Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  Jefferson would never have responded to his enemies, never mind his friends, in the blunt manner Adams did with the Warrens. He was always far more in control of his personal and political views than Adams. Jefferson knew instinctively what his fellow Americans wanted and needed to hear. If the United States was to be a nation, he realized it had to be fundamentally different from the European nations and especially England; and he spent a good deal of time stressing America’s exceptionalism. By contrast, Adams risked his reputation for patriotism by emphatically denying America’s uniqueness at the same time as he celebrated the greatness of the English constitution.

  Even Hamilton was infuriated by Adams’s naïveté, and he condemned his writings, particularly his Davila essays, saying that because they so publicly favored the English constitution, they tended to undermine, not strengthen, the new national government in the public’s eyes. Hamilton told Jefferson that he was sure that Adams’s intentions were pure—what dark motive could he have?—but that didn’t absolve the vice president of blame for blundering and disturbing “the present order of things.”37

  Unlike Jefferson, whose political antennae were generally quite alert, Adams seemed to have had no political sense whatsoever. When President Washington asked him if he wished to accompany him on a tour of the northern states in the fall of 1789, he balked at the invitation and reminded Washington that there was much business to be done in the capital. No wonder Jefferson later declared that Adams was someone whom Washington “certainly did not love.” Abigail, whose political instincts were often better than her husband’s, was surprised that her husband had turned down the president’s invitation, and she encouraged him to join him. Instead, Adams made his own separate journey north.38

  Adams often appeared to be living in his own mind. When in February 1790 John Trumbull informed him of what his enemies were saying about him, Adams denied that anyone disliked him. “I am the Enemy of no Man living,” he said; “and I know of none who is an Enemy to me.” That didn’t mean, however, that he wasn’t envied. “But Envy is not Enmity.” When Trumbull told Adams that his behavior in the Senate, particularly his mingling in debates, had been criticized, Adams replied that “you are the first who has ever hinted to me, that any exception has ever been taken in the senate.”

  He sloughed off other criticisms as well. The accusation of his favoring “‘the splendor of monarchical Court’ has no Effect on me.” All he had done was publish under his name “my honest sentiments of Government, with the Reasons on which they were founded, at great length in three solid perhaps ponderous Volumes.” If his countrymen disapproved of these sentiments, so be it; they were free to reject them. He did admit, however, that sometimes when he had felt “very easy and happy” with friends at his own table, he had been known to express himself too warmly in response to some “Strange sentiments” and thus he had unintentionally hurt some people’s feelings—something that “Mrs. Adams sometimes objects to me on this head.”39

  • • •

  APPARENTLY JEFFERSON, or so Jefferson claimed, had been calling Adams “a heretic” freely to his face for some time, but doing so in a joking enough manner as to not endanger the friendship.40 When Jefferson arrived in New York in late March 1790, he immediately began socializing with the Adamses—Abigail telling her sister that the new secretary of state “adds much to the social circle.”41 Although Jefferson told Benjamin Rush early that year, at least a month before the publication of any of the Davila essays, that he deplored the change he saw in Adams’s opinion on republican forms of government, he, according to Rush, still spoke of Adams “with respect and affection as a great and upright man.”42

  Adams, having expressed to Jefferson in 1789 “an affection that can never die,” was as yet scarcely capable of sensing any hostility coming from his friend; but he was clearly more restrained in expressing his monarchical ideas with Jefferson than he was with Benjamin Rush, with whom he had become very intimate.43

  With Rush, Adams issued his opinions, feelings, and resentments in an effusive and candid manner that he felt he could not duplicate with Jefferson.44 Corresponding with Rush, he seemed to hold nothing back. For every conventional bromide about American exceptionalism and American republicanism timidly offered by Rush—the bromides that Jefferson spouted all the time—Adams let loose a torrent of his eccentric opinions that left Rush stunned.

  Weren’t Americans, asked Rush hesitantly, different from other people, freer of faction, and peculiarly qualified for republican governments? That was absurd, responded Adams. The only republic appropriate for Americans was “the Aristo-Democratical-Monarchy,” and that was “because they are more Avaricious than any other Nation.” Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were as vicious and licentious as London. “How can you say,” he demanded of Rush, “that Factions have been few in America? . . . Have not our Parties behaved like all Republican Parties? Is not the History of Hancock and Bowdoin, the History of the Medici and Albizi.”

