John Adams | The 56 #2
The Man Who Made Independence Happen (And Got No Credit)
The Forgotten Architect
On July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, John Adams lay dying in his home in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Outside, cannons were firing.
Church bells rang across the nation.
The fiftieth anniversary of American independence was being celebrated with parades, speeches, and toasts.
Inside the Adams home, the ninety-year-old patriarch could hear the distant sounds of celebration, but he was too weak to join them.
That morning, his family had asked if he knew what day it was. Adams nodded. “It is a great day,” he whispered.
He was the last surviving Titan of 1776.
The man who had done more than almost anyone to make independence happen was slipping away on the anniversary of his greatest achievement.
His final words, according to those at his bedside: “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
He was wrong.
Jefferson had died five hours earlier, 500 miles away in Virginia, at approximately 12:50 in the afternoon.
Adams passed around 6:20 p.m.
The two men—once allies, then rivals, then bitter enemies, finally friends again—left the world on the same day, on the fiftieth anniversary of the document they had created together.
When news of the double death spread across the country, Americans saw it as a sign from Providence.
Daniel Webster, in his famous eulogy, declared: “It cannot be that this was mere accident.”
But here’s what strikes me about Adams’s final words: even at the end, he was thinking about Jefferson.
Even in death, Adams couldn’t escape the shadow of the men he had elevated.
The Problem with John Adams
In the musical Hamilton, John Adams doesn’t appear onstage. Not once.
He’s mentioned only to be mocked—called a fat, arrogant fool who takes too many vacations. In one song, Hamilton snaps at him: “Sit down, John, you fat mother****!”
That line is a deliberate callback to 1776, the 1969 Broadway musical where Adams is the central character. The opening number is literally called “Sit Down, John”, and it’s about his fellow congressmen telling him to shut up because he won’t stop pushing for independence.
In 1776, Adams describes himself as “obnoxious and disliked.” The line comes from his own writings. He knew exactly how people saw him.
Lin-Manuel Miranda has said that 1776 “certainly paved the way for Hamilton—not just in that it’s about our founders, but also in that it engages fully with their humanity.”
And yet there’s a cruel irony in how these musicals treat Adams.
In 1776, he’s the hero who drags a reluctant Congress toward independence.
In Hamilton, he’s a punchline who doesn’t deserve to appear onstage.
The difference? Whose story is being told.
Without John Adams, there would be no Declaration of Independence.
No Revolutionary War.
Possibly no United States of America.
In Paris, Benjamin Franklin was a celebrity, charming the French court while Adams did the unglamorous diplomatic work.
Franklin got the glory.
Adams got results and the resentment that came with it.
The Lawyer Who Defended His Enemies
Before independence, before Congress, before everything, Adams made a choice that defined his character.
On the night of March 5, 1770, a mob of colonists confronted a group of British soldiers outside the Custom House in Boston. Someone threw something and then the soldiers opened fire.
Five colonists died.
Six more were wounded.
The event became known as the Boston Massacre, and it inflamed anti-British sentiment throughout the colonies.
Samuel Adams (John’s cousin) and other radicals used it as propaganda, commissioning Paul Revere to create an engraving that depicted the soldiers as cold-blooded murderers firing into a peaceful crowd.
The soldiers were arrested and charged with murder. No lawyer in Boston wanted to defend them. Taking the case meant siding with the enemy, becoming a target of patriot rage.
John Adams took the case.
He believed that every person deserved a fair trial, even British soldiers accused of killing colonists.
Defending the accused—even when they were hated—was the foundation of justice.
“Facts are stubborn things,” Adams told the jury, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
He argued that the soldiers had been provoked by an aggressive mob. He presented evidence that the crowd had thrown ice, oyster shells, and clubs at the soldiers. He convinced the jury that the men had fired in self-defense.
Adams won. Six of the eight soldiers were acquitted. The two convicted of manslaughter received a lenient punishment: they were branded on their thumbs and released.
Patriots were furious. Adams’s cousin Samuel was particularly angry. But John Adams never apologized. Years later, he called the case “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”
Think about that.
The man who would become the loudest voice for independence first proved his principles by defending British soldiers against American mobs.
He risked his career and his safety to uphold the very rights that Americans would soon be fighting to preserve.
The question Adams faced in 1770 is the same one we argue about today: Does everyone deserve a defense, even the accused murderer, the terrorist, the person Twitter has already convicted?
Adams said yes.
He believed that the justice system only works if it applies to everyone, especially the people we hate.
Every generation has to learn this lesson again.
And every generation has lawyers who take unpopular cases and face public fury for it.
