1
SON OF PURITANS
John Adams was an American long before there was a United States of America. He was a fourth-generation New Englander, a spiritual, intellectual, and political heir to the Puritans. Shortly before he left France on assignment to London, a member of the local diplomatic corps asked him if he had often been in England. Only once, late in 1783, he replied.
"You have Relations in England no doubt," Adams recollected the man as continuing.
"None at all," he said, to which the diplomat expressed surprise.
"Neither my Father or Mother, Grandfather or Grandmother, Great Grandfather or Great Grandmother nor any other Relation that I know of or care a farthing for have been in England these past 150 Years," said John Yankee. "So that you see, I have not one drop of Blood in my Veins, but what is American."
"Ay," replied the diplomat, "We have seen proofs enough of that." "This flattered me no doubt," Adams recorded, "and I was vain enough to be pleased with it."1
The progenitor of the American line of Adamses, Henry Adams (c. 1583-1646), arrived in the Bay Colony late in the 1630s, toward the end of the first wave of Puritan emigration. He and his wife, eight sons, and one daughter made their farm on forty acres near Mount Wollaston, in Braintree, ten miles outside Boston.2
Little is known of this first American Adams except that, like most early Braintree settlers, he traveled light and accumulated little. His estate was valued at £75, 13s, and, besides the forty acres, featured a house with two rooms, a certain number of books, livestock—a cow, a heifer, and swine—and a silver spoon.3 If Henry was like others who fled to Massachusetts Bay in those years, he was driven from England by the established church. Religious tolerance was not an outstanding feature of sixteenth-or seventeenth-century England, but the nonconformists were besieged in the 1630s. It was the decade in which Charles I ruled without a Parliament and William Laud, the kings handpicked archbishop of Canterbury, directed British congregations in things great and small, not forgetting to stipulate the siting of the communion table at the east end of the chancel and no other place.
This is not to say that the dissenters braved the perils of the North Atlantic to found a society based on the ideals of tolerance and freedom of conscience. On the contrary, the Puritans were absolutists. Believing that they knew the truth, they saw no reason to countenance untruth, and they made short work of the blasphemers, witches, Quakers, Anabaptists, Antinomians, and other subversives who wandered into their midst.
What they sought in religion was freedom to worship in the simplicity of the Gospel, without the superstructure of bishops, the festival of Christmas, the convention of kneeling to receive communion, and other such Romanist trappings of the Church of England. As for the material realm, they were prepared to accept whatever God meted out. The American Dream, for the Puritan founders, had nothing to do with moneymaking. Addressing his fellow passengers aboard the Arabella en route to Massachusetts in 1630, John Winthrop reaffirmed the purpose of the undertaking: "The end is to improue our liues to doe more seruice to the Lord the comforte and encrease of the body of christe whereof wee are members that our selues and posterity may be the better preserued from the Common corrupcions of this euill world to serue the Lord and worke out our Salvacion vnder the power and purity of his holy Ordinances."4
If the founding Henry Adams was a Puritan, either he was a visible saint or he wasnt. Though everyone was expected to contribute to the upkeep of the churches and, of course, to visit them—twice—on Sunday, only the saints were admitted to church membership. Only they were contractual parties in the covenant between New England and God. Under its terms, the Puritans promised to live by the holy law. Falling short of it, as they inevitably did, they were prepared to suffer chastisement. "The government of Massachusetts and of Connecticut as well," wrote historians Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson several centuries after the fact, "was a dictatorship, and never pretended to be anything else; it was a dictatorship, not of a single tyrant, or of an economic class, or of a political faction, but of the holy and regenerate."5 The Puritans God was wrathful, omnipresent, and to even the most perceptive human being, incomprehensible. He was "the incomprehensible sum of all perfections, not to be understood in His essence, not to be prefigured by man-made images." Hence the Puritans opposition to religious art and to anything else that might introduce the distraction of aesthetic pleasure into the worship service. Seeking to purify the house of God, the dissenters stripped the premises of every amenity, creature comfort, and consolation they could find:
[Puritanism] demanded that the individual confront existence directly on all sides at once, that he test all things by the touchstone of absolute truth, that no allowance be made for circumstances or for human frailty. It showed no mercy to the spiritually lame and the intellectually halt; everybody had to advance at the double-quick under full pack. It demanded unblinking perception of the facts, though they should slay us. It was without any feeling for the twilight zones of the mind, it could do nothing with nuances or with half-grasped, fragmentary insights and oracular intuitions. It could permit no distinctions between venial and mortal sins; the slightest of them was "against the Great God, can that be a little Evil?" It was all or nothing, white or black, God or the Devil.6
