Small as the house was, its occupancy was seldom limited to the immediate family. Besides father and mother, three sons, and a hired girl, there was nearly always an Adams or Boylston cousin, aunt, uncle, grandparent, or friend staying the night. Men from town would stop in after dark to talk town business or church matters with Deacon John.
With the short growing season, the severe winters and stony fields, the immemorial uncertainties of farming, life was not easy and survival never taken for granted. One learned early in New England about the battle of life. Father and mother were hardworking and frugal of necessity as well as by principle. “Let frugality and industry be our virtues,” John Adams advised Abigail concerning the raising of their own children. “Fire them with ambition to be useful,” he wrote, echoing what had been learned at home.
About his mother, Adams would have comparatively little to say, beyond that he loved her deeply—she was his “honored and beloved mother”—and that she was a highly principled woman of strong will, strong temper, and exceptional energy, all traits he shared though this he did not say. Of his father, however, he could hardly say enough. There were scarcely words to express the depth of his gratitude for the kindnesses his father had shown him, the admiration he felt for his father's integrity. His father was “the honestest man” John Adams ever knew. “In wisdom, piety, benevolence and charity in proportion to his education and sphere of life, I have never known his superior,” Adams would write long afterward, by which time he had come to know the most prominent men of the age on two sides of the Atlantic. His father was his idol. It was his father's honesty, his father's independent spirit and love of country, Adams said, that were his lifelong inspiration.
A good-looking, active boy, if small for his age, he was unusually sensitive to criticism but also quickly responsive to praise, as well as being extremely bright, which his father saw early, and decided he must go to Harvard to become a minister. An elder brother of Deacon John, Joseph Adams, who graduated from Harvard in 1710, had become a minister with a church in New Hampshire. Further, Deacon John himself, for as little education as he had had, wrote in a clear hand and had, as he said, “an admiration of learning.”
Taught to read at home, the boy went first and happily to a dame school—lessons for a handful of children in the kitchen of a neighbor, with heavy reliance on The New England Primer. (“He who ne'er learns his ABC, forever will a blockhead be.”) But later at the tiny local school-house, subjected to a lackluster “churl” of a teacher who paid him no attention, he lost all interest. He cared not for books or study, and saw no sense in talk of college. He wished only to be a farmer, he informed his father.
That being so, said Deacon John not unkindly, the boy could come along to the creek with him and help cut thatch. Accordingly, as Adams would tell the story, father and son set off the next morning and “with great humor” his father kept him working through the day.
At night at home, he said, “Well, John, are you satisfied with being a farmer?” Though the labor had been very hard and very muddy, I answered, “I like it very well, sir.”
“Aya, but I don't like it so well: so you will go back to school today.” I went but was not so happy as among the creek thatch.
Later, when he told his father it was his teacher he disliked, not the books, and that he wished to go to another school, his father immediately took his side and wasted no time with further talk. John was enrolled the next day in a private school down the road where, kindly treated by a schoolmaster named Joseph Marsh, he made a dramatic turn and began studying in earnest.
A small textbook edition of Cicero's Orations became one of his earliest, proudest possessions, as he affirmed with the note “John Adams Book 1749/50” written a half dozen times on the title page.
In little more than a year, at age fifteen, he was pronounced “fitted for college,” which meant Harvard, it being the only choice. Marsh, himself a Harvard graduate, agreed to accompany John to Cambridge to appear for the usual examination before the president and masters of the college. But on the appointed morning Marsh pleaded ill and told John he must go alone. The boy was thunderstruck, terrified; but picturing his father's grief and the disappointment of both father and teacher, he “collected resolution enough to proceed,” and on his father's horse rode off down the road alone, suffering “a very melancholy journey.”
Writing years later, he remembered the day as grey and somber. Threatening clouds hung over Cambridge, and for a fifteen-year-old farm boy to stand before the grand monarchs of learning in their wigs and robes, with so much riding on the outcome, was itself as severe a test as could be imagined. His tutor, however, had assured him he was ready, which turned out to be so. He was admitted to Harvard and granted a partial scholarship.
“I was as light when I came home, as I had been heavy when I went,” Adams wrote.
It had long been an article of faith among the Adamses that land was the only sound investment and, once purchased, was never to be sold. Only once is Deacon John known to have made an exception to the rule, when he sold ten acres to help send his son John to college.
• • •
THE HARVARD OF JOHN ADAMS'S undergraduate days was an institution of four red-brick buildings, a small chapel, a faculty of seven, and an enrollment of approximately one hundred scholars. His own class of 1755, numbering twenty-seven, was put under the tutorship of Joseph Mayhew, who taught Latin, and for Adams the four years were a time out of time that passed all too swiftly. When it was over and he abruptly found himself playing the part of village schoolmaster in remote Worcester, he would write woefully to a college friend, “Total and complete misery has succeeded so suddenly to total and complete happiness, that all the philosophy I can muster can scarce support me under the amazing shock.”