Adams was the first.
The Workload No One Matched
Adams arrived at the Second Continental Congress in 1775 as a delegate from Massachusetts. He was forty years old, a lawyer, and already known as a firebrand.
Within months, he had earned a nickname: “the Atlas of Independence.” Like the Greek titan holding up the sky, Adams carried the Revolution on his shoulders.
The numbers are staggering.
During his time in Congress, Adams served on ninety committees.
He chaired twenty-five of them.
No other delegate came close to matching his workload.
He was the one who nominated George Washington to lead the Continental Army. A genius move because Adams knew that a Virginian leading the army would make the Revolution a national cause, not just a New England rebellion.
He was the one who organized the Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence. He picked Thomas Jefferson to write it. He knew Jefferson was a better writer, that a Virginian author would strengthen Southern support, and that if he wrote it himself, his many enemies would oppose it simply because it came from him.
He was the one who argued, cajoled, and bullied the Continental Congress into actually voting for independence when half the delegates wanted to keep negotiating with Britain.
Years later, Jefferson recalled that Adams was “the pillar of independence’s support on the floor of Congress, its ablest advocate and defender against the multifarious assaults it encountered.”
Jefferson wrote the words. Adams made them law.
The Diplomat Nobody Thanked
After the Revolutionary War, America had a new problem: survival.
The new nation needed money and allies. In 1778, Congress sent Adams to France to help. There was just one problem: Benjamin Franklin was already there.
Franklin was a celebrity in Paris, the most famous American in the world.
He charmed duchesses and cultivated the image of a simple philosopher from the wilderness.
The French adored him.
He seemed to do nothing but socialize, yet somehow he had already signed the alliance with France before Adams even arrived.
Adams was the opposite.
He didn’t speak French well.
He found the endless parties frivolous.
He worked long hours while Franklin seemed to float through Parisian society.
Their relationship curdled into mutual contempt.
“The life of Dr. Franklin was a scene of continual dissipation,” Adams complained. Franklin, for his part, found Adams insufferable.
Adams made things worse by writing to the French Foreign Minister criticizing France for not doing enough. The minister was so offended that he refused to speak with Adams again. Adams had effectively gotten himself fired from his own diplomatic mission.
Rather than return home in disgrace, Adams traveled to the Netherlands. If France wouldn’t provide enough support, he would find another source.
The Dutch initially refused to meet with him, but Adams was stubborn.
When the British surrendered at Yorktown, everything changed.
The Dutch formally recognized American independence, the second nation to do so after France.
Adams secured a loan of five million guilders and signed a treaty of commerce.
It was a genuine triumph, achieved through sheer stubbornness.
In 1785, Adams became the first American ambassador to Great Britain. His meeting with King George III—the man against whom America had rebelled—was cordial but produced nothing.
Britain refused to open its ports to American ships or remove its troops from American territory.
Adams spent three frustrating years in London, achieving little.
By the time he returned to America in 1788, Adams had traveled more than 29,000 miles on diplomatic missions. He had faced rejection across the continent. But he had also secured the loans and treaties that kept the new nation alive.
None of it made him famous. Franklin got the glory in France.
Jefferson, who succeeded Adams as ambassador, was remembered for his time in Paris.
Adams was a footnote.
The Most Insignificant Office
When Washington was elected president in 1789, Adams came in second and became vice president.
It should have been an honor.
Instead, it was eight years of frustration.
The Constitution gave the vice president almost no power. Adams’s only duty was to preside over the Senate, sitting in a chair, day after day, listening to debates but forbidden from participating. “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” he complained.
Adams was a lawyer who loved to argue.
Being forced into silence was torture.
In the early months, he tried to offer opinions on pending legislation.
The senators told him to stop.
The vice president was not a member of their body.
But Adams did have one power: the tie-breaking vote.
Over eight years, he cast more tie-breaking votes than any vice president in American history: at least 29, possibly as many as 38.
One vote may have changed history.
In 1794, the Senate deadlocked on a bill that would have banned British imports, a measure almost certain to provoke war.
Adams broke the tie by voting against the bill, clearing the way for the Jay Treaty and averting conflict.
The Jay Treaty bought America time; the young nation simply wasn’t ready for another war with Britain.
Of course, war with Britain came anyway.
The War of 1812 would prove that some conflicts can only be delayed, not avoided.
But in 1794, Adams made the calculation that delay was worth it.
History suggests he was right.
In 1796, Adams became the first sitting vice president elected president.
He had finally escaped the most insignificant office, and walked straight into crisis.
