Friends Divided
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Someone who has been teaching and writing history as long as I have accumulates a host of debts that can never be repaid, let alone adequately acknowledged. So I thank all those who have helped me in a variety of ways over the past several decades. I especially want to thank my wife, Louise, my editor in chief and my chief supporter over the years. I am also grateful for all the help I received from the editors and their associates at Penguin Random House, including Kiara Barrow, Christopher Richards, Jane Cavolina, Trent Duffy, Sophie Fels, and Bruce Giffords. My thanks too to the staff of the Rockefeller Library at Brown University, where this book was written; they couldn’t have been more helpful.
For this book I am once again grateful for the support given me by Scott Moyers, the publisher of Penguin Press. Not only has he edited and published several of my books (and recommended titles for a couple of them), but he also suggested the topic of this book. I had originally intended to write about only John Adams, but he proposed comparing Adams with Thomas Jefferson. Fortunately, I took his suggestion, and I learned more about both men by pitting them against each other.
I have dedicated this book to the editors of the Papers of John Adams and The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. I could not have written the book, at least not in a decent amount of time, without the documents they have edited and made available to the public. We historians write monographs and books that are inevitably ephemeral; but the editors of the papers of these two great patriots, indeed all the many documentary editors of America’s past, are producing work for the ages.
All these documentary editors seldom receive the recognition and acclaim they deserve. We historians, indeed, the entire country, are deeply indebted to them for making available to us in print, whether online or in letterpress editions, the many documents of America’s past. Because the coming generations of students no longer read cursive handwriting, the documentary collections like those of Adams and Jefferson will become all the more important. For most scholars and students in the future the original handwritten documents of American history will remain more or less inaccessible, expressed in a foreign language not easily deciphered.
NOTES
—
Because spelling and other forms of grammar were still unsettled in the late eighteenth century, reproducing the writing of that time in modern form presents some difficulty. John Adams tended to capitalize all his nouns, and Jefferson always spelled the possessive “its” as “it’s.” To acknowledge all the peculiarities of these writers would inevitably clutter up the text with numerous usages of “[sic].” Therefore, I have chosen to reproduce as accurately as possible the writing of the period as the people at the time wrote it and to leave it to the reader to adjust to the eccentricities of the various writers.
ABBREVIATIONS OF SOURCES
AA: Abigail Adams
AFC: L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence, 12 vols. to date (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1963– )
AFC–MHS: Adams Family Correspondence in uncorrected typescript at the Massachusetts Historical Society
AHR: American Historical Review
BR: Benjamin Rush
Cappon: Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959)
JA: John Adams
JA, Diary; JA, Autobiography: L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961)
JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775; JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1775–1783: Gordon S. Wood, ed., John Adams: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1783, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 2011)
JA: Writings from the New Nation: Gordon S. Wood, ed., John Adams: Writings from the New Nation (New York: Library of America, 2016)
JER: Journal of the Early Republic
JM: James Madison
JQA: John Quincy Adams
Letters of Rush: Benjamin Rush, Letters, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951)
Old Family Letters: Alexander Biddle, ed., Old Family Letters (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892)
PJA: Robert J. Taylor et al., eds., Papers of John Adams, 18 vols. to date (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1977– )
PJA–MH: Papers of John Adams in uncorrected typescript at the Massachusetts Historical Society
PTJ: Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 41 vols. to date (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950– )
PTJ: RS: J. Jefferson Looney et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, 12 vols. to date (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004– )
Republic of Letters: James Morton Smith, ed., The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, 3 vols. (New York: Norton, 1995)
Spur of Fame: John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1980)
TJ: Thomas Jefferson
TJ: Writings: Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984)
WMQ: William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser.
Works of JA: Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856)
PROLOGUE: THE EULOGIES
1.“Eulogy Pronounced at Boston, Massachusetts, August 2, 1826, by Daniel Webster,” in A Selection of Eulogies Pronounced in the Several States, in Honor of Those Illustrious Patriots and Statesmen, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Hartford: D. F. Robinson and Co., 1826), 193. On the Jubilee, see L. H. Butterfield, “The Jubilee of Independence July 4, 1826,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 61 (1953): 119–40; and Andrew Burstein, America’s Jubilee (New York: Knopf, 2001).
2.Samuel L. Knapp, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Boston, Massachusetts, August 2, 1826,” and Caleb Cushing, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Newburyport, Massachusetts, July 16, 1826,” in Selection of Eulogies, 175, 23, 175.
3.Samuel Smith, “Eulogy, Pronounced in Baltimore, Maryland, July 20th 1826,” and William Wirt, “Eulogy, Pronounced at the City of Washington, October 19, 1826,” in Selection of Eulogies, 72, 379.
4.Cushing, “Eulogy,” and Peleg Sprague, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Hallowell, Maine, July, 1826,” in Selection of Eulogies, 7, 300, 48, 149.
