Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Adams immediately suspected that the anonymous author was John Taylor, a disciple of Jefferson who had served in the Senate while Adams was vice president. “Taylor was an eternal talker,” Adams recalled, “the greatest talker I ever knew, excepting George the Third.” The manuscript read the way Taylor talked, full of “fire and fluency” that eventually lost itself in esoteric abstractions. Jefferson agreed with Adams’s speculation, recalling that Taylor was known for his “quaint, mystical and hyperbolic ideas…[and] affected, new-fangled and pedantic terms….” Adams confirmed the diagnosis: “The Style answers every characteristic, that you have intimated.” Taylor must be the man. A few months later, in April 1814, Adams wrote the first of what would eventually become thirty-two lengthy letters to Taylor. Rather than feel insulted that his political views were under attack again, Adams felt honored that his previous publications were still taken seriously. “I thought my Books, as well as myself were forgotten,” he joked to Jefferson: “But behold! I am to become a great Man in my expiring moments.”2

  The manuscript John Taylor had sent to Adams was published in Fredricksburg in 1814 under the title An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States. Although it eventually came to be recognized as a minor classic in the agrarian tradition, when it first appeared few readers noticed its existence and fewer still found it relevant or readable. Apparently Taylor had been sitting on his plantation in Caroline County, Virginia, for the past twenty years, studying and arguing with the three-volume work Adams had written in the late 1780s under the title A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. Taylor, in effect, had actually done what Adams kept telling his friends and correspondents they ought to do, indeed, the entire political leadership of the United States ought to do; namely, to go back and read his Defence, along with the separate collection of essays he had published in 1790 under the title Discourses on Davila, which he claimed should be “considered as a fourth volume of the Defence….” If only they would do so, he claimed incessantly, they would discover in one place the seeds of his system, and simultaneously understand why he had been right about the chief sources of danger to America’s experiment with republicanism. He told Rush, for example, that the Federalist leader Fisher Ames, whom he called “that pretty little warbling Canary Bird,” often “Sang of the Dangers of American Liberty,” but that a younger John Adams “had preached in ‘The Defence’ and the ‘Discourses on Davila’ and held up in a Thousand Mirrors all those Dangers and more twenty years before him.” Moreover, Ames, like so many other Federalist leaders, failed to comprehend that “the sordid Avarice which he imputes to the whole Body of the American People belongs chiefly if not exclusively to his own Friends, the Aristocrats or rather the Oligarchs who now rule the Federal Party.”3

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, the disciples of Jefferson—and Taylor fell into this camp—could have avoided their near-fatal infatuation with unfettered democracy, their naive belief that the people are capable of “nothing but Innocence, Purity, Virtue, Humanity, Liberty and Patriotism.” Perhaps the most remarkable feature of his political writing in the 1780s, Adams bragged to Mathew Carey, was “the date of their composition and publication,” for he had warned against the despotic consequences of unlimited democracy before the French Revolution had shown “its face of Blood and Horror, of Murder and Massacre, of Ambition and Avarice….” Adams went so far as to claim that the most scathing critique of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, had actually been based on his own Defence. In 1787, he had given a copy of the first volume of his Defence to the English diplomat David Hartley, Adams recalled to Vanderkemp, who had in turn passed it along to Burke, who was then allegedly inspired to compose his classic work. As a result, Adams claimed—with pride and with a covering joke to mask his vanity—whenever Burke was asked if he thought George Washington was the greatest man of the age, he purportedly replied: “I thought so…’till I knew John Adams.”4

  Throughout his retirement years, Adams returned regularly to his personal copies of the Defence and Davila to record his private pleasure at their prescience. “This dull, heavy volume,” he noted in the margins of Davila in 1812, “still excites the wonder of its author.” He remained proud that he had found “the courage to oppose and publish his [i.e., Adams’s] own opinions to the universal opinions of mankind.” But instead of assuring his reputation, “the work…operated to destroy his popularity” and became a piece of proof “that he was an advocate for monarchy, and labouring to introduce a hereditary presidency in America.” A year later, in 1813, he reviewed his political writings again, commenting that “Americans paid no attention or regard,” and concluding that their failure to heed his warnings would very probably lead to increasing sectional divisions and even civil war.5

  From the very beginning, for that matter, he had expected to be misunderstood. “If it is heresy,” he had written to Franklin the year the Defence was published, “I shall, I suppose, be cast out of communion.” And to James Warren he had predicted in the same year that “This Book will make me unpopular….” It was the classic Adams formulation. He had spoken the unpopular truths to a hostile world, just as he had done the right thing in the quasi-war with France despite the political costs. But posterity would eventually vindicate his judgment. “The time will come,” he assured himself, “after I am dead, when the System of it in general must be adopted, with bitter repentance that it was not heeded sooner.”6