The Contradictions
Adams’s presidency was consumed by crisis with France.
American ships were being seized.
War fever was spreading and his own party demanded blood.
Adams refused.
He believed that war would tear the young nation apart.
It was the right decision. It also led to his greatest mistake.
The war fever enabled the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. These laws criminalized criticism of the government. Ten newspaper editors were convicted for criticizing Adams. The man who had defended British soldiers because everyone deserves a fair hearing signed laws that threw journalists in jail for their words.
People contain contradictions, perhaps the founders most of all.
The impulse to silence critics in the name of safety crosses every political line. It appears when platforms remove speech they deem dangerous, when mobs demand people lose their jobs for wrong opinions, when institutions memory-hole inconvenient facts, when governments invoke emergency powers to restrict dissent.
Adams proved that even principled men, under pressure, find reasons to suppress the other side.
He secured peace with France, but the treaty came too late to save his presidency.
Jefferson won the 1800 election.
Adams was so bitter that he refused to attend the inauguration, leaving Washington before dawn.
The Rivalry and the Reconciliation
Adams and Jefferson were natural allies in 1776. Adams pushed for Jefferson to write the Declaration. Their friendship deepened in Europe, where they traveled together through the English countryside.
Then it crumbled.
Jefferson served as Adams’s vice president and spent much of his time undermining Adams’s policies, secretly funding newspapers that attacked the administration. They represented opposite visions of America: Adams believed in strong federal government; Jefferson believed in states’ rights.
Adams was the son of a farmer who rose through hard work; Jefferson was born into the Virginia aristocracy with inherited wealth and enslaved people.
By 1800, they were bitter enemies.
For twelve years after Jefferson’s victory, they didn’t exchange a single letter.
In 1812, a mutual friend named Benjamin Rush convinced Adams to write to Jefferson. “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other,” Adams wrote.
Jefferson responded.
Over the next fourteen years, they exchanged 158 letters covering philosophy, religion, science, memory.
They never saw each other again.
But through their letters, they found a way back.
The 1800 election makes modern campaigns look civil.
They accused each other of treason.
Their supporters printed vicious attacks.
And yet they reconciled.
It took twelve years of silence, a mutual friend, and the humility to admit the other side wasn’t entirely wrong.
When Adams died on July 4, 1826, his last thought was of his old friend. “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
But Jefferson had died that same morning. His own last words: “Is it the Fourth?”
Two men who had created a nation, fought over its direction, and finally reconciled. They died on the same day, on the fiftieth anniversary of their greatest achievement.
The Engine
Here is the puzzle of John Adams: he did more than almost anyone to create the United States, and yet he is less famous than the men he elevated.
Washington led the army because Adams nominated him.
Jefferson wrote the Declaration because Adams chose him.
Franklin charmed the French, but Adams did the unglamorous work.
Adams did the heavy lifting. Everyone else got the glory.
Part of this is his own fault. He was, by his own admission, “obnoxious and disliked.”
But mostly, Adams was overshadowed because he wasn’t a myth.
He was too human.
Too contradictory.
Washington became a marble statue.
Jefferson became the author of American ideals.
Franklin became a folk hero.
Adams remained a man: brilliant, difficult, essential, and largely forgotten.
Even his cultural resurrection came with irony.
David McCullough’s biography made Adams sympathetic.
The HBO miniseries, John Adams, introduced him to a new generation.
And then came Hamilton—the most successful Broadway show in decades—which made Adams a punchline again.
“Sit down, John, you fat mother****!”
The man who spent his life being overshadowed got overshadowed again, even in his own moment.
That’s what makes Adams interesting. He’s the founder you might actually be, if you were driven, principled, and lucky enough to be in Philadelphia in 1776.
His final toast, on the last Fourth of July he would ever see, was simple: “Independence forever.”
When asked if he wanted to add anything, he said no.
Two words were enough.
Without Adams, there is no Declaration.
Without Adams, there is no Washington at the head of the army.
Without Adams, Jefferson never writes the words we now treat as sacred.
He was not the face of the Revolution.
He was its engine.
Next: Caesar Rodney
If John Adams was the engine of independence, Caesar Rodney was its dramatic climax. On July 1, 1776, Rodney was eighty miles away from Philadelphia when he learned that Delaware’s delegation was deadlocked on the independence vote.
What followed was one of the most famous rides in American history: a desperate overnight journey through thunderstorms, made by a man suffering from skin cancer so severe he wore a green silk scarf to cover his disfigured face.
On Sunday, we’ll tell that story.
This is Essay #2 of 56 in “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Sunday and Friday, culminating on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.
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