Jefferson had installed a French chef in the presidential mansion. His wine bill alone exceeded $2,500 a year. “There was, as usual, the dissertation upon wines, not very edifying,” John Quincy recorded after another dinner. “Mr. Jefferson said that the Epicurean philosophy came nearest to the truth, in his opinion, of any ancient system of philosophy.”
In addition to serving in the Senate, John Quincy also accepted a new professorial chair of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard. Adams’s pride in his brilliant son could not have been greater, as he let him know when at times John Quincy grew discouraged with the pettiness and hypocrisies of politics.
Patience and perseverance will carry you with honor through all difficulties. Virtuous and studious from your youth, beyond any other instance I know, I have great confidence in your success in the service of your country, however dark your prospects may be at present. Such talents and such learning as you possess, with a character so perfectly fair and a good humor so universally acknowledged, it is impossible for you to fail.
Reminding him of their ordeal on the Boston, when “you and I . . . clasped each other together in our arms, and braced our feet against the bedboards and bedsteads to prevent us from having our brains dashed out,” Adams said he himself had since weathered worse political storms, “and here I am alive and hearty yet.”
Alive and hearty he was, and remarkably so, all things considered. He was a picture of health, as visitors and family members would attest. He still nursed wounds of defeat; he could brood over past insults; he longed for vindication, and for gratitude for so much that he had done and the sacrifices he had made. And he dwelled often on death. Dear old friends were passing from the scene — Parson Wibird, Samuel Adams. He was “never more to see anything but my plow between me and the grave,” Adams told a correspondent, sounding more than a little sorry for himself. Yet in the same letter he claimed to be happier than he had ever been, which if said partly for effect — as a matter of pride — was also fundamentally true, once the initial years of retirement had passed and particularly after he began writing again.
IN EARLY 1805, after four years at Quincy, during which he had made little effort to contact others, Adams decided to send a letter of greetings to his old friend Benjamin Rush.
“Dear Sir,” Adams began on February 6, “It seemed to me that you and I ought not to die without saying goodbye, or bidding each other adieu. Pray how do you do? How does that excellent lady, Mrs. R?
Is the present state of the national republic enough? Is virtue the principle of our government? Is honor? Or is ambition and avarice, adulation, baseness, covetousness, the thirst for riches, indifference concerning the means of rising and enriching, the contempt of principle, the spirit of party and of faction the motive and principle that governs?
“My much respected and dear friend,” Rush answered. “Your letter of the 6th instant revived a great many pleasant ideas in my mind. I have not forgotten — I cannot forget you.”
You and your excellent Mrs. Adams often compose a conversation by my fireside. We now and then meet with a traveler who has been at Quincy, from whom we hear with great pleasure not only that you enjoy good health, but retain your usual good spirits.
And so began an extended, vivid correspondence between the two men that was to occupy much of their time and bring each continuing enjoyment. For Adams it was as if he had found a vocation again. His letters to Rush became a great outpouring of ideas, innermost feelings, pungent asides, and opinions on all manner of things and mutual acquaintances — so much that he had kept within for too long. He wrote of his worries about the future and the sham of the political scene. “My friend! Our country is a masquerade! No party, no man dares to avow his real sentiments. All is disguise, vizard, cloak.”
Much of his strength and capacity for study were gone, Adams professed. “But such is the constitution of my mind that I cannot avoid forming an opinion.”
[Samuel] Johnson said when he sat upon his throne in a tavern, there he dogmatized and was contradicted, and in this he found delight. My throne is not in a tavern but at my fireside. There I dogmatize, there I laugh and there the newspapers sometimes make me scold; and in dogmatizing, laughing, and scolding I find delight, and why should not I enjoy it, since no one is the worse for it and I am the better.
He had by now resumed work on his autobiography as well, Part II, “Travels and Negotiations,” though it was still labor he did not relish. “To rummage trunks, letter books, bits of journals and great heaps of bundles of old papers is a dreadful bondage to old age, and an extinguisher of old eyes.” And how, after all, did one write about one’s self, he asked Rush. What must he say of his own vanity and levity? How was he to account for so many impulsive, tactless, ill-considered things he had said down the years?
There have been very many times when I have been so agitated in my own mind as to have no consideration at all of the light in which my words, actions, and even writings would be considered by others. Indeed, I never could bring myself seriously to consider that I was a great man, or of much importance or consideration in the world. The few traces that remain of me must, I believe, go down to posterity in much confusion and distraction, as my life has passed. Enough surely of egotism!
He wrote of how greatly friendship mattered to him. “There is something in my composition which restrains me from rancour against any man with whom I have once lived in friendship.” He wrote of his sense of duty to his country. “Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.” And the threats he saw to the country: “The internal intrigues of our monied and landed and slaved aristocracies are and will be our ruin.” He reported to the learned physician of his own health and disposition, assuring him “my spirits have been as cheerful as they ever were since some sin, to me unknown, involved me in politics.” And he described his physical activities, which began at five or six in the morning with work on his stone walls.
