Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams

by Joseph J. Ellis

  The pursuit of profits and wealth, no matter how successful, was only one way to satisfy the craving for respect. Adams thought that most Americans would opt to release their ambitious energies along this avenue, in part because it was the most visible and obvious course and in part because the economic opportunities were more prolific in America. A smaller number would choose to distinguish themselves outside the marketplace, pursuing what Adams called “reputation.” Many members of this group were likely to be successful merchants and businessmen who realized that wealth itself was inadequate to quench their thirst for recognition and who eventually graduated to a higher plateau, where they could release their passions in philanthropic causes. Public officials, men of letters, and military men also lived at this level; they could be expected to talk in terms of “a sense of duty, a love of truth,” but their deeper and often unconscious motives were decidedly selfish. “It is the notoriety, the celebration,” Adams argued, “which constitutes the charm that is to compensate the loss of appetite and sleep….”42

  The most successful players on this plateau might expect public recognition in the form of titles, statues, and even a place in the history books. “The wisdom and virtue of all nations,” Adams explained, “have endeavored to regulate the passion for respect and distinction, and to reduce it to some order in society, by titles marking the gradations of magistracy….” By creating separate honors to aim for, the government encouraged greater exertions on behalf of the public and was simultaneously able “to prevent…collisions among the passions of many pursuing the same objects.” One of the reasons Adams proposed fanciful titles for the leading public officials in America—a proposal that his critics denounced as evidence of his aristocratic and un-American sensibility—was to ensure an adequate supply of honorific rewards. Since America lacked the kind of aristocratic titles and emblems that had grown up over time in Europe and Great Britain, Adams thought they should be created for distinguished public servants in order to guarantee that the drive for distinction would be attracted into government and public service and not fall back into the merely material rewards of the marketplace.43

  On the other hand, Adams himself acknowledged that the quest for titles or statues or a place in the history books was an irrational drive: “For what a folly is it!” he observed. “What is it to us what shall be said of us after we are dead? Or in Asia, Africa, or Europe while we live. There is no greater possible or imaginable delusion. Yet the impulse is irresistible.” What made it irresistible he did not say. Like a primordial instinct, it was simply there, festering away in the souls of all human beings. Perhaps it was some hidden urge to deny one’s mortality, to live on in the imaginations of others. Perhaps it was some conditioned reflex that God had built into nature in order to guarantee public spiritedness. Whatever the ultimate source of the urge, Adams was clear about two points: first, he knew its power first hand and could testify personally to its dominance over purely rational approaches to life; second, given the undeniability of the passion for distinction, the proper function of government was not to pretend that such forces did not exist, but rather to assure they were “directed to virtue, and then encouraged by generous applause and honorable rewards.”44

  Finally, some men were born at opportune moments in history, when nations were being founded or great crises that would shape the future of the world were in process. These rare historical moments often called forth the deepest reservoir of human ambition, the most ferocious form of the passion for recognition. “This,” wrote Adams—surely with a keen sense that he was describing his own generation and, he hoped, himself—“is the tribe out of which proceed your patriots and heroes.” Men like Jefferson and Taylor, who had fashioned a political rhetoric that stigmatized aristocratic power, were inadvertently condemning the very group of American leaders—the revolutionary generation—which had been responsible for creating the American republic. History only afforded a few opportunities to satisfy such leaders. “But there are but a few, and God knows but a few,” Adams noted, with the combination of talent and ambition to “aim at approbation as well as attention, at esteem as well as congratulation….” Only those leaders with the deepest craving for fame were candidates for this highest calling; and society sanctioned the full release of their egotistical impulses because circumstances demanded and required nothing less. “I have read in a book that Alexander did much good,” Adams recalled wryly, “and in another book that Caesar did great work, and in others, that English liberties are all owing to Cromwell; and I believe all these paradoxes.”45

  The paradox derived from the fact that such leaders, like banks, were both indispensable and dangerous, that the very passion for fame and glory, once released, was also extremely difficult to control. Hamilton and Burr were his favorite examples of the built-in danger. Adams had given this lecture on self-control to himself countless times in his diary. In Davila it was elevated to the highest level of political theory: “But for our humiliation,” he warned, “we must still remember, that…the passion, although refined by the purest moral sentiments, and intended to be governed by the best principles, is a passion still; and therefore, like all other human desires, unlimited and insatiable.” He inserted a quotation from Samuel Johnson that put the question nicely: “Heroes proceed! What bounds your pride shall hold?” The autobiographical answer to that question he had always given to himself was clear: constant doses of humility, endless lectures on self-discipline. But at the national level more than trust in such personal admonitions was required. “The answer to that question can be nothing other than this,” he concluded, “that as nature has established in the bosoms of heroes no limits to those passions; and as the world, instead of restraining, encourages them, the check must be in the form of government.” This meant limited terms of office, checks and balances, and a constitution that explicitly precluded even the most charismatic and virtuous official from standing above the law.46

