Jill Biden said that her students taught her that it’s not always about being the perfect person in the perfect position, it’s about showing up when you’re needed.

John Adams showed up when needed. Anyone who followed George Washington was going to have a terrible time because they’d inevitably fall short in comparison to the first president. Adams knew it and was willing to serve anyway. When Washington retired in 1797, the citizens of the new nation wondered if the presidency would work for anyone else because whoever came second was going to have a rough tenure.

That scenario was enough to pique the interest of Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library, and the resulting book, “Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic,” will be her topic at a Sept. 24 talk at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

After finishing her first book, the award-winning “The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution,” Chervinsky had a strong sense of what George Washington created for the presidency but was left wondering about what came next. “How did everyone else manage the powers and demands of the job without Washington’s unparalleled and never-to-be-repeated stature?” she asks. “I was grappling with this question in late 2020 and I realized that I didn’t know enough about the peaceful transfer of power process and how it was created from the beginning, so I set out to explain that story.”

Source material was abundant. Among the best she found were the edited paper projects of the founders, including the Adams family, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, which are transcribed, edited, and available online along with editorial explanations. She also relied heavily on newspapers from the era, which provided a detailed snapshot of what people were discussing at the time. “Finally, I believe the space around us affects how we interact with events and each other,” she says. “So, I also work really hard to recreate the physical world with furniture, paint, decor, and more.”

Her research showed that the 1790s offered many important parallels for the world today, including political violence, intense partisanship, weak parties, xenophobia, immigration battles, pandemics, and debates over free speech. It was Adams who crafted many of the precedents that serve as essential scaffolding for democratic institutions, most importantly the peaceful transfer of power.

Chervinsky found that intense partisanship had been rampant. Politics were personal and nasty with regular attacks on not only a politician’s character, but their families as well. “Similar to today, the partisanship was not just between parties, but also within parties, which were weak and unable to protect diversity of opinion,” she says. “As a result, the more extreme voices turned on the moderate members of their party with shocking vitriol.”

In the 1790s, large waves of immigrants fled violence and poor economic conditions in Ireland, France, and Haiti, seeking a new life in the U.S. Both parties feared that immigrants might import radicalism and violence from the uprisings or revolutions in their home countries. “Federalists also hated immigrants’ general preference for the Jeffersonian Republicans,” she says. “So, they passed laws to make naturalization more difficult.”

And as bad as Covid was in the 21st century, beginning in 1793, yellow fever was an annual occurrence that broke out most summers in New York, Philadelphia and other urban spaces. It was highly fatal and had no cure at the time, so thousands of people fled the cities every year for several months. “The president and the department secretaries joined in this exodus and set up temporary offices most summers in Trenton or nearby towns,” Chervinsky says. “This disruption made communication and governing more complicated.”

Perhaps most importantly, Adams understood the peaceful transfer of power was central to the character of the republic. The way he saw it, if the transition was violent, it would be something other than a republic. “The transfer needed to be intentionally crafted and protected, and the American people had to be taught to cherish it and uphold the practice,” she explains. “Adams did everything in his power to establish the norms and customs that set the tone for future transitions.”

By the time she finished researching and writing her book, Chervinsky was convinced that Adams was far more politically savvy than his contemporaries understood, or than people today think, because he had the ability to plan and execute strategy, restrain his own impulses and focus on long-term thinking. “John Adams did three things. First, he showed up,” she says. “Second, he defended executive power and the structure of the presidency from threats in Congress and the cabinet. Third, he was the common denominator in the first two transfers of power and ensured the republic survived long beyond his one term.”

Washington accomplished much as the first president, but it was Adams who created the framework to ensure a peaceful transfer of power and left it up to the American people to cherish and uphold the practice. Chervinsky’s book could not be timelier.

“Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic,” talk by Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky takes place at noon on Tuesday, Sept. 24 at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, 428 N. Arthur Ashe Blvd. virginiahistory.org