STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
News from the 1700s - it's the story of John Adams, the second president of the United States. His single term was bitter and divisive. Through it all, he exchanged letters with his wife, Abigail. The historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky has been able to read those letters, even though Abigail wanted John to burn them.
LINDSAY M CHERVINSKY: John was very disobedient. He did not burn the letters with Abigail, and thank goodness, because they are - they're where all the good stuff is - where the snark and the sass and the grudges but the love and affection, the small little detailed things that make someone full - makes someone really come to life.
INSKEEP: Like letters, Adams wrote to Abigail soon after assuming the presidency in 1797. His wife had stayed home in Massachusetts.
CHERVINSKY: And he entered the president's house, and it was kind of a mess. And he sends these letters to her pleading for her to come, saying, I can't possibly manage this. I need you here. And she wrote back saying, we agreed that I was going to stay home because I have to take care of our house, and your mother is dying, and I need to take care of her. And he writes back, and he's like, but what about my feelings?
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
CHERVINSKY: And then...
(LAUGHTER)
CHERVINSKY: He realizes - you know, he's like - at the end, he writes - don't laugh...
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
CHERVINSKY: ...Like, knowing - just such awareness of the absurdity. And so when I saw that letter, I was like, oh, this is so priceless.
INSKEEP: Lindsay Chervinsky brings Adams to life in a new book called "Making The Presidency." The book has drawn attention to a rising young historian. Full disclosure - she once reviewed a book of mine, though we'd never met until she walked into our studios to talk about John Adams' perilous presidency.
It began as President George Washington retired, taking his unifying presence off the American scene. Adams was the leader of one party, the Federalists, and his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson, led a rival party. The country was at the edge of war. The U.S. Navy was exchanging gunfire with the French navy. The president and Congress took desperate measures that feel controversial and relevant to this day.
CHERVINSKY: So the Federalists really preferred a close alliance to Great Britain.
INSKEEP: This is Adams' people.
CHERVINSKY: Yes, correct. And the Jeffersonian Republicans, Thomas Jefferson's party, were much more closely aligned with France. And I think it's really one of the only other times where we have seen a election season that is closely defined with one party is aligned with one country and one party is aligned with another.
INSKEEP: We're getting to one fact about John Adams that I learned when I was a kid in some class somewhere or whatever, and that is something called the Alien and Sedition Acts, which sound really creepy. What were they?
CHERVINSKY: (Laughter) Well, some of them were a little creepy. So there were actually four bills.
INSKEEP: All of them targeting supposedly disloyal people within the borders of the United States, like the law that made it harder for immigrants to become citizens, or the law that made it easier to kick out citizens of a foreign nation, or the law targeting people who were American citizens.
CHERVINSKY: The next one was called the Alien's Friend Acts (ph), and it basically permitted the president to kick anyone out of the country whenever he felt like it without due process.
INSKEEP: ...Saying, I think this person is too friendly with the enemy.
CHERVINSKY: Yes. And that bill, the Alien Friends bill that gave Adams sort of unilateral power to expel people, he never used. He refused to use it 'cause he thought it was too extreme. The sedition bill is a different story. The sedition bill made it a crime to criticize the president and Congress, notably leaving out the vice president, who was Thomas Jefferson.
INSKEEP: Huh.
CHERVINSKY: And it expired on the last day of Adams' presidency, so it was very carefully tailored. And it, you know, was something that we would consider to be a gross violation of the First Amendment today. He didn't - again, didn't ask for it, but he did sign it. He worried that speech would be used to invoke or inflict violence. And newspapers were outwardly encouraging violence with success. There was political violence in the streets.
INSKEEP: How did that play out then when the president started running for reelection and had an opponent?
CHERVINSKY: What was interesting about the election is the prosecutions, it actually turns out, were kind of hard to bring because a lot of juries were uncomfortable with this concept. And it was actually pretty hard to bring forward witnesses because often the witnesses would be people in the government, and it would be embarrassing to them to call them as either examples of truth or as a defense of truth.
INSKEEP: Oh, and there wasn't necessarily a tweet that you could refer back to.
CHERVINSKY: Exactly. Exactly.
INSKEEP: You needed someone to testify to what they said.
CHERVINSKY: (Laughter) Exactly. And I think the common story has been that the bill was so unpopular, and so Adams lost. What I actually think happened was a lot of Americans saw all four of those bills as well as this much-expanded Army, which had become very political - and Adams was very uncomfortable with that politicization - as well as the taxes that were levied to pay for the Army. All of those things were seen as a system that the extreme Federalists were trying to impose on the American people. And that is, I think, what led to the Federalist downfall.
INSKEEP: We can skip over the way that it was a disputed election - the way that it was extraordinarily close - and get to the point that Adams lost. What was important about the way he behaved in defeat?
CHERVINSKY: Well, there are a couple of things that I think are essential. The first is - and it's the most simple - he lost, and he accepted the result. He did not contest it. He did not fight it, and he went home. And in the age of Napoleon, that is a radical thing to do. In any republic, it is radical for the first person who was defeated to willingly relinquish power.
The second thing he did was once it was clear that Jefferson was going to be the winner, he went out of his way to ensure that the character of the transition was as smooth and as helpful as possible. And then once he was home, he wrote a letter to Jefferson saying, everything looks peaceful here. I wish you a successful and happy administration. The Constitution doesn't require any of those things, and yet they're so unbelievably essential.
INSKEEP: I want people to know, if they don't, that you have a day job.
CHERVINSKY: I do.
INSKEEP: You work at Mount Vernon, George Washington's home, right?
CHERVINSKY: Yes. I am the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library.
INSKEEP: So here's my question. Without the work of John Adams, would the country that Washington is credited with founding have survived?
CHERVINSKY: No, because Washington laid down all of these precedents and crafted the structure of the presidency. But if someone else had come afterwards and thrown it out or had been more motivated to follow their own political ambitions, then Washington's precedents would have been seen as an interesting historic anomaly. It would have been a one-off. In a system of government that requires the buy-in and participation of citizens that is not enforced with military might generally from top down, it requires repetition over decades, if not centuries, to make these things actually stick. And so they have to start with the first person who repeats them.
INSKEEP: Lindsay Chervinsky is the author of "Making The Presidency." Thanks so much.
CHERVINSKY: Thank you for having me.
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