His Virginia colleagues must have been stunned by Jefferson’s extraordinary enthusiasm for reform and the ambitious nature of his vision. His desire to transform the aristocracy of which he was a prime and wealthy member must have been challenging and bewildering to many of his fellow legislators. A few conservatives like Carter Braxton dismissed Jefferson as one of those “Men said to possess unbounded knowledge” who were full of “Chimerical . . . Schemes and Ideas” that tended to “injure more than they benefit mankind.”65
Others, however, like the respected senior legislator Edmund Pendleton, took the proposals of the thirty-three-year-old Jefferson seriously, but tempered some of their impracticalities with doses of realism. Nevertheless, throughout all the debates and discussions, Jefferson kept the friendship and above all the respect of nearly all of his colleagues. He knew so much and had read so widely and was so intelligent and always amiable that they scarcely knew how to resist him. Besides, they realized that he was expressing the most liberal and enlightened thinking of the Western world, and they could not help wanting to be part of that Enlightenment.
It was an extraordinary moment in Virginia’s history. These Virginia slaveholding planters knew—John Adams told them so in June 1776—that the Revolution was placing all traditional aristocracies under assault. All “the Dons, the Bashaws, the Grandees, the Patricians, the Sachems, the Nabobs, call them by what Name you please,” said Adams in a letter that month to Patrick Henry, “sigh, and groan, and fret, and Sometimes Stamp, and foam, and curse—but all in vain.” A more equal liberty was spreading throughout America, and, Adams told Henry, “that Exuberance of Pride, which has produced an insolent Dominion, in a few, a very few oppulent, monopolizing Families, will be brought down nearer to the Confines of Reason and Moderation, than they have been used.”66
Even though they might have read Adams’s letter to Henry or at least knew of its predictions, few of the dons, nabobs, and grandees of Virginia saw themselves threatened by the Revolution. Despite being heavily in debt, despite uneasiness over signs of corruption in their society, despite some apprehension over possible slave revolts, the slaveholding planters of Virginia remained remarkably sure of their position in society. Adams himself was surprised by the planters’ eagerness to engage in the Revolution. But they had not just engaged in the Revolution; the Virginia aristocrats had in their own eyes taken the lead in breaking from Great Britain. Few aristocracies in history have ever undertaken a revolution with more confidence and enthusiasm than these southern aristocratic planters. And Jefferson was the most confident and enthusiastic of all.
• • •
ADAMS WAS AS MUCH AWARE as Jefferson of the spirit of enlightenment spreading throughout the Atlantic world, and like Jefferson, he expressed some longing to leave Philadelphia and get back home. But unlike Jefferson, he actually relished his participation in continental affairs, and was very eager to keep his seat in Congress. He was far more deeply involved in the business of the Congress than Jefferson. He was the chair of the Board of War, essentially in charge of the war, and was a member of the commission that met with British admiral Lord Richard Howe in August 1776 to discuss the possibility of peace. Adams missed his family, no doubt, but he returned to Massachusetts in October mainly because he hoped to persuade the state legislature to increase his salary so he could bring Abigail and his family back to Philadelphia.
Unlike Jefferson, he had no interest in hurrying home in order to overhaul the society of his state. Of course, he realized only too keenly that the societies of New England already had many of the things that Jefferson desired for Virginia. In fact, Adams had written his Thoughts on Government with the hope that it might help to convert the aristocratic South to New England’s ways. He knew he lived in a very different society from that of Virginia. By Virginia’s standards, slavery scarcely existed in New England, and by 1776 it was already rapidly being eliminated. Massachusetts had possessed a public school system since the seventeenth century and was tackling its system of criminal punishment more effectively than the states of the South. Moreover, New England already had a broad suffrage and annual elections and possessed no social rank that resembled the great slave-owning planters of Virginia. In fact, Adams thought that the biggest problem that Massachusetts society faced in 1776 was not to be reformed by expanding the power of the people, but rather to control and restrain the already existing power of the people—popular power that was being dangerously aroused by the turmoil of the Revolution.