He worked hard and did well at Harvard, and was attracted particularly to mathematics and science, as taught by his favorite professor, John Winthrop, the most distinguished member of the faculty and the leading American astronomer of the time. Among Adams's cherished Harvard memories was of a crystal night when, from the roof of Old Harvard Hall, he gazed through Professor Winthrop's telescope at the satellites of Jupiter.
He enjoyed his classmates and made several close friends. To his surprise, he also discovered a love of study and books such as he had never imagined. “I read forever,” he would remember happily, and as years passed, in an age when educated men took particular pride in the breadth of their reading, he became one of the most voracious readers of any. Having discovered books at Harvard, he was seldom ever to be without one for the rest of his days.
He lived in the “lowermost northwest chamber” of Massachusetts Hall, sharing quarters with Thomas Sparhawk, whose chief distinction at college appears to have come from breaking windows, and Joseph Stockbridge, notable for his wealth and his refusal to eat meat.
The regimen was strict and demanding, the day starting with morning prayers in Holden Chapel at six and ending with evening prayers at five. The entire college dined at Commons, on the ground floor of Old Harvard, each scholar bringing his own knife and fork which, when the meal ended, would be wiped clean on the table cloth. By most accounts, the food was wretched. Adams not only never complained, but attributed his own and the overall good health of the others to the daily fare—beef, mutton, Indian pudding, salt fish on Saturday—and an ever abundant supply of hard cider. “I shall never forget, how refreshing and salubrious we found it, hard as it often was.” Indeed, for the rest of his life, a morning “gill” of hard cider was to be John Adams's preferred drink before breakfast.
“All scholars,” it was stated in the college rules, were to “behave themselves blamelessly, leading sober, righteous, and godly lives.” There was to be no “leaning” at prayers, no lying, blasphemy, fornication, drunkenness, or picking locks. Once, the records show, Adams was fined three shillings, nine pence for absence from college longer than the time allowed for vacation or by permission. Otherwise, he had not a mar
k against him. As the dutiful son of Deacon John, he appears neither to have succumbed to gambling, “riotous living,” nor to “wenching” in taverns on the road to Charlestown.
But the appeal of young women was exceedingly strong, for as an elderly John Adams would one day write, he was “of an amorous disposition” and from as early as ten or eleven years of age had been “very fond of the society of females.” Yet he kept himself in rein, he later insisted.
I had my favorites among the young women and spent many of my evenings in their company and this disposition although controlled for seven years after my entrance into college, returned and engaged me too much 'til I was married. I shall draw no characters nor give any enumeration of my youthful flames. It would be considered as no compliment to the dead or the living. This I will say—they were all modest and virtuous girls and always maintained that character through life. No virgin or matron ever had cause to blush at the sight of me, or to regret her acquaintance with me. No father, brother, son, or friend ever had cause of grief or resentment for any intercourse between me and any daughter, sister, mother or any other relation of the female sex. My children may be assured that no illegitimate brother or sister exists or ever existed.
A student's place in his class being determined on entrance to Harvard by the “dignity of family,” rather than alphabetically or by academic performance, Adams was listed fourteenth of the twenty-five who received degrees, his placement due to the fact that his mother was a Boylston and his father a deacon. Otherwise, he would have been among the last on the list. At commencement ceremonies, as one of the first three academically, he argued the affirmative to the question “Is civil government absolutely necessary for men?” It was to be a lifelong theme.
• • •
HOW CLOSE ADAMS CAME to becoming a minister he never exactly said, but most likely it was not close at all. His mother, though a pious woman, thought him unsuited for the life, for all that Deacon John wished it for him. Adams would recall only that in his last years at Harvard, having joined a debating and discussion club, he was told he had “some faculty” for public speaking and would make a better lawyer than preacher, a prospect, he said, that he readily understood and embraced. He knew from experience under his father's roof, when “ecclesiastical councils” gathered there, the kind of contention that could surround a preacher, whatever he might or might not say from the pulpit. “I saw such a spirit of dogmatism and bigotry in clergy and laity, that if I should be a priest I must take my side, and pronounce as positively as any of them, or never get a parish, or getting it must soon leave it.” He had no heart for such a life and his father, he felt certain, would understand, his father being “a man of so thoughtful and considerate a turn of mind,” even if the profession of law was not one generally held in high esteem.
He judged his father correctly, it seems, but to become a lawyer required that he be taken into the office of a practicing attorney who would charge a fee, which the young man himself would have to earn, and it was this necessity, with his Harvard years ended, that led to the schoolmaster's desk at Worcester late in the summer of 1755.