I call for my leavers and iron bars, for my chisels, drills, and wedges to split rocks, and for my wagons to cart seaweed for manure upon my farm. I mount my horse and ride on the seashore, and I walk upon Mount Wollaston and Stonyfield Hill.
For a healthful diet, he told the abstemious Rush, he believed, like the doctors of his youth, in milk and vegetables, “with very little animal food and still less spiritous liquors.” In his autobiography, however, Adams told how his “excellent father” had encouraged him to partake of more meat as well as more “comforting” drink than milk.
He wrote of his renewed enjoyment of Shakespeare — Adams would read Shakespeare twice through again in 1805 — and in his continued devotion to Cicero and the Bible. And he dwelt much on ideas. The ideal of the perfectibility of man as expounded by eighteenth-century philosophers — perfectibility “abstracted from all divine authority” — was unacceptable, he declared.
It is an idea of the Christian religion, and ever has been of all believers of the immortality of the soul, that the intellectual part of man is capable of progressive improvement for ever. Where then is the sense of calling the perfectibility of man an original idea or modern discovery. . . . I consider the perfectibility of man as used by modern philosophers to be mere words without a meaning, that is mere nonsense.
He had himself, he told Rush, “an immense load of errors, weaknesses, follies and sins to mourn over and repent of.” These were “the only affliction” of his present life. But St. Paul had taught him to rejoice ever more and be content. “This phrase ’rejoice ever more’ shall never be out of my heart, memory or mouth again as long as I live, if I can help it. This is my perfectibility of man.”
The letters sparkled with aphorisms — on the virtue of America standing free from binding involvement with other nations: “We stand well, let us stand still”; on the perils of majority rule: “Absolute power in a majority is as drunk as it is in one”; on lawyers: “No civilized society can do without lawyers.” Of kings and presidents, Adams said he saw little to distinguish
them from other men. “If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle.” In a spirited appraisal of the overall folderol of an election year, he wrote:
Our electioneering racers have started for the prize. Such a whipping and spurring and huzzaing! Oh what rare sport it will be! Through thick and thin, through mire and dirt, through bogs and fens and sloughs, dashing and splashing and crying out, the devil take the hindmost.
How long will it be possible that honor, truth or virtue should be respected among a people who are engaged in such a quick and perpetual succession of such profligate collisions and conflicts?
Rush, a champion of reform in education, thought Greek and Latin were outmoded and should be replaced with the study of modern languages, which Adams considered thoroughly wrongheaded. “Your labors will be as useless as those of Tom Paine against the Bible,” Adams declared, but wrote also, “Mrs. Adams says she is willing [for] you [to] discredit Greek and Latin, because it will destroy the foundation of all pretensions of the gentlemen to superiority over the ladies, and restore liberty, equality, and fraternity between the sexes.”
Adams made frequent mention of his high regard for physicians as professional men and as friends. Benjamin Waterhouse was “a jewel of a man”; Cotton Tufts was “one of the best men in the world.” And the respect and affection he felt for Rush were abundantly apparent, even in the ways Adams would address him: “Honored and Learned Sir,” “My dear Philosopher and Friend,” “My Sensible and Humorous Friend,” “Learned, Ingenious, Benevolent, Beneficient Old Friend of 1774,” “My Dear Old Friend.” “I am not subject to low spirits,” Adams would tell Rush, “but if I was, one of your letters would cure me at any time for a month.”
For all their differences in political views, neither man had ever abandoned the other. When, in the aftermath of the yellow fever epidemics of 1793 and 1797, Rush had been publicly attacked for his bloodletting treatment, both by Philadelphia physicians and the press, and his practice dwindled to the point that he could barely survive, Adams, who was then President and struggling with troubles of his own, had appointed him treasurer of the United States Mint. It had been a generous act of friendship that Rush and his family never forgot. Though bound by political philosophy to Jefferson, Rush felt a closer personal tie to Adams.
Rush proved an eager and engaging correspondent, his letters brimming with opinion and vitality, and quite as candid as Adams’s own. “You see,” Rush wrote, “I think aloud in my letters to you as I did in those written near 30 years ago, and as I have often done in your company.”
But then they were both thinking aloud, both writing the way they spoke, each keeping the other company with common interest and shared miseries. If Adams had been rejected by the vote of the people, Rush had been made an outcast by much of his own profession. Each was lonely except for friends and family. “I live like a stranger in my native state,” Rush confided. “My patients are my only acquaintances, my books my only companions, and the members of my family nearly my only friends.” If Adams thought he might have been better off as a shoemaker, Rush would tell him, “I often look back upon the hours I spent serving my country (so unproductive of the objects to which they were devoted) with deep regret.” But much that Rush wrote was exactly the medicine Adams needed, as if the old physician in Philadelphia understood his distant patient perfectly.
