Об этой статье мне рассказал мой товарищ, который прошел http://kursyobucheniya.ru/ и повысил свою квалификацию. Теперь у него больше зарплата, более высокий статус, его повысили и наградили. Which act best represents John Adams? Early in 1761 the young Massachusetts lawyer arrived at the court chamber of Boston’s Town House and sat beneath full-length portraits of British kings Charles II and James II. He listened as James Otis, an older lawyer with a brilliant reputation, boldly argued that to use writs of assistance or general search warrants, as the Crown desired, would violate the British constitution. Adams wrote
furiously in his diary, engrossed by Otis’s words, excited by what Otis said. According to biographer Page Smith, "Adams was stirred in his deepest being. . . . It is only given a man to be once so moved, so transported as John Adams was. . . . these are the moments in which truth seems to have descended from heaven in the inspired word.” Nearly four decades later, having lost reelection to Thomas Jefferson, Adams prepared to leave the presidency. Legend has it that as he sat amid trunks and packing crates in the sparsely furnished building later called the White House, he feverishly signed appointments of conservative judges to office in a lastminute act intended to thwart Jefferson’s libertarian principles. Who, then, was the real Adams—the inspired crusader for liberty, or the vengeful reactionary seeking to contain it? k John Adams was born on October 19, 1735, to John and Susanna Boylston Adams at Braintree, Massachusetts, near Boston. He grew up on his family’s farm, more attracted to agriculture and boyhood idylls than to school. "I spent my time . . . in making and sailing boats and Ships upon the Ponds and Brooks,” he wrote much later in his autobiography, "in making and flying Kites, in driving hoops, playing marbles, playing Quoits, Wrestling, Swimming, Skating, and above all in shooting, to which Diversion I was addicted to a degree of Ardor which I know not that I ever felt for any other Business, Study, or Amusement.” Still, no farm could satisfy his brilliant, penetrating mind, and in 1751, at age 16, he enrolled at Harvard. Since his uncle, Joseph Adams, had graduated from there and had gone on to become a schoolmaster and clergyman, many in the Adams family expected young John would do the same. At first events appeared to be unfolding that way when, on receiving his degree in 1755, he found employment as a schoolmaster in Worcester, west of Boston. At this time Adams began keeping a diary, and for nearly 30 years he recorded observations historians still turn to in assessing early America. He used his diary as a magnifying glass, frequently turning it on himself to closely investigate his own character and what motivated him. In this he followed the example of his Puritan ancestors, who had made introspection fundamental to their lives. His diary entries reveal all the traditional Puritan concern—some might call it preoccupation— with ambition and worldly gains and how they corrupt the human spirit. His writings also reveal his feelings of guilt over failing to work hard enough. In one of his early entries, he lamented: "I am constantly forming, but never executing good resolutions.” Yet Adams assiduously pursued selfimprovement. In the early morning and again late at night he read ancient and some modern works, and during the school day he let his students teach one another while he sat at his desk and wrote. He had no desire to spend his entire life in the classroom—he referred to his students as ignorant "little runtlings”—but lacked clear plans for the future. He considered the ministry, but after he became friends with James Putnam, a local lawyer, he began studying law. He did so with considerable dread, for many colonists distrusted all lawyers. "In this situation I remained for about two Years,” Adams later wrote, "Reading Law in the night and keeping School in the day.” In 1758 he completed his training under Putnam and returned to his beloved Braintree to open his own practice. Without a reputation and dwarfed by the legal lights in Boston, Adams struggled to make a living. As he yearned to be a successful lawyer, he met with Jeremiah Gridley, the most prominent member of the Boston bar, who befriended him and gave him full use of his extensive library. At the same time he studied the political leaders in Braintree and how they worked with the townspeople in order to maintain power. From an early date, Adams believed politics was "psychology writ large, a heaving collection of irrational
