This was vintage Jefferson, the old Jefferson whose confidence in America and the future was once again clear and absolute.
• • •
BY EARLY 1826 BOTH MEN sensed they were near the end of their lives. Adams had lost most of his teeth, his eyesight was poor, and he could walk only with great difficulty. Jefferson was losing his hearing and was suffering from a painful inflammation of his prostate, for which he was regularly taking laudanum. By mid-June Jefferson knew he was dying, and he summoned his doctor. “I am like an old watch,” he said, “with a pinion worn out here, and a wheel there, until it can go no longer.”3 By early July he was in and out of consciousness and desperate to reach the Fourth, the anniversary of his Declaration. On at least one occasion during the night of July 3, he asked if it was yet the Fourth, and his doctor replied that it soon would be. Early the next morning he awoke briefly and called for his servants. Finally, at fifty minutes past noon on the Fourth of July he died, his last hope fulfilled. For someone who liked to be in control, it was fitting that he had managed his own death.
At the same time five hundred miles away in Massachusetts, Adams too lay dying and, like Jefferson, was struggling to reach the Fourth. A story later circulated that on July 3 Daniel Webster visited Adams and asked how he was. “Not very well,” Adams was supposed to have replied. “I am living in a very old house, Mr. Webster, and, from all that I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair.” If the story is not true, it ought to be, for it captured Adams’s characteristic humor. According to a memoir published in 1827 by William Cranch, who was Abigail’s nephew and the chief judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, Adams awoke on the Fourth of July to bells ringing and cannons firing. Asked whether he knew what day it was, he was said to have replied, “O yes, it is the glorious 4th of July—God bless it—God bless you all.” He then slipped into unconsciousness, but before he died at about six p.m., according to legend, he briefly awoke to say “Thomas Jefferson survives.”4
If Adams indeed did say this, he was of course technically wrong, for Jefferson had died five hours before him. But in a larger, more meaningful sense Adams turned out to be prophetically correct. In the mind of Americans Jefferson did survive Adams, and he survived him with a powerful significance for the nation that Adams, despite all his revolutionary efforts, all his contributions to American constitutionalism, and all of his realism, could never match.
No doubt, Adams said many things applicable to the nation he helped to create. He was a constitutionalist concerned with the abuses of governmental power and a realist concerned with the inequality of society. Because Americans could not count on the natural benevolence of people, he thought they must have institutional restraints to control the anarchic impulses of people and the selfish interests of the oligarchs. He was always the realist, quick to mock the foolishness of the world. As he said in his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials in 1770, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”5 He was pessimistic, even cynical, about human nature. He didn’t deny the existence of “human Reason and human Conscience,” but he thought they were “not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm.” All the passions of ambition, avarice, love, resentment, and so on, he told Jefferson, possessed so much subtlety and eloquence “that they insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and convert both to their Party.”6 He sought always to ensure that the facts of life were not hidden and distorted by people’s passions and their tendency to dissemble.
Adams knew it was easy for facts to get buried and twisted, for people were naturally selfish and power-hungry. “Ambition is one of the more ungovernable Passions of the human Heart,” he said in 1772. “The Love of Power is insatiable and uncontrollable.” In retirement he was repeating the same thing to Jefferson. “Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God service when it is violating all his Laws.” However much “you and your Party may have ridiculed . . . Checks and Ballances,” he told Jefferson in 1813, they were “our only Security.” Even every one of the various Christian denominations would persecute the others “if it had unchecked and unbalanced Power. . . . Know thyself, human Nature.” In perhaps the most profound statement he ever made, and surely his greatest contribution to American constitutionalism, he declared “that Power was never to be trusted without a Check.”7
• • •
NEARLY EVERYTHING ADAMS said about human nature and the character of his countrymen may have been utterly accurate and grounded in fact, but there was nothing inspiring about it, nothing that could sustain a nation. Adams even doubted whether America could be a real nation. Could Americans become the “one people” that Jefferson promised in the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence? In America, he said, there was nothing like “the Patria of the Romans, the Fatherland of the Dutch, or the Patrie of the French.” All he saw in America was an appalling diversity of religious denominations and ethnicities. In 1813 he counted nineteen different religious sects in the country. “We are such an Hotch potch of people,” he concluded, “such an omnium gatherum of English, Irish, German, Dutch Sweedes, French &c. that it is difficult to give a name to the Country, characteristic of the people.”8
In denying Jefferson’s enlightened assertion that all men were created equal, Adams thought he was just being honest and realistic and that those who believed in equality were living with an illusion. “None will pretend,” he said, “that all are born of dispositions exactly alike,—of equal weight; equal strength; equal length; equal delicacy of nerves; equal elasticity of muscles; equal complexions; equal figure, grace, or beauty.” In 1814 he recalled visiting a foundlings’ hospital in France in the 1780s. Examining the babies, who were all less than four days old, he had never seen “a greater variety, or more striking inequalities” anywhere in Europe. Some were ugly, others beautiful; some were stupid, others sensible. “They were all born to equal rights, but to very different fortunes; to very different success and influence in life.”9
