Whether it was a cause or a consequence of Adams’s newfound zest is impossible to know, but the reconciliation with Thomas Jefferson played a crucial role in carrying Adams past the morose resentment of his early retirement years. Beginning in 1812, Adams and Jefferson exchanged letters on a regular basis for fourteen years, until both legendary leaders died on the same day, which also happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Of the 158 letters exchanged, Adams wrote 109, more than doubling the pace of the correspondence from Monticello and usually setting the agenda for the subjects discussed. From the perspective of posterity, it was a friendship made in heaven, interrupted by unpleasant political and party squabbles in the 1790s, now miraculously retrieved in time for the two patriarchs to stroll arm-in-arm toward immortality. “Jefferson is as tough as a lignum vitae knot,” Adams exclaimed to Rush at the start of the exchange, marvelling at the clear and strong handwriting—no quiverations were allowed at Monticello—and admiring the famous Jefferson style: “Not one symptom of decay or decline can I discern in it.”2
Once begun, the correspondence between the two patriarchs proceeded on this affectionate note. And once completed, it quickly became a landmark in American letters and eventually a classic, some would say the classic statement of the founding generation. Sensibilities as different as Woodrow Wilson and Ezra Pound have celebrated its intellectual significance. In the twentieth century, theatre companies and public radio stations have sponsored readings from the text; publishers have issued full and abridged editions in paperback; and schoolchildren are occasionally required to memorize the most evocative passages. Adams and Jefferson, as both men surely suspected, were sending letters to posterity as much as to each other.3
The fact that the letters were ever written at all was almost as much a miracle as the simultaneous death of the two patriarchs and constitutes what is probably the clearest sign of Adams’s victory over his private demons and doubts. For Adams had to overcome the bitterness and resentment he had been harboring toward Jefferson from the start of the former’s term as president and throughout his own early retirement years at Quincy. Jefferson was a “shadow man,” he told friends, whose greatest talent was enigma. His character was “like the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see and make no noise.” When Rush told Adams that he had dreamed that the Sage of Monticello and the Sage of Quincy were reunited, Adams countered that Rush should “take a Nap and dream for my instruction and Edification the character of Jefferson and his administration….” There was no doubt, Adams concluded coldly, that such a dream would turn into a nightmare. When he was governor of Virginia and then again when he was president, Jefferson had exhibited “a total Incapacity for Government or War.” The embargo had been a complete failure; the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson’s major achievement, had been accomplished in violation of his own beliefs about federal power; his persistent opposition to the decisions of John Marshall and the Supreme Court threatened the independence of the judiciary; he had left the nation “infinitely worse than he found it, and that from his own error or ignorance.”4
Then there was Jefferson’s status as a slaveowner. Adams claimed to give no credence to the scandalous stories about Jefferson’s alleged relationship with Sally Hemings, his mulatto slave. As a fellow victim of similarly venomous vendettas, Adams empathized. But he went on to speculate that the allegation was “a natural and almost inevitable consequence of the foul Contagion in the human Character, Negro Slavery.” Jefferson was seriously contaminated by that contagion and could not escape the prevalent suspicion that “there was not a planter in Virginia who could not reckon among his slaves a number of his children.” Even though the Sally Hemings story was probably not true, Adams surmised with obvious satisfaction that it would remain “a blot on his Character” because it symbolized the inherently immoral condition in which all slaveowners, Jefferson included, lived.5