urges that moved across the social landscape.” Ambitious, he mused, "How shall I spread an opinion of myself as a lawyer of distinguished genius, learning and virtue?” He soon found that the events leading to the American Revolution provided him a grand stage on which to display his qualities. Eager to learn from outstanding lawyers around him and caught up in an intensifying controversy between Massachusetts and Britain, in 1761 Adams—with paper, pen, and ink pot in hand— attended the court hearing in which James Otis argued against the writs of assistance. For years the colonists had been subject to import duties and to restrictions on which ports they could trade with, but these laws had been enforced only erratically. Now the Crown wanted to hold the colonists to them and began using the writs to search ships for any violations. Jeremiah Gridley argued for the Crown with logic so tight that Adams thought it impregnable. Gridley insisted the writs rested on several centuries of statutory law. Then Otis arose. He, too, reached back into the centuries, but in his case it was to the fight of English people against arbitrary rule. He said that a law-abiding orderly person "is as secure in his house as a prince in his castle” and that any Parliamentary act that conflicted with the British constitution or "natural equity” must be voided by the courts. Adams marveled at Otis’s argument, both the reasoning he used and the forceful way in which he presented it. Adams believed Americans would never sacrifice their English liberties, "at least without an entire devastation of the country and a general destruction of their lives.” Despite his rational exterior, John Adams harbored deep emotional feelings toward women. He fell in and out of love several times before marrying Abigail Smith in 1764. She was well-read and articulate and seldom hesitated to voice her political views. Over the years they had five children. Much as Adams sought throughout his life to purge himself of impure motives, he sought to purge America of Britain’s impurities, its trampling of liberty. In 1765, when Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a tax on printed items, Adams protested. He gained attention throughout Massachusetts—his genius, learning, and virtue at last recognized—when he wrote the instructions used to guide the Braintree delegates to the colonial assembly. In his instructions he said the Stamp Act violated the colonists’ rights and liberties because it was a tax imposed without representation. "With the submission to Divine Providence . . . ,” he wrote, "we never can be slaves.” The General Court followed Adams’s argument and declared that no taxes could be imposed on the colonists except "by their respective legislatures.” Colonial protests, including a boycott of trade with England, forced Parliament to rescind the Stamp Act. In his diary Adams told of stamp tax collectors from New England to Georgia being forced to resign their offices and of colonists "more determined to defend” their liberties than ever before. He moved closer in thought to his cousin Samuel Adams, an increasingly radical dissident who, John Adams said, exhibited "refined policy, steadfast integrity, exquisite humanity, genteel erudition . . . [and] engaging manners.” The young lawyer socialized more and more with the emerging patriot leaders. "The year 1765 has been the most remarkable year of my life . . . ,” he said. Although repeal of the Stamp Act heartened Adams, he sensed more trouble brewing, and it came in 1767 when Parliament passed the Townshend Acts and levied taxes on goods imported into the colonies. The taxes angered Adams, and early in 1768 he moved to Boston to be at the center of protest and in a place more congenial to building his law practice. "Am I grasping at money or scheming for power?” he worried in words that could be just as easily applied to Britain or the colonies in the deepening political crisis. Adams stunned his fellow Patriots in 1770 when he decided to defend Captain Thomas
Preston and six British soldiers indicted for
murder in the Boston Massacre. He realized this would be a historic case with great legal and political impact for years to come and that it would resound in law books—as would his name. He realized, too, the case would make him widely, if only temporarily, unpopular. According to Peter Shaw in The Character of John Adams, such behavior was a theme in the Patriot’s life: "He courted not popularity but unpopularity as a mark of distinction.” The redcoats, so the charge went, had fired unprovoked into a crowd of Bostonians, killing and injuring several of them. In a brilliant defense, Adams proved that the colonial crowd—really a mob—had threatened the soldiers, causing them to fire in panic. In two separate trials, juries acquitted Preston and his men of murder, while finding two of the soldiers guilty of manslaughter. The Patriot press subsequently vilified Adams, and he temporarily retreated from politics. Yet revolutionary events combined with his ambition and principles to soon make him return to the fight. In late 1773 a flyer appeared in Boston declaring: "Friends! Brethren! Countrymen! That worst of plagues, the detested TEA . . . is now arrived in this harbor.” The Dartmouth had come into port bearing 114 chests of tea and enough political baggage to shake two continents. Parliament had recently passed the Tea Act, which allowed the financially troubled British East India Company to sell the product in the colonies without going through local middlemen. That arrangement made the company’s tea cheap and attractive to consumers. If the colonists bought it, however, they would be paying the tax, a holdover from