A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists/Adams, John
Adams, John, second President of the United States. B. (of Devonshire ancestry) Oct. 30, 1735. Ed. Harvard. Admitted to the colonial bar in 1758, Adams soon became one of the leading politicians of Massachusetts, and took an active part in the movement for independence. He seconded the original motion for the Declaration of Independence, and he was one of the most effective workers in various departments of the new Government. For some years he represented the United States in France, Holland, and England (1785-88); and his Defence of the Constitution of the United States (3 vols., 1787) rendered most valuable service to his country. He was Vice-President of the Republic from 1788 to 1796, and President from 1796 to 1800. The attempt that has been made to represent President Adams as other than an advanced Deist is frivolous. His grandson and biographer was a devout Unitarian, yet he cannot quite claim even the liberal tenets of Boston Unitarianism for the President. "In later years," he says, "he made a study of all religions and fixed his own theological convictions very much in the mould adopted by the Unitarians of New England" (Life of J. Adams, ii, 384). Professor Fiske more justly says: "Later in life he was sometimes called a Unitarian, but of dogmatic Christianity he seems to have had as little as Franklin or Jefferson (article "Adams" in Appleton's Encyclopedia). Adams's letters plainly indicate that he was a Deist to the close of his life. Jefferson, who was himself a Materialistic Deist, says of a letter about matter and spirit which he received from Adams (May 12, 1820): "Its crowd of scepticisms kept me from sleep" (Memoir and Correspondence of T. Jefferson, 1829, iv, 331). This letter seems to have been excluded from the official Works of J. Adams (edited by his grandson in ten volumes, 1856), but there are numerous other letters of his last years which show his scepticism. He defines God as "an essence that we know nothing of" (Jan. 17, 1820), and calls the efforts of religious philosophers to get beyond this vague Theism "games of push-pin." Of the Incarnation he writes (Jan 22, 1825): "Until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will any liberal science in the world." In this mood, far removed from Unitarianism, he died, a year later, on July 4, 1826.