Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  He could never write such a history, for his papers were a mess. Besides, what could he say of his “own Vanity and Levity”? Thank God, he had no crimes, but “Follies, indiscretions and trifles enough and too many.” What about all “the Jealousy and Envy of those who have been my most intimate friends, Colleagues and Coadjutors? What of the malice and vengeance of unprovoked enemies?” It was said that Washington had “an insatiable thirst” for fame, but that Adams was “excessively careless of it.” He believed the saying was correct, that he had neglected his role in history. He could never bring himself “seriously to consider that I was a great Man, or of much importance or consideration in the world.” The few traces of his life must therefore go down to posterity “in as much confusion and distraction, as my life has been passed.”8

  Three years later, in 1809, he was still pondering the problems of history writing. He reminded Rush that he had “very solemn notions of the sanctity of History,” and once again invoked de Thou’s oath. Although he would not write his own history but leave it to others, he doubted “whether faithful History ever was or ever can be written.”9

  By the time Adams received clergyman Jedidiah Morse’s request for assistance in writing a history of the Revolution, in 1815, he could only sigh and shake his head, saying that he did not know “whether I ought to laugh or cry.” He had, he said, “little faith in history.” He read history as he read romances, he said, “believing what is probable and rejecting what I must.” The history of the past half century in America was already corrupted. If he were to write a true and honest history of that period, in accord with de Thou’s oath, a hundred critics from America, France, England, and Holland “would immediately appear and call me, to myself, and before the world, a gross liar and a perjured villain.” He despaired that all the concealed and unknown facts, those that “mark characters,” would ever see the light of day.10 He told Jefferson in 1817 that he had been “so little satisfied with Histories of the American Revolution, that I have long since, ceased to read them. The Truth is lost, in adulatory Panegyricks, and in vituperary Insolence.”11

  • • •

  ALL THIS INTEREST IN THE HISTORY of the Revolution created disputes over which state had actually initiated the Revolution. Was it Adams’s Massachusetts or Jefferson’s Virginia? In 1817 an excited Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, a man who was friendly with both Jefferson and Adams, wrote Jefferson about William Wirt’s Life of Patrick Henry, which had just been published. He told Jefferson that Wirt had quoted Jefferson saying that Henry “certainly gave the first impulse to the ball of the Revolution.” Waterhouse then went on in his impassioned letter with a lengthy critique of Wirt’s claim for Henry’s priority in beginning the Revolution. If Jefferson was correct about Henry, he said, “we in New England have been brought up in error.” Waterhouse said that he had been taught to believe that the Revolution began not with the Stamp Act in 1764, the time when, as Wirt claimed, Henry had made his mark, but three years earlier, in 1761, with James Otis of Massachusetts and his opposition to the writs of assistance (search warrants used by royal customs officials).

  Waterhouse said that he had derived his information about Otis from “the venerable” John Adams, “who in his old age shines in the full brightness of his faculties.” Quoting from letters he had received from Adams, Waterhouse wrote that “it was the wonderful powers of James Otis’s oratory that electrified Samuel Adams; who electrified & enlightened John Hancock, when they in combination with the worthies already mentioned, enlightened France, & the rest of the world.” By the worthies already mentioned, Adams meant young Washington, who at that time still “dwelt on the banks of the Patomack”; Jefferson, who “was a youth of fifteen”; and Henry, “the Demosthenes of Virginia,” who “had not yet raised his powerful voice against the insidious encroachments of Britain.”

  Perhaps not aware of how well the two ex-presidents knew each other, Waterhouse reminded Jefferson what a wonderful character the old New Englander was. “There is a good humour & facetiousness about him, which makes his company very agreeable to young people of both sexes. He is venerated visited, consulted & followed, as were some of the ancient Philosophers in Greece.”

