John Adams

John Adams was a man driven by ambition, although he often denied the charge. In Adams’ later years, he grew increasingly embittered by the public’s exaltation of America’s more charismatic founders: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. All were lavishly praised with orations and marble monuments, yet , Adams felt his own contributions to American independence—including his call for revolution in the Continental Congress and pivotal diplomatic negotiations abroad—had been painfully obscured. In particular, Adams was insulted by contemporary books written about the American Revolution and its heroes that exalted some founders but neglected to account for the important role Adams himself had played. As he wrote to friend Benjamin Rush in 1790: “The history of our revolution will be one continued lye from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr Franklin’s electrical Rod smote the earth, and out sprung General Washington.” In his retirement, Adams resorted to the margins of his books to personally revise the written record of American history.

John Adams wasn’t born silver spoon in hand, and at the end of his life he was buried in a modest, granite tomb. In between, however, the Atlas of Independence was a man of tremendous good fortune. As we shall see, in lineage, love, and learning, John Adams’s luck was peerless.