Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Tom Paine ranked second only to Hamilton in Adams’s version of the American rogues gallery. Paine, wrote Adams, was “a Disastrous Meteor,” “a disgrace to the moral Character and Understanding of the Age.” Everyone knew that Benjamin Rush had given him the title for his wildly popular pamphlet, Common Sense, and that the arguments about the inevitability of American independence that Paine advanced had, in fact, been circulating throughout the colonies since 1760. In the midst of the accelerating events of early 1776, when Common Sense first appeared, Adams’s initial reaction had been more generous, though even then he was somewhat wary. Paine’s pamphlet, he noted then, contained “a great deal of good sense, delivered in a clear, simple, concise and nervous Style.” In fact, it was the electricity and accessibility of the prose that caught his attention, causing Adams to recognize that Paine’s message was identical to his own—the American Revolution was both inevitable and natural—but that he himself “could not have written any thing in so manly and striking a style….” What worried him then was Paine’s endorsement of a single-house legislature as the prescribed form of government for the new states, a prescription that revealed that “this Writer has a better Hand at pulling down than building.” What worried him in his autobiography was the credit Paine had received for his elegant statement of the obvious. Paine was a mere cypher, a nonentity in the Continental Congress. Worse, Paine was “the Satyr of the Age…a mongrel between Pigg and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a Butch Wolf.” Only if one wished to call the eighteenth century “the Age of Frivolity” could one call it “the Age of Paine.”14

  The verdict on what he called “the American untouchables”—Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington—was decidedly less vitriolic, but sufficiently equivocal to sense Adams’s ego throbbing just beneath the surface. All three American greats served as an illustration of the principle “that Eloquence in public Assemblies is not the surest road, to Fame and Preferment, at least unless it be used with great caution, very rarely, and with great Reserve.” This was the lesson of “eternal taciturnity” that Adams preached to John Quincy and anyone else who would listen, and it derived from Adams’s sure but somewhat neurotic sense that, as “the Atlas of Independence” who made the fierce and ferocious speeches that were needed to assure separation from England in the Continental Congress, he inevitably made lifelong enemies. The rule seemed to be that men who played leading roles in controversies became controversial. Jefferson, on the other hand, “had attended his duty in the House [the Second Continental Congress] but a very small part of the time and when there had never spoken in public.” Adams recalled, with a mingled sense of admiration and accusation, that “during the whole Time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.”15

  He acknowledged that Jefferson was a masterful stylist; Adams claimed to have “a great opinion of the Elegance of his pen and none at all of my own.” It was for this reason, along with the awareness, as Adams put it, that he himself “had been so obnoxious for my early and constant Zeal in promoting the Measure, and that any draught of mine, would undergo a more severe Scrutiny and Criticism in Congress,” that, as chairman of the committee encharged with the task, he chose Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, according to this version of history, was no more than an important ornament. Like Paine, he put into words the sentiments and ideas that others—like Adams—had hammered out in combat with lukewarm Whigs and surreptitious Tories in the real but unrecorded conversations within the corridors and subcommittees of Philadelphia. “I admire Bonaparte’s expression ‘The Scenery of the Business,’” he wrote Rush. “The scenery has often…at least in Public Life, more effect, than the Character.” Then he added, more explicitly, “Was there ever a Coup de Theatre, that had so great an effect as Jefferson’s Penmanship of the Declaration of Independence?” Adams implied that the real business of fomenting a revolution happened behind closed doors, that propagandistic documents like Paine’s Common Sense and Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence were “a theatrical side show…Jefferson ran away with the stage effect…and all the glory of it.” Even when writing to Jefferson himself years later, he belittled “the importance of these compositions,” claiming that they were “like children’s play at marbles or push pin…. Dress and ornament rather than Body, Soul and Substance.”16

  His jealousy of Jefferson was palpable. It wrankled Adams that his own massive efforts on behalf of American independence were blotted out by a piece of parchment that was conclusive only in the sense that it was culminating. Alongside the not-so-hidden jealousy, however, rested an important matter of substance about the true moment when the American Revolution began and about the relationship between propaganda and political events. In brief, Adams consistently argued that the decisive step toward independence occurred on May 15, 1776, when the Continental Congress adopted his resolution calling for new constitutions in each of the states. In his diary and in letters written at the time, he described this decision as “the Last Step, a compleat Separation from her [England], a total absolute Independence….” This was crucial to Adams’s view of what the American Revolution was about, not just because he was the author of the resolution, but also because it meant that American independence was a positive and constructive act, a voluntary choice of self-government and not just a repudiation of British tyranny. In his autobiography he repeated this interpretation of the hallowed events, along the way adding yet another related argument of considerable weight, that the resolution to form state governments had specifically stipulated that each state call a convention to draft the new constitution. “These were new, Strange and terrible Doctrines, for the greatest Part of the Members,” he recalled, because the requirement of a constitutional convention both symbolized and actually implemented the principle of popular sovereignty, the doctrine that “the People were the Source of all Authority and [the] Original of all Power.” This had all been decided six weeks before Jefferson’s lyrical prose declared the same political doctrine to be the basis for an independent America. Like the thunder in an electrical storm, Jefferson’s Declaration made much noise, but it was the lightning that did the work. And it had already flashed.17