  When Rush said that he abhorred all titles, Adams fired back that Rush was simply deceiving himself. Titles were “indispensably necessary to give Dignity and Energy to Government.” In fact, he said, “Government is nothing else but Titles, Ceremonies and Ranks.” This was a far cry from what he had said as a young man when he had railed against the pomp and vanities of the great families of Massachusetts. “Formalities and Ceremonies,” he had told his diary in 1770, “are an abomination in my sight.” But in two decades he had changed his mind. To Rush’s horror, Adams even praised hereditary institutions not only as possessing “admirable wisdom and exemplary Virtue in a certain Stage of Society in a great Nation,” but also “as the hope of our Posterity.” Indeed, Adams added, Americans must eventually resort to a hereditary monarchy and a hereditary aristocracy “as an Asylum against Discord, Seditions, and Civil War, and that in no very distant Period of time.” Therefore Americans should cease mocking those hereditary institutions.45

  Maybe Adams enjoyed getting a rise out of Rush by saying outrageous things that he would never have said to Jefferson. “Limited monarchy is founded in Nature,” he told Rush. “No Nation can adore more than one Man at a time.” Adams conceded that America was fortunate in having Washington as that one man. Yet he realized how “the Trumpetts, the Puffs” can distort the past. “The History of our Revolution,” he informed Rush, no doubt with his tongue somewhat in cheek, “will be one continued Lye from one End to the other. The Essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklins electrical Rod, smote the Earth and out Sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his Rod. And thence forward these two conducted all the Policy Negotiations, Legislation and War.” He realized that someone a hundred years later reading these lines might conclude that “the envy of this J.A. could not bear to think of the Truth!” Adams was mocking himself with this caricature, but he knew it contained a kernel of truth—that often the real movers of events were forgotten and others got all the credit.46

  • • •

  ADAMS NEVER HAD AS FREE and easy a relationship with Jefferson as he had with Rush—perhaps because Rush paid him such deference. By 1790 the relationship with Jefferson had become decidedly uneven. Jefferson knew what Adams thought about politics and the French Revolution from Adam’s writings and from observation and stories of his odd behavior and what Jefferson called “his apostacy to hereditary monarchy and nobility.”47 But Adams did not really know just how deeply contrary his political views were to those of his friend. Jefferson may have teased Adams privately with being “a heretic,” but because of his natural reserve and his aversion to personal confrontations, Jefferson never spelled out to Adams just how profound his differences were over government and the French Revolution.

  In fact, Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution knew no bounds; it even matched the revolutionary zeal of Thomas Paine. Jefferson had come to believe that the future of liberty in Europe depended on the favorable outco
me of what was taking place in France. “For the good of suffering humanity all over the earth,” he hoped that “that revolution will be established and spread thro’ the whole world.” But more important, he also believed that the success of that “so beautiful a revolution” could even determine the fate of the American Revolution. If the French Revolution should fail, he told George Mason, America was in danger of “falling back to that kind of Half-way-house, the English constitution.”48

  Although Adams may not have fully comprehended Jefferson’s view of the French Revolution, Jefferson knew only too well from the Davila essays where Adams stood on what was happening in France. Jefferson believed that there was a sect in the government that was opposed to the French Revolution and standing in the way of reason and progress. “The members of this sect have, many of them, names and offices which stand high in the estimation of our countrymen.” Fortunately, he said, “the great mass of our countrymen is untainted by these heresies, as is it’s head”—that is, President Washington.49 Indeed, Jefferson at the outset exempted Washington from all of his criticism of the administration. Although he still esteemed Adams as a friend and, as he told the president, he considered him “one of the most honest and disinterested men alive,” Jefferson nevertheless did not exclude Adams from this heretical sect. After reading Adams’s final Davila essay on the value of hereditary succession over elections, Jefferson could only conclude that Fenno’s Gazette had become “a paper of pure Toryism, disseminating the doctrines of monarchy, aristocracy, and the exclusion of the influence of the people.”50

  That was a private comment made to his son-in-law. The last thing that Jefferson wanted was to be caught up in a public controversy over the Davila essays. But inadvertently he did get thrust into the public arena. In April 1791, he received a copy from England of the first part of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. The book was a direct reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and an impassioned assault on monarchy and hereditary aristocracy. It also ardently defended the rights of the living generation over those of the dead and mocked titles as a sort of foppery in the human character. It ridiculed mixed governments of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy and declared that there was but one element of human power, that of the people. It thus opposed much of what Adams favored and said everything Jefferson believed in. Indeed, if Jefferson had ever systematically written out his thoughts on government, the book would have resembled The Rights of Man.

  Because his ardent republican friend John Beckley had asked him to, Jefferson forwarded Paine’s work to a printer in Philadelphia. He made the mistake, however, of including a covering note, expressing his pleasure that “something is at length to be publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us,” not doubting that “our citizens will rally a second time around the standard of Common sense.” By “political heresies” Jefferson admitted that he meant Adams’s Discourses on Davila.51

  When Jefferson received a printed copy of Paine’s pamphlet, he was stunned to discover that a preface to the work included his note to the publisher. By identifying the secretary of state as the author of the note and the person who had passed on a copy of Paine’s pamphlet for republication, the printer implied that Jefferson was the sponsor of the American edition of The Rights of Man—a work and its tendency that Adams declared he detested from the bottom of his heart.

