Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams
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Adams even felt sufficiently comfortable with the friendship, and with his own demons of ambition, to joke about the glaring difference between Jefferson’s ascending reputation and his increasing anonymity. “All the Literary Gentlemen of this part of the Country have an Ambitious Curiousity to see the Philosopher and Statesman of Monticello,” he noted in 1819. Since few visitors approached Jefferson for an introduction to the Sage of Quincy, Adams claimed to be in the awkward posture of granting requests without being able to pay back Jefferson in kind. He was like one of those despised bankers who loaned out money without any gold or hard currency to back it up.47
Even hostile voices from the past could not shake their mutual resolve to go to their graves as friends. In 1823, the son of William Cunningham published selections from Adams’s correspondence with his father. These letters dated from the early years of his retirement, when Adams was still reeling from his defeat of 1800 and full of anger at Jefferson. Adams was worried that his old resentments, now under control, had come back to haunt his newfound serenity with Jefferson. But the response from Monticello was a model of gracious charity:
Be assured, my dear Sir, that I am incapable of receiving the slightest impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth, and wisdom and to sow tares between friends who have been such for nearly half a century. Beseeching you then not to suffer your mind to be disquieted by this wicked attempt to poison its peace, and praying you to throw it by….”48
Adams demanded that Jefferson’s letter be read aloud at the Quincy breakfast table, calling it “The best letter that ever was written…just such a letter as I expected, only…infinitely better expressed.” The whole Cunningham episode had merely solidified their friendship, he observed triumphantly, by revealing that “the peevish and fretful effusions of politicians…are not worth remembering, much less of laying to heart.” He concluded his response to Jefferson with a “salute [to] your fire-side with cordial esteem and affection,” and signed it “J.A. In the 89 years of his age still too fat to last much longer.”49
The one significant subject that defied even the seasoned serenity of their latter years was slavery. Adams had alluded to it indirectly in 1816, when he confided to Jefferson that “there will be greater difficulties to preserve our Union, than You and I, our Fathers Brothers Friends Disciples and Sons have had to form it.” Then, in 1819, while Congress was debating the extension of slavery into the newly recognized territory of Missouri, Adams felt bold enough to broach the subject directly: “The Missouri question I hope will follow the other Waves under the Ship and do no harm,” he wrote, adding that he realized it was “high treason to express a doubt of the perpetual duration of our vast American Empire.” But he worried that the sectional conflict over slavery had the potential to “rend this mighty Fabric in twain…[and] produce as many Nations in North America as there are in Europe.” Finally, in 1821, after the so-called Missouri Compromise allowed for the extension of slavery in the western territories, Adams offered his most candid assessment of the national dilemma: “Slavery in this Country I have seen hanging over it like a black cloud for half a century…. I might probably say I had seen Armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in the air, shining in Armour.” Then he reiterated his long-standing position. “I have been so terrified with this Phenomenon,” he explained to Jefferson, “that I constantly said in former times to the Southern Gentlemen, I cannot comprehend the object; I must leave it to you. I will vote for forcing no measure against your judgments.” Jefferson never responded to Adams’s comments and never mentioned the subject of slavery in his letters to Quincy.50
Silence had, in fact, become Jefferson’s official position on slavery. After making several bold proposals for the end of the slave trade and the gradual abolition of slavery early in his career, Jefferson had maintained a mute posture since the 1780s, claiming that the intractable subject defied even his leadership. “I have most carefully avoided every public act or manifestation on that subject,” he wrote to George Logan in 1805, promising that “should an occasion ever occur in which I can interpose with decisive effect, I shall certainly know & do my duty with promptitude & zeal.” In the meantime, he observed, “it would only be disarming myself of influence to be taking small means.” But the propitious moment never arrived. In 1814, Edward Coles, the staunch Jeffersonian who eventually endorsed emancipation, begged the Sage of Monticello to break his silence, claiming that “This difficult task could be more successfully performed by the reverend father of our political and Social blessings than by any other succeeding Statesman.” By then, however, Jefferson pleaded old age. “No, I have outlived the generation with which mutual labors and perils begat mutual confidence and influence,” he explained. Ending slavery was a glorious cause, he acknowledged, but had been passed on to “those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation.”51
