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biography
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| male
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| lived:
| (1735–1826)
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| biography:
| US statesman and second president (1797–1801), born in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, USA. He studied at Harvard and settled into a law practice in Boston. Although he defended British soldiers after the Boston Massacre (1770), he had also shown ‘patriot’ sympathies by pamphleteering against the Stamp Act (1765). Having gained prominence as a political thinker and writer, he was sent as a Massachusetts delegate to the First (1774) and Second (1775–7) Continental Congresses; he helped edit Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and led the debate that ratified it (1776). During the American Revolution he chaired several committees and served on many more, was commissioner to France and Holland, and drafted the influential Massachusetts constitution (1779). After the war he was ambassador to England (1785–8), where he wrote Defense of the Constitution of the United States. After eight frustrating years as vice-president under Washington (1789–97), he assumed the presidency (1797), but the prickly Adams proved less able as a practical politician than as a theorist. His regime was torn by partisan wrangles between Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Democrat-Republicans, all of whom he antagonized, and his persistence in negotiating peace with France when his fellow Federalists were urging war cost him their support. Also, his Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), which virtually forbade criticism of the government, outraged many citizens. Defeated for re-election by Jefferson (1800), Adams retired from public life. In later years he pursued an extensive correspondence with many men, including his one-time opponent, Thomas Jefferson. Both men died on 4 July 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. |
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