Chances are no one else will bring this to your attention, so I guess the job falls to me. Today is the birthday of John Adams, the second president of the United States.“John Adams?” you ask. “So what? He took over after George Washington. Big deal.”
Well, it is, actually. Adams may well be the most important founding father you know nothing about (unless you caught Paul Giamatti in the HBO miniseries a few years back, or read David McCullough's stellar biography). Yet his life was amazingly eventful. Here are a few highlights culled from the National Park Service's web site for the Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, Mass.
Born in Massachusetts in 1735, the Harvard-educated lawyer:
- fathered John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States;
- mounted a legal defense for the British soldiers who stood accused of having committed murder during the Boston Massacre;
- proposed to the Continental Congress that George Washington be appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army;
- helped Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence;
- drafted the Massachusetts Constitution, which is now the oldest constitution in use in the world;
- negotiated a wartime treaty with Holland that included a massive loan to the United States;
- negotiated the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain that ended the Revolutionary War;
- served as the first American ambassador to Great Britain;
- served as the country’s first vice president;
- as president, maintained peace with France, which was then a superpower, despite the American public's clamor for war;
- with his wife Abigail, became the first occupant of the newly constructed Executive Mansion, later known as the White House;
- appointed John Marshall of Virginia as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
It wasn’t an unblemished record. As president, Adams signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts, which cracked down on immigrants and dissent. But if any of us could accomplish a tiny fraction of what Adams did in his 90 years, wouldn’t we consider ourselves fabulously successful?
