Abstract

John Adams and the Constructions of History Carla J. Mulford (bio) R.B. Bernstein, The Education of John Adams. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 368 pp. Illustrations, chronology, note on sources, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 James Muldoon, John Adams and the Constitutional History of the Medieval British Empire. Palgrave Studies in Modern History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xv + 267 pp. Notes, index. $109.99 John Adams was among the most learned and most mercurial of those who took up the challenge of rebelling against Great Britain, creating a constitution, and serving in administration of the new government. While Adams has received some scholarly attention across the years, he tends to be less frequently studied than his peers.1 James Muldoon points out that Adams, the "least studied of the founding fathers," ought to be studied for his political thought, because "it is in his political writings that his historical approach to political development extensively developed" (p. 32). Instead, in recent years, Adams has been studied for his relationship to his family, particularly to Abigail Adams, and his personality rather than for his prodigious legal mind and his writings on history. Richard Bernstein agrees: "Adams lived with books at his elbow and a pen in his hand" (p. 2). That Adams spent his life both learning and teaching—this is what Bernstein conceives as "the education of John Adams" (p. 2). To a scholar who studies the well-read and genial autodidact, Benjamin Franklin, the study of John Adams would be difficult. Both Muldoon and Bernstein acknowledge the difficulty and attend to the deep nuances of their subject's character and intellectual life. Muldoon writes that Adams, "quite proud of his learning," was "famously ambitious, touchy, sensitive to slights, and, eventually quite concerned that the country that emerged out of the Revolution was not what he anticipated" (p. xiii). Bernstein repeatedly shows us how Adams, the "thinking politician" (p. 12), was also at key moments in his life irritable, sanctimonious, self-centered, anxious about fame, and out of touch with his American colleagues in Congress on his return from diplomatic duties in Europe. Bernstein shows Adams's envy of George Washington's [End Page 232] commanding presence, framing the differences between the two as a difference between cultivated self-control (Washington) and its absence (Adams). Bernstein writes, "Adams knew that his own volcanic temperament was set on hairtrigger; unlike Washington, he had not perfected the ability to keep himself in check" (p. 180). Adams's "turbulent emotions" were ever near the surface of most of his interactions (p. 180). Muldoon and Bernstein thus faced a difficult task: how to focus on the intellectual life—the deep intellectual life—of such a compelling yet exasperating (and exasperated) intellectual and political leader. Both books study Adams's significant legal, intellectual, and political contributions to American colonial and early republican life. They make sense of Adams's political thought, with Muldoon focusing on Adams's pre-revolution writings and Bernstein, on those writings, too, but more capaciously on Adams's long life. James Muldoon's erudite, carefully argued John Adams and the Constitutional History of the Medieval British Empire—a treatise on Adams, on what colonial Americans knew about medievalism, and on Tory versus Whig representations of history—is based on the premise that "Adams's writings, poorly organized and developed as they were, contained a history of the development of the British Empire from the twelfth century to the eighteenth" (p. xiii). Muldoon, a historian of the medieval era, has identified what he calls an "underlying medieval infrastructure" that lies behind eighteenth-century American political thought. The argument centers on Adams's pre-revolutionary writings, the Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law (1765) and the Novanglus essays (1775). In Chapters 2 and 3, Muldoon offers keen insight into Adams's historical perspective on the medieval era by looking at "how he used the image of the canon and the feudal laws as the framework for understanding the political crisis of the British Empire resulting from the Stamp Act of 1765" (p. 36). Muldoon then pursues across four additional chapters, by far the larger part of the book, Adams's...

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