  The truth was much messier. Both the Defence and Davila, it is true, contained much of the political wisdom Adams had to offer his countrymen. But they were really not so much books as notebooks, not so much coherent expositions of the Adams “system” as collections of quotations from other authors interspersed with his own erudite effusions. In the preface to the first volume of the Defence, Adams explained that it had been “necessary to write and publish with precipitation,” apologizing that he was too pressed for time “to correct the style, adjust the method, pare off excrescences, or even obliterate repetition.” When offered the opportunity to revise the entire work in 1794, however, he declined. After his retirement to Quincy he regularly lamented the inchoate character of his political publications, worrying that “nothing I ever printed or wrote in my whole life is fit for the inspection of Posterity,” and justifying the incoherence on the grounds that they were “all written in a hurry, distracted with care, despirited by discouragements—never transcribed, never corrected, and not even ever revised.”7

  The problem was not so much lack of time as temperament. In his formal writings as in his conversation, Adams careened off one subject into another like the proverbial loose cannon on a slippery deck. The artifice required to implement a large design over many pages was not in him. More than any other member of the revolutionary generation, Adams wrote as he talked. His written thoughts, like his spoken thoughts, had an excited, volatile, rambling quality that defied orthodox versions of coherence or control. Moreover, he tended to seize whatever was at hand to document his convictions, then be led by that source into topics extraneous to his original point, thereby carrying the reader down long, often interesting but false trails, building up alongside his odyssey-of-an-argument massive mountains of only slightly relevant detail. Fully three quarters of the pages in the Defence and over half of Davila were lifted verbatim from other books, only a small portion of which were indicated by quotation marks.8

  In effect, Adams the inveterate conversationalist built into his published writings unacknowledged conversations with other authorities. Where Adams’s voice ends and another begins, however, is often impossible to determine, leaving most unsuspecting readers to wonder who is addressing them, where they are being led, and why they should put themselves in the hands of an author whose obsessions have so obviously overwhelmed his respect for their sensibilities as well as their patience. If there continues to be lively debate among twe
ntieth-century scholars over Adams’s prominence as a political thinker, there is virtual unanimity that his published political writings demonstrate his deficiencies as a formal political philosopher.9

  For any modern reader with the stamina to plow through the Defence, it is difficult at first to understand why Adams put such an emphasis on its contents or why John Taylor spent twenty years denouncing its doctrines. On its face the Defence was a long-winded refutation, in the familiarly obsessive Adams mood and mode, of the French philosopher Turgot’s claim that the legislatures established in the newly created American state governments should be simple, single-house affairs. Adams’s Defence was literally that, a defense of the bicameral legislatures adopted by most of the states and eventually enshrined in the federal Constitution. “The United States are large and populous nations…and they are growing every day more disproportionate,” Adams had argued, “and therefore [are] less capable of being held together by simple governments.” Adams advocated “mixed governments,” that is, governments composed of three separate branches, meaning a strong executive, an independent judiciary, and a legislative branch divided into an upper and lower house, again just as most of the colonial charters and state constitutions had required. “It may be laid down as a universal maxim,” he had written, “that every government that has not three independent branches” would eventually degenerate into a despotism. The history of republican governments in Europe demonstrated clearly that simple, unbalanced constitutions quickly deteriorated into either “an absolute monarchy; or an arrogant nobility….” The latter was actually the most dangerous, because emboldened aristocrats had shown a tendency to “annihilate the people, and, attended with their horses, hounds and vassals…run down the king as they would hunt a deer, wishing for nothing so much as to be in at the death.”10

  Very much a product of the 1780s, and of his reading of English and European history, the Defence demonstrated that Adams, along with several other American political thinkers of the time, recognized that the revolutionary faith in public virtue so prevalent during the 1770s was inadequate as a basis for political stability once the war with England was won. “We may preach till we are tired of the theme,” Hamilton had written in 1782, “the necessity of disinterestedness in republics, without making a single proselyte.” Adams concurred that it was foolish to expect Americans to become more capable of self-denial and public spiritedness than any other people in history. To believe that the American people would behave virtuously was to think like the French Utopians, who expected a political revolution to change human nature. “The best republics will be virtuous,” he noted in the Defence, “and have been so; but we may hazard a conjecture, that the virtues have been the effect of the well ordered constitution, rather than the cause.”

