John Adams's Health Reconsidered

Abstract

H T ISTORIANS have long believed that John Adams was given at times to irrational behavior that could only be attributed to emotional instability. Several of his contemporaries reached the same conclusion. His secretary of war, James McHenry, once called him actually insane. Theodore Sedgwick, a Federalist senator from Massachusetts, said the president has his passions that were derived from a half frantic mind. Rumors circulated in the capital in 1799 that Adams was mentally unbalanced and prone to lose control and that he was given to dashing and trampling his wig on the floor.1 The most famous allegations of Adams's instability were made by Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. During the late stages of the War of Independence, Franklin told Congress that Adams is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things [he is] absolutely out of his senses.2 In i8oo, Hamilton publicly denounced Adams, asserting that his eccentric tendencies often destroyed his judgment; Adams has certain fixed points of character, Hamilton added darkly, that deprive him of self command and produce very outrageous behaviour.3 Although more kind, several students of Adams have contended that he suffered one or more physical or mental breakdowns. Both Charles Francis Adams, his grandson and first biographer, and Gilbert Chinard, his first important twentieth-century biographer, concluded that he almost broke down in 1771 under an arduous workload and the emotional fatigue of his