The Puritan fathers reserved their special scorn for the uncommitted and cold-hearted. Worse than an outright sinner was a mere spiritual bystander. "Lukewarmnesse is loathsome to the stomacke," adjured Thomas Hooker, the most powerful preacher in Connecticut, "therefore appeare in your colours what you are, that you may be known either a Saint or Divell; lukewarme water goes against the stomacke, and the Lord abhorres such lukewarme tame fooles."7
The Puritans set out to build a city on a hill, a new Zion along the Charles River, by the salt flats of Braintree, or in the wilds of Hartford. Naturally this would entail hard work, but what was that to them? God called men to work, to serve society and themselves through productive labor, intellectual no less than manual.8 The premium the Puritans placed on education shines through in the founding of Harvard College—in 1636, long before the bare necessities of life in the colony had been made secure—as well as in the creation of a system of universal public education. The latter project was passed into law in 1647, the General Court of the colony explaining itself in a preamble: "It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the Scriptures, . . . and that Learning may not be buried in the graves of our fore-fathers in Church and Commonwealth." Hence it was ordered that every community of at least fifty households maintain a master to teach reading and writing and that every community of at least a hundred households establish a grammar school, "the Masters thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the Universitie."9
Daring, intelligence, piety, and work tended naturally to promote material success, and this fact the Puritans sometimes had cause to regret. Wealth, the tangible fruit of success, brought with it luxury, which yielded to pride and ostentation. An ordinance to check "the greate, superfluous, and unnecessary expenses occasioned by reason of some newe and immodest fashions" was passed as early as 1634.10
There being no compromise with the word of God, Puritans subjected themselves to ceaseless self-examination. Finding that, by and large, they failed to measure up to the Christian ideal, they prepared for the inevitable divinely ordered afflictions. For the early New En-glanders, cause and effect were self-evident. Crop failures, Indian massacres, and "excessive raigns from the botles of Heaven" were not random events but the wages of Sabbath-breaking, sleeping during sermons, drunkenness, lying, covetousness, licentiousness, price gouging, and other such crying sins.11
The youngest of Henrys sons, Joseph, born in 1626, was a father of twelve, selectman, farmer, and brewer. There is no record of his outlook look on life or of the intensity of his religious faith. If, however, his piety burned no brighter than that of the average New Englander at the close of the seventeenth century, it would have grieved the Puritan clergy. Already the tide of secularization was rolling in. "Our Ancestors were men of God," wrote Joshua Scottow in 1694; "made partakers of the Divine Nature, Christ was Formd, and visibly legible in them, they served God in Houses of the first Edition, without large Chambers, or Windows, Cieled with Cedar, or painted with Vermillion; a company of plain, humble and open hearted Christians, calld Puritans."12
Though the Puritans had nothing against innocent pleasures, Increase Mather had found it necessary by 1684 to speak out against "Profane and Promiscuous Dancing." By 1716 dancing was being openly taught in Boston by an Episcopalian organist.13 In 1681 Mather had written an approving preface to a tract against religious toleration; yet about 1721 Increase and his son Cotton participated in the ordination of a Baptist minister.14 The Puritans opposed gambling on the ground that it trivialized providence, the hand of God being present even in the roll of the dice; yet the eighteenth century brought legalized lotteries, sanctioned by the clergy, for the benefit of Harvard College.15
It was unlikely, however, that any of this secularizing drift, palpable though it was, altered the rhythm of a farmers life in Brain-tree. Among Joseph Adamss brood was a son named Joseph, Jr. (1654-1737), who himself had eleven children, one of whom was named John.16 It was this John Adams (1691-1761) who married Susanna Boylston, daughter of Peter Boylston of Brookline.17 And it was John and Susanna who brought forth the second president of the United States.
Reflecting on the fecundity of his line, John Adams—our Adams—supposed that there was nobody in America to whom he was not related, and he facetiously entered the claim that his kin had felled more trees than any other family in the country. ("What a family distinction!") In old age, addressing his friend Benjamin Rush, he posed a question: "What has preserved this race of Adamses in all their ramifications, in such numbers, health, peace, comfort and mediocrity?" And he answered: "I believe it is religion, without which they would have been rakes, fops, sots, gamblers, starved with hunger, frozen with cold, scalped by Indians, &c, &c, &c, been melted away and disappeared."18 But it was an evolved religion. Gradually and by degrees, God-fearing Puritans had become calculating Yankees.
