The Colossus of Independence: John Adams

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0:00:07.6 Paul Meany: George Washington is an American household name as the first ever president and hero of the American Revolution. John Adams, on the other hand, Washington’s vice president and eventually the second ever president has not fared so well in American memory. He’s been described as America’s last honest president and a party of one. But in his day, Adams was the foremost champions of the American Revolution, with Thomas Jefferson referring to him as, “The Colossus of Independence”. Joining us to talk about the life and work of John Adams is C. Bradley Thompson, the executive director of Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism and the founder of the Lyceum Scholars Program. His scholarly work focuses on American political thought. His most recent book is “America’s Revolutionary Mind,” A moral history of the American Revolution and the declaration that defined it, which I personally recommend as an excellent work of intellectual history. He’s also the author of “John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty”, which I read years ago and ever since have become an avid admirer of John Adams. On top of all of this, he writes about historical, political, philosophical and cultural topics and a subset, The Redneck Intellectual. And last but not least, he has recently started a new blog, Ed Watch Daily, documenting the declining standards in education. So thanks for joining us.

0:01:14.0 C. Bradley Thompson: Hi, Paul. Thanks very much for having me.

0:01:16.4 PM: So though most Americans might know John Adams in some way, shape, or form as a second President of America, I find it really hard to gauge as a foreigner, how much they know about him beyond that slightly bland fact that he was the President once. But Adams was definitely one of the driving forces behind the American Revolution. And he was a dedicated workaholic who tirelessly dedicated himself to the cause. Could you try and explain quite briefly, because there’s a lot to his life, just how essential Adams was to the success of the American Revolution, and that’s often kind of ignored by people?

0:01:47.0 CT: I can be brief, but I’d rather not be if I could. And for the very reasons that you’ve suggested, which are that Adams has for really the last 200 years been neglected amongst America’s founding fathers, all of the attention, of course, has always gone to Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. And John Adams traditionally has always been an afterthought. Now, I do think that is changing. And for the last 20-​plus years or so, I think Adams’ reputation has been rehabilitated for many Americans, in part because of David McCullough’s biography in the HBO series on John Adams which was excellent. But you’re right, I think Adams was, with the possible exception of George Washington, America’s greatest founding statesman. And I think this is a demonstrable objective fact. You can prove it, and that’s what I’d like to do, I’d like to lay it out for you and your audience. In my view, Adams was the revolution’s leading man of ideas, and he was undoubtedly its leading man of action. And if it’s the case that George Washington were the sword of the revolution and Jefferson the pen, then I think it’s undoubtedly true that John Adams was the engine of the American Revolution.

0:03:17.5 CT: He contributed more to the revolutionary cause than any other revolutionary, including Washington. And this goes back to the very, very beginning of his revolutionary career, which I actually date from 1761, and it goes continuously without interruption until 1800. So if you begin at the beginning, with Adams’ early revolutionary career, he assisted James Otis in 1761, in the so called, Writs of Assistance case, which from Adams’ perspective was the moment when there was a revolution in the American mind. And then he was from that point forward, up through the early 1770s, he was a leader of radical Boston politics. He defended English soldiers at the Boston Massacre trial in 1770 which was, I think, an extraordinary thing to do. And then he was a leading member of the Continental Congress from 1774 until 1779. Now this is completely forgotten by most Americans, including historians, it was Adams who delivered what I regard to be the single most important speech ever delivered in American history.

0:04:50.7 CT: And that was on July 1st 1776. And he was the man when no one else would, who stood up and defended independence, right? Knowing that the man who stood up in the Continental Congress on that day arguing for independence would be committing an act of treason. And during his service in the Continental Congress, he nominated George Washington to be commander in chief of the Continental Army. He served on the committee of five which drafted the Declaration of Independence, he served on some 90 committees during his time in the Continental Congress. He was the founder of the American Navy. He was the author of the first Model Treaty, whilst being a member of the Continental Congress. And then in the late… In 1779… Well, really 1778 through 1788 he was one of America’s leading revolutionary diplomats. He was a diplomat in France and then at The Hague, and then he was America’s first ambassador to Great Britain. And then, of course, there’s his political contribution…

0:06:10.0 CT: In the post-​revolutionary era, he was, of course, the first Vice President of the United States for two terms, he was the second president of the United States, and when he was president he nominated John Marshall to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He negotiated peace with the French in 1799. So from beginning to end, from 1760 to 1800 at the end of his term as President of the United States, I don’t think there is anybody who comes even close to Adams’ contributions, and I could go on for another 10 minutes, I won’t do that, but his contribution to the American revolution was absolutely singular.

