Only a part of the mystery got resolved in the correspondence with Jefferson, which served too many purposes to allow for systematic discussions of all contested political principles. Clearly, however, the core of the difference that divided the two patriarchs had something to do with incompatible conceptions of “democracy.” The term needs to be put in quotations in order to remind us that it had not yet achieved the powerful meaning that it would in the course of the nineteenth century, indeed was about to achieve during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Neither Adams nor Jefferson referred to themselves as “democrats.” For both of them, the operative term remained “republican.” But beneath this apparent agreement lay a fundamental difference of opinion with enormous implications for their subsequent political reputations and respective places in American history.
Put simply, Adams did not believe there was such a thing as “the people” he could never bring himself to think about popular sovereignty in the reverential fashion required by the emerging democratic tradition that Jefferson was coming to symbolize. “The fundamental Article of my political Creed,” he announced to Jefferson, “is, that Despotism, or unlimited Sovereignty, or absolute Power is the same in a Majority of a popular Assembly, an Aristocratical Counsel, and Oligarchical Junto and a single Emperor.”31 This put him at odds with the new democratic religion, which took as an article of faith the belief that what Jefferson called “the will of the people” was unquestionably benign; it was inherently impossible for “the people” to behave despotically. Adams had no trouble endorsing the Lockean doctrine that all political power derived from the people. He had helped lead a revolution against an English king and Parliament based squarely on that principle. Moreover, he had been a leader in the Continental Congress in insisting that all the state constitutions be ratified by popular conventions called explicitly for that purpose, perhaps the clearest expression of the doctrine that all political power is derived from the people. But he had never been able to convince himself that there was an undifferentiated body of popular opinion “out there” with an abiding will of its own. And he was similarly incapable of regarding popular movements as beyond criticism. On these central tenets of the emerging democratic faith, he remained an agnostic.
His way of defending what was already becoming a sacrilegious position, outside the mainstream of American political discourse, was to attack. A useful weapon was his new word “ideology,” which he had first encountered in a speech by Napoleon but which was first employed in a systematic fashion by Destutt de Tracy, a French philosophe Jefferson admired enormously. Adams read Tracy, then wrote Jefferson that he was delighted with this strange new term “upon the Common Principle of delight in every Thing We cannot understand.” What is “ideology,” he asked rhetorically. “Does it mean Idiotism?” he joked. “The Science of Non compos Menticism? The Science of Lunacy? The Theory of Deleriism?” The belief in the separate and independent existence of an entity called “the people” struck Adams as a typical act of ideology, the confusion of a romantic sentiment lodged in the mind of theorists and propagandists with a social reality. Moreover, the elevation of this illusory entity to the status of a sacred icon effectively blinded Americans to the political dangers that could just as easily come from misguided majorities as conniving minorities. Whenever he heard political leaders justify a policy by referring to “the people,” he suspected that something duplicitous and deceitful was brewing. Adams objected to Jeffersonian rhetoric because it tended to rhapsodize about the omniscience of popular majorities in much the same way that medieval defenders of papal and monarchical power had claimed a direct connection to the divine. For Adams, the threat to the American republic could just as easily come from the left as the right; democratic majorities were just as capable of tyranny as popes and kings.32
The differences between the two sages became even clearer when Adams, seizing on Jefferson’s use of the Greek word aristoi, launched what proved to be the most extensive exchange on political philosophy in the entire correspondence: “I recollect,” Adams noted nostalgically, “near 30 years ago to have said car[e]lesly to You, that I wished I could find time and means to write something upon Aristocracy. You seized upon the idea and encouraged me to do it, with all that friendly warmth that is natural and habitual to you.” Adams claimed that he had been “writing on that Subject ever since,” the only problem being that “I have been so unfortunate as never to make myself understood.”33
Whether it was a function of perversity, or utter obliviousness to the political vocabulary of the post-revolutionary era, Adams had always demonstrated outright genius at making himself misunderstood on the seminal political issues of his time. His criticism of Jeffersonian rhetoric about “the people” often came across as a denunciation of representative government. His obsession with the necessary role of the aristocracy and its ravenous appetite for power often made him sound like a proponent of privilege and an enemy of equality. And since the idea of equality happened to be the most alluring idea of the age, his reputation as a traitor to the republican cause always retained a tinge of plausibility.