As much as he insisted that American society should not be divided into classes, Jefferson thought that American history should be separated into generations. In other contexts his belief that there were discrete generational units which came into the world and went out together had extremely radical implications, for it led Jefferson to the rather awkward conclusion that one generation could not make laws for the next. “No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law,” he claimed, because to do so would defy the Jeffersonian principle that “The earth always belongs to the living generation.” Or as he put it to Adams, “When we have lived our generation out, we should not wish to encroach upon another.” Taken literally, for that matter taken at all seriously, this was a prescription for anarchy that Jefferson never tried to implement. On the issue of slavery, however, Jefferson’s belief in generational sovereignty served the conservative purpose of justifying, indeed requiring, silence and passivity from the revolutionary generation on the most ominous problem facing the new nation. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [i.e., slaves] are to be free,” he announced in his autobiography, written in 1821. But it was equally obvious to him that emancipation would require a revolution in public opinion that Jefferson felt was a long way off, the work of the next generation, or perhaps an even more distant cohort of American leaders several ages away.52
Adams agreed with Jefferson that slavery constituted the most nearly intractable problem faced by the revolutionary generation. “The Subject is vast and ominous,” he noted in 1817: “More than fifty years has it attracted my thoughts and given me much anxiety. A Folio Volume would not contain my Lucubrations on this Subject. And at the End of it, I should leave my reader and myself as much at a loss, what to do with it, as at the Beginning.” However, Adams did not agree with—for that matter, he did not comprehend at all—Jefferson’s belief in generational sovereignty. For Adams, history was not a dead burden of accumulated weight that each generation was free to toss aside; it was a combination of mishaps and successes, ignorance and wisdom, from which future leaders should learn. The problem with slavery, Adams acknowledged, was that it constituted the one subject on which he, Jefferson, and the rather remarkable generation of leaders they symbolized had little wisdom to offer.53
Just what Adams thought that limited wisdom was became clear in the national debate over the extension of slavery into Missouri, which prompted different reactions from the two patriarchs that were so loaded with emotion and implication that each man chose to avoid mentioning his thoughts to the other. Adams saw the issue as clearcut. “Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude,” he wrote to William Tudor, “and I am therefore utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territory.” He thought that the procedural question—whether the federal government or the state legislature had the power to make the decision—was of merely secondary importance. He hoped that “the Legislature of Missouri, or the [Territorial] Convention, may have the Wisdom to prohibit Slavery of their own accord,” but whether or not they did, the
federal government had established its right to rule for the territories when it approved the Louisiana Purchase. “I think the Southern gentlemen who thought it [the Louisiana Purchase] constitutional,” he explained to his beloved daughter-in-law Louisa Catherine, “ought not to think it unconstitutional for Congress to restrain the extention of Slavery in that territory.” The primary issue for Adams was the moral imperative against slavery and, even more telling, his clear sense that the revolutionary generation had never intended that the evil institution spread beyond the South. (This was eventually the position that Lincoln took in the 1850s.) In 1820, Adams was alerting several of his correspondents, though not Jefferson, that “we must settle the question of slavery’s extension now, otherwise it will stamp our National Character and lay a Foundation for Calamities, if not disunion.”54
Jefferson seemed to resent the very existence of the debate, as if the eloquent silence he had maintained on the unmentionable subject should become national policy. Although he supported what he called the rights of slaveholders to live in Missouri, his major complaint was the growth of federal power—the issue Adams considered secondary—which he began to describe as an encroachment on southern rights reminiscent of British intrusions in the pre-revolutionary years. “In the gloomiest moments of the Revolutionary War,” he wrote in 1820, “I never had any apprehensions equal to what I feel from this source.” His pronouncements became more pessimistic and morbid, outdoing even Adams at his most apocalyptic: “I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the…sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness,” he warned, “is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.” Even his beloved University of Virginia, which he had originally conceived as a national center of learning, became for Jefferson a bastion of southern ways to protect Virginia’s rising generation against the seductive infidelities of Harvard and Yale, where abolitionists, bankers, unscrupulous merchants, and Federalist fanatics acquired their bad manners and destructive ideas.55
“I look back with rapture to those golden days,” Adams wrote to him in 1825, “when Virginia and Massachusetts lived and acted together like a band of brothers and I hope it will not be long before they may say redeunt saturnia regna.”56 But the golden age Adams referred to was gone for Jefferson, blasted into oblivion by sectional politics and what seemed to him a northern conspiracy to make the unmentionable subject of slavery the dominant topic of the new age. Although Jefferson surely knew that Adams was one of the conspirators, just as he knew that John Quincy embodied a political persuasion that threatened the survival of slavery and states’ rights, he sustained his commitment to the correspondence to the end, avoiding the troublesome topics, concealing his mounting bitterness and despair, maintaining pretenses. The friendship symbolized by the correspondence would thus serve as a testimony to posterity about the way it had once been within the extraordinary but now nearly defunct generation that he and Adams symbolized.