the Townshend Acts. (Unknown to most of them, importers had been paying it for years.) Many colonists saw the Tea Act as a sly way to get them to admit Parliament’s right to tax them. Consequently, they determined to stop the Dartmouth from unloading its chests. At a rally called by the radical Sons of Liberty and held at Faneuil Hall, Samuel Adams addressed a crowd of 7,000. When he declared, "This meeting can do nothing more to save the country,” a war whoop went up from several colonists disguised as Indians, who then boarded the Dartmouth and for three hours dumped its cargo of tea into Boston harbor. John Adams heard about the Boston Tea Party on his return from a trip and in his diary noted: "This destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I can’t but consider it as an epoch in history!” Property had been destroyed, which to Englishmen was an attack on the very foundation of civilized society. Parliament therefore reacted with a vengeance. "The town of Boston ought to be knocked down about their ears . . .,” said one member before Parliament passed the Coercive Acts—called the Intolerable Acts by the colonists—which closed the port of Boston and restricted the colony’s town meetings. The acts combined with another colonial protest led by John Adams over a declaration of Parliament that required judges’ salaries be paid by the Crown rather than the colonial assembly. This measure was intended to lessen colonial influence over the judiciary. Adams convinced the colonial assembly to impeach Chief Justice Peter Oliver for taking such pay. When the Governor’s Council refused to hear the impeachment, colonists across Massachusetts refused to serve as jurors, thereby paralyzing the Superior Court. In 1774 Adams served as a delegate from Massachusetts to the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia, where he worked to get the Suffolk County Resolves adopted. This was a call for complete defiance of the Intolerable Acts, including taking up arms, a move favored by radicals who outvoted the conservatives. Adams frequently socialized with delegates from the other colonies with the goal, as he put it, "to get acquainted with the tempers, views, characters, and designs of persons.” A few months later, he wrote his Novanglus essays, in which he argued that Parliament had no authority over the colonies. In John Adams, Page Smith states,
"Novanglus was the most learned and laborious statement of the strictly constitutional grounds for colonial resistance.” When the colonies met as the Second Continental Congress in 1775, after the first shots had been fired between colonial militias and British troops at Lexington and Concord, Adams again cut a wide swath. He served on numerous congressional committees, sometimes working from 7:00 in the morning to 11:00 at night. He tirelessly promoted the radical drive for a complete break with Britain, and he nominated George Washington to command the emerging colonial army. Adams was sensitive to criticism and was embarrassed when the British intercepted and made public a letter he had written in which he called Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson a "piddling genius.” Nevertheless, most in Congress respected him. In 1776 he served on the committee that put together the Declaration of Independence. Although the document was largely written by Thomas Jefferson, Adams claimed he participated extensively in committee discussions that preceded Jefferson’s work and that he was the one who asked Jefferson to do the writing. Adams later drafted the Plan of Treaties, from which evolved a treaty with France. He was also the unanimous choice to head the Board of War and Ordnance and did so for over a year, equipping the army and establishing civilian control over it. With independence declared in July 1776, Adams served as a diplomat to France, making two trips there, one in 1778 and the other in 1780. In 1782 he negotiated a much-needed loan at The Hague, and the following year, along with Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, he signed the Treaty of Paris, in which Britain recognized the United States as an independent nation. He was appointed by Congress as the first American minister to London and began serving there in 1785, but the British government rejected his efforts to establish closer relations. Soon after John Adams returned home, the Constitution was ratified, and in 1789 the electoral college chose him to serve as the country’s first vice president. The electors did so after George Washington made it clear he preferred Adams for the job. Washington believed that Adams would strongly defend the Constitution and protect it against crippling amendments as advocated by some of its critics. Nevertheless, the vice presidency proved not to Adams’s liking. To his wife Abigail he wrote: "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” As Senate president, however, he broke 20 tie votes, all in support of President Washington’s policies, and he accepted a second term in 1792 because he expected it would lead to the presidency. When Washington retired, his expectation came true. Yet Adams, who