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A
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two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of elite colonists staged the original Brexit, a hissy fit of such epic proportions that it birthed a global superpower.
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But while modern politicians like Donald Trump post about two kings on social media, the men who started it all were desperately trying to kill the idea of monarchy while acting in some ways like royalty themselves.
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Today we're going to meet more of the crew that helped bring this amazing event about in 1776, 250 years ago. From John Jay, the boring lawyer who actually built the machine, to John Adams, the honest man who is so competitive that even his friends couldn't stand him.
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And we confront the ultimate contradiction. Thomas Jefferson, the man who gave the word its most beautiful words on equality while fathering children with an enslaved woman he refused to free.
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This is the messy, brilliant and deeply human truth of 1776. Hello and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Peter Frankipan.
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I'm Afwa Hersh.
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And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputations that they truly deserve.
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C
This is the Founding Fathers and the original Brexit.
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B
Thanks for joining us on Legacy today. To support the show, sign up to Legacy.
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C
Plus you can also enjoy early access, fewer ads, Q&As and bonus content like the legacy of the remote control, the legacy of fish fingers, or where we spoke with Professor Helen Thompson about energy, power and the Iran conflict.
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B
So sign up@Legacy Supportingcast FM. Okay, AFWA. So we're going back into the Founding Fathers, John Jay. Does that ring any bells?
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C
Well, he, I would say is one of the less well known Founding Fathers. Peter, is that fair?
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B
Yeah, oh yeah, that's right. I guess he was ever president, so many of that early group were. So he doesn't get the sort of the prizes but he doesn't leave an enormous legacy anywhere. I mean there's a hall named after him at Columbia University. There are a few schools and streets and buildings across New York State. But yeah, he's not in the same kind of category as Superstars. He's kind of like the guy at the back of Duran Duran. Well, they're all called Taylor, aren't they? So you can't go wrong with that. He's the loved member of the band who's always there, but doesn't quite get the credit he deserves, even though he
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C
does make important contributions. He negotiates the Treaty of Paris that ends what Americans call the American Revolutionary War. We in Britain tend to call the War of Independence. He is the first Chief justice of the United States Supreme Court and he served as Governor of New York. So not inconsequential achievements. PETER no, and he was very important.
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B
He was the co author of the Federalist Papers, which is a series of essays written in 1787 and 1788 to persuade America to support the new U.S. constitution after independence from Britain. As it so happens, Afra, I have been reading this morning a speech by China's leader Xi Jinping and blow me down with a feather. Xi Jinping has said one of the first things, the most enjoyable things he read about US history were the Federalist Papers. And what are the odds of that? I mean they are not without their interest. They're quite specialist knowledge, but, but they have a legacy that I think we don't pay a huge amount of attention to here in the uk, partly because the Federalist Papers are about what does a new state, how does it function? How do you separate the different branches of power? How do you make sure that you have something that's going to be stable too? And so without John Jay no Xi Jinping knowledge of the US political system, which is small world, you could say
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C
the Federalist Papers are really important because it's one thing to break away from your former colonial power, start a new nation, but then you have the really thorny and existential questions of how it's going to work. And the beginning of the United States of America is a fragile and unstable country. It's not even sure what it's called. In fact, it's not always capitalized as the United States. U.S. as we call it now it's united can be in some ways an adjective, like the states that are united. So even its name and identity is not yet secure. And the Articles of Federation, which is the existing system that was created on independence, creates a very weak central government. And that's actually on purpose, isn't it? Peter Having just tried to get away from King George, one thing that the founding fathers know is that they are not trying, at least in theory, to replace the English King with another king.
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B
Well, there's that. There's also the fact that ideas about what a new. Well, ideas about independence, first of all are not shared across the colonies. There's a sense that this might all go wrong. I mean, the fact that the Revolutionary War, war of independence has been won or there's reach a settlement doesn't mean that it's going to stay that way. What the government should look like is something else who should have the right to be able to collect taxes or whatever. So Congress, to start with, struggles to raise money. It struggles to regulate trade and to maintain order. You know, it's not easy to build a new country. And many people fear that the new republic might collapse into chaos or to rivalry or even to civil war. And, and you know, you mentioned the name United States Alpha. I mean, I know here we should be a bit more, a bit careful because we call it the United Kingdom too. But anywhere that uses United in its name is telling you that, you know, we're trying to paper over some of the cracks. Right. The reason why we're United States is we have to think as a group rather than each go our own ways. But those first years are really significant, I think, about the fragility of what the state might be. So that kind of, it's not a superpower that's suddenly born or independent state that's, that's born. It's one that has rivalries, tensions, problems everywhere. And so how you create the legal structure is really important. And John Jay is the kind of unsung hero of all of this.
