In fact, he liked to say that the very act of worrying was itself evidence that he had not succumbed to senility. He told Josiah Quincy that “human society, like the ocean, needed commotion to keep it from putrefying.” He wanted to worry; it was a sign of life. “For my own part,” he insisted, “I should not like to live in the Millennium. It would be the most sickish life imaginable.” Biblical descriptions of life in the hereafter seemed thoroughly boring to him. He preferred Cicero’s description in De Senectute, where the next world was a reunion of old friends and antagonists: “That is just how I feel,” he explained, “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.’”46
Gala visits from Lafayette and the entire Corps of Cadets at West Point provided occasions for spirited displays of public oratory, which served to exhibit his persisting powers. But he was happiest and most himself in more informal and intimate gatherings of family, friends, and neighbors. “It is a surprise,” wrote Josiah Quincy in his journal after one visit, “to find a great personage so simple, so perfectly natural, so thoroughly human.”47
Thanks in large part to the young Quincy’s journal accounts, we can catch glimpses of his conversation and flashes of the inimitable Adams style still flourishing at the end. At age eighty-nine, for example, he greeted an equally elderly woman whom he had known in his youth with the salutation: “What! Madam, shall we not go walk in Cupid’s Grove together?” After an embarrassed pause, the woman, remembering the local lovers’ lane of old, replied: “Ah, sir, it would not be the first time we walked together.” Or there was the time he proceeded to demonstrate his innovative approach to statecraft, recalling that he had once confounded the Turkish ambassador by blowing smoke rings throughout their interview, delighting his audience with the same skill as he told the story. Then there was the time a group of young men gathered at the Adams homestead to debate the strengths and weaknesses of the several Christian sects; they were shocked to hear the old sage complain about the intolerance of all Christians, then advocate “the old Roman system of permitting every man to worship how and what he pleased.” When one of the young men observed that this was paganism, Adams agreed that it was, and laughed heartily. Another young man reported hearing that, in the frontier settlements of Kentucky, “everybody was either a bigot or an atheist.” To which Adams replied that “it was pretty much the same all the world over.”48
The last description of his personality in full flight that survives dates from June of 1823. Despite a recent gash on his ankle, which Adams claimed would have healed nicely on its own if the local physicians had been prevented from prescribing “Bathes, Tents, and bandages and lotions,” he walked over a mile to Josiah Quincy’s house in order to share company and conversation. According to Quincy, he held forth for more than two hours, recalling local characters of old, speculating that John Jay was really the author of Washington’s famous Farewell Address, and then explaining at great length why John Dickinson had worked so hard to prevent the passage of the Declaration of Independence. It seemed to him that Dickinson’s real problem was a wife and mother who were devout Quakers; they tormented him with thoughts of pacifism. Poor Dickinson could not serve his country and his family simultaneously. Adams concluded the little story with the confession that, “If I had had such a mother and such a wife, I believe I should have shot myself.”
Then he launched into a longer tale about old Judge Edmund Quincy, Josiah’s grandfather, who was once accosted on the local road by a robber. As Adams reached the stirring climax of the story, he rose from his seat and lifted up his cane to demonstrate how the judge beat off the attacker, but the cane accidentally struck and demolished a picture hanging behind him. Adams began to laugh uncontrollably at his blunder, claiming he had not had such a good time in months. “If I was to come here once a day,” he announced, “I should live half a year longer.” When one of the guests countered that, if the spirited company had such a positive effect on the old man’s health, he might consider coming “twice a day, and live a year longer,” Adams noted the wisdom of the suggestion and declared that he planned to return again later in the day. And he did.49
In the annals of early American history there are several moments frozen in time by a memorable, if often romanticized, recounting of the illustrative events—Washington crossing the Delaware, Patrick Henry hurling his thunderous challenge at George III, Benjamin Franklin sauntering into Philadelphia as an aspiring youth with only the clothes on his back and two loaves of bread under his arm. Adams’s choice for a tableau, which never materialized, was the early and impassioned defense of colonial rights by James Otis, a scene in which Adams himself appeared only in the background. But if Adams had possessed Franklin’s genius for self-promotion, or if Josiah Quincy had chosen to dedicate his life to playing James Boswell to Adams’s Samuel Johnson, they might plausibly have selected that afternoon at Quincy’s house to memorialize.
