Excerpt from John Adams by David McCullough, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I was as light when I came home, as I had been heavy when I went," Adams wrote.

It had long been an article of faith among the Adamses that land was the only sound investment and, once purchased, was never to be sold. Only once is Deacon John known to have made an exception to the rule, when he sold ten acres to help send his son John to college.


The Harvard of John Adams's undergraduate days was an institution of four red-brick buildings, a small chapel, a faculty of seven, and an enrollment of approximately one hundred scholars. His own class of 1755, numbering twenty-seven, was put under the tutorship of Joseph Mayhew, who taught Latin, and for Adams the four years were a time out of time that passed all too swiftly. When it was over and he abruptly found himself playing the part of village schoolmaster in remote Worcester, he would write woefully to a college friend, "Total and complete misery has succeeded so suddenly to total and complete happiness, that all the philosophy I can muster can scarce support me under the amazing shock."

He worked hard and did well at Harvard, and was attracted particularly to mathematics and science, as taught by his favorite professor, John Winthrop, the most distinguished member of the faculty and the leading American astronomer of the time. Among Adams's cherished Harvard memories was of a crystal night when, from the roof of Old Harvard Hall, he gazed through Professor Winthrop's telescope at the satellites of Jupiter.

He enjoyed his classmates and made several close friends. To his surprise, he also discovered a love of study and books such as he had never imagined. "I read forever," he would remember happily, and as years passed, in an age when educated men took particular pride in the breadth of their reading, he became one of the most voracious readers of any. Having discovered books at Harvard, he was seldom ever to be without one for the rest of his days.

He lived in the "lowermost northwest chamber" of Massachusetts Hall, sharing quarters with Thomas Sparhawk, whose chief distinction at college appears to have come from breaking windows, and Joseph Stockbridge, notable for his wealth and his refusal to eat meat.

The regimen was strict and demanding, the day starting with morning prayers in Holden Chapel at six and ending with evening prayers at five. The entire college dined at Commons, on the ground floor of Old Harvard, each scholar bringing his own knife and fork which, when the meal ended, would be wiped clean on the table cloth. By most accounts, the food was wretched. Adams not only never complained, but attributed his own and the overall good health of the others to the daily fare -- beef, mutton, Indian pudding, salt fish on Saturday -- and an ever abundant supply of hard cider. "I shall never forget, how refreshing and salubrious we found it, hard as it often was." Indeed, for the rest of his life, a morning "gill" of hard cider was to be John Adams's preferred drink before breakfast.

"All scholars," it was stated in the college rules, were to "behave themselves blamelessly, leading sober, righteous, and godly lives." There was to be no "leaning" at prayers, no lying, blasphemy, fornication, drunkenness, or picking locks. Once, the records show, Adams was fined three shillings, nine pence for absence from college longer than the time allowed for vacation or by permission. Otherwise, he had not a mark against him. As the dutiful son of Deacon John, he appears neither to have succumbed to gambling, "riotous living," nor to "wenching" in taverns on the road to Charlestown.

But the appeal of young women was exceedingly strong, for as an elderly John Adams would one day write, he was "of an amorous disposition" and from as early as ten or eleven years of age had been "very fond of the society of females." Yet he kept himself in rein, he later insisted.

Copyright © 2001 by David McCullough