david mccullough presidential biographies

The saltbox farmhouse where you were born - the country’s oldest presidential birthplace still standing - isn’t on a farm anymore. But, well, you may not want to read this part. Now, it’s not all bad news: Your three Quincy homes have been preserved, and the National Park Service gives tours of them.

(Your friend George Washington’s burial site at Mount Vernon in Virginia attracts a million a year.) The slate roof of the old Quincy church nearly collapsed on you, but there’s now a new $1.6 million roof to pay for it, the tiny congregation sold its gracious parsonage, and the minister and his wife had to pack up their things and buy a small condo across town. It draws fewer than 6,000 visitors a year. The only place in the country where two presidents and two first ladies are buried, your crypt is one-stop shopping for history buffs. You and your incredible wife, Abigail, and your presidential son and his wife are buried in a stark basement crypt at the United First Parish Church in the center of your native Quincy. “Mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me,” you write a friend, with appropriate modesty, but you don’t actually mean that. The only comfort you take in your unpopularity is knowing that history will remember all your sacrifices. You know this decision will cost you your reelection in 1800, but you do it anyway. As the nation’s second president, you refuse to ride a popular wave toward war with the French, knowing it would destroy America’s fragile democratic experiment.

You write the Massachusetts Constitution, which becomes the model for the federal version. You function as a one-man civilian war department and wrangle the loans that keep the American Revolution afloat. As the unofficial leader of the Congress, you choose George Washington to command the army and Thomas Jefferson to write that little complaint-letter-turned-Declaration of Independence. You take a bunch of cautious Continental Congressmen gathered to write a complaint letter, and you brow beat them until they do the unthinkable in 1776 and declare war against the most powerful force on earth. This story was originally published in the Globe Magazine on Nov.

David mccullough presidential biographies