Finally, there was the matter of the past friendship between Adams and Jefferson. There is no question that the two men became close friends during the revolutionary struggle and the peace negotiations in Paris. Abigail even claimed that, in the 1780s, Jefferson was, as she put it, “the only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom and reserve.” And during the 1790s, even as the split between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans generated bitter and impassioned conflict that led to the creation of two political parties, the Hamiltonian wing of the Federalists worried constantly that Adams and Jefferson would draw on their vaunted friendship to strike a political compromise that might leave the High Federalists out of power. To be sure, when Jefferson spurned Adams’s offer to play a major role in his administration, he committed the unpardonable sin, at least according to the Adams creed—he chose party over country and personal ambition over friendship. This wound festered and left a scar that, in some respects, never completely healed. But Adams was cordial toward Jefferson in the aftermath of the election of 1800, had him for dinner at the presidential mansion before the inauguration and, in the eyes of the High Federalists, evidenced less hostility toward the man from Monticello than toward his fellow Federalists. As Fisher Ames explained it, Adams had always retained “a strong revolutionary taint in his mind, [and] admires the characters, principles and means which that revolutionary system…seems to legitimate, and…holds cheap any reputation that was not then founded and top’d off.” In short, the brotherly bond established in 1776 linked Adams and Jefferson in ways that Adams would never wholly repudiate.6
Throughout the early years of his retirement, however, as the anger over his defeat stewed and brewed inside him, Adams denied that a friendship with Jefferson had ever existed. “You are much mistaken,” he explained to William Cunningham in 1804, “when you say that no man living have so much knowledge of Mr. Jefferson’s transactions as myself.” Adams claimed that he and Jefferson were never close: “I know but little concerning him.” Then he went on to describe the almost constant personal interaction between the two men, from the Continental Congress in 1775–76, through the negotiations in Paris and the diplomatic efforts in London, then as fellow members of the Washington administration. The narrative conveyed just the opposite conclusion that Adams intended; no one in public life, save Madison, knew Jefferson so well and so intimately. But Adams held firmly to his denial of a close relationship. Although the Virginian “always proferred great friendship,” he observed cynically, Jefferson had secretly supported and salaried “almost every villain he could find who had been an enemy to me.” They were not now and never had been friends, Adams insisted, as if shouting the point more loudly would somehow make it true.7
Chinks in the Adams armor began to appear in 1809. Under the pressure of Rush’s incessant prodding and his reported dream of a reconciliation between the two patriarchs, Adams reiterated his disingenuous claim that he felt “no Resentment or Animosity against the Gentleman and abhor the Idea of blackening his Character or transmitting him in odious Colours to Posterity.” Then he opened a small crack in his pride through which the old friendship might crawl. “If I should receive a Letter from him however,” Adams observed curtly, “I should not fail to acknowledge and answer it.” A correspondence was not out of the question, he was suggesting, but Jefferson would have to go first.8
The melting away of pride and resentment continued over the ensuing months, helped along by Rush’s persistent dreams and by Adams’s emerging capacity to poke fun at his own stubbornness. Perhaps Jefferson should be excused for whatever mistakes he had made, Adams conceded, because he was a mere youth: “Jefferson was always but a Boy to me…. I am bold to say that I was his Preceptor on Politicks and taught him every thing that has been good and solid in his whole Political Conduct.” How could one hold a grudge against a disciple? In this buoyant and jocular mood it was even difficult to recall just what had caused the break between the two men. “It lay as a confused recollection in my own head,” Adams wrote Rush, “that th
e only Flit between Jefferson and me…was occasioned by a Motion for Congress to sit on Saturday.” Or was the source of the trouble the argument that he and Jefferson once had with Washington about hairstyles? Jefferson preferred it straight and he preferred it curled. Or was it the other way around?9
Then, in 1811, Adams was visited at Quincy by Edward Coles, a Virginian close to Jefferson. In the course of the conversation Adams let it be known that his political disagreements with Jefferson had never destroyed his affection for the man. “I always loved Jefferson,” he told Coles, “and still love him.” When news of this exchange reached Monticello, as Adams knew it would, Jefferson responded heartily, if a bit less affectionately. “This is enough for me,” he wrote Rush, adding that he “knew him [Adams] to be always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes incorrect and precipitate in his judgments.” The major caveat, however, came at the end, when Jefferson told Rush that he had always defended Adams’s character to others, “with the single exception as to his political opinions.” This was like claiming that the Pope was usually reliable, except when he declared himself on matters of faith and morals. Here Rush performed his mischievous magic. He silently edited out the offensive passages and forwarded the favorable remarks to Quincy. That was how it stood at the close of the year, the two former friends and living legends sniffing around the edges of a possible reconciliation; but like wary old dogs, they were still reluctant to close the distance.10