0:06:52.8 PM: Yeah, ’cause when I first started reading about Adams I thought he was kind of like a dinosaur, he’s from a bygone era, and he didn’t really contribute a huge amount, ’cause I was just looking at it from a complete outside perspective, but the more I read about Adams, the more I realized that this wouldn’t have happened without him. People were just not as organized as this man. He was a complete workaholic, and he never really gave up any of that in his entire life. He was always working, always writing, always doing something. I don’t think he ever gave himself a spare moment. And reading his diary you really see how like critically he was of himself. He’s always like, “Oh, I spent so much time being lazy today or playing cards or something.” And you’re like, “Give yourself a break, man, you’re killing yourself with all this work.”

0:07:30.0 CT: Yeah, and the passage in the diary that you’re… Well, there were many passages in his diary, but passages like that in his diary began when he’s a student at Harvard and then in the years immediately after he graduated from Harvard. So as a young man 20, 21, 22 years old, he’s constantly employing himself in his diary to get up with the sun and to get to work immediately and to turn to the books of law and read the books of law for several hours and then read some history and then read some philosophy and then read some theology.

0:08:04.3 PM: But then also observe society. Another part of his daily routine was to always spend some time looking at people as well. Isn’t that right? He spent time going to town halls and just observing human nature, and he even writes in his diary about arguments that his parents got into about the passions.

0:08:20.0 CT: Yeah. He referred to that as a conjugal spat that he witnessed in his parent’s home. And Adams was without question I think America’s greatest observer of human nature. He used a kind of baconian method, an inductive philosophic method in order to establish certain moral principles that he gauged by examining human nature. He would go out into the world and he would observe what he saw at church, at a town hall meeting, on the street, in his parents’ home, so he was constantly extrospecting out onto the world, observing, cataloging human passions. And then he would also introspect, turn in on himself, and as you know from reading his diary, he was a brutal critic of himself, of his weaknesses and vices. And then he was also finally an inveterate student of history and philosophy. And for Adams, history was a kind of laboratory by which to observe human nature and to induce conclusions about human nature which would then form the principles of his moral code.

0:09:51.6 PM: But the greatest shame of all is that it’s very hard to read what Adams wrote. So in the revolution everyone seems like for just a very basic perspective, the founding fathers they agree on lots of things, but then there’s all these nuanced little differences between them all, and in an era of constant pamphleteering and writing about the general idea of freedom and rights, republican constitutional government, it’s actually really hard to get detailed answers. But Adams was one of the rare people of the founding fathers who gave a very, very detailed answer on what a Republican government meant. His Defense of the Constitution which is written as a kind of a rebuttal of unicameralism that the French supported so much. However, the book is 70% quotations and it’s very long, it’s three or four volumes, if I remember. It’s very confusing to the lay person and generally an extremely alien text to modernize. And so I’d just like to try and pick your brains and what are some of the more classical liberal and libertarian themes that we find within the writings of John Adams that you wouldn’t normally pick up on, or people wouldn’t even normally bother reading to begin with, because they’re so esoteric almost.

0:11:00.1 CT: Yeah. So Adams wrote a lot. He wrote half a dozen pamphlets during the years of the imperial crisis, and then he published in 1787-’88 his three volume Defense of the Constitutions of the United States of America. And then in the early 1790s he published a treatise titled Discourses on Davila, so Adams wrote a lot. In fact, I think it’s true to say that he published more than any other revolutionary during the revolutionary founding period. And so to answer your question, you have to sort of divide it up, I think, into maybe a couple of periods. The first are his revolutionary writings between 1765 and 1776. And the revolutionary writings are I would say, and this would be from a libertarian perspective, they’re concerned with two things. They’re concerned with the nature of power and the nature of justice. And so when Adams looks at what the British parliament and then ultimately George III, what they’re doing during that period from, let’s say, the Sugar Act of 1764 to the Prohibitory Act of 1775, what he sees is an abuse of power, he sees…

0:12:26.6 CT: Adams was a proponent of the famous phrase of Lord Acton before Lord Acton was even born, right? “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Adams, without ever having stated it in that form, he believed that view, which is a view of human nature, he believed that fundamental to politics, and he thought you could not establish a just Republican regime without first understanding that principle. And so when he saw what Great Britain was doing in the form of the sugar stamp declaratory towns and tea coercive and then the Prohibitory Act, what he saw was an attempt by British imperial officials to acquire power, which they did not justly have a right to. And so I would say at the core, even though, yes, he’s concerned with power, he’s most of all concerned with justice and with what is right. Unlike British imperial officials who believed, for instance, that the Stamp Act was legal and therefore constitutional.

