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In 1777 as a member of the Continental Congress, Adams opposed a bill to emancipate slaves in Massachusetts. He said that the issue was too divisive at the time, and he recommended that the legislation should "sleep for a time." He also opposed the use of black soldiers in the US Army, because of opposition from southerners, who feared that arming enslaved African-Americans had potential for real problems. Adams generally tried to keep deal diplomatically with the issue and avoid it when it came to national politics, because of what he anticipated the southern response would be.
Adams' administration steered clear of this issue. He had enough on his plate with relations between the fledgling nation and the European powers of Britain and France. In an article in The Journal of Negro History, Volume 49, No. 3, an author writing on this subject summarizes Adams' views on slavery as follows:
"Slavery never figured prominently in the elder Adams' career. He left public life in 1801 and died in 1826, before slavery became a dominant political issue. John Adams lived long enough however to witness the beginnings of the slavery controversy and to develop serious apprehensions about it. The repugnance of negro slavery seemed to Adams so obvious as hardly to merit argument. The New England society from which he came, full of proud independent farmers, and almost empty of Negroes, found nothing appealing about human bondage. And the principles spoke so heatedly during the revolution, made the notion of American slavery seem all the more reprehensible.
"During the greater part of his life however, the matter seldom intruded upon his attention. In their personal lives, he and Abigail were careful to hire free white help as household servants. And later in life Adams recalled with considerable pride that he had never employed slaves on his farm, even when this was acceptable among the best circles of New England society, and in spite of the fact that it meant losses to him both of convenience and economy. Yet throughout his long and eventful public career, slavery drew from him only passing and incidental comment."