Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  If anyone in the colony still had doubts of Adams’s incredible mastery of English law and history, this dredging up of the process of impeachment put them to rest. Adams was no longer just the consigliere of the patriot cause in Massachusetts; he had become one of the most important leaders and Whig spokesmen in the colony.

  Thus there was little question that he would be selected in June 1774 as one of the colony’s four delegates to attend the Continental Congress. In his diary Adams described the Congress as “an assembly of the wisest Men upon the Continent, who are Americans in Principle, i.e. against the Taxation of Americans, by Authority of Parliament.” Yet at the same time he wondered whether these men were “fit for the Times.”50

  The Congress met in Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia from September 5 to October 26, 1774. If Jefferson had been able to attend the Virginia convention that selected delegates to the Congress, he might have joined Adams. Even without the presence of Jefferson, Adams was impressed with the delegates from Virginia. “These Gentlemen from Virginia,” he wrote in his diary, “appear to be the most spirited and consistent of any.”51

  Adams had never been outside of New England, and initially he was overawed by the task that lay ahead. He doubted his ability to adequately represent his colony of Massachusetts in what he called, in one of his typical flashes of learning, “the Court of Ariopagus, the Council of the Amphyctions, a Conclave, a Sanhedrim.” He felt his “own insufficiency for this important Business” of being “an American Senator.” He was, he confessed, “ignorant of the Characters which compose the Court of Great Britain, as well as of the People who compose the Nation.” He didn’t have “that Knowledge of the Commerce of the several Colonies, nor even of my own Province which may be necessary.” He knew the risks in defying monarchy. “Hampden died in the Field. Sidney on the Scaffold, Harrington in Goal, &c.” Engaging in high politics was dangerous, “yet someone must.” Beneath all the doubts and fears, however, Adams was exhilarated at the prospect of his participating in what he called “a Nursery of American Statesmen.” He was fulfilling his greatest ambitions.52

  At first, he was overwhelmed by the “quick and constant Succession of new Scenes, Characters, Persons, and Events.”53 In Congress, he told his former law student William Tudor, were “Fortunes, Abilities, Learning, Eloquence, Acuteness equal to any I have met with [in] my Life.”54 But as he got to know his fellow delegates better and took their measure, his confidence rose. They turned out to be less impressive than he had imagined. In his diary he sketched unforgettable vignettes of some of his congressional colleagues that helped to bring them down to earth.

  James Duane of New York had “a sly, surveying Eye, a little squint Eyed . . . very sensible, I think, and very artfull.” Caesar Rodney of Delaware was “the oddest looking Man in the World. He is tall—thin and slender as a Reed—pale—his Face is not bigger than a large Apple. Yet there is Sense and Fire, Spirit, Wit and Humor in his Countenance.” Edward Rutledge of South Carolina soon got on Adams’s nerves. “He has the most indistinct, inarticulate Way of speaking. Speaks through his nose—a wretched Speaker in Conversation.” He was “a perfect Bob-o-Lincoln—a Swallow—a Sparrow—a Peacock—excessively vain, excessively weak, and excessively variable and unsteady—jejune, inane, and puerile.”55

  • • •

  JEFFERSON WAS A GRACEFUL WRITER, but he never described people the way Adams did. No other Founder, indeed, no other eighteenth-century American, could paint in prose such colorful and pungent pictures of individuals as Adams. Take, for example, his description in his diary of his Braintree minister:

  P[arson] W[ibird] is crooked, his Head bends forwards, his shoulders are round and his Body is writhed, and bended, his head and half his Body, have a list one Way, the other half declines the other Way, and his lower Parts from his Middle, incline another Way. . . . His Nose is a large Roman nose with a Prodigious Bunch Protuberance upon the Upper Part of it. His mouth is large and irregular, his teeth black and foul and craggy. . . . His Eyes are a little squinted, his Visage is long and lank, his Complexion wan, his Cheeks are fallen, his Chin is long, large, and lean. . . . When he prays at home, he raises one Knee upon the Chair, and throws one Hand over the back of it. With the other he scratches his Neck, pulls the Hair of his Wigg, strokes his Beard, rubs his Eyes, and Lips. . . . When he Walks, he heaves away, and swaggs on one side, and steps almost twice as far with one foot, as the other. When he sits, he sometimes lolls on the arms of his Chair, sometimes on the Table. . . . When he speakes, he cocks and rolls his Eyes, shakes his Head and jerks his Body about.56

  Henry Fielding could not have done better. But when Adams tried to write seriously about history and politics, all his pungency and color disappeared, and his prose became ponderous and leaden. Unlike Jefferson, whose sensibility was predominantly intellectual, Adams’s was largely visual.

  • • •

  ADAMS AND THE REST of the Massachusetts delegation at the Congress soon realized that many of the other delegates suspected them of having independence in mind. At this point, no one dared openly voice a desire for independence, but Adams was certainly thinking about it. He knew, however, that the other colonies were still hoping for reconciliation with the British, and therefore he and his Massachusetts colleagues would have to act “with great Delicacy and Caution.”57

  The task before the Congress, as he saw it, was to explain previous American experience in the empire and at the same time deal with the problem of parliamentary sovereignty. Parliament had been passing Navigation Acts regulating colonial trade for over a century. Could the colonies allow that to continue without conceding the authority of the Declaratory Act of 1766, which had asserted Parliament’s right to legislate over the colonies “in all cases whatsoever”? Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina claimed that to acknowledge Parliament’s power to regulate the trade of the colonies was to accept “a Right of Legislation, and a Right of Legislation in one Case, is a Right to all.” Adams denied that this was true, but the issue was awkward. In the end the best the Congress could do (with Adams writing the draft) was “cheerfully consent” to Parliament’s regulation of America’s external commerce “from the necessity of the case and a regard to the mutual interest of both countries.”58

  Although Adams worked hard during this First Continental Congress, attending sessions from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon every day but Sunday, he and the other delegates spent a good deal of time dining and entertaining. Adams, alive and sensitive as he was to the world around him, soaked up as much of Philadelphia as he could. He was especially impressed by the number of different churches in the city, and each Sunday he went to two or three services in order to experience nearly all of them: Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Quaker, German Moravian, and Roman Catholic. He had never been in a Catholic cathedral before, and that experience, as he reported to Abigail, revealed not only his extraordinary sensuousness but also his religious sensibility.

  The poor Wretches, fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a Word of which they understood; their Pater Nosters and Ave Maria’s. Their holy Water; their crossing themselves perpetually; . . . their bowings and kneelings and genuflections before the altar. The dress of the priest was rich with lace. His pulpit was velvet and gold. The altarpiece was very rich; little images and crucifixes about; wax candles lighted up. But how shall I describe the picture of our Saviour in a frame of marble over the altar, at full length, upon the cross in the agonies, and blood dripping and streaming from his wounds! The music, consisting of an organ and choir of singers, went all the afternoon except sermon time. And the assembly chanted most sweetly and exquisitely.

  Despite his Puritan heritage and his strong anti-Catholic prejudice, which was common to all eighteenth-century Englishmen, he could not help being impressed by his experience. “Here,” he told Abigail, “is every Thing which can lay hold of the Eye, Ear, and Imagination. Every Thing which c
an charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.”59 One cannot imagine Jefferson having such a response to a Catholic Mass.