  Benjamin Franklin provoked the most quotable (and subsequently quoted) anecdotes in the entire autobiography. Franklin seemed to inspire folksy stories in Adams, to bring out the Franklin in his own personality, if you will. Perhaps the best of the lot, and the most revealing of Adams’s envious admiration of the man already regarded as the prototypical American, was the story of Adams and Franklin sleeping together in the same bed.

  It was September of 1776, and the two men were travelling through New Jersey for a futile, last-gasp conference with Lord Howe, then commander of the British army in North America. Forced to take accommodations for the night in a small room with a single bed, they broke into amiable argument over the question of whether the window should be open or closed. Franklin favored an open window. “The Doctor then began an harangue, upon Air and Cold and Respiration and Perspiration,” Adams recalled, “with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his Philosophy together.” The story effectively reversed the roles of the two great men, with Franklin the garrulous enthusiast and Adams the self-possessed pragmatist. Adams ended the story with the observation that, according to his sources, Franklin eventually died “a Sacrifice at last…to his own Theory; having caught the violent cold, which finally choked him, by sitting hours at a Window, with the cool Air blowing upon him.”

  At least in the pages of his autobiography, if not in life, Adams emerged triumphant over the most infuriatingly likable figure of the age, a man who seemed to be put on earth to embody the deficiencies in Adams’s personality. But vindication was only possible for Adams by exchanging identities with Franklin, clothing himself in Franklin’s temperament of controlled self-confidence while making Franklin play out the role of stubborn John Adams, clinging tenaciously to wrong-headed theorie
s that eventually did him in.

  Adams’s more explicit major message about Franklin, like his rendering of Jefferson, was qualified praise, tinged with a warning to his countrymen against making mere mortals into demigods. Franklin was “a great Genius, a great Wit, a great Humourist and a great Satyrist, and a great Politician….” Throughout his life, Adams professed admiration for Franklin’s way with words, acknowledging that “there is Scarce a Scratch of his Pen that is not worth preserving.” But the widespread belief that Franklin was also “a great Phylosopher, a great Moralist and a great Statesman,” Adams pointedly concluded, “is questionable.”18

  The ultimate “great,” of course, transcending mortal appreciation or analysis, was George Washington. In his autobiography, even Adams regarded the reputation of Washington as off-limits. Indeed, there were two subjects—the preservation of slavery in the South and the symbolic significance of Washington—that Adams considered too elemental and too fraught with danger to explore candidly in any writings that might find their way into the public press. Still, in private letters to trusted friends like Rush and Vanderkemp, Adams expressed his unease with the emerging mythology about cherry trees and godlike wisdom. Whenever the celebration of Washington’s birthday was reported in the Boston newspapers, Adams cringed, and usually fired off a letter of protest. “The feasts and funerals in honor of Washington,” he wrote Rush, “is as corrupt a system as that by which saints were canonized and cardinals, popes, and whole hierarchical systems created.”19

  The Federalists were especially guilty of idolatry, and “have done themselves and their country invaluable injury by making Washington their military, political, religious and even moral Pope, and ascribing everything to him.” The Federalists should have known better, for by identifying their party so totally with one person, who now was gone, they had committed political suicide. But the nation suffered too from such single-minded patriotism, because the Revolution should be remembered as a broad-based popular movement with many leaders who played different roles at different moments of the crisis. “It is to offend against eternal justice,” Adams complained, “to give to one, as the People do, the Merits of so many.” When an aspiring historian asked Adams if Washington’s decision to repudiate the offer of king or dictator-for-life after the war did not deserve admiration, Adams replied stiffly that, had Washington accepted the offer, “he would have become the contempt and abhorrence of two thirds of the People of the United Colonies.” No individual deserved the lion’s share of credit for the American Revolution. It was successful precisely because it had been a collective enterprise.20