Part of his problem was surely psychological; he was temperamentally averse to endorsing, or even appearing to endorse, political principles which were, or even appeared to be, faddish or fashionable. He only felt comfortable as the irreverent dissenter, delivering jeremiads to naive optimists, lectures on perseverance to the faint of heart, warnings about mob violence to defenders of popular rule. His obsession with aristocracy was yet another example of what might be called his enlightened perversity, his way of contesting the egalitarian presumptions of the political creed that Jefferson, more than any other American, would come to symbolize, by employing language that defied those very presumptions.34
“Your aristoi,” he warned Jefferson, “are the most difficult Animals to manage, of anything in the Whole Theory and practice of Government.” Adams had a way of describing the resourcefulness of aristocratic families in European and American history that seemed to render the likelihood of an egalitarian politics virtually impossible. Whether it was the feudal barons of medieval France, the landed gentry of Elizabethan England, the merchant class of colonial New England, or the great planter families of the Chesapeake, the preponderance of political power, as Adams saw it, invariably rested in the hands of a few wealthy individuals and families. “Now, my Friend, who are the aristoi?” Adams asked rhetorically. “Philosophy may Answer ‘The Wise and Good.’ But the World, Mankind, have by their practice always answered, ‘the rich and beautiful and well born.’” And even philosophers, he chided, when marrying their children, “prefer the rich the handsome and the well descended to the wise and good.” The power and influence of a wealthy family might wane, but it would “soon be replaced by an equally wealthy successor.” Or, as Adams put it, “Aristocracy, like Waterfowl dives for Ages and rises again with brighter Plumage.”35
In one sense, Adams was not saying anything especially novel, for that matter nothing that did not follow from James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), a classic treatise on the affinity between property and political power—one of those books Adams had in his library and covered with admiring marginalia. The notion that the wealthier segments of society had exercised a disproportionate share of political power throughout history was hardly news, even to a champion of equality like Jefferson.36
Where Adams and Jefferson parted company, and Adams parted company with the emerging liberal tradition in America, was in the diagnosis of the sources of social inequality. Adams thought it was natural and unavoidable rather than artificial and correctable. “Inequalities of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in his constitution of Human Nature,” Adams apprised Jefferson, “that no Art or policy can ever plain them down to a Level.” The thread of social inequality was woven “in the Constitution of human nature,” he repeated, “and wrought into the Fabrick of the Universe.” No matter how much “Philosophers and Politicians may nibble and qu
ibble,” he concluded, “they never will get rid of it.” Adams claimed that he had “never read Reasoning more absurd, Sophistry more gross, in proof of the Athanasian Creed, or Transubstantiation, than the subtle labours…to demonstrate the Natural Equality of Mankind.”37
Jefferson realized that Adams was contesting one of the central tenets of the Jeffersonian faith. He responded with his longest letter to date, acknowledging that “we are both too old to change opinions which are the result of a long life of inquiry and reflection,” then offered his contrasting opinion “on the suggestion of a former letter of yours, that we ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.”
He conceded that European society had been dominated by aristocratic families, but such domination was a function of artificial privileges as well as social conditions in which men were “crouded within limits either small or overcharged, and steeped in the vices which that situation generates.” In America, on the other hand, feudal privileges such as primogeniture and entail had long been outlawed and the existence of an unspoiled continent meant that “everyone may have land to labor for himself if he chuses.” Adams’s worries about aristocratic power were appropriate for Europe and for the past, but not for America and the future, where opportunity to advance was as available as the abundant land.
