In 1770, five years before the Revolution began in earnest, John Adams took on the most unpopular legal case of his career. Eight British soldiers and their captain had fired into a crowd on a Boston street, killing five colonists. The city was furious. The soldiers needed a lawyer. Adams agreed to defend them.
He won. Six of the nine soldiers were acquitted outright; two were convicted only of manslaughter and received reduced sentences. Adams's summation to the jury contains the argument that would run through his entire career: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." The rule of law — the principle that law applies equally regardless of political pressure — was, for Adams, not a procedural nicety but the foundation of free government.
A Government of Laws, Not of Men
Adams's formulation — "a government of laws, and not of men" — appears in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which he drafted almost single-handedly. It is one of the oldest active constitutions in the world. Adams drew on it extensively when thinking about what the federal constitution should accomplish.
His Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787), a three-volume work largely ignored by his contemporaries and almost entirely forgotten today, argued that stable free government requires a carefully balanced institutional structure — not because men are good, but because they are not. Adams was one of the most clear-eyed realists among the founders about human nature's capacity for corruption, faction, and self-delusion. He believed that even virtuous men, placed in positions of unchecked power, would eventually abuse it.
This led him to conclusions his fellow founders found uncomfortable. He argued that mixed government — with distinct legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and within the legislature a bicameral structure that checks the democratic impulse with a more deliberate upper house — was the only reliable form. He was suspicious of simple democratic majorities. He thought the Senate should function as an aristocratic check on the popular House. He was not, in the Jeffersonian sense, a democrat.
The Midnight Judges and Marbury
Adams's presidency ended in defeat — he lost the bitter 1800 election to Jefferson in a race that went to the House of Representatives under the contingency procedure. In his final weeks in office, he did something that would shape constitutional law for generations: he appointed a series of Federalist judges, including John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in a flurry of last-minute commissions that his opponents called the "midnight judges."
One of those commissions — for a justice of the peace named William Marbury — was signed and sealed but never delivered before Jefferson's inauguration. Jefferson instructed his Secretary of State, James Madison, not to deliver it. Marbury sued. The result was Marbury v. Madison (1803), in which Marshall — Adams's own appointee — established the doctrine of judicial review.
Marshall's genius was to declare that Marbury was entitled to his commission while simultaneously holding that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to order it delivered, because the provision of the Judiciary Act that authorized such suits was unconstitutional. Jefferson got the political outcome. Marshall got the constitutional principle. The Court's power to strike down acts of Congress as unconstitutional — entirely absent from the text of the Constitution — became settled law through an act of extraordinary judicial statesmanship by the man Adams had placed on the bench.
The Alien and Sedition Acts
Adams's darkest hour was the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, signed during a quasi-war with France when Federalist fear of radical French ideas and immigrant disloyalty ran high. The Sedition Act criminalized "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government or the President. It was used to prosecute Republican newspaper editors who criticized the Adams administration.
Jefferson and Madison responded with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, arguing that the states could "nullify" unconstitutional federal acts. The legal doctrine was dubious — and would be decisively rejected in the Civil War and in McCulloch v. Maryland — but their First Amendment argument was correct. The Sedition Act was an embarrassment to Adams's legacy and a serious abridgement of the principles he claimed to stand for.
The episode illustrates the tension at the core of Adams's political life: his genuine commitment to constitutional government and the rule of law, alongside a streak of Federalist high-handedness that could shade into authoritarianism when he felt the republic was threatened.
Adams and the Judiciary
Adams's most durable contribution to American government may be his understanding of the judiciary. He believed, more than most founders, that an independent court system was essential to the rule of law — that judges who served during good behavior and who were insulated from political pressure were a structural necessity, not a luxury. His appointment of Marshall was the most consequential judicial appointment in American history. The Marshall Court's decisions — Marbury, McCulloch, Gibbons v. Ogden — established the basic architecture of federal constitutional law.
Adams and Jefferson, who had been estranged for years after the 1800 election, reconciled in their old age through a remarkable correspondence that ranged across everything from classical history to religious doubt to the fate of the republic they had helped build. They died on the same day: July 4, 1826 — the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration. Adams's last words, reportedly, were: "Thomas Jefferson survives." He did not know that Jefferson had died hours earlier.