Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  Adams was obviously jealous of the fame Jefferson was getting as the author, not the draftsman, of the Declaration. In 1809 he even suggested to William Cunningham that he, Adams, had made his own declaration of independence from Great Britain as early as 1755. In a letter written in the year he graduated from college, he had predicted that as America became more populous than the mother country, the American people would inevitably transfer the seat of empire and set up for themselves in the New World. This 1755 letter was first published in 1807 and was widely circulated. In 1809 Adams referred to it as “my boyish letter” and playfully claimed that this 1755 letter was “demonstrative evidence that John Adams’ Declaration of Independence was one and twenty years older than Thomas Jefferson’s.”31

  In 1816 in a letter to Benjamin Rush’s son Richard, then James Madison’s attorney general, Adams offered a parody of some lines of Jonathan Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.” In his poem, Swift, whose view of human nature was even darker than Adams’s, developed a cynical maxim of La Rochefoucauld’s that stated “in the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something that does not displease us.” Adams imitated Swift’s lines, which had referred to his close friend John Arbuthnot, by saying

  Jefferson is no more my Friend,

  Who dares to Independence to pretend

  Which I was born to introduce

  Refin’d it first and Shewed its Use.

  Adams went on in this letter to Richard Rush to offer his own maxims concerning the arbitrariness of who was allowed into “the Temple of Fame.” “Mankind,” he said, “never give Credit to their true Benefactors,” and “deliberately rob the real Sages and Heroes of their Laurells and confer them on others who have done nothing to deserve them.” As an example, he pointed out that “Dr. Rush was a greater and better Man than Dr. Franklin; yet Rush was always persecuted and Franklin always adored.” For an additional example in a postscript, he told young Rush to look in the Journals of Congress for the 1774 Declaration of the Rights of the Colonies and for the resolutions of May 1776, and “then consider whether the Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776 is any thing more than a juvenile declamation founded on these two Documents”—documents that were drawn up by Adams himself. His jealousy was so palpable and was expressed so bluntly that more often than not his correspondents found it endearing.32

  When Jefferson was asked about the contributions of Franklin and Adams to the writing of the Declaration, he said that “the rough draught was communicated to those two gentlemen, who each of them made 2 or 3 short and verbal alterations only, but even this is laying more stress on mere composition than it merits; for that alone was mine.” But averse as he was to seeming vain, he wanted it understood that “the sentiments were of all America.”33

  Still, Jefferson had become increasingly proud of being the author of the Declaration and sensitive to suggestions that he was a mere draftsman who derived his ideas from elsewhere. Thus he was not at all happy when he learned from Adams in 1819 that an earlier declaration of independence had anticipated his famous document. Adams informed Jefferson that a resolution of independence supposedly issued by militia companies in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, on May 20, 1775, had been recently discovered. This declaration, he told Jefferson, was “fifteen months before your Declaration of Independence.” A physician named Joseph McKnitt Alexander had written an article for the Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette on April 30, 1819, within which he had included the resolves issued by the Mecklenburg militia companies. The resolves were republished in the June 5, 1819, issue of a Salem newspaper, the Essex Gazette, where Adams discovered them.

  In his article, Dr. Alexander contended that when the Mecklenburg militia companies had learned of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, they had passed a set of resolutions that dissolved “the political bands, which have connected us to the Mother Country, and hereby absolve ourselves from all allegiance to the British Crown.” After mentioning “the inherent and inalienable rights of man” and declaring themselves “a free and independent People,” the militia companies went on in language eerily similar to Jefferson’s Declaration to “solemnly pledge to each other our mutual cooperation, our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor.”34

  Adams was obviously excited by this discovery and initially thought the Mecklenburg resolutions were authentic. He told Jefferson that “the Genuine sense of America at that Moment was never so well expressed before or since.” By comparison, he said, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (and by implication perhaps Jefferson’s Declaration) was “a poor ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass.” Adams wrote the Reverend William Bentley of Salem that Jefferson “must have seen” the Mecklenburg declaration in 1775, since he “copied the spirit, the sense, and the expressions of it verbatim into his Declaration of the 4th of July, 1776.” He asked Bentley to have the printer of the Essex Gazette send him a half-dozen copies of the issue in which the Mecklenburg declaration had appeared, “whatever they may cost.”35

  Jefferson responded to Adams at once and claimed that the document was “spurious.” He thought it strange that no one in North Carolina or Virginia had ever mentioned it until now. Would not every advocate for independence have rung the glories of Mecklenburg County in the ears of all the doubters in 1775? he asked. Yet no one ever did. Now anyone who could authenticate the resolves was dead and the original document had burned. He couldn’t affirm that the document was “a fabrication,” but he would continue to believe it was, “until positive and solemn proof of it’s authenticity shall be produced.”36