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C
So three of these founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay begin publishing essays in New York newspapers to defend the Constitution. In these early days, when there's a lot of uncertainty as to whether it's really going to hold sway, they use a pseudonym, Publius, named after a founder of the Roman republic, which is a subject that I'm very interested in. They're very deliberately and consciously trying to show that they have this inheritance from antiquity of these great civilizations, ancient Rome, ancient Athenian democracy. It's all part of the ideology, the myth making that now using to build this new idea of the American system. And there are 85 essays in total. Hamilton wrote the majority, Madison produced some of the most famous. But Jay contributed very important early essays, especially on foreign policy and national security.
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B
It's so interesting, you know, the, the, the meme of how often do you think of Roman Empire? When that went bananas a few years ago. And it's turned out that American men are thinking about The Roman Empire every seven minutes. What they should have been saying, of course, if you're a proper classicist, is how often do you think about the Roman Republic? I mean, that's what you should be thinking about if you're an American. That is the foundations of the US Precisely that Britain was the empire and the United States was the republic. That the Roman Empire went wrong when Augustus and all these great emperors took over. That was what King George III was the tyrant who could do what he wanted. We're going to talk about that a few times with a few of these founding fathers, how important that kind of classical knowledge and information was. And you know, you could. We're not just going to argue. I mean, it's kind of amazing how you could think back 2,000 years. I think the real lessons I should learn are from, you know, the ages of the republic that dates back to millennium, that that's the model that the United States are picking. But John Jay and others, Hamilton and Jefferson are thinking about having to explain why do we need a constitution? Why do we need to have a federal government and why does it need to be strong? How is power going to be balanced? Why does there need to be a separation of powers and what will that look like? How do we stop tyranny? How do we stop one person being all important, signing executive orders? Oh no, hang on, that's going into Trump again. But how do you stop a single president from being too powerful? And how do you create the survival of a large republic? And they keep going back to the stuff that all of them know and the only model they can think of are Athens, which doesn't really last for very long as a democracy, or the Roman Republic, which is much, much more robust. So that articulation of writing in the press is trying to help frame an argument that is hugely important about the direction of travel, what the US will become.
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C
I think it's fascinating how new nations often do draw on antiquity. It's partly for practical ideas, but I think more it's for narrative. I mean, I think about Ghana, when Ghana was the Gold coast as a British colony, when it gained independence, which it fought for a little like how America fought for independence. When Ghana won its independence, it chose the name Ghana. Ancient Ghana, which was like in a thousand year old empire, was actually nowhere near modern day Ghana. It was near a Mali, it was in the Sahel. You know, it was this desert, great desert, ancient kingdom. But it was this deliberate kind of creating a link to antiquity. It gives you legitimacy, it gives you a story. It gives you ideas and a sense of this kind of unbroken lineage. And I think it's very important, especially because. And this is something I find so interesting, the Founding Fathers were doing a weird mix of wanting that sense of the weight of history, but they were also kind of making it up as they went along. There was definitely some blank slate thinking here. I mean, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he was kind of choosing new language. You know, he was creating something new. And I think that's one of the reasons that that language, which we'll talk about more, has lasted so long. So J is kind of in the middle of this. He is trying to help build very tangible systems. Courts, diplomacy, constitutional structures. You know, these. This isn't beautiful rhetoric. This is like bricks and mortar of a. Of a nation that's going to work. But he's also very suspicious of excessive democracy and popular passions. He wants this to be something that works, but that doesn't give in to the kind of whims of revolutionary radicals. And given that this has had quite a radical birth, this nation, that's not the easiest thing to do.
