Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams

by Joseph J. Ellis

  The ultimate source of this syndrome is unclear, but it seems to have been triggered by Adams’s fear of success. In 1777, while complaining to Abigail about the in-fighting between military officers who were, as he put it, “Scrambling for Rank and Pay like Apes for Nuts,” Adams for the first time articulated in full form what was to become a central tenet of his mature political thought:

  I believe there is no one Principle, which predominates in human Nature so much in every Stage of Life, from the Cradle to the Grave, in Males and females, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, high and low, as this Passion for Superiority…. Every human Being compares itself in its own Imagination, with every other round about it, and will find some Superiority over every other…or it will die of Grief and Vexation.35

  His own compulsion to excel in the Continental Congress, and to be acknowledged as having done so by the other delegates who were also vying for recognition, was, in this view, an inherent, irresistible human urge. Adams was uncomfortably aware of his ambition, and claimed that to deny its presence and power was to engage in self-delusion. Here was one source of his public relations problem: what others so often saw as arrogance and vanity was, in Adams’s view, simply a case of candor; or, to put it somewhat differently, Adams could not imagine how he appeared to others who did not share his own realistic estimate of human nature or his own habit of honest introspection. Why should he not speak to them with the same kind of brutal honesty that he practiced on himself?

  But if he could acknowledge ambition, he could not quite tolerate success. In the spring of 1776, as his own reputation and American independence ascended together, he confessed to Abigail the pride he felt in influencing “the great Events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing….” Three weeks later he announced to his wife that he had “purchased a Folio Book…and intend to write all my Letters to you in it from this Time forward.” He would copy his private correspondence in what amounted to a personal declaration of his own historical significance.36

  Whatever satisfaction and sense of fulfillment Adams derived from his success, however, was more than offset by his self-doubt; not about his contribution to the American cause—he was supremely confident about that—but about his capacity to survive success. Men, like nations, advanced toward greatness, reached the apogee of their ascent, then spiralled downwards into decadence and sloth, corrupted by the very affluence and pride that was the reward for their success. England was the prime example of this familiar cycle among nations. And his diagnosis of corruption within English society and politics was central to Adams’s advocacy of American independence. He was profoundly conscious of repeating on a microscopic scale the same pattern England had traced at the macroscopic level. He distrusted his own popularity for much the same reason he recommended that governments establish checks against the unrestrained democratic impulses of a single-house legislature; namely, there were powerful passions deep in the individual soul and in the people-at-large that required restraint. What struck some of his colleagues as irritability was actually a by-product of the internal struggle with his own vanity and ambition, the nervous energy generated by the incessant operation of his own internal checks and balances.

  All of which helps to illuminate the sources for Adams’s personal intensity as they developed with full force in the 1770s: he thought about politics and the entire world “out there” in terms of forces he felt throbbing inside himself. Virtually all of his political convictions, especially his most piercing political insights, derived from introspection, or what we would call psychology. Just as James Madison established a reputation as “Father of the Constitution” because of his leading role in the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Adams established his reputation as the premier political theorist of the American Revolution because of his leadership in the Continental Congress. But if Madison is the master sociologist of American political theory, Adams is the master psychologist. Virtue was not an abstract concept he learned about simply by reading Montesquieu, David Hume, or the writers of the English Commonwealth tradition. It was a principle of self-denial he harbored in his heart and kept preaching to himself in his diary. A state constitution was not just an agreed-upon framework of social customs and laws. It was a public replica of one’s internal order or constitution. The very idea of government itself was the act of implementing in the world the lessons learned in dealing with one’s own internal demons.

  The reason why Adams seemed to take the making of American policy in the 1770s super-seriously is obvious: he realized before most others that the future of a nation was at stake. Even that realization, however, was at least partially indebted to the overlap between America’s fate and his own ascent. And the reason he seemed to take public decisions so personally emerged out of the same overlapping habit: his political commitments were, quite literally, projections onto the world of his own layered and paradoxical personality. He was the kind of man, as his critics put it, who could unfailingly mistake a prejudice for a conviction, but it was all part of a larger confusion in the Adams mind between private and public affairs, which kept intersecting and interacting in patterns that defied neat separation.

