John Adams—the “Colossus of Independence”—was an acclaimed politician, lawyer, writer, and constitutional thinker. He started life as a bookish young man on a family farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where his father was a deacon in the Congregational Church. Fiercely loyal to the cause of America, Adams would go on to serve as Massachusetts’s delegate to the Continental Congress during the American Revolution, negotiator of the treaty to end the War of Independence, the first U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, the first Vice President, and the second President of the United States.
Yet for all his impressive accolades, Adams arguably made his greatest impact through his choices of whom to place in positions of leadership and influence. In his years as a young lawyer in Boston, Adams developed the practice of writing down character studies of people he encountered. Independent-minded and cantankerous, he was nonetheless an exemplary judge of character and unafraid to delegate to those he deemed worthy. Beginning with the very creation of the new nation, Adams’ most significant achievements came from empowering others.
Since the fall of 1775, Adams—along with the Virginian Richard Henry Lee—had been pushing Congress to issue a declaration of independence from Britain. In June 1776, Congress decided to set up a committee to draft the declaration’s preamble. Many people would have jumped at the chance to articulate the principles that would define the American experiment. Instead, Adams ensured that Thomas Jefferson would be appointed head of the five-person drafting committee.
Why? It’s true Adams was one of the busiest members of Congress, ultimately serving on ninety different committees. His real reasons, though, went beyond workload. As Adams claimed to have put it in a conversation with Jefferson:
Reason 1st. You are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business.
Reason 2nd. I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; you are very much otherwise.
Reason 3rd. You can write ten times better than I can.
Putting aside ego, Adams selected the man he believed would best articulate the moral case for the nation—a case that Lincoln would pick up and reinvigorate four-score and seven years later.