John Adams was born in Braintree on October 19, 1735 (October 30 by the modern calendar), in a farmhouse by the main road, the Plymouth highway.19 It had all the amenities, such as they were: two stories, four rooms, a big fireplace (open on both sides), and a lean-to. John was the first of three children, all boys—by prevailing standards of fertility, almost an only child.20 Peter Boylston followed in 1738 and Elihu in 1741.
An American loyalist, harboring no love for rebels against the king, would pronounce Adamss parentage "not very distinguishable."21 As a slur on the revolutionarys bloodline, it was only half correct. Adamss mother, an uncommonly well-read woman, was a Boylston of Brook-line and Boston. His father, whom he adored, had no such pedigree, but he was a pillar of the community and of the North Precinct Church—farmer, shoemaker, tithing man, tax collector, militia officer, nine times selectman, longtime deacon.22 This good man tolerated no wayward words or deeds and early conceived an "Admiration of Learning."23 On Sundays he occupied a place of honor in the meetinghouse, sitting with the other deacons in front of the pulpit. In good Puritan fashion, the father determined to give his firstborn son a liberal education.
Young John, the intended recipient of this blessing, was not immediately grateful for it. Perhaps he couldnt warm to The New England Primer, a standard textbook for Bay Colony children of that day. Not patronizing the little readers, the authors got right down to the business of eternity:
Youth, I am come to fetch thy breath.
And carry thee to the shades of death.
No pity on thee I can show,
Thou hast thy God offended so.24
Instead, John sailed little boats, hunted squirrels and crows, and lay in wait on the cold wet ground of the marshland for wild fowl.25 He took to carrying his fowling piece to school, until the master, Joseph Cleverly, found out and laid down the law: scholars were to report for class unarmed. One day the father sat his son down for a talk. What did the boy propose to do with his life? Be a farmer, said John. Very well, the deacon decided. He would show the lad what farming was really like.
"You shall go with me to Penny ferry tomorrow Morning and help me get Thatch," said father to son.
"I shall be very glad to go Sir."
"Accordingly," said Adamss account, "next morning he took me with him, and with great good humor kept me all day with him at Work. At night at home he said Well John are you satisfied with being a Farmer. Though the Labour had been very hard and very muddy I answered I like it very well Sir." The father judged it the wrong answer: "You shall go to School to day."26
So he went, rebelling against Master Cleverly in a manner that more parents might wish they could inculcate in their wayward children. "My School master neglected to put me into Arithmetic longer than I thought was right," Adams recalled, "and I resented it. I procured me Cockers [Cockers Decimal Arithmetick] I believe and applyd myself to it at home alone and went through the whole Course, overtook and passed by all the Schollars at School, without any master. I dared not ask my father Assistance because he would have disliked my Inattention to my Latin. In this idle Way I passed on till fourteen and upwards."27
Adamss autobiography, a characteristically wonderful, brilliant, scattered, undisciplined, self-justifying, and truth-telling production, contains an extraordinary passage in the early pages about sex, an "Article of great importance in the Life of every Man." Adams here declares that he was "of an amorous disposition and very early from ten or eleven Years of Age, was very fond of the Society of Females." He declines to identify his boyhood flames ("It would be considered as no compliment to the dead or the living"), but he wishes to assure posterity that there had been no funny business: "My Children may be assured that no illegitimate Brother or Sister exists or ever existed. These Reflections, to me consolatory beyond all expression, I am able to make with truth and sincerity and I presume I am indebted for this blessing to my Education. My Parents held every Species of Libertinage in such Contempt and horror, and held up constantly to view such pictures of disgrace, of baseness and of Ruin, that my natural temperament was always overawed by my Principles and Sense of decorum."28
An educational entente with his father was achieved in Johns teenage years, when the scholar promised to apply himself to his studies in exchange for deliverance from Master Cleverly. John proposed to switch to Mr. Marsh, whose boarding school was a short walk from the Adams home.29 As a rule, the Marsh school would accept only boarders, not day students, but Deacon John persuaded the tutor to make an exception, and young Johns college preparatory career was set in motion.
He started to spend less time with his fowling piece and more on his books. After a year and a half of study, Mr. Marsh pronounced him fit to take the Harvard entrance examination.30 The tutor conferred with an examining scholar at Harvard, and a day was set for young Adams, then fifteen.