People might be equal in the sight of God or in having equal rights in law, but to Adams the fact that “every being has a right to his own, as clear, as moral, as sacred, as any other being has” did not negate the obvious natural inequalities among individuals; these were inevitable and impossible to eradicate. People were born unequal, and these inequalities were the products of nature, not nurture. “To teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life,” he said, “is as great a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French revolution.”10
Inequality was a fact of life: some people were born smarter, more handsome, more personable, more wealthy than others. Education—the great American panacea—could not really change things. To be sure, education and the dissemination of knowledge were important for the common people: “May every human being,—man, woman, and child,—be as well informed as possible.” But, Adams warned, Americans must not assume that increased knowledge among ordinary people would make them equal to the aristocracy, to the elites. On the contrary: it would just accentuate the inequality natural to every society. “Knowledge, therefore, as well as genius, strength, activity, industry, beauty, and twenty other things, will forever be a natural cause of aristocracy.”11
Unlike most of his countrymen, Adams was preoccupied with the existence of inequality, not equality. He believed that aristocracies would inevitably emerge to dominate all societies, including that of the United States, and these aristocracies would not necessarily be based on talent and merit; ancestry and money, especially money, would be mo
re important.
Such views were too dark, too pessimistic, too contrary to the hopes of the Enlightenment, to be acceptable. Adams’s ideas were not at all what his fellow Americans wanted or needed to hear. In fact, there was scarcely an American myth, an American belief, and an American dream that Adams did not challenge. While his countrymen were celebrating the uniqueness of their nation and its special role in history, he claimed the opposite: he said the United States was no different from other nations; it was just as corrupt, just as sinful, just as vicious, as other countries. America’s future was as likely to be tragic as well as comic, “for,” said Adams, “we have no Patent of Exemption from the common Lot of Humanity.”12
However true, however correct, however in accord with stubborn facts Adams’s ideas might have been, they were incapable of inspiring and sustaining the United States, or any nation for that matter. Jefferson, by contrast, could and did inspire and nourish the people of the United States. Despite or perhaps because of his innocence and naïve optimism, he offered his fellow Americans a set of stirring ideals that has carried them and their country through all of their many ordeals.
Hezekiah Niles, the most important journalist of the early nineteenth century, knew the importance of Jefferson. Niles wanted to help establish “a NATIONAL CHARACTER” for Americans, and despite the victory over Britain in the War of 1812, he knew that eliminating the old English habits of mind was essential to establishing that national character. If we were to have a new nation, Niles declared in a public appeal to Jefferson in 1817, we needed new principles, new ideas, new ways of thinking. “We seek a new revolution, not less important, perhaps, in its consequences than that of 1776—a revolution in letters, a shaking off of the fetters of the mind.” To do this, he said, “we must begin with the establishment of first principles,” which were best found in the Declaration of Independence. Thus the Declaration “shall be the base of all the rest—the common reference in cases of doubt and difficulty.”13
Abraham Lincoln probably never saw Niles’s appeal to Jefferson, but he had the same insight. When he said in 1858 “all honor to Jefferson,” he paid homage to the one Founder who he knew could explain why the breakup of the Union could not be allowed and why so many lives had to be sacrificed to maintain that Union. Lincoln knew what the Revolution had been about and what it implied not just for Americans but for all humanity—because Jefferson had told him so. The United States was a new republican nation in a world of monarchies, a grand experiment in self-government, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Half the American people, said Lincoln in 1858, had no direct blood connection to the Founders of the nation. Either these German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian citizens had come from Europe themselves or their ancestors had, and they had settled in America, “finding themselves our equals in all things.” Although these immigrants may have had no actual connection in blood with the revolutionary generation that could make them feel part of the rest of the nation, they had, said Lincoln, “that old Declaration of Independence” with its expression of the moral principle of equality to draw upon. This moral principle, which was “applicable to all men and all times,” made all these different peoples one with the Founders, “as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.” This emphasis on liberty and equality, he said, was “the electric cord . . . that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”14
With words like these, drawing on the meaning of the American Revolution best voiced by Jefferson, Lincoln expressed what many Americans felt about themselves and the future of all mankind. Liberty and equality, said Lincoln, were promised “not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.” The Revolution, he said, “gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance” in the race of life. But if the American experiment in self-government failed, then this hope for the future would be lost. That was why the Civil War was worth all the sacrifices.15
These were Jefferson’s words, Jefferson’s ideas, Jefferson’s principles, that Lincoln drew upon. Adams was too questioning, too contrarian, too cynical, to offer any such support for America’s nationhood. Adams had no answer for the great problem of American diversity: how the great variety of individuals in America with all their different ethnicities, races, and religions could be brought together into one nation. Jefferson did have an answer. As Lincoln grasped better than anyone, Jefferson offered Americans a set of beliefs that through the generations have supplied a bond that holds together the most diverse nation that history has ever known. Since now the whole world is in the United States, nothing but Jefferson’s ideals can turn such an assortment of different individuals into the “one people” that the Declaration says we are. To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something. And that something is what Jefferson declared.
