Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams
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Adams was guilty of similar acts of duplicity. In 1819, he reported reading a copy of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, a document purportedly drafted by a group of citizens in North Carolina in May of 1775 and containing language similar to Jefferson’s later version of the Declaration. Jefferson responded immediately, contesting the authenticity of the Mecklenburg document, which seemed to cast doubts on the originality of his own famous draft. Adams promptly reassured Jefferson that he believed “the Mecklenburg Resolutions are a fiction” and that it had always seemed “utterly incredible that they should be genuine.” Meanwhile, however, he was telling other correspondents just the opposite. “I could as soon believe that the dozen flowers of the Hydrangia now before my Eyes were the work of chance,” he snickered, “as that the Mecklenburg Resolutions and Mr. Jefferson’s declaration were not derived one from the other.”16
The special character of the correspondence—the sheer literary quality, the classical references and proses, letters that take on the tone of treatises—followed naturally from their mutual realization that these private letters also had a public audience. Jefferson expressed amazement “that a printer has had the effrontery to propose to me the letting him publish it [the correspondence with Adams],” then wondered why “these people think they have a right to everything secret or sacred.” Adams was more realistic, or perhaps more forthright. “This correspondence,” he joked to Jefferson, “I hope will be concealed as long as Hutchinsons and Olivers,” referring to the secret letters of Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver that were intercepted by American revolutionaries and published as evidence of a British conspiracy to abolish colonial liberties. The most important readers, however, were not contemporary snoopers, but subsequent generations. Adams said as much to Jefferson, envisioning the day when “your letters will all be published in volumes…which will be read with delight in future ages.” Adams’s obsession with his historic reputation, of course, was both obvious and notorious. Jefferson’s concern was equally powerful, but more disguised and controlled. It seems fair to conclude that both men sat down to write the other in a more self-conscious frame of mind than they adopted when corresponding with less renowned friends and associates. This was not a casual correspondence. Words were chosen with one eye on posterity.17
What gave the correspondence its intellectual zest, and carried it beyond polite exchanges about old age, daily exercise discussions, and comparative reading lists, was Adams’s inveterate effusiveness. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how often he reminded himself to avoid controversy, no matter how frequently he vowed to provide posterity with a more serene, scrubbed-up image of himself as the classical hero, Adams found it impossible to behave like a proper patriarch: “Whenever I sett down to write to you,” he admitted to Jefferson in 1813, “I am precisely in the Situation of the Wood Cutter on Mount Ida: I can not see Wood for Trees. So many Subjects Crowd upon me that I know not, with which to begin.” It was the characteristically maddening and beguiling Adams impetuosity again. Soon, all the troublesome and forbidden subjects were breaking through with a velocity and ferocity that overwhelmed Jefferson’s capacity to keep up.18
Jefferson, for example, had used the phrase “mighty Wave of public opinion” in passing, intending it as a favorable commentary on the benign power of the popular will. Adams repeated it mockingly, then unleashed a verbal barrage. Claiming that “these Letters of yours require Volumes from me,” he went into a tirade against popular movements of several sorts: the Crusades, the French Revolution, the Thirty Years War, hurricanes in the Gulf Stream (!), corrupt elections, Christian and Muslim massacres, and a host of other catastrophes, creating a veritable wave of his own political rhetoric that was intended to wash over Jefferson’s presumption that the will of the people was always benign. “Upon this Subject I despair of making myself understood by Posterity, by the present Age, and even by you,” he thundered. On many occasions the “mighty Wave of public opinion,” he went on, took the shape of a mob that committed terrorist acts against the public interest. Recalling a popular demonstration against the government in 1799, Adams chided Jefferson: “I have no doubt You was fast asleep in philosophical Tranquility, when ten thousand People, and perhaps many more, were parading the Streets of Philadelphia.”19
Adams returned regularly to his outspokenly critical attitude toward popular movements. If not restrained by law, evangelical Christians in America would “whip and crop, and pillory and roast” just as they did throughout European history. “The multitude and diversity of them, You will Say, is our Security against them all. God grant it,” he acknowledged. But the same emotional forces that propelled religious fanatics to commit unspeakable acts against humanity operated with equivalent ferocity in the political arena. “I wish that Superstition in Religion exciting Superstition in Politicks…may never blow up all your benevolent and phylanthropic Lucubrations,” he warned Jefferson, but “the History of all Ages is against you.” When Jefferson tried to respond in an accommodating way, agreeing that religious fanaticism had certainly proven destructive in Europe, Adams reiterated that irrational energies were not confined by any psychological embargo to the other side of the Atlantic. “I can only say at present,” he concluded, “that it would seem that human Reason and human Conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm.”20
Of course, for Adams to insist on the power of the passions was like a devout Christian proclaiming the power of prayer. It came to him just as naturally, though surely more effusively, as silence and self-restraint came to Jefferson. A lifetime of introspection and daily entries in his diary had provided Adams with a palpable sense of his own emotional excesses. And his reading of history had confirmed that irrational forces usually shaped the behavior, not just of mass movements but also of aristocratic elites and individual despots. He could launch into a lecture on this theme with all the impetuous energy that graphically illustrated its point, thereby making his own passionate disposition an important part of his discourse on the irresistible power of human emotion.
