Profiles in Character #12: John Adams Puts His Career on the Line

On March 5, 1770, eight British soldiers of the large force stationed in Boston fired into a crowd of hundreds of angry colonists, killing five.  Paul Revere published a cartoon, “The Bloody Massacre,” which in time would lead the event to be called the Boston Massacre, a turning point on the path to the American Revolution. 

Seeking to contain the situation, Acting Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson promised a full inquiry.  The eight soldiers and their leader, Capt. Thomas Preston, were tried for murder.  Several local attorneys refused to defend them, but 34-year-old lawyer John Adams agreed.  Known already as a patriot and having just lost his 13-month old daughter in February, Adams could have declined but did not, hazarding, as he would later say “a Popularity very general and very hardly earned.”

Preston was tried first and acquitted when Adams convinced the jury that he did not order his men to fire into the crowd.  In a separate, later trial, six of the eight soldiers were found not guilty and two we convicted of manslaughter, a lesser charge.  Adams’s defense was that the clubs, stones, oyster shells and snowballs hurled at them made them fear for their lives, giving them the right to act in self-defense.  Astutely, Adams did not defend the occupation of Boston by royal troops or condemn the actions of the mob. 

That Adams prevailed in both trials in the midst of an enraged citizenry and managed to get the verdicts accepted by most of Boston was a tribute not just to his skills but to his belief in the dignity of the individual and the rule of law.  “We are to look at it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer,” he said to the jury in the soldiers’ trial.  He also reminded them that “[F]acts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Though a very new politician (elected to the Massachusetts legislature in June, just a few months before the trials began), Adams was already a strategic thinker.  If the colonists were to be given their full rights as Englishmen, they had to comport themselves as worthy of the canons of English law.  If American independence, should it come, were to be earned, valued and respected, reason not passion had to be seen to guide its affairs. 

At the same time, Adams was always conscious of his character.  He sought not just fame but to be honorable in the eyes of others.  Though he would be unpopular in Boston for some months after the trials, that was an outcome he was willing to accept.  Writing in his diary on the third anniversary of the tumultuous affair, he said:

“The Part I took in Defence of Cptn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough.  It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.  Judgment of Death against these Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently.”

Adams would become a central figure in the American Revolution and an intellectual leader in constructing the rule of law in American constitutions.  His demeanor could be stern.  He was impatient and off-putting to many in his push for American independence.  His wit was acerbic, as in his 1806 letter to Benjamin Rush in which he said of Alexander Hamilton that: “I lose all patience when I think of a bastard brat of a Scotch peddler."  

Adams always believed he lived in the shadow of Washington and Jefferson. Yet when he had to choose between furthering his career or the needs of his country, country came first.  As Washington’s successor as president in 1796, he would face Thomas Jefferson and the latter’s growing opposition political movement in the election of 1800.  Needing his Federalist base and its intellectual leader, Alexander Hamilton, Adams could ill-afford to alienate them.  The Federalists, furious at the French for seizing American ships in its war with England, wanted war.  Adams could have played to that anger but instead dispatched a secret mission to Napoleon to avert conflict.  When the negotiations succeeded, Hamilton turned on Adams, his Federalist base became divided and Jefferson defeated him.

Adams, after becoming the first president to ascend to office after a peaceful transition of power thus became the first to leave it peacefully after losing to a different political party.   His defeat was painful but he endured it with his character and love of country intact.  Perhaps, however, he recalled what he wrote to his wife, Abigail, from Philadelphia in April 1777, at the height of the American Revolution: “Posterity, you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.”

Photo Credit: Gilbert Stuart painting, wikimedia.com