He made the sixty-mile journey from Braintree to Worcester by horseback in a single day and, though untried and untrained as a teacher, immediately assumed his new role in a one-room schoolhouse at the center of town. To compensate for his obvious youth, he would explain to a friend, he had to maintain a stiff, frowning attitude.
His small charges, both boys and girls numbering about a dozen, responded, he found, as he had at their age, more to encouragement and praise than to scolding or “thwacking.” A teacher ought to be an encourager, Adams decided. “But we must be cautious and sparing of our praise, lest it become too familiar.” Yet for the day-to-day routine of the classroom, he thought himself poorly suited and dreamed of more glorious pursuits, almost anything other than what he was doing. One student remembered Master Adams spending most of the day at his desk absorbed in his own thoughts or busily writing—sermons presumably. But Adams did like the children and hugely enjoyed observing them:
I sometimes, in my sprightly moments, consider myself, in my great chair at school, as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth. In this little state I can discover all the great geniuses, all the surprising actions and revolutions of the great world in miniature. I have several renowned generals but three feet high, and several deep-projecting politicians in petticoats. I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockleshells, etc., with as ardent curiosity as any virtuoso in the Royal Society... At one table sits Mr. Insipid foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig, or playing with his fingers as gaily and wittily as any Frenchified coxcomb brandishes his cane and rattles his snuff box. At another sits the polemical divine, plodding and wrangling in his mind about Adam's fall in which we sinned, all as his primer has it.
He perceived life as a stirring drama like that of the theater, but with significant differences, as he wrote to a classmate, Charles Gushing:
Upon common theaters, indeed, the applause of the audience is of more importance to the actors than their own approbation. But upon the stage of life, while conscience claps, let the world hiss! On the contrary if conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value.
He boarded with a local physician whose collection of medical books helped satisfy his insatiable appetite for reading. For a time, interest in the law seemed to fade and Adams thought of becoming a doctor. But after attending several sessions of the local court, he felt himself “irresistibly impelled” to the law. In the meantime, he was reading Milton, Virgil, Voltaire, Viscount Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History, and copying long extracts in a literary commonplace book.
From his reading and from all he heard of the common talk in town, he found himself meditating more and more about politics and history. It was the time of the French and Indian War, when Americans had begun calling themselves Americans rather than colonists. Excitement was high, animosity toward the French intense. In one of his solitary “reveries,” Adams poured out his thoughts in an amazing letter for anyone so young to have written, and for all it foresaw and said about him. Dated October 12, 1755, the letter was to another of his classmates and his cousin Nathan Webb.
“All that part of Creation that lies within our observation is liable to change,” Adams began.
Even mighty states and kingdoms are not exempted. If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways. When they have reached the summit of grandeur, some minute and unsuspected cause commonly affects their ruin, and the empire of the world is transferred to some other place. Immortal Rome was at first but an insignificant village, inhabited only by a few abandoned ruffians, but by degrees it rose to a stupendous height, and excelled in arts and arms all the nations that preceded it. But the demolition of Carthage (what one should think should have established it in supreme dominion) by removing all danger, suffered it to sink into debauchery, and made it at length an easy prey to Barbarians.
England immediately upon this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough to trace) in power and magnificence, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe.
Soon after the Reformation a few people came over into the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our people according to exactest computations, will in another century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have (I may say) all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe, will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us. Divide et impera. Keep us in distinct colonies, and then, some great men
in each colony, desiring the monarchy of the whole, they will destroy each others' influence and keep the country in equilibrio.
Be not surprised that I am turned politician. The whole town is immersed in politics.
At Harvard he had tried keeping a journal. In Worcester he began again in a paper booklet no bigger than the palm of his hand, writing in a minute, almost microscopic script, numbering the days down the left hand margin, his entries at first given to spare, matter-of-fact notations on the weather and what little passed for social events in his new life:
January 23 [1756]. Friday.
A fair and agreeable day. Kept school. Drank tea at Col. Chandler's, and spent the evening at Major Gardiner's.
January 24. Saturday.
A very high west wind. Warm and cloudy. P.M. Warm and fair.
January 25. Sunday.
A cold weather. Heard friend Thayer preach two ingenious discourses from Jeremy [Jeremiah] 10th, 6, and 7. Supped at Col. Chandler's.
Soon he was filling pages with observations like those on his small scholars and on the arrival of spring, with frequently sensuous responses to nature—to “soft vernal showers,” atmosphere full of “ravishing fragrance,” air “soft and yielding.”
Increasingly, however, the subject uppermost in mind was himself, as waves of loneliness, feelings of abject discontent over his circumstances, dissatisfaction with his own nature, seemed at times nearly to overwhelm him. Something of the spirit of the old Puritan diarists took hold. By writing only to himself, for himself, by dutifully reckoning day by day his moral assets and liabilities, and particularly the liabilities, he could thus improve himself.
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