When Adams enrolled in Harvard, he also began keeping a diary. Keeping as full and honest a diary as he did was part of the inheritance passed on from his Puritan ancestors; but it was also an inevitable response to his acute self-awareness. None of his colleagues and in fact no American in the eighteenth century kept a diary like that of Adams. In it he poured out all his feelings—all his anxieties and ambitions, all his jealousies and resentments.
It is impossible to imagine Jefferson writing such a journal. Jefferson was always reserved and self-possessed and, unlike Adams, he scarcely ever revealed much of his inner self. Jefferson seemed to open up to no one, while Adams at times seemed to open up to everyone. He certainly opened up to his diary. “Honesty, Sincerity, and openness, I esteem essential marks of a good mind,” he wrote, and once he got going his candid entries bore out that judgment.48
Adams used his diary to begin a lifelong struggle with what he often considered his unworthy pride and passions. “He is not a wise man and is unfit to fill any important Station in Society, that has left one Passion in his Soul unsubdued.”49 Like his seventeenth-century Puritan ancestors, he could not have success without guilt.
Although Adams was anything but an orthodox Puritan in his religious views, he often tormented himself in the early years of his diary as if he were one. And the kind of acute self-awareness that Adams had could lead to self-loathing. “Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal Vice and cardinal Folly,” and he continually rebuked himself for it and sought to suppress it.50 He confided in his diary all his feelings of self-conscious awkwardness. “I have not conversed enough with the World, to behave rightly,” he confessed in January 1759, at age twenty-three. “I talk to [Robert Treat] Paine about Greek, that makes him laugh. I talk to Sam Quincy about Resolutions, and being a great Man, and study and improving Time, which makes him laugh. I talk to Ned [Quincy], about the Folly of affecting to a Heretick, which makes him mad. . . . Besides this I have insensibly fallen into a Habit of affecting Wit and Humour, of Shrugging my Shoulders, and moving [and] distorting the Muscles of my face. My Motions are stiff and uneasy, ungraceful, and my attention is unsteady and irregular.” All these, he said, were “faults, Defects, Fopperies and follies, and Disadvantages. Can I mend these faults and supply these Defects?” 51
Adams admonished himself for even the smallest expressions of vanity and self-conceit. “Oh,” he said, “that I could wear out of my mind every mean and base affectation, conquer my natural Pride and Self Conceit, . . . acquire that meekness and humility, which are the sure marks and Characters of a great and generous Soul.” Every social occasion called forth this self-conscious adolescent-like wincing and worrying, and he was in his midtwenties. Too often—in fact, “to a very heinous Degree”—he had tried to show off his learning, too often he had sought to make “a shining Figure in gay Company,” and too often he had displayed “a childish Affectation of Wit and Gaiety.” And all he ever did, he rued, was make a fool of himself. He reproached himself over and over and resolved to act more sensibly in the future—“Let it therefore be my constant endeavor to reform these great faults.” Yet the self-criticism continued.52
• • •
JEFFERSON KEPT NO DIARY, and if he had, he would never have expressed any self-loathing in it. Instead of a diary, Jefferson kept records—records, it seems, of everything, with what he called “scrupulous fidelity.”53 He religiously recorded the weather, taking the temperature twice a day, once in the morning and again at four in the afternoon. He entered into memorandum books every financial transaction, every source of income and every expenditure, no matter how small or how large—seven pennies for chickens or thousands of dollars for a land sale. Unfortunately, he never added up his earnings and his expenses. Since his painstaking bookkeeping was not double entry, he never fully appreciated his overall financial situation. His daily and detailed record keeping gave him a false sense of control over his world that in the end played him false.54
He kept a variety of specialized books, including several commonplace books—a legal book, an equity book, and a literary book, in which he copied passages from his reading that he found important or interesting.55 He also kept a case book and a fee book, for tracking work and income from his legal career as long as it lasted; a farm book, in which he entered, among other things, the births and sales of slaves as well as farm animals; and a garden book. In his garden book, he made such notations as how many peas he was planting would fill a pint measure, how much fodder a horse would eat in a night, and how many cucumbers fifty hills would yield in a season.
His habit of calculating everything even included the production of slaves. In a notorious letter in 1819 he told his steward to restrain the overseers from overworking the female slaves who were breeding children. “A child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” Although the labor of female slaves was important, it was, he said, “their increase which is the first consideration with us.”56
• • •
WHEN ADAMS WENT OFF TO HARVARD, his father expected him to become a minister, which was what Deacon Adams believed an education at Harvard was all about. But young Adams knew that the liberal education he would receive at Harvard would do more than prepare him for a career. It would give the right to call himself a gentleman—a very important and distinctive status in the eighteenth century.
Both the societies of colonial Virginia and of colonial Massachusetts were vertically organized in hierarchies. There was, however, a horizontal division running through those hierarchical societies that was often more meaningful to people in the eighteenth century than the separation between free and slave that is so horrible to us today: that was the distinction between gentlemen and commoners.
