Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  Chastellux’s comment explains everything. The fact that Monticello did not resemble any of the great mansions of the other Virginia planters was precisely the point. Chastellux shrewdly deduced as much. Jefferson wanted a house that matched his intellect. Since “no object escaped Mr. Jefferson . . . ever since his youth he had placed his mind, like his house, on a lofty height, whence he might contemplate the universe.” 16

  Jefferson never revealed his ambition in the fulsome way that Adams did. He never cared about becoming a great lawyer as Adams did. Instead, it seems clear that from the moment Jefferson began conceiving of Monticello he aimed at nothing less than becoming the supreme connoisseur of the best that was thought and known in the world.

  By the time he moved to Monticello in the fall of 1770, the year his mother’s house at Shadwell burned, he was already thinking about marriage. His only recorded reaction to the fire concerned the loss of his papers and books—nothing about what the loss of her home might have meant to his mother.17

  • • •

  DURING THESE SAME YEARS Adams’s legal practice was booming. He recalled that by 1770 he “had more Business at the Bar, than any Man in the Province.”18 In 1766 he was elected a selectman of Braintree and continued to write newspaper pieces protesting British policies. In 1766–1767 he wrote nearly a dozen essays for the press attacking his old friend Jonathan Sewall, who, writing under the pseudonym “Philanthrop,” had vigorously and publicly defended Governor Francis Bernard for his support of the Stamp Act.

  In his pieces Sewall had promoted the importance of subordination in society and the need for the people to pay proper respect to their governing officials. In response Adams accused Sewall of trying “to deceive his countrymen,” of seeking to fill “their minds with principles in government utterly subversive of all freedom.” Behind all government, said Adams (and he knew of what he spoke) was the “infinite” power of “human Ambition.” “We know it because We have felt the cruel oppressions, which Sprung out of it.” In all ages and nations “the Prince and his favourites” have sought to cultivate “Reverence and Awe . . . Dread and Terror” among their inferiors. “The very first Maxim of Tyranny, is and always was, to puzzle the Understandings and excite the Admiration of the People.”

  In some of his attacks on Sewall, Adams took a strong populist line. Adopting in several essays the hick-farmer persona “Humphrey Ploughjogger,” which he had also used earlier, Adams assailed Sewall for his display of “Pride and Vanity” and for the “Contempt” he had expressed “for the Generality of Mankind.” He and his courtier ilk—“the better sort”—had too readily dismissed those whom they sneeringly referred to as “the Herd, Rabble, Mob, common People, Vulgar and such stuff.”

  No doubt in these essays Adams was releasing some of the pent-up resentments of the “Fleers and flounts, sneers and snubs” that he himself had felt from the better sort of Massachusetts. Above all, he wanted his newspaper readers to understand that “Parliament had no Authority” to pass the Stamp Act. But he went on to say that the Stamp Act at least had the unexpected benefit of resurrecting the dwindling spirit of the people. “Calamities are the causticks and catharticks of the body politick,” he said. “They arouse the soul. They restore original virtues. They reduce a constitution back to its first principles.”19

  In 1768 he suddenly stopped keeping his diary, except for one entry at the end of January, in which he once again worried about what he was doing with his life. “What is the End and Purpose of my Studies, Journeys, Labours of all Kinds of Body and Mind, of Tongue and Pen?” he asked on January 30. “Am I grasping at Money or Scheming for Power? Am I planning the Illustration of my Family or the Welfare of my Country? These are great Questions.”20

  Sometime in that year he had an opportunity to answer these questions. His former friend Jonathan Sewall, who had been rewarded for his support of the government with an appointment as special attorney general of the province, asked whether Adams would accept an appointment as advocate-general in the court of admiralty. Adams knew the office was lucrative and that it would be “a first Step in the Ladder of Royal Favour and promotion.” Despite the fact that this offer of a royal office was “unexpected,” he nevertheless, as he later recalled, was “in an instant prepared for an Answer.” And that was to promptly decline the offer.21

  Such a position would surely have fulfilled some of his earlier ambitions; and since he scarcely knew what was ahead of him, the offer must have been tempting. Ten years later, after Thomas Hutchinson had fled America and was exiled in England, he heard some Loyalist gossip related by two Massachusetts men, “Mr. [Richard] Clarke and [Samuel] Quincy.” The two reported that Adams had said to Sewall “that he was at a loss which side to take, but it was time to determine.” According to this story, Sewall advised Adams to go with the government and proposed to Governor Bernard to make him a justice of the peace, “as the first step to importance.” But Bernard was piqued by something Adams had done and delayed the offer, which in turn, said Hutchinson, irritated Adams, who concluded that the governor had “some prejudice against him, and resolved to take the other side.”22

  • • •

  THERE IS NO OTHER EVIDENCE for this story, but since Hutchinson mentioned that the proposed office was merely a justice of the peace, and not the more important position of advocate-general in the court of admiralty mentioned by Sewall in 1768, the gossip was likely wrong or else referred to an earlier moment in the 1760s when the political situation was more fluid. But the fact that such a story was circulating in England two years after independence suggests that at some point some of Adams’s fellow citizens had had doubts about where he stood—perhaps because his ambition had been so conspicuous.

