Elder It’s John Adams’s 278th birthday: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gilbert_Stuart_John_Adams.jpg I don’t think I’ve ever been fair to his memory. In the lists of Presidents that I used to study as a child, he stood between austere-father-Washington and favourite-uncle-Jefferson; neither a quasi-monarch nor a comfortable democrat. Even his stamp in the Prexie series I collected was passionless-pink, not the Virginia-agricultural green of Washington’s one cent or the Roman purple of Jefferson’s three cents; merely offering its seemingly feeble two cents’ worth: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_adams_stamp.JPG These were childhood intuitions and, as I say, unfair. Later on, Pound [whose birthday is also today] made much much more of Adams, and that itself seemed dangerous: ‘…You the one, I the few said John Adams speaking of fears in the abstract to his volatile friend Mr. Jefferson…’ [canto LXXXI] There’s also the poignant story of Adams’s death on July 4th 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration, during the Presidency of his son – I used to read [don’t know if it’s true] that his last words were ‘Thomas Jefferson survives’. He was wrong; Jefferson had died a few hours earlier. Their deaths left Charles Carroll of Carrollton as the only living signer. Somehow, Adams comes out of this story upstaged by Jefferson. I wouldn’t want it otherwise, but I still feel obscurely that I’m being unfair to him. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Adams_Presidential_$1_Coin_obverse.png
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 07:10:39 +0000
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