Introduction

John Adams, born on a modest farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, on October 19, 1735, was twenty years Hamilton’s senior. It is difficult to dispute Adams’s view of himself as a political-intellectual heavyweight and Washington’s rightful heir. A graduate of Harvard College and a distinguished lawyer in colonial times, he had demonstrated his “almost rabid” independence by successfully defending British soldiers accused of murder following the 1770 “Boston Massacre.” As a delegate to the Continental Congress, he had served on the drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence. With the exception of Jay, he had more diplomatic experience than any American alive in the late 1790s, having helped to negotiate the Franco-American treaties, the peace with Britain, and loans from the Dutch. He had resided in Europe (where Hamilton had never set foot) for many years, including his unsuccessful mission to Britain (1785 to 1788). During the free time his public life had afforded (in London it had afforded much), Adams produced such monuments to erudition as Thoughts on Government, Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, and Discourses on Davila.

There is little trace of animosity, for that matter, of any kind of relationship, between Adams and Hamilton before 1796. Adams was the prototype of American vice presidents, coveting the top position, but scrupulously loyal and prepared to suffer in silence as the president and cabinet more or less ignored his existence. He was also the first to deal with a common vice presidential dilemma, how to seem the dutiful and worthy successor of a revered chief while demonstrating a strong will of his own. Adams’s characteristic solution would be to leave Washington’s cabinet in place, but later to fire a pair of ministers in a kind of delayed volcanic eruption after more than three years on the job.