John Adams life timeline

æt. — short for aetatis suae, "of his age." It's what a portraitist of the period would letter into the corner of the canvas.

1. 1735æt. 0
   Braintree, Massachusetts

   Born to a shoemaker deacon

   October 30, in a saltbox farmhouse in the north precinct of Braintree, a farming village ten miles south of Boston. His father farms, makes shoes, serves as a town selectman, and is a deacon of the church — four generations of middling New England farmers, none of whom held office past the town line. The house is still standing.

2. 1751æt. 15
   Cambridge

   Enters Harvard at fifteen

   His father, set on producing a minister, sells a parcel of the family land to cover the fees. Adams is the first of them to go, and spends four years there working out that he would rather argue than preach.

3. 1755æt. 19
   Worcester

   Schoolmaster, reluctantly

   He leaves Harvard with a degree, no money, and the standard job for a graduate in that position: master of a one-room school in Worcester, forty miles inland. He finds the work stupefying, rules out the ministry for good, and reads law at night in the house of James Putnam, the town's lawyer, who takes him on as an apprentice.

4. 1758æt. 23
   Braintree & Boston

   Admitted to the bar

   Sworn in as an attorney at twenty-three, he sets up practice in Braintree and joins the circuit — the traveling courts that carried lawyers and judges from county to county through the year. Sixteen years of muddy roads, land disputes, and debt collection follow, and he builds one of the busiest practices in the colony. He records nearly all of it in a diary, along with detailed notes on his own vanity.

5. 1764æt. 28
   Weymouth

   Marries Abigail Smith

   Abigail Smith of Weymouth is a parson's daughter, nine years younger, with no formal schooling — girls were given none — and a sharper political ear than most of the men he will work alongside. The marriage runs fifty-four years and produces five children, one of them a future president. Because Adams is so often somewhere else, more than 1,100 letters between them survive.

6. 1765æt. 29
   Braintree

   The Stamp Act makes him a public man

   Parliament lays the first direct tax on the colonies: a stamp required on newspapers, licenses, and legal documents, which falls hardest on printers and lawyers. Adams answers with A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law and with the Braintree Instructions, a set of orders from his town to its representative declaring the tax invalid. Some forty Massachusetts towns adopt his text as their own, and a country lawyer becomes a public man.

7. 1770æt. 35
   Boston

   Defends the soldiers of the Boston Massacre

   In March, British troops quartered in Boston fire into a jeering crowd and kill five men. No other lawyer in town will take the defense, so Adams does, at real cost to his practice in a place that wants a hanging. At trial that autumn, six of the eight soldiers are acquitted and two convicted of manslaughter. Boston elects him to the Massachusetts legislature that June, months before the verdicts, and thirty years later he still called the defense:

   One of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.

8. 1774æt. 38
   Philadelphia

   First Continental Congress

   Twelve colonies send delegates to Philadelphia to answer Parliament's punishment of Boston — the port closed, the Massachusetts charter suspended, troops in the streets. Adams travels three weeks by carriage as one of four Massachusetts delegates, all of them suspected by the rest of wanting a war. He spends much of the session listening rather than talking, which does not come naturally.

9. 1775æt. 39
   Philadelphia

   Nominates Washington

   The shooting has started at Lexington and Concord, and a New England militia army is camped around occupied Boston with no country behind it. In June, Adams rises in the Second Continental Congress and moves that the army be adopted as a continental one under George Washington — a Virginian, and a delegate sitting in the room. The motion ties the southern colonies to a northern war, and hands away a command a Massachusetts man might have had.

10. 1776æt. 40
    Philadelphia

    Independence

    He publishes Thoughts on Government, a pamphlet on how the colonies should govern themselves once they are states, and is named to the committee of five appointed to draft a declaration of independence. He gives the writing to Thomas Jefferson — thirty-three, and a Virginian whose name will carry further in the south than his own — then spends July 1 and 2 arguing the resolution through the floor of Congress. Half a century later Jefferson remembered him as "the pillar of its support on the floor of Congress, its ablest advocate and defender."

