Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  In response to the Stamp Act, Adams revised and expanded an essay that he had initially written for a private club of his fellow lawyers called Sodality. The revised piece, later entitled “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” was published in four installments in the Boston Gazette in 1765.

  His theme was the progress of liberty and the gradual enlightenment of the common people: since the Middle Ages the people had struggled to wrest their rights from the twin tyrannies of power—monarchs and the church. For centuries the great had exploited the ignorance and timidity of ordinary people in order to dominate and oppress them. When government was properly restrained by respect for the people’s rights, it could be a useful force for good. “But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an incroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power.” Up until the sixteenth century, the most effective weapons the great had used to oppress the common people were the canon and feudal law.

  Canon law was framed by “the Romanish clergy” for the aggrandizement of their own order. Catholic priests had assumed an authority over all aspects of life—not only “a power of dispensation over all sorts of sins and crimes” but also “the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine, the flesh and blood of God himself.” Under feudal law, which was allied with that of the church, “the common people were held together in herds and clans, in a state of servile dependence on their lords; bound even by the tenure of their lands to follow them, whenever they commanded, to their wars.”

  As long as this confederacy between kings and clergy lasted and the people were kept in ignorance, “Liberty, and with her, Knowledge, and Virtue too, seem to have deserted the earth, and one age of darkness succeeded another.” Then the Protestant Reformation broke the hold that canon and feudal law had on the common people, especially in England. As a result of the Reformation, the English people grew more and more conscious of the wrong that had been done them and became more and more impatient with their oppression until “under the execrable race of the Steuarts” the struggle between the people and the confederacy of temporal and spiritual tyranny “became formidable, violent and bloody.” It was this great struggle “that peopled America.” In the seventeenth century Adams’s Puritan forefathers had fled from the twin sources of Old World tyranny, the Stuart state and the hierarchical Anglican church, in search of both universal liberty and religious freedom. The Puritans came to New England and began their settlements and formed their plan of both ecclesiastical and civil governments “in direct opposition to the cannon and the feudal systems.”

  Adams conceded that the Puritans were enthusiasts in religion—not something valued by enlightened eighteenth-century liberals, but, he observed, everyone in Christendom was a religious enthusiast at that time. Besides, no great enterprise was ever accomplished without enthusiasm. Their settlement was “founded in revelation, and in reason too.” They granted as much popular power in their new government as was consistent with human nature, but they focused their attention on religion. They sought to get rid of all the nonsense and delusions associated with canon law, and found their church on the Bible and common sense. This “at once imposed an obligation on the whole body of the clergy to industry, virtue, piety and learning and rendered that whole body infinitely more independent on the civil powers, in all respects, than they could be where they were formed into a scale of subordination, from a pope down to priests and fryers and confessors, necessarily and essentially a sordid, stupid wretched herd.”

  These Puritan adventurers denied that “most mischievous of all doctrines, that of passive obedience and non-resistance.” Such a doctrine was inconsistent with “the constitution of human nature and that religious liberty, with which Jesus had made them free.” They were convinced that nothing could preserve them from the twin tyrannies of feudal and canon law “but knowledge diffused generally thro’ the whole body of the people.” For this reason they founded a college and established schools, all publicly supported. The consequence was a highly literate people.

  It was true, said Adams, that recently some High Churchmen, who were not descendants of the Puritans, had criticized these educational efforts as needlessly expensive and causing idleness among the people who ought to be working instead of going to school. But the people had “a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to that most dreaded, and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.” And contributing to the maintenance of that right was the press. Whenever the public interest and liberty were in danger from the ambition and avarice of great men, “whatever may be their politeness, address, learning, ingenuity, and in other respects integrity and honesty,” the newspaper editors had done themselves honor “by publishing and pointing out that avarice and ambition.”2 This certainly was one of his many opinions that Adams would come to regret.

  Since for Adams canon law was as threatening as feudal law, the conflict with Great Britain in the 1760s had to be about more than simply protecting the constitutional rights of the colonists. In his “Dissertation” he warned that the British government would ally with the Church of England to reverse the results of the Puritan revolution. As he told his diary, the Anglican clergy in Massachusetts were bigots and “devout religious Slaves.” These “Church People,” he said, “are many of them, Favourers of the stamp act.”3

  As he later recalled, the liberal Congregational minister Jonathan Mayhew had warned the people of Massachusetts that the Church of England was using the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts—an organization presumably designed to bring Anglican Christianity to the Indians—to undermine the Congregational churches. These warnings “excited a general and just apprehension, that bishops and dioceses, and churches and priests, and tithes, were to be imposed on us by Parliament. It was known that neither king, nor ministry, nor archbishops, could appoint bishops in America, without an act of Parliament; and if parliament could tax us, they could establish the Church of England, with all its creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies, and tithes, and prohibit all other churches, as conventicles, as schism shops.”4

  Not only was the “Dissertation” a powerful justification of American opposition to the recent policies of the British government, but it was Adams’s first effort to set forth the importance of New England in the settlement of America.

