Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  JEFFERSON AND ADAMS HAD DIFFERENT ranges of knowledge and different sensibilities, but what more than anything else distinguished the two patriots from each other were the backgrounds and environments in which they were raised. Both men knew this, and Jefferson actually voiced it when he told Adams that their differences of opinion about important matters were probably “produced by a difference of character in those among whom we live.”29

  The environments in which they were raised were profoundly different. Jefferson’s Virginia was not only the oldest British colony in North America, but the largest in territory and the richest and most populous. In 1760 it had a population of 340,000. Most important, 40 percent of that population—136,000—constituted the labor force of black slaves.

  Adams’s Massachusetts was the second-oldest colony, and with a population on the eve of the Revolution of about 280,000, it was close to being the second most populous one, just behind Pennsylvania, with both far behind Virginia. Out of the Massachusetts population, fewer than 5,000 were African slaves. Nothing distinguished the societies of the two places from each other more than this fact.

  Jefferson was raised and lived with slaves all around him. Slavery was woven into the fabric of Virginia life and could scarcely have been evaded. Jefferson’s earliest memory, according to family lore, was being carried at age three or so on a pillow by a mounted slave from his father’s home, Shadwell, in western Virginia to Tuckahoe, a Randolph plantation on the James River. Since the Randolphs were one of the most distinguished families in Virginia, by marrying Jane Randolph in 1742, Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, a surveyor and substantial planter, gained for his family extensive and influential connections that otherwise would not have been possible. Young Jefferson grew up in a privileged aristocratic world; and yet he tended to deny that he belonged to that world and indeed during the heady days of the Revolution he tried to change that world.

  Virginia was largely rural, with very few towns. Its economy was dependent on production of a staple crop—tobacco—that had direct markets in Britain and that required a minimum of distribution and handling. This was why towns in Virginia were so few and far between. When on the eve of the Revolution some of the planters in the upper South turned to the production of wheat and other grains, which had diverse markets that required special handling and distribution centers, towns such as Norfolk and Baltimore suddenly emerged to market the grain. Still, Virginia’s society remained overwhelmingly rural and agricultural, dominated by slavery.

  Although it was slavery more than anything else that separated Virginia from Massachusetts, Jefferson could at times be amazingly blind to that fact. He knew there were great differences between the people of the North and those in the South, but he attributed these differences mostly to differences of climate. In 1785 he outlined to a French friend his sense of the sectional differences. The northerners were “cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others, interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion.” By contrast, said Jefferson, the southerners were “fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, [and] without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.” Jefferson implied that there was an intimate connection between the southerners’ zeal for liberty and their capacity to trample on the liberty of others.30

  By the end of their lives, the distinction between Adams’s Massachusetts and Jefferson’s Virginia had become ever more glaring. When Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge moved north in 1825 with her husband, Joseph, she was immediately struck by the vast difference between New England and her native Virginia. She marveled at the “multitude of beautiful villages” in Adams’s New England that stood in stark contrast to the depleted and unimproved rurality of her grandfather’s Virginia, and she was amazed by the fecundity that the hardworking Yankee farmers had wrung from “the hard bosom of a stubborn and ungrateful land.” For her the reason for the difference was obvious. The southern states, she told her grandfather, could not begin to match “the prosperity and the improvement” of the northern states “whilst the canker of slavery eats into their hearts, and diseases the whole body by this ulcer at the core.”31

  There were other contrasts between Virginia and Massachusetts. Virginia had no public school system resembling that of Massachusetts and its literacy rate was nowhere near that of Massachusetts, which had one of the most literate societies in the world. By the middle of the eighteenth century, 70 percent of males and 45 percent of females in Massachusetts were literate. Unlike colonial Virginia, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had no laws of primogeniture (by which the eldest son inherited the estate) and no laws of entail (by which the estate was kept in the stem line of the family). New Englanders prided themselves on the relative equality of their societies, which they believed flowed from their early abandonment of these aristocratic laws.

