Adams said he considered Jefferson to be as good a Christian as Priestley. But that was not much of a compliment, since Adams later went out of his way to disparage Priestley “as absurd inconsistent, credulous and incomprehensible as Athanasius” and no different from all those other so-called “rational Creatures,” the utopian French philosophes. Adams claimed that he had been a student of religion for sixty years and had read books whose titles Jefferson had never seen. Although Priestley had been dead for ten years, Adams said that he had many questions about the Apocryphal epistles of the Bible that he would ask Priestley about—“when I see him.” 58
Jefferson took all this amiably enough and suggested that people did not differ in religious opinions as much as was supposed. He agreed with Priestley, who had declared that if people candidly examined themselves, “they would find that Unitarianism was the religion of all.” It was “too late in the day,” Jefferson said, “for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet the one is not three, and the three are not one.”59
Along with the French Revolution, religion was a major issue that divided the two men. Both Jefferson and Adams agreed in the belief in a supreme being who organized the universe, and both, like many other enlightened rationalists of the age, denied the divinity of Christ and thus the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity. For Jefferson, Jesus was just “an extraordinary man,” and for Adams, claims for the divinity of Jesus had become an “awful blasphemy.”60
Nevertheless, Adams had a much more acceptable view of religion than Jefferson. Although he did not put much stock in creeds or ecclesiastical authorities, he never became as hostile to organized religion or to orthodox Christianity as Jefferson. Adams certainly agreed that ancient Christianity had been corrupted and debased by “Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, and Christian Factions, above all the Catholicks”—“Miracles after Miracles have rolled down in Torrents”—but he never mocked the Trinity as Jefferson did, never ridiculed it as “mere Abracadabra” foisted on the people by “the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.”61 Although Adams was certainly a Unitarian in his beliefs, he treated “the doctrine of the Trinity” not as a joke but as “a Part of an immense system of doctrines of too inormous faith for me to digest.” “Let the Wits joke; the Phylosophers sneer!” he said, but that was not his approach to religion. He always was, as he said in 1811, “a Church going Animal.”62
Adams believed that there was “in human nature, a solid, unchangeable and eternal foundation of Religion.” All he felt was awe and adoration in the face of “the Author of the Universe,” a universe that was infinite and eternal and in which Adams himself was “but an Atom, a Molecule.” Indeed, to Adams God was so beyond all human understanding, so “altogether incomprehensible, and incredible” that he could just “as soon believe the Athanasian Creed, which asserted the traditional Roman Catholic belief in the Trinity.”63
Adams’s sense of religious liberty and ecumenical toleration—“all Religions have Something good in them”—came from this sense of humility in an “inscrutable and incomprehensible” universe, from his deeply held belief that Christianity was “Resignation to God.” When Adams was minister to Great Britain, he had worked hard to get the Anglican hierarchy to consecrate American bishops in the Episcopal Church without having to swear allegiance to the king. In fact, he said in 1814 that “there is no part of my Life, on which I look back and reflect with more Satisfaction, than the part I took, bold, daring and hazardous as it was to myself and mine, in the introduction of Episcopacy into America.” He even admired the Episcopal Church service. It was “very humane and benevolent, and sometimes pathetic & affecting: but rarely gloomy, if ever.” It was certainly “more cheerful and comfortable” than the Presbyterian Calvinists, but he really couldn’t criticize the Calvinists either. Since all his family and his ancestors were Calvinists, he would have to be “a very unnatural Son to entertain any prejudices against Calvinists or Calvinism.” Indeed, he had “never known any better people than the Calvinists.” And as infidelity became associated with Jefferson and Paine’s beloved French Revolution, Adams’s esteem for Christianity went up. Christianity, Adams told his diary in 1796, was the “Religion of Wisdom, Virtue, Equity and Humanity, let the Blackguard Paine say what he will.”64
Jefferson never conceived of himself as an insignificant speck in an infinite universe, nor did he ever have anything good to say about the Episcopal hierarchy or Calvinism. As far as he was concerned, Calvinism had “introduced into the Christian religion more new absurdities than its leader had purged it of old ones.”65
But what most separated Jefferson from Adams was Jefferson’s view, at least as he expressed it in his younger years, that religion was exclusively private and personal and did not have much to do with society. Not only had Jefferson revealed in his Notes on the State of Virginia his indifference to the social significance of religion, but in the first section of his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which had taken effect in Virginia in 1786, he had claimed that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics and geometry.”66
This was a position that most Americans, including Adams, found totally unacceptable. However liberal and however tolerant American leaders might have become, nearly all of them continued to believe that religion was essential for the maintenance of order and morality in society, which was especially important for a republic. Indeed, in contrast to Jefferson, most Americans were convinced that America’s civic rights were absolutely dependent on religion. And religion for them was a matter of faith, not, as it was for Jefferson, a mere matter of opinion. As president, Jefferson would have nothing to do with proclaiming national days of fasting and prayer as Adams had done; they were anathema to him.
