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Adams, John

(Trumbull portrait)

John Adams, Jr. (October 30 [O.S. October 19] 1735 – July 4, 1826) was an American lawyer, author, statesman, and diplomat. He served as the second President of the United States (1797–1801), the first Vice President (1789–97),[1] and as a Founding Father was a leader of American independence from Great Britain.[2]

Adams was a political theorist in the Age of Enlightenment who promoted republicanism and a strong central government. His innovative ideas were frequently published. He was also a dedicated diarist and correspondent, particularly with his wife and key advisor Abigail.

He collaborated with his cousin, revolutionary leader Samuel Adams, but he established his own prominence prior to the American Revolution. After the Boston Massacre, despite severe local anti-British sentiment, he provided a successful though unpopular legal defense of the accused British soldiers, driven by his devotion to the right to counsel and the "protect[ion] of innocence".[3] As a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress, Adams played a leading role in persuading Congress to declare independence.

He assisted Thomas Jefferson in drafting the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and was its foremost advocate in the Congress. As a diplomat in Europe, he helped negotiate the eventual peace treaty with Great Britain, and acquired vital governmental loans from Amsterdam bankers. Adams was the primary author of the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780 which influenced American political theory, as did his earlier Thoughts on Government.

Adams' credentials as a revolutionary secured for him two terms as President George Washington's vice president (1789 to 1797) and also his own election in 1796 as the second president. In his single term as president, he encountered fierce criticism from the Jeffersonian Republicans, as well as the dominant faction in his own Federalist Party, led by his rival Alexander Hamilton. Adams signed the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts, and built up the army and navy in the face of an undeclared naval "Quasi-War" with France.

The major accomplishment of his presidency was a peaceful resolution of the conflict in the face of Hamilton's opposition. Due to his strong posture on defense, Adams is "often called the father of the American Navy".[4] He was the first U.S. president to reside in the executive mansion, now known as the White House.[5]

In 1800, Adams lost re-election to Thomas Jefferson, and retired to Massachusetts. He resumed his friendship with Jefferson upon the latter's own retirement by initiating a correspondence which lasted fourteen years.[6] He and his wife established a family of politicians, diplomats, and historians now referred to as the Adams political family. Adams was the father of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States. He died on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Modern historians in the aggregate have ranked his administration favorably.

Contents

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams

Abigail,

[both friends of] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abigail_Adams)Mercy Otis Warren

Sandbox: 5vmKkJ

American Connections

JOHN ADAMS (MA) was forty. Known as "His

Rotundity." A shoemaker's son turned lawyer, Adams was also known

variously as vain, irritable, and cantankerous. The Declaration of

Independence was his idea, though he later complained that Jefferson got

all the glory.

From the outset Adams said he wanted power and

"reputation." In 1797 he got it as the country's second president, even

though back in revolutionary days he had lobbied against the

left-wingers in favor of royalist trappings like a lifetime presidency,

a hereditary Senate, and personal-fortune requirements for

representatives (£100), senators (£300), and governors (£1,000). The

idea being to reduce the likelihood of corruption. Hope springs eternal.

In 1798 bribery came back to haunt him during negotiations with the

French revolutionaries over their likely help against the Brits

(again!), when the negotiators for zee foreign minister demanded a

quarter-million back-hander for the man himself and twelve million for

la France .

Adams said stick it, and told Congress about the

scam. He referred to the blackmailers as: "X, Y, and Z." Congress went

ape. Things were about to go totally pear-shaped when Napoleon took over

in France. Whereupon sweetness and light supervened.

The mysterious X, Y, and Z turned out to be an American banker living in

Hamburg and two Swiss. One of whom was J. Conrad Hottinguer. Who in 1816

was witness to a contract signed by thirty-one-year-old Laurent Clerc, a

teacher in Paris. The contract (with an American in Europe on a

head-hunting visit) was for Clerc to go to Hartford, Connecticut, and

teach for three years. Clerc's career to this point had been remarkably

successful, and this contract required him to teach geography, history,

Bible studies, arithmetic, and grammar. And sign language, since his

pupils would be deaf (and in some cases, dumb).

