40. Ibid., 247–48; Adams to George Washington Adams, December 27, 1821, Reel 124; Adams to Josiah Quincy, February 18, 1811, Works, IX, 633–34.
41. Works, VI, 245.
42. Ibid., 240.
43. Ibid., 241–43.
44. Ibid., 245, 397.
45. Ibid., 248; Adams to J. A. Smith, January 7, 1817, Reel 123.
46. Ibid., 248, 262, 254.
47. Ibid., 254–56.
48. Ibid., 266.
49. The matter of Adams’s legacy receives extended treatment in chapter 7. For now, it might be noted that his reputation as a political thinker or theorist has oscillated wildly: he has been “discovered” by scholars who were not otherwise inclined to appreciate his brand of wisdom; and he has been “dismissed” by scholars who otherwise claimed to admire his intellectual integrity. The standard work remains John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton, 1966). One of his unlikely champions is Vernon L. Parrington, a stalwart defender of Jeffersonian values and “democratic liberalism,” who nonetheless concluded that Adams’s political insights “merit a larger recognition than has been accorded them by a grudging posterity,” and that Adams “remains the most notable political thinker—with the possible exception of John C. Calhoun—among American statesmen.” See Vernon Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (2 vols., New York, 1927), I, 325. The strongest Adams advocate among contemporary scholars of American political thought is John Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics, 66–99, who sees Adams as the most astute student of political power within the founding generation. My own understanding of Adams as a political thinker has been greatly enriched by a spirited correspondence with Diggins, who sees Adams as an early-day deconstructionist and a precursor of Neitzsche, Derrida, and Foucault, a group that I suspect Adams would regard as an unholy trinity of “ideologians.”
6. Intimacies
1. Bernard Bailyn, Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (New York, 1990), 3–21.
2. Adams to Shelton Jones, March 11, 1809, Reel 118.
3. Diary and Autobiography, II, 362–63, for the comparison to a lion; Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past (Boston, 1883), 61.
4. Quincy quoted in Richard McLanathan, Gilbert Stuart (New York, 1986), 147.
5. Adams to Elihu Marshall, March 7, 1820, Works, X, 388–89.
6. Adams to John Jay, March 6, 1821, Reel 124; Adams to Vine Alttey [?], September 10, 1819, Reel 124; Theodore Parker, Historic Americans (Boston, 1871), 210, for the quotation about the Adams talkativeness.
7. Adams to Daniel Cory, January 23, 1820, Reel 124; Adams to Charles Francis Adams, November 17, 1815, Reel 122.
8. John Taylor to Adams, April 8, 1824, Works, X, 411–12.
9. Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, June 17, 1820, Reel 124. Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (New York, 1979), is the best biography, and William Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character, offers the most illuminating study of the Cavalier as type.
10. Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, April 27, 1820, Reel 124; Adams to David Sewall, January 18, 1816, Reel 122; Adams to David Sewall, May 22, 1821, Reel 124; Adams to David Sewall, May 13, 1811, Reel 118.
11. Adams to Benjamin Rush, February 26, 1812, Reel 118.
12. Adams to Thomas Jefferson, September 14, 1813, Adams-Jefferson Correspondence, II, 372–73; Diary and Autobiography, I, 57.
13. Adams to Richard Rush, November 13, 1816, Reel 123. See also Adams to William Tudor, August 12, 1813, ibid.
14. Adams to William Cunningham, June 16, 1810, Correspondence Between Adams and Cunningham, 216–17; see also ibid., v–vii, for the critical assessment of Adams as president.
15. Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, August 17, 1814, Reel 122. See above, chapter 2, for a fuller discussion of the argument over Warren’s History.
16. The standard work on gender relations in the post-revolutionary era remains Nancy F. Cott’s The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977); Barbara Welter’s Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century contains the seminal essays on the shifting roles of middle-class women during the first third of the nineteenth century; the crucial work on the intersection of republicanism and gender is by Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980). Mercy Otis Warren still awaits a biographer who can integrate her life into the scholarship on ideology and gender generated over the past two decades.
