Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Memories: A Prologue

  1. For the most recent scholarly summary, see Ralph A. Brown, The Presidency of John Adams (Lawrence, 1975), 199–200.

  2. James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York, 1966), for the physical condition of the new capital; Abigail Adams to Mary Cranch, November 21, 1800, in Stewart Mitchell, ed., New Letters of Abigail Adams, 1788–1801 (Boston, 1947), 259–60, for a description of the interior of the presidential mansion at the time.

  3. Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, December 17, 1800, The Microfilm Edition of the Adams Papers (608 reels, Boston, 1954–59), Reel 399. This microfilm collection, published by the Massachusetts Historical Society, which owns the originals, will hereafter be cited by date and reel number; Adams to Elias Burdinot, January 16, 1801, Reel 120.

  4. Fisher Ames to Rufus King, September 24, 1800, Charles R. King, ed., The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King (6 vols., New York, 1895), III, 304; Fisher Ames to Rufus King, August 26, 1800, ibid., 295–97. See also Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800 (New York, 1974), 379–80; Brown, Presidency of John Adams, 195–209; Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John Adams: The Collapse of Federalism 1795–1800 (Philadelphia, 1957), 374–408. Throughout this book, italics in quotations appear in the original text, unless otherwise noted.

  5. Harold Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (26 vols., New York, 1974–), XXV, 186, 190.

  6. Ibid., 222, 196, 208–09.

  7. Ibid., 187–88.

  8. Adams to Uzal Ogden, December 3, 1800, quoted in ibid., 183. The Syrett edition of the Hamilton Papers provides the fullest and fairest scholarly treatment of this entire episode in the notes to the text.

  9. See ibid., 178–81, for the Federalist correspondence in the wake of Hamilton’s Letter. On the other side of the political spectrum, Madison rejoiced in a letter to Jefferson that “Hamilton’s attack upon Mr. Adams…will be a Thunderbolt to both. I rejoice with you, that Republicanism is likely to be so completely triumphant….” See James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, November 1–3, 1800, ibid., 181.

  10. For a full discussion of Adams’s treatment of Hamilton in his autobiography and in the Boston Patriot, see below, chapter 2.

  11. James Bayard to Alexander Hamilton, August 18, 1800, Syrett, ed., Hamilton Papers, XXV, 71, for the quotation on Adams’s congenital irrationality. Much more on this theme will be coming up shortly.

  1. The Education of John Adams

  1. The standard works on the Adams presidency are: Kurtz, Presidency of John Adams; Brown, Presidency of John Adams; Manning Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Baltimore, 1953). All tend to conclude with favorable assessments of Adams and critical assessments of the Hamiltonians or High Federalists. Eric McKitrick has graciously allowed me to read his chapters on the Adams presidency in The Age of Federalism, written with Stanley Elkins (to be published shortly, New York: Oxford University Press). Elkins and McKitrick adopt a more critical posture toward Adams and do so within the context of a truly magisterial narrative of the political history of the 1790s that promises to supplant all previous treatments of the decade. My own version differs from theirs in several respects, chiefly in absolving Adams of major blame for the collapse of the Federalist persuasion. But we concur that the personality of Adams was a crucial factor requiring extensive analysis. It will not do, in short, to dismiss Hamilton’s charges as misguided, petty, or motivated solely by political jealousy.

  2. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, January 4, 1797, quoted in Kurtz, Presidency of John Adams, 209–10. For more on Jefferson’s thinking at this time, see Sisson, Revolution of 1800, 360–61; Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American Party System (Williamsburg, 1956), 73.

  3. Adams to Abigail Adams, December 30, 1796, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife (2 vols., Boston, 1841), II, 233–35.

  4. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, December 5, 1796, quoted in Brown, Presidency of John Adams, 18; Thomas Jefferson to Adams, December 28, 1796, Andrew Lipscomb and Albert Bergh, eds, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (20 vols., Washington, D.C., 1903), hereafter cited as Writings of Jefferson, IX, 356–57; Oliver Wolcott, Sr., to Oliver Wolcott, Jr., March 10, 1797, in George Gibbs, Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams (2 vols., New York, 1846), I, 246. See also Kurtz, Presidency of John Adams, 222–24; Sisson, Revolution of 1800, 361–62; Syrett, ed., Hamilton Papers, 193–94. The scholarly literature on the emergence of political parties at this moment is both voluminous and spirited. In addition to the above-mentioned books by Charles and Sisson, see Noble Cunningham, The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789–1801 (Chapel Hill, 1957); Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley, 1969); Richard Buel, Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics (Ithaca, 1972).