In Virginia the distinction was there practically from birth. “Before a boy knows his right hand from his left, can discern black from white, or good from evil, who knows who made him, or how he exists, he is,” declared one sardonic observer, “a Gentleman.” And as a gentleman, “it would derogate greatly from his character, to learn a trade; or to put his hand to any servile employment.”57 Work, after all, was mean and despicable, as Aristotle and all of antiquity had said, and fit only for the lowly, which to the Virginian gentry meant African slaves.
In Virginia the great leisured gentry were few in numbers, constituting perhaps only 2 or 3 percent of the population. If there should be any doubt who the Virginia squires were, they had ways of displaying their presence among the common people. Only after their families and the ordinary people had been seated in the church on Sunday did the Virginia gentry enter as a body and tramp booted down the aisle to take their seats in their pews at the front; they exited the church in the same way, with women and ordinary folk waiting in their seats until the gentlemen had left.58
• • •
TO A NEW ENGLANDER LIKE ADAMS the South always seemed aristocratic, even though he had never been there. When he initially met the southern leaders in the Continental Congress, his prejudices were confirmed. The large slaveholding planters possessed an arrogant and patrician notion of themselves. Their separation from the common people, who were “very ignorant and very poor,” was much greater than in New England.59 Indeed, the southern aristocrats, claimed Adams, came close to thinking that the common people had distinct natures from themselves.
Adams actually feared that the South was so different from New England that unifying the sections in the cause of resisting British tyranny was going to be very difficult. But when Virginia and the other southern colonies began to draw up their new state constitutions in 1776, Adams expressed relief in seeing “the Pride of the Haughty” brought down “a little” by the revolutionary movement.60
• • •
COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND was obviously much more egalitarian than Virginia. The distinction between gentry and commoners was certainly less clear there, but it did exist, with perhaps 12 percent of th
e population designated as gentlemen.61 Arthur Browne, an Anglican clergyman who lived in Newport, Boston, and Portsmouth, was sure that inequality had to exist everywhere, even in New England, which liked to pride itself on its lack of a nobility. The bigger New England towns, said Browne, were actually breeding grounds for gentlemen. Their inhabitants, by possessing “more information, better polish and greater intercourse with strangers, insensibly acquired an ascendency over the farmer of the country; the richer merchants of these towns, together with the clergy, lawyers, physicians and officers of the English navy who had occasionally settled there, were considered as gentry.”62
Still, as Browne admitted, there was enough leveling and equality-mindedness in New England that the country folk sometimes mocked the gentry’s pretensions to superiority. When General George Washington came to Massachusetts in the summer of 1775 to take command of the Continental Army, as a good Virginian militia officer he expected to find the soldiers paying due respect to their superiors. Instead, he found the opposite. The New Englanders—“an exceedingly dirty & nasty people,” he called them—lacked all sense of discipline, order, and subordination. The problem, Washington realized, was that these New Englanders had “from their Infancy imbibed Ideas of the most contrary Kind.”63 The “lower class of these people” was ignorant, and its members were full of themselves, which was not surprising since they even elected their militia officers. But the officers themselves were little better. They were, complained Washington, “nearly of the same Kidney with the Privates,” often artisans and tradesmen and certainly not gentlemen. It was difficult if not impossible, he said, to get “Officers of this stamp to exert themselves in carrying orders into execution.” Instead, they sought “to curry favour with the men (by whom they were chosen, & on whose Smiles possibly they may think they may again rely).” Most of the New England officers, he concluded, were “the most indifferent kind of People I ever saw.”64
Although the division between gentleman and commoner may have been more difficult to sustain in New England, Adams always felt that he knew the difference. The distinction between “Yeoman and Gentleman,” he said in 1761, was the “most ancient and universal of all Divisions of the People.”65 It persisted even in law. The colony’s courts, for example, scrupulously sought to determine whether or not plaintiffs and defendants were properly identified as gentlemen. Adams especially knew when someone was not a gentleman. A person who springs “from ordinary Parents,” who “can scarcely write his Name,” whose “Business is Boating,” who “never had any Commissions”—to call such a person a gentleman, he said in 1761, was “an arrant Prostitution of the Title.”66
In fact, this distinction between gentlemen and ordinary folk was far more meaningful for Adams than it ever was for Jefferson, who took his gentry status for granted. Adams was always more self-conscious about this social cleavage, and he thought and talked about it all the time; indeed, this division between patricians and plebeians undergirded the political theory that he worked out over the course of his life.
Adams knew that ordinary individuals could become gentlemen, mainly by gaining enough wealth so they didn’t have to work for a living. Adams noted, for example, that Philip Livingston of New York had once been “in Trade,” but he became “rich, and now lives upon his Income.”67 But for Adams himself, who lacked that degree of wealth, it was his Harvard degree that mattered. In his mind gentlemen were “all those who have received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences.”68
• • •
ALTHOUGH ADAMS ALWAYS divided society into two unequal parts—gentry-aristocrats and commoners—in the way most Virginians did, what really characterized his society of Massachusetts was the growing number of those who were called the “middling sort.” These middling sorts, like Adams’s farmer-shoemaker father, were middling because they could not easily be classified either as gentlemen or as out-and-out commoners. Yet because Adams’s ideas of political science required that society be divided into two parts, he always classified the middling people as commoners.