  In 1768 Adams actually seems to have hesitated for several weeks before replying to Sewall about the advocate-general position. But he must have realized that he had committed himself so completely to the patriot cause that to join the government as a royal office holder would be disastrous for his reputation. It may not have been simply lack of time that kept him from writing in his diary that year. Not knowing the future, he was becoming increasingly anxious over whether his closer involvement in patriot politics might hurt his practice as an attorney.

  He certainly had been busy in 1768, and he had undoubtedly become much more deeply involved in patriot politics. In May he had written a piece in the Boston Gazette denouncing the creation of an Anglican bishopric in America. In June he had written instructions to the Boston representatives to the General Court protesting the seizure of John Hancock’s sloop Liberty; and later he defended Hancock in admiralty court against charges of smuggling. In 1769, the year that he defended the three sailors accused of murdering the naval officer, he was engaged as co-counsel in bringing a civil case on behalf of one of Boston’s leading patriots, James Otis, who had been assaulted by a customs commissioner. Also that year, he again drafted instructions for the Boston representatives opposing the power of the vice-admiralty court and the presence of British troops in Boston. In 1770 he was elected representative from Boston to the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

  In effect, Adams had become the consigliere, the lawyer and counselor, of the Boston patriots and their organization, the Sons of Liberty.23 And as such, ironically, he was assigned to defend the British officers and soldiers involved in the so-called Boston Massacre. In 1768 the British government, believing that all order had broken down in Massachusetts, had ordered two regiments to Boston. With nearly four thousand armed redcoats crammed into the seaport with fifteen thousand inhabitants, it was just a matter of time before a clash occurred. On March 5, 1770, a party of eight British soldiers fired upon a threatening crowd and killed five civilians. This was the “Boston Massacre.”

  Adams later described his role in defending the soldiers as one of the most courageous acts of his career. He recalled that taking on that unpopular task actually threatened him and his fam
ily with ruin and perhaps with his death; “for I could scarcely perceive a possibility that I should ever go through the Thorns and leap all the Precipices before me, and escape with my Life.” And yet he assumed the dreadful responsibility, and he did it, he said, “for nothing, except, what indeed was and ought to be all in all, a sense of duty.”24

  Despite all these later hand-wringing expressions of fear and anxiety, the actual circumstances of his appointment as defense attorney were more complicated. Josiah Quincy Jr., another successful Boston attorney, was appointed as co-counsel with Adams to defend the soldiers. When Quincy’s father heard rumors of this appointment, he was appalled. He was filled “with anxiety and distress” over news that his son had “become an advocate for those criminals who are charged with the murder of their fellow citizens.—Good God!” he exclaimed to his son. “Is it possible?—I will never believe it.” He thought that if the rumor was true, his son’s reputation and interest were likely to be destroyed.

  Young Quincy wrote back immediately to calm his father down. At first he took the high moral line that under English law everyone deserved a defense. But then he went on to say that he had initially declined the appointment as defense attorney—“until advised and urged to undertake it by an Adams, a Hancock, a Molineux, a Cushing, a Henshaw, a Pemberton, a Warren, and a Phillips”; in other words, until advised and urged by all the leading patriots of Boston to defend the soldiers.25

  Apparently, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Dr. Joseph Warren, and the other town leaders were concerned about Boston’s reputation in the empire as a hotbed of mobs and fanatics; they thus sought through a fair trial for the soldiers to disabuse people of that reputation. As Adams later admitted, at the time “We knew not whether the Town would be supported by the Country: whether the Province would be supported by even our neighbouring States of New England; nor whether New England would be supported by the Continent.” The stakes were high, and Adams and Quincy performed superbly. The captain and six of the eight soldiers were acquitted; two soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter but with pleas of benefit of clergy (the legal fiction that allowed for lesser sentences for first-time offenders) they were branded on their thumbs and released. The subsequent legal business of both Adams and Quincy, far from being damaged, actually flourished.26

  Although the role of Adams and Quincy in the trial of the soldiers was sanctioned by his cousin Samuel Adams and the other patriot leaders, John Adams was sensitive to the feeling of the general public. In December 1772 Samuel Adams and Samuel Pemberton, a former Boston selectman, privately asked him to be the next orator in honor of the Massacre, March 5 already having been established as a day of remembrance. Adams declined, and told his cousin that although he thought the subject of the oration was quite compatible with his defense of the soldiers and the verdict of the jury, “I found the World in general were not capable or not willing to make the Distinction.” Therefore, if he gave the Massacre oration, he told his colleagues, “I should only expose myself to the Lash of ignorant and malicious Tongues on both Sides of the Question.” Samuel Adams and Pemberton reluctantly accepted his explanation and asked him to keep the invitation a secret.27