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B
And he's from a very conservative background. So he's born in New York City in 1745 to a wealthy merchant family of Huguenot origins. And he grows up in one of the colonies that's most deeply connected to British commercial and imperial networks. He studies at King's College, later Columbia University, where there's the hall now named after him. And he trains as a lawyer, where he develops a reputation for being very serious, very disciplined, very intellectually precise. I dare say those are all words for quite boring. But he's very reserved, he's very formal, he's very religious. He doesn't have the flamboyance of Alexander Hamilton that we talk about or the sociability of Benjamin Franklin, who we discussed last time. He lacks the theatricality and he doesn't really look for public attention. So he's described as being calm and dignified and trustworthy, which is, I guess, what you want in a lawyer or an attorney. But it also means that you're not going to stand out in a crowd of superstars either. At the time, actually one of the reasons he doesn't become president, I guess, but also why so few people have heard about him today.
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C
Like many colonial elites, J. Considered himself 100% British. He was an Anglophile. He admired Britain's legal institutions and traditions, and he, even though America had just fought this war for independence, wanted reconciliation with London. And his optimism about that remained well into the 1700s. In 1774 he helped draft New York's response to British policies and he became a delegate to the first Continental Congress where he favoured negotiation rather than separation. And you can see that reticence for breaking completely away from Britain. In his early writings he opposed parliamentary overreach and defended colonial rights, but he didn't fully trust his fellow Americans to do things on their own. And that caution, I think reflects the complicated political position of New York. It was commercially very, very connected to London. It was ethnically diverse, it was politically divided. And you know, there's that phenomenon in colonies sometimes when they're very divided amongst themselves, that actually the colonial overlord is a greater force for stability than self government among themselves. So this is the person who is moving towards independence with this still slight longing for being part of the British system, but also realizing that the British government no longer viewed the colonies as equal partners within the empire. And you know, that was the sense of betrayal that many of these colonists had that they thought that Britain saw them as equals and that they would be treated with this dignity and respect. And it was the betrayal of this that angered them and provoked them so much into revolution.
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B
I mean, what's so interesting about the Founding Fathers is that, you know, when you think about revolutionaries, you know, they've been looking for the overthrow of something they spent their whole life working towards, you know, Lenin or Trotsky or Gandhi wanting independence in India. This is the fulfillment of a whole long held series of beliefs with these guys, the Founding Fathers, they all are reacting very, very quickly to events in the 1770s and creating solutions on the hoof. So none of them are committed, none of them would have been brought up thinking about independence. What starts as being kind of, there's a bit of British overreach there, snowballs into something much, much more dramatic. So by 1776, over the previous sort of 12, 18 months, Jay has been reacting to, you know, the boss of Tea Party, towards the sort of heavy handed implementation of taxes from London. But, but he'd become a very important member of the revolutionary leadership. I mean even revolutionary is probably not the right word of the kind of group that's thinking about what's the best way to try and protect their own rights. And he becomes important, Jane, not because he's the most radical voice, but because he gives credibility and restraint. Actually he reassures moderates who thinks that revolution might descend into, well, full blooded war with Britain, which it does, but that that won't end. You know, that just because you can fight to a standstill. The British will come again. But he's representing legalism, discipline and sort of cautious patriotism rather than ideological zeal. And it's underpriced when we think about the history of revolutions and independence movements. But it's quite helpful to have somebody quite dull around you because you can convince people that things are not going to become all fire and brimstone. So Jay plays a really important role. But when we come back, Afwa, I want to talk to you about one of the superstars of US independence and Thomas Jefferson. So join us in a moment.
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D
Hey everybody, this is Taylor from the Total Soccer show. And this episode is brought to you by Hotels.com the summer of soccer is right around the corner. And if you aren't using hotels.com to book the experience of a lifetime, it's worth asking why. And as a member, you save up to 20% on hundreds of thousands of hotels around the world and earn rewards on every single stay. Which means the trips you're taking now help pay for the ones you're already dreaming about. So whether you're following your team across North America this summer or planning a well earned escape after being glued to football for weeks on end, make sure you book on hotels.com and start earning rewards. Because when it comes to hotels, it's all in the name. Hotels.com aprobecha Los Aoros de Memorial Day
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in Los y Comparia Char Royal Performance Series.
