Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams

by Joseph J. Ellis

  The last portrait done of Adams, painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1823, captured the lionlike fury, with its steely-eyed gaze and rumpled hair that floated around his head and down to his shoulders like a mane. “Stuart caught a glimpse of the living spirit shining through the feeble and decrepit body,” observed Josiah Quincy, adding that it fixed the final image of the old man “at one of those happy moments when the intelligence lights up the wasted envelope….” Despite the wrinkled skin, reddened eyes, arthritic hands, and stooped posture, the spirit of the man remained incandescent, always at risk of becoming inflammable.4

  Bronze casting of John Adams, by John Henri Isaac Brownere,

  based on plaster “life mask” of 1825, depicting Adams

  as the American Cicero.

  Courtesy New York Historical Association, Cooperstown

  The older he got, the more Adams tried to fit himself into the role of the stoic Roman statesman, living out a life of rustic simplicity as depicted in Cicero’s De Senectute. “I can read Cicero’s de Senectute, because I have read him for almost seventy years,” he wrote in 1820, “and seem to have him almost by heart.” But the heart was always the problem for Adams, whose temperament precluded stoicism in much the same way that fire melted ice. In his eighty-fifth year, while rereading Cicero’s advice on self-control and seasoned serenity, he acknowledged that his admiration for the stoical message was at odds with his visceral reaction to the text. “I never delighted much in contemplating commas and colons, or in spelling or measuring syllables,” he admitted—and this from a writer whose cavalier approach to punctuation and spelling defied generations of accomplished editors—“but now, while reading Cato, if I look at these little objects, I find my imagination, in spite of all my exertions, roaming in the Milky Way….” Even the punctuation in a Latin sentence, it seems, could set him off, catapulting his mind beyond simple translation and into some idiosyncratic realm where his own eccentricities were free to roam. He had always been, and always remained, too passionate and slightly out of control to fit neatly into the classical mold, too sentient and singular a being to appear properly enigmatic.5

  Even as he grew into a very old man, his efforts to adopt Ciceronian poses usually failed miserably, victims of his penchant for candor and the tendency to transform dignified requests for his wisdom into jokes. In response to a touchingly laudatory letter from John Jay, Adams refused to accept the praise or behave like a sage. “I am too feeble and have been confined to the house the greatest part of the winter,” he wrote to Jay in 1821, “but I hope to crawl out like a Turtle in the Spring.” One visitor who expected to encounter a sedate and sober old man came away shaking his head and reporting that, unlike all other professed sages, Adams “could not keep his mouth shut.” When a correspondent asked him the secret of his longevity, he replied that every day he drank lots of cider, water, lemonade, and “no more than a pint of wine,” and always tried to have chocolate for breakfast. Then he pleaded for relief from such questions, claiming that “the history of my Physical habits according to the best estimate I can make, would fill a Volume in folio as large as the life of Richard Baxter.”6

  In 1820, when a friend apprised him that the new Maine constitution set an age limit for judges, he dashed off a comic retort that self-consciously mocked his own reputation for vanity as well as the infamous Adams vituperative style: “I consider this as a personal affront to me as an Old Man,” he joked; it was also a repudiation of the wisdom of the ages and of the classics and, if these revered authorities carried no weight with the voters of Maine, they should be informed that the Master of Montezillo had declared the new law “against the Precepts and practice of the Bible.” His daily exercise habits inspired the same self-deprecating exuberance. As he told Charles Francis, his grandson and eventual editor, he liked to ride his horse, Rosenante, two or three miles a day, but would much prefer to ride around his property on a less majestic and much shorter beast: “Six and thirty years ago as your father can tell you,” he recalled in 1815, “I rode over a great part of the Asturian & Pyrenian mountains in Spain, on a beautiful mule, and I would give more for that little animal for any use now, than for the best horse at the new market races.” The erstwhile Cicero of American politics kept behaving like Sancho Panza.7

