[John] Adams's letters to [his wife] Abigail are wonderful. In his letters, he is loving, humorous, preachy, learned, and saucy. He speaks to her with almost complete abandon, revealing all of his sensuous and vulnerable nature.

[John] Adams identified himself with the political theories of [James] Harrington, [John] Locke, and [Charles-Louis] Montesquieu, whose ideas of constitutionalism, he believed, were applicable to all peoples everywhere; they were his contribution to what he called "the divine science of politics."

By 1782 [John Adams] had come to feel for [Benjamin] Franklin "no other sentiments than Contempt or Abhorrence."

[Benjamin] Franklin may be a great philosopher, [John Adams] told his diary in 1779, but "as a Legislator in America he has done very little."

[John Adams' writings] had indicted the United States for slavishly copying the English constitution by erecting bicameral legislatures in their state constitutions, most drafted in 1776.

[John Adams] experience with the French philosophers only convinced him further of the need for a bicameral legislature representing the two principal social orders and, equally important, an independent executive.

[John] Adams was arguing that a separate social order existed that needed to be embodied in senates and his fellow Americans could not accept this and accused him rightly of being obsessed with the English constitution.