  As he said in a note added to later reprintings of the essay, he had always considered “the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scheme and design of Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”5

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH JEFFERSON had his own historical narrative about the struggle of liberty against tyrannical power, he would never have written anything like Adams’s “Dissertation.” For Adams, the Protestant Reformation always remained a powerful event. In 1815 he concluded “that all the Wars of the past fifty Years are only a continuation of the Wars of the Reformation.” It was natural for him to draw analogies between the sixteenth century and the 1760s. “If [James] Otis was Martin Luther,” he said, “Samuel Adams was John Calvin.”6 By contrast, the Reformation had almost no emotional significance for Jefferson. Since the origins of Virginia, unlike those of Massachusetts, had nothing to do with religious enthusiasts seeking freedom from Anglican tyranny, his story of the settlement of America had no place for the Protestant Reformation. Insofar as Jefferson found history useful in explaining the origins of America, he invoked in place of the Reformation the myth of a democratic Saxon period of independent landowning farmers that had been destroyed by the feudal laws of the Norman Conquest in 1066. For Jefferson this Saxon past was a lost utopian world that eighteenth-century Americans ought to emulate and recover. This was very different from Adams’s understanding of history as a long, ongoing struggle against tyranny in which America had a central role to play.

/>   • • •

  ADAMS HAD BEEN THINKING about the theme of his “Dissertation”—America’s place in world history—as early as 1755, the year he graduated from Harvard. That October, he outlined to his friend Nathan Webb his thoughts about the rise and fall of empires. Rome, he said, began as an “insignificant village” but gradually it rose “to a stupendous Height,” only to find itself in subsequent centuries sinking “into debauchery,” which “made it att length an easy prey to Barbarians.” Likewise, England had gradually risen “in Power and magnificence, and is now the greatest Nation upon the globe.” Following the Reformation, “a few people came over into this new world for Conscience sake.” Perhaps, he said, “this trivial incident may transfer the great seat of Empire unto America.” The rapid growth of America’s population and the increasing wealth of the country made its eventual dominance likely. Only the separation of the colonies one from another could “keep us from setting up for ourselves.” With such thoughts it is obvious that Adams was already primed for the events that would take place over the next two decades.7

  Although Adams later claimed that his “Dissertation” was the spark that ignited New England’s opposition to the Stamp Act, in fact it was barely noticed at the time. However, Thomas Brand Hollis, an English radical, picked it up and published it in London in 1765; eventually the essay was printed in England without Adams’s knowledge three times before 1776.

  In 1765 Adams made another contribution to Massachusetts’s resistance to the Stamp Act, with his draft of instructions for the town of Braintree to its representative in the General Court, as the Massachusetts legislature was known. His draft voiced defiance of recent British actions, which, he said, had been “pursued with a direct and formal Intention to enslave Us.”8 The draft was too radical for the town and it was moderated. Still, his influence over the final adopted instructions was unmistakable. He had obviously captured the attention of many of his fellow subjects in the colony.

  But in Adams’s mind there was a severe downside to the troubles provoked by the Stamp Act. All legal business had come to a halt, and Adams’s legal career had been suddenly interrupted, just as it was about to take off. He had lived his life of thirty years in preparation for this moment of success. Now, however, his career was in danger. He had poverty to struggle with, and the malice of enemies to contend with, and only a few friends to assist him. It was as if the whole world were conspiring against him. He had, he told his diary, “groped in dark Obscurity, till of late, and had but just become known, and gained a small degree of Reputation, when this execrable Project was set on foot for my Ruin as well as that of America in General, and of Great Britain.”9

  For Adams resistance to British actions was not something abstract and distant. He knew his enemies personally and palpably—the Bernards, the Hutchinsons, the Olivers, the Grays—these were “my bitter Foes.” They were all “Conspirators against the Public Liberty,” all part of the “Conspiracy” that “was first regularly formed, and begun to be executed, in 1763 or 4.” Thomas Hutchinson, above all, was his personal enemy. Hutchinson, the chief justice and lieutenant governor of the colony, and his family and friends had acquired all the highest honors and profits in Massachusetts, “to the Exclusion of much better Men.” Adams believed that the province had more to fear from Hutchinson than from any other man in the world. By 1772 Adams had become convinced that Hutchinson was using all his “Art and Power” to destroy him personally just as he had sought to demolish the lives of other patriots.10