No problem. Clerc himself was deaf and had been trained at the Paris

Institute for those similarly challenged. He had happened to be on a

visit to London when he met his future employer, Thomas Gallaudet (whose

son later set up what eventually became the modern-day Gallaudet

University for the deaf in Washington, D.C.). Gallaudet was in the

United Kingdom to check out the Braidwood family schools for the deaf.

The Braidwoods (who'd started out in Edinburgh) taught deaf pupils to

make sounds by feeling their teacher's larynx so as to recognize a

correct sound when they made it themselves, and by using a small

instrument to position their lips, jaw, and tongue. Unfortunately for

Gallaudet, Braidwood required nondisclosure, lots of money, and several

years' training for any would-be teacher.

Braidwood's methods worked remarkably well. In a famous test the famous

Dr. Johnson provided a word one and a half feet long long and a deaf

Braidwood pupil spoke it perfectly.

Another of Braidwood's Edinburgh

pupils, John Philip Wood, was so good he ended up as a qualified

accountant in charge of auditing the Excise Office. Where he revealed

corruption, incompetence, and expenses fraud on a massive scale.

In 1813 Wood got married, marking another triumph for the Braidwood

system and its aim of giving pupils a normal life.

Wood's new wife was

the sister of Scotland's best-known publisher, Robert Cadell, close

friend and business partner of Sir Walter Scott. Scott was very big

business. As the first successful historical novelist (twenty of his

twenty-three books), Scott's work burst upon an English public

fascinated by the Gaelic past it had recently tried so hard to wipe out

with the Highland Clearances (a "sheep in, people out" policy that

emptied Scotland and filled Canada, and that was carried out in savage

retribution for Scotsman Bonnie Prince Charlie and his clans' having

nearly made it to London and the throne). Walter Scott's novels and

their tartan Disneyfication of Scotland sold like hot bannocks, and

everybody involved got very rich.

One of the very few times Scott put a foot wrong was in 1818 with

Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenary (sic) of

Scotland. Which failed in spite of the illustrations by

up-and-coming young painter J. M. W. Turner. Who in 1792 had started

walking all over the country, doing twenty-five miles a day with his

possessions and food in a bag on the end of a stick, producing landcape

sketches and watercolors for a magazine.

The year after Scott's book came out, Turner left England (as every painter tried to) for Rome and the Great Experience. After a few weeks of the usual Old Masters

copying, Turner developed his own style and changed the world of

painting. His scrapings, blottings, wipings, and scratchings of the wet

paint created dreamlike visions of light and color unlike anything that

had gone before (take a look at *The Fighting Temeraire* .

During another trip to Rome, in 1819, Turner also made the obligatory

visit to the new excavations at Herculaneum, where he met and dined with

Sir Humphry Davy, big science cheese and the darling of London beauties,

who flocked to his lectures at the Royal Institution. Davy isolated

potassium and sodium, invented a miner's lamp, won a Napoleonic prize

(even though there was a war with Napoleon at the time), and wrote the

definitive [Agricultural Chemistry. And wasn't boring.

Davy was in Herculaneum trying to unroll Roman papyrus documents stuck

together by the Vesuvius eruption and seventeen-hundred-plus years in

the ground. After six months' effort, in the face of Italian

obstructiveness and a chemical solution that wasn't the solution, Davy

was the only thing to come unglued and left.

So did his sidekick Peter Elmsley. At 240 pounds, Elmsley was known as

the fattest undergraduate of his day. As genial as he was obese, Elmsley

(rich, Oxford, sinecure vicarage) indulged in two pleasures: food and

ancient Greek. Years of digging in Italian libraries for manuscripts by

Sophocles and Euripides turned Elmsley into the leading Greek scholar in

Britain. In 1822 he applied for the chair of divinity at Oxford. He

didn't get it. Second prize was the offer of the bishopric of Calcutta.

No thanks.

This left the job to Reginald Heber. An altogether more qualified man

since he was a full-time divine, was married to a cathedral dean's

daughter, had traveled widely, and was gung-ho to get the word out to

the idol-worshipping heathens. Heber ended up spending only three hectic

years in India involved with the poor and needy as well as dealing with

the "predicaments of Indian Princes" (caused by the gradual removal, by

the Brits and the East India Company, of their princely authority and valuables) and generally overdoing it until he expired in a bath. But not before writing

fifty-seven hymns. One of which, "Greenland's Icy Mountains," would be

set to music by the man who wrote twelve hundred hymns of his own and

singlehandedly created a musical culture in American schools. Or

(depending on your view) singlehandedly destroyed a flourishing

indigenous musical tradition ("backwoods" and "unscientific," he called

it).

