Abigail responded with a letter full of her feelings over the loss of Nabby, who had died at age forty-eight after a terrible struggle with breast cancer. Aware that Jefferson had suffered a similar loss of an adult daughter, she knew he could “sympathize with your bereaved Friend.” Although political calumny had interrupted their “friendly intercourse and harmony,” she was pleased that “it is again renewed.”28
Since Jefferson had been initially told of Nabby’s death by Adams, he did not reply directly to Abigail, but expressed his condolences to both Adamses in a letter to John.29 Fifteen months later Abigail sent some letters written by John Quincy that contained accounts of the Destutt de Tracy family that she thought Jefferson might be interested in. She expressed her continued friendship with “the philosopher of Monticello.”30 Jefferson replied politely enough, but the correspondence between him and Abigail never achieved the intimacy it had possessed in the 1780s. Before her death in October 1818, Abigail wrote one more businesslike letter to Jefferson, requesting a letter of introduction for a young Massachusetts man traveling to France.31
Thus the exchanges were almost totally confined to the two revolutionary heroes. “You and I,” said Adams at one point, “ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”32 But they were writing to posterity as well as to themselves. Their styles expressed their personalities. Adams’s writing spewed forth from him with extraordinary exuberance and unrestrained passion (he called it “incoherent rattle”); and it was often loaded with provocative and sometimes facetious remarks.33 Sometimes the provocations could be cruel. Knowing that Jefferson had greatly admired the engineer-scientist David Rittenhouse, Adams nevertheless described him as “a good simple ignorant well meaning Franklinian Democrat, totally ignorant of the World, as an Anachorite, an honest Dupe of the French Revolution.”34
Whenever Adams sat down to write to Jefferson, he said he could not see the forest for the trees; “so many Subjects crowd upon me,” he said, “that I know not, with which to begin.”35 Besides, what could he say to the man who knew everything? Writing Jefferson about any subject was like “sending Coal to Newcastle.” Nevertheless, Adams continually reported what he was reading and made all sorts of joshing comments about it. John Marshall’s five-volume Life of George Washington he described as “a Mausolaeum, 100 feet square at the base, and 200 feet high.”36 But other times he could be quite serious, as when he quoted extensively from the account by the French revolutionary Armand-Gaston Camus concerning the fifty-two volumes entitled Acta Sanctorum (Acts of the Saints). Adams concluded that the work was “the most complete History of the corruptions of Christianity, that has ever appeared.”37
Adams told anecdotes from his reading in ancient literature and related gossip from the present. A scandal involving the wife of James Bowdoin III, son of the former governor of Massachusetts, set him off on a chaotic account of the race of Boudouins in France that went back to the twelfth century. He ended the story by telling Jefferson that in 1804 he, President Jefferson, had immortalized the name Bowdoin by appointing this cuckold as minister to Spain. In commenting on John Taylor’s prolix writing style, which was based on Taylor’s precept “Gather up the Fragments that nothing be lost,” he said that such a rule was “of inestimable Value in Agriculture and Horticulture,” but perhaps not for books. “Every Weed Cob, Husk Stalk ought to be saved for manure.” He agreed completely with Jefferson’s view that Plato’s Republic was full of “sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities.” All he ever got out of “the tedious toil” of reading Plato were two things: one, that Franklin’s idea of exempting farmers and mariners from military service was borrowed from Plato, and two, “that Sneezing is a cure for the Hickups.” Adams’s persistent theme, he said, was drawn from Horace: “What forbids a man to speak the truth by joking.”38
Jefferson was always graceful and polite in response to Adams’s effusive and often teasing banter, and he tended to ignore Adams’s flippant provocations. Indeed, anyone else might have broken off the correspondence; but Jefferson knew that beneath Adams’s outward irascibility lay a warm and amiable heart.
