Signing Their Lives Away: John Adams of Massachusetts

Author’s Note:  This series of postings are taken from the book Signing Their Lives Away by Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese.  The publishers at Quirk Books kindly gave me permission to judiciously quote from it on my blog.  While I dispense with quotation marks, the sentences are lifted directly from the book.  The purpose is to introduce you to those who signed the Declaration of Independence and who often remain in the shadows of history.  This book is a must for the home collection of any avid reader, historian, or patriot.

 

 

 

Massachusetts                  By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty

John Adams.  Age at signing: 40, Profession: Lawyer

The signer some called the “Atlas of Independence” was sucked into the cause by his older, poorer second cousin, Samuel Adams.

Adams seemed blessed with enlightened arrogance.  People who think they’re always right are typically blind to their own faults.  Adams was self-aware enough to know that he rubbed many people the wrong way and that this character flaw might be a political obstacle.

He knew that the southern delegates thought he was dragging them into war, so Adams schemed to allow two Virginians to hog the official independence limelight:  Richard Henry Lee, who proposed that Congress vote on the matter of independence, and Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration.

When Adams lost reelection to Jefferson, it was the final straw.  The two men were sworn enemies.  They reconciled only when they were much older, at the urging of a mutual friend, signer Benjamin Rush.  From 1812 until their deaths in 1826, they wrote each other long, philosophical letters that delighted them both.  Widowed and perhaps lonely, the two Titans found solace in reminiscing about the eve of independence.

In an eerie coincidence, Adams and Jefferson died on the same day:  July 4, 1826, fifty years after the adoption of the famous document.  Adams, who was ninety years old, drifted in and out of a coma before dying.  His last words were, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”  Ah, but he was wrong:  Jefferson had died just hours earlier.

 

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.  Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.  Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate for any other.

John Adams