  If his behavior in the Continental Congress affords the best glimpse at Adams as he emerged as a national figure, he was less fully formed twenty years earlier. The pieces of the Adams puzzle had yet to align themselves in any discernible pattern in the fall of 1755, when he was still a young man grappling with his purpose in life. He had just graduated from Harvard the previous summer, was unsure whether he should pursue a career in the ministry or the law, and needed time to mull over his prospects. An offer from the minister at Worcester, about forty miles west of Boston, promised to provide a small salary and a large space in which to ruminate in return for his services as a schoolmaster. During the three years he remained in Worcester Adams read much, brooded even more and, most importantly for our purposes, began to keep a diary in which he recorded a good deal more than the weather. In that rather remarkable diary, one can already discern if only dimly the paunchy, balding, toothless patriarch and president sitting in the semi-darkness of the presidential mansion nearly a half century later. If the origins and sources of his complex character left any traces in the historical record, this is surely the place to look for them.37

  The Adams diary begins, quite literally, with a jolt: “We had a severe Shock of an Earthquake,” he noted, describing the considerable damage done to New England houses and chimneys by the seismic movements that, unbeknown to the young Adams, had virtually levelled the city of Lisbon on the other side of the Atlantic. The seismic shiftings occurring inside Adams himself at the time were less visible but just as disconcerting. A half century earlier the question over which he was anguishing would have had a decidedly religious cast: Am I saved or damned? By the middle of the eighteenth century the form of the question had changed, although the underlying psychological forces set in motion in the rite of passage to adulthood were still saturated with moral and religious meanings that had not lost their power. For Adams, the questions he was posing to himself were more recognizably modern: what should I do with my life? what is my proper calling? who am I? But his way of answering them remained indebted to Puritan traditions as old as New England and as compelling for young Adams as an earthquake.38

  In one sense, the essential Adams qualities were already visible in 1755, eminently discernible once one knows what to look for. The eerily accurate sense of what was in store for America, which gave Adams such a headstart over his colleagues in the Continental Congress and then shaped his policy toward France as president, had already assumed articulate form. In a letter to Nathan Webb, a longtime friend and distant relative, Adams first sketched out his vision of an expanding American empire. “If we look into History we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings, and spreading their influence, ’till the whole Globe is subjected to their sway,” he wrote in October of 1755. Rome was obviously the il
lustrative example for the ancient world. And England was clearly the heir to Rome’s greatness in the modern world. But history demonstrated that whenever great nations reach “the summit of Grandeur, some minute and unsuspected Cause commonly effects their Ruin, and the Empire of the world is transferr’d to some other place.” Just what the “unsuspected Cause” that would unseat England might be, Adams could not say for sure. The growing population of North America, however, which “in another century [will] become more numerous than England itself,” suggested the time would eventually be ripe for transferring “the great seat of Empire into America,” a development, Adams predicted, that “looks likely to me.” Much later, during his retirement years, when Adams was given a copy of this youthful letter, he showed it to friends and made it available for publication, joking that he had forgotten how prophetic he had once been. Strictly speaking, his early prediction of an independent America did not foresee a violent rupture with England, but rather a gradual evolution (à la Canada) rather than a revolution. But the young man did have an instinct for the flow of history.39

  The famous, or perhaps infamous, Adams ambition was also fully present. The job of schoolmaster, he needed to assure his friends, was a mere way station; he was not about to romanticize the life of the classroom, which struck him as “a school of affliction, [with] a large number of little runtlings, just capable of lisping A.B.C. and troubling the Master.” Uplifting talk to his diary about “Cultivating and pruning these tender Plants in the garden of Worcester” never lasted long. The realistic truth was that “keeping this school any length of Time would make a base weed and ignoble shrub of me.” If the ultimate destination of his already quite palpable ambitions was not yet clear, it surely lay beyond the provincial world of Worcester, perhaps along the ascending slope that America seemed fated to travel.40