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C
In Louis Punto com pisita to Lois Mastercano. Okay, Peter, before the break, poor Jay. You designated his role as the dull member of the revolution. Nobody is saying that about our next character, Thomas Jefferson.
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B
No, but I said that. I said I'm in defense of dull. I said everyone needs a dull dull and a lawyer.
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C
I'm just saying that. I'm just thinking if I was in a revolution and people said, you know, what's your role? You're the Darwin. I'm not sure I would.
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B
I don't think you're too much Deja Van, but yeah, I'd be flattered by that. I think it would be great. Go on, tell me a bit about Jefferson, Afwa, because I know you know a lot about his story.
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C
Well, Jefferson is a fascinating character. He's one of the most intellectually ambitious and idealistic figures among the revolutionary generation. And I love an idealist, even if they can be very, very problematic people. He was born in Virginia in 1743 into the plantation elite. And he inherits land, wealth and enslaved labourers from his father. So he belongs firmly to the plantation colonial gentry class, unambiguous background in that respect.
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B
Yeah. And his father, it's called Peter, has accumulated huge property through surveying, through land speculation and plantation agriculture, while his mother was from the very influential and wealthy Randall family, one of Virginia's leading dynasties. So he's a. He's a posh boy. Right. So through inheritance and marriage, Jefferson, that becomes one of the largest slaveholders of Virginia himself, eventually controlling hundreds of enslaved people across his estates, especially at Monticello, which I don't know if you've been to. It's an incredible plantation estate, but it's. It screams both privilege, but also this is a way that a gentleman would live who's never had to do a day's work in his life. So he. He receives a classical education. We mentioned that a few times before. He studies Latin and Greek, law, architecture, languages. He reads widely in Latin and Greek in the original, as well as really familiarizing himself with Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Bacon and Montesquieu. So he presents as a refined gentleman scholar. He's a violinist who gets his fiddle out to play for his guests. He's a voracious reader. He's an obsessive collector of books. And also, by the way, he's very enthusiastic about climate change. He has barometers, he takes temperature readings, he takes precipitation, wind readings. He writes it down three or four times every single day for decades. He's a man who has quite a nice lifestyle.
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C
I think you can just picture him kind of sitting in his study reading Latin and Greek and Locke and thinking about ideas. And he did think a lot. He was a student of philosophy. He thought about life, liberty, about intellectual freedom, about how human societies could be improved through knowledge and rational government. And while he's sitting at this kind of rarefied desk thinking about these things, you can kind of imagine the enslaved people on the plantation outside the window, you know, and that was the reality of many of these men's lives, that they had the privilege of these big ideas while, you know, there was a wife kind of managing everything, and then there were enslaved people living the opposite. You can't really think of a more extreme juxtaposition of how far their lives were from the reality of the things he was kind of thinking about. And it's always fascinating to me how anyone can embody such contradiction. But I suppose he was also in a peer group where that was normalized. And he was also kind of an interesting physical presence. He didn't have the. The physicality of George Washington, who was really tall and, you know, everybody talked about how kind of imposing his stature was.
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B
He wasn't good at a uniform. Yeah. Washington love loves his uniform. Yeah.
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C
Benjamin Franklin wasn't necessarily like, so kind of physically imposing, but he was, you know, the sparky guy in the room, you know, that would always be the center of attention with his brilliance and his charisma. Jefferson was the writer he influence through writing. He was an incredible wordsmith, and that was something that gave him enormous influence over people. And he understood that power.
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B
Yeah. And John Adams, he describes Jefferson, says he's a happy talent of composition. That's how both of us would like to. I'd like to be described like that, you know, not necessarily very good at anything, but good at sort of most things. Right. So he's a bit awkward, he's a bit reserved. He doesn't have a huge physical presence. He's quite a tall man. But, you know, he's just good at doing things. And the writing bit is important. As we know, he's the man who primarily drafts the Declaration of Independence, but then his personal life, rather something that. I'd like to hear what your thoughts are. You know, it's extreme emotional attachment, repeated bereavement, but a lot of controversy, particularly with his relationship with Sally Hemings.