  Jefferson made such a convincing case for the fraudulent character of the document that Adams agreed at once that it was a “fiction.” Contrary to what some historians have claimed, Adams was not guilty of any “duplicity.”37 He wrote immediately to Reverend Bentley to tell him that Jefferson’s explanation was “correct and exact” and “intirely satisfactory in all its parts.” Jefferson had persuaded him that “the pretended Mecklenburg Resolutions” were a fake or a hoax, and “ought to be called forgery’s” with the authors exposed to public resentment. “It will be difficult for Posterity to detect the Multitudinous falsehoods which were published from day to day during the Revolution, and ever since—but fictions of this kind, five and forty years after the pretended fact, ought to be discountenanced by every man of honor.”38

  As his initial excitement over the Mecklenburg resolutions suggests, Adams undoubtedly had a secret desire that Jefferson would turn out to be a plagiarizer, for the Declaration of Independence had taken on a sacred character that no one in 1776 had anticipated. It had become, as the Board of Visitors of Jefferson’s University of Virginia declared, “the fundamental act of union” of the United States. As such, Jefferson told Madison in 1823, our goal ought to be “to cherish the principles of the instrument in the bosoms of our own citizens.”

  Federalist critics of his role in writing the Declaration, such as Timothy Pickering (who claimed that he had gotten his information from John Adams), did not know what they were talking about. They claimed that the document “contained no new ideas, that it is a commonplace compilation, it’s sentiments hackneyed in Congress for two year before, and its essence contained in [James] Otis’s pamphlet.” This “may all be true,” Jefferson told Madison; he was not to be the judge. All he knew was that he had “turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it.” He had not been seeking originality. He then went on in his letter to Madison to defend Adams’s role in the Congress. “He supported the Declaration with zeal and ability fighting fearlessly for every word of it.”39

  In 1824 Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, acting under a resolution of Congress, sent Jefferson two facsimile copies of the Declaration. Jefferson was delighted, and took the Congress’s act as “evidence afforded of reverence for that instrument, and view in it a pledge of adhesion to its principles and of a sacred determination to maintain and p
erpetuate them.” This, he told John Quincy, was a “holy purpose.”40

  All the queries Jefferson was receiving about his authorship of the Declaration convinced him that the document had taken on a hallowed character; and he began to realize that the writing box or desk on which he had composed the Declaration might become sacredly significant. In 1825 he told his granddaughter Ellen Wayles Coolidge that he had been recently impressed with the reverence accorded William Penn’s chair in Philadelphia and it got him thinking. “If then things acquire a superstitious value because of their connection with particular persons, surely a connection with the great Charter of our Independence may give a value to what has been associated with that.” Although the writing box was plain and ordinary, he wanted Joseph Coolidge, his granddaughter’s husband, to have it. “Its imaginary value will increase with years, and if he lives to my age, or another half century, he may see it carried in the procession of our nation’s birthday, as the relics of the saints are in those of the Church.”41

  No wonder that in working out a brief list of his life’s achievements for his tombstone, Jefferson chose to have engraved “Author of the Declaration of Independence” first, followed by his authorship of the Virginia statute for religious freedom and his founding of the University of Virginia.

  • • •

  BY THE EARLY 1820S Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration had become a consolation, a justification, for a life that otherwise seemed to be spinning out of control. The final decade of Jefferson’s life was not a happy time. To be sure, he had become the Sage of Monticello, relaxing among his family and friends and holding court on the top of his mountain for the hordes of visiting admirers. Against much opposition, he had fulfilled his dream of establishing the University of Virginia in his neighborhood. And he had his thousands of exchanges with his many correspondents and his reconciliation with Adams, which became increasingly meaningful to him. But there was not much else to comfort him.

  The world around him, the world that he had done so much to create, was rapidly changing, and changing in ways that he found bewildering and sometimes even terrifying. The Revolution was unfolding in a radical and unforeseen manner. American society was becoming more democratic and more money-minded than he had anticipated. The economy had become wild and risky and unbelievably speculative. The people in whom he had put so much trust were behaving in ways he had not expected. During the final years of his life, he had moments of apprehension that the American Revolution to which he had devoted his life was in danger of failing. In response, he spoke and acted in ways that tended to violate the principles that he had lived by. He turned inward and began conjuring up thoughts, stirring up demons, and spouting dogmas that many subsequent historians and biographers have found embarrassing and puzzling.42

  He feared the dynamic commercial society that was emerging in the aftermath of the Revolution and hated all the capitalistic accouterments that went with it—banks, stock markets, liquid capital, and especially paper money. As a southerner used to thinking of commerce as the selling of staples to international markets, he had little or no understanding that all this credit and capital—the proliferation of paper money—was feeding the enormous expansion of America’s economy, an economy increasingly dominated by domestic trade in which the people of the nation carried on innumerable exchanges with one another and not with markets abroad. He told Adams; Albert Gallatin, who had been his secretary of the treasury; and all his other correspondents that the “Mania” for banknotes was ruining both individuals and the country. “All the members of our governments, general, special, and individual” have been “siesed by it’s delusions and corruptions.”43