Hence, unlike Jefferson, who was so eager to get moving on reform, Adams advised patience. He told his Massachusetts colleagues to move “slowly and deliberately” in creating their government. He had no interest in reforming a society that needed no reform. Beware of “dangerous Innovations,” he warned, especially since “the Spirit of Levelling” was abroad. He worried about “Duplicity” and “Hypocrisy” and the many reports that all kinds of wild proposals were flying about the province. “Are not these ridiculous Projects, prompted by disaffected Persons, in order to divide, dissipate, and distract, the Attention of the People, at a Time, when every thought Should be employed, and every Sinew exerted, for the Defence of the Country.”67 Reforming society was just not in his nature. Although he hated slavery and never owned any slaves, he hoped that a bill in the Massachusetts legislature in 1777 abolishing slavery would be allowed to “sleep for a Time. We have Causes enough of Jealousy Discord and Division, and this bill will certainly add to the Number.”68
In Adams’s eyes, the great danger of the Revolution was social disorder—something Jefferson never feared, at least not in 1776. “There must be a Decency, and Respect, and Veneration introduced for Persons in Authority, of every Rank, or We are undone,” Adams told his friend James Warren in April of that year. “In a popular Government, this is the only Way of Supporting order.”69 Especially alarming were the numbers of new men taking advantage of the war to make money and to establish themselves as mushroom aristocrats. “When the pot boils the scum will rise,” James Otis had warned at the outset. Primed as Adams was to think the worst of human nature, he was quick to appreciate how rapidly the scum was rising. By 1777 Adams feared “the Rage of Speculation and Flames of Passion” that were spreading throughout Massachusetts. “Our State,” he lamented, “abounds with ambitious Men, in such Numbers, and with avaritious ones, who are still worse, and with others whom both Passions unite, in a great degree, who are the most dangerous of all,” that he despaired of Massachusetts achieving any order and stability.70
Adams became especially troubled by suggestions that the qualifications for voting might be reformed. Don’t touch the issue, he warned James Sullivan, a lawyer recently appointed to the Massachusetts superior court. “There will be no End of it,” he predicted. “New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights are not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State. It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell.”71 He had none of the confidence that Jefferson expressed in his proposals for expanding the suffrage.
Of course, Jefferson, who was married to a conventional southern belle, could scarcely have imagined extending the franchise to women. He thought women were “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics.” Instead, “they are contented to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning from political debate.” Women had “the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other, and the art to cultivate it beyond all others.” As late as 1813, he believed that the participation of women in politics was “an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.” Adams, married to Abigail, could never be so sanguine.72
Abigail was a woman of such wit, passion, and volubility—expressing her views about everything from education to forms of government—that she was bound to think about women participating in politics. In her
now famous letter to John written on March 31, 1776, Abigail suggested to her husband, who she knew was busy in Philadelphia thinking about creating new governments, not to overlook the role of women.
Remember the Ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.73
As biting as the passage is, it doesn’t have quite the significance that many recently have attributed to it. John certainly did not take it seriously. “I cannot but laugh” at her ideas, he said in response. And he went on in the same amusing and saucy tone Abigail had used, telling her that men knew better than to repeal their “Masculine systems.” Although those systems were “in full Force, you know,” he said, “they are little more than Theory.” Men were actually “the subjects. . . . We have only the Name of Masters,” and giving that title up “would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat.”74
John’s response clearly reveals the joking nature of their relationship. Abigail was not a modern feminist and she never became one. She was clever and witty and, proud of her sauciness, loved to tease and banter with her husband, which is what she was doing in this famous letter, to which John responded in a similar manner. Abigail kidded her husband about many things, including his being a big-shot delegate at the Continental Congress. At one point she suggested that their Braintree cows, suffering from drought, ought to petition the Congress, setting forth their grievances and their deprivations of ancient privileges that ought to be restored to them. She even joked with him about lawyers. Her “Remember the Ladies” letter was another example of her teasing. In her statement, Abigail was not expecting to fundamentally transform the role of women in her society.
Teasing, of course, can often make a serious point, and in her bantering remarks, Abigail was certainly expressing a self-conscious awareness of the legally dependent and inferior position of women—a provocative awareness that she never lost. In 1782 she noted once again the things women were denied. They were “excluded from honours and from offices” of government; “deprived of a voice in Legislation,” they were “obliged to submit to those Laws which are imposed upon us.” “Even in the freest countrys our property is subject to the control and disposal of our partners, to whom the Laws have given a sovereign Authority.” Despite these sorts of complaints, however, Abigail did not seriously question the place of women in her society. She in fact listed the deprivations women suffered from simply to show how virtuous and patriotic women were.75
Although she did want women to be as well educated as men (itself a bold proposal), she was generally content merely with her domestic role as wife and mother. What she most disliked was having to act as the sole head of the household in John’s absence, which she regarded as an unnatural sacrifice for the patriotic cause. Still, she always considered “it as an indispensable requisite that every American wife should herself know how to order and regulate her family; how to govern her domestics, and train up her children.”76
Although Abigail became proud of her success as a manager of the family farm and the family finances, she wanted nothing more than to have her husband back so she could resume what she thought of as her rightful role as wife and mother. To conceive of Abigail as somehow yearning to be like her husband is not only anachronistic, it also trivializes and demeans her domestic character—as if the male model of political activity is the only standard of worth.77 At the same time she certainly felt the equal of men, telling her sister in 1799 that she would “never consent to have our sex considered in an inferiour point of light.” She admitted that God and nature designed men and women to move in different orbits, but that didn’t make them unequal: “If man is Lord, woman is Lordess.” Although she accepted the fact that women did not hold the reins of government, she saw no reason that women could not judge how those governments were conducted.78
It is not surprising that John, knowing Abigail’s feelings and having read her saucy letter about women voting, should have warned Sullivan not to contemplate changing the suffrage.