17. Adams to Francis Vanderkemp, April 8, 1815, Reel 122.
18. Adams to John Quincy Adams, May 30, 1815, ibid.
19. Adams to Emma Willard, December 8, 1819, Reel 124; Adams to John Adams Smith, May 12, 1821, ibid.; Adams to Caroline de Wint, July 8, 1822, ibid.
20. Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Burwell, March 14, 1818, Ford, ed., Writings, X, 104. The most comprehensive study of Jefferson’s educational thought is Harold Hellenbrand, The Unfinished Revolution: Education and Politics in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson; Adams to Caroline de Wint, February 11, 1820, Reel 124, for the reading list.
21. Adams to Francis Vanderkemp, July 13, 1815, Works, X, 169. Paul C. Nagel’s Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family (New York, 1983) is a brilliant exploration of the emotional life of the entire Adams family that, in its early chapters, offers the fullest account of domestic life at Quincy. While I do not agree completely with Nagel’s interpretation of Abigail, which strikes me as somewhat hostile, his familiarity with the sources is unsurpassed by any other scholar, save perhaps the editors of The Adams Papers.
22. Adams to John Quincy Adams, August 27, 1815, Reel 122.
23. Adams to Alexander Johnson, January 2, 1814, ibid.; Adams to John Adams Smith, June 15, 1812, Reel 118.
24. Adams to George Adams, December 15, 1815, Reel 122; Adams to John Quincy Adams, May 20, 1816, ibid.; Adams to John Quincy Adams, June 8, 1815, ibid.; Adams to George and John Adams, May 3, 1815, ibid.
25. Adams to George Adams, January 27, 1822, Reel 124; Adams to Richard Peters, March 31, 1822, Works, X, 402; Adams to Thomas Jefferson, February 10, 1823, Adams-Jefferson Correspondence, II, 587; Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, May 30, 1815, Statesman and Friend, 117; Adams to George and John Adams, May 6, 1815, Reel 122; Adams to John Quincy Adams, March 14, 1815, ibid.
26. Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, January 14, 1823, Reel 124.
27. Adams to John Quincy Adams, October 17, 1815, Reel 122; Adams to John Quincy Adams, March 11, 1815, ibid.; Adams to John Quincy Adams, February 28, 1815, ibid.; Adams to John Quincy Adams, June 30, 1815, ibid.; Adams to John Quincy Adams, August 26, 1816, ibid.
28. John Quincy Adams to Adams, July 7, 1814, Worthington C. Ford, ed., The Writings of John Quincy Adams (7 vols., Boston, 1913–17), V, 57. The magisterial account by Samuel F. Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1949), remains the authoritative version of John Quincy’s public career. But his private life, and the connection between that life and his statesmanship, still await a biographer. There is a brilliant sketch of his character in George Dangerfield’s The Era of Good Feelings (New York, 1952), 7–10, which has yet to be surpassed.
29. Adams to John Quincy Adams, February 8, 1819, Reel 123; Adams to John Quincy Adams, November 13, 1816, ibid.
30. John Quincy Adams to Adams, January 3, 1817, Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds., The Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams (New York, 1946), 289–91.
31. Adams to John Quincy Adams, April 23, 1813, Reel 95; Adams to John Quincy Adams, November 28, 1813, ibid.
32. Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, December 17, 1822, Reel 124; Adams to John Quincy Adams, March 14, 1815, Reel 122; Adams to John Quincy Adams, November 26, 1815, Reel 123.
33. Quoted in David F. Musto, “The Youth of John Quincy Adams,” American Philosophical Society, Proceedings, CXIII (1969), 269–82; see a
lso Musto’s “The Adams Family,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, XCIII (1981), 40–58. Musto is a psychiatrist who attributes John Quincy’s neurotic behavior to excessive parental pressure during childhood and adolescence, and singles out Abigail, more than John, as the chief culprit. Edith B. Gelles, “The Abigail Industry,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, XLV (October 1988), 656–83, concurs with the notion that John Quincy experienced excessive pressure in his youth, but defends Abigail against the charge of being the most relentlessly demanding parent. My own instinct, as a historian and parent, is to recognize the plausibility of such psychologizing, but to embrace agnosticism; there are some things we will never know.
34. Adams to John Quincy Adams, October 28, 1817, Reel 123; Adams to John Quincy Adams, May 24, 1815, Reel 122; Adams to Alexander Johnson, January 4, 1823, Reel 124.