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C
Well, first of all, he has a wife with whom, by all accounts, he has a pretty emotionally available and affectionate relationship, which is by no means necessarily a given for marriages of that time, and especially in that class. So he marries Martha, a young widow from one of the leading families in Virginia's planter elite. So he's staying very much within his social circle, but they seem to be happy together. Contemporaries noted how devoted he was to her. They shared a lot of intellectual interests in common music. They often played duets together. But they lost many, many children, even by the standards of the time, where, you know, death in childbirth and death in infancy was common. They had six children. Only two daughters survived into adulthood. And Martha suffered repeated pregnancies and declining health before dying in 1782, just 33. And that bereavement had a really huge effect on Jefferson. According to family accounts, he just shut himself away and. And refused to speak about her for years. And he reportedly promised Martha on her deathbed that he would never remarry. And I think that might be important for the choices that he made later. PETER.
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B
Well, the most controversial aspect of Jefferson's personal life after Martha's death involves Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello who's Almost certainly the half sister of his late wife Martha, because of Martha's father having had sex with an enslaved woman. And Sally Hemings accompanies Jefferson on lots of his trips abroad, too, including to Paris in the 1780s, where he served as American minister or ambassador to France. And there she lived in a society where slavery is technically illegal, but where in principle, she could assort high levels of freedom that she had back at home. But historians now overwhelmingly accept that they had a sexual relationship and that Jefferson fathered several of her children. But for a long time, that was a kind of forbidden topic. There was no discussion about it because it was considered so controversial.
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C
It's just so weird to me that that was considered controversial. I mean, contemporaries knew, oral accounts suggested it. There had to be DNA evidence that they had children together before the wider historical community would accept that Thomas Jefferson had a long term sexual relationship and children with an enslaved woman who he owned. And I think that just speaks to the atmosphere around the history of the Founding Fathers, that for many years they were regarded as kind of untouchable and that it was considered inappropriate to discuss even historically proven facts about their lives if it kind of was out of step with the narrative that these were the kind of glorious founders of a country of liberty. And, you know, I think that that does a disservice to the story of America. It's a really, really complicated story, and there are many deep contradictions. And you can't understand America today if you don't grapple with the contradictions at the time. And this was a relationship, you know, that you can kind of trace its roots to the death of Martha, that because he couldn't marry again, an enslaved woman offered the opportunity to have that kind of long term companionship without the pressure of having to marry and confer rights onto her. And you also can't deny the imbalance of power in that relationship. I mean, he owned Sally Hemings. She was his property under the laws of the time, time and the country, she belonged to him. And so, you know, you think now of power imbalances in relationships. This is a completely different level. I mean, she. Her life is dependent on his ownership. And the relationship endured for decades, as far as the evidence suggests. And he acknowledged her children in some ways, gave them special treatment, some of them were later freed, but the reality remained that she remained an enslaved person in his possession. And it is a really uncomfortable fact that one of the most important Founding Fathers, the one who penned the words that have inspired generations about life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness was living in this way and treating another human in this way.
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B
And his political outlook before independence reflects different kinds of contradictions too. I mean, he saw himself as both British and Virginian. He hoped that those imperial tensions could be resolved. But like many colonial elites, he really admired Britain's traditions of liberty. Ironically, I mean, Britain was seen as being a much more free society than many of its European rivals. But at the same time, he also started to believe that Parliament's actions after the 1760s were threatening fundamental rights. And he was particularly influenced by the language of natural rights, you know, those books that we mentioned, you know, of John Locke and Burke and so on, that had started to circulate through enlightenment and political thought. And he became convinced that unchecked power inevitably becomes corrupt and tyrannical. And this is one of the things, the funny stories of classics. I mean, that's what Plato says in the Republic, that the problem with democracy is it always ends in tyranny. And again, no clues for why that's particularly resonant today. But the idea that you're part of a big continuum of political thought that you need to protect and defend and fight for your rights and your freedoms, it's something that was really felt very strongly in the U.S. it was. We're going to talk about taxation as being a kind of cue for some of these problems, but it's not just about that. It's about the really long held belief about liberty that's set within a context of the, of the 1700s, I think it's quite hard for us to really understand what that means today.
