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Posted by Roger Saunders Apr 25, 2008 |
Many people, with just a passing glance, view the John Adams administration as a failure, if only because he was not elected to a second term. There were some glaring mistakes in his presidency. The number one mistake being the passage of the Alien and Sedition Act which severely limited the freedom of speech that the constitution was supposed to protect in the 1st Amendment.
A closer look tells a different story. The main reason that Adams was not reelected was because members of the Federalist Party didn't like the way for the way he handled the crisis with France. It almost came to a declared war and was all but that on the high seas. Adams had to stand up to his own party in order to cool the ardor for war. He held the conviction that diplomacy and patience would win in the end. It was very close but he turned out to be right. He sacrificed his own ambition to remain president in order to make sure that his young country would not have to go through a war that it was not ready for.
Historians tell us that if he had followed his ambition rather than his conscience, Americans could very well be speaking French today. It was only a few short years later that Napoleon came on the scene. If we had gone to war with France, Napoleon's rise to power would most assuredly have hastened. If we had lost that war, the French had a very ambitious plan to take over North America and make it part of the French Empire.
So, while Adams had some policies that were not positive, overall, I would say his presidency was successful. He left the country in better shape, from a foreign affairs point of view, than he found it!