The United States presidency is a complicated office. Its legacy has developed, changed, regressed, and progressed. The idea of the office is pivotal to most history classrooms, as it is often the focus of how United States history is taught. Learning about history through domestic and foreign policy allows students to understand how presidents reacted to national and international affairs. It helps students see change through time and connects them to figures they can identify with. Yet this framework can also disguise how uncertain the presidency actually was in its earliest years. It appears orderly from a distance, but historian Lindsay Chervinsky emphasizes that the office was shaped through experimentation, debate, and personal interpretation.

The American presidency was forged in uncertainty. While George Washington served as the first president, his administration was full of unpredictability and surrounded by important questions. How will the president govern? What powers does he have? What powers does he not have? What is the relationship to Congress? These questions dominated the Washington presidency. But arguably, the second president had the harder task. George Washington was always the vision for the presidential role. At the Constitutional Convention, Washington’s own copy of the Constitution contains heavy annotation under Article Two, evidence that even he was preparing to give meaning to an office no one yet fully understood. When Washington announced his retirement in 1796 citing exhaustion and a longing for Mount Vernon, the nation confronted an even more unsettling question: How would the United States survive without him? Not if, but how? What would happen if the country could not survive without a leader whose authority extended far beyond written law? John Adams, the second President of the United States, was no George Washington.

These questions are at the core of Chervinsky’s new monograph Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic, where she details how Adams refined the still fragile template left behind by Washington. She writes that Adams “was tasked with navigating the presidency without that unique prestige” (2). This claim is not only descriptive but interpretive. It suggests that Adams’s choices were effectively arguments about the nature of executive power. Chervinsky argues that the difference between Washington and Adams is what makes the presidency so revealing. The navigation of the republic after Washington is the central focus of her book, and she is persuasive when she shows that Adams faced not only the responsibilities of the office, but also the responsibility of defining what the office was. Chervinsky treats Adams not simply as a statesman, but as a political thinker whose writings show how he reasoned through constitutional uncertainty. It is not a hagiographic portrait but rather examines how Adams’s own ideals shaped his decisions, sometimes constructively and sometimes problematically. This makes her work different from biographies that focus on Adams as a personality, such as David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning John Adams (2001) or Joseph Ellis’s Passionate Sage (1993). Instead, she follows the development of Adams’s political thought during a moment when the office itself was still under construction.

John Adams the man and the president appear as two distinct figures. Some historians, like John Ferling, Page Smith, and Bernard Weisberger, argue that the United States may not have achieved independence without Adams’s fierce defense of civil liberties and his ability to articulate Revolutionary purpose. As president, however, Adams confronted political realities that pressured him to define how his principles applied within the new constitutional framework. This tension interests Chervinsky, who shows Adams wrestling with the same ideas of virtue, order, and republican survival that guided him in earlier decades. Her treatment invites readers to consider whether Adams successfully adapted his Revolutionary ideals to a partisan republic or whether those ideals sometimes misled him in the new environment.

While president, Adams tackled a trade and naval conflict with France. He attempted to keep the United States out of full-scale war, but the resulting Quasi-War did not help his position. At the same time, he grew increasingly fearful of French spies and domestic dissent. This fear shaped his support for the Alien and Sedition Acts which allowed him to “order all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The Sedition Act criminalized “false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government. These acts plagued his legacy, and many historians have tried to explain why he signed them. Chervinsky pays special attention not just to the war and the acts themselves, but to Adams’s thought process.