  What proved to be a life-long internal dialogue with those ambitions had also begun by this time. Which is to say that he was already painfully aware of the passions that were to bedevil him throughout his long life. “Vanity I am sensible, is my cardinal Vice and cardinal Folly,” he lectured himself, “and I am in continual Danger, when in Company, of being led an ignis fatuus Chase by it, without the strictest Caution and watchfulness over my self.” He must be more careful and restrained in groups, he kept reminding himself, so that his conversation did not betray his sense of superiority. “A puffy, vain, conceited Conversation, never fails to bring a Man into Contempt,” he told his diary, “altho his natural Endowments be ever so great, and his Application and Industry ever so intense.” He must rein in his congenital pugnacity, his urge “to shew my own Importance or Superiority, by remarking the Foibles, Vices, or Inferiority of others,” which only alienated the very people he wished to impress. In general, he must lash down his passions: “Untamed they are lawless Bulls,” he wrote to himself, “they roar and bluster, defy all Controul, and some times murder their proper owner.” Too often, however, his imagination would form an alliance with his ambition, easily snapping all ties and overwhelming all injunctions. For example, in March of 1756, he recorded this daydream about his little schoolroom as a model “of the great World in miniature”:

  I have severall renowned Generalls but 3 feet high, and several deep-projecting Politicians in peticoats. I have others…accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockle shells &c., with as ardent Curiousity as any Virtuouso in the royal society. Some rattle and Thunder out A, B, C, with as much Fire and impetuosity, as Alexander fought…. At one Table sits Mr. Insipid foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig, or playing with his fingers as gaily and wittily as any frenchified coxcomb brandishes his Cane or rattles his snuff box. At another sits the polemical Divine, plodding and wrangling in his mind about Adams fall in which we sinned all as his primer has it. In short my little school like the great World, is made up of Kings, Politicians, Divines, L.D. [LL.D’s?], Fops, Buffoons, Fidlers, Sychophants, Fools, Coxcombs, chimney sweepers, and every other Character drawn in History or seen in the World.

  Over this human menagerie, Adams confessed in mocking tones that “in my sprightly moments, [I] consider myself, in my great Chair at School, as some Dictator at the head of a commonwealth,” a sort of Cromwell of the kindergarten.41

  Finally, it was evident very early during his time at Worcester, long before he made the decision explicit, that Adams was destined to reject a career in the ministry in favor of the law. His earliest diary entries reflect his distaste for the endless, and to him futile, theological disputations, his impatience with what he called “the whole Cartloads of other trumpery, that we find Religion incumbered with in these Days.” He confided to himself that the deepest design of Christianity “was not to make men good Riddle Solvers or good mystery mongers” but that was what the clergy of the day seemed to prefer, with their “Ecclesiastical Synods, Convocations, Councils, Decrees, Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, [and] Subscriptions….” Some of his own private opinions, scribbled into the margins of his new diary booklet, suggested an impatience with religious wrangling that verged on sacrilege. After listening to an argument in behalf of the divinity of Jesus Christ that concluded with the unknowability of it all, Adams jotted down his own conclusion: “Thus Mystery is made a convenient Cover for absurdity.” These were not the kind of private thoughts likely to lead toward a flourishing clerical career.42

  Despite the deeper disinclinations, Adams felt an obligation to keep open the possibility of a ministerial calling, in part because his parents seemed to prefer that course, in part because the ministry represented, in its clearest and purest form, a commitment to the virtuous life. “The Man who lives wholly to himself is of less worth than the Cattle in his Barn,” he wrote to Charles Cushing, a college friend who was also facing the same questions about career. The right choice, he told Cushing and himself, would reveal itself through incessant introspection and would probably defy popular opinion: “But upon the Stage of Life, while Conscience Clapps, let the World hiss! On the contrary if Conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the World are of little Value.” Even at this early age, Adams was predisposed to cast his choices into categories that juxtaposed what was popular with what was right. The distinguishing mark of the proper calling, he assured Cushing, was its social utility, its tendency to require “service to our fellow men, as well as to ourselves.” All callings have their advantages and disadvantages, but the chief problem with the lawyer was that “he often foments more quarrells than he composes, and inriches himself at the expense of impoverishing others more honest and deserving than himself.”43