  Although Massachusetts’s economy, like Virginia’s, was mainly agricultural, the colony had many more towns, especially on the seacoast and along the rivers. The bulk of the population was composed of middling farmers, most of whom traded with one another. Yet there was considerable overseas trade, both to Britain and elsewhere in Europe and to the other colonies and the West Indies. There was no single staple product; fish and rum probably came closest to playing that role. Artisans and mechanics existed everywhere and manufactured the tools and products that in Virginia were mainly made by slaves. Slavery was legal in colonial Massachusetts, but the province had relatively few slaves, perhaps comprising less than 2 percent of the population; and most of these were household servants in Boston and the other towns of the colony. However, many merchants in Massachusetts and in the other New England colonies were deeply involved in the slave trade, bringing blacks from Africa to the southern and Caribbean colonies.

  Although slavery was not officially abolished in Massachusetts until 1784, well before independence it was already a dying institution in the colony; and the courts were reluctant to enforce it. Adams, recalling a case in 1766 in which an enslaved woman sued for her freedom and won, declared, “I never knew a Jury by a Verdict to determine a Negro to be a Slave—They always found them free.”32 Still, in the middle of the eighteenth century, one out of every five families in Boston owned at least one slave.33 Although neither Adams nor his family ever owned any slaves, he later admitted that in colonial Massachusetts the owning of slaves “was not disgraceful,” and “the best men in my Vicinity—thought it not inconsistent with their Characters.”34 His refusal to emulate them, he claimed, “cost me thousands of dollars for the Labour and Subsistence of free men which I might have saved by the purchase of negroes in times when they were very Cheap.”35

  • • •

  DIFFERENT AS THEY WERE, the colonial societies of Virginia and Massachusetts were still both hierarchies. Indeed, prior to the Revolution it was almost impossible to conceive of a civilized society not being a vertically organized hierarchy of some sort in which people were more aware of those above and below than of those alongside them. Everyone and everything could be located in the great chain of being and be made part of what Adams called the “regular and uniform Subordination of one Tribe to another down to the apparently insignificant animalcules in pepper Water.”36

  Jefferson certainly saw the society of colonial Virginia as a hierarchy. Later in his life William Wirt, who was writing a biography of Patrick Henry, asked Jefferson to describe the society he grew up in. In his response Jefferson emphasized the colonial society’s insular and immobile character, the better to demonstrate the transformation that he believed he and the other revolutionaries had brought about. Colonial Virginia had been an utterly provincial society, he told Wirt, separated from both its sister colonies and the greater European world, and seldom visited by foreigners. It had experienced little social mobility.
“Certain families had risen to splendor by wealth” and had preserved that wealth from generation to generation by the legal devices of primogeniture and entail. “Families in general had remained stationary on the grounds of their forefathers,” because migration to the west had scarcely begun. Hostile Indians were still present on the other side of the mountains. In the mid-1760s parties of Indians attacked white settlements in the valley of Burke’s Garden and wiped out entire households; as recently as 1768 the Cherokees and Shawnees had fought a ferocious two-day battle with each other near Rich Mountain in Tazewell County.37 Prior to the Revolution, said Jefferson, only rough Scotch-Irish frontiersmen had moved into the valleys beyond the Blue Ridge, and few easterners had as yet chosen to settle among them.