Although Adams, like Jefferson, had come to deny the divinity of Jesus and the miracles of the Bible, he never doubted the need the society had for Christianity. At the outset of the Revolution, he told Abigail that New England was superior to other parts of America because it obliged “every Parish to have a Minister, and every Person to go to Meeting.”67 Adams later said he was not responsible for article III in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, which authorized the state legislature to maintain an established church in the towns, and in the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1820 he favored complete religious freedom. Nevertheless, he was not opposed to the public support of religion. As much as he worried that the clergy, especially the New England divines, could foster “spiritual tyranny and ecclesiastical Dominion” and endanger liberty, he nevertheless believed that America could not “do without them in this wicked world.” He even regretted that the federal Constitution did not at least pay “Homage to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.”68
Although both men proclaimed themselves Unitarians, they could not have differed more on religious matters. It was inconceivable that Jefferson would ever have said, as Adams did in 1817, that “without Religion this world would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell.”69
During the election for the presidency in 1800, Jefferson’s radical comments on religion had come back to haunt him. The Federalists had accused him of being an atheist, an infidel, and a Paine-like opponent of Christianity. If he were to become president, they warned, all religion and morality would be destroyed and the bonds of society would come apart. So vicious had been the criticism of his religious views that Jefferson felt the need to explain his understanding of the role of Christianity in society. He had been anticlerical since his college years, but reading the works of Joseph Priestley helped to clarify his religious ideas and to reconcile them with Christianity.
When Jefferson read Priestley’s History of the Corruption of Christianity sometime in the mid-1790s, he had been deeply impressed. Priestley had argued that Christianity was originally a simple religion subsequently corrup
ted by the church and that Jesus was not divine but a great moral teacher. By 1801 Jefferson was telling correspondents that “the Christian religion when divested of the rags in which [the clergy] have inveloped it, and brought to the original purity & simplicity of it’s benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansions of the human mind.”70 Priestley’s work helped Jefferson to conceive of himself as a genuine Christian.
In reading Priestley’s new pamphlet, Socrates and Jesus Compared, in 1803, Jefferson realized that he could give the ancients “their just due, & yet maintain that the morality of Jesus, as taught by himself & freed from the corruptions of later times, is far superior” to that of the ancient philosophers.71 In 1803 Jefferson wrote out his thoughts in what he called his “Syllabus of an Estimate on the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, compared with Those of Others.” Anxious to dispel the impression held by many that he was antireligious and especially anti-Christian, Jefferson sent copies of this thousand-word essay to several friends and members of his cabinet and family. (He belatedly sent a copy to Adams in 1813.)
In 1804 Jefferson followed up this essay with a scissors-and-paste version of the New Testament in which he cut out all references to supernatural miracles and Christ’s divinity and kept all the passages in which Jesus preached love and the Golden Rule. He called this collection “The Philosophy of Jesus.” He told a friend that this “wee little book” was “proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel, and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what it’s Author never said nor saw.”72 In 1820 Jefferson expanded his work into the “Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” By 1819 he had become, he said, “a sect by myself.”73
Although both Jefferson and Adams denied miracles and the divinity of Jesus, they both accepted the existence of a hereafter. Jefferson was somewhat more circumspect than Adams. When he was young, he had hoped to gain “some insight into that hidden country,” but eventually had come to rest easy with his ignorance and simply trust in God’s goodness. Adams assumed that God would not have created all these human beings if there were no life after death. “Take away hope and What remains?” he asked Jefferson. People wouldn’t put up with earthly existence if there were no hope of a hereafter. He said if he did not believe in “a future state I should believe in no God.” Adams put it more colorfully to his friend Francis Adrian Van der Kemp: “Let it once be revealed or demonstrated that there is no future State, and my Advice to every Man Woman and Child would be, as our Existence would be in our own power, to take opium.”74 In other words, if there were no afterlife, life on earth would not be worth living—a truly extraordinary notion.