  Less than six months later, however, Adams declared in his diary, albeit a bit defensively, his decision to study the law. “Necessity drove me to this Determination,” he explained, claiming that the ministry might have been his preference, but that his “Opinion concerning some disputed Points” of theology essentially disqualified him. Nevertheless, he would make himself the right kind of lawyer: “I set out with firm Resolutions I think never to commit any meanness or injustice in the Practice of Law.” In fact, he resolved to bring to his legal career the same other-worldly qualities that were associated with the ministry: “The study and Practice of Law,” he reminded himself, “I am sure does not dissolve the obligations of morality or of Religion.”44

  Here, at last, we begin to catch a central feature in the Adams character just as it was congealing. Put most simply and succinctly, he carried with him into the secular calling of lawyer and later public official the moral obligations and self-imposed expectations of the New England ministry. And his conscious self-doubt—probably too his less conscious guilt—about the path he had chosen encouraged him to make any conflict between personal and public interests into a test of his moral sincerity. Indeed, he sought out such tests, actively pursuing opportunities to demonstrate to himself the purity of his own motives and the depth of his own virtue. He was driven by insecurity and self-doubt, not in the sense of doubting his talent or intelligence, but in the sense of requiring i
ncessant assurance that what he knew to be his considerable gifts would be given to a cause larger than himself. Those powerful passions for worldly success and fame were, in the end, fuelled by a compulsion to serve an otherworldly ideal that truly dominated his soul.

  Once he departed Worcester in 1758, then, he was like a cannon ball streaking toward the center of American history, aimed at the enemies to his own and America’s advancement and destined to destroy his own prospects for popularity upon impact. Which is to say that his behavior in the Continental Congress and the presidency followed naturally, if not inevitably, from his internalization of spiritual standards of conduct that defied worldly measures of success. “If Virtue was to be rewarded with Wealth, it would not be Virtue,” he would later explain to Abigail, and if “Virtue was to be rewarded with Fame, it would not be Virtue of the sublimest Kind.” Such was the impossible standard he imposed on himself as a young man, and later, in ways he came to regret, imposed on his son John Quincy.45

  Finally, the process by which Adams reached a decision about his calling reveals more about the primal dynamics of his character than does the decision itself. More than any other prominent American of the revolutionary generation, Adams brought the private energies generated by a truly searching self-scrutiny into the public arena. Unlike Benjamin Franklin’s similar-sounding injunctions—work hard, conquer pride, rise early, resist temptations—Adams’s introspections remained true to the original intent of reformed Christianity. That is, Adams was obsessed with interior integrity, not with the external rewards that the mastery of appearances could bring. Humility, piety, self-denial, and other habits of the heart were not just means to an end for him, but the ends themselves. The Worcester phase of his development was the New England equivalent to the early Christian retreat to the desert, where worldly ways could be purged and the soul forged into the kind of hard and sharp implement required to do God’s work. Within the Puritan tradition of New England, the process was similar, though the language to describe it spoke of a “time of atonement” and the “doctrine of preparation.” Like the Puritans of old, Adams was obliged to confront his own sinfulness—his vanities, ambitions, jealousies—and to acknowledge at the deepest level that these powerful forces could never be destroyed or conquered; at best they could be controlled; they were profane drives that might be harnessed to sacred causes in the world. And like the devout Puritan who could never be sure he was saved, lest his very assurance reveal a sense of pride that sabotaged the whole effort at saintliness, Adams’s compulsions were inherently insatiable.46