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C
But you get a sense, you know, just listening to Jefferson's background and how learned he was and how erudite and how much an intellectual kind of student of what he would have regarded as Western civilization. These founding fathers had a high opinion of themselves. They did regard themselves as equal to British parliamentarians and British elites. And as a result, the treatment by Britain that relegated them to this kind of lesser status was deeply offensive. And in 1774, Jefferson published of lincendury pamphlet A Summary View of the Rights of British America, in which he powerfully argued that colonial assemblies did not need the authority of Parliament to operate, that they already could operate independently. And it was extremely radical for its time. But he had such confidence in his intellect and in his peer group as these men who could manage their own affairs that he started to really conceive of a world in which they would push very heavily back against the patronizing attitude of the British Crown.
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B
And he thought that Power should be best held by independent landowners who were loosely governed. You know, so a bit like the kind of the small state idea of what we think of today as Republican United States or Conservative Party Britain, where the government should do as little as possible. So Jefferson didn't believe in the idea of concentrations of power, of standing armies, of financial elites that could be dangerous. He generally saw his ideal state of being run by gentlemen who were sort of benign rulers who looked after each other, quite fearful of the idea of banking and of finance and of elites. In other words, you could say if you were cynical, it was a world that he would be perfect for him. You know, if you're wealthy, you're a landowner and you're benign, then great. But, you know, Jefferson's real calling card was his ability to write and express these colonial grievances in universal language. And that's most obvious from the fact that in 1776, aged just 33, he drafted probably the most important, most famous document of the modern era, certainly in American history, which is the United States Declaration of Independence and its assertion that all men are created equal, which transforms a colonial dispute between levels of taxation and power accountability into a statement of universal political principles. And, you know, Jefferson therefore became a sort of towering figure in US Politics. And of course, he got to be the boss as the third President of the United States. But after the break, we're going to come back and we're going to see who was the second president. So we're doing this a bit like Top of the Pops after sort of the countdown to see who's next. But we're gonna, we're gonna come back after the break and have a chat through John Adams.
- [30:09]
D
Hey, everybody, this is Taylor from the Total Soccer show. And this episode is brought to you by Hotels.com the summer of soccer is right around the corner. And if you aren't using hotels.com to book the experience of a lifetime, it's worth asking why? As a member, you save up to 20% on hundreds of thousands of hotels around the world and earn rewards on every single stay, which means the trips you're taking now help pay for the ones you're already dreaming about. So whether you're following your team across North America this summer or planning a well earned escape after being glued to football for weeks on end, make sure you book on hotels.com and start earning rewards. Because when it comes to hotels, it's all in the name. Hotels.com.
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B
Okay, for John Adams, second President of the United States. Super famous, right?
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C
He is famous. I think helped by Hamilton, which we'll come on to.
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B
Oh yes.
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C
He is one of the fiercest, most argumentative, most intellectually driven of the founding fathers. I'm not sure that he was a hugely likable person, Peter no.
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B
He's born in 1735 Massachusetts to a relatively modest but respectable farming family. And so he lacks the immense wealth of the Virginian plantation elites. And he doesn't have the cosmopolitan glamour of Benjamin Franklin. He rises through education, law, hard work and relentless ambition. And by the early 1770s he's become one of the colony's leading political thinkers and amongst the strongest advocates for independence. Because like some of the others that we're talking about, he trained as a lawyer. Adamson studied at Harvard and had a deep respect, like John Jay did, for law, constitutionalism and civic order. So he's thinking about what is it that a state needs to function.
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C
He is a very serious man, intensely serious. I'm not sure he had a great sense of humor actually. He's very disciplined, often combative, and even his allies, I wouldn't even say close friends, but people who probably would have regarded themselves as his allies found him difficult. He could be blunt, he was proud, very sensitive to criticism, and he was prone to long and quite tiresome intellectual
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B
arguments, but otherwise fun to be around,
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C
but otherwise the life and soul of the party. Contemporaries, though, must have really been impressed with his work because they put up with that and still recognized his integrity, who was often described as having this incredible integrity and his work ethic. And Thomas Jefferson would later describe him as always an honest man, often a great one. That's such a compliment. If ever I heard, I'd settle for that.
