John Adams

John Adams was a leading advocate of independence in the Continental Congress, a diplomat in France, the Netherlands and Britain, and the principal author of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. He served as the first Vice President under Washington and as President from 1797 to 1801. A Federalist, he was suspicious of the French Revolution and governed during the Quasi-War with France. He lost the 1800 election to Thomas Jefferson. Unlike several other founding-era presidents, Adams did not own enslaved people.

Admirers credit Adams with a principled public career: defending British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, pressing for independence, drafting an enduring state constitution and choosing a peace mission to France over a wider war, even at political cost. His writings on balanced government and the separation of powers influenced American constitutional thought, and his letters with Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson remain widely read. Critics focus on the Alien and Sedition Acts, under which editors of opposition newspapers were prosecuted. The National Archives notes that these trials set off a firestorm of criticism and contributed to the Federalists' defeat in 1800. Contemporaries also described him as vain and suspicious, and Jeffersonians accused him of monarchist sympathies because of his emphasis on executive dignity. Unlike Washington, Jefferson and Madison, he did not enslave people.