• • •
ADAMS KEPT INTERRUPTING the discussion of religion with what interested him even more—his old bugaboo, aristocracy. Perhaps because he was surrounded by all those Essex Junto Federalists who were plotting secession in opposition to “Mr. Madison’s War,” he couldn’t stay away from the subject. He reminded Jefferson in 1813 that thirty years before, Jefferson had encouraged him to write something on aristocracy, and he had “been writing Upon that Subject ever since.” No society, including republican America, could rid itself of its aristocracy. “It is entailed upon us forever.” All we could do, he said, was manage our aristocrats, but they were “the most difficult Animals to manage” in every kind of government. “They not only exert all their own Subtilty Industry and courage, but they employ the Commonalty to knock to pieces every Plan and Model that the most honest Architects in Legislation can invent to keep them within bounds.” And unfortunately, said Adams, the aristocrats were usually not the best men in the society. “Birth and Wealth together have prevailed over Virtue and Talents in all ages.”75
Jefferson told Adams that parties, such as Whigs versus Tories, had always existed and would continue to exist, one taking the side of the many, the other the few. Adams agreed. The aristocracy and the democracy would always quarrel, and all those like Rousseau and Helvétius (and, he might have added, Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence) who proclaimed “the natural Equality of Mankind” were wrong. “Inequalities of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in his constitution of Human Nature that no Art or policy can ever plain them down to a Level.” The only equality Adams would admit was equality before the law, but he knew that was not at all what Jefferson and most others in 1776 had meant by equality.76
Jefferson understood there was a natural aristocracy in every society, but he wanted that natural aristocracy distinguished from those he called an artificial or pseudo-aristocracy, which, he said, was “founded on wealth or birth, without either virtue or talents.” He considered the natural aristocracy based on wisdom and virtue to be “the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.” In fact, he said, governments should be judged by their capacity to ensure that these natural aristocrats were selected into the offices of government.77
He realized that Adams had a different take on this issue. “You think it best to put the Pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where they may be a protection to wealth against the Agrarian and plundering enterprises of the Majority of the people.” This was a mistake, he told Adams. Giving the wealthy aristocrats power in order to prevent them from doing mischief was “arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.” He didn’t feel that wealthy aristocrats had to be protected anyhow. “Enough of them will find their way into every branch of the legislation to protect themselves.” The best remedy was to let the citizens in free elections separate the natural aristocrats from the pseudo-aristocrats, the wheat from the chaff. “In general,” he said, “they will elect the real good and wise.” Only in a few instances would the citizens be corrupted by wealth and birth, but never enough to endanger the society. This, of course, was the view of an aristocrat who had never lost an election in his life.78
Jefferson accounted for their differing opinions on the aristocracy from the different societies in which he and Adams lived. Because of the established Calvinist churches in Massachusetts and Connecticut, Jefferson claimed that the New England clergy tended to encourage “a traditional reverence for certain families.”79 This was not true in Virginia, he claimed. The clergy had no influence over the people, and the great families that had been allied with the Crown had been discredited by the Revolution and undone by the abolition of primogeniture and entail and the separation of the church from the state.
Jefferson only regretted that his plans for a system of public education in which the geniuses and future leaders would be “raked from the rubbish annually” had not been implemented by the Virginia legislature.80 He went on to describe his plans for small wards of four or five miles square that would be responsible for the schools and for local self-government in Virginia. When finally put into effect, these plans for public education and small ward-republics would raise “the mass of the people to the high ground of moral responsibility necessary to their own safety,” and would qualify them “to select the veritable aristoi, for the trusts of government, to the exclusion of the Pseudalists.”81
Jefferson’s plan for publicly supported education had no place for women. In fact, he admitted he had never systematically contemplated the subject, and had thought about it only insofar as his daughters were concerned. Their education was designed so that when they became mothers they could educate their own daughters; they would not be responsible for educating their sons unless the “fathers be lost, be incapable, or be inattentive.” Although women might read some great poets—Pope, Dryden, Shakespeare—“with pleasure and improvement,” Jefferson advised that “too much poetry should not be indulged,” and novel reading should be avoided altogether. Becaus
e the French language was the universal language among nations and “now the depository of all science,” it was “an indispensable part of education for both sexes.” Education allowed for some attention to be paid to the amusements of life, and for women these were “dancing, drawing & musick.”82
Adams had a different approach to women’s education. Marriage to Abigail helped to make him remarkably respectful of women of intelligence and learning. He even joked with his friend Van der Kemp that he was terrified of “learned Ladies”; he felt “such a consciousness of Inferiority to them” that he could “scarcely speak in their presence.” That may have been true with some aristocratic women he had known in France, but once a learned lady, such as Mercy Otis Warren or John Quincy’s wife, Louisa Catherine, became his friend, he treated her as his intellectual equal. When in 1820 the educator and women’s rights activist Emma Willard sent Adams her pamphlet proposing publicly supported women’s seminaries, Adams endorsed the plan enthusiastically. “The Feminine Moiety of Mankind,” he told Willard, “deserve as much honour Esteem, and Respect, as the Male.” He advised his granddaughter that since she would be responsible for educating all her children, sons and daughters alike, she should become acquainted with all the great writers, bar none, who had dealt with both the “little Aerial World within us”—of intelligence and sensibility—as well as “the great World without us—of Heaven, Earth and Seas.”83
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