded that he had achieved everything that he had dreamed of accomplishing as a lawyer, and more. Yet, the world had changed. Now it was not lawyers that attained fame, but political activists, the likes of Samuel Adams and John Dickinson. By 1773 and 1774 he yearned to resume the political career he abandoned in 1771. As he wrestled again with becoming politically active, the Hutchinson Letters helped allay the misgivings he had earlier exhibited at participating in the radicals’ orchestrated campaigns to arouse popular resistance to royal authority.

Samuel Adams and other popular leaders aided John in overcoming the last hurdles, calling on him frequently and placating his fears. They utilized every artifice in their bag of tricks to persuade him of their temperate outlook. Wanting to believe in their cause, John was easily swayed. Soon he was writing that Samuel Adams was driven by the purest motives of “public Service.”
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A couple of years earlier he would have denounced an act such as the Boston Tea Party, but when Adams heard of the destruction of the East India Company’s tea, he effusively remarked that the action “charms me.” If it led to a war that cost the lives of thousands, the carnage would be “very profitably Spent,” he declared.
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John Adams had become a radical.

When the colonies responded to the Coercive Acts by calling the First Continental Congress, the Massachusetts assembly chose John Adams as one of its delegates. In memoirs that he wrote a quarter century later, Adams matter-of-factly described his election as if it had been inevitable.
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In fact, Adams owed his selection to Samuel Adams, who never explained why he added to the delegation an individual who was not only politically inexperienced but also only a recent convert to the colonial protest. Samuel’s likely motives are not difficult to fathom. As it was imperative that the Massachusetts congressmen appear to be the antithesis of fire-breathing militancy, it was a savvy move to include in the delegation a member who was untainted by extremism as well as a leading lawyer who had defended the British soldiers charged with the Boston Massacre. Samuel no doubt also thought it a plus that John was a political innocent who would look to his older cousin for guidance.