The caveat, of course, was the abiding Adams message. And the enduring Adams legacy, if such a thing can be said to exist at all, tends to take the form of a sober and realistic caveat to America’s buoyant optimism and nationalistic pretensions. Adams was a pessimist by conviction and an optimist only when he felt the need to play contrarian. He rarely indulged in optimistic predictions except when presented with visitors or correspondents who, thinking he would agree, offered pessimistic estimates of the fate of the American republic. Then he would, as he put it, “jump upon the great See-Saw” and balance the political equation with reassuring observations that “the Federal Union…will last longer than we shall live,” or that neither monarchy nor dictatorship will ever take root in America “unless Napoleon should make Aaron Burr a King…which I do not believe he is either willing or able to attempt.” His optimistic forecasts, in short, were almost always expressions of his oppositional disposition, his instinct to serve as an alter ego to the dominant political wisdom of the moment, to make himself into the great American caveat.3
It would have been completely in character, then, for the old man sitting in his favorite chair that final morning to resist the swells of satisfaction he might be expected to feel on that special day. The whole country, after all, was celebrating an event that he, more than anyone else, had helped bring about. And the current occupant of the presidency, who officially presided over the nation’s Independence Day festivities, was his own flesh and blood. The surges of pride and vanity generated by such historic triumphs must not be allowed to get out of hand, at least not in an Adams. Balance must be restored. Sagacity must prevail over passion.
If he remained true to his most prevailing version of political sagacity and sobriety, Adams would have encountered the prideful swells with healthy doses of apprehension. As for John Quincy’s glorious political achievements, for example, there was good reason to regard them as short-lived and, like his father before him, the son was destined for defeat in the next election. “Our government will be a game of leap-frog,” Adams had observed throughout his retirement, predicting that the dominant political parties would “be leaping over one another’s backs about once in twelve years, according to my computation.” It was one of his favorite metaphors.4
The notion that American politics operated on a twelve-year cycle eventually became a special trademark of the Adams family’s version of American history. Henry Adams provided the most precise description of the cyclical thesis in his History. “A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum,” he wrote: “After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.” Wars and depressions could lengthen or shorten the cycle, but the great-grandfather of Henry Adams, who originated the theory, emphasized the regularity of the pattern. “It is always so,” he had written to Rush in 1812: “When a party grows Strong and feels its power, it becomes intoxicated, grows presumptuous and extravagant and breaks to pieces. You may depend upon it. It is a Game of Leapfrog every twelve years.” And it was the singular misfortune of the Adams family always to reach the presidency just when the cycle was ending. Or as Adams put it, Washington had inherited “a bowl of Punch, half brandy or Whiskey,” but by the time Adams took office in 1796, the bowl had become “half Water with a large mixture of Sour Drops without a grain of Sugar.” As for John Quincy’s prospects, well, Andrew Jackson was already waiting in the wings, ready to play the role of Jefferson to John Quincy’s version of his father in the next election and to catch the political cycle on its next lurch upward. As the nation prepared to set off firecrackers and lose itself in festivals and parades, the most comfortable and natural posture for the patriarch of the Adams clan was as the sober sentry, defiantly guarding the harsher truths that the family and the nation would need to remember once the parades ended.5
If John Quincy was fated to suffer the political defeat that seemed to stalk the Adams line—and he was—what about the nation itself? This was a question about the future that visitors and correspondents asked him almost as often as they asked about his recollections of crucial moments in the past, especially the revolutionary years. His characteristic response to both kinds of inquiries was to declare the questions absurd and the answers unknowable. One could no more foresee what was in store for the American people, he would lecture, than one could fathom what was in the minds of all the members of the Continental Congress fifty years ago. But invariably he would then contradict his own declaration of ignorance and revoke his vow of silence, recalling that about half the delegates who voted for American independence in 1776 did so with reluctance, or predicting that the sectional crisis would eventually lead to bloodshed if the slavery issue were not faced squarely by the rising generation.