Adams never knew the depth of the tragedy Jefferson felt nor the irony of their shifting circumstances. From 1820 onward, Jefferson—America’s most attractive apostle of optimism—was trapped in a spiralling despondency. He had lost the faith that his very name was destined to epitomize and instead became an example of the paranoia and pessimism that Adams had eventually overcome. Wracked by rheumatism and a painful intestinal disorder that would eventually kill him, even his physical condition deteriorated more rapidly than that of his older friend at Quincy. Jefferson’s personal debts continued to mount, for he had never mastered the reconciliation of his expensive tastes with the financial facts of his household economy. His addiction for French wines and French luxuries, like his affinity for French ideas, never came to grips with the more mundane realities. When an old friend whom he had unwisely loaned a huge sum of money defaulted, the liability fell on Jefferson’s estate, prompting a lamentation that was saved from total despair by the inimitable Jeffersonian style: “A call on me to the amount of my endorsements for you,” he wrote his indebted friend, “would indeed close my course by a catastrophe I had never contemplated.” Infirm, insolvent, and depressed that the future he always trusted had somehow taken a wrong turn, Jefferson lived out his last days amidst two hundred slaves he could not free without encumbering his heirs with even greater debts, without his magnificent library, which he had been forced to sell for cash, on the deteriorating grounds of the once proud Monticello, which was decaying at the same rapid pace as his own political optimism.57
5
Erudite Effusions
I am willing to allow your Phylosophers your opinion of the universal Gravitation of Matter, if you will allow mine that there is in some souls a principle of absolute Levity that buoys them irresistably into the Clouds…an uncontroulable Tendency to ascend…. This I take to be precisely the Genius of Burr…and Hamilton.
—Adams to Benjamin Rush, April 12, 1807
The Town of Quincy have been pleased to Elect me a Member of the [Massachusetts Constitutional] Convention—and wonderful to relate…I am sufficiently advanced in my dotage to have accepted the Choice. And if I should fall like Chatham in attempting to utter a few sentences, it would be pronounced by the World…EUTHANASIA. I feel not much like a maker or mender of Constitutions, in my present state of imbecility…. But I presume one shall not be obliged to carry wind-mills by assault.
—Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, October 21, 1820
AT ITS BEST, the dialogue with Jefferson had the character of a good conversation, its pace and rhythm dictated by the more ebullient Adams temperament, its content determined by the play between Adams’s compulsion for candor and Jefferson’s desire for discretion. One might conjure up the picture of a stately Jefferson, gazing calmly into the middle distance, while Adams, slightly frenzied, briskly paces back and forth, periodically tugging on Jefferson’s lapels, slapping him on the back, whispering admonitions into his ear, filling up the Jeffersonian silences with talk.
Since conversations are, by their nature, informal exchanges without an explicit agenda, it would be foolish to expect the dialogue between Adams and Jefferson to provide a comprehensive account of either man’s mature thought. Nevertheless, certain features of the political landscape as Adams saw it came into sharper focus in the correspondence with Jefferson than they ever had before. Jefferson was like one of those books he argued with in the margins, except Jefferson could argue back, forcing Adams to clarify the core values of what he called “my system.” It was not just that Adams needed an opponent to discipline his inherently effusive intellectual energies, though that was surely so. Or that Adams possessed a dialectical temperament that tended to define its deepest convictions in opposition, like a lawyer defending a client, though that was true as well. The Adams affinity for dialectic and dialogue had even deeper roots. Although he had written four volumes to explain his “system,” Adams was perhaps the most unsystematic great thinker of the era. For Adams, thought was more a series of pulsations than a connected set of geometric lines, more a set of explosions that went off in his consciousness than a logical syllogism. He revealed more of his political thought in dialogues with others than in his informal political treatises because the episodic character of a conversation matched nicely with his impulsive, hit-or-miss, indeed episodic, mode of thinking.
The correspondence with Jefferson had drawn out of him fresh expressions of his reasons for mistrusting the liberal faith as Jefferson embodied it. But the deepest and most comprehensive expression of the convictions underlying Adams’s own political thought occurred in his correspondence with another, less famous, Virginian. The dialogue with Jefferson exposed the extent of Adams’s discomfort with the beguiling optimism of the Jeffersonian vision, most especially the formulations that grew out of the French philosophical tradition and that eliminated altogether the need for an active role for government in shaping and controlling social p
olicy. At the same time he was writing Jefferson, however, Adams unburdened himself in a series of candid letters-as-lectures that constituted his clearest and fullest explanation of what he meant by an American aristocracy.
It began somewhat mysteriously. In September of 1813 Adams told Jefferson that he had “scarcely sealed my last letter to you…when they brought me from the Post Office a Packett, without Post Mark, without name date or place….” The package contained an unsigned manuscript over 600 pages in length. “I gravely composed my risible Muscles and read it through,” he reported to Jefferson, and discovered that he was reading “an attack upon me by name for the doctrines of Aristocracy….” Adams was stretching the truth with Jefferson. He later admitted that he “never read the book” but only “dipped here and there,” claiming that the prose style defied comprehension and that “no one will ever read it through.”1