11. 1778æt. 42
    At sea, then Paris

    Sails for France with a ten-year-old

    Congress appoints him a commissioner to France, and in February he sails with his ten-year-old son John Quincy aboard the frigate Boston: six weeks of winter gales, a lightning strike that kills a man on deck, and a running fight with a British ship. He lands to learn that Benjamin Franklin has already concluded the French alliance that was to be his errand, and that his commission is, in practice, redundant.

12. 1779æt. 43
    Braintree

    Writes a constitution in a few months at home

    Home for a single autumn between missions, he is elected to the state convention, which hands him the drafting and largely leaves him to it. What he writes — two legislative chambers, an independent executive with a veto, a separate judiciary — took effect in 1780 and is still in force: the oldest functioning written constitution in the world, and the document the framers of the federal one had in front of them seven years later.

13. 1780æt. 44
    Amsterdam

    Two years working the Dutch bankers

    With the war going badly and Congress out of money, Adams goes to the Dutch Republic to find some — without instructions and without the language. Two years of lobbying merchants, bankers, and regents follow. In April 1782 the Dutch recognize the United States, the second country to do so, and lend it five million guilders. He rated it the greatest triumph of his career, and nobody since has agreed with him.

14. 1783æt. 47
    Paris

    Treaty of Paris

    Adams, Franklin, and John Jay negotiate the peace that ends the Revolutionary War, dealing with the British directly and cutting out the French, against explicit instructions from Congress to do nothing without them. Signed September 3, the treaty recognizes American independence and hands the new country everything east of the Mississippi.

15. 1785æt. 49
    London

    Presented to the king he rebelled against

    Two years after the peace, Adams is posted to London as the first minister the United States has ever sent to the country it just broke away from. He bows three times to George III, who receives him better than anyone expected. Three years follow of being politely ignored by a government with no intention of settling the war debts, evacuating its forts on the American frontier, or signing a trade treaty.

    I was the last to consent to the separation; but the separation having been made… I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.George III, to Adams

16. 1787æt. 51
    London

    Three volumes on balanced government

    From London, he publishes A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States: three volumes arguing for two legislative chambers, a strong independent executive, and the premise that any single body of men will eventually help itself at everyone else's expense. The Constitutional Convention is sitting in Philadelphia in those same months, without him — the first volume reaches the delegates while they work.

17. 1789æt. 53
    New York

    First vice president

    Under the new Constitution the runner-up in the presidential vote becomes vice president: Washington is elected unanimously and Adams finishes second. The office comes with a gavel and nothing else. Across eight years he presides over the Senate and casts twenty-nine tie-breaking votes — still one of the highest totals anyone has run up in the job — while burning his standing with the senators by arguing that the president should be addressed with a grand title.

    My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.To Abigail, 1793

18. 1796æt. 61
    Philadelphia

    Elected president, 71–68

    Washington declines a third term and Adams beats Thomas Jefferson by three electoral votes, in the first contested presidential election the country has held. The rules still give the second chair to the runner-up, so his opponent becomes his vice president. He also keeps Washington's cabinet, most of which reports quietly to Alexander Hamilton.

19. 1798æt. 62
    Philadelphia

    The XYZ affair and an undeclared war

    France, at war with Britain, has been seizing American merchant ships. Adams sends three envoys to Paris, where French agents — named in the published dispatches only as X, Y, and Z — demand a bribe before talks can begin. The country reads them and howls for war. Adams gives it a limited one instead: the Quasi-War, fought at sea and never declared, plus a Navy Department to fight it with.