0:13:45.5 CT: Adams’ position was that the Stamp Act was unjust and therefore unconstitutional. So at the foundation of Adams’ view of politics was a certain conception of justice, and at the heart of his conception of justice was his belief in the Enlightenment view of the moral laws and rights of nature. I would say that Adams’ primary intellectual philosophic political goal, during the years of the revolution, were to establish a new Republican regime built, not on the so-​called historical rights of Englishmen, but rather on the moral laws of nature… The moral laws and rights of nature, which unlike the rights of Englishmen are not a part of history. The moral laws and rights of nature are objective, absolute, certain, permanent and universal. And for Adams, those underlying laws and rights of nature have to serve as the unalterable fixed foundation of all Republican government.

0:15:06.0 CT: So that’s the first thing, and one I could say a lot more about his views of the imperial conflict before 1776, but then you mentioned his three volume Defense of the Constitutions, which by the way, it’s important to note that he wrote the defense whilst living in London, and he began writing it in 1786. And he wrote the Defense of the Constitution against the attacks of certain French philosophs, namely Turgot and Condorcet, but also the criticism of the idea of mixed and balanced government that was coming from America’s students of Turgot and Condorcet, primarily radicals in Philadelphia, which would have included Benjamin Franklin, and the authors of the unicameral Pennsylvania Constitution. So that’s the context, but on the other hand, you have to remember, Adams is in London just as the French Revolution is beginning to take off, he’s there when the revolution… When the assembly of notables is meeting and revolution is clearly in the air.

0:16:32.7 CT: So on the one hand, Adams… The context in which Adams writes the defense is what’s coming to be revolutionary France and on the other hand, he’s worried about the ideas of these French philosophs influencing American Constitution makers as well. And so Adams is writing a defense of the revolutionary state constitutions, but what he’s writing most importantly, or what he’s defending most importantly, is not all of the state constitutions, but his own constitution: The Massachusetts constitution of 1780. Adams was the Solon or the Lycurgus of Massachusetts, he was the sole author of the Massachusetts Constitution and his 1776 pamphlet, “Thoughts on Government”, had influenced the drafting of three or four other revolutionary state constitutions.

0:17:33.6 CT: So Adams is in effect defending American Revolutionary Constitution making with the exception of the Pennsylvania Constitution and more specifically… So what Adams is defending here is the idea of bicameralism versus unicameralism, where he’s defending the idea of complex government versus the idea of simple government. Adams is without question, he is a proponent of the Republican form of government, but he has a much, much more sophisticated view of what Republican government is. So, like all American Revolutionaries, Adams is a proponent of sovereignty resting with the people, with “We the People”. He’s a proponent of the Republican form of government. He’s a proponent of separation of powers, which all American Revolutionaries were, but he is also the most sophisticated philosophic defender of what was referred to at the time as mixed and balanced government. That is the mixing in government of the one, the few, and the many, by which I mean the generic… What we might even call secular a view of monarchy.

0:18:57.1 CT: Aristocracy and Democracy, now of course the problem is there is no monarchy, there is no aristocracy in America, but that’s not what Adams means. Adams means that there is, and this goes back to what you had mentioned earlier Paul about being, Adams being a student of human nature. Adams recognizes that there is in human nature, that there is an impulse towards aristocracy and that there is an impulse even towards monarchy and that it’s important to recognize these impulses of human nature in the government. So there is yes, a separation of the legislative, executive and judicial power, but Adams argues that within the legislature there should also be a recognition of the one, the few and the many. Now, how does that play out? The one comes in the form of having an executive veto the many or I’m sorry, the few, the aristocratic element comes in the form of having a bicameral legislature with the Senate, and the Senate is not like the English House of Lords. This is an Americanized Senate, an Americanized aristocracy that is the natural aristocracy.