was aligned with the Federalist Party, won the presidency in 1796 by just three electoral votes over Thomas Jefferson, who was aligned with the Republican Party. That narrow victory rankled him, as did the enmity of a fellow Federalist, the powerful former treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, who had plotted to have South Carolinian Thomas Pinckney elected president. John Adams entered the presidency under difficult circumstances. As Thomas Jefferson, the new vice president, said to a friend: "[George Washington] is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag. Yet, as his departure will mark the moment when the difficulties begin to work, you will see that they will be ascribed to the new administration. . . .” Many of the difficulties came from the continuing revolution in France and war between that country and Britain, which threatened to envelop the United States and incite Americans to take up arms against one another. Although Adams represented the Federalist Party, he often acted independently of it. Consequently, when he began his term he hoped to bridge the gap between himself and Jefferson by turning to the vice president for help in shaping policy. Like most Republicans, Jefferson strongly supported France, and because he feared Adams might take a strong pro-British stand and link him to it, he
rejected the president’s overtures. Relations between Adams and Jefferson soon worsened. In May 1797, after France stated it considered the United States too closely aligned with Britain and would refuse to recognize American ships as neutral, Adams called for Congress to form a provisional army to prepare for war. Jefferson criticized the president’s message, and in reaction Adams privately said the Virginian showed evidence of "a mind, soured, yet seeking for popularity, and eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed and ignorant.” Just weeks after the president’s call for preparedness, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering reported that French cruisers had attacked 316 American ships over the previous year. Adams wanted to avoid war with France while getting that nation to respect American neutrality, a difficult chore given that the United States lacked a powerful military. At the same time, he rejected any alliance with Britain; foreign entanglements, he believed, would only involve his countrymen in distant wars, in this case one that would likely tear the nation into two armed camps, one pro-French and the other pro-British. In the fall of 1797, President Adams sent John Marshall, Charles Pinckney, and Elbridge Gerry on a peace mission to Paris. A few months later he announced the mission had failed. The news stunned Republicans, who asserted that pro-British Federalists had undermined the delegates. They demanded that all the relevant diplomatic correspondence be made public. Adams happily obliged, for he knew what had really happened in Paris. The French government had refused to meet with the Americans until they acquiesced to three demands: an apology from President Adams for his "disparagement” of France in his recent address to Congress, a payment to the ruling French Directory, and a loan from the U.S. government. Now the Republicans were stunned as the demands, interpreted as an insult to American sovereignty and morality, produced a frenzied reaction against France. At rallies crowds shouted "Adams and Liberty!” In July 1798 Congress authorized the capture of French armed ships and declared previous treaties with France to be void. An undeclared naval war erupted, and the tiny U.S. Navy, aided by privateers, captured more than 80 ships flying the French flag. In responding to an address from a group in South Carolina, Adams declared: "I know of no government ancient or modern that ever betrayed so universal and decided a contempt of the people of all nations, as the present rulers of France.” At the same time Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Act, aimed at French immigrants, authorized the president to arrest and deport aliens involved in "treasonable” activities. The more controversial Sedition Act set heavy fines and even imprisonment for writing, speaking, or publishing anything "false, scandalous and malicious” against the government. The Alien Act was never used, but the Sedition Act was—in each instance to prosecute Republicans. Adams never asked for these laws (which were allowed to expire in 1800), but he signed them, and many historians have criticized the Federalist president and Congress for essentially trampling free speech. Yet Adams acted in an explosive time when several thousand French agents were operating within the United States and newspapers were exciting the citizenry with charges about supposedly treasonous activities. The turmoil over France produced a headache for Adams in the form of the provisional army. Although he preferred to strengthen the navy, Congress established a bigger army than he wanted. In addition, the Hamiltonian Federalists offended him when, after former President Washington was made the army’s commander, they maneuvered Alexander Hamilton into the position of second-in-command. Nothing riled Adams more than to have his archenemy in that position. The president feared that Hamilton and his faction among the Federalists would use the army against domestic enemies and begin rounding up Republicans. There was some