Occasionally Jefferson did try to match some of Adams’s playfulness; and his letters became less somber and serious than was usual in his correspondence. Both men enjoyed showing off their wide knowledge of Greek, Latin, and modern literature. Indeed, their letters often exploded with kaleidoscopic displays of learning in classical and Christian texts that are bound to leave a modern reader thoroughly abashed. At age seventy-five, Jefferson offered a long disquisition on the difference between the pronunciation of ancient and modern Greek, followed by a learned discussion of the changes in the pronunciation of American English. For his part Adams once mentioned Archytas, the fourth-century BC Greek philosopher, and followed that up by pointing out that “John Gram a learned and honourable Dane has given a handsome Edition of his Works with a latin translation and an ample Account of his Life and Writings.”39
Jefferson fed Adams’s vanity by expressing wonder over Adams’s extensive reading. “Forty three volumes read in one year, and 12 of them quartos! Dear Sir, how I envy you!” Adams’s reading of the twelve volumes of Charles François Dupuis’s Origine de tours les cultes was, he said, “a degree of heroism to which I could not have aspired even in my younger days.” But Jefferson had an explanation for why he could not match Adams’s reading: He didn’t have the time, he was so busy answering his many correspondents, some of whom he had “never before heard.” All his letter writing, he said, was “the burden of my life.” He wished he could get rid of the strangers and concentrate on friends he loved like Adams. He was mortified that he had not been able to keep up with his letters.
Adams had his own answers to this burden. One was to simply ignore many of the letter writers and neglect to answer their letters, which, he said, he had done, and it had cost him many correspondents from whom he might have learned something. The other expedient was to give “gruff, short, unintelligible, mysterious, enigmatical, or pedantical Answers.” He told Jefferson that this solution was “out of your power,” since it was “not in your nature.”40
• • •
OF COURSE, PUBLISHERS eventually discovered that the two former presidents were exchanging letters and, much to Jefferson’s disgust, wanted to publish them. “These people,” he said, “think they have a right to everything however secret or sacred.” Adams confessed that no printer had approached him, but that was not surprising, since Jefferson’s writing was famous and his was not. He said that “our Correspondence is thought such an oddity by both Parties, that the Printers imagine an Edition would soon go off and yield them a Profit.”41
Although Adams realized that both he and Jefferson were “weary of Politicks,” he nevertheless couldn’t stay away from the subject. He used the fact that he had received some books on Virginian prophets as an excuse to mock all those prophets of the 1780s and ’90s, including Joseph Priestley, who had predicted that the French Revolution was the beginning of the millennium. Priestley, Adams reported, had told him, “soberly, cooly and deliberately,” that “he fully believed upon the Authority of Prophecy that the French Nation would establish a free Government and that the King of France who had been executed, was the first of the Ten Horns of the great Beast, and that all the other Nine Monarchs were soon to fall off after him.”42 Knowing what Jefferson had thought about the French Revolution, Adams obviously was trying to get a rise out of him.
