There were, to be sure, dissenters from this tidied-up political drama. In the late 1920s the distinguished Progressive literary historian Vernon Parrington drew a suggestive portrait of early republic politics that strayed beyond the traditional Jeffersonian-Hamiltonian dualism. Though recognizing the “liberal” and “conservative” strains in American life, he veered off the prescribed path, perceptively writing that “midway between” these two points “stands John Adams.” Independent of mind, intellectually aggressive, and blessed with astonishing energy that often exceeded the patience of his peers, Adams appeared always to be in a state of doing, acting, making, and moving, much to the bounce of his own drummer’s beat. Striking the proper chord, Parrington notes that “he was an uncompromising realist” and “refused to be duped by [either the] fine dreams of humanitarian panaceas” that so delighted Jefferson or the push for centralized power that drove Hamilton.¹ He feared, rather, top and bottom alike. As his colleagues quickly grouped into rival factions, Adams resisted their lead as a false choice between “democracy” and “aristocracy.” A stubborn republican, he found himself ideologically alienated from the sharp partisanship that dominated post-Revolutionary politics.

An avid observer of human limitations, Adams wore an impulsive skepticism like a second skin. Unlike Jefferson, he approached the Enlightenment’s promise of perfectibility as an intelligent carnivore might accost a porcupine—curious and with a certain instinctive hunger, but exceedingly wary. This guarded cast of mind colored Adams’s opinions on both representative rule (“There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” he once avowed) and the heaven-on-earth hopes inspired by the French Revolution. Accordingly, he foreswore the colossal optimism that underlined the Jeffersonian faith in virtue as the blessed product of vice. It is impossible to imagine Adams ever repeating anything remotely close to Jefferson’s remarkable claim that “the liberty of the whole earth was depending on the [French Revolution], and … rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.”²

True, Hamilton too questioned America’s French connection and, more broadly, the philosophical underpinnings that shaped the Age of Reason. Yet he presumed that an abiding social stability might be cobbled by combining the stock jockeying of nascent capitalists with the martial prowess of a standing army. As the country’s first treasury secretary, Hamilton sought to centralize financial power in such a way as to strike at states’ rights and turn local loyalties to national allegiances. His controversial proposal for the creation of the First Bank of the United States (chartered by Congress in 1791) provided a uniform currency and monetary engine for elites to acquire loans. It also spurred a speculative boom that threatened to launch a money monopoly among the very rich. This ersatz aristocracy offended Adams, who broke early from Hamiltonianism, concerned that it promised the rise of a new tyranny.

More broadly, Federalism and Republicanism emphasized conflicting visions of development. The great question facing Americans from the 1787 drafting of the Constitution to the 1861 dissolution of the Union involved the tense relationship between localism and nationalism. In various permutations, the confusion of critical issues challenging the new nation during these decades—slavery, internal improvements, and expansion across the frontier—intersected with this fundamental problem. By their very natures, localism and nationalism were incompatible. One would have to give way, peacefully or otherwise. In ruminating on the ideological world formed by the Jeffersonian-Hamiltonian contest, Adams insisted that the nation suffered for its association with extremism. He believed this to be the natural if injurious outcome of political parties that held contrasting views on where power resided. Most Americans at this time abhorred the concept of party spirit, but in the end most drifted into the party system. Adams never did. This independence proved to be the ultimate source both of his proud self-sovereignty and of his inevitable failure as president to offer a viable third way of governing.

The easy sociability of the senior Adams, a popular figure at the meetinghouse, does little to suggest let alone explain the temperamental volatility that shook his son. Gripped by strong passions, the younger John gave every indication of living his life more slave than master to the potent combination of engagement, ambition, and insecurity that pressed his political career forward. Reared in a Puritan tradition that questioned cravings for personal distinction, he twitched constantly between pride and a punishing self-denigration, oppressively, confessionally aware of both his real and imagined shortcomings. In need of the occasional brimstone, Adams found that a chilly deism offered him nothing. Reflecting in late age upon the special and wholly unanticipated success enjoyed by his simple kin, he concluded that a humble faith had spared more than their souls. “What has preserved this race of Adamses in all their ramifications, in such numbers, health, peace, comfort and mediocrity? I believe it is religion, without which they would have been rakes, fops, sots, gamblers, starved with hunger, frozen with cold, scalped by Indians, &c., &c., &c., been melted away and disappeared.”⁴

If the religion observed by Adams resembled in faint outline the once exacting Calvinism of the Bay Colony’s earliest elect, it also contained more liberal qualities. Adams believed, as he once put it, in a “Being existing from Eternity” with supreme power over His creation, and while he considered it an absolute certainty that in this world of wonder “there … never was but one being who can Understand the Universe,” he reasoned by analogies from nature and society that his Maker refrained, as he explained to Jefferson, from condemning “innumerable millions to … miser[y], forever.” To the partisans of predestination, Adams cribbed a stark reply: “I believe no such Things.” His faith found strength, rather, in the following simple, affirming metaphysics: “The Love of God and his Creation; delight, Joy, Tryumph, Exultation in my own existence … are my religion.”⁵ Devoted to a personal and sympathetic divinity, Adams was no more abstract spiritualist than condemning Calvinist. He appears to have occupied an ecclesiastical middle ground that we might designate as harmonious, just, and Whiggish—God loved His cosmos and offered His children a rewarding life if they lived in a condition of moral accord. This search for a meaningful saintly center proved also to be the temperamental path on which Adams pursued his public career. Though teased by strong emotions, he considered extremes, whether in worship or in politics, to be symptomatic of indiscreet impulses.

