Friends Divided
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In 1776 the Congress, with Adams writing the draft, had drawn up a model treaty that would avoid the traditional kinds of political and military commitments and concentrate instead exclusively on commercial connections with other nations. Such a treaty promised the greatest amount of commercial freedom and equality among nations, which, if widely achieved, would eliminate the tensions and conflict of world politics. Absolute reciprocity in trade was the guiding principle of the model treaty. In duties and trade restrictions, foreign merchants would be treated as one’s own nationals were treated. Even in wartime, trade was to be kept flowing. Neutral nations would have the right to trade with and carry the goods of the belligerent nations—the right expressed in the phrase “free ships make free goods.”
The model treaty also provided that “the most Christian King,” Louis XVI, would promise never to invade nor attempt to possess any portions of North America, which were to be exclusively possessed by the United States. At the same time as the treaty claimed America’s right to all potential conquests in North America, it asserted that if this treaty with France resulted in Britain declaring war on France, the United States promised only to refrain from assisting Britain in such a war. This audacity of innocence did not last long.
Although the United States in 1778 was unable to avoid signing a conventional military treaty with France, the dream of tying nations together solely through commercial connections remained alive. The members of the commission, or at least Jefferson and Franklin, continued to hope that they might realize “an object so valuable to mankind as the total emancipation of commerce and the bringing together all nations for a free intercommunication of happiness.”61
But, as Adams had anticipated, the world wasn’t ready for such enlightened ideas. “No Facts are believed, but defensive military Conquests,” he told Franklin in 1780; “no Arguments are seriously attended to in Europe but Force.”62 But Jefferson the enlightened dreamer hadn’t given up. In 1785 he asked Adams what he thought of his draft of a model treaty to be presented to the courts of England and France. He admitted that the treaty went “beyond our powers; and beyond the powers of Congress too,” but unfortunately it also went beyond the powers of possibility. It was truly radical. It not only proposed the free flow of commerce between the two signatory nations but also provided that “the intercourse between all the subjects and citizens of the two parties shall be free and unrestrained.” While traveling in each other’s territory, the peoples of each nation would be “considered to every intent and purpose as members of the nation where they are, entitled to all the protections, rights and advantages” of the natives of the other nation, but without any requirement for religious conformity. The signatory nations might confine their public offices to natives. Otherwise, this treaty that placed natives and aliens on an equal footing promised a mutuality of citizenship among nations. It was the fulfillment of an enlightened vision of a world that would exist virtually without borders.63
Adams politely told Jefferson that his model treaty was a fine idealistic effort, but unfortunately it was not appropriate to the realities of European politics. “We must not, my Friend, be the Bubbles of our own Liberal Sentiments. If we cannot obtain reciprocal Liberality, We must adopt reciprocal Prohibitions, Exclusions, Monopolies, and Imposts. Our offers have been fair, more than fair. If they are rejected, we must not be Dupes.” By 1787 Adams had become convinced, as he told Jefferson, “that neither Philosophy, nor Religion, nor Morality, nor Wisdom, nor Interest, will ever govern nations or Parties, against their Vanity, their Pride, their Resentments or Revenges, or their Avarice or Ambitions. Nothing but Force and Power and Strength can restrain them.” In ascribing personal passions to nations in this peculiar manner, Adams was merely expressing his deepening understanding of himself and his fellow human beings.64
In the end Adams’s realism turned out to be more accurate than Jefferson’s enlightened vision. Only three states—Sweden, Prussia, and Morocco, peripheral powers with little overseas trade—agreed to sign liberal commercial treaties with the United States, none of which involved more than most-favored-nation commercial relations. Most European states were indifferent to the Americans’ enlightened ideas of commerce, ignorant, said Jefferson, to the power of American commerce.