Jefferson was not temperamentally disposed to find the discourse interesting. He tended not so much to deny the influence of the emotional and irrational as to believe that they were best ignored. He was as constitutionally cool as Adams was warm. An inveterate record keeper who logged all his letters, kept track of daily weather changes, and maintained elaborate files on his library, Indian languages, and garden plantings, Jefferson never kept a diary or any account of his deepest feelings. Introspection struck him as self-indulgent. In 1816 he made the mistake of declaring this opinion to Adams, wondering why otherwise intelligent people allowed themselves to probe their private feelings and become preoccupied with depressing emotions like gloom and grief. “I wish the pathologists then would tell us,” Jefferson asked rhetorically, “what is the use of grief on the economy, and of what good it is the cause….”21
It was as if he had dropped a match in a munitions factory. Adams felt obliged to deliver a series of lectures on “the uses of grief,” a subject on which he claimed to be one of America’s experts. Grief, he explained, was not just a futile form of sorrow. Under its spell men are driven into “habits of serious Reflection….” It “sharpens the Understanding and Softens the heart.” The furrows depicted in the portraits and statues of great men “were all ploughed in the Countenance, by Grief.”22
Jefferson tried to drop the subject: “To the question indeed on the Utility of Grief, no answer remains to be given. You have exhausted the subject.” But Adams had just gotten started. There were many more “uses of grief,” all of which required enumeration. Then there were the equally important “abuses of grief,” which required documentation with examples drawn from the classics, Christianity, and even the misuse of Washington’s reputation by the High Federalists under Hamilton to sustain support for their banking schemes. Grief, it turned out, was a many-sided and many-splendored
emotion. Jefferson tried to fight off the last lecture-of-a-letter on the subject by concluding that the uses and the abuses of grief seemed to cancel themselves out, allowing him to cling to his original contention that “we may consider its value in the economy of the human being, as equivocal at least.” Adams could not have disagreed more, since he regarded the controlling of human passion as the ultimate function of government. But he let the matter drop.23
By then, however, the pattern was set. Adams was writing over two letters for every one of Jefferson’s, setting the intellectual agenda of the correspondence so that it accorded with his most passionate preoccupations. “Answer my letters at your Leisure,” he advised Jefferson as it became clear that the stream of words from Quincy was threatening to flood Monticello. “Give yourself no concern,” Adams added, explaining that the correspondence had become a major emotional outlet for him, “a refuge and protection against Ennui.” Jefferson apologized for his failure to keep up, claiming that he received over twelve hundred letters each year, all of which required answers. Adams replied that he received only a fraction of that number, but chose not to answer most of them so he could focus his allegedly waning energies on Jefferson, whom he called the only person “on this side of Monticello, who can give me any Information upon Subjects that I am now analysing and investigating: if I may be permitted to Use the pompous Words now in fashion.” Adams declared that he was not going to take a “stand upon Epistolary Etiquette…though I have written two Letters, yet unnoticed I must write a third.” If Jefferson felt somewhat overwhelmed, Adams assured him that he was only writing “a hundredth part of what I wish to say to you.” And after all, Adams pleaded to his famous friend, “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”24
There was never any realistic possibility that a truly mutual understanding of their deep-rooted differences would emerge fully in the correspondence. Adams invested himself in the exchange much more than Jefferson; it obviously meant more to him and received a fuller measure of his intellectual attention. (Indeed, Adams gave the correspondence with Jefferson almost the same kind of intense attention that Jefferson gave to the founding of the University of Virginia at that same time.) In addition to the inherently unbalanced character of the exchange, its self-conscious theatricality and the patriarchal role-playing in which both men engaged meant that genuine debate and complete closure were not the highest priorities. But the initial clash over the role of popular movements in history, and then the semicomical argument over how to regard basic human emotions like grief, constituted clues into the deeper mystery of what was, in fact, their profound disagreement over the proper meaning of the American Revolution.
Part of the disagreement, to be sure, was temperamental; if asked to choose weapons, Adams would have selected a broadax while Jefferson would have picked a stiletto. But the honesty of their personal affection suggested that each man recognized the missing elements in his own personality in the character of the other. They were the proverbial opposites that attracted. Beyond or beneath the temperamental differences, however, were buried several fundamentally incompatible political convictions and two opposing versions of republican ideology. No matter how polite and seductively civil their letters were designed to appear—and they were self-consciously designed for just that effect—the correspondence between the two wise men of the revolutionary generation was an earnest American dialogue over just what they and their generation had wrought.