In Adams’s eyes and in the eyes of many others, these middling types could not be gentlemen, because they had occupations and worked for a living with their hands. Even artisans or mechanics who employed dozens of journeymen were regarded as something less than gentlemen. At the same time, however, these middling artisans, such as the successful Boston silversmith Paul Revere, were often too well off or too distinguished and knowledgeable to be placed among “the lower sort” or “the meaner sort.” Indeed, many of these middling sorts were becoming quite well-to-do. Of the three thousand adult males in Boston in 1790, eighteen hundred, or 60 percent, made up this middling sort. Yet these artisans were not poor; they held 36 percent of the taxable wealth of the city and constituted the majority of its property holders. Although Revere the silversmith was wealthy and often moved in the highest circles of Massachusetts society, he remained an artisan; and despite his desperate desire to improve his status, he was never able to get the Massachusetts gentry to recognize him as one of them.69
From the beginning of the eighteenth century, thinkers like Daniel Defoe had tried to explain and justify these emerging middling people, including the “working trades, who labour hard but feel no want.”70 These well-to-do working people with property, like Benjamin Franklin as a young printer, increasingly had prided themselves on their separation from the idleness and dissipation shared by both the gentry above them and the propertyless poor beneath them. The middling sort combined work with the owning of a decent amount of property. This distinguished them, on the one hand, from the gentry who owned a good deal of property but did not engage in productive labor, at least not with their hands, and, on the other hand, from the wage earners who labored but owned very little if any property. These artisans, petty merchants, clerks, traders, and commercial farmers, who tended to dominate the towns of Massachusetts, were the beginnings of what would become the middle class of the nineteenth century.71
Although most yeoman farmers in Virginia were not big slaveholders or even slaveholders at all, most of them did not have the kind of middling consciousness that marked the commercial farmers and artisans of Massachusetts. They saw themselves as potential slaveholding planters, not as some middling stratum caught between the gentry and the slaves. Since slaves performed many of the tasks that artisans and craftsmen in Massachusetts did, a middling population and middling consciousness were slow to develop in the South. Although Jefferson often hired white supervisors on his plantation, most of the skilled workers—blacksmiths, coopers, carpenters, painters, nail- and textile-makers, charcoal burners, and other craftsmen—were black slaves. Compared with New England, the colonial South had virtually little or no middle class. In the end this made all the difference.
• • •
PRECISELY BECAUSE OF his middling origins, Adams was always keenly aware of the aristocrats of Massachusetts. Just as Virginia had its first families of Carters, Lees, Byrds, and Randolphs, so too did colonial Massachusetts, as Adams noted, have its grand families of Winslows, Hutchinsons, Saltonstals, Leonards, and others.72 But Adams’s reaction to these families and their pretensions was different from Jefferson’s response to the great families of Virginia. Although both men saw themselves as outsiders in their respective societies, their positions were very different. Jefferson was thoroughly one of the Virginia aristocrats and confidently criticized his peers from a position of intellectual and cultural superiority. Adams, by contrast, never felt himself to be fully part of the Massachusetts aristocracy and thus came to criticize it ambivalently from a position of social inferiority.
Moving originally on the edges of the genteel Boston world, he was awed by the wealth, sophistication, and elegance that he witnessed. When he dined in 1766 at the home of the wealthy merchant and future Loyalist Nicholas Boylston, his distant relative, he was overwhelmed. Such a dinner! Such a house! Such furniture, “which
alone cost a thousand Pounds sterling.” Boylston’s home, Adams told his diary, was a seat “for a noble Man, a Prince. The Turkey Carpets, the painted Hangings, the Marble Tables, the rich Beds with crimson Damask Curtains and Counterpins, the beautiful Chimney Clock, the spacious Garden, are the most magnificent of any Thing I have ever seen.”73
For Adams the world was always larger and more impressive than he expected, and he was constantly taken aback by displays of wealth and refinement. After a day in court in 1758, where he “felt Shy, under Awe and concern,” he attended a “Consort” where he “saw the most Spacious and elegant Room, the gayest Company of Gentlemen and the finest Row of Ladies, that I ever saw.” In 1774 at the house of wealthy New Yorker Jeremiah Platt, he was shown “into as elegant a Chamber as I ever saw—the furniture as rich and splendid as any of Mr. Boylstones.” In the home of John Morin Scott, another rich New Yorker, “a more elegant Breakfast, I never saw—rich plate—a very large Silver Coffee Pot, a very large Silver Tea Pott—Napkins of the very finest Materials, and toast and bread and butter to near Perfection.”74
But Adams despised this world of affluence and elegance even as he envied it. Although he told his diary in 1772 that he was “wearied to death, with gazing wherever I go, at a Profusion of unmeaning Wealth and Magnificence,” he couldn’t help being fascinated. The very rich, he said, feel their fortunes. “They feel the Strength and Importance, which their Riches give them in the World . . . their imaginations are inflated by them.”75 Because he had personally felt “the Pride and Vanity” of the “great ones” of Massachusetts, he could not help but denounce them for their “certain Airs of Wisdom and Superiority” and their “Scorn and Contempt and turning up of the Nose.”76
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