  This static hierarchical society, said Jefferson, was composed of “several strata, separated by no marked lines, but shading off imperceptibly, from top to bottom, nothing disturbing the order of their repose.” At the top were the “aristocrats,” whom Jefferson defined as “the great landholders who had seated themselves below the tide water on the main rivers.” These would be the Randolphs, Lees, Carters, Byrds, and others—the families that came closest to emulating the English landed gentry. Only instead of tenants paying rents that supported the English landed gentry, the great Virginia planters possessed African slaves, hundreds of them on each of their plantations. Many of these great planters would lead the resistance against Great Britain. They were, as northern and British travelers often noted, “haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior power.”38

  Just below these great slaveholding planters, said Jefferson, were their descendants, their younger sons and daughters—“half breeds,” Jefferson called them—who inherited the pride of their ancestors, without their wealth. Next came those whom Jefferson disdainfully labeled “the pretenders”—those “who from vanity, or the impulse of growing wealth, or from that enterprize which is natural to talents, sought to detach themselves from the plebeian ranks to which they properly belonged, and imitated, at some distance, the manners and habits of the great.”

  Jefferson’s calling such men “pretenders” is surprising, since the republicanism of the Revolution presumably had justified such social mobility. Below the pretenders were those he always placed most trust in—the “solid and independent yeomanry” who, he said in his Notes on the State of Virginia, were free from the “casualties and caprice of customers.” They were the stabilizing backbone of the society, “the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people.” They were more or less content with their middling status, “looking askance at those above them, yet not venturing to jostle them.” At the bottom of this hierarchy, said Jefferson, were “a feculum of beings called Overseers, the most abject, degraded, unprincipled race, always cap in hand to the Dons who employed them, and furnishing materials for the exercise of their pride, insolence, and spirit of domination.”39

  Yet whom did these overseers oversee? In his description of Virginia’s colonial society, Jefferson never mentioned the tens of thousands of black slaves who constituted nearly half of Virginia’s population. He possessed hundreds of slaves himself; indeed, he became the second-largest slaveholder in Albemarle County and one of the largest slave owners in all of Virginia. In his eyes, however, it was as if the slaves were not part of Virginia’s society at all.

  But in some sense neither was he. In his social hierarchy he had no place for himself. Although he was in fact one of the “aristocrats,” who, he said, “lived in a style of luxury and extravagance, insupportable by the other inhabitants,” he did not want to be classed as such. But neither did he want to be a pretender or a half-breed. Although he sometimes saw himself as a western frontiersman with some of the qualities of an independent yeoman, he knew that given his wealth and status he could never really be that. And despite his admiration of the yeoman farmers, he himself had no natural affinity for farming, and later in his life he admitted as much, saying that he was “not fit to be a farmer with the kind of labour” that existed in Virginia. Tobacco was a major product of his plantations; nevertheless, he confessed in 1801 that he had never in his entire life seen a leaf of his tobacco packed in a hogshead.40 By contrast, Adams may not have done much farming, but when he did he was much more hands-on than Jefferson—concerned, for example, with such matters as the proper mixture of constituents for the manure used for fertilizer.

  In the 1790s, like other Virginia planters, Jefferson shifted from tobacco production, which was depleting the land, to wheat. Since the production of wheat required only one-fifth the labor of tobacco, Jefferson was able to diversify and improve his plantation holdings. But his incompetence as a farmer hurt his transition to wheat production. His county had no mill large enough to handle all the wheat; by the time he built a mill complex on his Monticello plantation, it had taken years of hired labor and an enormous sum of money, and it never worked efficiently. Although corn was a staple of the diet of his slaves and livestock, he put all his land into wheat production and made no provision for growing corn; consequently, he ended up having to buy corn from his neighbors at high prices. Even his newly designed moldboard plow, which was supposed to save labor, cut the furrows in such a way as to aggravate the washing away of topsoil from the fields. His inadequacies as a farmer were graphically revealed when his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph took over management of the Monticello plantation in 1815 and tripled the yield of wheat.41

  • • •

  JEFFERSON MAY HAVE BEEN the patriarch of his self-contained extended family, both free and enslaved, but managing a successful and profitable plantation was never his greatest ambition. What he really wanted to be was the enlightened intellectual leader of his Virginia society, standing above it, superior to it, and reforming it.