Through letters and diaries, Chervinsky analyzes what Adams believed the presidency demanded of him and how he explained it to himself and others. Chervinsky expertly keeps Adams at the center of her narrative but also uses his words to demonstrate how he understood executive responsibility. In a letter from John Adams to Judge Benjamin Chadbourne, Adams warned that “the fate of our republic is at hand” and that most republics fail when “the virtues are gone a free and equal constitution of government has rarely existed among men and requires constant vigilance to protect” (130). When Chervinsky writes that President Adams had not asked for the Sedition Act and had not lobbied for it, she explains that, per Adams’s own words, he believed that he was preserving the republic. She also leaves space for the reader to question whether his reasoning truly aligned with republican principles or whether his fear of disorder overwhelmed his commitment to liberty. Chervinsky does not suggest that the Acts were defensible. Instead, she shows how Adams explained them to himself. This is a valuable distinction because it reveals the internal logic of a president who believed that the preservation of the republic could at times require actions that strained the meaning of freedom. Yet it also raises significant questions. Does understanding his fear make his decision more acceptable? Does it reveal a consistent theory of the presidency, or does it show how easily an executive can interpret a crisis in ways that lead to an expansion of federal authority?

Chervinsky’s work nonetheless gestures toward a broader argument about the nature of executive power. Making the Presidency shows that Adams believed the office required a steady guardian who would act decisively when republican stability seemed threatened. Yet the book also reveals the profound limitations of Adams’s approach. His attempt to balance fears of French subversion with what he viewed as equitable solutions to the problem of a volatile press led to choices that were undeniably wrong. The evidence for this appears most clearly in Adams’s own letters and justifications, where he repeatedly warned that the republic stood on the brink of collapse and insisted that measures like the Sedition Act would safeguard national stability. These documents reveal a leader who conflated criticism with danger and believed that extraordinary action was necessary to avert disaster.

Chervinsky illuminates the internal logic behind those decisions, but the narrative also underscores the hazards of allowing executive anxiety to shape national policy. Rather than offering a coherent model of presidential authority, the book demonstrates how urgent concerns can distort judgment and invite expansive interpretations of federal power. In this sense, it encourages readers to consider whether the origins of the executive branch contain tensions that resist easy resolution and whether Adams’s example serves as a warning about the fragility of republican liberty when fear becomes a guiding force.

Writing history is a time-consuming process. Formulating cohesive sentences and nuanced paragraphs that are readable is an art. Chervinsky makes this process appear effortless, not because she avoids complexity, but because she interprets her sources with care. Her earlier book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, examined how Washington built a structure for executive advice. In Making the Presidency, she shows how Adams made decisions when no structure or precedent offered guidance. Both books demonstrate how institutions grow through interpretation and misinterpretation, success and error.

Chervinsky’s treatment of the Election of 1800 continues in this same nuanced vein . When Adams lost, he ensured that the fundamental attribute of the nation, a peaceful transfer of power, was respected. Chervinsky argues that Adams did not attend Jefferson’s inauguration, not because of personal spite, but because no precedent existed and no invitation was given (332). This interpretation encourages readers to consider the moment not as a failure of character but as a moment of constitutional uncertainty. Yet it also raises a question that Chervinsky acknowledges but does not fully settle: Was Adams consciously shaping a tradition, or did the tradition emerge from circumstances that neither he nor Jefferson fully controlled? That ambiguity strengthens the book, because it reflects the uncertainty that defined the early presidency.

Further Reading:

Joseph Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (W. W. Norton & Company, 1993).

John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (The University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

David McCullough, John Adams (Simon & Schuster, 2001).

Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (The University of North Carolina Press, 1976).

David Waldstreicher, In The Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

Bernard Weisberger, America Afire: Jefferson, Adams, and the First Contested Election (Harper Collins, 2000).

Gordon Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Penguin Press, 2017). 

 

This article originally appeared in January 2025

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Ethan Healey is a historian specializing in Early American History with particular emphasis on 18^th– and 19th-century New England. Ethan’s most recent research was an analysis of second American President John Adams and why he stayed retired. The work primarily focused on Adams’s relationship with the press, as well as friends and rivals of his era. Ethan earned his bachelor’s degree in history from New England College, and he currently attends Gettysburg College, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in history. Ethan has published a few academic papers across various online outlets, appeared on several historical podcasts, and has even published poetry in a small local publication known as The Henniker Review. His debut fiction novella, Petition for Return, was released in 2025. He is a high school History Teacher in New Hampshire.