The larger pattern, which he discerned in both the past and the future, was the cycle, the flow of empires and nations that rose and fell with the same regularity and for essentially the same reasons that political parties came and went. The Adams version of the cyclical pattern was less a formal theory than an instinctive way of thinking. Since he regarded it as a matter of common sense—indeed, Tom Paine’s famous pamphlet of the same name depended on the presumption that Britain and America were experiencing different stages of the historical cycle—Adams never felt the need to explain its major features. He regarded the cyclical pattern of nations as a commonplace assumption shared by most members of the revolutionary generation, one of those self-evident truths with a darker side that Jefferson had neglected to mention in the Declaration. In fact, it was a way of thinking rapidly going out of style by the time of his death. It then became nearly extinct in America for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though it always enjoyed great favor among subsequent generations of the Adams family. In the late twentieth century it has made a modest but discernible comeback, largely as a consequence of America’s relative decline as a global economic power. For old man Adams, sitting in his Quincy study that last morning, the historical cycle possessed all the inevitability and undeniability of the biological imperatives about to carry him to the hereafter.6
The essence of the theory was that all societies go through the same developmental stages and the same aging process as human beings. The Adams version of the cyclical perspective—this bears repeating—represented a variation on a habit of mind shared by most of his generation, who believed that all nation-states had limited life-spans. His view was distinctive primarily in the sense that he gave special prominence to the influence that irrational forces exerted on human motivations; the engines which drove nations up and then down the cycle, as Adams conceived it, were fuelled by the emotions he had spent a lifetime exploring inside himself. And perhaps it is also true that Adams seemed to derive perverse satisfaction from noting the exquisite charms of the cyclical pattern and its applicability to America as well as Europe.7
In the typical Adams formulation, every aspiring nation-state was like an enterprising young man. His ambition produces worldly success, which then corrupts his character until, sapped of his earlier energy and work habits, he descends into depravity. “Former ages have never discovered any remedy against the universal gangrene of avarice,” he wrote in a characteristic version of the story, and “the steady advance of Wealth…has overturned every Republic from the beginning of time.” The dramatic economic and geographic expansion the United States was experiencing throughout his retirement years, therefore, made him simultaneously proud and nervous. For while “our country is rising with astonishing rapidity in population and wealth,” it was also “proportionally sinking in Luxury, Sloth and Vice.” The idea of the historical cycle was such a fixture in Adams’s mind that virtually every major event affecting America’s social and economic development was made to fit i
nto this developmental scheme, which functioned as a kind of plot outline that history had made available for all enlightened statesmen, who could presumably calculate where on the cycle their country was located and make policy accordingly. Indeed, Adams’s ultimate definition of the natural aristocrat—utterly and obviously autobiographical—was the leader who had conquered his own internal demons, had thereby reached a fuller understanding of the emotional forces driving the cyclical dynamo and, therefore, could apply the appropriate social controls required at the current stage of national evolution.8
Given the cyclical mentality, however, and given his preoccupation with the irrational forces propelling the country through the cycle, Adams consistently preferred policies that reduced the pace of historical change. After all, if the ultimate destination was decline, the last thing the nation needed was leaders who accelerated social and economic development. “When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition,” he had explained to John Taylor, “it is hard to resist the temptation.” But that was what responsible American leaders should do—resist the temptations presented by an undeveloped continent and a land of unprecedented opportunity. They should monitor and manage demographic and economic growth in order to delay the day when America would become “more populous, more commercial, more wealthy, and more luxurious.” For Jeffersonians and Jacksonians of the emerging liberal tradition, the primary task facing America’s political leaders was to liberate individual energies, to destroy the institutional impediments to human progress. For Adams, the primary task was just the opposite—to make government a brake that slowed down the rate of change and thereby postponed America’s inevitable encounter with history.9
It was axiomatic to Adams that the United States was destined to become a world power with a burgeoning population—he once estimated “more than two hundred millions”—and a flourishing capitalistic economy. Part of the reason for his certainty on this score was what he always called “our geographical advantages,” meaning the isolation from Europe and the favorable soil and climate of North America. Another reason was the political institutions his generation had created, which he believed were the best instruments yet devised for balancing the dynamic interests of an expanding society. But perhaps the major reason was historical. The ubiquitous cycle on which America was travelling was actually a spiral: it simultaneously moved forward as well as revolving, so that each nation which repeated the age-old pattern of rise and fall also moved the human condition ahead a few notches in terms of the physical comfort, economic prosperity, and the social justice enjoyed by the overall population. Here was yet another instance when Adams and his old friend at Monticello shared a common vision of America’s future but emphasized different features of the vision. Although Jefferson also harbored apprehensions about the long-term prospects for the country, after the continent was fully populated and the agrarian life he idealized gave way to cities and factories, he tended to focus attention on the robust years of the nation’s lifespan and the progressive unfolding of America’s destiny. He emphasized the forward movement of the American cycle, in short, while Adams emphasized its circularity. The glass was always half-full at Monticello and half-empty at Quincy, even though it was the same glass.