Because Adams in passing had mentioned the Prophet of the Wabash, Tenskwatawa, who with his brother Tecumseh had been defeated in November 1811 at the Battle of Tippecanoe, Jefferson was able to ignore Adams’s provocative statements about the French Revolution and instead concentrate on giving Adams a detailed description of the beliefs and visions of this Shawnee religious leader.43 It was a technique that Jefferson used over and over to deflect Adams’s baiting comments. It didn’t stop Adams, however, from coming rig
ht back at Jefferson with another attempt at needling. After thanking Jefferson for his account of the Shawnee Prophet, Adams suggested that all modern prophets ought to be put in the stocks as they had been in biblical times: they might thus be prevented “from spreading so many delusions and shedding so much blood.”44
Adams brought up the case of Timothy Pickering and the other extreme Federalists who had earlier tried to separate the northeastern states from the Union. He told Jefferson he had long opposed these High Federalists, at a cost of his popularity in New England, but if the national government under the Republican administrations continued to employ embargoes and oppose a buildup of naval power, it would play into the hands of these arch-Federalists, resulting not only in making Adams and his son John Quincy more unpopular in New England than they already were, but, more alarming, in provoking “a Convulsion as certainly as there is a Sky over our heads.”45
When Adams asked about books on Indian antiquities, Jefferson jumped at the opportunity to get away from sensitive subjects, and he responded with a scholarly and informative discussion of the issue. He respected the Indians and knew a great deal about their culture and languages. Adams, by contrast, confessed that he knew very little about Indians and had never collected any books on the subject. He remembered seeing Indians in his youth, but he thought, mistakenly, that they had disappeared from New England. He was not very sympathetic to their plight. He conceded that they had “a Right to Life Liberty and Property in common with all Men.” But could “a few handful of Scattering Tribes of Savages have a right of Dominion or Property over a quarter of the Globe capable of nourishing hundreds of Millions of happy human Beings?” He admitted that his ancestors had not puzzled themselves with the “Refinements” over who actually possessed the land prior to “civil Society,” but had simply entered into negotiations with the Indians, “purchased and paid for their Rights and Claims whatever they were, and procured Deeds, Grants and Quit-Claims of all their Lands, leaving them their Habitations Arms Utensils huntings and Plantations.” For Adams, the land unquestionably belonged to the whites. During the Revolutionary War, he had told Abigail that any tribes that fought on the side of the British “deserve Extermination.”46
Jefferson was never so harsh, but by 1812 he did believe that those Indians who were not becoming civilized and were falling under the sway of the English in Canada would soon be conquered. This was a measure of his confidence in the outcome of the war that was soon to be declared against Great Britain.47
• • •
AS LONG AS THE LETTERS were confined to the history of Mount Wollaston in New England and the origins and nature of the Indians, they went on swimmingly. But when Adams discovered a volume that contained several of Jefferson’s letters to Joseph Priestley in 1801 and 1803, there was a moment of tense embarrassment. One was the letter in which Jefferson criticized the Federalists for being “barbarians,” and Adams in particular, for looking backward and not forward in his 1798 “To the Young Men of the City of Philadelphia.” Adams denied Jefferson’s charge and explained that he had written so many answers to addresses in that hectic year that he couldn’t recall what he had said. But he couldn’t drop the issue and had to defend his statement about our ancestors being the best source of knowledge by suggesting that by ancestors he meant none other than Jefferson and himself. In fact, he said, Americans were so different in religion and ethnicity that only the general principles coming out of the Revolution could unite them. Those were, he said, “the general Principles of Christianity, in which all those Sects were United: and the general Principles of English and American Liberty.”48
Adams was very upset by Jefferson’s letters to Priestley and had a hard time letting them go. He anguished over what Jefferson had said about his election in 1800 being something new under the sun. He told Jefferson he had been elected by merely the narrowest margin, and that had been made possible by one Federalist changing his vote; consequently, he mocked Jefferson’s phrase about his election resulting from a mighty wave of public opinion rolling over the nation. “Oh! Mr. Jefferson!” he exclaimed. “What a Wave of public Opinion has rolled over the Universe.” And he went on to describe all the many waves of changing opinion in Western history.49