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B
But he, so he's not, he's not effortly charismatic like George Washington, who we'll hear about, or polish like Jefferson. He could be awkward like you mentioned, therefore he could be start an argument with himself. Very self conscious and thin skinned. His letters and diaries reveal someone who's really aware of anybody who says anything critical, deeply anxious about his reputation and his legacy. And like you mentioned, he has these long arguments. You know, he's, he's just one of those people who won't ever let things go. You know, he turns conversations into arguments. And Benjamin Franklin also says that Adams was an honest man and often a wise one. But sometimes, says Franklin, it is some things absolutely out of his senses. In other words, you know, he just wouldn't let it go. We've all got friends like that, right?
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C
I mean, I tried not to these days, honestly.
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B
That's another story.
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D
Okay.
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C
At the same time, he did believe in public service. He wasn't driven by the accumulation of personal wealth or excess or fame or patronage. He really believed in personal duty and the ideas that he was putting forward. And so that seriousness did give him moral authority. During the Revolutionary crisis, people recognized that he was someone who stood for something. And he emerged as one of the earliest and fiercest advocates of independence in the Continental Congress. And even despite his abrasive manner and the sometimes tiresome and thin skinned way he engaged with these discussions, delegates actually trusted him because he was driven by principle rather than by ego.
- [34:21]
B
The thing I was most interested in with John Adams is his relationship with his wife, Abigail Adams. Tell me a bit about Abigail Afwa. Because we haven't had too many women in the founding fathers story, apart from the ones who are in subservient positions. But Abigail's slightly unusual.
- [34:38]
C
Well, actually, the women were all there. I mean, Martha Jefferson had a huge role in Thomas Jefferson's life. We'll talk about George Washington later. His wife also played a huge role in his life. But Abigail Adams is different because the correspondence between her and John Adams has survived. And so through that, we get to really see the intensity of that relationship and how much of a relationship of intellectual equals they really had. I mean, they would debate and discuss all of the issues, all of the ideas, all of the experiences. And it was also an intellectually intimate and emotionally candid exchange that has actually given us a really important source of insight into the mechanisms and the workings of that period in American history. And Abigail Adams was an intellectually formidable woman and absolutely part of the revolutionary generation. And she's an example of how women were excluded from formal political life, even though they had so much to offer and the ways in which they found other avenues to influence and shape events without ever being formally recognized or credited for it. But one of the things that's incredible about the exchange between John Adams and Abigail Adams is that she even at one point explicitly says, don't forget about women, like don't forget about women in founding this nation in these documents. And he basically dismisses it out of hand. So even this woman that he respects, who's his companion and equal, he treats in a way, when it comes to the rights of women as an unnecessary distraction.
- [36:12]
B
So she doesn't have the same level of elite education that's available to men, but she's just got very good judgment. And Adams is constantly talking to her and asking her. And like you said, not only where she says, remember women. But she also warns that unlimited male authority could be dangerous. And she said all men would be tyrants if they could. And so she shows, you know, that she's constantly there as, and should be recognized as a sort of key person within the story of US Independence, because without her, her husband's judgment would have been much more clouded. He keeps talking to her to ask for her advice. And apart from all everything else, she's also extremely practical. So while the war's going on, she manages farms, the finances, family affairs, as do so many of the other wives of the founding fathers. From her home near Boston, she can sometimes hear the cannon fire, in fact, and all these other things she's having to deal with about smallpox outbreaks, troop movements, the fears of British attacks are important. And she opposes slavery. That's an important thing, too. Much more openly than many of her contemporaries. She's very troubled, openly about the contradiction between revolutionary rhetoric and freedom and the fact that there's unfreedom for a huge part of the population in the United States, too. So she becomes really important in the story of azadams towards independence. But afterwards, too, Afra.
- [37:34]
C
Well, John Adams becomes president, and she then becomes more than his companion who advises him, but actually an unofficial advisor to the president. And that's something that is so obvious to people around Adams that some actually refer to her mockingly as Mrs. President. And that's not a compliment. You know, there were people in the circle who were uncomfortable with a woman having this level of access and influence, and yet Adams depended on her judgment. So again, the contradictions at this time, that the role of women that played a crucial role that actually enabled these events was something that people didn't want to see or be aware of because it conflicted with their ideas about the proper role of women. And looking back, it's hard to get your head around how they could create the cognitive dissonance to make both of those things work. But they were so far from acknowledging gender equality, even while they were personally benefiting from it.
