Reviews of Books

The Apotheosis of John Adams

Richard D. Brown

Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution. By JOHN FERLING. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xxxii, 392. $30.00.)

John Adams. By DAVID MCCULLOUGH. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Pp. 751. $35.00.)

Long ago John Adams predicted that "mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me."1 For about 200 years he was right. Now the United States House of Representatives has voted to set aside a site in Washington dedicated to Adams's memory, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts plans to honor the Founding Father with a monument of its own. For John Adams, whose quest for fame was a lifelong obsession, this forecasting error would be most gratifying. True, some prominent voices prefer to remember Adams for his signature on the infamous Alien and Sedition laws of 1798 and for his advocacy of the title "His Majesty" for the president of the United States, not to mention his skepticism toward popular democracy. But the pendulum of scholarly and popular opinion has finally swung in Adams's favor, so whatever his defects, Adams's status as an American hero of the first rank now seems assured.

1

The reasons for the apotheosis of John Adams begin with his own practice of saving every written scrap of paper and the decision of his descendants fifty years ago to make public all of his and the family's papers for four generations. In so doing, the Adams family launched the Adams Papers, a 608-reel microfilm and letterpress publishing venture, supervised by the Massachusetts Historical Society and led initially by Lyman H. Butterfield, an editor committed to accurate transcription and full annotation. As a result, the early glimmerings of Adams's ascendancy appeared at the beginning of the 1960s. First, after the appearance of the microfilms (1954–1959) came the richly annotated four volumes of Adams's Diary and Autobiography in 1961. Praised in the American Historical Review by the sitting president, John F. Kennedy, the Butterfield edition of the Diary revealed a direct, earthy Adams, whose lively observations and self-criticism belied the haughty, aristocratic image that Jeffersonians, among others, had drawn of the second president. In a brilliant review of the Diary appearing in this journal, Bernard Bailyn called attention to Adams's appealing emotional qualities as well as his unusual literary powers. In 1962, Page Smith, drawing on the Adams microfilms, published the first full-length biography of Adams in over a generation.2

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