  Nearly a half century later, Adams vividly recalled the way Chief Justice Hutchinson had abruptly interrupted his argument during an important trial, Rex v. Corbet, that took place during the tense atmosphere in Boston in 1769. Adams was defending several colonial seamen who were charged with murdering a British naval officer who was apparently trying to impress them. The trial was held before a special vice-admiralty court composed of fifteen dignitaries, including, in addition to Hutchinson, the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the judge of admiralty, a commodore of the Royal Navy, and some counselors from the other New England colonies. In the inflammatory atmosphere of Boston that year Hutchinson was more concerned with the politics than the legalities of the case, and he suddenly interruped Adams and adjourned the trial. Four hours later, he and the court returned a hasty and unsubstantiated verdict of justifiable homicide. Even though Adams had won his case, he resented the court’s lack of legal reasoning and the fact that he was prevented from presenting his legal discoveries to the public. To be cut off so brusquely by Hutchinson in front of so many worthies whom he was eager to impress angered and embarrassed him. “Never in my life,” he recalled, “have I been so disappointed, so mortified, so humiliated as in that trial.”11

  • • •

  JEFFERSON NEVER THOUGHT about his resistance to British policies in this personal manner. For him Parliament and the king were distant and abstract; they were institutions he knew about, but they never assumed the direct and personal character that they did for Adams. In fact, until near the very end of the colonial period Jefferson was intimate with royal officials, dining and playing music with Governor Fauquier in the mid-1760s. His opposition to Great Britain was intellectual and ideological, not tangible, not personal. And unlike Adams, he never let the law trump political reality.

  Jefferson was only twenty-two in 1765 and, he recalled, was “but a student” of law in Williamsburg. He hadn’t yet expressed anything resembling Adams’s farsighted view of the future of America, and compared with Adams, he had a much more subdued reaction to the Stamp Act. At the end of May 1765, he wrote in his autobiography, he had gone to the Virginia capital to listen to the House of Burgesses debate the Stamp Act, and he had heard Patrick Henry let loose his “torrents of sublime eloquence” in opposition to British tyranny.12

  Because of the fire at Shadwell in 1770 Jefferson lost most of his early papers, so we know little of his activities in the 1760s. He clearly spent a good deal of time engaged in his private affairs—establishing his law practice, wooing two women, and getting married. But he was obviously reading and thinking and developing enlightened ideas about what might be done in Virginia and in the empire. Once he began serving in the House of Burgesses, he introduced a measure for the emancipation of slaves in the colony, but it was rejected. Or as he recalled in his autobiography, “Indeed, during the regal government, nothing liberal could expect success,” since Virginians were still paralyzed by a habitual subservience to the mother country. Although there is no record of any such measure being introduced, Jefferson, according to his first major biographer, Henry S. Randall, may have been referring to a bill he introduced to allow slave owners to emancipate their slaves. Or he may have wanted in his autobiography to embellish his liberal credentials at the outset of his career. At any rate he was certainly more radical on slavery and the imperial crisis than many of his colleagues in the House of Burgesses.

  Jefferson was very much involved in the House’s initial support of Massachusetts’s resistance to British policies in the late 1760s. He joined other burgesses who met in Williamsburg’s Raleigh Tavern in June 1770 to form an association pledged to the nonimportation of British goods as long as the Townshend Acts, which, in place of the repealed Stamp Act, had levied duties on a number of colonial imports, were in effect. But interest among the burgesses flagged, and so few members of the association showed up for a meeting scheduled for December 1770 that the effort finally collapsed.13

  In the meantime, during the late 1760s Jefferson was busy planning and building his new mountaintop home, which he called Monticello. In an important sense this home became a symbol of his separation, not just from his mother and her home at Shadwell and the Randolphs in general, but also from the patrician society that he later derided. He originally called it Hermitage, a secluded place where he could escape from the people he did not like. In this respect he was very different from Adams, whose several
homes in Braintree and Boston were nestled snugly into the community and possessed none of the size or architectural distinctiveness of Monticello.

  Adams’s final home in Quincy, which he purchased in 1787, was a simple New England farmhouse without a grand veranda or any of the pretensions of Monticello. Indeed, a French visitor in 1788 described the Adams homestead as “a small house, fifteen miles from Boston which no Paris advocate of the lowest rank would choose for his country-seat.” Throughout his life Adams customarily covered any feelings of embarrassment with humor: he gave his modest home a variety of titles, many of them comical, beginning with “Peacefield,” then “Stoney Field,” later “Mount Wollaston,” and finally “Montezillo a little Hill” to rival Jefferson’s “Monticello the lofty Mountain.”14

  Although Jefferson’s house was supposedly designed in the manner of the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio, no one before Jefferson had ever conceived of building a country estate on the top of a deserted mountain. Not only did the peculiar location of Monticello violate all Palladian precedent, but the house’s inaccessibility and the problems of supplying it with water made it expensive to erect and to maintain. But to Jefferson these difficulties did not matter. He had acquired a number of architectural books, surely more than any of his fellow planters ever owned, and read and studied them. He desired a building that would be a self-contained patriarchal enclave set apart from the hustle and bustle of the outside world, one that would be distinctive and reflect the superiority of his knowledge and taste.15 As the Marquis de Chastellux pointed out, Monticello as a home resembled “none of the others seen in this country; so it may be said that Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the Fine Arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.”