  Adams joined with a host of commentators on the American scene to argue that “the people in America have now the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number, since the transgression of the first pair…” Although it was a propitious moment, the act of framing new constitutions for the American republic was, he insisted, a decidedly human project taking place on this earth and not in the Garden of Eden: “It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service [i.e., framing constitutions] had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven.” He went out of his way to dispel the mythology of America as an exception to the rules of history or the revolutionary generation as instruments of divine providence. And the chief lesson that Adams claimed he had learned from his reading of history was that “without three orders, and an effectual balance among them, in every American constitution, it must be destined to frequent unavoidable revolutions.” Although Adams made the matter sound rather mechanistic—separate branches of government and a bicameral legislature automatically yielding a balanced constitution—nothing about the basic message defied the common wisdom then being implemented in the separate state constitutions or in the national convention in Philadelphia. When, years later, James Madison, the chief architect of the United States Constitution, asked Adams about foreign critics of the American system of government, Adams emphasized the same features. “When a writer on government despises, sneers, or argues against mixed governments or a balance in government,” he wrote to Madison, “he instantly proves himself”—the favorite Adams stigma—“an ideologian.”11

  A close reading of the Defence—something very few could manage in the 1780s, given the sprawling, inchoate character of the work and the quirky schedule of its publication—revealed that Adams had been correct to worry that his apparent agreement with the broad outlines of American constitutionalism masked a fundamental disagreement that would set him against the emerging mainstream of American thinking about politics. The seeds of his aversion to liberalism, in short, were already planted in the Defence. Madison, in fact, had been one of the first to notice the lurking problems posed by Adams’s analysis. “Men of learning find nothing new in it,” he cautioned Jefferson, who had initially congratulated Adams for his contribution to the debate over constitutional frameworks, while “Men of taste [find] many things to criticize.” Always a sharper and more sophisticated political thinker than his mentor at Monticello, Madison was hoisting the warning flags. Some of Adams’s ideas, he was telling Jefferson, were not worthy of applause.12

  But until John Taylor published his own sprawling but comprehensive critique in 1814, no one had identified the deepest sources of Adams’s political alienation. Adams himself tended to focus on two specific recommendations in the Defence, the power he proposed for the chief executive and the role of the Senate or upper house, believing that his chief sin had been to insist on investing more authority in those branches than the bulk of his compatriots found necessary.

  And, indeed, Adams’s preference for a strong executive was part of the problem. At several places in the Defence, Adams seemed to endorse empowering the executive, which he also called “the first magistrate,” to a degree that seemed dangerously reminiscent of the sovereign powers of European kings. He advocated “a first magistrate…invested with the whole executive authority,” and he specifically recommended that the Constitution “give that first magistrate a negative on the legislature,” a right of veto which could not be overturned by a two-thirds majority. During his term as vice president he incurred the wrath of most members of Congress and became the butt of jokes in the press for advocating royal titles for the president. He was dubbed “His Rotundity” for insisting that Washington be referred to as “his Majesty.” Throughout his retirement years, he clung tenaciously to his belief that the Americans’ justifiable disenchantment with the arbitrary policies of George III, whom, after all, he had played a leading role in overthrowing, ought not blind them to the need for executive power. “The Supreme head or the executive of a great nation must be inviolable,” he noted in the margins of one book, “or the laws will never be executed.” In 1811 he told Josiah Quincy that “the President has, or ought to have, the whole nation before him, and he ought to select the men best qualified…without being shackled by any check, by law, constitution, or institution.”13

  Critics who accused him of secretly harboring a fondness for a divine right theory of the American presidency, or for a hereditary rather than elective chief executive, immediately found themselves drowning in a flood of Adams invective. “I never in my life went to such a length,” he complained to Rush, insisting that he was a republican to the core and not a royalist. But critics noted that his attitude toward European monarchs was disturbingly empathetic: “Talley rand once [in 1789] asked me, what I thought of the [French] King,” he recalled to John Quincy. “I answered that he was Daniel in the Lyons Den. If he ever escaped alive, it must be by Miracle.” He repeated a version of the recollection to Jefferson as late as 1823, acknowledging that “I am no king killer merely because they are kings—poor creatures they know no better—they believe sincerely and conscienti
ously that God made them to rule the world.”14

  Not only was Adams willing to invest the presidency with powers that many readers of the Defence found downright monarchical, he also exhibited a curious fascination with the role of the Senate. At Philadelphia, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had eventually seen fit to create an upper house in order to provide the smaller states with a legislative body in which there would be equal representation rather than representation proportional to populations. But Adams’s motives for favoring the creation of a senate were entirely different and seemed to smack of an affection for a European-styled aristocracy. “The rich, the well-born, and the able, acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense,” he wrote in the Defence. He argued that these natural aristocrats “must, therefore, be separated from the mass and placed by themselves in a senate,” an arrangement, he claimed, “that is, to all honest and useful intents, an ostracism.”15

  The notion that the people of the United States ought to conceive of senators as some kind of elected aristocracy struck most readers as odd. The belief that empowering such creatures by electing them into the Senate was a means of limiting their influence struck most readers as bizarre. Nevertheless, there it was in the Defence, not just an incidental point made in passing, but one of Adams’s major preoccupations. In every society known to man, he assured his readers, “an aristocracy has risen up in a course of time, consisting of a few rich and honorable families, who have united with each other against both the people and the first magistrate.” Best to put these talented but troublesome creatures in one place, the Senate, and watch them carefully. He seemed to be saying that the Senate was simultaneously a podium for the natural aristocrats and a prison.16