John Adams – A Visit to Bilbao

John Adams (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826) was the second president of the United States, and is known as one of the fathers of the Constitution of the United States of America. Adams was the first vice president of the republic under the presidential mandate of George Washington, revising his position in 1792. He was the second president of the United States from the 4th of April 1979 until the 3rd of March 1801, with his grand rival Thomas Jefferson as the vice president, ultimately surpassing him in the election in 1801.
In 1776 Adams joined the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence. Three years later he worked on the Massachusetts Constitution and in 1787 at the latest assured himself as one of the founding fathers of the United States.
In the late 1770s, due to a position as a Minister Plenipotentiary, Adams traveled to Europe in order to find constitutions and laws that would serve him in designing that which would later become the American constitution of 1787.
The search for constitutions brought Adams also to the Basque Country. His stay in Bilbao is reflected in his book A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, where he cites Biscay and its capital Bilbao as having the second place in the republic democracies of Europe. He speaks of Bilbao as the capital of the republic of Biscay, inside of Spain, but totally self-governing and independent.
John Adams was the only president amongst the men that gave life to the American republic who refused, by conviction, to have slaves, which gives us an idea of the great man that he was.
We are convinced that if John Adams had arrived in the Bilbao of the 21st century he would have taken a Spanish course at the Hemingway Institute.