Ryan Tindall

Review of: R.B. Bernstein, The Education of John Adams New York: Oxford, 2020.

John Adams will never be the most popular of the Founding Fathers. He did not have the commanding grace of Washington, the elegant pen of Jefferson, or Franklin’s way with a coonskin cap. Paul Giamatti is a compelling actor, but there is no hope of a rap musical reprise of HBO’s miniseries. Adams was, however, a great man, having many qualities that were underappreciated in his day–and are underappreciated in our own. Many of these qualities were specifically what made him a great lawyer as well, qualities which, R. B. Bernstein highlights in his new biography of Adams qua attorney.

Bernstein’s biography, entitled The Education of John Adams (as a nod to another famous Adams’s autobiography), suitably begins with Adams’ education—specifically his legal education. Adams was a student at Harvard and, shortly thereafter, apprenticed himself to a local attorney and began to read for the law. His approach was distinctively intellectual. He was impressed with the historical nature of law, and devoured Coke, Grotius, and Justinian—among others. The other Founders were similarly well-educated, well read in the classics and early modern republican thinkers. Adams brought this too, but brought an impressive command of the British constitution and common law tradition—as well as a trial lawyer’s penchant for verbal jousting.

Adams brought matched his intellectualism with this courtroom demeanor. Although at first annoyed by the self-taught pettifoggers (and pushing for their regulation by the Bar), he learned to emulate the low-brow tactics of one of his mentors, James Otis. Otis challenged the infamous writs of assistance issued by Parliament—a sort of general, perpetual search warrant issued by the Crown which only expired upon the Monarch’s death. Parliament engaged in constitutional innovation, attempting to issue these writs on its own authority. Otis argued this was unconstitutional, teaching Adams in the meantime lessons that would be important when Boston Patriots were hurling tea into the harbor a decade later. This knowledge of the British constitution made Adams invaluable to his countrymen in declaring independence, as well as when Adams almost singlehandedly drafted the Massachusetts Constitution. 

Bernstein’s Adams was, at heart, absolutely committed to the rule of law. He made his name famous by defending the British soldiers who fired at the Boston Massacre. Reflecting on the defense, he wrote “The Part I took in Defence of Captn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of service I ever rendered to my Country” (59). This lawyerly commitment, in Bernstein’s view, also is responsible for some of Adams’ let downs. For instance, Adams was too rigid and unable to engage with Versailles’ hypocrisy while on diplomatic mission. Later in the constitutional debates, Adams was attuned to the issues of separation of powers and checks and balances—his “theory of the case” —but when the question was how to balance factions and regions into a federal republic, Madison proved the more competent draftsman. 

This is a particularly interesting portion of Adams’ thought to focus in on—indeed, it’s the part I wrote my master’s thesis on. Adams derived his thought out of the republican/monarchical debates of the seventeenth century, and saw a strict separation of the legislative and executive as necessary to maintain the stability of the state. Adams’ thought was focused on class in ways with which American political thought has always been uncomfortable. Adams thought an aristocracy would arise in the United States because, by nature, it had to—every society in human history has/had had one—and that the essential goal of constitutional government was to balance the monarchical, the aristocratic, and the democratic forces within society. Adams was, in thinking this way, in keeping with the main stream of western political thought back to Aristotle. Adams was also frequently slandered as a friend of the aristocracy, even though his main concern was to build a form of government that could hem in the aristocratic class. By having a popularly elected and strong executive, the executive could become the champion of the people against the aristocracy (taking on the monarchic function)—an aristocracy that would inevitably dominate the legislative branches. 

Madison and the Framers of the 1789 Constitution did not see this as the issue at hand. Their diverse reactions to Shays’ Rebellion is an instance of this. Adams saw the Rebellion as a failure to balance these interests. But the Framers’ response was not to tinker with the balance of interests within the polity; it was rather to build a stronger federal government that could both put down these rebellions and deal with the class issue by building a super-aristocracy, a virtuous aristocracy (as Gordon Wood as described) centered around Washington, D.C., and to deal with the debt issue by starting Hamilton’s bank. This is part of why Jefferson was so opposed to the new constitution—Jefferson saw the heart of the new American experiment as his Declaration of Independence, and thought a little bit of bloodletting as part of that document’s spirit in the service of further justice and liberty. Madison drew not from republican thought or the British constitutional repertoire, but from the balance of powers that were required to keep the Holy Roman Empire together for years to come, as he sought to keep north and south, urban federalists and rural anti-federalists together. Adams never managed to realize this, and thought the most interesting thing about the new constitution was that it created out of the executive and legislative branches a new third branch: the judicial. This also contributed to some of his struggles as Vice President sitting as President of the Senate, as he worked out what role he would have as someone both in the executive and legislative branches. 

This legal-mindedness contributed to Adams’ out-of-step views in other areas too. Perhaps the most interesting is in the Sedition Act. Famously reviled today as both an example of xenophobia and a censorious government, one of the best parts of Bernstein’s book is the discussion he gives the Sedition Act. Sedition was, at common law, a crime. As a matter of law then, for Adams, prosecution of it could not violate the constitution, and should not have even been controversial. Additionally, it was necessary—thought Adams—due to the fragility of the new federal government to maintain a tight grip. The High Federalists, led by Hamilton, disagreed with the prudence of such a measure; the anti-federalists thought it violated the First Amendment. But to say that the Anti-Federalists have certainly carried the jurisprudential day should not be to pass judgment on Adams as though that was the morally right choice—that isn’t how law works. Indeed, his commitment to law over politics cut the other way as well: as the participants in the Fries Rebellion were tried and found guilty of treason, Adams promptly pardoned them for the very simple reason that, under the constitution, they hadn’t committed treason. To be a good lawyer is to hazard making everyone upset with you.

Adams bequeathed a legacy to generations that would follow him. First, he did this in appointing Justice Marshall, one of the greatest jurists this country has known, to the bench. Second, he was the first defeated president. Losing to Jefferson stung, but Adams did not cling to power and respected the result. Historians meditate on how easily Washington could have made himself king; Adams, with the power of the Federalist Party behind him, could have made himself tyrant. And in his retirement, he actively pushed for increased religious liberty in Massachusetts, and left a republic of letters for posterity in his correspondence with Jefferson. 

In Bernstein’s assessment, Adams was, for all his foibles, fundamentally law minded. Bernstein’s book, while not the magisterial biography that others have written, is a helpful perspective on Adams that lawyers and historians—and the considerable overlap between the two—can enjoy and engage with. Law-mindedness brought with it a sense of fair play, a commitment to pre-established rules, and a mind attuned to justice which, in Bernstein’s opinion, caused Adams to fail when his law-mindedness was not valued. True enough; but it should surely be noted, we should be thankful such people exist, and certainly wish for more of them.