The Founder Who Built the Plumbing

John Adams was born on October 19, 1735, under the Julian calendar Britain still used, and he would be annoyed that you forgot. The colonies switched in 1752, and the date became October 30 in the Gregorian reckoning.

Adams was neither flashy nor rich, and he knew it. In 1790 he wrote to Benjamin Rush that the history of the Revolution would be "one continued Lye": Franklin's electrical rod would smite the earth, out would spring General Washington, and those two would get the credit for everything. He was mostly right.

Here is what gets left out. He defended the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre because he believed even the hated deserve a lawyer. He proposed Washington to command the army. He pushed the Declaration through Congress while Jefferson wrote it. He borrowed the money from the Dutch that kept the Revolution solvent, and he negotiated the peace that ended it. He was the principal author of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, the oldest written constitution still in force anywhere. He lost the presidency in 1800 and went home, which is the whole point of a republic.

No monument on the Mall. A lot of the plumbing.

I've been reading founders' biographies this year, and he has become my favorite. As a lifelong Jefferson man, I did not see that coming. Neither would Adams, who spent years convinced Jefferson got all the credit.

So in his honor, a birthday menu, with a line from Adams to each dish:

• Boston baked beans. Sweetened with molasses, which Adams credited directly: "I know not why We Should blush to confess that Molasses was an essential Ingredient in American independence." The fight over molasses taxes was one of the first sparks.
• Johnnycakes. Cornmeal griddle cakes, the plain fare of a Massachusetts farm family before, during, and after the war.
• Cranberry compote. Native to Massachusetts bogs, harvested by the Wampanoag for generations, and first grown commercially on Cape Cod in 1816, in his lifetime.
• Roasted carrots. The root-cellar vegetables that carried a Braintree farm through the winter, and Adams was proud to be a farmer first.

Cider is optional. His diary records a morning gill of it, drunk "in conformity to the fashion." Historians have not endorsed this.

The republic he helped build has outlasted a civil war, two world wars, a depression, and more than a few years when its people were sure it was finished. It held, and will hold, because men like Adams built the parts nobody sees, and built them to last.

In Hamilton, King George gets a whole number, "I Know Him," on learning that Adams will follow Washington. He is delighted. He remembers Adams as the short one, and he gives the little man no chance.

The king was wrong about the country and wrong about the man. Happy 291st birthday, Mr. Adams.