Jefferson was clearly embarrassed by the revelation of his letters to Priestley. He said his letters were private communications only, not intended to be made public. He went on to explain that each political party would interpret the events of 1798–1799 differently and posterity would have to judge between them. He said that he did not consider Adams’s statement about respecting only his ancestors’ views as “your deliberate opinion.” Jefferson tried to suggest that his comments were directed at the Federalists, whom both he and Adams hated, and not at Adams himself. He followed with another letter emphasizing that he had no intention of reviving these “useless and irksome” quarrels of the past. It was clear that Jefferson was acutely worried that the Priestley letters might wreck the restored friendship.50
Adams quickly reassured him. “Be not surprised or alarmed.” The statements in the Priestley letters “will do no harm to you or me.” Neither man wanted to endanger the reconciliation that had been so long in coming. Adams assured Jefferson that he had no intention of publishing their letters in the way someone had published Jefferson’s letters to Priestley. If they were eventually published, he told Jefferson, “your Letters will do you no dishonor.” As for his own letters, Adams cared “not a farthing.” His reputation had been “the Sport of the public for fifty years, and will be with Posterity, . . . a bubble, a Gossameur, that idles the wonton Summer Air.”51
Adams made this kind of self-deprecating remark over and over, but always wished that it were not so. He was not wrong, however, about how posterity would view his reputation. He told Jefferson he had suffered from more terror, often verbal terror, than any other American. “Name another if you can.” He had “been disgraced and degraded,” and he had “a right to complain.” But he had “always expected it,” and had “always submitted to it, perhaps often with too much tameness.” He had been treated “with the Utmost Contempt” by Republicans in the Congress, including being threatened “with Impeachment for the murder of Jonathan Robbins,” the British sailor who falsely claimed to be an American when the British had impressed and executed him.52
Adams knew what future histories of their respective presidencies would say. “Your Administration,” he told Jefferson, “will be quoted by Philosophers, as a model, of profound Wisdom; by Politicians, as weak, superficial and short sighted.” “Mine . . . will have no Character at all.” Adams’s complaints were endless. “How many Gauntletts am I destined to run? How many Martyrdoms must I suffer.” Jefferson, he said, knew him better than most, “yet you know little of the Life I have led, the hazards I have run.”53
When reading all of Adams’s moaning and groaning, Jefferson must have shaken his head and smiled—but with affection. He realized that this was the warmhearted friend he had always known.
• • •
AFTER WRITING SIX LETTERS in a row in two weeks during the summer of 1813, Adams was thoroughly wound up and was able to release the tension only by reminding Jefferson once again of his wrongheaded support for the French Revolution. It was, he said, the first issue on which they had differed. What he most hated about the French Revolution, he told Jefferson, was the way it set back, perhaps for a century or more, the progress that was “advancing by slow but sure Steps towards an Amelioration of the conditions of Man, in Religion and Government, in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity Knowledge Civilization and Humanity.” The French patriots were like young students or sailors flushed with recent pay, mounted on wild horses, lashing and spurring, until they killed the horses and broke their own necks.
He had written his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America and Davila essays to try to head things off. Although his “poor, unprotected, unpatronised Bo
oks” had said new things about government that other theorists—from Locke to Montesquieu to Rousseau—had never said, his books never had a chance. They were “overborne by Misrepresentations and will perish in Obscurity.” Unfortunately, his works laid the foundation of the immense unpopularity that had befallen him, while “your steady defence of democratical Principles,” he told Jefferson, “laid the foundation of your Unbounded Popularity.”54
Adams enjoyed needling Jefferson over the apparent failure of the French Revolution. All those naïve French philosophes—Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot, Rousseau, and others—could have been of some service to humanity “if they had possessed Common Sense. But they were all totally destitute of it.” They assumed that all of Christendom was as convinced as they were that every religion was visionary and that “their effulgent Lights had illuminated the World.” These dreamers seemed to believe that “whole Nations and Continents had been changed in their Principles Opinions Habits and Feelings by the Sovereign Grace of their Almighty Philosophy.” Their effort “to perfect human Nature and convert the Earth into Paradise of Pleasure” had come to nothing.55
Where now were the “Perfection and perfectibility of human Nature?” he asked Jefferson, who in Adams’s mind had been as dreamy as the philosophes. “Where is now the progress of the human Mind? Where is the Amelioration of Society?” The ravings of men like Dr. Thomas Young and Thomas Paine who attacked all organized religion were no answer; “for,” said Adams, “I hold there can be no Philosophy without Religion.”56 He then picked up on Jefferson’s statement in one of his letters to Priestley, in which he had said that Christianity, though benevolent, was also “the most perverted System that ever shone on Man.” Priestley had said that Jefferson was “generally considered an unbeliever.”57
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