  5. The standard account of this elaborate episode is Alexander De Conde, The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France (New York, 1966). The best brief treatment is Jacob E. Cooke, “Country Above Party: John Adams and the 1799 Mission to France,” in Edmund Willis, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers: Papers and Comments Presented at the Nineteenth Conference on Early American History (Bethlehem, 1967), 53–79. Although all the accounts of the Adams presidency cover the story, the upcoming book by Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, provides the fullest account by far and supports the interpretation offered here.

  6. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, January 20, 1797, and January 30, 1797, Writings of Jefferson, X, 367, 375; Adams to Elbridge Gerry, February 20, 1797, “Warren-Adams Letters,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections (Boston, 1925), 72–73.

  7. George W. Comer, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, 1948); the Parker quotation is from Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 1; Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States (10 vols., Boston, 1850–56), IX, 194–221, hereafter cited as Works, for Adams’s speeches on this subject.

  8. Kurtz, Presidency of John Adams, 215–29, offers the most convenient account of this moment. I am not arguing that Jefferson ever gave serious consideration to Adams’s offer of a bipartisan administration. Madison’s intervention foreclosed the possibility, but Jefferson would almost certainly have reached the same conclusion on his own.

  9. Works, X, 285–86.

  10. Adams to Uriah Forrest, June 20, 1797, Works, VIII, 546–47, 320–22.

  11. Adams to Elbridge Gerry, May 3, 1797, Reel 117; Adams to James McHenry, October 22, 1798, Works, VIII, 612–13; Adams to Harrison Gray Otis, May 9, 1823, Reel 124.

  12. Adams to Oliver Wolcott, September 24, 1798, Works, VIII, 601–04; Minutes of a Conference with the President, March 26, 1799, Gerry Papers, Library of Congress; Syrett, ed., Hamilton Papers, XII, 388–94, 440–53, for Hamilton’s correspondence concerning his plans for the military expedition; Fisher Ames to Rufus King, July 15, 1800, King, ed. Life and Correspondence, III, 275–76; Sisson, Revolution of 1800, 360.

  13. The Sedgwick quotation is from Richard E. Welch, Jr., Theodore Sedgwick, Federalist: A Political Portrait (Middletown, 1965), 185–86. See Brown, Presidency of John Adams, 95–96, for the most incisive account of reaction in the Congress.

  14. Syrett, ed., Hamilton Papers, XXII, 494–95, provides a full view of the Federalist reaction; Abigail Adams to Adams, March 3, 1799, Reel 393; Adams to Abigail Adams, February 22, 1799, ibid.; Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, chapter 12, part 5, offers the best scholarly account.

  15. Robert Troup to Rufus King, November 6, 1799, King, ed., Life and Correspondence, III, 141–42; Alexander Hamilton to Theodore Sedgwick, May 10, 1800, Syrett, ed., Hamilton Papers, XXIV, 430–31; Uriah Forrest to Adams, April 28, 1799, Works, VIII, 637–37; Adams to Uriah Forrest, May 13, 1799, ibid., 645–46; Adams to Benjamin Stoddert, September 21, 1799, Work
s, IX, 31–34.

  16. [Anonymous], Adams to William Cunningham, November 7, 1808, Correspondence Between the Hon. John Adams, Late President of the United States, and the Late William Cunningham, Esq…. (Boston, 1823), 48. There is still a lively scholarly debate over whether an earlier resolution of the French question would have made any difference in the presidential election of 1800. The current consensus would seem to be that Federalist projections showed that the vote in New York was the key; and there Aaron Burr had already lobbied the delegates in the legislature on behalf of Jefferson, so that neither a favorable resolution of the quasi-war with France nor the suppression of Hamilton’s Letter would have made a significant difference in the final tally.

  17. See Doris Graber, Public Opinion, the President, and Foreign Policy (New York, 1968), 79; Brown, Presidency of John Adams, 77–78, 102, 193; and Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, chapter 12, part 5. For Adams’s own first-hand version of his thinking at the time, see Adams to Timothy Pickering, August 6, 1799, and Adams to John Trumbull, September 10, 1800, Reel 120.

