Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams

by Joseph J. Ellis

  His ultimate verdict—which was a premonition of the scholarly perspective on the Revolution dominant in the last quarter of the twentieth century—focused attention on invisible social, economic, and demographic forces operating at different speeds and in different patterns throughout the colonies. He told James Madison that the perennial question about “Who was the author…of American Independence” was silly and misguided: “We might as well inquire who were the Inventors of Agriculture, Horticulture, Architecture, Musick.” It was not just that certain New Englanders deserved more acclaim than certain Virginians. Or that heroic icons like Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson should be remembered for their blunders as well as their success. The whole emphasis on “great men” was wrong. History was a panoramic process, better viewed through a telescope than a magnifying glass, best understood perhaps by older commentators who had acquired a seasoned sense of change over time and a perspective that carried the debate beyond myopic squabbles about who did what first or who merited the most credit. This was a way of thinking attractive to old man Adams for many reasons, not the least of which being that it was considered unfashionable.32

  In 1812, Adams described a magnificent three-year-old colt that he had just considered purchasing. It was “seventeen or eighteen hands high, bones like mossy timbers, ribbed quite to the Hips, every way broad, strong and well filled in proportion.” The colt was also tame and gentle, as “good natured and good humored as a Cosset Lamb.” Adams explained that the analogy to America came to him immediately: “Thinks I to myself, This noble Creature is the exact Emblem of my dear Country.” Adams was hardly alone in believing that America was a spirited and sturdy colt-of-a-nation, blessed with nearly limitless natural resources, an exploding population and economy, a stable political system that both released and harnessed the energies of its citizenry, a nation destined at some time in the future to dominate the Western Hemisphere for a good stretch of human history. Nor was Adams alone in arguing that the foreign policy of the infant nation should be guided by the principle of neutrality. As he put it to Rush in the characteristic Adams formulation, he believed that the United States “should make no treaties or alliance with any European power; that we should consent to none but treaties of commerce; that we should separate ourselves as far as possible and as long as possible from all European politics and wars.” These twin beliefs—that America was destined for greatness and that international neutrality was the wisest course—had been bedrock convictions within the political leadership of both major parties since the Washington presidency.33

  But in two significant ways the Adams version of these elemental convictions differed from the versions embraced by most of his contemporaries. First, Adams refused to attribute the buoyant prospects of America to divine providence; he did not think that Americans were a special people rendered immune by God’s grace from the customary ravages of history. He had always been clear about this. Throughout his letters and formal political writings in the 1780s, for example, he had warned that “there is no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others.” The steady flow of letters from Quincy after his retirement frequently reiterated the point. “There is no special Providence for us,” he wrote Rush. “We are not a chosen people that I know of, or if we are, we deserve it as little as the Jews…. We must and we shall go the way of all earth….” Americans were just as susceptible to vanity, folly, and delusion as any other people—the notion that God watched over them being a singular example of such superstitious stupidity—while the strategic strengths and the “advantages we have over Europe,” he noted caustically, “are chiefly geographical.”34

  Second, Adams’s notion of American neutrality was neither as isolationist as the Jeffersonians preferred nor as pro-English as the policies of most New England Federalists. “The government of the United States from 1789 has been but a company of Engine Men,” he wrote Vanderkemp, complaining that the chief job of every president, from Washington to Madison, “has been to spout Cold Water upon our raw habitations…to prevent them being scorched by the Flames from Europe.” Neutrality was both a wise and noble ideal, because America needed time to consolidate its continental resources and resolve its sectional differences. But Adams never believed that Europe would leave America alone, or that the commercial interests of New England merchants and southern planters would allow for complete insulation from European problems: “Thus our beloved country,” he confided to Rush, “is indeed in a very dangerous situation. It is between two great fires in Europe [i.e., England and France] and between two ignited Parties at home, smoking, sparkling and flaming, ready to burst into Conflagration.” Despite the Atlantic Ocean and our “geographical advantages,” America could never completely separate itself from the rest of the world and ought not to try.35

  These variations on dominant American themes, or what we might call Adams’s corollaries to the guiding principles of early American foreign policy (and what Adams himself simply called “my system”), gave him an unusual if not unique perspective on the events that led up to the War of 1812. “I am, I know, a singular Being,” he wrote one congressman in 1813, “for Nobody will agree with me.” But he nevertheless thought he was just as right now about the proper American policy as he had been in 1776 when he counselled war with England and in 1799 when he counselled compromise with France. He conceded to his old friend and physician Benjamin Waterhouse in 1813 that he might not have “the Foresight of the Tumble-Bug. Yet in my Conscience, I believe, I had seen more and clearer, than this Nation or its Government for fourteen years past.”36