  Jefferson was born in 1743 at Shadwell on the wild edge of western settlement in Virginia. Although he became as cultivated as any eighteenth-century American, he always remained proud of his frontier origins. When Jefferson was only fourteen years old, his father died. Peter Jefferson’s estate was not grand, but it was substantial—at least seventy-five hundred acres and over sixty slaves—of which his eldest son got his fair share. Jefferson was brought up by his mother’s family, the socially prestigious Randolphs. Somehow or other, that Randolph experience made him question the benefits of inherited privilege. Jefferson scarcely mentions his mother in all his writings; by contrast, he tended to idolize his father as a hardy product of the wilderness.42

  Both Jefferson and Adams wrote autobiographies, with Adams’s being about four times longer than Jefferson’s. Jefferson began his in 1821, at the age of seventy-seven. Although it is often perfunctory and not very revealing, beneath its placid surface one can detect Jefferson’s restrained dislike of the dominant aristocracy of Virginia. He described his efforts in 1776 to bring down that “Patrician order, distinguished by the splendor and luxury of their establishments.” No doubt he was thinking especially of the Randolphs. Perhaps his maternal grandmother had often corrected his teenage manners and blamed his uneducated father for the boy’s rough edges. At any rate Jefferson came to value his frontier father—a man of “strong mind, sound judgment, and eager after information,” a man who had “improved himself”—in a way that he did not value his refined Randolph mother, whose status was inherited. (Her death in 1776 produced the briefest of comments and that one was totally without sentiment.)43 Jefferson came to believe that the privileges of this “aristocracy of wealth” needed to be destroyed in order “to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent,” of which he considered himself a prime example.44

  To us the wealthy slaveholding Jefferson does not seem all that different from the “Patrician order” he challenged, but he obviously saw a difference. In the opening pages of his autobiography, Jefferson tells us that the lineage of his Welsh father was lost in obscurity and he was able
to find in the British records only a couple of references to his father’s family. His mother, on the other hand, was a Randolph, one of the first families of Virginia. The Randolphs, he said with dry derision, “trace their pedigree far back in England & Scotland, to which let every one ascribe the faith & merit he chooses.”45

  • • •

  ADAMS’S BACKGROUND WAS VERY DIFFERENT. He was born in 1735 in Braintree, Massachusetts, the eldest son of a substantial but nevertheless ungenteel farmer and shoemaker; in other words, despite his being a militia officer, a deacon in the local church, and a recently elected selectman of the town, his father remained one of what were called the “middling sort.” Adams’s mother, however, was a Boylston, a fairly distinguished family, which, like the Randolphs and Jefferson, gave Adams some social cachet. When he enrolled in Harvard in 1751, entering students were still ranked in accord with their “dignity of family.” Because his mother was a Boylston and his father was a deacon in the Congregational Church, Adams was listed socially higher than he otherwise might have been—fourteenth out of twenty-five.

  Like Jefferson, Adams admired his father more than his mother, not, as in Jefferson’s case, for his rough manliness, but for his moral integrity and his selfless public virtue. “He was,” said Adams, “the honestest Man I ever knew,” and “in proportion to his Education and Sphere of Life, I have never seen his Superiour.” Possessing a great “Admiration of Learning,” his father was determined “to give his first son a liberal Education.”46

  As a boy Adams apparently had some doubts about attending college. In his autobiography, which he began writing in 1802 at age sixty-seven, he says that as a schoolboy he initially told his father to “lay aside the thoughts of sending me to Colledge.” His father replied, “What would you do Child? Be a Farmer. A Farmer?” His father then proceeded to show exactly what it meant to be a farmer. He worked his son hard all one day at farming. That evening he asked young Adams what he thought of farming now. “Though the Labour had been very hard and very muddy I answered I like it very well Sir.” His father responded, “Ay but I don’t like it so well: so you shall go to School” and, as his eldest son, prepare for college. In 1751, the year he entered college, Adams began his personal library with a purchase of an edition of Cicero’s orations.47