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THE COMMISSION’S FAILURES, however, were redeemed by the renewal of the friendship between Adams and Jefferson. Adams was delighted that his “old Friend” with whom he had labored at solving “many a knotty Problem” was joining him in Europe. Jefferson, he told James Warren, was someone “in whose Abilities and Steadiness I always found great Cause to confide.”65 But it was not just Jefferson who was joining him. Abigail and his daughter Nabby would be arriving in Europe at about the same time as Jefferson arrived with his daughter Patsy. This news made Adams “twenty Years younger” and “the happiest Man upon Earth.”66
The separation of John and Abigail over the previous decade had been extraordinary. During the ten years between August 1774 and August 1784, the couple had been together only about a quarter of the time. Between February 1778 and August 1784, they saw each other for just the fourteen weeks in 1779 that John returned to participate in the writing of the Massachusetts constitution. There were periods in Europe when John seemed to forget that he was married. No doubt his ambition to succeed as a great man was overriding his marital obligations. By contrast, Jefferson had turned down an appointment in Europe in 1777 because of his wife’s uncertain health, even though he had long yearned to get to Europe. By 1781 Adams’s letter writing to Abigail had declined considerably; during the first nine months of that year he sent only six letters to her. Abigail thought of herself as a widow and justifiably felt that she suffered from the separation more keenly than did her husband. She relieved her solitude by carrying on a flirtatious correspondence with James Lovell, a Massachusetts congressman. Finally she had had enough. If John wasn’t coming home, then she would go to him.67
Abigail’s presence in Europe helped to deepen the friendship of the two revolutionaries. She softened her husband’s cantankerous personality, captivated the polite and reserved Jefferson, and enlivened the conversations that took place at the Adams home in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil. Accustomed to southern belles who knew their familial place and never discussed politics, Jefferson had his eyes opened by Abigail. Not only did Adams’s wife fulfill her expected role as a household manager, being one of “the most attentive and honourable oeconomists” Jefferson had ever known, but she was also, and more remarkable, an intelligent, well-read, and politically knowledgeable person who had many opinions about the role and rights of women. Although Jefferson never accepted these opinions, he developed great affection and respect for Abigail; he described her to his friend Madison as “one of the most estimable characters on earth.” In his eyes, Abigail, who could converse on history and philosophy, was no ordinary woman. “When writing to you,” he said in one of his letters to her after the Adamses had gone to London, “I fancy myself at Auteuil, and chatter on till the last page of my paper awakens me from my reverie.”68
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JEFFERSON HAD MIXED FEELINGS about France. He was excited about being at long last at what he earlier had called “a polite court with literati of the first order.” He certainly took to French fashion in dress more readily than Adams. He admired the refinement, art, music, and wine of France, but he found the bulk of the population to be oppressed. “The truth of Voltaire’s observation, offers itself perpetually,” he said, “that every man here must be either the hammer or anvil.” But, as he told Mrs. Adams, he loved the French “people with all my heart.” He thought that “with a better religion and a better form of government . . . their condition and country would be most enviable.” Sensitive to Abigail’s feelings about women’s rights, Jefferson went on to point out that he had “used the term people and that this is a noun of the masculine as well as feminine gender.”69
As someone who always valued politeness, certainly much more than did John Adams—who thought “the polite life in Europe is such an insipid round of head-dressing and play” as to be “beneath the character of a rational being”—Jefferson was especially taken with the good-humored manners of the French aristocracy. He even wished his countrymen would adopt some French politeness. Without abandoning “too much of the sincerity of language,” perhaps his fellow Americans might try to “make all those little sacrifices of self which really render European manners amiable,” and thus relieve their “society from the disagreeable scenes to which rudeness often exposes it.” In France, he said, “it seems that a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness.”70
Since good republicans always extolled sincerity and condemned courtierlike dissembling and deceit, too much politeness could appear monarchical and antirepublican. Coupled with his total admiration for all the French arts—he had no words, he said, to express his enjoyment of them—Jefferson’s passion for French politeness could sometimes make him seem un-American. But ultimately “the empty bustle” of the French aristocracy, with its members “ever flying from the ennui” of their pointless lives, repulsed him; and he delighted in drawing contrasts between the worldly sophistication of Europe and the innocent simplicity of America. For the first time, he met individuals who were smarter and more knowledgeable than he, and that experience was bound to make him feel more American. He was no more at ease amid the libertine culture of the French nobility than the Adamses. The French aristocrats, Jefferson said, did not believe in conjugal love or domestic happiness; with all their lovers and mistresses they lived lives that offered only “moments of extasy amidst days and months of restlessness and torment.”71
