Welcome to the archive of John Adams’s environmental thought. This digital archive collects the Massachusetts Historical Society’s digitized writings of John Adams (1735-1826), Founding Father and Second U.S. President, as they relate to his ideas about nature and the natural environment. It exists to encourage and aid researchers in studying the history of environmental ideas and thought in the Founding Era and the Early American Republic (1754-1820). This archive does not contain all the excerpts of John Adams’s voluminous writings, but only selections that relate to ideas and themes of nature.
Many historians believe that John Adams was purely a political and social thinker and that his worldview was dominated by a dark introspective Calvinism, classical republicanism, and skeptical utilitarianism. However, the diaries, letters, and papers of John Adams suggest that he was also a profound environmental thinker. His numerous writings on the subject show that he was one of the most prolific nature writers of Early America. Adams’s environmental thought was deeply influenced by a combination of practical Enlightenment ideas and proto-Romantic aestheticism and idealism. Adam’s ideas of nature were microcosmic of a general shift in American environmental thought during the transition between Enlightenment practicality and Romantic idealism.
Adams conceptualized “nature” as the unchanging, universal, and transcendent ordering of reality. His environmental thought was influenced by two main intellectual strains: Enlightenment utilitarianism and proto-Romantic idealism. These seemingly conflicting worldviews were not in any way contradictory to Adams. As such, Adams’s idea of nature was microcosmic of a general shift in American environmental thought during the transition between Enlightenment practicality and Romantic idealism. He viewed nature in light of an overarching anthropocentrism that valued both the practical and aesthetic qualities of the natural world for the betterment of the human person. Adams also envisioned nature in two senses: the humanistic and the environmental. Adams’s overall idea of nature was grounded in a Christian teleology, which was experienced through reason and sensory empiricism. John Adams had incredibly complex ideas of nature that are evidenced across his entire life and he warrants recognition as one of the Early Republic’s deepest environmental thinkers.
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