(The original was published in The Free Radical # 52 (June-July 2002) and on the old SoloHQ.com spot on July 8, 2002)
Two lawyers - future Presidents both - were early advocates of American independence. John Adams was building a successful law practice in Boston and was also the younger cousin and political protege of radical agitator Samuel Adams, a Puritan who hoped to see Massachusetts become an American Sparta. Thomas Jefferson, scion of the Virginia plantation gentry, was absolutely radical in many of his beliefs and was influenced by European political thinkers, including John Locke. The two would be bound by radical events all their lives.
Like William Pitt and Edmund Burke in Parliament, the John Adams of the 1760s would have been described as a moderate Whig: while not an outright advocate of independence from George III's England, he clearly sided with his fellow colonists in the many tax and sovereignty disputes with the mother country. One of those disputes, ironically -- the Stamp Act controversy -- could have ruined him: patriots in Massachusetts were refusing to buy stamped paper, and the Royal Governor refused to accept or recognize legal documents without the required stamps. And John Adams was, after all, a lawyer. Still, his position favored his fellow colonists.
Although he defended the British soldiers involved in the March 1770 Boston Massacre (he won acquittal for the commander and most of the troops involved; two were convicted of manslaughter), Adams was clearly on the patriot side by then. He wrote approvingly of the Boston Tea Party, in which Americans disguised as Indians boarded British ships and dumped the tea into Boston Harbor rather than pay a hated tax. By August 1774 he was making his first trip outside of the Massachusetts colony: colonial legislators had elected to send him to the (illegal) Continental Congress. He wasn't yet forty years old. He had already decided on a course of independence for America.
On this trip Adams was awed by New York, a city far grander than his own Boston, and by Philadelphia, the second-largest city in the English-speaking world. For the first time in his life, he laid eyes on a Roman Catholic church. But he didn't see Thomas Jefferson: the Virginian had written A Summary View of the Rights of British America to honor the occasion of the first Congress, but he wasn't selected to attend it: members of Virginia's House of Burgesses felt that his views were too radical.
But events were moving too fast for the House of Burgesses -- or, for that matter, Congress or Parliament -- to control. By the spring of 1775 the first battles of the American Revolution had been fought and a second Continental Congress had been called. John Adams served on some ninety committees in this Congress, and chaired twenty-five of them. And in these committees, the radical agenda was strongly represented. Congress decided that a Continental Army should be created, and Adams nominated George Washington - a colonel in the Virginia militia and a member of the Virginia delegation to Congress - to be its commander in chief. The nomination was seconded and Adams' nominee was easily elected.
(George Washington, then, would have been one of the last American leaders to have served in the executive and legislative branches of the government at the same time -- to the extent that the Continental Congress, its Army, and the colonial legislatures were the American government.)
This Congress had also posted Adams to a small committee charged with drafting a statement of revolutionary intent. Adams served on this committee with Thomas Jefferson, by now a member of Congress himself. A list of colonial grievances against King George III was drafted in committee, and Jefferson went to work on writing the document itself.
On July 1, 1776, Adams was the last speaker to address the Congress. He spoke for hours, arguing that Congress should declare, on behalf of the thirteen American colonies, independence from Great Britain. The vote was taken and the resolution favoring independence passed the next day. Adams wrote to his wife that Americans in the future would celebrate July 2 as the day of their country's independence.
John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, and Charles Thomson, its secretary, signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 - the only members of Congress to do so. The document was published that day. Congress officially declared independence on July 8 and on August 2 most of the remaining members of Congress signed as well.
Jefferson was dissatisfied with his Declaration, as was Adams. Adams, a Puritan and a lawyer, simply didn't agree that all men were created equal. Jefferson felt that Congress had rewritten so much of his Declaration that it was ruined; to the end of his long life he would force visitors to read his original drafts, in which he fixed the slave trade and even slavery itself on George III.