  Waterhouse said that he had written Adams about Jefferson’s statement in Wirt’s book, and he quoted Adams’s reply. “As Mr. Jefferson has made the revolution a game of billiards, I will make it a game of shuttlecock.” Henry might have given the first impulse to the ball in Virginia, “but Otis’ battledore had struck the Shuttlecock up in the air in Massachusetts; and continued to keep it up for several years before Henry’s ball was touched.” According to Waterhouse, Adams had gone on to explain why he had said that Jefferson in 1761 was but a youth in college, “too intent on his classicks & sciences to know, think, or care about anything in Boston.” Since Adams was only twenty-five in 1761, and “Mr. Jefferson is at least nine, or ten years younger than me,” he could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen; “and he probably knew more of the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites than he did of what was passing in Boston.”12

  Jefferson replied at once to Waterhouse, well aware that whatever he said would be passed on to Adams. He admitted that he did say to Wirt something about Henry’s setting the ball going, but explained that Wirt in citing his remark had probably meant Virginia alone. But even if he didn’t, the question of “who commenced the revolution” was impossible to answer.13 Anxious to head off any trouble with Adams, Jefferson also wrote to inform him of Waterhouse’s letter. Appealing to Adams’s legal professionalism, he said that lawyers know that words always needed to be put in context and that in Wirt’s case that context was Virginia. “It would moreover be difficult to say at what moment the revolution began, and what incident set it in motion, as to fix the moment that the embryo becomes an animal, or the act which gives him a beginning.”14

  In response Adams agreed that it was difficult to say when the Revolution began. In his opinion it had actually started in the seventeenth century “as early as the first Plantation of the Country. Independence of Church and Parliament was a fixed Principle of our Predecessors in 1620 as it was of Sam. Adams and Chris. Gadsden in 1776.” Of course, 1620 was when the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower, and it was not the first plantation in America. Like many New Englanders, Adams tended to ignore the founding of the colony of Virginia in 1607, for it had had nothing to do with independence from the Church of England and Parliament.15

  Adams’s views about the priority of the revolutionary movement soon became public and aroused controversy. In March 1818, a very agitated Thomas Ritchie, the publisher of the Richmond Enquirer, wrote to Jefferson that he had read in a Baltimore paper John Adams’s letter to Hezekiah Niles “in which he attempts to strip Virginia of the merit of originating the War of Independence, and transferring it to Massachusetts.” In his letter to Niles, the founding editor of Niles’ Weekly Register, Adams claimed that the awakening and revival of American principles had taken place in Massachusetts as early as 1750 with a sermon by Jonathan Mayhew, well before Patrick Henry supposedly got the ball of revolution rolling. Ritchie told Jefferson that he was grateful for what the Massachusetts patriots had done, but as a proud Virginian he couldn’t sit by patiently and have his state stripped of the laurels to which he always had assumed it was entitled. He asked Jefferson to clarify this matter and settle the issue.16

  Jefferson replied at once and sent Ritchie an extract of his letter to Waterhouse. As usual, he was calm and reasonable, saying that he did not think the issue was “susceptible of dispute.” Everyone will decide for himself who first set the ball of revolution in motion. Some will think an opinion voiced in private conversation would count. Others will believe a lawyer’s argument denying the validity of a law would be the initial impulse. Still others would think that nothing short of a formal declaration would satisfy. He then went on to disparage all this jealousy between the states. He thought a state, like an individual, ought not
to be praising itself. Leave that judgment to the world. Americans weren’t noted for their modesty. “It has been said, and I am afraid not entirely without foundation, that ours is the most boasting and braggadocio nation on earth.” We Virginians, he said, “have been held up as arrogating all praise and power to our own state, and it has not been without some ill effect.” It might have been wiser for Virginia to have been more delicate and unassuming, which would help “conciliate the suffrage of our sister states.” As always, Jefferson’s sensibility was highly refined—it was what made him so attractive.17

  • • •

  LATE IN HIS LIFE AND AFTER A DECADE of his renewed correspondence with Adams, Jefferson had to bear with embarrassing revelations of Adams’s earlier opinion of his presidency. In 1823 the publication of Adams’s correspondence with William Cunningham, a distant relative, could well have destroyed the reconciliation. In 1804 Cunningham had asked Adams for information that could be used against Jefferson’s reelection. With his usual frankness, Adams had declaimed against “the awful spirit of democracy” that, like an artful villain, was seducing the people and would bring about their ruin. And he had told Cunningham of his experience with Jefferson’s “intrigues.” He admitted that Jefferson had talent, but he said that “candour and sincerity belong to other people,” not to him. With Jefferson, “cool, dispassionate, and deliberate insidiousness never arrived at greater perfection.”18