truth in this as a few Federalists advocated such an attack, and with Republicans in Virginia gathering arms to defend themselves, the country moved perilously close to civil war. In February 1799 Adams stunned the Hamiltonians, and the nation as a whole, when in response to French overtures he announced a new peace mission. The Hamiltonians exploded. They accused the president of giving in to France, and they accused him of ruining the Federalist Party by defusing the excitement against France that had damaged the Republicans. Adams sent the peace mission for several reasons. First, he wanted to weaken Hamilton. Second, he realized that militarism was becoming unpopular; by 1799 the public was tiring of the political fervor, was more critical of the Sedition Act, and had become increasingly resentful at having to pay taxes levied to support the army. Third, his attachment to peace with honor remained unchanged. Finally, he realized that with a successful peace mission he could win popular support and reelection. In The Presidency of John Adams, Stephen Kurtz writes that the president "was a patriot, but he was also a far more astute politician than most historians have given him credit for being. When he saw an opportunity to benefit the nation and the political fortunes of John Adams he quite naturally seized on it.” While Adams absented himself at his home near Boston, Hamiltonians within his cabinet worked to keep the peace commission from departing. Although told about the underhanded maneuver, Adams at first did nothing, perhaps because continuing political turmoil in France caused him to doubt the French government would engage in any talks. But in the spring of 1799 he acted. After a tense meeting with Hamilton at Trenton, New Jersey, at which the former treasury secretary tried to persuade the president to cancel the peace mission (Adams later said Hamilton acted like a fool), he ordered the three emissaries to leave for Paris. John Adams correctly read public opinion, and the peace mission boosted his popularity. But as he sought reelection in 1800, the Federalist Party split when Hamilton and his faction supported Charles C. Pinckney for president. Thomas Jefferson sought the presidency as a Republican. As the election neared, Hamilton wrote a pamphlet, published by some friends, that detailed Adams’s character flaws and called him "unfit for the highest office of Chief Magistrate.” Hamilton observed: "It is a fact that he is often liable to paroxysms of anger, which deprive him of self command, and produce very outrageous behavior to those who approach him.” In the spring of 1800, John Adams found his impending defeat unbearable. After all, he had stood up to the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian extremists, had prepared the nation militarily while tempering the militarists, and had begun peace talks with France—all this, yet he faced little chance of an election victory. In October the Treaty of Morfontaine ended the French crisis, adding to his accomplishments. On November 1 Adams became the first chief executive to occupy the new presidential residence that by 1809 was being called the White House for its white-grey sandstone exterior, which contrasted with the brick buildings nearby. Adams nearly won reelection; a few hundred votes in New York switched his way would have made the difference. Shortly after he was defeated, however, he appointed fellow Federalist John Marshall as Chief Justice of the United States. This appointment rankled Republicans, but the story that John Adams spent his last hours as president appointing Federalists to the courts to get back at Jefferson holds no truth. Actually, most observers at the time expressed surprise at his magnanimity toward Jefferson and his praise for the Virginian’s talents. Embittered by defeat, Adams refused to attend Jefferson’s inauguration, but the person he hated and never forgave was Hamilton. Adams spent his remaining years at his home in Quincy (formerly Braintree), Massachusetts, tending to his farm and writing. On the first day
of 1812 he sent a friendly letter to Thomas Jefferson, by then also a former president, and proposed that they correspond. Thus began 14 years of exchanging ideas about politics, philosophy, and the past. Jefferson consoled Adams over Abigail’s death in 1818 and shared Adams’s joy when his son, John Quincy Adams, was elected president. John Adams died on July 4, 1826, just hours after Jefferson. Not knowing that Jefferson had already passed away, Adams’s last words were, "Jefferson still survives.” Often thwarted by Hamilton and attacked by his own party, unable to establish an effective working relationship with Congress, principled more than charismatic, John Adams led America to independence as a revolutionary and preserved peace as an embattled president amid a trying
crisis with France.