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John Adams
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John Adams was the first President to occupy the White House and the first to be defeated for reelection and turn over his office to a member of an opposition party. Adams was one of the most experienced men ever to become President. As a young man, he taught school in Worcester, Massachusetts, and studied law, becoming a lawyer in Boston in 1758. He played a major role in the struggle for independence. On the principle that there should be “no taxation without representation,†Adams led the opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765, which required the purchase of a stamp (effectively a tax) for all public documents. He showed his fierce independence... when he defended several British soldiers accused of killing four people in the Boston Massacre in 1770; most were acquitted.
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John Adams was the second president (1797-1801) of the United States. Adams was born on the 30th of October, 1735 in what is now the town of Quincy, Massachusetts. His father, a farmer... named John, was of the fourth generation in descent from Henry Adams, who emigrated from Devonshire, England, to Massachusetts about 1636; his mother was Susanna Boylston Adams. Young Adams graduated from Harvard College in 1755, and for a time taught school at Worcester and studied law in the office of Rufus Putnam. In 1758 he was admitted to the bar. From an early age he developed the habit of writing descriptions of events and impressions of men.
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Like his masterly, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Truman, David McCullough's John Adams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel. 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. 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.
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John Adams had a great childhood. Since his father was run over by a train, he got his $15,000 life insurance policy (which wasn't that much even back then). He invested all of this money into his childhood endeavor, McDonalds.
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![[photo Adams]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/j/o/h/john-adams/i/003.gif)
John Adams, who represented the United States in France 1778-1779, returned to Paris in 1780 as a Peace Commissioner charged by the Continental Congress with negotiating a peace treaty with Great Britain. Unable to get the British to begin peace negotiations, in January 1781 Adams moved to Holland as Minister to the Netherlands. Ironically, Britain declared war on Holland in December 1780 on the pretext that the Dutch were contemplating a treaty with the rebellious Americans. Adams hoped to use British belligerence and the republican traditions of the United Provinces for the patriot cause, but he soon found that Dutch commercial interests outweighed support for American independence. The Dutch carried on a profitable contraband trade with the 13 States from their holdings in the West Indies. An alliance with America would imperil that trade, since British sea power could easily disrupt it. Furthermore, Willem V, the Stadholder of the United Province, was an Anglophile and close relative of George III.
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John Adams followed George Washington as president of the United States, becoming the country's second chief executive. An early colonist agitator against the Stamp Act of 1765, John Adams helped draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He served as an all-purpose diplomat for the new republic during the Revolutionary War, and after the war, in 1785, he became the first American Minister to London. He served two terms as vice-president under Washington (1789-97), and beat Thomas Jefferson in 1796 to become president himself. He was respected but not popular, and served one term before losing to Jefferson in the elections of 1800. His son, John Quincy Adams, was president from 1825-29.
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John Adams