In the end it was Adams who made the decisive move. The first letter went out from Quincy to Monticello on January 1, 1812, timing that suggests Adams had decided to revive the relationship as one of his resolutions for the new year. It was a short and cordial note, relaying family news and referring to “two pieces of Homespun” which he had sent along as a gift by separate packet. He apprised Rush soon thereafter, protecting his pride behind a barrage of jokes: “Your dream is out…. You have wrought wonders! You have made peace between powers that never were at War! You have reconciled Friends that never were at Enmity…. In short, the mighty defunct Potentates of Mount Wollaston and Monticello by your sorceries…are again in being.” This was the playfully evasive and self-consciously nonchalant posture he maintained whenever the question of his reconciliation with Jefferson came up. There was nothing momentous or historic about the reunion, he insisted. There had never been any serious break between the two men most responsible for the Declaration of Independence. “It was only as if one sailor had met a brother sailor, after twenty-five years’ absence,” Adams quipped, “and had accosted him, how fare you, Jack?”11
There was a discernible awkwardness as well as a slight stumble at the start of the correspondence. Jefferson presumed, quite plausibly, that the “two pieces of Homespun” Adams was sending referred to domestically produced clothing, a nice symbol of the American economic response to the embargo; it also recalled the colonial response to British taxation policies in the 1760s, a fitting reminder of the good old days when Adams and Jefferson first joined the movement for American independence. And so Jefferson responded with a lengthy letter on the benefits of domestic manufacturing, only to discover afterwards that Adams had intended the homespun reference as a metaphor. His gift turned out to be a copy of John Quincy’s two-volume work, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory. The exchange had begun on the same note that the friendship had floundered, an elemental misunderstanding.12
It quickly recovered, as both men demonstrated that they required no instruction in rhetoric from John Quincy or anyone else. “And so we have gone on,” wrote Jefferson in his lyrical style, “and so we shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man.” The “puzzled and prospering” phrase was vintage Jeffersonian prose, a melodic and alliterative choice of words conveying the paradoxical character of America’s march toward its destiny. Not to be outdone, Adams shot back with an eloquent alliteration of his own. “Whatever a peevish Patriarch might say,” he apprised Jefferson, “I have never seen the day in which I could say I had no Pleasure; or that I have had more Pain than Pleasure.” The playful word duel continued throughout the correspondence. When Jefferson wrote: “My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving fear astern,” Adams replied in kind: “I admire your Navigation and should like to sail with you, either in your Bark or in my own, alongside of yours; Hope with her gay Ensigns displayed at the Prow; fear with her Hobgoblins behind the Stern.” Both men were, of course, splendid stylists, with Jefferson heading Adams’s personal list of prominent Americans who knew how to write a sentence. (That was the major reason, Adams liked to remind his friends, he had chosen Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence in the first place.) Throughout the correspondence, however, and most especially at its start, the formality and elegance of the language suggests a level of self-conscious literary craftsmanship uncommon even for two of the most accomplished letterwriters of the era.13
Beyond their calculated eloquence, the early letters are careful, diplomatic, eager to avoid the political controversies which might still be tender topics for the other man: “But whither is senile garrulity leading me?” asked Jefferson rhetorically: “Into politics, of which I have taken leave. I think little of them, and say less. I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier.” Quite conscious of Adams’s easily aroused irritability and sense of propriety, Jefferson felt compelled to wonder whether “in the race of life, you do not keep, in its physical decline, the same distance ahead of me which you have done in political honors and achievements.” This gracious gesture, which indirectly endorsed Adams’s earlier opinion to Rush that Jefferson was his protégé, prompted a gracious response from Quincy. Jefferson had now taken the lead on all counts, Adams acknowledged; Adams was only leading in the sense that he would be first to the grave.
