The Off-Key Bard
History

John Adams

John Adams defended the soldiers responsible for the Boston Massacre because he believed the law had to matter even for the most unpopular defendants. That conviction shaped everything he built — and everything he got wrong.

On March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd in Boston, killing five civilians in what became known as the Boston Massacre. The soldiers were arrested, and Boston demanded justice. Then a Massachusetts lawyer stepped forward to defend them: John Adams. Adams was sympathetic to the colonial cause, but he believed a society governed by law had to grant justice even to the most unpopular defendants. Most of the soldiers were acquitted, cementing Adams's lifelong conviction that liberty depends entirely upon constitutional guardrails — and that those guardrails have to hold even when the public doesn't want them to.

A Massachusetts Farmer's Son

Born in 1735 in Braintree, Massachusetts, Adams attended Harvard and chose law over the ministry. Analytical, ambitious, and deeply self-reflective, he filled extensive diaries and letters that give historians a remarkably detailed view into his mind — his doubts, his vanities, his frustrations, and his principles in constant, sometimes uncomfortable tension with one another. In 1764, he married Abigail Smith. Their marriage became one of the greatest intellectual partnerships in American history. While John traveled for law and politics, Abigail managed their farm and finances while offering sharp political counsel — famously urging him in 1776 to "remember the ladies" when the new government was being constructed, a challenge he deflected and never forgot.

Architect of Independence and Constitutional Law

Adams emerged as a leading voice for independence in the Continental Congress. He championed George Washington to command the Continental Army, served on the drafting committee for the Declaration of Independence alongside Thomas Jefferson, and argued tirelessly for a clean break from Britain at a moment when many delegates still hesitated. After independence, he drafted the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, introducing the foundational principle that free government must be "a government of laws and not of men" — a phrase that embedded itself permanently in American political thought. He later served as a diplomat in Europe, securing crucial loans from the Dutch that kept the Revolution financially alive, and co-negotiating the 1783 Treaty of Paris that formally ended the war.

Presidency, Contradiction, and Legacy

After serving eight frustrating years as Vice President under Washington — a role he famously called "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived" — Adams won the presidency in 1796. His single term was defined by severe crisis and painful contradiction.

The Quasi-War of 1798–1800 pitted American and French naval forces against each other in an undeclared conflict at sea. Adams successfully avoided a full-scale war through diplomacy, despite intense pressure from the war faction of his own Federalist Party — a decision that probably cost him reelection but that he always considered his finest presidential achievement. Yet in the same year, he signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, including legislation criminalizing false or malicious criticism of the federal government. The Sedition Act was used to prosecute political opponents and journalists, and it stands as a major stain on a man who spent his career arguing that constitutional limits on power had to be absolute. The contradiction between his defense of the Boston Massacre soldiers and his signature on the Sedition Act is not easy to resolve — and Adams, characteristically, never fully resolved it himself.

After losing a bitter election to Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Adams stepped down without resistance, leaving Washington before Jefferson's inauguration in a sulk that history has judged harshly. But the transfer of power happened peacefully, establishing a vital precedent in a world where defeated leaders rarely surrendered office voluntarily. Adams retired to Massachusetts, eventually reconciling with Jefferson through a decade of extraordinarily rich correspondence that remains one of the great intellectual exchanges in American letters. Both men died on July 4, 1826 — exactly fifty years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

The Law Had to Matter

John Adams is not the easiest founder to admire. He was vain, prickly, politically clumsy, and capable of signing legislation that directly contradicted his stated principles. He craved recognition he often felt he didn't receive and nursed grievances with an intensity that alienated allies. But the core conviction that animated his career — that free societies require law that applies equally, even to the unpopular, even to the powerful, even when the crowd wants otherwise — remains as vital and as contested as it was when he stood up in 1770 to defend the soldiers who had fired into a Boston crowd. The law had to matter. Adams spent his life insisting on it, imperfectly, stubbornly, and at considerable personal cost.

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