The Importance of John Adams 1763-1776

The Importance of John Adams 1763-1776 “Fear is the foundation of most governments,” (1) quoted by the fearless leader John Adams. John Adams played significant roles during the years of 1763 through 1776. He was in support of self-governing and independence which caused him to become the leader of the Boston Massacre. Between 1765 and 1776, Adams’s involvement in radical politics ran apace with the escalation of events. In 1770, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and he later served as chief legal counsel to the Patriot faction and wrote several important resolutions for the lower house in its running battle with Governor Thomas Hutchinson. He also wrote a penetrating essay on the need for an independent judiciary, and his Novanglus letters are generally regarded as the best expression of the American case against parliamentary sovereignty. By the mid-1770s, Adams had distinguished himself as one of America’s foremost constitutional scholars. The year 1774 was critical in British-American relations, and it proved to be a momentous year for John Adams. With Parliament’s passage of the Coercive Acts, Adams realized that the time had come for the Americans to invoke what he called “revolution-principles.”4 Later that year he was elected to the first Continental Congress. Over the course of the next two years no man worked as hard or played as important a role in the movement for independence. His first great contribution to the American cause was to draft, in October 1774, the principal clause of the Declaration of Rights and Grievances. Adams also chaired the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, he drafted America’s first Model Treaty, and, working eighteen-hour days, he served as a one-man department of war and ordnance. In the end, he worked tirelessly on some thirty committees. “Every member of Congress,” Benjamin Rush would later write, “acknowledged him to be the first man in the House.”

Bibliography: Crompton, Samuel W., John Adams: American Patriot. Chelsea House Publishers, 2006. Clarendon Press, 1923. Gipson, Lawrence H. The Coming of the Revolution. New York: Harper and Row, 1954. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Appleton and Co., 1898. Meier, Arthur. The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763- 1776 New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.