If Jefferson customarily described American progress over time in celebratory language, Adams almost always preferred the cautionary mode. Progress for Adams always seemed to come at a cost. “What Wars, foreign or civil, what forms of government or what divisions these changes may produce,” he typically warned, no one could foresee clearly, except that history would exact a toll. Or when Jefferson speculated that the gradual unfolding of human rights might one day produce a condition of nearly idyllic personal freedom, Adams expressed only skeptical optimism: “When People talk of the Freedom of Writing Speaking or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists…. I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.” The only kind of progress Adams truly trusted came gradually, moving at an evolutionary pace that allowed institutions to adjust and expectations to remain under some modicum of control. The secret of the American Revolution’s success, he believed, was that it was rooted in political values and constitutional ideas with longstanding acceptance throughout the colonial era. It therefore followed that the fulfillment of the Revolution’s liberal promise, so elegantly articulated by Jefferson, should seep out slowly over the course of the next century, gradually and almost surreptitiously entrenching itself in the minds and hearts of subsequent generations. Adams clearly believed that two of the liberal promises—the abolition of slavery and the improved status for women—were certain of fulfillment. The promise of social and economic equality, on the other hand, struck him as unlikely, one of those ever-receding goals that Jefferson’s spiritual descendants would pursue as the French philosophes had done before, and with equivalently futile results. Whatever gains and successes future Jeffersonians might enjoy would require future Adamses to nurture them slowly, to bring them along gradually, to integrate them into the social fabric, to consolidate them after each round of leapfrog.10
Meanwhile, however, the cycle would continue to turn. No one could say with certainty precisely how long it would take America to reach the apex of world power and then begin to slide down. One could only say that it would eventually happen, for, at least as Adams saw it, the story was as old as history and as predictable as the unquenchable appetite of the human passions. By disposition inclined to see America’s ultimate fate lurking behind every political crisis or spurt of growth, Adams nonetheless gave himself plenty of latitude as a prophet. In a sour mood, he warned that the looming sectional crisis threatened to kill the republic “in about twenty years.” On another more buoyant occasion, he predicted that the American cycle could last “more than one hundred and fifty years.” Precise chronology was impossible to forecast accurately and Adams expressed his contentment to “leave that to others.” Various members of the Adams family subsequently took him up on the offer and, true to the tradition of the patriarch, offered prematurely pessimistic estimates.11
And so if we were to engage in one final, and admittedly fanciful, fling of the imagination, if we were to conjure up old man Adams, fidgeting about in his favorite chair that last morning, and if we were to grant him a glimpse into the future that is our present, we can be reasonably sure that he would lecture us on the grim lessons of history. He would probably express his surprise and pleasure that the republic he had helped to found had lasted this long. The size and density of our cities, along with our enormous industrial centers, would trouble him. (They would terrify Jefferson.) Most troubling, however, would be the malls, outlet stores, and visible trappings of consumer culture, along with the widespread presumption of unbridled individual freedom, unencumbered by any internalized sense of social responsibility and even justified as a fulfillment of the Revolution he had fought and wrought. We would certainly have to listen to one of his blistering jeremiads and a cascade of advice about how to strengthen government power in order to conserve our resources and manage our obvious decline.
He would also most surely want to know how his own reputation had fared. And he would probably derive a perverse sense of satisfaction in correctly predicting his own relative obscurity, noting for the record that no major mausoleums, monuments, or statues had yet been erected in his honor. In a final spasm of candor and irreverence, he might ask if his beloved republic, now in its third century of existence, had reached a sufficiently ripened stage of development to acknowledge his present relevance. Explaining in his defensive and over-animated way that he did not want to be famous so much as useful, he might propose the construction of an Adams monument on the Tidal Basin in the nation’s capital, done in the classical style and situated sufficiently close to the Jefferson Memorial that, depending on the time of day and angle of the sun, he and Jefferson might take turns casting shadows across each other’
s facades.12
Notes
THE NOTES below are both more and less than a conventional scholarly account of the sources used in writing this book. They are more, because I have tried to register my personal positions on the major arguments encountered in attempting to assess the meaning of Adams’s life. Which is to say that the endnotes are also meant, on occasion, to serve as a bibliographic essay. They are less, because I have not tried to list all the secondary sources consulted, which would have burdened the book with more citations than any reasonable reader would find sensible. I have cited those major secondary works and those titles that had a decided impact on my thinking. And I have tried to cite all primary sources from which I quote in the text. As per scholarly custom, the full citation is provided when first encountered, then an abbreviated version is used thereafter.
Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams Page 28
