专八人文知识需知的美国名人--约翰·亚当斯

专八人文知识需知的美国名人--约翰·亚当斯

　　英语专八人文知识涵盖的知识面较广，考生们需要平时多积累小常识，这样在专八考试中才能游刃有余，新东方在线整理了专八人文知识需知的美国名人系列知识点供考生们参考。

　　约翰·亚当斯(John Adams，1735年10月30日-1826年7月4日)是美国第一任副总统(1789年-1797年)，其后接替乔治·华盛顿成为美国第二任总统(1797年-1801年)。亚当斯亦是《独立宣言》签署者之一，被美国人视为最重要的开国元勋之一，同华盛顿、杰斐逊和富兰克林齐名。他的长子约翰·昆西·亚当斯后当选为美国第六任总统。

　　John Adams (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826) was anAmerican politician and political philosopher and the secondPresident of the United States (1797–1801), after being the first Vice President of the United States(1789–1797) for two terms. He was one of the most influential Founding Fathers of the UnitedStates.

　　Adams came to prominence in the early stages of the American Revolution. As a delegate fromMassachusetts to the Continental Congress, he played a leading role in persuading Congress todeclare independence, and assisted Thomas Jefferson in drafting the United States Declaration ofIndependence in 1776. As a representative of Congress in Europe, he was a major negotiator ofthe eventual peace treaty with Great Britain, and chiefly responsible for obtaining important loansfrom Amsterdam bankers.

　　Adams' revolutionary credentials secured him two terms as George Washington's vice presidentand his own election as the second president of the United States. During his one term aspresident, he was frustrated by battles inside his own Federalist Party (by a faction led byAlexander Hamilton) and the newly emergent bi-partisan disagreements with JeffersonianRepublicans. During his term, he also signed the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts. The majoraccomplishment of his presidency was his peaceful resolution of the Quasi-War crisis with France in1798.

　　After Adams was defeated for reelection by Thomas Jefferson (at the time, Adams' vice-president),he retired to Massachusetts. He and his wife, Abigail Adams, founded an accomplished family line ofpoliticians, diplomats, and historians now referred to as the Adams political family. Adams was thefather of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States. His achievements havereceived greater recognition in modern times, though his contributions were not initially ascelebrated as those of other Founders.

　　Career before the Revolution

　　Opponent of Stamp Act 1765

　　Adams first rose to prominence as an opponent of the Stamp Act of 1765, which was imposed bythe British Parliament without consulting the American legislatures. Americans protestedvehemently that it violated their traditional rights as Englishmen. Popular resistance, he laterobserved, was sparked by an oft-reprinted sermon of the Boston minister, Jonathan Mayhew,interpreting Romans 13 to elucidate the principle of just insurrection.

　　In 1765, Adams drafted the instructions which were sent by the inhabitants of Braintree to itsrepresentatives in the Massachusetts legislature, and which served as a model for other towns todraw up instructions to their representatives. In August 1765, he anonymously contributed fournotable articles to the Boston Gazette (republished in The London Chronicle in 1768 as TrueSentiments of America, also known as A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law). In the letterhe suggested that there was a connection between the Protestant ideas that Adams's Puritanancestors brought to New England and the ideas behind their resistance to the Stamp Act. In theformer he explained that the opposition of the colonies to the Stamp Act was because the StampAct deprived the American colonists of two basic rights guaranteed to all Englishmen, and which allfree men deserved: rights to be taxed only by consent and to be tried only by a jury of one'speers.

　　The "Braintree Instructions" were a succinct and forthright defense of colonial rights and liberties,while the Dissertation was an essay in political education.

　　In December 1765, he delivered a speech before the governor and council in which hepronounced the Stamp Act invalid on the ground that Massachusetts, being withoutrepresentation in Parliament, had not assented to it.

　　Boston Massacre

　　In 1770, a street confrontation resulted in British soldiers killing five civilians in what became knownas the Boston Massacre. The soldiers involved, who were arrested on criminal charges, had troublefinding legal counsel. Finally, they asked Adams to defend them. Although he feared it would hurthis reputation, he agreed. Six of the soldiers were acquitted. Two who had fired directly into thecrowd were charged with murder but were convicted only of manslaughter.

　　As for Adams's payment, Chinard alleges[14] that one of the soldiers, Captain Thomas Preston,gave Adams a symbolic "single guinea" as a retaining fee, the only fee he received in the case.However, David McCullough states in his biography of Adams that he received nothing more thana retainer of eighteen guineas. Adams's own diary confirms that Preston paid an initial ten guineasand a subsequent payment of eight was "all the pecuniary Reward I ever had for fourteen orfifteen days labour, in the most exhausting and fatiguing Causes I ever tried."

　　Despite his previous misgivings, Adams was elected to the Massachusetts General Court (thecolonial legislature) in June 1770, while still in preparation for the trial.

　　Dispute concerning Parliament's authority

　　In 1772, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson announced that he and his judges wouldno longer need their salaries paid by the Massachusetts legislature, because the Crown wouldhenceforth assume payment drawn from customs revenues. Boston radicals protested and askedAdams to explain their objections. In "Two Replies of the Massachusetts House of Representativesto Governor Hutchinson" Adams argued that the colonists had never been under the sovereigntyof Parliament. Their original charter was with the person of the king and their allegiance was only tohim. If a workable line could not be drawn between parliamentary sovereignty and the totalindependence of the colonies, he continued, the colonies would have no other choice but tochoose independence.