  The only hope for the country, he told Adams in 1818, lay in the West. “Our greediness for wealth, and fantastical expense has degraded and will degrade the minds of our maritime citizens. These are the peculiar vices of commerce,” commerce for him still being identified with overseas trade. As far as he was concerned, the issue of hundreds of millions of dollars of paper currency was benefiting only speculators and gamblers. The paper money was merely “frothy bubbles” that no one was confident in holding. “We are now without any common measure of the value of property, and private fortunes are up or down at the will of the worst to our citizens.”44

  Although Jefferson thought that paper money was destroying the country, people seemed to want even more of it. How to convince them otherwise? He expected no relief from the state legislatures, “as little seems to be known of the principles of political economy as if nothing had ever been written or practiced on the subject.” Perhaps if he could bring into print an English translation of Destutt de Tracy’s Treatise on Political Economy, which he declared was “the best work on Political economy that has ever appeared,” he could expose the problems of the banks and the excessive printing of paper money.45

  Jefferson became almost desperate to bring this Treatise to the American public, and he worked hard—four to five hours a day for three months—to translate it into English. If the people and their representatives in the legislatures could read Destutt de Tracy’s Treatise, they would be impressed by its rationality and its science and so find evidence for curbing the excesses of paper money.

  No matter that Destutt de Tracy’s book had nothing to say about the kind of staple-producing economy of the South that was dependent on international markets and instead celebrated the kind of domestic economy that was emerging in the North. No matter that Destutt de Tracy directly denied some of Jefferson’s dearest and most fundamental convictions, including his belief that farmers had a special role to play in the nation. No matter too that this French liberal’s book condemned slavery and the “drones” and the “truly sterile class” of “the idle, who do nothing but live, nobly as it is termed, on the products of labours” of others. In contrast to the South, which remained “in languor and stagnation,” Destutt de Tracy praised the North for being “full of vigour and prosperity.”46

  Ultimately, what Jefferson was taken with was Destutt de Tracy’s strong condemnation of the wildcat banks and the issuing of paper money. “Paper money,” the French philosophe had written, “is the most culpable and most fatal of all fraudulent bankruptcies.” Indeed, “all paper money” was “a frenzy of despotism run mad.”47

  Jefferson agreed. In fact, he told Albert Gallatin that “we are undone, my dear Sir, if this banking mania be not suppressed.” Either the banks must be destroyed or the country would be. If translating and publishing Destutt de Tracy’s Treatise didn’t solve the problem of paper money, then things looked hopeless. Everyone, Jefferson said, would just have to sit back and endure the evils of paper money the way they endured hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural phenomena.48

  • • •

  ADAMS ALSO THOUGHT the dynamic world of the early republic was going to hell in a handbasket. He hated all the banks and their proliferating issues of paper money as much as Jefferson. He even called the rage for them “a Mania,” as Jefferson had. They were “the Madness of the Many for the Profit of a Few.”49 He told Jefferson that he agreed with him that all the state banks had created “a system of national Injustice,” by which public and private interest was sacrificed “to a few Aristocratical Friends and Favourites.”50

  Despite sharing Jefferson’s view on the evils of banks, Adams responded very differently to the wild and hellish world of the early republic. He was not surprised by it and came to believe that it was what he had expected all along. He praised Jefferson’s translation of Destutt de Tracy’s book as accurate and elegant and told him he had read as much of it as he could. “If it can destroy the Parasite Institutions of our country it will merit immortal honor.” But he wondered “how it has happened that religious liberty, fiscal science, coin and commerce, and every branch of political economy should have been better understood and more honestly practiced in that Frog land, than in any other country in the world.”51

  In f
act, Adams told Jefferson that he felt detached from the whole speculative and gambling mess, just as if he were viewing it from the hereafter. “We cannot choose,” he told Jefferson, “but smile at the gambols of Ambition Avarice Pleasure, Sport and Caprice here below.” He reminded Jefferson of a French fable in which the angels, thinking of man and his fine qualities, especially his being “a rational Creature,” set the whole of heaven into laughter. Man a rational creature! “How could any rational Being even dream that Man was a rational Creature?”52

  Adams enjoyed teasing Jefferson about all the failures of reason. Reason was unable, for example, to sort out the differences between the Spiritualists and the Materialists. “We may read Cudworth Clark Leibnitz, Berkly Hume Bolingbroke and Priestley and a million other Volumes in all Ages and be obliged at last to confess that We have learned nothing. Spirit and matter,” he told Jefferson in 1817, “still remain Riddles.” It was foolish to count on reason. “Vain Man! Mind Your own Business! Do no Wrong! Do all the good you can! Eat your Canvas back ducks, drink your burgundy, sleep your Siesta, when necessary, and Trust in God!”53