Mr. Madison and his lady are now in our city [he reported to Adams]. It gave me great pleasure to hear him mention your name in the most respectful terms a few days ago. He dwelt upon your “genius and integrity,” and acquitted you of ever having had the least friendly designs in your administration upon the present forms of our American governments. [Madison did not consider Adams a monarchist, in other words.] He gave you credit likewise for your correct opinion of banks and standing armies in our country.
To Adams, Rush was a true cohort, in the original meaning of the word — one belonging to the same division of a Roman legion and united in the same struggle. With Rush, Adams felt free to say things not possible with just anyone, as for example in appraising those they had known in the struggle.
When considering George Washington, said Adams, one must always bear in mind that he was a Virginian, which was worth at least five talents, in that “Virginian geese are all swans.” Washington, furthermore, was a great actor who had “the gift of silence,” which, wrote Adams, “I esteem as one of the most precious talents.” Washington was too “unlearned” and had seen too little of the world for someone in his “station.” Still, Washington was a “thoughtful man,” and had great self-command, a quality Adams admired in the extreme.
Dabbling in medical theory, Adams suggested that all Hamilton’s overheated ambitions and impulses might be attributed to “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off!” and that “the same vapors produced his lies and slanders by which he totally destroyed his party forever and finally lost his life in the field of honor.”
Knowing how much Rush admired Jefferson, Adams was nonetheless equally candid on the subject. Hamilton was a great “intriguer,” but so, too, was Jefferson, Adams wrote. “Jefferson has succeeded, and multitudes are made to believe that he is pure benevolence. . . . But you and I know him to be an intriguer.”
He held no resentment against Jefferson, “though he has honored and salaried almost every villain he could find who had been an enemy to me.” Nor would he publicly criticize Jefferson’s handling of the presidency. “I think instead of opposing systematically any administration, running down their characters and opposing all their measures, right or wrong, we ought to support every administration as far as we can in justice.”
THE RESUMPTION of correspondence with Benjamin Rush was one of the happiest events of Adams’s life in retirement. Rush’s wife remarked that the two elderly gentlemen were behaving like a couple of schoolgirls. And though they were never to see one another, the friendship grew stronger than ever.
But while Rush substantiated so much that Adams liked to believe about the meaning of friendship, another old friend, Mercy Otis Warren, hurt and provoked him as no one had in years, and without warning.
In 1806, Mercy Warren published her History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution in which she singled out Adams as one of those who had betrayed the Revolution. Adams, she declared, reviving the old charge, had been “corrupted” by his time in England. The man who had “appeared to be actuated by the principles of integrity” became “beclouded by a partiality for monarchy . . . by living long near the splendor of courts and courtiers,” and came home enamored by rank, titles, and “all the insignia of arbitrary sway.” The most prominent features of his character, she further charged, were “pride of talents and much ambition.” “Mr. Adams’s passions and prejudices were sometimes too strong for his sagacity and judgment,” she observed.
With Bache, Callender, and Alexander Hamilton all in their graves, Adams could only have assumed that such accusations were things of the past. Like nearly everyone who ever played a large part in public life and helped make history, Adams wondered how history would portray him, and worried not a little that he might be unfairly treated, misunderstood, or his contributions made to look insignificant compared to those of others. He had no great expectation of being celebrated. No statues or monuments would be erected in his memory, he told Rush, adding, “I wish them not,” which was hardly so. It was an understandable desire to make his own case before the bar of history that propelled him in his labors at autobiography. But to have such a blow as this fall now in his old age, and inflicted by a friend, was infuriating.
In his years in office Adams had felt obliged to say nothing when subjected to ridicule and abuse. But now he felt no such restraint, and in a series of letters he unleashed his wrath as he seldom had, demonstrating, just as Mercy Warren had said, that his passions could at times overcome his sagacity, but also ho
w deeply she had hurt him.
“What have I done, Mrs. Warren,” he wrote, “to merit so much malevolence from a lady concerning whom I never in my life uttered an unkind word or disrespectful insinuation?”
“Corrupted!” he exploded. “Madam! . . . Corruption is a charge that I cannot and will not bear. I challenge the whole human race, and angels and devils, too, to produce an instance of it from my cradle to this hour!”
He denied still again any “partiality for monarchy” and implied that she was getting even with him for once refusing to give her husband a federal job.
To be charged with a surfeit of ambition cut deepest, it would appear. An overweening ambition was the flaw Adams so often attributed to others, that he warned his sons against, and that privately he recognized in himself. But to see it brought against him in print was another matter. “Ambition . . . is the most lively in the most intelligent and most generous minds,” he asserted. However:
If by ambition you mean love of power or a desire of public offices, I answer I never solicited a vote in my life for any public office. I never swerved from any principle, I never professed any opinion — I never concealed even any speculative opinion — to obtain a vote. I never sacrificed a friend or betrayed a trust. I never hired scribblers to defame my rivals. I never wrote a line of slander against my bitterest enemy, nor encouraged it in any other.
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