The weather on the appointed day was threatening, and Mr. Marsh, indisposed, declined to venture outdoors.31 Adams, facing the solitary ride to Cambridge, wished that he too could stay in bed. "But foreseeing the Grief of my father and apprehending he would not only be offended with me," he recalled, "but my Master too whom I sincerely loved, I aroused my self, and collected Resolution enough to proceed."32
Thereby collected, he rode into Cambridge, walked into the college, and presented himself to the examining committee. Joseph May-hew, the tutor whose class Adams would enter, handed the candidate an English passage to be translated into Latin. Adams spotted several words for which the Latin did not immediately occur to him. "Thinking that I must translate it without a dictionary," the account continues, "I was in a great fright and expected to be turned by, an Event that I dreaded above all things. Mr. Mayhew went into his Study and bid me follow him. There child, said he, is a dictionary, there a Grammar, and there Paper, Pen and Ink, and you may take your own time."33
A relieved Adams made his translation, which passed muster. He was admitted to the class of 1755 (with a partial scholarship) and presented with a theme to write before the beginning of classes. "I was as light when I came home as I had been heavy when I left: my Master was well pleased and my Parents very happy. I spent the Vacation not very profitably chiefly in reading Magazines."34
In those days, fluency in translation was not essential for success as a Harvard undergraduate. There were no examinations, and precious little of what a modern undergraduate would recognize as the freedom and amenities of college life. Students, the Harvard rules held, "should keep in their chambers and diligently follow their studies; except half an hour at breakfast; at dinner from twelve to two; and after evening prayers till nine of the clock."35
In modern times a Yale professor was heard to explain that the secret of the success of his institution lay in taking in good students and turning out good students. So too with eighteenth-century Harvard. John Adams performed his lessons, read voraciously, and conceived a particular interest in mathematics and science, which were taught at the time by the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, John Winthrop, Harvards most distinguished scholar. In one lecture Professor Winthrop reflected on the vast strides in productivity that applied technology had brought about in warfare. He invited the boys to consider that a crew of six men, serving a cannon, could create as much mayhem as a hundred had been able to do with a battering ram.36 Adams, a lifelong user of tobacco, smoked a pipe in those days but committed no known infractions against the rules of the college.37 Under Winthrops influence, he recorded his observations in a diary. For June 20, 1753: "At Colledge, a most Charming and Beautifull Scene is this morning displayed. All nature wears a Chearfull garb, after so plentifull a Shower as we were favoured with the Last night, receiving an additional lustre from the sweet influences of the Sun."38
Adams became that rarest of alumni, the lifelong student, a true prototype of what another age would call an intellectual. Preparing to live the life of the mind, he joined an undergraduate literary club whose members passed evenings by reading to one another: plays, poetry, and other compositions. "I was as often requested to read as any other, especially Tragedies," the budding advocate recalled, "and it was whispered to me and circulated among others that I had some faculty for public Speaking, and that I should make a better Lawyer than Divine."39
The basic professional options for a college graduate in those days numbered three: medicine, the pulpit, or the law. Adams was pointed toward the pulpit when an acrimonious theological dispute erupted. Luckily for the political, diplomatic, and constitutional development of the United States, Lemuel Briant, minister of the Adamses church in Braintree, became the object of a furious local controversy. The Reverend John Hancock, father of the merchant-patriot, had been called to the Braintree church in 1726 and preached there until his death in 1744. His doctrinal views, evidently, were orthodox. Certainly they were more orthodox than those of his successor. Briant, who took over the ministry in 1745, was an advanced thinker who proceeded to contribute to the transformation of the Puritanism of Increase Mather into the Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing. In 1749 Briant delivered a sermon on moral virtue, taking his text from Isaiah 64:6—"All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags."40 By no means was the Braintree congregation unanimously prepared to consign the old-time doctrine of spiritual righteousness to the ragbag, and there ensued a controversy. As a deacon of the same North Precinct Church, Adamss father was in the middle of the fight, which was moved off the plane of pure theology when Briants wife abandoned him, either because "she [was] distracted" or because "he did not use her well," or both.41 The charges and countercharges, some doctrinally recondite, others not, seemed to bring out the worst in the disputants and caused the young prospective minister to ask if this was really the life for him.
Excerpted from John Adms: Party of One by James Grant.
Copyright © 2005 by James Grant.
Published in First edition, 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.