Along the way Jefferson distinguished between the natural aristocracy, based on virtue and talent, and the artificial or pseudo-aristocracy, “founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.” Adams’s strictures against aristocracy, he thought, were really warnings against the artificial aristocracy, which Jefferson agreed was “a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.” Given the favorable laws and social conditions in America, as well as an educational system that was accessible to and rewarded talent, one could reasonably expect that “rank, and birth, and tinsel-aristocracy will finally shrink into insignificance….”38
Jefferson’s clear articulation of the assumptions underlying his vision helped Adams to focus his own disagreement more sharply than ever before. The chief problem was not that Adams clung tenaciously to outmoded definitions of an aristocratic order, but rather that he could not persuade himself that a wholly new chapter in human history had opened in America. Although he used the word “order” instead of “class,” his heresy derived from his refusal to accept the Jeffersonian vision of a classless American society, a vision he regarded as illusory. “No Romance could be more amusing,” he wrote Jefferson, than the belief that the elimination of feudal restrictions and the availability of land would lead toward greater social equality. Unless one believed that human nature itself had somehow changed when it migrated from Europe to America, the removal of encrusted restrictions would only ensure a more ferocious scramble for wealth and power and a more unequal distribution of property. “After all,” he observed, “as long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families.” Unless Jefferson wanted to do away with the very notion of private property, releasing Americans into the marketplace or the wilderness would only assure the unequal distribution of goods: “I repeat it, so long as the Idea and existence of PROPERTY is admitted and established in Society, Accumulations of it will be made, the Snow ball will grow as it rolls.”39
Finally, Adams cautioned Jefferson that “Your distinction between natural and artificial Aristocracy does not appear to me well founded.” One might be able to separate wealth from talent in theory, but in fact, and in society, they were inextricably connected, like the world itself, “a mixture of the Sublime and the beautiful, the base and contemptible, the whimsical and the ridiculous.” Adams went into a frenzy over Jefferson’s sentimental presumption that wisdom and virtue, if somehow miraculously unmoored from all physical and economic conditions, would sail victorious into the American sunset: “The five Pillars of Aristocracy,” he argued, “are Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius and Virtues. Any one of the three first, can at any time, over bear any one or both of the two last.” But it would never come to that anyway, because the qualities Jefferson regarded as artificial and those he regarded as natural were, in fact, all mixed together inside human nature, then mixed again within society, in blended patterns that defied Jefferson’s geometric dissections.40
Adams eventually let the subject of aristocracy in America drop. The correspondence again moved into less contentious territory—the character of Napoleon, Plato’s metaphysical murkiness, the problematic status of medicine as a science. Both the dialogue and the friendship that underlay it survived the sharp clash over elementary political values and moved ahead. Despite their irreconcilable differences over the seminal political questions of the era, the friendship remained rock solid. In 1818, when asked about his relationship with Jefferson, Adams declared firmly that “He is the last & oldest of my confidential bosom friends, let party faction & politics say what they will.”41 Adams might have used the persistence of the friendship as an instructive example of his point about the power of the passions: sheer affection always overpowered mere reason.
But the momentary clash was itself an example of what Benjamin Rush meant when he referred to the two patriarchs as “the North and South Poles of the American Revolution.” The tension that had existed between Adams and Jefferson from the 1790s onward went far beyond the personal jealousies and bickerings generated by specific political conflicts over particular episodes like the quasi-war with France, the need for an enlarged American navy, or the controversial election of 1800. Adams and Jefferson had come to embody fundamentally different versions and visions of what the American Revolution meant. Conventional political categories—left versus right or liberal versus conservative—cannot adequately capture the issues at stake. The labels most recently employed by historians—modern versus classical—are more helpful, but still do little justice to the layered differences of intellect and temperament that would permit each man to wear both labels on different parts of his intellectual anatomy.
