The Marginalia of a Future President: On John Adams's Ciceronian Habit
In the quiet of his study, long before the clamor of revolution, a young John Adams opened his copy of Cicero’s Orations. The year was 1759. He was a lawyer in his mid-twenties, grappling with the weight of classical rhetoric and his own burgeoning sense of civic duty. He did not merely read the text; he engaged with it. His pen, sharp and opinionated, flew into the margins, not with casual doodles, but with a fierce, running commentary that reveals the very forge of a revolutionary mind.
Adams’s marginalia, preserved in the Massachusetts Historical Society, are a masterclass in active reading. He argued with Cicero, praised him, and dissected his logic. In one margin, next to a passage on the moral duties of a statesman, Adams scrawled, "This is noble." Elsewhere, he challenged a point with a succinct "Not so." These were not mere notes; they were a dialogue across centuries. He was testing his own nascent ideas about liberty, governance, and virtue against one of history’s greatest orators, using the margins as his sparring ring.
The Craft of Conversation with the Dead
This practice was, for Adams, a form of slow and deliberate living. It was the antithesis of passive consumption. Each annotation was a deliberate act of distillation, a way to process, question, and internalize the wisdom of the past. He wasn’t collecting quotes to be regurgitated; he was forging a personal philosophy, line by line, in the quiet company of his library.
We see in these marked pages the raw material of the patriot he would become. His critiques of Cicero’s arguments on tyranny later informed his own legal defenses during the tumultuous years leading to 1776. The margins became a private training ground where he honed the principles that would help birth a nation. The act of writing by hand, of physically connecting his thoughts to the source, cemented these ideas in a way that fleeting reading never could.
In our age of digital highlights and disposable text, Adams’s Ciceronian habit offers a potent reminder. Our engagement with a text need not be fleeting. The craft of reading can be a conversation. It is in the deliberate pause, the thoughtful rebuttal, the enthusiastic underline, and the scrawled "Yes!" in the margin that we truly make a book our own. We may not be writing the Declaration of Independence, but we are, in our own way, declaring our intellectual independence—engaging with the past to better understand our present, one deliberate note at a time.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: