Young John Adams and the New Philosophic Rationalism

Abstract

URING his retirement years, John Adams was fond of saying that the War of Independence was a consequence of the American Revolution. The real revolution, he declared, had taken place in the minds and hearts of the colonists in the decade or two before I776. What he meant by this evocative statement and how he understood the sources and nature of America's Revolutionary transformation have long intrigued historians. In an i8i8 letter to Hezekiah Niles, Adams left a clue to his meaning. Among other things, he said, there had been a in the people's sentiments of duties and obligations. This great and important alteration in the colonists' religious and moral character forced them to rethink duties and obligations to king and Parliament after imperial authorities began to violate their lives, liberties, and properties.1 How can historians examine or measure the causes and nature of such a phenomenon? We might begin by looking to Adams himself: his early diary records in remarkable detail a radical change in his religious and moral views. If we are to understand how John Adams experienced the coming of the Revolution, we must begin by examining the assumptions and ideas through which he filtered and interpreted events of the day. Historians have commonly described Adams as a Puritan or a neo-Puritan and have equated his diary with the self-exorcising daybooks of his Calvinist forebears.2 Two important attempts to examine Adams's early years agree that his behavior and character traits, his knowledge and ideas, and even his response to the Revolutionary crisis were largely shaped by a strict Calvinist