5.Knapp, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 184.
6.Cushing, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 28.
7.Knapp, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 185.
8.Wirt, “Eulogy,” Cushing, “Eulogy,” and Smith, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 380, 51, 88.
9.Cushing, “Eulogy,” and Wirt, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 25, 380.
10.Cushing, “Eulogy,” and Webster, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 20, 233.
11.John Tyler, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Richmond, Virginia, July 11, 1826,” and William Johnson, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Charleston, South Carolina, August 3, 1826,” in Selection of Eulogies, 7, 300.
12.Sprague, “Eulogy,” and William F. Thornton, “Eulogy Pronounced at Alexandria, District of Columbia, August 10, 1826,” in Selection of Eulogies, 149, 341.
13.Merrill Peterson, The Jeffersonian Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 234.
14.BR to JA, 17 Feb. 1812, Letters of Rush, 2:1127.
ONE: CONTRASTS
1.JA to Adrian Van der Kemp, 20 Feb. 1806, PJA–MHS. Russell Kirk, in his influential work The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1985), considered Adams “the founder of true conservatism in America”
(p. 71).
2.Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, 4 March 1789–5 March 1791, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen Veit, vol. 9, The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 275, 306.
3.JA, Diary, 2:362; Diary of William Maclay, 278, 19, 11, 33.
4.“The Memoirs of Madison Hemings,” in Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 247.
5.Jonathan Sewall to Judge Joseph Lee, 21 Sept. 1787, AFC, 1:136–37n. The editors point out that by 1787 Sewall had taken to spelling his name “Sewell.” (Sewall spelled the possessive “its” the way Jefferson always did, “it’s.”) Adams’s personality seems to have resembled that of Dr. Samuel Johnson as described by James Boswell: “hard to please and easily offended, impetuous and irritable in his temper, but of a most humane and benevolent heart.” Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett, eds., Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D (New York: The Literary Guild, 1936), 7.
6.JA to JQA, 22 Jan. 1817, AFC–MHS.
7.JA to Charles Carroll, 2 Aug. 1820, PJA–MHS; JA to TJ, 12 Dec. 1816, Cappon, 2:499.
8.TJ to Nathaniel Burwell, 14 Mar. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:532. In 1771 Jefferson told a young man who had asked for advice about building a library that “the entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant.” But since the young man admitted that he possessed only the “capacity of a common reader who understands but little of the classics and who has not leisure for any intricate or tedious study,” Jefferson wasn’t necessarily speaking for his own tastes, which as an adult did not involve much reading of fiction and novels. TJ to Robert Skipwith, 3 Aug. 1771, PTJ, 1:76–77; Skipwith to TJ, 17 July 1771, ibid., 1:74–75; Douglas L. Wilson, Jefferson’s Books (Lynchburg, Va.: Monticello, 1993), 21–22.
9.TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 64. See Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 91–164.
10.TJ to JM, 20 Sept. 1785, Republic of Letters, 1:385; TJ to Giovanni Fabbroni, 8 June 1778, PTJ, 2:195–96.
11.Hugh Howard, Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson: Rediscovering the Founding Fathers of American Architecture (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 11.
12.Seymour Howard, “Jefferson’s Art Gallery,” The Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 583–600.
13.PTJ, 7:383; James Traub, John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 124.
14.Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782, ed. Howard C. Rice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 2:391.
15.JA to J. B. Binon, 7 Feb. 1819, PJA–MHS.
16.JA to George Washington Adams, 27 May 1816, AFC–MHS.
17.JA to AA, 10 May 1777, AFC, 2:235; JA to Henry Laurens, 24 Oct. 1779, PJA, 8:224. Adams’s vivid description of the painting was as follows: “The Picture represents a Coach, with four Horses, running down a steep Mountain, and rushing on to the middle of a very high Bridge, over a large River. The Foundations of the whole Bridge, give Way, in a Moment, and the Carriage, the Horses, the Timbers, Stones, and all, in a Chaos are falling through the Air down to the Water. The Horror of the Horses, the Coachman, the Footman, the Gentlemen and Ladies in the Carriage, is Strongly painted in their Countenances and Gestures, as well as the Simpathy and Terror of others in Boats upon the River and many others on shore, on each side of the River.” The editors of the Adams Papers did not identify the painting, but it is almost certainly The Collapse of a Wooden Bridge, by Casanova, who painted several such disaster paintings. It is now in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Rennes and can be viewed online. I owe the identification of this painting to Christopher S. Wood.
18.JA, Autobiography, 3:305. According to Christopher S. Wood, the painting that Adams recalled was probably The Last Supper by Jacob Jordaens, now located in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.
19.JA to AA, 27 Apr. 1777, AFC, 2:225; JA to AA, 28 Apr. 1777, ibid., 2:227; JA to John Trumbull, 1 Jan. 1817, PJA–MHS; JA to Benjamin Waterhouse, 26 Feb. 1817, ibid.