20. 1798æt. 62
    Philadelphia

    Signs the Alien and Sedition Acts

    With the country on a war footing, the Federalist Congress passes four laws that stretch the wait for citizenship from five years to fourteen, let the president deport foreigners at will, and make it a crime to publish "false, scandalous and malicious" writing against the government. Adams signs them. Some two dozen men, most of them opposition newspaper editors, are arrested for insulting him, and several go to prison. It is the part of his presidency that never washes out.

21. 1800æt. 64
    Philadelphia

    Makes peace with France, and loses his party

    Against half his cabinet and most of his own Federalist party, who want a full war and a standing army to fight it, Adams sends a second commission to Paris. It works: the Convention of Mortefontaine ends the naval war and releases the United States from its 1778 alliance with France. It also splits the Federalists in an election year and costs him a second term. He knew what it had cost, and wanted the receipt on his headstone.

    Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800.

22. 1800æt. 65
    Washington

    First to live in the President's House

    The capital moves from Philadelphia to the new city of Washington, and on November 1 Adams becomes the first occupant of the President's House — the building later called the White House — unfinished, unplastered, and standing in a muddy clearing, with Abigail hanging the laundry in the East Room. On his second night he writes her a line that Franklin Roosevelt later had carved into the State Dining Room mantel:

    May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.

23. 1801æt. 65
    Washington

    Appoints John Marshall, then leaves before dawn

    Jefferson, his own vice president, beats him in the election of 1800, making Adams the first president turned out of office by the voters. In his last weeks he signs a new judiciary act, fills the courts with Federalist judges, and gives John Marshall the chief justiceship — a few minutes' work that shapes the Supreme Court for the next thirty-four years and outlasts everything else he did in office. On inauguration day he takes the four o'clock stage out of the city rather than watch.

24. 1801æt. 65
    Quincy

    Home to the farm at Peacefield

    At sixty-five he retires to Peacefield, the farmhouse and orchard he had bought while he was minister in London — in the north precinct of Braintree, which had been set off in 1792 as a town of its own and named Quincy. He is back on the ground he was born on, under a new name. His son Charles had drunk himself to death that winter at thirty. Adams farms, reads, argues with visitors, and begins an autobiography he never finishes.

25. 1812æt. 76
    Quincy

    Writes to Jefferson again

    The two had not written to each other since 1801, when the election and the midnight judges finished off a friendship of twenty-five years. Their mutual friend Benjamin Rush spends years working both ends of the quarrel, and on New Year's Day the seventy-six-year-old Adams sends a short note to Jefferson at Monticello. What follows runs to 158 letters over fourteen years — on religion, aristocracy, grief, and what had actually happened — the two of them arguing the revolution into the historical record.

26. 1818æt. 82
    Quincy

    Abigail dies

    Typhoid fever takes Abigail on October 28, at seventy-three, after fifty-four years of marriage — a decade of which had been conducted by mail across an ocean while he was posted in Europe. He lives another eight years without her.

    The dear partner of my life for fifty four years and for many years more as a lover.To Jefferson, December 1818

27. 1820æt. 85
    Boston

    Back in convention at eighty-five

    Massachusetts calls a convention to revise the constitution Adams wrote in 1779, and Quincy elects its eighty-five-year-old author as a delegate. He is received as a monument and treated as one. He argues for striking the religious tests out of his own document — it still bars anyone but a Christian from office — and the change is voted down.

28. 1825æt. 89
    Quincy

    His son is sworn in as president

    John Quincy Adams — the ten-year-old from the winter crossing to France, since then a senator, a minister in four European capitals, and secretary of state — takes the oath as the sixth president, after an election so close it was decided in the House of Representatives. His father, eighty-nine and too frail to travel, follows it from Quincy. No other father and son would hold the office for another 176 years.

29. 1826æt. 90
    Quincy

    The Fourth of July, fifty years on

    He dies in his bed at Peacefield in the late afternoon, aged ninety, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and in the middle of the town's celebrations of it. Jefferson had died at Monticello a few hours earlier, which nobody in Quincy yet knew. Adams's last words are reported as:

    Thomas Jefferson survives.