Of course the question of what constituted a state of moral accord proved, in the vicissitudes of daily life, elusive and complex. Seeking structure, Adams circled back on the path that led to the old Puritanism. Shaped by Calvinism’s penchant for introspection and haunted by the blurred line separating sin and salvation, he disclosed in his letters and diaries a practiced attachment to self-analysis. Collapsing society with self, he sought to subject his country to the same kind of restless internal dialogue in a language more Jeremiad than Enlightenment. Certainly he never lingered so long or so lovingly on the latent possibilities of the republic as did Jefferson in his eloquent Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), a document tying the presumed environmental superiority of the New World to its rising political prospects.

In this study, Jefferson read Virginia’s agrarian vision across the continent as a case of a wishful Edenic innocence sustained in a republic mercifully absent, as he put it, “the mobs of great cities.” Nor could Adams embrace the “penny saved is a penny earned” homilies that underlie Benjamin Franklin’s famous Autobiography, which has long served as shorthand for the nation’s worship of self-help strategies and self-made men. The memoir opens with a boastful oration touting its author’s worldly success: “Having emerg’d from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World, and having gone so far thro’ life with a considerable Share of Felicity … my Posterity [may find my situation] fit to be imitated.”⁶ Adams too could assume a pedantic attitude, though his sermons typically arrived in the clipped cadence of the cold scold. For an earthy art of living, the fruits, that is, of Parisian cuisine, London theater, and Philadelphia’s secular-minded modernity, interested him far less than Franklin. He felt compelled, rather, to apprise his countrymen of their assorted shortcomings, this but a preface to a pedagogy heavy on the special sacrifices born by the sons and daughters of 1776 in their moment of nerve and mettle.

Practiced in the psychology of self-effacement, Adams projected a host of private insecurities across America’s ideological landscape. In A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, a survey of republicanism ancient and new that he completed in the late 1780s, Adams emphasized the various forms of failure known to have crippled past governments, aristocratic and democratic alike. Here, he needed no prompting to read the seventeenth-century Puritan concern for moral decline onto the next century’s political world. Accordingly, he held more conventional and less confident views of human nature than a rising chorus of thinkers and philosophes claiming a progressive personality type. Self-interest, greed, and corruption, he little doubted, retained their traditional influence. Reason alone would never trump misplaced power; the “people” comprised both the promise and the problem of respectable government.

Responding to the strong stirrings of Western liberalism, the Defence counseled a callow American democracy to dismiss the uneven model of European republics from the ancient to the modern world. They had, so Adams insisted, underestimated humanity’s prideful quest for autonomy, overestimated religion’s capacity to provide a binding moral social core, and turned an ignorant eye to the confused impact of commercial forces on the body politic. At heart, he believed in a dispersal of mastery to check both ruler and ruled. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Adams appeared, if not precisely hostile to, then certainly suspicious of the Enlightenment’s new trinity of reason, liberty, and equality. He preferred a more mundane set of principles and clear constitutional guidelines that spelled out both the prerogatives and limitations of government. “The predominant passion of all men in power,” he wrote, “whether kings, nobles, or plebeians, is the same; that tyranny will be the effect, whoever are the governors, whether the one, the few, or the many, if uncontrolled by equal laws, made by common consent, and supported, protected, and enforced by three different orders of men in equilibrio.”⁷

Unwilling to privilege the confident claims of humanity, Adams’s Defence recalled the religious compact produced nearly a century earlier in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Pastor of Boston’s original North Church, controversial defender of the Salem witch trials, and a voluminous writer, Mather won recognition as a learned and influential spiritual leader. Addressing second- and third-generation Puritans, his literary output helped establish the philosophical foundations for Calvinism in the New World. Notably, both Mather’s Magnalia and Adams’s Defence bore the impress of authors influenced by the anticipation of civilizational decline. Mather’s study offered a historical perspective of New England’s presumed descent from the august days of the Puritan ministerial elite to the rise of the Yankee shopkeeper. The recent and tragic witchcraft panic, sporadic conflicts with neighboring Indians, and the omnipresent fear of Catholic New France to the North darkened the divine’s vision and discolored his narrative.

Working through the Defence, Adams faced in his own day an equally unsettling assortment of issues. In 1786 a debtor party won control of the Rhode Island legislature and passed a paper money law that radically inflated the state’s currency. Although this extraordinary bill eased the financial burden of debtors, it concurrently drove some creditors from Rhode Island lest they be forced to accept essentially worthless script. In the eyes of more than a few wary observers, democracy had run riot and class warfare now threatened all of New England. In the Anarchiad, a satiric-heroic verse sequence published anonymously in 1786–87, Rhode Island’s troubles were laid bare:

Tensions escalated the following year as debtors in western Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley, threatened with foreclosures and bereft of tax relief from an unsympathetic statehouse, concentrated in August under the leadership of Daniel Shays, a veteran at the battles of Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga. Wounded during the War for Independence, Shays had...