Independence (28 page)

Adams later said that he was transformed into a revolutionary partly as a result of having immersed himself in European and English radical thought. He was drawn to the literature of European Enlightenment rationalism, especially the works of Voltaire and Montesquieu. Even more important were the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century essays of John Locke and other Englishmen, writings that historian Caroline Robbins characterized as a veritable “textbook of revolution” for Americans. These tracts not only described an England in which liberties were imperiled by internal corruption, but also warned of a ministerial conspiracy to eradicate the rights of Americans. While influenced by what he read, Adams believed that it was the 1773 publication of Thomas Hutchinson's purloined letters that pulled together his disparate thoughts and converted him into a dissident. He called those letters his “grand discovery.” The scales fell from his eyes and he at last understood that London's policies threatened to render Bostonians “more unhappy than the basest Negro in Town.” He now believed that Great Britain's leaders were “cool, thinking, deliberate Villain[s], malicious, and vindictive, as well as ambitious and avaricious.” Unless stopped, they will “ruin the Country,” he added. What is more, Adams also believed that Hutchinson's letters confirmed what Samuel Adams and his collaborators had been saying all along: A “profoundly secret, dark, and deep” plot indeed existed among royal officials to quash the rights of the colonists.
25

Adams's retrospective account might have exaggerated the immediate impact of Hutchinson's letters, but there can be little doubt that the three years that followed his illness, or breakdown, in 1771 was a crucial time for him. Adams turned thirty-seven in October 1772, and he noted on his birthday that he had reached a point when most men's lives were half over.
26
Taking stock, Adams concluded that he had achieved everything that he had dreamed of accomplishing as a lawyer, and more. Yet, the world had changed. Now it was not lawyers that attained fame, but political activists, the likes of Samuel Adams and John Dickinson. By 1773 and 1774 he yearned to resume the political career he abandoned in 1771. As he wrestled again with becoming politically active, the Hutchinson Letters helped allay the misgivings he had earlier exhibited at participating in the radicals' orchestrated campaigns to arouse popular resistance to royal authority.

Samuel Adams and other popular leaders aided John in overcoming the last hurdles, calling on him frequently and placating his fears. They utilized every artifice in their bag of tricks to persuade him of their temperate outlook. Wanting to believe in their cause, John was easily swayed. Soon he was writing that Samuel Adams was driven by the purest motives of “public Service.”
27
A couple of years earlier he would have denounced an act such as the Boston Tea Party, but when Adams heard of the destruction of the East India Company's tea, he effusively remarked that the action “charms me.” If it led to a war that cost the lives of thousands, the carnage would be “very profitably Spent,” he declared.
28
John Adams had become a radical.

When the colonies responded to the Coercive Acts by calling the First Continental Congress, the Massachusetts assembly chose John Adams as one of its delegates. In memoirs that he wrote a quarter century later, Adams matter-of-factly described his election as if it had been inevitable.
29
In fact, Adams owed his selection to Samuel Adams, who never explained why he added to the delegation an individual who was not only politically inexperienced but also only a recent convert to the colonial protest. Samuel's likely motives are not difficult to fathom. As it was imperative that the Massachusetts congressmen appear to be the antithesis of fire-breathing militancy, it was a savvy move to include in the delegation a member who was untainted by extremism as well as a leading lawyer who had defended the British soldiers charged with the Boston Massacre. Samuel no doubt also thought it a plus that John was a political innocent who would look to his older cousin for guidance.