  Adams’s inveterate effusiveness, the sheer volume of emotional energy that he expended in talk, letterwriting, friendships, and even in solitary thinking, deserves more than casual notice as an intriguing aside that supplements, in merely ornamental fashion, an intellectual assessment of his thought and character. His emotional intensity, and the free-flowing manner in which it expressed itself, was a central feature of his personality. It was the major reason he found it impossible to produce a coherent statement of his political philosophy in a single volume or treatise; it underlay his inability to craft his autobiography with the manipulative artifice of a Franklin or—to peer into the future of the Adams family—with the ironic orchestrations of his great-grandson, Henry; it shaped, often in a decisive way, the opinions of friends, enemies and, even more tellingly, associates who did not know him well, by creating an impression of unpredictable volatility and almost dangerous honesty; and it prevented him from being conveyed to the world or to posterity in the guise of a classical hero with a dignified deportment, deliberative demeanor, and a temperament sufficiently elusive to serve as a Rorschach test for subsequent generations. In all these ways, the passionate energy of his personality was the electrical current that animated his very being and defined what even he came to call his “singular character.”

  The very same emotional excesses that so often got him into trouble in public life—his candor, flat-out style of argument, and proclivity to engage whenever challenged—usually had the opposite effect in his private life. Most of those who came within his orbit, even when that orbit was delineated by his withering criticisms and hostile opinions, ended up concluding that Adams was irresistibly likable. For example, in 1824 John Taylor saw fit to compose an affectionate final letter to Adams. “During a long illness from which I am not yet recovered,” Taylor wrote, “the reveries which usually amuse sick people visited me; and among them the idea of writing a farewell letter to you.” Taylor knew better than most how difficult and contentious Adams could be. But as he lay dying, Taylor felt the urge to record his respect and affection for the man whose political theory he had spent twenty years attacking. However much they might disagree about politics, however irascible Adams had been in responding to Taylor’s criticism of his Defence, Taylor wanted to go to his grave acknowledging Adams’s personal greatness. His farewell letter “will not be suspected of adulation,” wrote Taylor, given their long record of disagreement and Taylor’s fatal illness; it was intended only “to file among your archives some facts, which may meet the eye of a historian, as well as to give some pleasure to a patriot.”

  Among the facts was Taylor’s assessment that Adams ranked “next to Washington” in the American pantheon, a rather remarkable placement for an avid Jeffersonian to make, especially one whom Adams had confronted in thirty-two long, accusatory, and explanatory letters. But the candor, the unvarnished sincerity and human engagement that Adams displayed in the extended conversation with Taylor won over the Virginian’s heart despite their irreconcilable differences as political thinkers. The bond Taylor claimed to feel defied logic or reasoned argument. Having encountered the palpable vivacity of the essential Adams, it was simply impossible not to like him.8

  Usually, however, it was Adams who defied conventional expectations to reach out for a personal connection in spite of public disagreement. The resumption of the friendship with Jefferson illustrated this tendency, which Jefferson then responded to with his characteristic geniality. But the rekindling of the Adams-Jefferson relationship was but the most famous example of a decided pattern that recurred regularly throughout the latter years at Quincy. In 1820, for example, Adams wrote Louisa Catherine that there were “reports in circulation here that M
r. Randolph of Roanoke is in a state of insanity….” The reference was to John Randolph, the eccentric Virginia congressman, avid defender of states’ rights, slavery, and agrarian values—Randolph might be described as a slightly deranged man-child whose eloquent tantrums on the floor of the Congress on behalf of what he gleefully acknowledged was a lost cause became the prototype for the doomed Cavalier of southern fiction. Adams admitted that Randolph “has appeared through his whole public life to be possessed of a Demonical Spirit of Malice and Vengeance without cause against me.” And this was no Adams exaggeration. (Randolph had expressed the hope that the entire male side of the Adams family should be tortured to death by Indians.) Nevertheless, Adams confided to his daughter-in-law that “I have ever considered him [Randolph] gifted by nature with some amiable qualities and therefore have always felt a kind of respect for him.” He asked Louisa Catherine to convey his wish for a quick recovery and a resumption of the inimitable Randolph style.9

  Perhaps Adams recognized some piece of himself in the eccentric Virginian, a tendency toward wildly idiosyncratic urges that could easily, as it had in Randolph, expand into a near-maniacal temperament. More likely, the Adams gesture of friendship, for forgiving past political differences, for responding to the elemental humanity inside old enemies as well as old allies, was an established and instinctive habit that required no special explanation.