  Whereas Madison thought that the vast size of the American republic served as a safeguard against despotism by assuring that the greater variety and number of interest groups would collide with one another in a continental version of Adam Smith’s marketplace, Adams worried about the geographical size of the United States and the growing population. “National passions and habits are unwieldy, unmanageable, and formidable things,” he warned, and when “exposed to the observation of greater numbers of people, the effects…become more serious, interesting, and dangerous.” His primary concern was that vastness of the American republic would enlarge the size of the political theatre in which ambitious leaders played their roles, expanding the arena in which their urge to distinguish themselves could function, feeding that urge with continental conquests. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr troubled him in this connection, since they were energetic leaders with “an uncontroulable Tendency to ascend,” and the western territories afforded them every opportunity to stage adventurous expeditions. He also worried that personal rivalries for national attention would break down regionally, with sectional leaders vying for political power in elections that produced “slanders and libels first, mobs and seditions next, and civil war, with all her hissing snakes, burning torches, and haggard horrors at last.” Frequent elections, like so many other features of his political thinking, were double-edged weapons: on the one hand, they prevented entrenched power from becoming permanent; on the other hand, they multiplied the occasions when vanity could distort the national interest. But he offered such scenes as warnings rather than prophecies. They were also reminders that the American experiment with republican government over such a vast tract of land was an unprecedented undertaking of great promise and great risk, with the greatness on both scores deriving from the unprecedented scope America offered for the expression of humankind’s most elemental drives.47

  Davila was like his other attempts at political theory, only more so: a disorderly collection of profound insights, both the disorder and the profundity deriving from the same s
ource inside the Adams personality. Adams admitted as much to himself. Whenever he made marginal notes in his personal copy of Davila, he admitted disappointment at its rambling and disjointed form. “The Style has little fluency,” he scribbled in 1813, then added with obvious pride, “but the sense is as immortal as human nature.”48

  The lack of what Adams called “fluency”—the ricochet style of Davila and the Defence—inadvertently expressed one of his deepest political convictions: namely, that comprehensive theories of politics were invariably too neat and rational to capture the maddening messiness of the real world. True, Adams did believe there was such a thing as human nature. He had studied it in written histories and, more tellingly, had confronted its emotional imperatives inside himself. But he did not believe that conventional forms of political philosophy did much justice to the complex irrationalities of the human condition. He associated elaborate theories of politics with French philosophes like Turgot and Condorcet, whose mental fabrications bore only a tenuous connection to history’s machinations. As Adams saw it, political theory of the grandiose sort was invariably “ideology,” an organized collection of seductive hopes and wishes, a systematic way of going wrong with confidence. History and the human heart that propelled it could not be reduced to a set of accessible political prescriptions, which were, after all, merely pieces of theoretical wisdom, and therefore a contradiction in terms.

  If the dishevelled condition of his political writings conveyed an important insight into the limitations of language and political theory, it also obscured his legacy. Adams was fond of telling friends and family that his reputation suffered for the lack of “puffers,” what we would call publicists or lobbyists. (The deeper problem, of course, was that, even if such creatures had made themselves available to Adams, he would never have listened to them.) What he really needed was a skillful editor, someone to play the role of monitor of his political writings, a role Madison played with Jefferson, someone to rescue his erudition from his inveterate effusiveness. For if Adams should not be seen, indeed did not wish to be seen, as a political theorist or philosopher, he does merit recognition as one of America’s most notable political thinkers.49

  What might a thoughtful editor have selected as the central features of the Adams political legacy? Well, the core impulse of his political thought was adversarial, contrarian, and dialectical, an exact intellectual expression of his personal temperament. For this reason all scholarly attempts to locate logical inconsistencies in his thought, or to accuse him of shifting his ideological position after the American Revolution, are misguided ventures that fail to grasp the animating principle of his political mentality. While a firm believer in the classical political categories, he was obsessed with a dynamic version of the classical ideal of balance. This meant that he could be counted on to oppose the reigning Zeitgeist, whether it was blowing toward the left or the right. Dramatic shifts of emphasis were an integral part of his avowed system. He regarded all political movements and social trends as addictions; like the vanities and ambitions coursing through his own soul, they required countering correctives lest they fly out of control. He was unparalleled among his peers in understanding the doctrine of checks and balances in ways that went beyond erector-set rationality.

