Margotlog: I Fell in Love with John Adams

Margotlog: I fell in Love with John Adams.

There are some classic books that I reach for when I'm uncertain if I want to live or die, or life seems so nasty and brutish I almost can't bear being human. These fluctuate, a rock and roll of moods and and helps, meaning tips on how to live. Right now, I'm rereading John Adams by David McCullough.

Who knows why we chose certain books? I was swapping bound copies of books I'd enjoyed over the years for books on disk. This many-disk volume seemed absolutely right. McCullough won the Pulitzer Prize for this book. I love American History. My father taught American History. Not the Puritans, heaven forbid. Or the trek westward which makes me want to grind in my heels and refuse to move. No, I want a town, an ocean to look across to the "old world," and a character so lively that in this fine rendition, he pokes and snorts right off "the page."

He was small of stature, five feet something to Jefferson's six feet three or four. They would be elected as the second duo to lead the new nation, but it's the material before Adams left Braintree that charms me the most. Imagine a town called "Brainstree." A brain with many-branches, stoked by a busy pen that scratched its intelligence every chance it got. Adams kept voluminous journals, in the style of New England worthies. But he wasn't "worthy" in that sense, not a minister. He was a lawyer, and suffered small disgraces before getting it right.

His early infatuations were also rather silly. When he met Abigail and her sisters, he was not originally impressed. She did not flirt like other young ladies who'd entranced him. Yet with time, he came to count on her steady intelligence, her perserverence, and the flame she lit which kept burning in the letters where she addressed him as "My Dearest Friend." He'd been advised not to marry young, and indeed he kept her waiting for years, something of the opposite of the woeful knight, palely loitering.

It was his insistent, masterly writing, his journal-keeping in the New England style, where he cringes or chortles, strides or creeps away--this honest, salty self-assessment day after day that makes his story so appealing. Yes, once he married Abigail, once he took horse to Philadelphia for the first and second Continental Congress, once the affairs of independence consumed all his time and left little for his pen, then he became the politician and leader worthy to guide a new country through some especially perilous times. But it's Adams the individual man, not necessarily the political leader that David McCullough brings so enticingly to life. As president, it was only his quiet resistance to war-mongering against the French or the English that struck me as a kind of genius. He waited. He did not denouce or champion. He waited to see what would transpire. Eventually the French offered a treaty. Eventually, the war against Britain, the war of 1812, subsided. He lost the next election to Jefferson and retired to Braintree.

By this time, Abigail had more than come into her own. As they lived together in Philadelphia, the capital of the new nation, she became so involved in political affairs that residents bowed to her on the street. Always his advocate, she did not shirk from voicing her own opinions. I like very much what I read of her, and mourn her rather early death back in Braintree, so ill the doctors would not let her speak, She died "aware of herself up until the very end."

Her husband mourned her, but his life continued, full of long walks and rides on horseback. Of managing his farm. Of watching his son John Quicy become fit material for the presidency. It's Adams as the old man who also appeals to me. He is writing his diary again, reading, farming, riding. I imagine him facing the ocean and taking stock, day after day, as his life lengthened. He had made much of himself but in the salty, gregarious, tempered manner of a fine, lawful, intelligent man. The more I think of it, the more I believe we were very very lucky to have him as our second president.