35. The “bulldog among spaniels” observation is by the British diplomat W. H. Lyttleton in a letter to Sir Charles Bagot, January 22, 1827, quoted in Dangerfield, Era of Good Feelings, 7.
36. Louisa Catherine Adams to Adams, March 12, 1820, Reel 264; Louisa Catherine Adams to Adams, December 22, 1819, ibid.
37. Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, February 20, 1820, Reel 124; Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, January 29, 1820, ibid.
38. Louisa Catherine Adams, The Adventures of a Nobody, Reel 269, 122.
39. Adams to Thomas Jefferson, October 20, 1815 [1818], Adams-Jefferson Correspondence, II, 529; see Nagel, Descent from Glory, 129–30, for a description of the deathbed scene; Adams to Francis Vanderkemp, September 25, 1819, Reel 124; Adams to Caroline de Wint, March 15, 1820, ibid. There is, of course, an enormous secondary literature on Abigail, though the focus tends to be on the earlier years. Edith B. Gelles, “The Abigail Industry,” is the best review of the many biographies; see also her insightful “Abigail Adams,” New England Quarterly, LII (1979), 500–21. Finally, Paul C. Nagel’s The Adams Women (New York, 1983) offers a more critical assessment of Abigail and a highly laudatory interpretation of Louisa Catherine.
40. The Abigail quotation is from Nagel, Descent from Glory, 174; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston, 1961), 17–18.
41. Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, January 14, 1823, Reel 124; Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, November 11, 1821, ibid.; Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, February 20, 1820, ibid.; Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, December 17, 1822, ibid.
42. Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, June 25, 1819, Reel 123.
43. Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, January 29, 1820, ibid.; Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, May 10, 1823, Reel 124; Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, April 22, 1823, ibid.
44. Adams to Nicholas Boylston, August 24, 1822, ibid.
45. Quincy, Figures of the Past, 61, 73–74; Adams to Thomas Jefferson, April 17, 1826, Adams-Jefferson Correspondence, II, 614.
46. Quincy, Figures of the Past, 77, 74–75.
47. Ibid., 65.
48. Ibid., 69, 71.
49. Adams to Jefferson, December 2, 1822, Adams-Jefferson Correspondence, II, 586; Quincy, Figures of the Past, 80–82.
7. Legacies
1. Lyman H. Butterfield, “The Jubilee of Independence, July 4, 1826,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 61 (1953), 119–40, for the best account of the celebration. Adams to John Whitney, June 7, 1826, Works, X, 416–17, for the letter to the Quincy committee.
2. Thomas Jefferson to Mayor Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826, which is available in several editions of Jefferson’s papers, but the handwritten original is in the Massachusetts Historical Society.
3. Douglass Adair, “Rumford’s Dying Speech, 1685, and Jefferson’s Last Words on Democracy, 1826,” in Trevor Colbourn, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair (New York, 1974), 192–202.
4. Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1858), III, 544–48, which reprints the first-person recollections of the family gathered at the bedside.
5. Eliza Quincy, Memoirs of the Life of Eliza S. M. Quincy (Boston, 1861), 205–09; Niles’ Weekly Register, July 22, 1826; Butterfield, “Jubilee of Independence,” 134–35, summarizes the scenes at both bedsides.
6. Niles’ Weekly Register, July 22, 1826, for the Rush quote; Merrill Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960), 2–10, for the Binney quote and for an excellent account of the national response to the simultaneous departure of the two patriarchs.
7. A Selection of Eulogies, Pronounced in the Several States, in Honor of Those Illustrious Patriots and Statesmen, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Harford, 1826), 98, 94, 121–22, 128, 422, 282.
8. Ibid., 3–17, 336, 149–50, 180.
9. Ibid., 380, 256, 233.
10. Ibid., 336, 178–79, 185–86, 94, 160.
11. My discussion of the image of “the founders” in the following paragraphs is indebted to Wesley Frank Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers (New York, 1956); George Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, 1979), 13–53, which raises the analysis of the psychological role of “the fathers” to new levels of sophistication; and to McCoy, The Last of the Fathers, 9–38, which offers fresh insight into the characteristics being held up for emulation, characteristics being held up for emulation.
