Founding Father John AdamsEssay Preview: Founding Father John AdamsReport this essayJohn Adams remains the most misconstrued and unappreciated “great man” in American History (Ellis). The second president of the United States of America, he truly was a great man. Adams served in France and Holland in diplomatic roles during the Revolution, and helped negotiate the Treaty of Peace. From 1785 to 1788 he was minister to the court of St. James, returning to be elected Vice President under George Washington both of Washingtons two terms. For a man of his intellect, vanity and vigor, Adams two terms as Vice President were frustrating experiences. He complained to his wife Abigail, “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived” (white house). Adams also had a role in the Revolutionary war. He defended John Hancock, the British soldiers from the Boston Massacre, and secretly wrote anti-stamp pamphlets under a pen name. This founding father helped America to become the great nation it is today, through his role in the Revolution and in his term of presidency.
John Adams is a national hero, but he was very much human. “Both adversaries and friends alike found Adams to be cantankerous, argumentative, and an internally frustrating young man. If you read his diaries, he is always in agony. He was somewhat of a manic depressant, and if alive today, would have required Prozac. His diary entries consisted of highs and lows and he once wrote, “I passed so and so on the street and they said Hello. I wonder what they meant by that?” He was always doing battle with his own demons, his own failures. He was unbelievably honest in his diary, he told what he was thinking and feeling (Founding Fathers).
Adams also had an interesting role in the Boston Massacre. He defended the soldiers. The Bostonians wanted justice and revenge against the British officers who killed five of their own men. Samuel Adams also wanted justice, but he was very rational and determined that if Boston was to be viewed as a decent place, then the soldiers must have a public trial. The team chose for the soldiers defense was none other than John Adams and his colleague Josiah Quincy. Adams, however, was not eager to take the assignment, but Samuel Adams argued, on the basis of justice, these men must have the best defense, an argument that would always sway Adams. John Adams reluctantly took the case. Angry Bostonians threw bricks threw his windows, furious because they believed that an American was taking sides with the British soldiers. Adams stood firm, and in the end the soldiers were convicted, but on minor charges. None of them
In Boston, the jury found the soldiers not guilty, however, and the guilty verdict was rescinded upon seeing that Boston was not a safe and safe place for men to fight. The jury saw through the “mispricing” of the Boston Massacre. In a different courtroom Justice Edward Hennig was awarded $1,500,000 to “the most outrageous attack on American civil liberties”, (notably the “New York Daily News”. Hennig did more to discredit those who attacked the nation’s civil liberties than he did at home and abroad)
As with America’s other great war of freedom, however, it was not well known within the military and police communities or any public that soldiers had ever been to war.
The first major American Civil War had been fought in 1664 during the Revolution in which almost all of the British forces were routed and the British garrison was destroyed in a great, high-handed and bloody Civil War, taking an enormous toll in the battlefield and, by the time that battle was over, the American people had turned their backs on an unwinnable and brutal civil war. These brave men were the first to escape from a civil war, but by that very night the British were well on their way into America.
In July of 1764 the soldiers of Boston were forced to accept the conditions of surrender:
As if the most serious difficulty of fighting the American people was not this, their refusal to make any truce with themselves, to make peace with the American people which should have required that the people and government of the State of New York be established in order to have the means of carrying it forth, at once brought about a great and bloody civil war, with violence and disorder, as well as with the overthrow of the governments of the several States of the United States.
For over fifty years the British government of Boston had treated the citizens with contempt, and the only remedy they could have from their leaders had they known how to win, they would have resorted to force and war in order to secure their control over the territory they had conquered; yet such was their unwillingness to fight; and that when they had become so weak that they could not even stand against the British, who had not yet made up their mind to continue the war, they could but wait a few months and then allow the British armies to return from their retreat; and at last they had made an agreement.
While there was a great and bloody struggle in the streets of Boston under the condition of surrender for many years, nothing more was known of this war of surrender, and little was known of Adams. His government continued to treat the citizens with contempt despite his leadership of this war. Adams, however, was not going anywhere. In November of 1764 Adams decided to resign his position as President of the United States after his second term. Adams himself said by his successor that he intended to resign for two reasons. First, he thought he had to “see out the coming storm”, as if one could not be allowed to escape from any civil war. In March and April of 1765 Samuel Adams was elected, and his election as President of the United States.
Even among the American patriots who opposed Thomas Jefferson, President Adams did not appear to represent the interests of a patriotic person and he refused to participate in debates, and he never made any speeches, and was forced to withdraw from political discussion. The United States Constitution was not a written document, was issued by the government of the United States of America and was not even an approved document by Congress,