Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

Indicative of how superficial at times his relationship with Adams could be, Jefferson tried to avoid even mentioning the Missouri crisis to his Massachusetts friend. Adams, of course, was less inhibited, but even he realized there were limits to what he could say on the sensitive issue of slavery. Invoking the nautical image that Jefferson had often used, Adams hoped that the crisis over the expansion of slavery into the West would “follow the other Waves under the Ship and do no harm.” Although he realized, he told Jefferson, that it was “high treason to express a doubt of the perpetual duration of our vast American Empire,” he feared that there were demagogues who “might rend this mighty Fabric in twain” or even “produce as many Nations in North America as there are in Europe.”80

  With no response from Jefferson, Adams two months later expressed a further wish that the Missouri question would “not sett too narrow limits to the Power and Respectability of the United States,” and hoped that “some good natural way or other will be found out to untie this very intricate knot.”81 Privately, he was opposed to allowing slavery in Missouri, and, as he told his daughter-in-law, he had “no doubt of the right of Congress to stop the progress of slavery.”82

  After a year of silence, Jefferson finally revealed his anxieties on the Missouri question to Adams. He wondered what “the Holy alliance, in and out of Congress” meant to do “with us,” meaning slaveholding southerners. Those who called it “the Missouri question,” he said, scarcely scratched the surface of the problem. The real issue, he told Adams, in terms that vividly exposed his fears for the future of the South, involved those “in the states afflicted with this unfortunate population.” Were “our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?” If Congress had “the power to regulate the conditions of the inhabitants of the states, within the states, it will be but another exercise of that power that all shall be free.” Would there then be two confederacies like Athens and Sparta and another Peloponnesian war “to settle the ascendancy between them?” Or was the tocsin announcing merely a servile war, a war between blacks and whites that he had long predicted? He could only hope that events would be delayed long enough for both he and Adams to get out of the way.83

  Jefferson’s belated disclosure of his feelings on the Missouri crisis allowed Adams an opening to respond. He said that he had seen slavery hanging over the United States “like a black cloud for half a Century.” He had actually envisioned “Armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in air, shining in Armour.” He had been “so terrified with this Phenomenon” that he always said to southern gentlemen that he could not “comprehend this object; I must leave it to you.” He would never force a measure against Jefferson’s judgment.84

  • • •

  FEARFUL AND APPREHENSIVE over the future of slavery to a degree he had never felt before, Jefferson became a more strident defender of states’ rights than he had been even in 1798, when he penned the Kentucky resolution justifying the right of a state to nullify federal laws. In 1825 he proposed sending to the Virginia assembly a “Solemn Declaration and Protest” against the possibility of the federal government promoting internal improvements of roads and canals in violation of the strict principles of the Constitution. Although his proposal did not advocate breaking up the Union, it declared that there were worse calamities than that: “submission to a government of unlimited powers.” It was “only when the hope of avoiding this shall become absolutely desperate that further forbearance could not be indulged.” In the meantime, the state would urge its citizens to comply with the acts of the federal Congress, until the state legislature should decide otherwise, even though those acts were “usurpations, and against which, in point of right, we do protest as null and void, and never to be quoted as precedents of right.”85

  His friend Madison talked him out of submitting this extraordinary document, arguing that Virginia ought not any longer be taking leadership “in opposing the obnoxious career of Congress, or, rather of their Constituents.” Given the “prejudices” against Virginia in the country, the state would be better off letting others take the lead. Besides, said Madison, “the Phalanx” in favor of internal improvements and consolidation might break apart of its own accord.86

  While Madison remained a nationalist, even upholding the right of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution, Jefferson lent his wholehearted support to the views of the most dogmatic, impassioned, and sectional-minded elements in Virginia, including the arch-states’-rightists John Randolph of Roanoke and Spencer Roane. His anguish over “the degeneracy of public opinion from our original and free principles” intensified.87 As he became more and more parochial and increasingly alarmed by northern aggrandizement, his zeal for states’ rights became fanatical.

  • • •

  IN THE END JEFFERSON’S supreme faith in the people became riddled with doubts. The people did not seem to know who he was, what he had done. Was this the new generation on which he had rested all his hopes? Because of the Missouri crisis over the expansion of slavery, he sensed that he was to die in the apprehension that all the sacrifices of the generation of 1776 to acquire self-government and happiness for their country were “to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.” During the last year of his life, at a moment when he was experiencing “a kind of uneasiness I never had before,” Jefferson was pathetically reduced to listing his contributions during sixty-one years of public service in order to justify a legislative favor. He realized he had overvalued himself, and the reluctance of the Virginia legislature to respond to his request was “a deadly blast to all my peace of mind during my remaining days.” When his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph suggested that he might have to sell Monticello to cover his debts, he “turned quite white & set for some time silent.” No wonder he felt “over whelmed at the prospect of the situation in which I may leave my family,” and no wonder he felt cast off. “All, all dead!” he wrote in 1825 to his and Adams’s mutual friend Adrian Van der Kemp, “and ourselves left alone midst a new generation whom we know not, and who know not us.”88

  On the eve of the golden jubilee of the nation, Jefferson had become deeply depressed over both its fate and the fate of his family. Ultimately, he had been victimized by his own rosy temperament, by his absolute confidence in the people, and by his naïve hopefulness in the future.