0:20:22.8 CT: And Adams makes it absolutely clear, he writes time and time again that you cannot legislate the existence… You cannot legislate out of existence the natural aristocracy, it is built into human nature and then you also then have the many represented by House of Representatives. And so you have to mix and balance these three elements of human nature within the context of the legislative branch. And I think that is and Adams has a very, very sophisticated view of this which he develops over the course of three volumes, but that is the heart and soul of Adams’ political… Theory of political construction. And, of course, it goes back to the question of power, it’s how do you control power, how do you control the one, the few or the many from acquiring power over the rest of society.

0:21:31.7 PM: Adams, I think he deals with that problem that without power, freedom can’t really exist while power can easily exist without freedom. And it’s kind of this very odd balancing act that you have to have some level of political power. But with this level of political power, freedom is always really, really fragile gift that can be thrown out of balance at any time nearly. I think it’s interesting as well that Adams views human nature as quite universal ’cause at the time a lot of people are writing about virtue and character and how we weren’t as good as the past, but Adams is saying, “No, no, what’s wrong with human nature has always been wrong.” And he looks back at Roman history for example and he says Rome didn’t decline because all of a sudden people just stop going to church or stop being moral, it declined because there was a constitutional imbalance and I think people often… Today people talk about, “Oh, America is declining and America is… We’ve lost our way,” and it’s like sometimes we’ve lost our way, but also it might be because we are not paying attention to the Constitution as much as we ought to.

0:22:30.4 CT: No, I think that’s exactly right. And Adams was a student of history and in particular as you know as well as anyone, he was a student of the decline fall of the Roman Republic and a great fan of Cicero. And so what Adams is doing is he is attempting to create constitutional structures. Now, this is gonna sound a little abstract but he’s attempting to construct constitutional structures that are in effect outside of time, outside of the so-​called cycles of history that had destroyed the Roman republic and it destroyed various Greek Republics. Adams is attempting… See, what American revolutionaries had and which Adams was the single most important proponent of is the idea of a written constitution as fundamental law which neither England had nor for instance the Roman Republic. And this idea of a written constitution as fundamental law is to create a constitution that is fixed and while it has certain mechanisms built inside it that can adjust with the changes that come with time, still it’s meant to be grounded in fundamental moral principles that are absolute, permanent and universal.

0:24:11.6 CT: And that is meant to serve as kind of like a granite like foundation so that the constitution does not enter history because when it enters history in effect, then it becomes subject to the vagaries of time. Now, I know that this is… I’m laying out here a very sort of abstract conception of constitutional construction, but you see Adams was not only concerned with constitutional construction and he was America’s leading proponent and a handyman, you might say, of constitutional construction but he was also concerned with constitutional preservation. And that’s a question that most scholars don’t think seriously and deeply about, we’ve got innumerable histories of how the state constitutions were drafted, how the Federal Constitution was drafted, but there’s been very little work done, which I hope to do in a forthcoming book, on the mechanisms that America’s founding fathers built into their constitutional system that would preserve the constitution over time.

0:25:26.3 PM: On Massachusetts, his constitution that he wrote is the longest living written constitution in the world, next to possibly San Marino, am I correct on that one?

0:25:35.6 CT: Yes, yes. You are correct.

0:25:38.2 PM: So Adams some good libertarian credentials, constitutionalism is all libertarian power, and Adams is all about natural law, natural rights, man’s place in the world as a free being, however, despite all of these great ideas, Adams is often rejected by libertarians. And whenever I bring up anything positive about John Adams to other libertarians, they will always mention the Alien and Seditions Act. And so could you briefly summarize it, what exactly these Acts were and how he was involved with them, and if you think that kind of precludes Adams from being in the hall of fame for libertarians.

0:26:10.9 CT: Right, so first consider the context, the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were passed in 1798, they came in the midst of the so-​called Quasi-​War with France, so they were considered at the time to be war measures, and the Naturalization Act and the Alien Act, these were attempts… They were passed in reaction to thousands of French radicals who were coming to the United States during a war and who were criticizing America’s policy against France, and they were a lot in the public press, they were libeling the government, saying extraordinarily seditious things about the government and about Adams in particular. So you have to keep that in mind.

0:27:18.1 CT: And then the Alien Acts, they gave the president the authority to designate alien enemies who are from a hostile nation, it gave the president the authority to return these citizens to their home country. And then the Sedition Act of 1798 made it a crime to utter or publish any false scandalous and malicious writings or writings against the government of the United States or against Congress. So what does one say about Adams’ involvement with the Alien and Sedition Acts? The first thing to say is that these were not Adams’ laws, they were passed by a federalist Congress, they were not a part of Adams’ political program at all. The second thing you would have to say about them is that Adams was very reluctant to sign the Alien and Sedition laws. The problem, put in the context of the time, is that he was being pressed on two sides, he was being pressed by the federalists in his own party who were aligned with England and with the Republicans on the other side, one of whom was his vice president, Thomas Jefferson, who was siding with France.