  Adams consistently bemoaned “the pilgramages to Mount Vernon as the new Mecca or Jerusalem.” When John Marshall’s mammoth biography of Washington appeared in 1807, Adams described it as “a Mausoleum, 100 feet square at the base and 200 feet high,” and “as durable as the Washington benevolent Societies.” And when a Philadelphia artisan sent him a miniature statue of the great man, Adams claimed that, because of his poor eyesight, he could not “distinguish the features of the figure clearly enough to know, whether it is a fair representation of the hero, not even with the help of a solar microscope.” Then he added: “I am always pleased to correct representations of that great man…but I totally despise the miserable catch-penny tricks by which he is represented in situations where he never stood & as the author of measures in which he had nothing to do.”21

  And of course Washington was the supreme example of “eternal taciturnity” and enigmatic wisdom couched in stoic silence. He knew how to stand and how to affect an appearance of profundity, especially in public. At times, especially in letters to Rush, Adams came close to suggesting that Washington was primarily an actor, playing a role he never fully understood: “We [in the Washington administration] all agreed to believe him and make the world believe him.” Adams described a conversation he had with Timothy Pickering in 1791, in which Pickering claimed that Washington often dozed in cabinet meetings, never read dispatches, wrote few if any of his own speeches, needed chalk marks on the floor to know where to stand at receptions and levees, and was, in general, an illiterate, intellectually incompetent cipher who was propped up in public by his staff.

  But Adams was careful to put these scandalous (and to our contemporary ears, familiar) accusations in Pickering’s mouth, then to note that, as everyone knew, Pickering was a third-rater whose mediocrity was only surpassed by his duplicity. Adams hinted at his own sense of intellectual superiority to Washington, suggesting that, as far as he could tell, all of Washington’s philosophy was derived from a cursory reading of Rollins’s Ancient History. Beyond that level of glancing criticism, Adams was unwilling to go, preferring to “take my deepest secrets to the grave.” Washington should be esteemed but not adored. He was an object lesson in the efficacy of enigma. But he was also the one American leader whom even Adams grudgingly acknowledged as an overall superior in terms of virtuous public service.22

  Adams put down his autobiography in 1807, never again to pick it up, and ever after resisted requests for a published version of his life with eloquent protestations of inadequacy: “I have been importuned by many persons both Europeans and Americans to write my own life,” he explained, “but if I could once prevail upon myself to travil [sic] over such a Series of Egotisms, it is now become as impossible as to cast the Blue Hills…into the Sea.” The more excruciating truth was that, even though his formal efforts at autobiography were over, he was still haunted by his eventual place in posterity and still unable to conceal his wounded pride or to control his emotional outbursts when the question of his role in history was raised publicly.23

  And in 1805 it was raised, when Mercy Otis Warren published her History of the American Revolution in three volumes. Warren was a friend of John and Abigail Adams of nearly fifty years standing. The younger sister of James Otis, whom Adams considered the true instigator of the movement for independence and his first political hero, she was the wife of James Warren, one of Adams’s closest confidants during the war, who could outdo even Adams in acts of virtuous eccentricity. Mercy Otis Warren was herself a complex blend of apparent opposites: devoted wife, mother, and staunch republican propagandist during the war; a charming and elegant lady, but one who also wrote polemical poems, plays, and histories for public consumption. In Copley’s portrait she appears the epitome of cultured New England gentility, but friends and enemies alike knew from her writings that “Mrs. Warren,” whom the Adamses knew as “Marcia,” had one of the sharpest minds in New England. She was, without much doubt, the most intellectually accomplished woman in revolutionary America.24

  Adams genuinely enjoyed the company of intelligent and spirited women. He had married a woman of just that sort. And over a long friendship with Mercy Otis Warren he had shown himself capable of establishing a relationship of both intimacy and intellectual equity with a woman whose unconventional abilities would have terrified most men into postures of stiff-backed supremacy or gallant silence. For example, when Warren had written him for information about his role as American commissioner in Holland, Adams confessed that he lacked the important diplomatic virtue of patience: “I had rather you should immortalize my Imprudence,” he wrote her half-jokingly, “for I rather think it was this quality, than the other, which produced the Effect in Holland.” Adams felt a special kinship with Warren that often allowed him to be as candid with her as with Abigail or Rush. “The Times, Madam, have made a Strange Being of me,” he admitted in 1783, “an irritable fiery Mortal…as profuse as a Prodigal and as proud as a Caesar. But an honest Man in all and to the Death.”25

  None of this history of mutual trust and respect, however, could rescue Adams from the demons that were still eating away at his soul. In July of 1807, after reading Warren’s History of the American Revolution, Adams wrote the first of ten lengthy letters to his old friend that, in effect, continued the therapy begun with the autobiography. “I shall observe no order in selecting the passages,” he began, �
�but take them up as they occur by accident.” For any seasoned Adams-watcher this was a bad sign, an indication that the sage was in mid-explosion. No sensible or systematic rebuttal of Warren’s version of the American Revolution was possible when Adams felt the furies, like waves, rising inside himself.26