  • • •

  AS JEFFERSON BECAME MORE TROUBLED and pessimistic, Adams became more serene if not optimistic. The two friends seemed to reverse their outlooks on the world. Not only was Adams being elected to many committees, but his fellow citizens in Massachusetts were honoring him more than they ever had before. “You cannot imagine of how much importance I am become,” he told his son John Quincy in 1816. Although this was said jokingly, Adams felt the difference. “After being buffeted calumniated courted, neglected by turns all my Lifetime, I am lately invited into all Societies and much caressed.” His home became a gathering place “where,” according to young Josiah Quincy, who had occasionally read and been an amanuensis for the ex-president, “the fair ones of Milton and Quincy met in harmony.” Adams was in his element: he told amusing anecdotes and entertained young girls on the “ancient belles and beaux of this place.” On Adams’s eighty-ninth birthday, Quincy said that he had never seen him “look better or converse with more spirit.”89

  When Adams reached his eighties, he became more accepting of things and actually conceded that progress had occurred. The world was “better than we found it,” he told his old friend and Harvard classmate David Sewall. “Superstition, persecution and Bigotry are some what abated, Governments are a little ameliorated, science and Literature are greatly improved and more widely spread.”90 Adams became more mellow and more forgiving of his enemies. Not only had he reconciled with Jefferson, but he patched up his quarrel with Mercy Otis Warren before her death.91 He was less and less bothered by the critics who buzzed about him. “Their bite in former times tingled,” he told his son J
ohn Quincy, “but I am grown almost as insensible, as a Boston Dray horse, in September.”92

  In 1824 even John Taylor, the conscience of the Republican Party and the severest critic of Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States of America, came around. Taylor knew he was dying and wanted to write Adams to express his admiration for his integrity and patriotism despite their great differences over political theory. In the exchange of dozens of letters, Adams’s honesty and willingness to engage with Taylor’s arguments—Adams may in fact have been the only person who actually read Taylor’s lengthy and convoluted book—had won over the Virginian’s heart, and Adams was touched by the compliments.93

  Others too were writing him to tell him how much they admired his Defence, “a Book,” Adams believed, “that has been misunderstood, misrepresented and abused more than any other, except the Bible.” In fact, some even apologized for having formerly maligned the book before having actually read it. One such person, “convinced of his errour,” had become an admirer after belatedly reading the work. “Great is Truth,” said Adams, “and it will prevail.” “My plain Writings had been misunderstood by many, misrepresented by more, and Vilified and Annathematised by multitudes, who never read them.” They had nothing to recommend them “but stubborn facts.” He had the consolation to know that his writings had been translated into French, German, and Spanish, and that “they are now contributing to introduce Representative Governments into various Nations of Europe” just as they had influenced the establishment of America’s constitutions, “both of the Individual States and the Nation at large.” Now the Latin American states were using his writings.94

  At last he felt his great work might be properly appreciated. Thomas Cooper, a friend of Dr. Priestley, had recently published in the Port Folio “a very handsome eulogium on the Work.” And most important, as Adams bragged in 1820 to one of the recent converts to his point of view, “the learned and scientific President Jefferson has in letters to me acknowledged that I was right, and that he was wrong”—an exaggeration no doubt, but emotionally accurate. Adams apologized to his correspondents for the vanity he was expressing, but he believed that all the injustice he had suffered over the years ought to excuse his egotism. At long last he felt that he might achieve the fame that all the Founders sought.95

  With all of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren multiplying around him (“You have no idea of the prolific quality of the New England Adamses,” he told Van der Kemp), he was as happy as he ever had been. Having all these children surrounding him was “as delightful as any thing we find in this pleasant world, as I call it.” Certainly, he said, he could not call it “a vale of tears.”96

  Given some of his personal circumstances, Adams had every reason to feel the world to be “a vale of tears.” His son Charles had died in 1800 at age thirty of alcoholism, and he had lost his daughter Nabby to cancer in 1813. Although John Quincy’s career was progressing brilliantly, his son Thomas had moved back to Quincy and was drinking heavily. No doubt Abigail’s death in 1818 devastated him, but he recovered. Six months later, he told Jefferson that although “the World is dead” and he could no longer hold a pen, “I still live and enjoy life.”97

  Knowing of Jefferson’s ballooning debts, Adams could take comfort that his personal affairs were in order. He felt increasingly sure of his judgment and of his assessments of reality. He had never been happy with Jefferson’s idea of withholding commerce as a weapon in international conflicts. It was true that he had accepted a temporary embargo against Britain in 1794 to protect American seamen and ships, “but not with the faintest hope that it would influence the British Councils.” In fact, he had come to believe that a war was preferable to trying to enforce nonimportation laws and embargoes.98 His predictions about the futility of Jefferson’s embargo and the War of 1812 had been borne out. He told Benjamin Waterhouse in 1813 that he may not have the “Foresight of the Tumble-Bug: Yet in my Conscience, I believe, I have more and clearer, than this Nation or its Government for fourteen years past.”99