　　In Novanglus; or, A History of the Dispute with America, From Its Origin, in 1754, to the PresentTime Adams attacked some essays by Daniel Leonard that defended Hutchinson's arguments forthe absolute authority of Parliament over the colonies. In Novanglus Adams gave a point-by-pointrefutation of Leonard's essays, and then provided one of the most extensive and learnedarguments made by the colonists against British imperial policy.

　　It was a systematic attempt by Adams to describe the origins, nature, and jurisdiction of theunwritten British constitution. Adams used his wide knowledge of English and colonial legal historyto argue that the provincial legislatures were fully sovereign over their own internal affairs, and thatthe colonies were connected to Great Britain only through the King.

　　Continental Congress

　　Massachusetts sent Adams to the first and second Continental Congresses in 1774 and from 1775to 1777. In June 1775, with a view of promoting union among the colonies, he nominated GeorgeWashington of Virginia as commander-in-chief of the army then assembled around Boston. Hisinfluence in Congress was great, and almost from the beginning, he sought permanent separationfrom Britain.

　　On May 15, 1776, the Continental Congress, in response to escalating hostilities which had startedthirteen months earlier at the battles of Lexington and Concord, urged that the colonies beginconstructing their own constitutions, a precursor to becoming independent states. The resolutionto draft independent constitutions was, as Adams put it, "independence itself."

　　Over the next decade, Americans from every state gathered and deliberated on new governingdocuments. As radical as it was to write constitutions (prior convention suggested that a society'sform of government needn't be codified, nor should its organic law be written down in a singledocument), what was equally radical was the nature of American political thought as the summerof 1776 dawned.

　　Thoughts on Government

　　Several representatives turned to Adams for advice about framing new governments. Adams gottired of repeating the same thing, and published the pamphlet Thoughts on Government (1776),which was subsequently influential in the writing of state constitutions. Using the conceptualframework of Republicanism in the United States, the patriots believed it was the corrupt andnefarious aristocrats, in the British Parliament, and their minions stationed in America, who wereguilty of the British assault on American liberty.

　　Adams advised that the form of government should be chosen in order to attain the desired ends,which are the happiness and virtue of the greatest number of people. With this goal in mind, hewrote in Thoughts on Government, "There is no good government but what is republican. Thatthe only valuable part of the British constitution is so; because the very definition of a republic is 'anempire of laws, and not of men.'" Thoughts on Government defended bicameralism, for "a singleassembly is liable to all the vices, follies, and frailties of an individual." He also suggested that thereshould be a separation of powers between the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature, andfurthermore recommended that if a continental government were to be formed then it "shouldsacredly be confined" to certain enumerated powers. Thoughts on Government was enormouslyinfluential and was referenced as an authority in every state-constitution writing hall.

　　Election of 1796

　　The 1796 election was the first contested election under the First Party System. Adams was thepresidential candidate of the Federalist Party and Thomas Pinckney, the Governor of SouthCarolina, was also running as a Federalist (at this point, the vice president was whoever came insecond, so no running mates existed in the modern sense). The Federalists wanted Adams as theirpresidential candidate to crush Thomas Jefferson's bid. Most Federalists would have preferredHamilton to be a candidate. Although Hamilton and his followers supported Adams, they also held agrudge against him. They did consider him to be the lesser of the two evils. However, theythought Adams lacked the seriousness and popularity that had caused Washington to besuccessful and feared that Adams was too vain, opinionated, unpredictable, and stubborn to followtheir directions.

　　Adams's opponents were former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, who was joinedby Senator Aaron Burr of New York on the Democratic-Republican ticket.

　　As was customary, Adams stayed in his home town of Quincy rather than actively campaign forthe Presidency. He wanted to stay out of what he called the silly and wicked game. His party,however, campaigned for him, while the Democratic-Republicans campaigned for Jefferson.

　　It was expected that Adams would dominate the votes in New England, while Jefferson wasexpected to win in the Southern states. In the end, Adams won the election by a narrow margin of71 electoral votes to 68 for Jefferson (who became the vice president).

　　Presidency: 1797–1801

　　As President Adams followed Washington's lead in making the presidency the example ofrepublican values, and stressing civic virtue; he was never implicated in any scandal. Somehistorians consider his worst mistake to be keeping the old cabinet, which was controlled byHamilton, instead of installing his own people, confirming Adams' own admission that he was a poorpolitician because he "was unpractised in intrigues for power."Yet, there are those historians whofeel that Adams' retention of Washington's cabinet was a statesmanlike step to soothe worriesabout an orderly succession. As Adams himself explained, "I had then no particular object of any ofthem." Adams spent much of his term at his home Massachusetts, ignoring the details ofpatronage and communication that were not ignored by his opponents in both parties.

　　Adams' combative spirit did not always lend itself to presidential decorum, as Adams himselfadmitted in his old age: "[As president] I refused to suffer in silence. I sighed, sobbed, and groaned,and sometimes screeched and screamed. And I must confess to my shame and sorrow that Isometimes swore."

　　Adams continued not just the Washington cabinet but all the major programs of the WashingtonAdministration as well. Adams made no major new proposals. His economic programs were thus acontinuation of those of Hamilton, who regularly consulted with key cabinet members, especiallythe powerful Secretary of the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott, Jr.

专四专八：历年真题免费领

专四专八：精选好课 暖心助学