John had not expected to play a major role in the First Congress, and indeed, like his three colleagues from Massachusetts, he remained in the background, saying little and taking pains to be circumspect on the rare occasions when he spoke. Furthermore, John had come to Philadelphia in September 1774 very much aware that he was a political novice. He had expected to be overshadowed—overawed, in fact—by the bevy of “wise Statesmen” in attendance.
30
Adams was additionally convinced that he had not been graced with the qualities exhibited by most political standouts. Leaders, he thought, were almost always tall and graceful men who readily filled every room with their commanding presence. But he stood only five feet seven, the average height of American-born males in the late eighteenth century, leading him to sadly acknowledge that “By my Physical Constitution I am but an ordinary man.” In addition, Adams was awkward, portly, balding, and, by his own admission, a rather careless dresser. Nor was he especially warm and engaging. He admitted that he did not possess a knack for telling jokes. When it came to what he thought were men's three favorites subjects—women, horses, and dogs—Adams could barely join in a conversation. Instead, he was a cantankerous sort given to arguing. That led others, including Jefferson, to describe him as “irritable.” Adams characterized himself as “irascible.”
31

Adams had sat on the First Congress's Grand Committee, and it had turned to him to draft the section on Parliament's authority over colonial commerce, the great roadblock to completing its statement on American rights. Otherwise, he had watched and listened, and what he had seen and heard boosted his self-confidence. By the time Congress adjourned, Adams had come to see himself as intellectually superior to nearly all of his colleagues and the equal of most as a public speaker. He eagerly looked forward to playing a greater role in the Second Congress.

But Adams, who had collapsed following his tension-laced visit to Lexington soon after the war's first battle, was still ill when he reached Philadelphia two weeks later. In letter after letter to Abigail that spring, he complained that he was “completely miserable,” “not well,” “quite infirm,” “wasted and exhausted,” and “weak in health.” “I am always unwell,” he despaired in the early weeks of Congress. He suffered with “smarting Eyes” and dim vision. He was afflicted with a skin disorder, night sweats, insomnia, weakness, fatigue, tremors, arrhythmia, depression, and acute anxiety.
32
These were the same symptoms he had experienced during his illness four years earlier, and they would haunt him again in 1781. Each of Adams's illnesses occurred in times when he endured great stress. Today, stress is thought to be one possible trigger of hyperthyroidism, and the cluster of symptoms Adams displayed is symptomatic of an overactive thyroid, or thyrotoxicosis. Physicians in Adams's time were unaware of the thyroid, much less its maladies, but medical records from the next century—prior to the discovery of modern therapies—demonstrate that while the disease was usually fatal, some patients lived for years, because in some instances hyperthyroidism lapsed into remission and, on occasion, never reappeared.
33

The cause of Adams's poor health is uncertain, but the source of the tension that gripped him is not difficult to find. At the height of his illness, Adams remarked that “a vast Variety of great objects were crowding upon my Mind,” including worries over the safety of his family in a colony that was “suffering all the Calamities of
Famine
,
Pestilence
,
Fire
, and
Sword
at once.”
34
Furthermore, Adams knew that he was part of a body in rebellion against king and Parliament. If the war was lost, every congressman would be liable to arrest and prosecution for the capital crime of treason, a grim fact that allegedly led Franklin to quip that the members of Congress must hang together or they would hang separately. Adams was not a coward, and from the start he believed the war was necessary and just. He also believed America would win the war. However, he was profoundly troubled by the knowledge that he had helped bring on a war in which others would be compelled to face hazards on the battlefield that he had never confronted. He was uneasy over the fact that he was the first male in the Adams family who had never served in the military. His burden of guilt only grew when one of his brothers, Elihu, died that summer of a camp disease while soldiering in the siege of Boston. When not writing home about the alarming symptoms of his illness, Adams filled his letters with remorseful pledges to fight for his country. “Oh that I was a Soldier!—I will be,” he exclaimed. “We must all be soldiers,” he said, adding: “Every body must and will and shall be a soldier.” But deep down he knew that he would never bear arms or come under fire, and it gnawed at him, feeding his anxieties and perhaps fueling his illness.
35

In May 1775 Adams was too ill to mount a strenuous opposition to Dickinson's campaign to petition the king. Even had he been well, he may not have fought too hard. Massachusetts's fundamental priority at that stage was to preserve unity, at least until Congress created a national army that would displace the sectional Grand American Army.