  • • •

  BY THE TIME THE CONGRESS ended its session in late October 1774, Adams had come to realize that he was the equal of any of the delegates. Most of them, he complained, were caught up in “nibbling and quibbling.” He told his diary that “these great Witts, these subtle Criticks, these refined Genius’s, these learned Lawyers, these wise Statesmen, are so fond of shewing their Parts and Powers, as to make their Consultations very tedious.”60

  After Adams returned to Massachusetts from Philadelphia, he confronted an imposing series of pseudonymous newspaper pieces by “Massachusettensis” defending the British actions. Although Adams thought the author was his old college friend Jonathan Sewall, Massachusettensis was actually another friend, Daniel Leonard, who had recently joined the colony’s administration. Leonard offered a lucid defense of the existing relationship between the colonies and the mother country and warned of the dangers of too much popular power. Alarmed by the attention the Massachusettensis articles were getting, Adams in January 1775 began a response under the pseudonym of “Novanglus.”

  The patriots tended to adopt the English party name of Whigs to set themselves in opposition to those they labeled Tories, who were the traditional defenders of the Crown. Because there were very few Tories in Virginia compared with their numbers in Massachusetts, Jefferson, even if he had been so inclined, never had the same need that Adams and other Whigs in Massachusetts had to confront serious arguments by Loyalist native sons. For Jefferson his enemies were always three thousand miles away; for Adams they were his former friends and neighbors.

  Adams began his Novanglus papers intending to “shew the wicked policy of the Tories—trace their plan from its rude sketches to its present compleat draught. Shew that it has been much longer in contemplation, than is generally known—who were the first in it—their views, motives and secret springs of action—and the means they have employed.” He immediately quoted Massachusettensis’s charges that the Whigs had been reminding “the people of the elevated rank they hold in the universe as men; that all men are by nature equal; that kings are but the ministers of the people; that their authority is delegated to them by the people for their good, and they have a right to resume it and place it in other hands, or keep it themselves, whenever it is made use of to oppress them.” These charges only showed how out of touch Massachusettensis was with the colony’s opinion. If this Tory polemicist thought that making such Whig views explicit would prove embarrassing to the Whigs, said Adams, he was sadly mistaken.61

  For Adams, these Tory charges of excessive popular power were not at all awkward or disconcerting; he took all the popular power for granted as right and just. These descriptions of the people’s authority, he said, were “what are called revolution principles,” the principles of every major thinker in Western history, of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, of Algernon Sidney, James Harrington, and John Locke. They were “the principles of nature and eternal reason—the principles on which the whole government over us now stands.”62 If the Whigs of Massachusetts were indeed to take these “revolution principles” to heart as completely as Adams suggested, then it was just a matter of time before an actual revolution broke out.

  Adams eventually published twelve essays in response to Leonard’s seventeen. Unlike Jefferson, Adams seemed to enjoy the give-and-take of these sorts of newspaper exchanges. But the bloated prose of his Novanglus essays was nothing like the clear and succinct writing of Jefferson’s Summary View. Adams sought to overwhelm his readers with his many references to arcane legal authorities and historical sources, and thus his essays had little of the persuasive power of Jefferson’s lean and lithe pamphlet.

  At this point Adams was a very good Whig who overflowed with confidence in the people. When Leonard, like other Tories, raised the possibility that the democracy expressed in all the proliferating popular meetings and conventions might become despotic, Adams dismissed the notion out of hand. The idea that the people might tyrannize themselves was illogical. “A democratical despotism,” he said, “is a contradiction in terms.”63 This was a popular position that Adams, but not Jefferson, eventually came to disavow.

  • • •

  BY 1775 NEARLY ALL the debates over the nature of the empire sooner or later had to end up focusing on the problem of sovereignty. When Leonard writing as Massachusettensis followed the earlier arguments of Knox and Hutchinson and declared that “two supreme or independent authorities cannot exist in the same state,” since that would result in “what is called imperium in imperio, the height of political absurdity,” Adams could only agree. Obviously, he said, two supreme authorities could not exist in the same state, “any more than two supream beings in one universe.” Therefore it was clear, he said, “that our provincial legislatures are the only supream authorities in our colonies.”64

  Like the other patriot polemicists, Adams eventually had given up trying to divide the indivisible and separate the inseparable and inevitably had surrendered to the logic of sovereignty—that there had to be only one supreme and indivisible power in each state. Adams and the other patriots finally accepted the idea of sovereignty, but placed it not in Parliament but in their provincial legislatures. The empire, Adams concluded in a common patriot reckoning, could be held together only by the connection that each of these thirteen legislatures had to the king.