20.JA to AA, Apr.–May 1780, AFC, 3:332–33.
21.TJ to JM, 20 Sept. 1785, Republic of Letters, 1:385.
22.TJ to Benjamin Harrison, 12 Jan. 1785, PTJ, 7:600; George Washington to TJ, 1 Aug. 1786, ibid., 10:186; TJ to Nathaniel Macon, 22 Jan. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:384–87. By 1800 the much copied Houdon statue of Washington was erected in the Virginia state capitol. The statue by Antonio Canova was installed in the capitol of North Carolina in 1822, but was destroyed by fire in 1831.
23.TJ to Charles McPherson, 25 Feb. 1773, PTJ, 1:96.
24.TJ to Harrison, 12 Jan. 1785, PTJ, 7:600; Washington to TJ, 1 Aug. 1786, ibid., 10:186; TJ to Macon, 22 Jan. 1816, PTJ: RS, 16:385–86.
25.JA to AA, post 12 May 1780, AFC, 3:342.
26.JA to Cotton Tufts, 9 Apr. 1764, AFC, 1:20.
27.JA, “Thoughts on Government,” PJA, 4:86; JA to James Warren, 17 June 1782, ibid., 13:128; JA to Benjamin Franklin, 27 July 1784, ibid., 16:285.
28.TJ to Charles Clay, 29 Jan. 1815, PTJ: RS, 8:212.
29.TJ to JA, 28 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:389.
30.TJ to Marquis de Chastellux, 2 Sept. 1785, TJ: Writings, 826–28.
31.Ellen Randolph Coolidge to TJ, 1 Aug. 1825, in The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Edwin Morris Betts and James Adam Bear Jr. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 454–57.
32.JA to Jeremy Belknap, 21 Mar. 1795, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 313–14. Prior to the Revolution, JA was involved in four cases in which slaves in Massachusetts sued for their freedom. In each case he was the attorney for the master. “Slavery,” in The Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1965), 2:48.
33.Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 51.
34.JA to Robert J. Evans, 8 June 1819, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 647.
35.JA to Evans, 8 June 1819, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 647–48.
36.JA, Diary, 1:39.
37.Lewis Preston Summers, History of Southwest Virginia, 1746–1786 (Richmond: J. L. Hill Co., 1903), 79, 26, 27.
38.Rufus Rockwell Wilson, ed., Burnaby’s Travels Through North America (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 55. Andrew Burnaby, an English clergyman, traveled in Virginia in 1759–1760.
39.TJ to William Wirt, 5 Aug. 1815, PTJ: RS, 8:641–46; William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1817), 33–34; TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 164.
40.TJ to Stevens Thompson Mason, 27 Oct. 1799, PTJ, 31:222; TJ to Thomas Leiper, 21 Feb. 1801, ibid., 33:50; Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 2016), 78.
41.Christa Dierksheide, Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 49–50; Lucia Stanton, “Thomas Jefferson: Planter and Farmer,” in A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Francis D. Cogliano (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley and Sons, 2012), 260–61; TJ to Joel Yancey, 17 Jan. 1819, in Edwin Morris Betts, ed., Jefferson’s Farm Book (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1999), 43.
42.Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 46–47.
43.McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 47.
44.TJ, Autobiography, in TJ: Writings, 32, 3.
45.TJ, Autobiography, in TJ: Writings, 3.
46.JA, Autobiography, 3:256.
47.JA, Autobiography, 3:257
; Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 4–6, 50–51.
48.JA, Diary, 1:12.
49.JA, Diary, 1:33.
50.JA, Diary, 1:25.
51.JA, Diary, 1:67–68.
52.JA, Diary, 1:7–8, 37, 10.
53.TJ to Nichols Lewis, 11 July 1788, PTJ, 13:339–44.
54.Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
55.Douglas L. Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson’s Early Notebooks,” WMQ 42 (1985): 433–41.
56.TJ to Vancey, 17 Jan. 1819, in Betts, Jefferson’s Farm Book, 43.
57.James Reid, “The Religion of the Bible and Religion of K[ing] W[illiam] County Compared,” in The Colonial Virginia Satirist: Mid-Eighteenth Century Commentaries on Politics, Religion, and Society, ed. Richard Beale Davis, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new ser. 57, pt. 1 (1967), 567.
58.Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 61.
59.JA to Joseph Hawley, 25 Nov. 1775, PJA, 3:316.
60.JA to Hawley, 25 Nov. 1775, PJA, 3:316; JA to James Warren, 15 June 1776, ibid., 4:316.
61.William Manning, a Billerica farmer and entrepreneur, claimed that in Massachusetts in the 1790s gentlemen constituted one out of eight male citizens. Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., “William Manning’s The Key of Libberty,” WMQ 13 (1956): 220. For a modernized version, see Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, eds., The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “A Laborer,” 1747–1814 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 138.