The Importance of John Adams

  

A quote from John Adams:  Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

  

 Our founding fathers understood that their actions, should England prevail, and the dreams of a free United States of America fail, they would be treated as traitors, subject to punishment and probably death.  Yet, they risked their lives to establish this nation.  They had definite concerns, particularly about how long such a nation could survive.  The concerns they expressed are worth considering, particularly in our current times.  

 Although John Adams served as Vice President for George Washington, our first President, for two terms, and was elected as president following Washington, he is less well known.  However, he played important roles in the drafting of our constitution and the various roles he played, both during the colonial years and in the early years of our independence.

He was born in 1735, the son of a farmer and shoemaker.  The family could be traced back to the first generation of Puritan settlers in New England.  He had two younger brothers, but being the oldest, his father wanted him to become a minister.  He attended Harvard, still uncertain about his future, teaching for a while before settling on the law.  Although he did not become a minister, as his father had hoped, he did marry a minister's daughter.  History indicates that she was a perfect match for him.

He was an important leader from and before the Battle of Bunker Hill, and that continued when he served as a delegate for Massachusetts at the Continental Congress.  He assisted Thomas Jefferson in drafting the Declaration of Independence.  He had been the primary author of the Massachusetts Constitution, and it became influential in the drafting of the United States Constitution.  He served as Vice President under George Washington for his two terms and was elected as President following Washington. 

The disagreement between Adams and his former close friend, Thomas Jefferson, is well known, and they did not speak for many years, but it was Adams who reached out to his old friend later in life, and their correspondence in the later years of their lives is a part of American history.

If I had to select one of the greatest achievements of Adams, besides selecting Abigail as his wife, it was probably selecting his Secretary of State to be the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.  John Marshall shaped the court during his long service, and the respect for him among the other members of the Court established rules and practices that had not been particularly defined until Marshall took the bench.

Adams served only one term in the White House, but although he would probably have preferred to return home to be with Abigail, he continued to serve his country.  His peers did not always believe he was the right man for the jobs he was asked to do.  As Benjamin Franklin summarized, "He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, is absolutely out of his senses."

I believe that his warning to future Americans that our nation depends on our morality for it to survive is true.  We are a people of many religions, ethnicities, and nationalities, probably more that he may have imagined, but his warning that the survival of America depends on our morality rings true.