duties previously assigned to Henry Laurens, and at the Hague was eminently successful, securing there recognition of the United States as an independent government (April 19, 1782), and negotiating both a loan and, in October 1782, a treaty of amity and commerce, the first of such treaties between the United States and foreign powers after that of February 1778 with France.
In 1785 John Adams was appointed the first of a long line of able and distinguished American ministers to the court of St James’s. When he was presented to his former sovereign, George III. intimated that he was aware of Mr Adams’s lack of confidence in the French government. Replying, Mr Adams admitted it, closing with the outspoken sentiment: “I must avow to your Majesty that I have no attachment but to my own country”—a phrase which must have jarred upon the monarch’s sensibilities. While in London Adams published a work entitled A Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States (1787). In this work he ably combated the views of Turgot and other European writers as to the viciousness of the framework of the state governments. Unfortunately, in so doing, he used phrases savouring of aristocracy which offended many of his countrymen,—as in the sentence in which he suggested that “the rich, the well-born and the able” should be set apart from other men in a senate. Partly for this reason, while Washington had the vote of every elector in the first presidential election of 1789, Adams received only thirty-four out of sixty-nine. As this was the second largest number he was declared vice-president, but he began his eight years in that office (1789–1797) with a sense of grievance and of suspicion of many of the leading men. Differences of opinion with regard to the policies to be pursued by the new government gradually led to the formation of two well-defined political groups—the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans—and Adams became recognized as one of the leaders, second only to Alexander Hamilton, of the former.
In 1796, on the refusal of Washington to accept another election, Adams was chosen president, defeating Thomas Jefferson; though Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists had asked that an equal vote should be cast for Adams and Thomas Pinckney, the other Federalist in the contest, partly in order that Jefferson, who was elected vice-president, might be excluded altogether, and partly, it seems, in the hope that Pinckney should in fact receive more votes than Adams, and thus, in accordance with the system then obtaining, be elected president, though he was intended for the second place on the Federalist ticket. Adams’s four years as chief magistrate (1797–1801) were marked by a succession of intrigues which embittered all his later life; they were marked, also, by events, such as the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which brought discredit on the Federalist party. Moreover, factional strife broke out within the party itself; Adams and Hamilton became alienated, and members of Adams’s own cabinet virtually looked to Hamilton rather than to the president as their political chief. The United States was, at this time, drawn into the vortex of European complications, and Adams, instead of taking advantage of the militant spirit which was aroused, patriotically devoted himself to securing peace with France, much against the wishes of Hamilton and of Hamilton’s adherents in the cabinet. In 1800, Adams was again the Federalist candidate for the presidency, but the distrust of him in his own party, the popular disapproval of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the popularity of his opponent, Thomas Jefferson, combined to cause his defeat. He then retired into private life. On the 4th of July 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, he died at Quincy. Jefferson died on the same day. In 1764 Adams had married Miss Abigail Smith (1744–1818), the daughter of a Congregational minister at Weymouth, Massachusetts. She was a woman of much ability, and her letters, written in an excellent English style, are of great value to students of the period in which she lived. President John Quincy Adams was their eldest son.
Authorities.—C. F. Adams, The Works of John Adams, with Life (10 vols., Boston, 1850–1856); John and Abigail Adams, Familiar Letters during the Revolution (Boston, 1875); J. T. Morse, John Adams (Boston, 1885: later edition, 1899), in the “American Statesmen Series”; and Mellen Chamberlain, John Adams, the Statesman of the Revolution; with other Essays and Addresses (Boston, 1898). (E. Ch.)
ADAMS, JOHN COUCH (1819–1892), British astronomer, was born at Lidcot farmhouse, Laneast, Cornwall, on the 5th of June 1819. His father, Thomas Adams, was a tenant farmer; his mother, Tabitha Knill Grylls, inherited a small estate at Badharlick. From the village school at Laneast he went, at the age of twelve, to Devonport, where his mother’s cousin, the Rev. John Couch Grylls, kept a private school. His promise as a mathematician induced his parents to send him to the university of Cambridge, and in October 1839 he entered as a sizar at St John’s College. He graduated B.A. in 1843 as the senior wrangler and first Smith’s prizeman of his year. While still an undergraduate he happened to read of certain unexplained irregularities in the motion of the planet Uranus, and determined to investigate them as soon as possible, with a view to ascertaining whether they might not be due to the action of a remote undiscovered planet. Elected fellow of his college in 1843, he at once proceeded to attack the novel problem. It was this: from the observed perturbations of a known planet to deduce by calculation, assuming only Newton’s law of gravitation, the mass and orbit of an unknown disturbing body. By September 1845 he obtained his first solution, and handed to Professor Challis, the director of the Cambridge Observatory, a paper giving the elements of what he described as “the new planet”.
On the 21st of October 1845 he left at Greenwich Observatory, for the information of Sir George Airy, the astronomer-royal, a similar document, still preserved among the archives. A fortnight afterwards Airy wrote asking for information about a point in the solution. Adams, who thought the query unessential, did not reply, and Airy for some months took no steps to verify by telescopic search the results of the young mathematician’s investigation. Meanwhile, Leverrier, on the 10th of November 1845, presented to the French Academy a memoir on Uranus, showing that the existing theory failed to account for its motion. Unaware of Adams’s work, he attempted a like inquiry, and on the 1st of June 1846, in a second memoir, gave the position, but not the mass or orbit, of the disturbing body whose existence was presumed. The longitude he assigned differed by only 1° from that predicted by Adams in the document which Airy possessed. The latter was struck by the coincidence, and mentioned it to the Board of Visitors of the Observatory, James Challis and Sir John Herschel being present. Herschel, at the ensuing meeting of the British Association early in September, ventured accordingly to predict that a new planet would shortly be discovered. Meanwhile Airy had in July suggested to Challis that the planet should be sought for with the Cambridge equatorial. The search was begun by a laborious method at the end of the month. On the 4th and 12th of August, as afterwards appeared, the planet was actually observed; but owing to the want of a proper star-map it was not then recognized as planetary. Leverrier, still ignorant of these occurrences, presented on the 31st of August 1846 a third memoir, giving for the first time the mass and orbit of the new body. He communicated his results by letter to Dr Galle, of the Berlin Observatory, who at once examined the suggested region of the heavens. On the 23rd of September he detected near the predicted place a small star unrecorded in the map, and next evening found that it had a proper motion. No doubt remained that “Leverrier’s planet” had been discovered. On the announcement of the fact, Herschel and Challis made known that Adams had already calculated the planet’s elements and position. Airy then at length published an account of the circumstances, and Adams’s memoir was printed as an appendix to the Nautical Almanac. A keen controversy arose in France and England as to the merits of the two astronomers. In the latter country much surprise was expressed at the apathy of Airy; in France the claims made for an unknown Englishman were resented as detracting from the credit due to Leverrier’s achievement. As the indisputable facts became
