He was obnoxious and disliked, as even John Adams himself admitted in a letter to his wife Abigail, but along with cousin Samuel, he was one of the leading voices for independence for the colonies.
But how did he fare as the second president?
Well, he signed the awful Alien and Sedition Acts into law. So he was an asshole, right? Not exactly. Congress would have overridden him had he vetoed them. So he just didn’t enforce them.
The country was still finding its way in those days, so perhaps I ought to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, when the time came to relinquish the presidency after only one term, he did establish the precedent of peacefully handing over the presidency to a despised political party. And those parties really did despise each other in those days.
The first real presidential contest in American history turned out to be exuberantly venomous. On both sides handbills, pamphlets, and articles in party newspapers denounced, disparaged, damned, decried, denigrated, and declaimed. There were plenty of issues. For the Federalists there was Jefferson’s sympathy for the French Revolution despite the guillotine and the Terror; and there was also his religious heterodoxy. The [Democratic-]Republicans had Adams’s lack of faith in the people to harp on as well as his preference for high-toned government. Late in October, to the embarrassment of the Republicans, Pierre Adet, French minister to the United States, publicly denounced the Federalists’ foreign policy and said French-American relations would improve with Jefferson as President. The Republicans hastily disavowed Adet’s action, but the Federalists indignantly called it “an outrageous attempt on the dignity of an independent nation” and claimed it proved Jefferson was the tool of a foreign power.
Adams and Jefferson themselves remained on good terms during the contest and neither deigned to take an active part in it. But their followers throughout the land filled the air with charges and countercharges. It was perhaps surprising, and certainly gratifying, that it all ended peacefully enough. In 1796, as in later elections, there was a great gap between rhetoric and reality. Adams was more of a republican and Jefferson less of a democrat than either friend or foe was willing to acknowledge. Yet the Republicans called Adams “an avowed friend of monarchy” who plotted to make his sons “Seigneurs or Lords of this country.” And the Federalists called Jefferson an atheist, anarchist, demagogue, coward, mountebank, trickster, and Franco-maniac, and said his followers were “cut-throats who walk in rags and sleep amidst filth and vermin.”
Adams, now sixty-one, won the shouting match, but not by much. He came out on top with 71 votes to Jefferson’s 68, Pinckney’s 59, and Burr’s 30. Some disappointed Republicans taunted him with the cry, “President by three votes!” But Jefferson cheerfully accepted second place under Adams, who, he said, “has always been my senior.” The “second office… is honorable and easy,” he added; “the first is but splendid misery.”‘ It didn’t take Adams long to find that out.
— Presidential Campaigns by Paul F. Boller, Jr.