  Although Cunningham had promised never to publish Adams’s letters during the ex-president’s lifetime, he committed suicide in May 1823, and his son immediately published the correspondence for political purposes. Young Cunningham claimed that Adams had written the letters in 1803–1804 in order to destroy Jefferson’s reputation and raise “himself and his family upon the ruins of republicanism.”19 Cunningham hoped their publication would discredit the character of the Adams family and thus undermine John Quincy Adams’s upcoming campaign for the presidency, in 1824.

  Of course, Adams was mortified that Jefferson would read what Adams had said about him in the bitter aftermath of Adams’s defeat for the presidency and feared that the reconciliation would be damaged, if not destroyed.

  With his usual good manners and his deep desire to maintain the friendship, Jefferson immediately dismissed this “wicked” attempt “to draw a curtain between you and myself.” He assured Adams that he was “incapable of receiving the slightest impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth and wisdom, and to sow tares between friends who have been such for near half a century.” Indeed, he said, “it would be strange . . . if, at our years, we were to go back an age to hunt up imaginary, or forgotten facts, to disturb the repose of affections so sweetening to the evening of our lives.” He beseeched Adams to ignore the whole business and put it “among the things which have never happened.”20

  According to Adams, his entire family read Jefferson’s letter and universally exclaimed that it was “the best letter that ever was written. . . . How generous! How noble! How magnanimous!” everyone said. But Adams believed it was just such a letter as he expected from Jefferson, “only it was infinitely better expressed.” This was exactly the heartwarming response that Jefferson wanted.21

  Jefferson seems to have valued the correspondence and the renewed relationship so much that he scrupulously avoided mentioning any of his views of Adams’s earlier monarchical beliefs. While carrying on his correspondence with Adams in their retirement years, he certainly remained convinced that Adams had once been a monarchist, even if he wasn’t one now.

  Shortly before his death, Jefferson vividly recalled returning from France and confronting all the monarchical sentiments in New York in 1790. The Federalists of the 1820s, he told his protégé William Short in 1825, were trying to whitewash the monarchical history of their party and “prove that the sun does not shine at mid-day.” The Federalists in 1790 were monarchists. Hamilton was one and so was Adams. “Can anyone read Mr. Adams’ defence of the American constitutions,” he asked, “without seeing that he was a monarchist?” Yet he would never have brought up Adams’s monarchism with Adams himself, sensing what an explosion of passion it would set off.22

  • • •

  AS THE SIGNERS OF THE Declaration of Independence died off, more and more attention was paid to the survivors. In fact, Jefferson and Adams kept a tally of who among the signers were still alive. When Robert R. Livingston died in 1813, Adams and Jefferson became the last two survivors of the committee that had drafted the Declaration (Benjamin Franklin had died in 1790 and Roger Sherman in 1793). In January 1812, Jefferson informed Adams that “of the signers of the Declaration of Independence I see now living not more than half a dozen on your side of the Potomak, and on this side, myself alone.” (Actually there were ten signers of the Declaration, including Jefferson and Adams, still alive in 1812.) Benjamin Rush and George Clymer died the same year as Livingston, 1813. Rush’s death—“a better man than Rush could not have left us”—prompted Jefferson once again to write Adams to ask how many were left. He knew of four, including Adams and himself. He said he was the only one south of the Potomac. And “we too must go; and that ere long.”23

  Conscious of himself as the principal author of the Declaration, Jefferson was obviously more interested in the document and its signers than Adams. Initially, he and others had not made much of the preamble or his authorship. Attention at first focused on the document’s conclusion: “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States.” Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration was not widely known; indeed, one of the first references to his writing the Declaration was made by Yale College president Ezra Stiles in 1783, in which he said that Jefferson had “poured the soul of the continent into the monumental act of independence.” During the 1780s, Jefferson was mentioned as one of the members of the committee that drafted the Declaration, but he was not singled out and celebrated as the author.24