12. Daniel Webster, The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster (18 vols., Boston, 1903), I, 252–53.
13. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson, eds., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), I, 7. The quotation is from Emerson’s Nature.
14. Marcus Cunliffe, ed., The Life of Washington (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), which is a modern edition of the Mason Weems biography. See also John Marshall, The Life of George Washington…First President of the United States (5 vols., Philadelphia, 1804–07), which is the biography Adams joked about as a verbal mausoleum. The best books on Washington’s popular image in the nineteenth century are: Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monument (Boston, 1958); Paul Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley, 1988); and Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York, 1987).
15. Peterson, Jefferson Image, 36–37, offers the best succinct version of Jefferson’s role in the Webster-Hayne debate. Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States Rights, and the Nullification Crisis (New York, 1987), provides the best of the recent secondary accounts.
16. Charles M. Wiltse, ed., The Papers of Daniel Webster (Hanover, NH, 1986), I, 285–348, for the famous Webster reply to Hayne.
17. Peterson, Jefferson Image, which is the most comprehensive and probing study of any prominent American’s reputation as it moves from generation to generation and adapts to different contexts.
18. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided, 123–58, offers the fullest review of the role of “the founders” in the slavery debates of the 1850s. For the speeches themselves, see Henry V. Jaffa and Robert W. Johannsen, eds., In the Name of the People: Speeches and Writings of Lincoln and Douglas in the Illinois Campaign of 1859 (Columbus, Ohio, 1959).
19. For Jefferson’s tortured and inconsistent position on slavery, see William Cohen, “Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Slavery,” Journal of American History, 56 (1969), 503–26; also, a more pro-Jefferson view that plays down his views on the Missouri question, William Freehling, “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” American Historical Review, 77 (1972), 81–93.
20. Interestingly, there is no scholarly study of Adams’s views on slavery. The starting place for such a study is the 1770s, especially Adams’s correspondence in the Continental Congress. See, for example, the anonymous requests sent him, pleading for an immediate end to slavery, in Papers, III, 18–20, 411–12. The clearest statement of his own view, which tended to warn against insisting on emancipation because of the divisions it would create in the shaky confederation against England, can be found in Papers, IV, 208–12, 469, and V, 242. For his position
on the Missouri question, the correspondence with Louisa Catherine in 1819–20 is the best source, discussed above in chapter 4. The interpretation offered here is too abbreviated to do full justice to the nuances of Adams’s response to what proved to be the most glaring failure of the revolutionary generation. The subject deserves a full-length treatment.
21. See Peterson, Jefferson Image, 220–22, for an elegant summary.
22. For the background to Croly’s book, see Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York, 1956), 146–61.
23. Herbert D. Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York, 1909), 28, 45–46.
24. Ibid., 42–43.
25. Ibid., 30, 33, 41, 46.
26. Ibid., 29, 36.
27. There is no scholarly study of Hamilton’s legacy akin to Peterson’s book on Jefferson. My interpretation here relies primarily on Peterson, Jefferson Image, 221–26. See also Henry Cabot Lodge, Life and Letters of Alexander Hamilton (Boston, 1882).
28. See Butterfield, “Jubilee of Independence,” 128, for the description of the Quincy railroad track. For the most insightful study of Henry Adams as historian, see William H. Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (New Haven, 1952).
29. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (2 vols., 1988); Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (New York, 1961), which is the most convenient and accessible version of the classic originally published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1918. See also Jordy, Henry Adams, 43–120, 256–88.
30. The secondary literature here is almost as boundless as the America allegedly coming into existence in the 1830s. Two recent books strike me as seminal: John Higham, From Boundlessness to Consolidation: The Transformation of American Culture, 1848–1860 (Ann Arbor, 1969), and Robert Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York, 1984). Older but still standard accounts include Curtis Nettles, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (New York, 1962), and Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (New York, 1961). For a nice summary of current historical wisdom on the shift from republicanism to liberalism, see the symposiums on Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, XLIV (July 1987), 549–640. Finally, I find John Murrin’s version of the ideological issues at stake most cogent in his “The Great Inversion, or Court Versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolutionary Settlements in England (1688–1721) and America (1776–1816),” in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions (Princeton, 1980), 368–453.
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