SOURCE: “Young John Adams and the New Philosophic Rationalism,” in William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 2, April, 1998, pp. 259-80.

In the following essay, Thompson claims that most scholars have overestimated the importance of Adams's Puritan background and minimized the importance of philosophic rationalism in the formulation of his revolutionary philosophy.

During his retirement years, John Adams was fond of saying that the War of Independence was a consequence of the American Revolution. The real revolution, he declared, had taken place in the minds and hearts of the colonists in the decade or two before 1776. What he meant by this evocative statement and how he understood the sources and nature of America's Revolutionary transformation have long intrigued historians. In an 1818 letter to Hezekiah Niles, Adams left a clue to his meaning. Among other things, he said, there had been a “radical change” in the people's “religious sentiments of their...