A History of the American People

more than two hundred million.' But he did not want to see it. He hated progress, change, the
consequences of science and technology, inventions, innovation, bustle. It was not that he
despised science. Quite the contrary. Like most of the Founding Fathers, he admired and studied
it. He believed in what he called the science of government' and he ingeniously worked into his constitutionalism a variety of scientific metaphors, particularly the principle on which the balance rested. Believing wholeheartedly in educating the young republic, he thought students should be taught science, both theoretical and applied:It is not indeed the fine arts our country
requires,' he noted, but the useful, the mechanical arts.' But he loathed the physical, visual evidence of life in a progressive country.From the year 1761,' he wrote to Rush, now more than fifty years, I have constantly lived in an Enemy's Country. And that without having one personal enemy in the world, that I know of.' This tremendously unAmerican dislike of progress was compounded by the purgatory Adams suffered from being dislocated. He was devoted to New England, especiallythe neighborhood
of Boston' and his own town, Quincy. Being in Europe, as envoy, was an adventure and in some
ways a delight for a man who has a taste for the Old World, but being forced to live outside New
England in restless, self-transforming America was punishment. One feels for these early
presidents, with their strong local roots, being sentenced to long exile in temporary
accommodation before the White House was built and made cozy. Washington hated New York.
Philadelphia was marginally better but was then the biggest city in the entire New World, dirty,
noisy, and anathema to a country gentleman. Before his presidency was over, Adams was
compelled to leave Philadelphia to set up his government shop in the new, barely begun capital
of Washington, where the vast, endless streets, which mostly contained no buildings of any kind,
were unpaved, muddy cesspools in winter, waiting for summer to transform them into mosquito-
infested swamps. Washington in fact is built on a swamp and, then and now, specialized in
gigantic cockroaches, which terrified Abigail. She was often ill, and demanded to be sent back to
Quincy, and Adams used the excuse of tending her to hurry there himself and try to conduct
government from his own house. He found the business of creating a new capital commensurate
with America's future profoundly depressing, laying it down that the country would not be ready for greatness' inless than a century.' One has a vivid glimpse of Adams, towards the end of his
presidency, sitting in the unfinished executive mansion,' still largely unfurnished and requiring thirteen fires' constantly replenished just to keep out the cold and damp, surrounded by packing-
cases and festooned with clotheslines that Abigail used for drying the wash.
However, before leaving the presidency, which, as we shall see, he did most reluctantly
despite all its discomforts, Adams made a selection of vital significance, perhaps the most
important single appointment in the whole history of the presidency. John Marshall (1755-1835)
was a Virginian frontiersman, born in a log cabin on the frontier. Like many early Americans he
combined a modest background with honorable lineage, being of old stock, related to the Lees,
the Randolphs, and the Jeffersons. His father was prominent in state politics. Marshall fought in
the Revolution, but as a result of the crisis he had little formal education apart from a brief spell
at William and Mary College. But he set up as a lawyer in Richmond-the Americans were never
inhibited by the trade union restrictions of the English Inns of Court system from nailing their
name-plates to the wall-and soon showed, by his brilliant advocacy in court, that he was made
for forensic life. He and Adams got on well together. They were both confirmed and cerebral
federalists, believing in strong government, hierarchy based on merit and no nonsense about
states' rights. They did not like nonsense in social life either, beyond the formality needed to
keep the executive and the judiciary respected. Marshall, like Adams, was an elitist-but he did