On this episode of Newt's World, it's part of Founding Father's Week.

I'm talking about the lives and legacies of our original founders and the impact they've had in our country.

On this episode, we're going to talk about probably the most misunderstood of the Founding Father's.

John Adams. Adams is a little bit of an odd duck,

partly because he's from New England, which at that time was just very different from either New York or Virginia.

Partly because Adams himself was really, really smart, but he was very argumentative and he was very blunt.

He also had enormous courage. Adams had really developed over time a view of British as a tyranny.

He didn't arrive at it immediately. He was also of all of the Founding Father's, probably the one who believed the most deeply in the rule of law.

And in fact, one of the most creative and courageous parts of his life was his willingness to defend the British soldiers who were charged with murder during the Boston massacre.

It was very unpopular in Boston because it was sort of a lynch mob desire to just hang them.

And Adams said, no, this whole thing is about the rule of law. He ultimately wrote the Massachusetts Constitution,

which served as a model for the U.S. Constitution. And he worked very, very hard to knit together the country.

He understood that Virginia as the biggest colony and then biggest state in population and wealth had to be at the center,

but at the same time he also realized that bringing all of New England in really, really mattered.

And it's important to remember that in this period, the idea of America is a really sort of vague idea to most people.

Most people think of themselves in terms of their colony or later on in terms of their state.

On Adams' case, he was born in the Massachusetts Bay colony.

So, again, hard for us to look back and realize that his early life started in 1735 when he was born.

He was English, he thought of himself purely as a columnist. He didn't think that was a nationalist.

He was educated at Harvard, the first university created in the United States, and gradually came to believe that the British were behaving in the manner of a dictatorship.

And the real fight here is overpower. It's not over money, the stamp tax and other kind of things are points they fight over.

But what they're really fighting over is a core question. Can the British parliament sitting in London pass laws that affect directly people in the colonies?

...