Later on, Adams took refuge in one of the recurrent motifs that both men used as a safe haven throughout the correspondence—the dwindling list of surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence: “I may rationally hope to be the first to depart,” he apprised Jefferson, “and as you are the youngest and the most energetic in mind and body, you may therefore rationally hope to be the last to take your flight.” Like the last person to retire from the hearth in the evening, Jefferson would be the last one “to set up and rake the ashes over the coals….” But danger lurked behind even the most careful remarks. If Jefferson thought the reference to Thucydides and Tacitus would keep the dialogue a safe distance from politics, Adams reminded him that even the classics, especially those particular authors, spoke directly to his own pessimism. The old nerve endings were still vibrating. “I have read Thucydides and Tacitus, so often, and at such distant Periods of my Life,” he recalled, “that elegant, profound and enchanting is their Style, I am weary of them,” claiming that their descriptions of Athens and Greece in decline were strikingly reminiscent of “my own Times and my own Life.” Then he apologized for this outbreak of self-pity, joking that “My Senectutal Loquacity has more than retaliated your ‘Senile Garrulity.’”14
A mutual sense of the delicacy and fragility of their newly recovered friendship explains in part the initial politeness and obvious care with which each man composed his thoughts and arranged his words. Their trust was newly won and incomplete; nor, for that matter, would it ever be total. For example, when Adams asked Jefferson to assist in obtaining a judgeship for Samuel Malcolm, the former private secretary to Adams, Jefferson promised he would try. He then wrote Madison to say Malcolm was “a strong federalist” and therefore an inappropriate choice. Later he wrote Adams to express regret at failing to place Malcolm, claiming the request to President Madison had arrived too late.15
Adams was guilty of similar acts of duplicity. In 1819, he reported reading a copy of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, a document purportedly drafted by a group of citizens in North Carolina in May of 1775 and containing language similar to Jefferson’s
later version of the Declaration. Jefferson responded immediately, contesting the authenticity of the Mecklenburg document, which seemed to cast doubts on the originality of his own famous draft. Adams promptly reassured Jefferson that he believed “the Mecklenburg Resolutions are a fiction” and that it had always seemed “utterly incredible that they should be genuine.” Meanwhile, however, he was telling other correspondents just the opposite. “I could as soon believe that the dozen flowers of the Hydrangia now before my Eyes were the work of chance,” he snickered, “as that the Mecklenburg Resolutions and Mr. Jefferson’s declaration were not derived one from the other.”16
The special character of the correspondence—the sheer literary quality, the classical references and proses, letters that take on the tone of treatises—followed naturally from their mutual realization that these private letters also had a public audience. Jefferson expressed amazement “that a printer has had the effrontery to propose to me the letting him publish it [the correspondence with Adams],” then wondered why “these people think they have a right to everything secret or sacred.” Adams was more realistic, or perhaps more forthright. “This correspondence,” he joked to Jefferson, “I hope will be concealed as long as Hutchinsons and Olivers,” referring to the secret letters of Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver that were intercepted by American revolutionaries and published as evidence of a British conspiracy to abolish colonial liberties. The most important readers, however, were not contemporary snoopers, but subsequent generations. Adams said as much to Jefferson, envisioning the day when “your letters will all be published in volumes…which will be read with delight in future ages.” Adams’s obsession with his historic reputation, of course, was both obvious and notorious. Jefferson’s concern was equally powerful, but more disguised and controlled. It seems fair to conclude that both men sat down to write the other in a more self-conscious frame of mind than they adopted when corresponding with less renowned friends and associates. This was not a casual correspondence. Words were chosen with one eye on posterity.17
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