American Presidents: John Adams (PDF)

The rare man who can sift the unchanging out of a constantly changing world is a man for the ages. John Adams, philosopher of the Revolution and early America, and participant in many of the major events of that period, strove to find universal patterns in the lives of all men. His life and ideas are as pertinent to our time as they were to his own. We still ponder the nature of the unbreakable bond between liberty and law. As did Adams, we question how to relate the goal of freedom to the authority necessary in political society.

Adams viewed man as a being of liberty subject to God's law. Th is colored his answer to the fundamental problem of how to reconcile liberty and law. His solution was not original. It was an answer rooted in the thought of classical Greek, Roman and English political philosophers. Moreover, it was the answer of a lawyer who, by his very profession, viewed man as an historian whose accumulated experience in history tells us about human nature. Because the principles of politics and human nature that he delineated are still relevant, Adams correctly shares a place as one of America's outstanding political thinkers.

Burleigh gives us a warm, sensitive study of John Adams in the many roles he played during his eventful life: student, lawyer, polemicist, Founding Father, diplomat, President, husband, father. His own brilliance and the events of the times in which he lived combined to off er him the knowledge and fame he sought. Her new introduction explains our continuing interest in this central figure of the early years of the American Republic.