It is tempting, and perfectly plausible, to read the correspondence between the two patriarchs as an elegant and amiable conversation between elder statesmen, moving from topic to topic like accomplished dancers doing a minuet. It would be more accurate, however, to understand the correspondence as a dialogue between intellectual combatants representing two different visions of the American republic, periodically retreating to safe and uncontroversial subjects in order to avoid risking another rupture in the friendship.
Aging, for example, was a safe subject. Both men worried about senility, what Adams called “dying at the top,” and shared their sense of dismay when meeting old friends whose mental faculties had deteriorated. Each time one of their fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence died, they exchanged recollections of the remaining survivors. In 1821, when William Floyd of New York passed on, Adams noted that “We shall all be asterised very soon,” then concluded with a Latin inscription and a question: “Sic transit Gloriola (is there such a Latin Word?) mundi.” Jefferson concurred that the time for their generation was running out. As for the term “gloriola,” he recalled that Cicero had once used the word, which, translated loosely, meant “little bit of glory,” an appropriately modest description of their generation’s contribution to American history.25
Language was another safe refuge. Adams enjoyed using words like “quiveration” and “gloriola,” often accompanying their usage with denunciations of British dictionaries, especially the famous dictionary by Samuel Johnson, which Adams regarded as a fossilized list compiled by a pedant. In 1820 The North American Review, New England’s leading magazine of letters, criticized Jefferson for using such new words as “location” and “centrality,” which had not yet earned their way into common usage. Jefferson wrote Adams to confirm their mutual sense that “Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage,” and to declare proudly that the two old patriarchs were still young enough to serve as wordsmiths in “the work-shop in which new ones [words] are elaborated.” Adams did not believe, as Jefferson sometimes predicted, that an entirely new American language would eventually evolve independent of English, but both men relished their role as linguistic revolutionaries, viewing the language as a vibrant, ever-changing human creation shaped in the hurly-burly of public opinion.26
There were, of course, other safe harbors besides aging, language, and the classics, but the trouble was that Adams was congenitally predisposed to steer even the most innocuous subject out into the rough waters of politics if Jefferson inadvertently happened to leave the way open. That, in fact, is how the most extensive and revealing debate over political principles in the correspondence actually began. Jefferson accidentally launched the debate with a familiar, and he must have thought, completely unexceptional formulation:
The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed thro’ all time. Whether the power of the people, or that of the aristoi should prevail, were questions which kept the states of Greece and Rome in eternal convulsions; as they now schismatize every people whose minds and mouths are not shut up by the gag of a despot…. To me it appears that there have been differences of opinion, and party differences, from the first establishment of governments, to the present day…every one takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few.27
Adams had already declared himself an avowed enemy to all political parties, whose only concern, as he saw it, was “that they shall lose the Elections, and consequently the Loaves and Fishes….” His first instinct was diplomatic, to agree with Jefferson’s characterization of the eternal struggle between the few and the many, a distinction as old as Aristotle. “Precisely,” he wrote back to Jefferson, adding that this was why he had always insisted that “While all other Sciences are advanced, that of Government is at a stand; little better understood; little better practiced now than 3 or 4 thousand Years ago.” Having dispensed with the civilities and acknowledged the points of agreement, they then proceeded to expose how much they disagreed.28
The truth was that Adams and Jefferson were about as far removed from one another on the question of “the few and the many” as any members of the revolutionary generation. Jefferson’s formulation sounds so familiar to our ears because it presents the political choices in a modern political vocabulary that was destined to dominate American political culture and eventually become a rhetorical posture adopted by all major political parties: “the power of the people” was hallowed and sacred; governments became despotic whenever a pri
vileged elite defied the will of the majority; the only legitimate republican government was rooted in popular consent; as Jefferson put it, “governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of the people, and execute it.”29
Adams sensed the dramatic gap that separated him from Jefferson without ever being able to fathom fully where his own thinking had veered off in another direction. He recalled an evening in Paris in the 1780s when Jefferson, a youthful John Quincy, and he were being harangued by Lafayette on the power of the people and the future of what was being called “democracy.” He was astonished then, and remained perplexed ever after, at what he called “the gross ideology of them all.” But he acknowledged to Jefferson that “Your steady defence of democratical Principles, and Your unvariable favourable Opinion of the french Revolution laid the foundation of Your Unbounded Popularity.” Meanwhile, his opposition to these ideas “laid the foundation of that immense Unpopula[r]ity, which fell like the Tower of Siloam upon me.”30 Somehow, from that moment onward, Adams had developed the reputation as a crypto-monarchist, a defender of aristocratic privileges, an enemy of the common man and his aggregate symbol, “the people,” a reputation which Adams justifiably claimed was misrepresentative. Somehow, even though the French Revolution had followed a disastrous course that Adams correctly predicted, Jefferson’s association with romantic convictions about “the power of the people” that had legitimized the bloodshed and human misery in Europe made him a political hero in America. It forever remained a mystery to Adams how this had happened.