The Education of John Adams by R. B. Bernstein

Author:R. B. Bernstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

An iconic figure for all Americans, Washington helped to define the presidency by his eight years in that office. To a greater extent than any later president, except perhaps Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Washington had fused his identity with the presidency; for decades, Americans used Washington as a measuring rod to assess his successors.3 Adams was the first ordinary American (by comparison with Washington) to be president. He tried to emulate Washington’s conduct—but fundamental differences between them in background and temperament doomed him to failure. Washington had been a veteran soldier and general. By contrast, Adams had no military experience; the short, stout lawyer from Braintree could not project authority, dignity, and gravity the way the tall, erect, powerfully built Washington could.

Washington had had nearly sixteen years’ experience of wielding executive power—from his service as commander in chief of the Continental Army from 1775 to 1783 through his two terms as president from 1789 to 1797. In the process, he had come to embody the Revolution and the American nation.4 Adams had never held an executive office. He was a veteran legislator and diplomat, he had chaired or served on countless committees in the Continental Congress, and he had spent eight years as vice president—but he had never been a state governor or the head of an executive department. And he was all too aware of that lack of experience. Moreover, Washington was a product of Virginia’s colonial and revolutionary aristocracy, whereas Adams was a man formed by relatively democratic New England; Washington’s Virginia background helped to groom him for national leadership in ways that Adams’s New England origins did not.

As to temperament, Washington had a long and difficult history of restraining his formidable temper and cultivating his ability to project dignified calm, which sometimes came across as chilly formality. Adams knew that his own volcanic temper was set on hair-trigger; unlike Washington, he had not perfected the ability to keep himself in check. Adams also knew that his turbulent emotions raised doubts about whether he could muster the self-command that a president should have. His critics focused on his outbursts. At the height of the clashes between Adams and his cabinet, Secretary of War James McHenry wrote to Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, mocking the president: “Whether he is sportful, playful, witty, kind, cold, drunk, sober, angry, easy, stiff, jealous, careless, cautious, confident, close or open, is almost always in the wrong place or to the wrong persons.”5

Adams also brought with him inconvenient intellectual and political baggage that shaped Americans’ perceptions of him. Recalling his writings and his service as American minister to England and as vice president, many Americans saw him as an advocate of high-toned government, believing that he yearned to bring aristocracy and monarchy to America. Not only did his Defence of the Constitutions and his Discourses on Davila contain passages that his foes used to indict him for those sins; his 1789 campaign for an ornate title for the president seemed to confirm these propensities.

Finally, unlike Washington, Adams had not been the Electoral College’s unanimous first choice.

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