  Paine’s pamphlet and especially Jefferson’s note created a sensation in America. As Tobias Lear, one of Washington’s secretaries, remarked, “This publication of Mr. Jefferson’s sentiments respecting Mr. Paine’s pamphlet will set him in direct opposition to Mr. Adams’s political tenets.” Jefferson was mortified over having been “thus brought forward on the public stage,” which he told Washington was “against my love of silence and quiet, and my abhorrence of dispute.”52

  Jefferson knew Adams would be displeased. He said to Madison that Adams was one of “those gentlemen, fast by the chair of government, who were in sentiment with Burke and as much opposed to the sentiments of Paine.” But Madison told him not to worry about it. Adams had been acting recklessly and had no right to complain of criticism. “Under a mock defence of the Republican Constitutions,” said Madison, Adams had “attacked them with all the force he possessed, and this in a book with his name to it whilst he was the Representative of his Country at a foreign Court.” And as vice president, “his pen has constantly been at work in the same cause.” If one public servant can attack the government as he has done, said Madison, then surely “it can not be very criminal or indecent in another to patronize a written defence of the principles on which that Government is founded.” Madison had none of Jefferson’s affection for Adams.53

  In response to Paine’s pamphlet and Jefferson’s note, someone writing as “Publicola” published a series of letters in the Boston Columbian Centinel attacking The Rights of Man and its sponsor Jefferson for assuming that the work was a kind of “Papal Bull of infallible virtue.”54 Since “the stile and sentiments” of Publicola seemed to be those of Adams, Jefferson like many others presumed that he was the author. Actually, Publicola was John Quincy Adams, the twenty-four-year-old son of Adams. The public assumed, however, at least at first, that the secretary of state and the vice president were at odds over fundamental principles of government—a personal confrontation that had serious political implications.55

  Jefferson’s inclination was not to get involved at all in this brouhaha. But since both his name and that of Adams had been “thrown on the public stage as public antagonists,” he felt he had to write to Adams and explain what had happened. It would not be easy, and he put off writing to Adams for two months. When he finally wrote, he told Adams that he had taken up his pen a dozen times only to lay it down again. He then decided that he would write “from a conviction that truth, between candid minds, can never do harm.”

  Unfortunately, the harm had already been done. “That you and I differ in our ideas of the best form of government is well known to us,” he said to Adams; “but we differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each other’s motives, and confining our differences of opinion to private conversations.” He told Adams that he had had no intention whatsoever of having their names brought before the public in this manner. “The friendship and confidence which has so long existed between us required this explanation from me.”56

  Two weeks later Adams replied to what he called Jefferson’s “friendly Letter” in a letter that was not quite so friendly; indeed, Adams revealed that he had been deeply hurt by Jefferson’s note that had been attached to Paine’s work. He described how that note had been reprinted in many newspapers and considered “as a direct and open personal attack on me.” It appeared to countenance “a false interpretation of my Writings as favouring the Introduction of hereditary Monarchy and Aristocracy into this Country.” The newspapers had asked, What heresies was the secretary of state talking about? And the answer they had given, said Adams, was “the Vice Presidents notions of a limited Monarchy, an hereditary Government of Kings and Lords, with only elective commons.” Adams said he had not written the Publicola essays, and he categorically denied that he had ever in his public writings or private letters attempted to introduce hereditary executives and hereditary senates into America’s governments. He then told Jefferson that he did not realize, as Jefferson stated, that their ideas differed over the best form of government. How would he have known? “You and I have never had a Serious conversation together that I can recollect concerning the nature of Government. The very transient hints that have ever passed between Us,” he said, “have been jocular and Superficial, without ever coming to any explanation.”

  Adams concluded by telling Jefferson that “it was high time that you and I should come to an explanation with each other.” The friendship of fifteen years had always been and was still “dear to my heart.” Just as he knew Jefferson’s motives in writing to him were pure and friendl
y, he trusted that Jefferson would think of his motives “in the same candid Light.”57

  It is obvious that Adams was not as honest as he thought he was in his letter. By the time he wrote his letter, if not well before, he knew that he and Jefferson had very different ideas of government. He had told Henry Knox a month earlier that he would not allow “Paine’s Nonsense” or its preface by “his Godfather” to much affect him, the “Godfather” being, of course, Jefferson. “It only grieves me,” he added, “that a Character who stood high is so much lowered in the public Esteem.”58 Although Adams believed that technically he had never advocated that hereditary executives and senates be introduced immediately into America’s governments, his final Davila essay—in which he suggested that hereditary succession was preferable to elections—certainly opened him to that charge.

  But Jefferson was not honest either. In his reply to Adams he placed all the blame for the controversy on the writings of Publicola, “the real aggressor in this business.” If Publicola hadn’t attacked Paine’s principles, “which were the principles of the citizens of the U.S.,” and hadn’t “thought proper to bring me onto the scene,” Paine’s pamphlet and his note, Jefferson claimed, would have gone “unnoticed.” Jefferson was so anxious to exculpate himself that he told Adams that “so far from naming you, I had not even in view any writing which I might suppose to be yours” when he wrote his covering note. Then as if to compensate for this blatant lie, Jefferson went on to praise Adams for “the disinterestedness of character which you are known to possess by every body who knows your name.” He hoped Adams would see that he was “as innocent in effect” as he “was in intention.” He trusted that “the business is now over,” and its effects too, “and that our friendship will never be suffered to be committed [meaning to be put away and forgotten], whatever use others may think proper to make of our names.” He ended by asking Adams to present him “to Mrs. Adams with all the affection I feel for her.”59