  18. Theodore Sedgwick to Rufus King, September 26, 1800, King, ed., Life and Correspondence, III, 308; Fisher Ames to Rufus King, July 15, 1800, ibid., 275–76. Several historians and biographers of Adams have suggested that our modern perception of his long absence from the seat of government must be informed by the political values of the pre-modern era. Jefferson and Madison, for example, were absent as much or more than Adams. But it seems to me that the timing of Adams’s absence was too crucial to be excused or explained as a function of more leisurely customs.

  19. This is not the place to list the many major works on the coming of the American Revolution or the various books and articles that feature Adams as a key player. It is the place to note the enduring appeal of a semi-fictional account by Catherine Drinker Bowen, John Adams and the American Revolution (Boston, 1950), which still manages to recreate the atmosphere in the Continental Congress more imaginatively than any other historical account.

  20. Adams to Abigail Adams, July 1, 1774, in Lyman Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence (3 vols., Cambridge, 1963), I, 118, hereafter cited as Family Correspondence; Adams to Abigail Adams, July 9, 1774, ibid., 135.

  21. Adams to James Warren, June 25, 1774 in Robert J. Taylor, ed., Papers of John Adams (6 vols., Cambridge, 1977–), II, 99, hereafter cited as Papers; Adams to James Warren, July 25, 1774, ibid., 117; see also Adams to William Tudor, September 26, 1774, ibid., 176.

  22. Adams to Abigail Adams, September 25, 1774, Family Correspondence, I, 162–63; Adams to Abigail Adams, October 9, 1774, ibid., 167.

  23. Lyman Butterfield, ed., The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (4 vols., Cambridge, 1961), II, 121, 182, 173, hereafter cited as Diary and Autobiography.

  24. Diary and Autobiography, II, 150; see also Adams to William Tudor, October 7, 1774, Papers, II, 188.

  25. Ibid., III, 307, for the account of “Moody’s Doctrine” in the autobiography; Adams to Abigail Adams, July 2, 1774, Family Correspondence, I, 121, for the contemporary version, which is slightly different; Adams to James Warren, April 9, 1774, Papers, II, 82–83; Adams to Moses Gill, June 10, 1774, Papers, III, 21.

  26. Adams to Abigail Adams, April 15, 1776, Family Correspondence, I, 383; Adams to Horatio Gates, March 23, 1776, Papers, IV, 59; Diary and Autobiography, II, 181; Adams to Abigail Adams, October 1, 1775, Family Correspondence, I, 290, for the anecdote about the Reformation, which Adams first heard from John Zubly, the delegate from Georgia.

  27. Diary and Autobiography, II, 131, 152–53, and Papers, II, 144–52, for his role in drafting the Declaration of Rights and Grievances; Diary and Autobiography, III, 309–14, for his somewhat haphazard recollection of the events of the fall and winter of 1774–75; Papers, II, 216–387, for the text of Novanglus; Diary and Autobiography, II, 161, for his thoughts at the time and an editorial note by Butterfield.

  28. Diary and Autobiography, III, 327, 332–32, 358–59; Adams to William Tudor, April 12, 1776, Papers, IV, 118, 200–02, for the mistaken authorship of Common Sense; ibid., 65–73, for Thoughts on Government.

  29. Diary and Autobiography, III, 396–97, for his recollection of the speech, which several delegates confirmed was the dramatic and decisive event he described. The fullest account of the debate is in Julian Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (26 vols., Princeton, 1950–), I, 311–13; Papers, IV, 341–51, for the Declaration of Independence, and ibid., 260–302, for the Plan of Treaties.

  30. Ibid., 252–59, for his service on the Board of War and Ordnance; Adams to Nathaneal Greene, April 13, 1777, Papers, V, 56; Diary and Autobiography, III, 447; Adams to William Tudor, March 27, 1777, Papers, V, 132, for his prediction about the war’s duration; Adams to Abigail Adams, September 8, 1777, Family Correspondence, II, 337–39, for one of several examples of his strategic vision of the military campaign; William Gordon to Adams, March 27, 1777, Papers, V, 133, for the kudo.

  31. Diary and Autobiography, III, 316, 383, 386–88.

  32. Diary and Autobiography, II, 236; see also ibid., 181 and Adams to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1776, Family Correspondence, I, 406, for his suspicion of conspiracy against him.

  33. Adams to James Warren, July 24, 1775, Papers, III, 89–93, for the remarks about Dickinson in the letter that was intercepted by the British; Diary and Autobiography, II, 173–74, for his private reaction at the time of the incident; Diary and Autobiography, III, 318–19, for his version in his autobiography.