Living in Europe, advised Jefferson, was in fact dangerous for a young American. “He acquires a fondness for European luxury and dissipation, and a contempt for the simplicity of his own country.” He becomes “fascinated with the privileges of the European aristocrats and sees with abhorrence the lovely equality which the poor enjoys with the rich in his own country.” A young American abroad becomes “a foreigner, unacquainted with practices of domestic oeconomy necessary to preserve him from ruin.” He is apt to be “led by the strongest of all the human passions into a spirit for female intrigue destructive of his own and others happiness, or a passion for whores destructive of his health.” In either case, he “learns to consider fidelity to the marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice and inconsistent with happiness.”72
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PRECISELY BECAUSE HE HIMSELF FELT these temptations and was so deeply drawn to the sophistication and the arts of Paris, Jefferson welcomed the company of the Adamses—in Jefferson’s eyes, a down-to-earth domestic American family if there ever was one. Abigail, who was only a year younger than Jefferson, made the recent widower feel at home. She doted on him and helped him recover from a serious illness he suffered during his first winter in Paris. She consoled him when he learned that he had lost to whooping cough the two-year-old daughter he had left behind in Virginia. She urged him to bring his middle daughter, Maria, called Polly, to France and unite his family.
In 1787 Abigail met the nine-year-old Polly and her fourteen-year-old mulatto maid, Sally Hemings, in London. The little girl, who did not recognize her father from a portrait that was shown her, spent three weeks with the Adamses, and Abigail and Polly grew very attached to each other, with Abigail telling Jefferson that she was “really loath to part with her.”73
Despite Abigail’s sense that Jefferson should have come himself to London to pick up his daughter instead of sending his maître d’hôtel, she nevertheless continued to believe that he was “one of the choice ones of the Earth.”74 During the time Jefferson and Adams were in Paris together, the two families frequently intermingled. On one occasion Jefferson took Nabby and John Quincy to a concert, and at another time the two families visited Patsy’s convent school together. Unlike the diplomatic guests whom the Adamses were obliged to invite to their home, Jefferson, said Abigail, was someone “who visits us in the Socially friendly way.”75 So close were the families that Adams later told Jefferson that he thought of John Quincy as “our John, because when you was at Cul de sac at Paris [the location of one of Jefferson’s residences], he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as mine.”76 Rarely had Adams had such an intimate and sociable friend. Indeed, Abigail told Jefferson that he was “the only person with whom my Companion could associate with perfect freedom, and unreserve.”77
Adams enjoyed Jefferson so much because Jefferson was always amiable, always a good listener, and, most important, always deferential to him. Adams tended to think of Jefferson as a much younger man than he was in fact—only seven and a half years separated them. Jefferson, he once said, was “but a boy to me.” Moreover, Adams had been abroad for most of the previous half-dozen years, and Jefferson naturally submitted to Adams’s greater experience. Certainly Adams took great pleasure in the respect Jefferson paid him and regarded himself as Jefferson’s “preceptor in politics.” Indeed, Adams in 1809 claimed that he had “taught him everything that has been good and solid in his whole political conduct.”78
Despite warnings from America that Jefferson was too idealistic and would “snuff up the incense of French adulation,” Adams believed that Congress could not have sent a better man. He had studied Jefferson’s character nine years earlier, and it was unaltered: “The Same industry, Integrity, and Talents remain without diminution.” Jefferson was a “wise and prudent Man” with an “unquenchable Thirst of Knowledge.” He was without “Party Passions or national prejudices, or any Partialities but for his own Country.” With Franklin ill and indisposed, the two remaining members of the commission “lived together” in what Adams later recalled as “the most perfect friendship and harmony.”79
Both Adams and Jefferson complained that the salaries paid them by the Congress were insufficient to maintain their households, especially if they wished to uphold the dignity of the United States. The Adamses tried desperately to avoid going into debt. Abigail told her sister Mary Cranch that “we spend no evenings abroad, make no suppers . . . and avoid every expence which is not held indispensable.”80 By contrast, Jefferson had no such qualms about borrowing money in order to sustain the patrician style of life to which he was accustomed. He was an aristocrat to his toes. He admitted as much when he told Madison that he disliked getting involved in any negotiations about money. “I do not understand bargaining nor possess the dexterity requisite to make them.” Adams, he said, was better at it; he “stands already on ground for that business which I could not gain in years.”81 Perhaps he thought Yankees naturally had that skill.
