Passionate Sage by Joseph J. Ellis Page A

Adams family homestead at Quincy 56
    Mercy Otis Warren (1763) 71
    Marginalia of John Adams in his copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) 94
    Bronze casting of John Adams, based on plaster “life mask” of 1825, depicting Adams as the American Cicero 177
    Thomas Jefferson’s “last letter,” June 24, 1826, declining the invitation to attend the Independence Day celebration in Washington, D.C. 207

Preface
    W HEN JOHN ADAMS ARRIVED as an American diplomat to France in 1778, one of the first questions he encountered proved awkward and a good test of his personal diplomatic skills. Everyone asked him if he was “the famous Adams, Le fameux Adams?—Ah, le fameux Adams?” It seems he was the victim of a double dose of mistaken identity. On the one hand, he was being confused with his cousin Samuel Adams, the fiery propagandist of the American Revolution and organizer of the Boston Tea Party, who currently headed the British lists of American traitors most wanted for hanging. On the other hand, the French mistakenly believed that a “Monsieur Adams” was also the author of Tom Paine’s celebrated pamphlet Common Sense , which had electrified readers in Europe as well as America with its seductive argument that formenting a revolution was a natural and sensible act.
    Despite his best efforts to persuade the French that he was neither Sam Adams nor the author of Common Sense , John Adams discovered that no one believed him. “All that I could say or do,” he reported to his diary, “would not convince any Body, but that I was the fameux Adams.” For weeks the French attributed his denials to excessive modesty, thereby demonstrating conclusively that they were completely misinformed. When they eventually came to believe his protestations, however, and acknowledged that he was not “the famous Adams,” the question then became: who was he? Adams himself observed rather grudgingly that no one knew. He was quickly transformed from an American celebrity to an American obscurity. He had suddenly become, as he put it, “a Man of whom Nobody had ever heard before, a perfect Cypher, a Man who did not understand a Word of French—awkward in his Figure—awkward in his Dress—no Abilities—a perfect Bigot—and fanatic.” At dinner parties he came to be known simply as “the other Adams.” Who was he?
    The pages that follow could be construed as an explanation to his French hosts. If so, it is a somewhat ill-timed explanation, not only because it is more than two centuries too late to do them much good, but also because it focuses on Adams as an older man, long after he had suffered their slights, even after his active political career was over. But while concentrating on Adams in retirement, my intention has been broader and more ambitious than a chronicle of his twilight years at Quincy. It is true that previous studies of Adams have paid less attention to the last quarter century of his life, so that there is more fresh material available here that has never before found its way into the books. But my motives for focusing on old man Adams reach beyond the desire to bring previously unpublished letters into print. For reasons that I try to explore, John Adams remains the most misconstrued and unappreciated “great man” in American history. Not only does he deserve better; we will be better for knowing him. Adams used his retirement to engage in a long and often bittersweet retrospective on his public career and personal life. That is also my purpose—to use his latter years as a perch from which to meditate on his thought and character, to assess his proper place within the revolutionary generation, to appraise his legacy for us, to offer an answer to the question his French hosts posed long ago.
    Â 
    N OT THAT historians and biographers have been