Excerpt from John Adams by David McCullough, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

About his mother, Adams would have comparatively little to say, beyond that he loved her deeply -- she was his "honored and beloved mother" -- and that she was a highly principled woman of strong will, strong temper, and exceptional energy, all traits he shared though this he did not say. Of his father, however, he could hardly say enough. There were scarcely words to express the depth of his gratitude for the kindnesses his father had shown him, the admiration he felt for his father's integrity. His father was "the honestest man" John Adams ever knew. "In wisdom, piety, benevolence and charity in proportion to his education and sphere of life, I have never known his superior," Adams would write long afterward, by which time he had come to know the most prominent men of the age on two sides of the Atlantic. His father was his idol. It was his father's honesty, his father's independent spirit and love of country, Adams said, that were his lifelong inspiration.

A good-looking, active boy, if small for his age, he was unusually sensitive to criticism but also quickly responsive to praise, as well as being extremely bright, which his father saw early, and decided he must go to Harvard to become a minister. An elder brother of Deacon John, Joseph Adams, who graduated from Harvard in 1710, had become a minister with a church in New Hampshire. Further, Deacon John himself, for as little education as he had had, wrote in a clear hand and had, as he said, "an admiration of learning."

Taught to read at home, the boy went first and happily to a dame school -- lessons for a handful of children in the kitchen of a neighbor, with heavy reliance on The New England Primer. ("He who ne'er learns his ABC, forever will a blockhead be.") But later at the tiny local schoolhouse, subjected to a lackluster "churl" of a teacher who paid him no attention, he lost all interest. He cared not for books or study, and saw no sense in talk of college. He wished only to be a farmer, he informed his father.

That being so, said Deacon John not unkindly, the boy could come along to the creek with him and help cut thatch. Accordingly, as Adams would tell the story, father and son set off the next morning and "with great humor" his father kept him working through the day.

At night at home, he said, "Well, John, are you satisfied with being a farmer?" Though the labor had been very hard and very muddy, I answered, "I like it very well, sir."

"Aya, but I don't like it so well: so you will go back to school today." I went but was not so happy as among the creek thatch.

Later, when he told his father it was his teacher he disliked, not the books, and that he wished to go to another school, his father immediately took his side and wasted no time with further talk. John was enrolled the next day in a private school down the road where, kindly treated by a schoolmaster named Joseph Marsh, he made a dramatic turn and began studying in earnest.

A small textbook edition of Cicero's Orations became one of his earliest, proudest possessions, as he affirmed with the note "John Adams Book 1749/50" written a half dozen times on the title page.

In little more than a year, at age fifteen, he was pronounced "fitted for college," which meant Harvard, it being the only choice. Marsh, himself a Harvard graduate, agreed to accompany John to Cambridge to appear for the usual examination before the president and masters of the college. But on the appointed morning Marsh pleaded ill and told John he must go alone. The boy was thunderstruck, terrified; but picturing his father's grief and the disappointment of both father and teacher, he "collected resolution enough to proceed," and on his father's horse rode off down the road alone, suffering "a very melancholy journey."

Writing years later, he remembered the day as grey and somber. Threatening clouds hung over Cambridge, and for a fifteen-year-old farm boy to stand before the grand monarchs of learning in their wigs and robes, with so much riding on the outcome, was itself as severe a test as could be imagined. His tutor, however, had assured him he was ready, which turned out to be so. He was admitted to Harvard and granted a partial scholarship.

Copyright © 2001 by David McCullough