  If Adams was at all accurate in his assessment of public opinion in 1772—that many Bostonians felt as Quincy’s father had, that the defense of the soldiers was unpatriotic and outrageous—then his belief, which he expressed in his diary on the occasion of the March 5, 1773, oration, that his defense of the soldiers was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country” may have considerable merit after all.28

  • • •

  IN 1772 THE BRITISH CROWN ATTEMPTED to add the superior court judges of Massachusetts to the royal civil list, which would mean that the judges’ salaries would be paid by the Crown out of customs revenues rather than by the General Court, the province’s legislature. This threatened to deprive the colonists of a traditional popular check on the judiciary. At a meeting in December 1772, the town of Cambridge condemned the idea of the Crown’s paying the salaries of the judges as a violation of the colonists’ ancient liberties.

  At that meeting William Brattle, a wealthy landowner, military officer, and a member of the Council (the upper house of the General Court), defended the Crown’s paying of the judges’ salaries; and he challenged all patriots, including John Adams “by name,” to debate him on the subject in the newspapers. Brattle contended that the judges in the province held their office with the same life tenure as judges in the mother country—that is, during good behavior, and not at the pleasure of the Crown. Thus the Crown’s assumption of their salaries, said Brattle, did not threaten the judges’ independence. Brattle argued that Parliament’s Act of Settlement of 1701 had not created a new condition of judicial tenure but only reaffirmed the previously existing common law that granted life tenure in judicial offices.

  Adams took up Brattle’s challenge and with his usual profusion of citations and quotations from English history and law in seven weekly essays in the Boston Gazette overwhelmed the “absurdities” of Brattle’s “vain and frothy Harrangues and Scribblings.” Adams argued that prior to the Act of Settlement all English judges had not been independent but had served at the pleasure of the Crown. The Act of Settlement, he said, did not reaffirm old law, as Brattle claimed, but had created new law that unfortunately had not been extended to the colonies. This meant that the judges in Massachusetts, like the judges in the other colonies, remained totally dependent on the Crown.

  Adams believed that his essays “contributed to spread correct Opinions concerning the Importance of the Independence of the Judges to Liberty and Safety.” These opinions in turn, he claimed in his autobiography, influenced the strong affirmation of an independent judiciary in the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 and the federal Constitution of 1787. These principles prevailed almost everywhere in the nation, he wrote in his autobiography during the first decade of the nineteenth century, “till the Administration of Mr. Jefferson, during which they have been infringed and are now in danger of being lost.”29

  • • •

  THE CONTROVERSY OVER the independence of the judiciary was only one of the many issues that were rapidly eroding the colonists’ relationship with the mother country. Following the rioting by mobs and the development of nonimportation agreements by the colonists in the wake of the Stamp Act, the British Parliament in 1766 had repealed the act. Changing its mind so suddenly was so embarrassing that Parliament had to cover itself by accompanying the repeal with the passage of the Declaratory Act, which asserted Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” This was a robust assertion of parliamentary sovereignty, which was the most important concept of political science in eighteenth-century British culture.

  This doctrine of sovereignty, articulated most forcefully by the great English jurist William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), held that there must be in every state “a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, in which the jura summi imperii, or the rights of sovereignty reside.”30 For the British, this sovereignty lay with the king-in-Parliament, since not only were all the estates of the realm—Crown, lords, and people—present in the Parliament, but the logic of the doctrine dictated that sovereignty or final authority had to be located in some institution in every state. Otherwise, there would be what was commonly called an imperium in imperio, a power within a power—a logical contradiction.

  Although some British leaders, like William Pitt, did not accept the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, most did. Indeed, sovereignty became the central issue in the debate between the colonists and the British over the nature of the empire. In the end it was the colonists’ inability to overcome the British insistence on the sovereignty of Parliament—that the colonists had to be totally under Parliament’s authority or totally outside it�
�that ultimately drove them into their wholesale rethinking of the nature of the empire. Both Adams and Jefferson made major intellectual contributions to that rethinking.

  The colonists had begun the imperial debate in 1765 by trying to explain their previous experience in the empire. They knew that since the late seventeenth century they had accepted parliamentary regulation of their trade. Controlling the flow of commerce was one thing; taking people’s property through taxation was quite another. The Stamp Act of 1765 levied taxes on nearly all paper products in the colonies, and it aroused instant opposition. Americans knew instinctively that they could never accept Parliament’s right to tax them and said so emphatically in the resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress, which met in New York in October 1765. At the same time, however, the Stamp Act Congress declared that the colonists owed Parliament all “due subordination”—presumably in matters of the Navigation Acts and the regulation of imperial trade.

  Mistakenly believing that the Americans had rejected an “internal” tax such as the stamp tax, but would accept “external” taxes such as duties on imports, British officials led by Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend in 1767 tried imposing levies on glass, paper, paint, and tea imported into the colonies. But the colonists no more accepted these Townshend duties than they had the Stamp Act, and they exploded once more in opposition with riots and nonimportation agreements.