The account would have depicted a very old, quite rumpled and wrinkled Adams, holding forth in his garrulous and animated style, telling all the old and slightly indiscreet anecdotes about his fellow members of the revolutionary generation, explaining why the true story of the American Revolution would never find its way into the history books, reviewing the litany of Adams lessons about balanced constitutions in state and self, the dangerous but unavoidable power of aristocracies, the seductive influence of political illusions. At the end, the account might have the patriarch murmuring to himself about paradoxes he had forgotten to mention as he trundled back to the Adams homestead or—a bit of fictional improvement here—rode home on his favorite donkey. Words and visual images would come together to convey the absence of pretense or self-delusion, the candor about himself and about his country, the reckless release of honest affection that could only find its fullest expression in the safety of an intimate circle of trusted friends.
7
Legacies
“Is it the Fourth?”
—Last words of Thomas Jefferson, July 3, 1826
“Thomas Jefferson survives.”
—Last words of John Adams, July 4, 1826
AS THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the Declaration of Independence approached, both Adams and Jefferson, along with Charles Carroll of Maryland, the only other surviving signer, were deluged with requests to attend official celebrations of the national birthday. Both men responded by pleading old age and ill-health, offering regrets, then providing self-consciously eloquent testimonials that they knew would be read out loud to the assembled guests. It was an ironic opportunity for Adams, who had spent much of his retirement criticizing the historical significance of the Declaration as anything more than an ornamental epilogue to the real story of the American Revolution. But the annual celebration on July 4 was now too well established to make his criticism sound like anything more than mindless carping. So for about a decade he had stopped complaining and accepted the fact that, misguided or not, this was the day when Americans remembered the great cause.
Although he received requests to participate in what was being called “the Jubilee of Independence” from as far away as Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, his most resonant reply went to the organizers of the Quincy celebration. After lamenting that his physical condition precluded attendance, Adams defied the customary sentiments and solemnities by declaring, in effect, that the ultimate meaning of the American Revolution was still problematic. He acknowledged that the revolutionary era had been “a memorable epoch in the annals of the human race,” but the jury was still out on its significance. He warned that America was “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.” Posterity, in short, would not only judge, it would play an active role in shaping the outcome. This was a disconcerting message for patriot
ic celebrants gathered to dispense praise rather than accept a challenge, but it was also vintage Adams irreverence. When a delegation from Quincy called on him a few days later to request a clarifying statement that might be presented as a toast in his behalf at the celebration, Adams uncharacteristically offered only an enigma: “I will give you INDEPENDENCE FOREVER,” he replied. When prodded to enumerate, he refused. “Not a word,” he insisted.1
Meanwhile, down at Monticello, the other great patriarch was receiving the same kind of requests. Jefferson was also too old and infirm to leave his mountaintop, but he, more than Adams, sensed that this might be the last occasion to register his personal stamp on the public understanding of just what the American Revolution had meant. His most eloquent response was sent to the committee responsible for the Independence Day ceremonies in Washington. Although his intestinal disorder had become nearly incapacitating, Jefferson worked over the draft of his reply with great care, correcting and revising with the same attention to detail that he had brought to the original draft of the Declaration, producing one of his most inspired and inspiring renditions of the Jeffersonian message. After gracefully excusing himself from the ceremonies at the nation’s capital, he regretted his absence from “the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election…between submission and the sword” then he offered his distilled understanding of just what the band of worthies had done:
Thomas Jefferson’s “last letter,” June 24, 1826, declining the invitation to attend the Independence Day celebration in Washington, D.C.
Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
May it 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 the light 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. These are grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.2
Both the lyrical language and the uplifting theme were vintage Jefferson, and were immediately recognized as such when read aloud before the distinguished gathering in Washington on the Fourth. Some of the language, it turns out, had been borrowed, either inadvertently or surreptitiously, from a famous seventeenth-century speech by Richard Rumford, an old, one-eyed Cromwellian soldier executed for treason by James II in 1685. The memorable image of mankind being born without “saddles on their backs,” and the passage about “a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them,” came straight from Rumford’s oration at the execution block. Jefferson owned copies of several English histories that reprinted the Rumford speech; certain telling phrases had obviously lodged themselves in his memory, then leapt into his mind as he wrote.3
But even if the felicity of the style was in part secondhand, the content provided a fresh and vigorous statement that contrasted nicely with Adams’s more cautious message. For Jefferson, the American Revolution was the opening shot in what would eventually become a global struggle for liberation from all forms of oppression. Moreover, the final victory in that struggle was foreordained—“to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all”—and the end result toward which destiny was driving mankind, with America in the lead, was a freer individual and a more egalitarian as well as more prosperous social order. Adams, on the other hand, went out of his way to undercut intimations of American destiny, emphasizing the precarious and fragile character of the American experiment in republican government, challenging subsequent generations of Americans to meet the inevitable threats to national survival with the same realistic rationality that his and Jefferson’s generation had managed to muster at the very beginning.