  Finally, Adams was the supreme political realist of the revolutionary generation. His lifelong habit of mistrusting himself effectively immunized him against illusory solutions to the problem of political power provided by both the older classical and newer liberal traditions. The classical belief in virtue, while a noble ideal, struck him as a naive and at best short-lived hope, for it asked more of human nature than could possibly be sustained. Meanwhile the various liberal antidotes to the virus of political power—an enlightened people, a benign marketplace, the expansive borders of an enlarged republic—struck him as a wholly inadequate, or as seductive delusions that usually made matters worse. Among America’s dominant political theologians, he remained the avowed agnostic and therefore the most astute analyst of political power’s inherent intractability. In the end, he could not bring himself to believe that there were any ultimate answers to the overlapping problems of self-government or national government, at least none that did not contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction.

  6

  Intimacies

  Among all the great characters that it has been my lot to meet…I have never met with a mind of such varied powers, such acute discrimination, and which if I may use the expression, was so intrinsically sound; with a memory so fertile, so clear, and so perspicuous. Every thing in his mind was rich, racy, and true.

  —Louisa Catherine Adams, Diary, June 2, 1839

  I have as great a Terror of learned Ladies, as you have. I have such a consciousness of Inferiority to them, as mortifies and humiliates my self-love, to such a degree that I can scarcely speak in their presence. Very few of these Ladies have ever had the condescention to allow me to talk. And when it has so happened, I have always come off mortified at the discovery of my Inferiority.

  —Adams to Francis Vanderkemp, April 8, 1815

  AS THE RETIREMENT YEARS at Quincy rolled on and Adams entered his eighties, his vision of public affairs remained connected to incessant explorations of his own boisterous personality. When he looked backwards into history or outward into the emerging nation he had helped to establish, he saw the same emotional ingredients throbbing and pulsating and influencing events as when he looked inside himself. Politics for him remained psychology writ large, a heaving collection of irrational urges that moved across the social landscape like the ambitions and vanities he felt surging through his own soul. More than any member of the revolutionary generation, Adams thought of statecraft as a public application of the skills required for self-management, regarded political analysis as a public version of introspection.

  The emotions or passions were not merely abstract concepts to think or write about in splendid isolation from their effects; they were forces he experienced personally. As Bernard Bailyn has so nicely put it, Adams “felt the world, directly and sensitively, before he thought about it,” so that his most profound and perceptive insights into what we call political theory were not, for him at least, theoretical at all. They were vivid projections onto a larger social screen of the images he saw inside himself; or, more accurately, they were intellectual expressions of the emotions he felt most deeply. His mind and heart were wired together in such a fashion as to preclude purely abstract expression; thought and feeling were so intermingled inside him that he was literally incapable of rational detachment.1

  One reason Adams kept rereading his Discourses on Davila with approval throughout his retirement was that its central argument—that emotional rather than rational forces inevitably shaped history and the men who made it—confirmed his personal experience with his own interior demons; it also somewhat sanctioned his own temperamental volatility. And one reason Adams had to contend with a reputation for unpredictable outbursts unbecoming a classical hero of the American republic was that he remained maddeningly and irreverently outspoken in public as well as private situations.

  “I have one head, four limbs and five Senses,” he responded mockingly to one of the innumerable inquiries about his physical condition in old age, adding that he was “Five feet seven or nine Inches, I really know not which.” As for his reputation for emotional outbursts that resembled tantrums, he claimed that his political enemies had exaggerated the tendency: “My temper in general has been tranquil except when any Instance of extraordinary Madness, Deceit, Hypocricy, Ingratitude, Treachery or Perfidy has suddenly struck me. Then I have always been irascible enough, and in three or four Instances too much so.” This was a concession he would never have made in the earliest years of his retirement. As he entered his eighties, he wanted the world to know that, whatever storms still brewed inside him, they were now under control and that “Anger never rested in the bosom.”2

  Anger, of course, was only one kind of em
otion. There were many others, which Adams could readily exhibit whenever roused to action by what he considered an impertinent remark about his political values or an uninformed question about the meaning of the American Revolution. Then his verbal artillery would blast away and the words would explode on the page or in the air, usually in a long series of capitalized or emphasized abstractions that defined a whole range of emotions. Years earlier, during his most active service on behalf of the American Revolution, Adams had confided to his diary that he was, by nature, a calm and even languid character. Then he added: “Yet some great Events, Some cutting Expressions, Some mean Hypocrisies, have at Times, thrown this Assemblage of Sloth, Sleep, and littleness into Rage a little like a Lion.” What impressed visitors to Quincy who called upon the septuagenarian patriarch was the abiding ferocity of his feelings, the sheer energy and animated intelligence that remained vibrant and powerful even as his physical condition succumbed to the inevitable ravages of old age. As one visitor put it, there was not “the smallest chip of an iceberg in his composition.”3