That’s why we honor Jefferson and not Adams.
The young John and Abigail Adams by Benjamin Blyth (1766). These portraits, drawn in pastel by an obscure Massachusetts artist, reveal much more about Abigail than about John. While his picture portrays a plain, pudgy, and expressionless figure, Abigail’s reveals a sharp, confident, and rather commanding personality.
Official presidential portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale (1800). This portrait expresses the confidence and optimism of Jefferson at the height of his powers.
Portrait of John Adams by Gilbert Stuart (1824). This likeness captures the sparkle and crustiness of Adams as an old man.
Portrait of Jefferson by Gilbert Stuart (1805). Stuart was not happy with a portrait he had done of Jefferson in 1800, and in 1805 he insisted on another sitting. Not until 1821 did Jefferson finally receive a portrait of himself painted by Stuart.
Portraits of Adams and Jefferson by Mather Brown (1788). In the 1780s Jefferson began collecting portraits of those he considered “worthies” in the history of America. He commissioned Brown, a young American artist who was abroad studying with Benjamin West, to do these portraits of himself and Adams. While Brown depicted Adams as rather old and tired looking, he portrayed Jefferson as aloof, aristocratic, and dressed to the nines in his elegant French clothes. This portrait is the earliest known likeness of Jefferson.
Adams’s Montezillo (top) and Jefferson’s Monticello (bottom). The difference between their homes tells us much about the two men. That Adams in 1819 began calling his house “Montezillo a little Hill” reveals his characteristic facetiousness, something Jefferson never displayed.
Portrait of Benjamin Rush by Thomas Sully (c. 1813). If it weren’t for an intervention by Rush, a physician, Adams and Jefferson would never have been reconciled after the election of 1800.
Portrait of Abigail Adams by Gilbert Stuart (1800–1815). Stuart began this portrait in 1800 but did not finish it until 1815. In her old age, Abigail retained the same sharp and piercing look as in her youth.
Self-portrait of Maria Cosway (1787). In addition to being an accomplished painter who exhibited more than thirty of her paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Cosway was a talented composer and musician and a European celebrity.
Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull (1832). Trumbull initially thought he would paint only the famous battles of the Revolution, but Jefferson apparently suggested that he include the signing of the Declaration of Independence in his depictions of great events.
Washington, D.C., in a watercolor by William Russell Birch (1800). In 1800 Abigail and her entourage got lost trying to make their way through the woods to the primitive city of Washington. One can travel miles, she said, “without seeing any human being.”
Portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph-Siffre
d Duplessis (1778). Duplessis’s portrait was just one of many likenesses of Franklin that the French created. Franklin’s image appeared everywhere—in numerous prints and on medallions, snuffboxes, candy boxes, rings, clocks, vases, dishes, handkerchiefs, and pocketknives, making him, as Adams complained, “one of the most curious Characters in History.”
Portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette by Joseph-Désiré Court (1785). An enlightened and enthusiastic liberal who initially promoted the reforms that led to the French Revolution, Lafayette was beloved by Jefferson but dismissed as ignorant and naïve by Adams.
Portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart (1796). Washington possessed what Adams and even Jefferson lacked: the gift of natural charismatic leadership.
Portrait of Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull (1806). Hamilton was the one founder who was hated by both Adams and Jefferson.
Portrait of James Madison by John Vanderlyn (1816). Madison was Jefferson’s closest friend and confidant. He never quite understood what Jefferson saw in Adams.
Engraving of Thomas Paine by William Sharp (1793). Adams claimed in 1805 that the age he and Jefferson were living through was anything but Paine’s “Age of Reason.” But he had little doubt that this man Paine, “such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf,” had had the greatest influence over all their lives. Never before in history, said Adams, had “the poltroonery of mankind” allowed anyone “to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.”
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