- [38:31]
B
And ironically, Adams is a real Anglophile. You know, he considers himself fully British. He really admires Britain's traditions and its governance. Like many colonial lawyers, he believed that the way that the British presented and protected rights was one of the great protectors of liberty in history and not just in the modern world. And so his opposition to London and to imperial policy therefore emerges not from a hostility to Britain, but from the conviction that Parliament is violating established constitutional principles. And that turning point comes for Adams like it does for so many of the Founding Fathers we're talking about is with the Stamp act and with the idea that taxation without colonial representation threatens fundamental liberties. It's not just that they want to have representation in London. It's that they are being governed with an iron fist from abroad. So Adams is still very conflicted in the 1770s because he's committed to legal process and order. And in fact, after the Boston Massacre in 1770, he defends British soldiers in court because he believes that justice matters more than political passion. So Adams is quite a complicated character, and I think he is quite a good example exemplif of what an American was thinking in the 1770s, very conflicted by models that he finds very attractive. This idea about liberty and it has to have a stable constitutional framework is really important. And it's not just because the Roman Republic model, it's about the idea about what you need to stop tyrants taking over.
- [40:05]
C
Well, I mean, as well as studying the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic, these men have also exhaustively studied the collapse of Rome. And I think one of the lessons they've taken from that story is this fear, this fear of building a civilization only to have it collapse and give way to mob rule and violence. And they felt the fragility of their situation. And it's one of the reasons that they set out to create a stable constitutional framework. They knew they needed checks and balances. They knew they couldn't have unchecked executive power. They were genuinely fearful that breaking away from Britain and starting this new experiment would all be for nothing if they didn't get the model right. And Adams is influential in that way because of his determination and his clarity about how important that is. So he's pushing relentlessly towards independence because of his sense of justice, his sense of having been mistreated by Britain, and that they deserve and can manage their affairs better themselves. But he's not gung ho. He knows that it needs to be set up the right way. In 1775, he plays a really crucial role in backing the separation from Britain, persuading Congress to support this, but also supporting the appointment of George Washington as commander of the Continental Army. And he is very concerned to make sure that this is done in the right way.
- [41:27]
B
So you could say that if Jefferson gives the revolution its language, John Jay gives it the structure, and John Adams provides much of the urgency, the discipline, and the political drive that sits behind it. So look, Alfred, that's. That's five of the seven Founding Fathers we've done. We've mentioned the role that the that their wives or their mistresses played in that too. But the next episode we're going to look at the probably the two most famous of all the rock stars. The rock stars, well, we've got superstar Thomas Jefferson, but yeah, I think Alexander Hamilton, who's had a sort of burst of light and shone on him by Lin Manuel Miranda. And then of course the the daddy of them all, George Washington. Someone should write a musical about him him as well. I reckon it might do quite well. Thanks for listening to Legacy.
- [42:13]
C
To dive deeper and support the show, sign up to Legacy plus, you'll get to enjoy bonus episodes early access, fewer ads Q and as and more go to Legacy supportingcast fm.
- [42:24]
B
Don't forget, you can watch all our episodes on Spotify and YouTube as well. For everything else, including our substacks and update on TikTok and Instagram, just check out the show notes or search Legacy Podcast I'm Peter Frankenberg.
- [42:36]
C
I'm Afra Hersh and we'll see you on the next episode of Legacy.
- [42:57]
D
Hey everybody, this is Taylor from the Total Soccer show and this episode is brought to you by Hotels.com the summer of soccer is right around the corner, and if you aren't using hotels.com to book the experience of a lifetime, it's worth asking why? As a member, you save up to 20% on hundreds of thousands of hotels around the world and earn rewards on every single stay. Which means the trips you're taking now help pay for the ones you're already dreaming about. So whether you're following your team across North America this summer or planning a well earned escape after being glued to football for weeks on end, make sure you book on hotels.com and start earning rewards. Because when it comes to hotels, it's all in the name. Hotels dot com.