FIVE
MISSIONS ABROAD
ADAMS HAD LEFT the Continental Congress and arrived back home in Braintree in November 1776. He remained home only about nine weeks until, in January 1777, he left once again and returned to the Congress. In the meantime, the Congress in Philadelphia had been threatened by the British army and had temporarily relocated to Baltimore. Despite having suggested that he did not want to be separated any longer from his family, Adams returned to the Congress without them. Unlike Jefferson, whose heart and mind remained in Virginia, Adams realized that he needed to be in the Congress in order to fulfill his deepest ambitions. There was where he had accomplished the most; there was where he had acquired the respect of his countrymen; there was where he became something more than a provincial lawyer riding circuit in small-town courts.
Once back in Congress, Adams threw himself into its business. Once again he served on two dozen committees, chairing eight of them, with heading the Board of War taking most of his time. Perhaps out of guilt over having abandoned Abigail so quickly, his letters to her became more frequent. Perhaps too he had become more self-conscious of the Revolution as a historic event. Since, as he told his son John Quincy, he would be one of the “considerable Characters” in any history of the Revolution, his letters became all the more important.1 But in his letters home he seemed to quickly forget that he was writing for posterity, for he continually filled them with complaints of the burdens of his service and the degree to which it was harming his health. Even the weather was often too much for him. “In the Midst of infinite Noise, Hurry, and Bustle,” went one of his typical grumbles, “I lead a lonely melancholly Life, mourning the Loss of all the Charms of Life, which are my family, and all the Amusement that I ever had in Life, which is my farm.”2 As he was wont to do, he even raised the likelihood of his dying on behalf of the patriot cause. How often, he told Abigail, had he imagined her “a Widow and her Charming Prattlers Orphans, exposed to all the Insolence of unfeeling impious Tyrants!” Although he said the possibility of his death hadn’t weakened his resolve, his melodramatic recounting of that possibility reduced Abigail to tears.3
In one of his complaints to Abigail in which he expressed once more his longings for home, and “for rural and domestic scenes, for the warbling of Birds and the Prattle of my Children,” he abruptly stopped, and wrote, “Dont you think I am somewhat poetical this morning”—the kind of joking with “his dearest Friend” that helped make bearable all his moaning and groaning.4
In that same letter Adams went on to deny all political ambition. “I should prefer the Delights of a Garden to the Dominion of the World. I have nothing of Caesars Greatness in my soul. Power has not my Wishes in her Train. . . . Of that Ambition which has Power for its Object, I dont believe I have a Spark in my Heart.” Later on, when rereading this letter, he inserted at this point, “But is not the Heart deceitfull above all Things?” It is this kind of occasional self-awareness that helps redeem Adams’s egotism and self-pity.5
Finally, in November 1777 Adams obtained leave from Congress, and he returned to Braintree to resume his law practice. He told Abigail that he would not go back to Congress. But when Congress asked him to go to France as one of the commissioners to negotiate a treaty of alliance, he was surprised but excited. Abigail was full of anger and anguish. She said that if John must accept the appointment he should take his family with him. He convinced her that it was too dangerous in wartime for her to cross the Atlantic. But wanting some company, Adams took John Quincy, his ten-year-old son. They set sail on the Boston on February 15, 1778, and after a somewhat harrowing voyage they arrived in Europe six weeks later.
• • •
IN THE MEANTIME JEFFERSON remained in Virginia serving in the state legislature. Not only was he busy revising the state’s laws and looking after the militia and local justice in his county, he was also preoccupied with the building and landscaping of Monticello. Although the war seemed far away, correspondents kept him informed of its progress. In May 1777 he wrote his first letter to Adams, who was still in the Congress. Jefferson was worried about the difficulties of maintaining the union of the states. Adams replied warmly, urging him to “come and help us. . . . Your Country is not yet, quite secure enough, to excuse your Retreat to the Delights of domestic Life.”6
Adams did not intend this as a rebuke, and Jefferson did not take it as one. But Jefferson was not going to the Congress. Virginia was his “country” and that was where he wanted to be. Still, others, including Washington, found Jefferson’s unwillingness to go to the Congress puzzling, because good men were needed there. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina even joked that he hoped Jefferson would soon condescend “to come from above and interest yourself in Human Affairs.”7
All through the trying years of the war in 1777–1778, Jefferson remained optimistic that Britain could never conquer America. Thus he felt free “to indulge my fondness for philosophical studies,” taking weather readings and viewing an eclipse of the sun.8 In writing to David Rittenhouse, the ingenious Philadelphia inventor and scientist, he saw himself as one philosopher speaking to another. Since he had heard that Rittenhouse was deeply involved in “the civic government of your country”—that is, Pennsylvania—he suggested that he was wasting his talents. Some people were obliged to engage in public affairs, he said, but “there is an order of geniuses above that obligation, and therefore exempted from it. No body can conceive that nature ever intended to throw away a Newton upon the occupation of a Crown.” So he hoped he would be excused “the hazarding these free thoughts” in advising Rittenhouse to get back to science and let other men “do the commonplace drudgery of governing a single state.” In fact, governing was “work which may be executed by men of an ordinary stature, such as are always and every where to be found.”9 So much for Adams’s “divine Science of Politics.”
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