As a good aristocrat, Jefferson inevitably had expensive tastes, and he denied himself few comforts. Unlike Adams, who lived on the outskirts of Paris, where the rents were cheaper, Jefferson chose to live closer to the center of the city, on the Champs-Élysées, where the price, as he complained to Abigail, was much more than that of his previous residence.82 He kept changing houses, once paying rent to two houses at the same time, and remodeling them and furnishing them with new and more expensive furniture than he needed. He could scarcely refrain from sampling the vast array of goods that Paris offered—clothes, wine, candlesticks, silverware, and works of art. He especially couldn’t stop buying books, sometimes purchasing books every day for weeks on end, and he borrowed money to do so. He admitted that the Adamses were living in a much plainer and more economical manner than he, which he attributed to the management skills of Abigail.83
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IN 1785 JEFFERSON SUCCEEDED FRANKLIN as minister to France and Adams became minister to Great Britain, and the two friendly families had to separate. Jefferson immediately missed the camaraderie and told Adams that “the departure of your family has left me in the dumps.”84 But the families kept in touch through letters, Adams telling Jefferson that the “intimate Correspo
ndence with you . . . is one of the most agreeable Events of my Life.”85 In her first letter from England, Abigail ruffled Jefferson’s feathers a bit when she told him that London seemed “vastly superiour to Paris” in “wealth and grandeur,” especially in its equipage of horses and carriages. In reply Jefferson said that he “always found it best to remove obstacles first,” so he told her that her boast of London superiority was “a flout,” and in a jesting manner went on to praise Paris and its people. A few months later and having experienced England more fully, Abigail now told Jefferson just what he wanted to hear: that the English were inferior to the French, “more constricted and narrow in their Sentiments notwithstanding their boasted liberality. . . . They affect to despise the French, and to hate the Americans. . . . So great is their pride that they cannot endure to view us as independent, and they fear our growing greatness.”86
Abigail and Jefferson not only wrote to each other, but they shopped for each other, Jefferson, for example, buying shoes and table figurines for Abigail and she purchasing tablecloths and linen shirts for him. The relationship of Jefferson and Abigail was warm and for Jefferson remarkably playful, even flirtatious. In selecting the classical figurines, Jefferson told Abigail that he had been offered “a fine Venus, but I thought it out of taste to have two at table at the same time.”87 Although he believed, as he said to Angelica Schuyler Church, Alexander Hamilton’s sister-in-law, that “the tender breasts of young ladies were not formed for political convulsion,” he was more than willing to talk politics with Abigail. Suggesting that he was not getting enough political news from her husband, he asked Abigail if she would “be so good as to keep that office in your own hands.” He was getting “little from any other quarter.” Adams was so busy trying to open markets for whale oil—his “head,” joked Jefferson, “was full of whale oil,” but don’t tell him this, he said—that he counted on Abigail to keep him informed about what was going on. Even if Mr. Adams could supply him with news, he said, “De tout mon coeur, I had rather receive it from you.” In 1788 he asked Abigail if he could continue corresponding with her, to which she gratefully agreed.88