0:28:57.2 CT: And so Adams was put into a very difficult position, and I guess the last thing I would say about the Alien and Sedition, the Sedition law in particular, which is the one that is always of most concern, I think, to libertarians, is that it turns out the Sedition law was actually a liberalization of the then existing sedition law in the United States. So for instance, the sedition law of 1798 permitted truth as a defense, which it had never done before. Right, and that fact is long forgotten now by most people, and many libertarians also contrast Adams’ signing of this war time Act with the position of Thomas Jefferson, who was Adams greatest critic on the Sedition law. But guess what, it turns out that Jefferson’s opposition to the Sedition law was not a principled objection to sedition laws in general, it was just because it was a federal law. Jefferson supported sedition laws at the state level. So the issue, it turns out, is more complex, and the very last thing I would say is that the Sedition law was only meant to be in effect for two years, it had a sunset clause of two years, so it was meant to go out of business as quickly it came into business.

0:30:31.0 PM: So for a time, Adams was pushed aside, revolutionaries like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson overshadowed his legacy, despite every single one of these men begrudgingly admitting that Adams was a genius, and today, scholars such as yourself have given Adams much more of a fair shake down. But I really, really want people to love this guy, being perfectly honest, because I find him absolutely amazing and inspiring and one of the most learned men who ever lived, and it seems to me that he’s always relegated to being one of the more boring founders. So I have two questions. The first is, why has history not been so kind to John Adams, what particular reason was it, is it his grumpy personality, or is he just a bit too esoteric? And the second question would be, what can classical liberals and libertarians learn from Adams despite him living over 200 years ago?

0:31:20.2 CT: So I think the answer to both questions is the same, which is that Adams more than anything else, was honest to a fault, and he was a man of extraordinary integrity, you might say of him as Melville set of Captain Vere and Billy Budd. Adams was intrepid to the verge of temerity, as you said earlier, he was a workaholic, he dedicated 40 years of his life to fighting for the revolution, he was pugnacious, and he was unyielding, and I think we both know, and I think your audience knows, that men of integrity, men of constant principle, are always the first to be sacrificed in the wars of politics. And that’s certainly what happened to Adams during his time. You can identify all kinds of personality flaws. He was the first to admit, as many others did about him, that he was… That he had an exceedingly high degree of vanity, which is true. And he was… Adams was a fighter. Adams would always… He was always… Well, he couldn’t stop talking, I guess, is maybe the way, to be perfectly blunt, when he thought there was a question of justice at hand.

0:32:54.7 CT: And so he was not as prudent as someone like Thomas Jefferson or George Washington. And he would just… He would never back down when he thought the question of justice was at stake. And consider how such men have been treated throughout all history. Consider how Cicero was treated during… Who was Adams’ great hero during the time of the revolution. And Adams, I think, also got caught up in the fights between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

0:33:37.5 CT: And for almost 200 years of American history, really from 1800 to literally 2000, when my book came out and when David McCullough’s book on John Adams came out, there had been basically 200 years of silence. Adams was just shunted aside, right? Because the whole country, for 200 years, was effectively divided ideologically between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians. And Adams was the man caught in the middle. He… And Adams had a foot in both worlds. Adams’s political principles were, I think, classical liberal to the core. He was an isolationist in foreign policy, and his economic policy was very similar to Thomas Jefferson’s. But he also had a more sophisticated view of human nature than Thomas Jefferson did. So he sat uncomfortably between these two icons, Jefferson and Hamilton. And for 200 years, the debate between… The debate amongst scholars was always a debate between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians. The good news is that all ended in around the year 2000. And I would say that Adams’s reputation has been rehabilitated since, let’s say, 1998. And in the last 22 years, I think Adams’s reputation has skyrocketed, and I think many people now regard him as America’s greatest founding father, as I do.

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0:35:22.1 PM: Thanks a mill for listening. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. And if you did, you can subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Portraits of Liberty is written and hosted by me, Paul Meany, and produced by Landry Ayres. You can also visit lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org to find more shows like this. I hope to see you next time.