By mid-June Adams felt better. He told Abigail that his eyes were improving and some of his other ills had abated. His health seemed to get better—and his spirits soared—on learning of America's “astonishing” military spirit and Congress's unanimous support of the war.
36
The action that he had taken to break the logjam in Congress by urging the creation of a national army, and Washington's subsequent appointment as its commander, were signals that Adams was ready to play a greater role. As the summer heat and humidity settled over Philadelphia, one observer remarked that Adams had emerged as “the first man in the House,” the leader of those who favored taking a firmer line toward Great Britain than did Dickinson's faction.
37
Adams's ascent was breathtaking. Virtually devoid of political experience prior to the First Continental Congress, he had come to be a leader in the Second Congress after only a few weeks.

The legendary determination and industry that led Adams to flourish as a lawyer served him again in Congress. Pursuing what his colleagues might have thought was a sleepless pace, Adams tended to congressional business from early morning until well past dark, six days a week. He sat through the daily sessions of Congress and served on at least thirty-five committees during the year that began in June 1775. The committees often met before Congress convened or following its late-afternoon adjournment, and many required long hours of intense work in order to meet the pressing deadlines set by Congress.
38
Characteristically, Adams also sought to become the best-informed congressman on a wide variety of subjects. He brought to Philadelphia several books from his considerable library and from time to time asked Abigail to send down others. He rose early and stayed up late reading and studying, straining to see the pages by the dim light of a flickering candle. His hard work paid dividends. In time, his colleagues came to see him as Congress's foremost expert on political theory, diplomacy, and even military ordnance.

Nor was his diligence all that he had going for him. Adams's years in the courtroom had made him both a talented debater and an able orator. He lacked Henry's flair for the dramatic, but his speeches were eloquent and rational, prompting one congressman to remark that Adams was unequaled in his ability to grasp “the whole of a subject at a single glance.” Jefferson described Adams as “profound in his views … and accurate in his judgment.” Finally, while Adams's penchant for argumentation was irritating, once the other congressmen got to know him, most grew to like him. Adams had “a heart formed for friendship,” as one of his fellow Boston lawyers remarked, and he so badly wanted to succeed that he overcame his naturally reserved habits.
39
Adams never conquered his prickly manner, but he grew to be more outgoing and a good conversationalist. He had the ability to talk about numerous subjects, and he was blessed with the rare virtue of being a good listener. It may not be an exaggeration to say that John Adams made more lasting friendships with deputies from throughout America than any other member of Congress. Curiously, too, while John was no less radical than Samuel Adams by the summer of 1775, he was from first to last seen by most of his colleagues as something of a moderate, at least as far as Yankees went. Their perception only gave greater credibility to the tough and unsentimental line that he advocated.

By fits and starts that summer, Adams saw hopeful evidence that things were falling in place for those of his persuasion. He remained vexed that many in Congress, probably most, believed that North's ministry and Parliament would come to their senses when they learned of what happened at Lexington and Concord. Adams predicted with certainty that Britain's government would give America nothing “but Deceit and Hostility.” He was displeased too that the selection of the general officers who were to serve beneath Washington had been shot through with politics, leading to the appointment of some men who he feared were strikingly incompetent. Nothing that Congress had ever done gave “me more Torment,” he raged, although he knew that some good men had been chosen and was delighted that the top two officers were General Washington and Major General Lee, just as Massachusetts had wished. He may even have shared Samuel Adams's belief that Washington and Lee jointly exhibited so many wonderful qualities that they would “make good all Deficiencies” of the other general officers. Adams was additionally thrilled that Congress had voted to raise soldiers from several colonies south of New England, a step that would make the Continental army a truly national force while giving the siege army at least a two-to-one superiority over Gage's regulars. Among those raised were ten companies of riflemen from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Adams exclaimed that these men, armed with rifles rather than the notoriously inaccurate muskets that most eighteenth-century soldiers carried, could “kill with great Exactness at 200 yards Distance.” He was unruffled by their vow to hone in on the officers in the British army. Indeed, he hoped “they perform their oath.”
40