  He had been right about so many things, especially about the French Revolution. “What a mighty bubble!” he said to Jefferson. The French Revolution had failed, and by 1815 the Bourbons—Louis XVIII—were back on the throne of France, and the whirlwind that had raised Napoleon had “blowed him a Way to St. Helena.” Adams hoped that “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Humanity will never again . . . blindly surrender themselves to an unbounded Ambition for national Conquests.” Adams never taunted Jefferson directly by saying “I told you so” over his mistaken faith in the French Revolution, but indirectly he did. He delighted in reminding Jefferson how the Poet Laureate Robert Southey had become the laughingstock of Britain, America, and all of Europe over the 1817 republication of his poetic pro-republican drama of 1794, Wat Tyler. Since “poor Laureate Southey” was “writhing in Torments” and suffering as much as Bonaparte, perhaps Jefferson—who had held out equally high hopes for republicanism in Europe—was writhing and suffering as well.100

  Jefferson had ignored Adams’s gibes and had put the best face on affairs in France as he could. He observed that “friends of a limited monarchy there consider the popular representation as much improved by the late alteration, and confident it will in the end produce a fixed government in which an elective body, fairly representative of the people will be an efficient element.” Adams, of course, had no such assurance and doubted whether the French had the character to sustain even a mixed monarchy.101

  Adams had always had qualms about Jefferson’s dreams and illusions, and at last events had vindicated him. He became more confident with Jefferson than he had been earlier. His letters became more ebullient and more self-assured. He told Jefferson that “every line” from him “exhilarates my spirits and gives me a glow of pleasure.” He lifted Jefferson’s own spirits by telling him that “I look back with rapture to those golden days when Virginia and Massachusetts lived and acted together like a band of brothers.” He was more optimistic about the future than Jefferson. He hoped that it would not be long before people would be saying “the golden age is returning,” and then the world would hear no more of Hartford conventions or Virginian threats of 1798 to the Union.102

  He knew that slavery was the greatest threat to this vision and that he could not easily discuss it with Jefferson. Adams told Richard Rush that he had “the sweet consolation to reflect, that I never owned a slave” and had always been opposed to the institution of slavery.103 “The bible itself has not authority in these days to reconcile negro slavery to reason, justice, & humanity.” He shuddered when he thought of the “calamities which slavery is likely to produce in this country.” While Jefferson was struggling mightily with the problem, Adams was confident that on this most complicated issue facing the country he had always been on the right side of history.104

  To top off his new sense of contentment, his son John Quincy in March 1825 became president of the United States. Many saw what this meant to Adams. Young Josiah Quincy and his mother visited Montezillo, the Adams home, to congratulate the ex-president on the election of his son. They found him “considerably affected by the fulfillment of his highest wishes.” Mrs. Quincy compared Adams to “that old man who was pronounced by Solon to be the happiest of mortals when he expired on hearing of his son’s success at the Olympic Games.” The comparison visibly moved Adams and “tears of joy rolled down his cheek.” But he retained enough of his cynicism to predict that his son would pay for this honor. “He will make one man ungrateful and a hundred men his enemies for every office he can bestow.”105

  According to Quincy, Adams actually looked forward to his death, when like Cicero he would meet up with all those he had known. “Nothing,” he said, “would tempt me to go back” and relive his life, which was what Jefferson was willing to do. “I agree with my old friend, Dr. Franklin, who used to say on this subject, ‘We are all invited to a great entertainment.
Your carriage comes first to the door; but we shall all meet there.’” If Franklin had become his “old friend,” then Adams had indeed mellowed.106

  EPILOGUE

  THE NATIONAL JUBILEE

  THE TWO OLD PATRIOTS were well aware of the approaching golden jubilee of the nation on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Several weeks before the jubilee, various organizations had invited the aged ex-presidents to participate in celebrations of the anniversary. Adams expressed his regrets to a committee of the citizens of Quincy, explaining that the “feeble State” of his health prevented his attendance at the town’s festivities. He told the committee that the day that “these United States” became independent was “a Memorable epoch in the annals of the human race, destined, in future history, to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall, in time to come, be shaped, by the human mind.”1

  This response, so typical of Adams’s ambivalence about America and the future, was very different from the one Jefferson made to the committee representing the citizens of Washington, D.C. Jefferson also expressed his regrets, but with far more effusive politeness than Adams, saying that he could not attend the celebration on account of “ill health.” But he hoped that the American people would continue to approve the choice the men of 1776 had made in declaring independence. He then went on with one of his greatest perorations, which outdid anything that Adams could have said. May the American experiment in democracy, he declared,

  be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. . . . All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.2