If both could legitimately claim to be republicans, and they could, the correspondence exposed the ideological breadth of the term as well as the intriguing affinity the two men felt in large part because of the way their mutual contradictions interacted. In his private life, most especially with trusted friends, Adams released his passionate energies in bursts of unbridled opinion. In his political thought, all his different formulations were bound together by the belief in control, balance, the modulated supervision of social change. Jefferson reversed the dichotomy, controlling his own private feelings so effectively that no one, then or since, could claim to know him fully, while simultaneously advocating a politics of release, an ideology of individual liberation from all forms of exterior constraint or control. Such paradoxical patterns defy one-dimensional labelling and call into question the very relevance of generic categories of description.
Whatever we choose to call them, the political values that Jefferson championed, indeed that his name came to represent, became central tenets of the American liberal tradition; the values Adams embraced became important ingredients for critics of that tradition on both the conservative and radical sides of the political spectrum. And that posture—critical realist of seductive Jeffersonian illusions—was the one Adams found most comfortable throughout his correspondence with that man at Monticello. Jefferson embodied deep and sincere convictions about a truly open-ended America, a fundamentally new kind of society which had liberated itself from the burdens of the past and from the class divisions of Europe; which required only a minimalist government, whose only function would be to remove artificial barriers to individual initiative; which could justifiably claim to represent an undifferentiated, nearly spiritual entity called “the will of the people.” No matter how powerful these convictions were to become in nineteenth-century America, Adams regarded all of them as illusions.42
During the last ten years of the correspondence Adams remained the instigator and primary energy source of the exchange,
but even Adams preferred to seek out subjects on which disagreement was unlikely. The proliferation of banks became a convenient rallying point, since both men worried that men who merely “moved money around” without creating anything substantial with their labor were parasites. Jefferson expressed agreement when Adams broke into angry soliloquies on the evils of the banking business, which he called “an infinity of successive felonious larcenies.”43 Or when James Madison retired after two terms as president, both men welcomed him into the fold of senior patriots. Adams thought that Madison’s administration “has acquired more glory, and established more Union, than all three of his Predecessors, Washington Adams and Jefferson, put together.” But he worried that, because “our good Brother Madison” did not have “Children and Grand Children and great grand Children” around him, he would be unhappy. Jefferson said not to worry: “Such a mind as his, fraught with information, and with matter for reflection, can never know ennui.”44 Or when John Quincy was elected president in 1824, the proud father expressed his concern that “our John” would be devoured by competing political factions. “I call him our John,” he explained to Jefferson, “because when you was at Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to be almost as much your boy as mine.” Jefferson responded graciously, expressing confidence that public support would rally around the new president, avoiding any mention of his nearly total disagreement with all of John Quincy’s presidential programs.45
Minor disagreements presented no threat to the friendship. Jefferson thought that France and French ideas, despite the excesses of the French Revolution and the havoc of the Napoleonic Wars, were destined to dominate the European continent. Adams claimed to be “charmed with the fluency and rapidity of your Reasoning,” but predicted that Great Britain, not France, would remain the major European power throughout the rest of the century. In 1820, when Jefferson was attempting to establish the curriculum of his newly founded University of Virginia, Adams impishly suggested that “it would…be advisable to institute…Professorships of the Philosophy of the human Understanding, whose object should be to ascertain the Limits of human knowledge already acquired.” But then the disciple of doubt acknowledged that the disciple of optimism would himself “have doubts of the propriety of setting any limits, or thinking of any limits of human Power, or human Wisdom, and human Virtue.” And since Jefferson had repeatedly expressed his opinion that Europe was a swarm of contagious diseases that ought not be allowed to contaminate the American social environment, Adams wondered why he would recruit the faculty for his beloved university from England and the Continent. “The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices,” he reminded Jefferson, “all infected with Episcopal and Presbyterian Creeds, and confessions of faith.” Jefferson conceded the point, but explained that Europe also happened to be the home of the best scholars.46
Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams Page 15