Independence having been declared, neither man served out the rest of the war in the Continental Congress. Adams was sent on diplomatic missions to Holland and France, and remained in Europe for several years. Jefferson had wanted to leave the Congress in the summer of 1776, without writing the Declaration of Independence, because back in Virginia the House of Burgesses was writing a new constitution for the state - but that body ordered him to remain in Philadelphia and finish the job.
Jefferson did leave the Congress and served in the Virginia legislature, repeatedly trying and failing to be elected as speaker. He left the legislature in June 1779 when he was elected governor. He was a weak governor, although in his defense the war was still going on and by that time much of it was being fought in the South, particularly in Virginia. He was still the republican radical, however: when Congress authorized the Army's quartermasters to confiscate private goods in order to provision its troops, Jefferson fought that authority and sought to limit it where he could.
Adams fared better in Europe. Sent to Holland in the summer of 1780, he achieved a number of important aims for the American cause: diplomatic recognition from The Hague, Dutch declaration of war against Britain (now the Royal Navy would have to worry about American, French, and Dutch ships of the line), and a loan of five million guilders from a Dutch syndicate. In the fall of 1782 he was sent to Paris, along with Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, to negotiate peace terms with the British.
Both Adams and Jefferson endured difficult presidencies. In Adams' case, most of his cabinet consisted of appointees left over from George Washington's administration. Many of them felt more loyalty to Alexander Hamilton and other out-of-office "High Federalists" than they did to President Adams. One appointment of his own, however, stands as possibly his greatest presidential achievement: the appointment of the articulate and strongly pro-property John Marshall as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. But continued British and French involvement on the North American continent caused many Americans to desire war again, some with Britain, some with France. A Congress with a Federalist majority passed the various and tyrannical Alien and Sedition Acts, which, sadly, met no veto from President Adams. Adams himself was even seen as urging war with France, and many powerful members of his own Federalist party favored such a war.
The prospect of raising and maintaining a 50,000-man Army brought Adams' latent classical republicanism out of its dormancy, and he instead sent an emissary to France and avoided war. This angered the pro-war Federalists, who maneuvered against him in his bid for re-election, and he was defeated by the vice-president: Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson, far more of a radical republican than Adams had ever been, could have been expected to introduce no innovations at all during his presidency. But it was Jefferson who, with no Constitutional authority at all, agreed to double the size of the United States by paying France fifteen million dollars for the Louisiana Territory. He was denounced for this by his own southern Republican allies in Congress -- but he insisted that he had acted under the treaty-making authority of the presidency, and the purchase was ratified by the Senate. Jefferson's second term in office was marred by the treason trial of his vice-president, Aaron Burr, and by more war fever such as Adams had had to endure. When he left office in 1809, he was glad to return to Virginia.
By then, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, who'd known both Adams and Jefferson in the Continental Congress, had been trying to effect a rapprochement between the two former friends for about two years. He succeeded: Adams and Jefferson exchanged letters and began a correspondence which lasted for years - Adams, the strong Federalist who yet insisted on civilian control of the military and avoided war when powerful interests in his own party demanded it; Jefferson, the strict republican who nevertheless, when he had the chance, stretched the Constitution (and the new country's borders) to its limits as far as he could. Their letters touched on each man's respective writings, their careers, and on contemporary affairs. Both agreed that posterity would forever judge them by what they'd done in 1776. In February 1825 Adams wrote to Jefferson, "I wish your health may continue to the last much better than mine....The little strength of mind and the considerable strength of body I once possessed appear to be all gone, but while I breathe I shall be your friend."
John Adams died peacefully on July 4, 1826 - the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of Independence. His last words were, "Thomas Jefferson still survives."
A few hours later, Thomas Jefferson was gone.
UPDATE: Peri Sword notes, over at SoloPassion, that Adams actually died first. This is a bit difficult to determine, but apparently Jefferson went into a coma around midnight (from which he never recovered), and Adams died earlier the next day. Thanks, Peri.
Posted by Craig Ceely at July 4, 2006 04:41 PM