With the advent of the two political parties, they became archrivals, even enemies, in the intense struggle for the presidency in 1800, perhaps the most vicious election in history. But they were alike in their devotion to their country.Īt first they were ardent co-revolutionaries, then fellow diplomats and close friends.
Adams had great humor Jefferson, very little. Adams embraced conflict Jefferson avoided it.
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, the British spy Edward Bancroft, Madame Lafayette and Jefferson's Paris "interest" Maria Cosway, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the scandalmonger James Callender, Sally Hemings, John Marshall, Talleyrand, and Aaron Burr all figure in this panoramic chronicle, as does, importantly, John Quincy Adams, the adored son whom Adams would live to see become President.Ĭrucial to the story, as it was to history, is the relationship between Adams and Jefferson, born opposites - one a Massachusetts farmer's son, the other a Virginia aristocrat and slaveholder, one short and stout, the other tall and spare. In particular, the more than one thousand surviving letters between John and Abigail Adams, nearly half of which have never been published, provide extraordinary access to their private lives and make it possible to know John Adams as no other major American of his founding era.Īs he has with stunning effect in his previous books, McCullough tells the story from within - from the point of view of the amazing eighteenth century and of those who, caught up in events, had no sure way of knowing how things would turn out. It is both a riveting portrait of an abundantly human man and a vivid evocation of his time, much of it drawn from an outstanding collection of Adams family letters and diaries. Like his masterly, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Truman, David McCullough's John Adams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel. In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot - "the colossus of independence," as Thomas Jefferson called him - who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution who rose to become the second President of the United States and saved the country from blundering into an unnecessary war who was learned beyond all but a few and regarded by some as "out of his senses" and whose marriage to the wise and valiant Abigail Adams is one of the moving love stories in American history. The enthralling, often surprising story of John Adams, one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.
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