A Fictional Conversation with President John Adams at Fort Adams, Newport, Rhode Island

Historic note: This interview is a work of historical fiction. President John Adams did not live to see Fort Adams completed as it stands today; the Third System fort was built decades after his death. His words here are imagined, grounded in his documented character, writings, and convictions, in service of bringing history and leadership lessons to life.

Setting the Scene

[The granite walls of Fort Adams catch the late afternoon sun over Narragansett Bay. Gulls wheel above the ramparts. Dan Blanchard stands at the edge of the pentagonal fort, recorder in hand, when a figure in a dark coat and breeches appears beside the old cannon — stout, sharp-eyed, unmistakably John Adams.]

DAN BLANCHARD: Mr. President. I have to say, this is not how I expected today’s episode to go.

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: Nor I, Mr. Blanchard. One moment, I am walking the grounds of Peacefield in my memory, and the next I am standing before a mountain of granite bearing my own name. You will forgive me a moment of astonishment.

DAN BLANCHARD: Take all the time you need. For our audience watching or reading Travel in Time with Dan, we are at Fort Adams in Newport, Rhode Island, and somehow, today, I get to ask the man himself about the fort that carries his name.

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: Then let us not waste the occasion. Ask your questions, sir. I have always preferred a direct examination to idle flattery.

On Being the Fort’s Namesake

DAN BLANCHARD: Let’s start at the beginning. This fort was commissioned in 1799, during your presidency. Why was Newport Harbor worth that kind of attention?

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: Because, sir, a nation that cannot guard its own harbors is a nation that begs to be conquered. I had seen with my own eyes, during the war for our independence, how the British made free use of Newport… occupying it for years, using that deep water as a base from which to threaten all of southern New England. A harbor so deep and so well-placed is a blessing from Providence only if a free people are prepared to defend it. Left undefended, it is merely an invitation.

DAN BLANCHARD: So when you commissioned the fort, you were thinking about that British occupation during the Revolution.

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: I was thinking of it constantly. I had spent years in Europe dealing with nations who respected only strength married to principle. I returned home determined that America should never again be at the mercy of any navy that chose to call upon our shores uninvited. I will confess some pride that they chose to set my name upon those walls… though I suspect Mr. Hamilton would have preferred his own name there instead.

DAN BLANCHARD: (laughing) I don’t think we can confirm that one, Mr. President.

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: No. But you may print it regardless. I shall not object from beyond the grave.

Earthworks, Blockades, and Hard Lessons

DAN BLANCHARD: Here’s something our viewers might not expect — the fort that first carried your name wasn’t this granite giant. It was earthworks and timber. And during the War of 1812, the British still managed to blockade Newport.

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: Yes… and it galled me to hear of it, even retired as I was at Peacefield. We had built what we could afford and what the moment seemed to require. Earth and wood will serve against a raiding party or an undisciplined foe. They will not serve against the most formidable navy upon the earth. The blockade of 1812 was not a failure of courage. It was a failure of foresight. It was a debt left unpaid from an earlier season, now called due at the worst possible time.

DAN BLANCHARD: That’s a tough thing to admit about your own administration’s work.

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: I have never found honesty about one’s errors to be a weakness, Mr. Blanchard. I made a great many errors in my life, public and private, and I am better remembered for owning them than I would have been for hiding them. The first fort was a beginning, not an ending. It fell to those who came after… men like Colonel Totten… to finish what circumstance and treasury would not yet allow in my own time.

Granite, Time, and the Third System

DAN BLANCHARD: Let’s talk about what replaced those earthworks. This fort took thirty years to build — Maine granite, Newport shale, a pentagon design where every inch is covered by defensive fire. As someone who valued patience and long views, what do you make of that kind of investment?

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: Thirty years. (He runs a hand along the stone.) I spent the better part of my own life laboring for a cause whose fruits I did not always live to see fully ripened… independence, a constitution, a government of laws and not of men. Thirty years to raise a single fortress does not strike me as extravagant. It strikes me as the ordinary price of anything built to endure. The nations of Europe scoffed at young America’s patience for self-government. Let them scoff likewise at our patience for stone.

DAN BLANCHARD: There’s something almost stubborn about it… thirty years of labor for a fort that, in the end, never fired a shot in anger.

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: Stubbornness, properly directed, is among the more useful virtues a republic can cultivate. And as to never firing a shot — sir, that is not the absence of success. That is the very picture of it. A wall that need never be defended has done its office perfectly. I would rather be remembered for a war prevented than a battle won.

The Power of Never Being Tested

DAN BLANCHARD: That’s exactly where I want to go next. Fort Adams became such an obvious deterrent that no one ever tried to take it after the War of 1812. From your time negotiating with France and Britain as a diplomat, does that idea of deterrence ring true to you?

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: It rings entirely true. I spent years in Paris and London learning that nations, like quarrelsome men, rarely attack what they know will cost them dearly to take. I negotiated treaties not merely with ink but with the implicit understanding of what America could become if provoked. A fortress such as this says to any approaching power, without uttering a word: ‘the price of testing us exceeds any prize you might win.’ That silence, Mr. Blanchard, is louder than any cannon.

DAN BLANCHARD: So the leadership lesson here… the Three Ps, Preparation Prevents Problems… that’s something you’d recognize from your own diplomacy.

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: I would have phrased it with rather more syllables, being a Massachusetts lawyer by training. But the sentiment is sound. I have long believed that the surest way to keep the peace is to be so thoroughly prepared for war that no sane adversary thinks it worth provoking you. It is not a contradiction to love peace and to build strong walls. It is, in fact, the only honest way to secure peace at all.

Watching History Pass Through the Walls

DAN BLANCHARD: Mr. President, this fort has had quite a life since your time. The Naval Academy relocated here during the Civil War, it served as a command post in World War II, and President Eisenhower used it as his Summer White House.

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: (He studies the walls for a long moment.) It pleases me more than I can easily say. A fortress is not merely brick and granite. It is a vessel for the purposes of the nation that built it. That young midshipmen of the Navy should shelter here in a moment of civil calamity, that soldiers should plan the defense of New England from these same walls in a war I could scarcely have imagined, that a later president should walk these grounds in a season of uneasy peace. This is precisely what such an investment ought to yield across generations. We did not build it for ourselves alone. We built it for the country that would outlive us.

DAN BLANCHARD: Does it surprise you that a fort meant for cannons against tall ships ended up better known for folk festivals and joggers along the water?

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: (A dry laugh.) Surprise is too strong a word. Amuse, perhaps. I confess I cannot picture the music you describe, nor the costume of the joggers. But I find nothing objectionable in it. A free and prosperous people at leisure upon ground once built for their defense… that, sir, is the entire point of the exercise. We did not labor so that our grandchildren might forever stand at arms. We labored so that they might one day forget what it felt like to need to.

Closing Thoughts

DAN BLANCHARD: Before you go, Mr. President… any final word for everyone watching or reading Travel in Time with Dan today, standing here at Fort Adams?

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: Only this. You stand upon a structure raised by the unglamorous virtues of patience, foresight, and the willingness to pay today for the safety of a tomorrow you will not see. Whatever cause you serve, in your classrooms or your travels or your own households, build it as we built this fort: soundly, honestly, and for longer than your own lifetime. Preparation prevents problems, as you say. I should only add — it also outlasts the men who insist upon it.

DAN BLANCHARD: Mr. President, thank you. This has been an honor I did not expect to have.

PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS: The honor, Mr. Blanchard, is in the remembering. See that you keep at it.

[The figure of John Adams fades into the granite and the late sun, leaving only the gulls, the bay, and the old fort standing sentinel as it always has.]

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