250 years of American independence: When John Adams predicted that democracy would soon commit suicide

'America 250' (5/13). John Adams, the second president of the United States, and his successor Thomas Jefferson did not share the same view of human nature. Adams, an educated anti-slavery advocate from the North, feared that democracy would perish under the weight of corruption among the powerful. Posterity, however, has largely remembered the soaring rhetoric of Jefferson, the slaveholding Southern planter.