Adams’s message, it is now abundantly clear, was much truer to and representative of the traditional values of the passing generation that he and Jefferson had come to symbolize, most especially in its unsentimental recognition that the corrosive forces that had undermined other nations and empires were a persistent threat to America as well. Jefferson, on the other hand, spoke a different, more unabashedly liberal, political rhetoric and idiom, one that emphasized the unprecedented impact of individual energies released into the world now that encrusted traditions and feudal privileges had been blown away. There was a providential, even fatalistic dimension to Jefferson’s formulation, for it suggested that something wonderful and elemental had already happened, that it had occurred in America during the preceding fifty years, and that, like an explosion or natural force such as a river or lava flow, it was destined to run its course regardless of human foibles and intrusions. Perhaps the most beguiling feature of Jefferson’s vision was its confident sense that, now that the American Revolution had propelled the country into a leadership role as the global model for what he called “self government,” the fate of the American political experiment was no longer either in doubt or in human hands.
The Adams formulation suggested exactly the opposite: the destiny of the new nation was contingent upon wise and skillful leadership if it hoped to avoid the sad fate of all other republics and eventually all other empires. Whatever superiority the Adams version had as an accurate expression of his generation’s best wisdom on the question of America’s prospects, the rhetorical superiority of the Jefferson version was already obvious. Anyone poised to assess their relative appeal to posterity would have been forced to conclude that Adams’s chances were just as problematic as his diagnosis of America’s future.
But before the historic reputations of the two patriarchs could diverge, their lives were joined one final time in an episode that almost all the commentators described as an act of divine providence. On the evening of July 3, Jefferson, whose health had been declining since February, fell into unconsciousness. He awoke momentarily that night and uttered his last discernible words: “Is it the Fourth?” As midnight approached, his family, which had gathered around his bedside for the death watch, offered a prayer for “a few minutes of prolonged life.” As if in response to their prayers, life lingered in him until the next morning and he died at twenty minutes past twelve noon on July 4.4
Meanwhile, Adams rose at his customarily early hour, wishing to keep his routine despite the special distinction of the day, and asked to be placed in his favorite reading chair in the study. Around mid-morning, however, he began to falter and family members moved him back to his bedroom. Word went out to relatives attending the Independence Day celebration in Boston and to John Quincy in Washington to hurry home, that the founding father was dying. He lapsed into unconsciousness at almost the exact moment that Jefferson died. The end then came quickly, at about five-thirty in the late afternoon of July 4. He wakened for a brief moment, indicated his awareness that death was near and, with obvious effort, spoke his last words: “Thomas Jefferson survives.”5
News of the nearly simultaneous death of America’s two most eminent elder statesmen seeped out to the world over the next few weeks. The prominent mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch calculated that “the chance that two of the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 should survive half a century, and die on the 4th of July, was only one in twelve hundred millions.” Richard Rush observed that most people were stunned at the coincidence. “We should pronounce it romantic,” he declared, “did we not believe it providential.” In what became a common image, Rush envisioned Adams and Jefferson “hand in hand ascending into heaven.” Throughout the cities and states, and eventually in the nation’s capital, plans for memorial services honoring the paired patriarchs proceeded apace. One of the few sour notes came from Horace Binney, the
old Philadelphia Federalist, who despised Jefferson and recalled the long-standing political differences between the two men. “The most extraordinary feature of their history is that of a joint or consociated celebration,” Binney noted. “Their tempers and dispositions toward one another would at one time have made a very tolerable salad…[and] it never entered into my conception…to admit one and the same apotheosis.”6
Actually, the notion that Adams and Jefferson represented opposing impulses in the life of the early republic that blended together like the oil and vinegar of “a very tolerable salad” was one of the dominant themes in the eulogies. It was the old suggestion of Benjamin Rush; namely, that the two statesmen embodied “the North and South Poles of the American Revolution,” but now orators from Maine to Tennessee developed the idea as a major reason for the success of the founding generation.
Passionate Sage Page 24