  And that connection, he later recalled, was solely through the seventeenth-century charter, which was “more like a treaty between Independent Sovereigns than like a Charter or grant of privileges, from a Sovereign to his subjects.” In other words, Adams came to believe that the colony had been independent of the “English Church & State” from the very beginning in the seventeenth century. Thus the real authors of independence were “the first Emigrants.” Adams and Jefferson and all the other patriotic polemicists of the 1760s and ’70s “were only Awakeners & Revivers of the original fundamental principle of Colonization.”65

  By the spring of 1775 and the outbreak of fighting at Lexington and Concord, Adams surely saw that breaking that remaining connection to the British monarchy was just a matter of time, but he was reluctant to say so in print. For his part, Jefferson with his extraordinarily bold and radical pamphlet, Summary View, had already so severely shredded that tie to George III that it wouldn’t take much to break it completely.

  FOUR

  INDEPENDENCE

  IN THE AFTERMATH OF Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress convened on May 10, 1775. By this time royal government in several colonies had collapsed and the distant king in England was unresponsive to the Congress’s petition asking for a redress of the colonists’ grievances. Without any central authority to hold the colonies together, the Congress necessarily had to become a replacement for the far-off Crown. Which is why it assumed an authority far beyond what the colonists had conceded to Parliament. As a substitute for the Crown, it began doing all the things that the king had done in the colonies, from regulating Indian affairs to borrowing money and directing the army. The confusion and workload of government often overwhelmed the several dozen delegates from the colonies who made up the Congress. Because it was the entire central government for the colonies, blending legislative, executive, and judicial functions, the members of Congress ended up deciding not only major issues of policy but also the most mundane matters of administration, including whether to pay the bill submitted by a doorkeeper for his services. With only a handful of clerks to help the delegates, it is amazing that anything got done.

  Adams was much busier in this Congress than he had been in the First Continental Congress. With actual fighting having broken out, the stakes were higher and the delegates took their responsibilities much more seriously than they had earlier, entertaining and feasting much less than they had in the fall of 1774
. The congressional sessions were longer and the delegates were working harder, with Adams working the hardest of all. He was soon serving on two dozen committees and chairing many of them. “Such a vast Multitude of Objects, civil, political, commercial and military, press and crowd upon Us so fast,” he told his friend James Warren after several weeks of meetings, “that We know not what to do first.”1

  From Monday through Saturday Adams met in committees from seven to ten o’clock in the morning; then he participated in the debates in the full Congress from ten o’clock until the late afternoon, when the delegates broke for dinner. After dinner there were more committee meetings that went on from six until ten at night. For fear of British agents and spies, everything had to be done in secrecy, which added to the strain. Since each colony had only one vote, some delegates could take time off. Adams was not one of them.

  At first Jefferson was not one of Virginia’s seven delegates. But when Peyton Randolph had to return from Philadelphia, the thirty-two-year-old Jefferson was belatedly selected to be one of the colony’s congressional representatives. Wealthier than many of the delegates, Jefferson spared no expense in traveling to Philadelphia, arriving with four horses. He took up luxurious quarters that were separated from the other delegates. By the time he arrived, the Congress had been in session for six weeks.

  Unlike Adams, who seemed constantly on his feet, Jefferson remained silent in the public sessions. Adams later recalled that the whole time he sat with Jefferson in the Congress, “I never heard him utter three Sentences together.” Jefferson was, however, very effective in committees and small groups, Adams recalled. He came to the Congress with “a reputation for literature, science, and a happy talent at composition”; indeed, the delegates passed Jefferson’s writings about and praised their “peculiar felicity of expression.”2