  Jefferson himself actually helped draw attention to the significance of the Declaration. While hosting the young painter John Trumbull in Paris in the 1780s, Jefferson listened to the artist’s ambitious plans to paint a series of military battles of the Revolution. Apparently, Jefferson suggested to Trumbull that he ought to consider painting the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. He even sketched out the scene in Independence Hall; unfortunately, it contained some architectural inaccuracies that Trumbull included in his painting.25

  When Adams learned of Trumbull’s intention to paint the Declaration of Independence, he urged him to be accurate. “Truth, Nature, Fact, should be your guide. Let not our Posterity be deluded by fictions under pretence of poetical or graphical Licenses.” But Adams was not very encouraging. Not only did he question whether debates or arguments could ever be depicted on canvas, but he told Trumbull that all the arts, including painting, had always been “enlisted on the Side of Despotism and Superstition” to the detriment of “the Rights of Mankind.” He further deflated Trumbull’s ambitions by claiming that no Americans were interested in the history of the Revolution anyway. “I see no disposition to celebrate or remember, or even Curiosity to enquire into the Characters, Actions, or Events of the Revolution.”26

  Despite the cantankerous letters he had received from Adams, Trumbull thanked him for his support, telling him that in painting a great moral and political event he had enabled the United States to break from previous artistic conventions. He hoped “the Example thus set will be hereafter followed, in employing the Arts in the Service of Religion, Morality and Freedom.”27

  Jefferson dealt with Trumbull very differently. He praised Trumbull’s plans and hoped that their fellow citizens in the Congress would “honor themselves, their country and yourself by preserving these monuments of our revolutionary achievements.”28

  • • •

  SINCE TRUMBULL’S PAINTING of the Declaration was officially exposed to public view only in 1819, it
was not the source of the heightened interest in the document or in Jefferson’s authorship. Actually, Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration first became well known during the partisan struggles of the 1790s. To counter the vicious Federalist attacks on Jefferson, his Republican followers had begun touting his writing of the Declaration. They made much of the preamble that emphasized equality, inalienable rights, and the right of revolution—dangerous ideas to the Federalists frightened by the French Revolution. Republican newspapers began referring to the Declaration as “our great American charter” drawn up by “the immortal Jefferson.” When someone mentioned the similarity of the Declaration to some of the writings of John Locke, the Federalists were quick to pick this up and use it to disparage the originality in Jefferson’s authorship. Whenever the Federalists had asked what services Mr. Jefferson had ever rendered the country, the Republicans had always replied that “he was the author of our Declaration of Independence.” But now, the Federalists gloated, it turned out that he had “borrowed” or “compiled” the Declaration from Locke’s writings. All this Federalist belittling of Jefferson’s authorship was to no avail. When Jefferson served as president, his sole authorship of the Declaration became even more firmly established.29

  Adams did not take this claim of Jefferson’s authorship well. Back in 1776, he had not believed that drafting the Declaration was all that important, especially compared with the heavy burden of congressional committee work that he was bearing. By 1805 he had come to realize that Jefferson was being lavishly celebrated for writing the Declaration. This in turn led him to lament to Rush that the scenery surrounding the activity of public life was often more important than the character of the actors. “Was there ever a Coup de Theater, that had so great an effect as Jefferson’s Penmanship of the Declaration of Independence?” Adams felt that the real business of bringing about the Revolution had been behind the scenes, where he had done much of the work. He had never put much stock in the addresses and documents of the Congress. They were “Dress and ornament rather than Body, Soul or Substance.” Although he later confessed that he was wrong about denigrating the addresses of the Congress, “for these things were necessary to give Popularity to Our cause both at home and abroad,” he nonetheless felt that Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration had been a mere “Theatrical Show,” a performance, something decorative that had captured the attention of people but was not substantially significant. But alas, he moaned, “Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that: all the Glory of it.”30