John Adams defended the British soldiers of the Boston Massacre
Before he led a revolution, John Adams took the most unpopular case in Boston: defending British soldiers charged with murder after the Boston Massacre, and winning. He believed everyone deserved counsel. He went on to become America's second president, the first to live in the White House, and died on the Declaration's fiftieth birthday.
Adams was born on 30 October 1735 on the family farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. His father was a deacon, farmer, shoemaker and militia lieutenant; his mother, Susanna Boylston, came from a prominent medical family. As a boy he skipped school, disliked his teacher and wanted to farm, but his father insisted he stay, then found a better schoolmaster, and the boy thrived. He entered Harvard at sixteen in 1751, later reading Thucydides, Plato, Cicero and Tacitus in the original. Expected to become a minister, he taught school in Worcester after graduating in 1755, then chose law, openly hungry to become a great man.
As a lawyer and activist he championed the presumption of innocence, even when it cost him popularity. Sent to the Continental Congress from Massachusetts, he helped Thomas Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and pushed hardest for its adoption. During the war he served as a diplomat in France and the Netherlands, raised Dutch loans and helped negotiate peace with Britain.
He served two terms as George Washington's vice president from 1789, then won the presidency in 1796 as a Federalist. The French Revolutionary Wars dominated his single term. His insistence on neutrality angered the Jeffersonian Republicans and a faction of his own party led by Alexander Hamilton. He signed the contested Alien and Sedition Acts and expanded the army and navy during an undeclared naval conflict with France. In 1800, attacked from both sides, he lost to Jefferson, his own vice president.
Retiring to Massachusetts, Adams later restarted his friendship with Jefferson through letters, adding to a vast body of correspondence that includes his exchanges with his wife and adviser Abigail. He died on 4 July 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration was adopted. His son John Quincy Adams became the sixth president, and the two are the only presidents among the first twelve who never owned slaves. Most historians rank his administration favourably.
Source: John Adams