  34. Adams to Samuel Chase, June 14, 1776, Papers, IV, 312; Adams to James Warren, August 21, 1776, ibid., 482.

  35. Adams to Abigail Adams, May 22 [1777], Family Correspondence, II, 245–46.

  36. Adams to Abigail Adams, May 17, 1776, Family Correspondence, I, 410; Adams to Abigail Adams, June 2, 1776, Family Correspondence, II, 3.

  37. See Edmund S. Morgan, “John Adams and the Puritan Tradition,” New England Quarterly, XXXIV (1961), 518–29, for the earliest and still the best rumination on this theme; Mary McManus, “The Education of John Adams,” senior thesis (1975), Mount Holyoke College, remains the best secondary account of the early Adams.

  38. Diary and Autobiography, I, 1. See Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven, 1966), for the best analysis of the morphology of conversion in seventeenth-century Puritanism.

  39. Adams to Nathan Webb, October 12, 1755, Papers, 1, 4–7. It seems likely that Adams had recently read, or talked to someone who read, the essay by Benjamin Franklin, Observations on the Increase of Mankind (1755), which forecast the demographic explosion in America and its implications for the relationship with England. Less scientific predictions of America’s inevitable destiny were “in the air” about this time, often associated with Bishop Berkeley’s poem, “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” (1753). For a modern look at this optimistic tradition and what lay behind it, see the first two chapters of Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New York, 1979).

  40. Adams to Richard Cranch, September 2, 1755, Papers, I, 3–4.

  41. Diary and Autobiography, I, 25, 7–8, 37, 33–34, 13–14.

  42. Ibid., 6–8.

  43. Adams to Charles Cushing, April 1, 1756, Papers, I, 13–14.

  44. Diary and Autobiography, I, 42–43.

  45. Adams to Abigail Adams, December 2, 1778, Family Correspondence, III, 125.

  46. The classic statement of the relationship between the psychology of the reformed Christian pursuing God and grace and the modern capitalist is Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons, ed. (New York, 1958). Strictly speaking, Franklin reversed the priorities of Puritan psychology, but even Franklin remained imbedded in Puritan values in ways that would have made him a stranger to nineteenth-century entrepreneurs.

  47. Adams to Samuel Dexter, March 23, 1801, Works, X, 580–81; Diary and Autobiography, I, L; Adams to Benjamin Stoddert, Mar
ch 31, 1801, Works, X, 582; Adams to Thomas Jefferson, March 24, 1801, Reel 118.

  48. Adams to Elias Boudinot, January 26, 1801, Works, IX, 93–94; Adams to Joseph Ward, February 4, 1801, ibid., 97.

  49. Adams to Christopher Gadsen, April 16, 1801, Reel 118.

  50. Abigail Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, July 12, 1801, Reel 400.

  2. History and Heroes

  1. Adams to Benjamin Rush, August 17, 1812, in Alexander Biddle, ed., Old Family Letters Copied from the Originals for Alexander Biddle (Philadelphia, 1892), 420, hereafter cited as Old Family Letters.

  2. Adams to Francis Vanderkemp, November 24, 1814, Reel 122; also Adams to Elbridge Gerry, April 26, 1813, ibid. The quotation from the French visitor is in Haraszti, Prophets of Progress, 22–23.

  3. Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, September 15, 1801, Reel 118; Adams to Francis Vanderkemp, October 18, 1814, Reel 122.

  4. Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, August 16, 1812, Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend: Correspondence of John Adams and Benjamin Waterhouse, 1784–1822 (Boston, 1927), 81, hereafter cited as Statesman and Friend.

  5. Adams to Benjamin Rush, May 14, 1812, Reel 118; Adams to John Quincy Adams, December 22, 1804, Reel 95.

  6. Diary and Autobiography, I. LXIX, for the Adams quotation. Ibid., I, XLIV–LXXIV, for the editorial history of the autobiography.

  7. Adams to Benjamin Rush, August 31, 1809, Old Family Letters, 238.

  8. The first use of what would become an Adams refrain that I can find is Adams to John Quincy Adams, January 8, 1808, Reel 118: “Shall I recommend to you the eternal Taciturnity of Franklin and Washington? I believe your nature is as incapable of it as mine.”

  9. Diary and Autobiography, III, 253. Adams began writing the autobiography on October 5, 1802.

  10. Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (New York, 1976), 278–82, has a thoughtful comparison of the two autobiographies. Leonard Labaree, et al., eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 1964).