  To his Federalist friends in New England, who were dedicated to preserving commercial relations with England at almost any cost, Adams delivered lectures against myopia. “Is it not wonderful that some persons among us are so eager to rush into the arms of Great Britain,” he chided, “but it is unaccountable that there should be so many….” At some elemental level, the hostility toward England that had been generated in Adams’s breast during the war for independence had never died. And, more importantly, he insisted that England’s hatred for America was also still intact. “She has looked at us from our first settlement to this moment, with eyes of jealousy, envy, hatred and contempt,” he claimed. As early as 1805 he predicted to John Quincy that a second war with England was likely: “Our Confusions will be very great, but she [England] will suffer most in the end,” he declared, adding the hope that “Another war will transmit an eternal hatred of England to our American Posterity.” But he realized that his prophecies were regarded as somewhere between treason and insanity by most of his New England friends. “Croak! Croak! Croak! Croak J Q Adams Esq.,” he shouted in frustration to his son. “I can do nothing but croak, in the present state of things.” He argued that he knew the English better than most, that Parliament was like an arrogant aristocrat who believed he had the right to impress American seamen and dictate terms about trade. Neither the Whig nor Tory leaders in London had a kind thought for America, he believed, and as for the mass of English citizens, “those millions of people who are not politicians, neither know, nor care, any more about us, than they do about the Seminole Indians.”37

  To the Jeffersonians, who also distrusted England but wished to avoid war at almost any cost, he gave sermons on military preparedness, especially the need for a larger navy. “The counsel which Themistocles gave to Athens, Pompey to Rome, Cromwell to England…and Colbert to France, I have always given and shall continue to give to my countrymen,” he wrote as early as 1802; because “the great questions of commerce and power between nations and empires…are determined at sea, all reasonable encouragement should be given the navy.” Then he added a slogan repeated over and over in his correspondence from Quincy: “The trident of Neptune is the sceptre of the world.” American neutrality and aversion to war were both noble principles, he agreed, but the sincerity of the Jefferson administration’s commitment to such principles was no guarantee of their ultimate triumph. A
dams advocated a major naval build-up to protect the coastline and to secure control of the Great Lakes in the event of war, all the while negotiating just as strenuously in the hope that war might be avoided. It was the same position he had advocated during his own presidency when the danger was war with France. But this time Adams suspected that the English would spurn all American efforts at peaceful compromises.38

  When Jefferson ordered an embargo on all American exports, designed to keep American commercial shipping out of the conflict between England and Napoleonic France, Adams went along with great reluctance, predicting that the embargo would prove more ruinous to the American economy than to the economies of the European belligerents. “I have never approved of Non Importations, Non Intercourses, or Embargoes for more than six weeks,” he told Jefferson years later, suggesting that the real purpose of such measures was more psychological than economic; that is, the embargo produced pain and suffering within the American populace and thereby stiffened the will for war. “You and Mr. Madison had as good a right to your Opinions as I had to mine,” he observed years later, “and I must acknowledge the Nation was with you. But neither your Authority nor that of the Nation has convinced me. Nor, I am bold to pronounce will convince Posterity.” Although he sympathized with the burdens and respected the integrity of his successors to the presidency, noting that the “Talents, the Scholarship, the Genius, the Learning of Jefferson and Madison are not disputed,” he worried about their discomfort with conflict and confrontations and what he called “their total Incapacity for practical Government in War….”39

  Nor did he attempt to hide his critical views from Jefferson himself. When negotiations failed and war finally broke out in 1812, Adams chided Jefferson for “the total Neglect and absolute Refusal of all maritime Protection and Defence….” The war had now come and America was, just as he had warned, wholly unprepared for it. Jefferson tried to be gracious in response, congratulating Adams for his foresight “as having been an early and constant advocate of wooden walls,” but then went on to explain that he had opposed a large naval force because England’s fleet was too large and powerful for any American navy, no matter how enhanced, to risk combat on the open seas. Adams responded with a mini-lecture on military strategy: the United States had no intention of invading England, so a massive American navy capable of taking on the entire British fleet was unnecessary; the chief battles would be on this side of the Atlantic, mainly on the Great Lakes and coastline. “We must have a Navy now to command The Lakes,” he observed, “if it costs us 100 Ships of the Line; whatever becomes of the Ocean.” He believed that Jefferson had to assume responsibility for America’s lack of readiness, for “if only a few Frigates had been ordered to be built,” the war might have gone differently. “Without this,” he wrote pointedly to Monticello, “our Union will be a brittle China Vase, a house of Ice or a Place [Plate? Palace?] of Glass.” Jefferson wisely let the subject drop.40

  Even before the fighting began, Adams had decided not only that it was inevitable but also that it was necessary, “necessary against England, necessary to convince France that we are something; and above all necessary to convince ourselves.” The chief effect of the war, he predicted to Rush three years before it began, would be renewed American nationalism. “We hear very often declarations on the demoralizing tendency of war,” he wrote, “but as much as I hate war, I cannot be of the opinion that frequent wars are so corrupting to human nature as long peaces.” It was a tragic comment on mankind, he acknowledged, “that we cannot be virtuous without murdering one another,” but such was the sad historical truth of the matter. A few months before the outbreak of hostilities, Adams repeated in almost poetic language his hope that war with England would recover the national spirit that had faded since the end of the revolutionary war:

  The winds begin to rustle, the clouds gather, it grows dark; will these airy forces rear up the Ocean to a foaming fury? A spirit seems to be rising; a spirit of contrition and shame at our long apathy and lethargy; a spirit of resentment of injuries, a spirit of indignation at insolence; and what to me is very remarkable, a spirit of greater unanimity than I have ever witnessed in this country for fifty years.41

  Adams also tended to view the causes and the conduct of the War of 1812 through the prism of the American Revolution. He was critical of American military strategy, especially the decision to invade Canada, which proved a fiasco, because of British naval supremacy on the Great Lakes. But what he called “the great Comedy of Errors” reminded him of the initial months of the Revolution: “I say we do not make more mistakes now than we did in 1774, ’5, ’6, ’7, ’8, ’9, ’80, ’81, ’82, ’83,” he reminded Rush. “It was patched and pie bald then, as it is now, and ever will be, world without end.” He disclaimed any right “to reproach the present government or the present generation” for its conduct of the war: “We blundered at Lexington, at Bunker’s Hill…. Where, indeed, did we not blunder except Saratoga and York[town], where our triumphs redeemed all former disgraces?” Even when the British army closed in on the national capital, Adams told friends not to panic. It was worse during the Revolution, he recalled, “when Congress was chased like a covey of Partridges from Philadelphia to Trenton, from Trenton to Lancaster….”42

  Lack of support for the war in pockets of Federalist New England reminded him of the foot-draggers and pseudo-Tories of old. In the Congress this timidity took the form of orchestrated delays, which he found nearly treasonable: “I expect to be tortured all winter, to read eternal Speeches in Congress repeating…over and over again a thousand times this common place nonsense,” he complained. “The times require Ships and Cannon, not Sighs and Figures.” His break with the Federalists, which for all intents and purposes had occurred in the last year of his presidency, was now rendered final and complete. When word reached him that New England Federalists were contemplating a convention in Hartford to consider boycotting the war and even seceding from the Union, he was indignant. These traitors should be “made to repeat in dust and ashes.” The Hartford Convention would prove a fiasco, he predicted defiantly, claiming that it would produce only lukewarm opposition; or, as he put it more colorfully, it would resemble “The Congress at Vienna, as least as much as an Ignis fatuous resembles a Volcano.”43

  Even the excruciatingly prolonged negotiations that eventually led to the Treaty of Ghent ending the war produced in Adams a sharp sense of déjà vu. For many of the issues at stake—the impressment of American seamen, British claims to trading rights in the western territories and fishing rights off the Newfoundland coast—were identical to the issues Adams had negotiated as head of the American delegation in Paris at the end of the Revolution. And the head of the American delegation at Ghent was none other than his son, John Quincy Adams.

  When President Madison asked his advice about American concessions, Adams tried to be both candid and diplomatic: “All I can say is, that I would continue this war forever, rather than surrender one acre of territory, one iota of the fisheries, as established by the third article of the treaty of 1783, or one sailor impressed from any merchant ship. I will not, however, say this to my son, though I shall be very much obliged to you, if you will give him orders to the same effect.” A few months later, of course, he was writing John Quincy with just the advice offered confidentially to Madison, recommending with relish what he called his own successful “mixture of fluency and impudence” as a diplomat. He warned John Quincy not to trade the coastal fisheries for control of the Mississippi: “Oh, how glad I am, that I am not in his [John Quincy’s] place,” he told Benjamin Rush’s son. “I should have been tempted to say ‘War! War, interminable, or eternal, rather than any such terms.’” When news of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent reached him, he was relieved that John Quincy would finally be coming home. But when the specific terms of the treaty revealed that both sides had agreed to the status quo ante, he was incensed, interpreting the stalemate as a personal affront to his efforts in 1783: “neither Georg
e third nor his Son have fulfilled his promises to my Country, made to me, as her Representative.”44

  It surely required “a singular Being” to take an entire peace treaty personally. But then, Adams was accustomed to uttering irreverencies out loud, just as he was accustomed to defying established opinions and presenting his strong and often passionate views in a defiant and argumentative format. That was the way he thought and felt and behaved. The most disarming aspect of his arguments about the causes and conduct of the War of 1812 turned out to be that, on virtually every major issue, events proved him correct. And, most disarming of all, this time he did not need to wait for posterity to clinch the verdict. But there was no need to worry about his foresightedness leading to sudden esteem, enhanced popularity, and vaunting vanity. He was safely insulated from such corruptions this time and did not need to take precautions against popularity. For no one, save John Quincy and a few close friends, was paying any attention.

  4

  The American Dialogue

  I consider you and [Jefferson] as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.