ohn Adams was definitely not our most charming founding father. He possessed neither Washington’s commanding presence, nor Jefferson’s elegant poise, nor Hamilton’s startling brilliance. In addition to his confessed “love of fame,” he was short-tempered, ambitious, subject to volatile mood swings, and according to his wife, Abigail, prone to an “irritability” that clouded his political judgment.
His campaign to clothe the presidency in an impressive title — he proposed that President Washington be officially referred to as His Highness or His High Mightiness — earned Adams an undeserved reputation as a monarchist, as well as his own puffed up unofficial titles, the Duke of Braintree, Braintree being his birthplace, and His Rotundity, a poke at both his preoccupation with titles and his waistline.
He was without question an honorable man. When British soldiers killed six colonists in the street riot we know as the Boston Massacre, no attorney would take the soldiers’ case. Adams agreed to defend them, even though he supported the patriot cause. He won the acquittal of all but two, and a reduced charge for those two, but in the process, he was widely condemned by the patriot citizens of Boston and lost half his law practice. He explained that, in a free country, every man deserves the right to counsel and a fair trial. Even as an old man and former president, he remembered this deed on behalf of justice as “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”
His contemporaries acknowledged him an accomplished writer, a scholar and the “Colossus of the Revolution.” He served on 26 committees at the Second Continental Congress, including the Committee of Five assigned to prepare a declaration of independence. He was instrumental in selecting Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration and George Washington to command the Continental Army.
On July 1, 1776, when the Congress wavered in its resolve, it was Adams who rose to argue in favor of independence. Jefferson described Adams’s address to his fellow delegates as possessing “a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.”
After 10 years stationed in Europe as Congress’s ambassador, much of it separated from his wife and family, Adams returned home to be elected our first vice president. Eight years later, he succeeded Washington as our second president. As president, he prevented what would have been a disastrous war with France, even though it cost him popularity with his political base. He also signed the ill-advised, largely unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts, which hardened the opposition of most everyone else who already didn’t like him.
In short, he was a competent president, but more successful establishing the nation than he was running it.
When he lost his bid for reelection to Jefferson in 1800, he presided over the first peaceful transfer of power between two opposing American political parties. History records that Jefferson had orchestrated a vicious election campaign against his friend, and that Adams left the president’s house by public stagecoach before Jefferson’s inauguration. Yet, despite bitter personal feelings on both sides that persisted until they reconciled 12 years later, both men faithfully executed their constitutional responsibilities.
One man wholly, freely, without question or qualification, laid down his presidential power.
The other took it up.
And our infant nation survived.
Donald Trump isn’t likely to be familiar with any of this history. After four years in the White House, he thought Thomas Jefferson wrote the Constitution, a token of his confusion about our two fundamental documents and the details of either. Of course, he’s also the commander-in-chief who paid tribute to the Continental Army for liberating airports during the Revolution.
But while former President Trump doesn’t know much about our founders, they knew him as the president they anticipated and dreaded — self-interested and deceitful, a deluder and a despot.
A president who asserts his “authority is total” is either ignorant or lying. A former president who enlists his supporters to repeat the outrages of Jan. 6 to threaten and obstruct lawful investigations into credible evidence of his corrupt business practices and ongoing election fraud, is unfit for office and dangerous.
A defeated president who publicly confesses to trying to “overturn the election,” is guilty of sedition.
Citizens and elected officials who are complicit in seditious conspiracy or who obstruct the due process of law, are likewise unfit to govern and should be prosecuted.
Those who tolerate sedition by their silence or by turning a blind eye, should be removed by their constituent voters.
Here is where we play a part in our history. Because, we aren’t ruled by a king and cast of hereditary nobles. We live, for now, in a democratic republic. The power to govern belongs to us. If we abuse that power, if we fail to exercise it wisely, if we choose unworthy leaders, we will be accountable for the death of the nation.
This is the responsibility we bear. The burden isn’t light, and the task isn’t easy. It’s why Jefferson warned us “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
John Adams had a warning for us, too. Like the other founders, he wasn’t made of marble or bronze. He was an extraordinary man with ordinary human failings. In the winter of 1819, he wrote to Jefferson about national virtue and corruption. By virtue, he meant moral excellence. He told his old friend that no nation in history, after being “thoroughly corrupted,” was ever “restored to virtue.” Without virtue, Adams continued, “there can be no political liberty.”
He also conveyed an assurance: “No effort in favor of virtue is lost.”
Our virtue in this world will always be imperfect but two centuries later, our winter struggle isn’t Republican against Democrat, or liberal against conservative. It’s a question of virtue or corruption, liberty or tyranny.
You don’t preserve, protect and defend the Constitution by ignoring what it says and defiling what it means.
We are responsible for who our leaders are.
Are we now incompetent to govern ourselves?
Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.
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