Lowell Mason's "Better Music" movement started in Boston (where he

founded the Academy of Music), then spread to every school curriculum

throughout the country. It earned him America's first doctor of music

degree. Mason's approach to music teaching (based on European classical

music) was influenced by an 1837 European visit to an obscure Swiss

named Johann Naegeli (Mason arranged two of his hymns). Naegeli was the

inventor of the Swiss choir and wrote dozens of tunes for the Swiss

Reformed Church. And inspired Mason by his classroom methods. Which were

inspired in turn by another Swiss, Heinrich Pestalozzi. Who inspired

everybody.

Pestalozzi believed in teaching children through direct experience of

life. Observation led to awareness led to measurement led to description

led to writing. No books, no timetables, no punishment, no teachers

(except other kids). It seemed to work. His school at Yverdon in

Switzerland became the radical-chic must-see after it opened in 1805.

Glitzy visitors included the Russian ambassador. Confusingly, a Greek.

John Capodistria's meteoric rise took him (in only eighteen years) from

obscure Corfu doctor to Russian foreign minister to first republican

Greek head of state. After which (in 1831) he was assassinated for

insulting somebody's family honor. Whereupon the Brits, Russians, and

French opted for a (less-precarious, they thought) monarchy and

installed Otto I. Confusingly, a German.

Seventeen-year-old Otto was the son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria and

spoke about as much Greek as he did Sanskrit. Accompanying him were

three regents: two nonentities and Count von Armansperg. Who'd made

enemies cleaning up Bavarian government finances and would soon do the

same for Otto.

Once Otto reached the age of throneship he spent more

time thinking up regulations for chimneysweeps than running cabinet

meetings. The London Morning Chronicle described his reign as

"incompetence and imbecility." Crime levels rose and carriage-jacking

happened right outside the Royal Palace, where nonstop full-dress balls

were held. Athens University was opened with thirty-three professors and

fifty-two students. And the medieval city was indiscriminately destroyed

by German archeologists so as to leave the Greek ruins looking like

museum pieces. Eventually the exasperated Greeks ran Otto and von

Armansperg out of town.

In 1853 Armansperg's daughter Princess Caroline arrived in Hoboken, New

Jersey, where she met and married Julius Froebel, himself on the run

from a death sentence in Germany for his involvement in the 1848

revolution. Froebel (mineralogist, educator, and revolutionary) spent

several years in Central America becoming the authority on Mayan

architecture and linguistics. He and Caroline ended up in Algeria.

Julius's brother Friedrich Froebel went further, becoming a fervent supporter of Karl

Marx, an educator setting up kindergartens in Prussia (the schools were

banned), and finally a political exile in Edinburgh, Scotland. Where in

1875 he opened a school. In 1898 one of his little pupils was Clementine

Hozier (she remembered the school as "a strong smell of haddock").

Hozier was the granddaughter of the tenth earl of Ainslie and known for

her beauty. In 1908 after a classic whirlwind romance she married a

young politico on his way up, then down, then up again.

The second up took him all the way, and in 1940 Winston Churchill was

prime minister just in time to lead Britain through World War II.

Churchill's director of atomic energy research was physicist John

Cockcroft, (A-Bomb, radar, V-1 defense} who after the war ran the U.K. Atomic Energy Research Establishment. In 1953 Cockroft sent a young man to Geneva to help

design and build CERN's first proton synchrotron, in which atomic

particles were (and still are) smashed into each other at high speed. These were detected by Gargamelle, the bubble chamber detector. The name itself is derived from a 16th-century novel by François Rabelais, The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, in which the giantess Gargamelle is the mother of Gargantua (not to be confused with an evil Smurf).

In 1975 Cockcroft's young protégé became CERN's director general. His

name was JOHN ADAMS. CERN later gave us Tim Berners-Lee and the WWW.