  Just two months before he asked after Randolph’s health, for instance, he bemoaned the death of John Wentworth, a Harvard classmate Adams described as “my friend of 70 years standing.” Wentworth had sided with the British during the Revolution, served as the last royal governor of New Hampshire, then fled to Nova Scotia as an exile. But Adams still felt an emotional bond with him. “In spite of Political and National Alienations,” he wrote, “which I find do not reach the heart, I feel the death of Wentworth—as I should a brother.” The same sentiments applied to David Sewall, who after Wentworth’s death remained his sole surviving Harvard classmate. “Our political sentiments,” Adams observed to Sewall, “are of no consequence to the community. You & I agreed very well at College…. We have ever since, as I hope, agreed in private friendships. But we have gazed at the great political system of the universe, through different telescopes.” That made little difference, however, as long as their mutual trust allowed them to begin letters with a hearty “How do you do?”10

  In the classical scheme of things such a capacity to reach past political and ideological disagreements reflected the maturation of the mind, the older and wiser man’s development to a stage where cool reason finally established control over unruly passions; serenity, in the form of sober judgment and calm acceptance of life’s petty vicissitudes, was an inherently rational condition that usually came with age, when the youthful fires had died down and reasoned decisions at last had the opportunity to assume their place of natural supremacy. But much as he enjoyed making self-congratulatory references to Cicero, Adams never evolved to this allegedly “higher” stage of personal maturity. One of the central ironies of his character was that America’s most notorious defender of a classical conception of politics possessed an inherently passionate, non-classical disposition: “The astonishment of your Family at my vivacity is very just,” he had written to Rush just before his closest friend’s death, adding that “when a man’s vivacity increases with years it becomes frenzy at last.”11 His vaunted vivacity remained the dominant feature of his personality.

  Adams never conquered his passions. They were, in fact, the basis for and source of his infectious amiability. Adams did not overcome long-standing political differences with old friends like Jefferson, Wentworth, or Sewall because of some newfound Ciceronian self-control. Quite the opposite, he retrieved such relationships because he could not control himself. “Had you and I been forty days with Moses on Mount Sinai,” he gushed to Jefferson, “and admitted to behold, the divine Shekinah, and there told that one was three and three, one: We might not have had the courage to deny it, but We could not have believed it.” The urge to share such playful thoughts was spontaneous, the irresistible result of what Adams himself called his “sauciness.” He could forgive and forget, not because he had achieved stoic detachment, but because he had never lost a childlike impulse to share his deepest personal feelings. When, much earlier in his life, Jonathan Sewall commented that “Adams has a heart formed for friendship,” he was making what turned out to be more than a casual observation. Once Adams had established a bond of trust with another, there were no well-placed way stations in his soul where candor could make convenient stops while discretion assessed the implications. Friendship filled too basic a need, satisfied too compelling an impulse, to make it subservient to cautionary restraints.12

  Of course, trust could easily get him into trouble. Four years after Benjamin Rush’s death his son, Richard Rush, asked Adams about the possible publication of the Adams-Rush correspondence. This would have exposed Adams to a cascade of criticism and humiliation, since his letters to Rush contained his most outrageous bursts of indignation and his most indiscreet judgments on his fellow members of the revolutionary generation. “The correspondence between your Father and me has been for forty years together too intimate and too free, to see the Light at present,” Adams explained. When Richard Rush suggested that perhaps an edited version might not offend, Adams countered that “My Letters to him are of a rougher and coarser Constitution” than public taste, no matter how skillful the editing, “could withstand.” Adams rejected any censored version, insisting that he “would not have one line of them suppressed.” Fortunately, Richard Rush concurred, so Adams was spared the embarrassment of explaining opinions that, even in the twentieth century, possess the power to shock.13

  Not so fortunately, Adams sent off many letters to less reliable correspondents, strangers or casual acquaintances who were trusted with controversial opinions, which were then published without his permission in local newspapers. The most damaging episode involved William Cunningham, a Federalist polemicist who had engaged Adams in an exchange of letters in the early years of his retirement. The correspondence contained some of Adams’s most critical assessments of Jefferson, accusing him of “a mean thirst of popularity, an inordinate ambition, and a want of sincerity.” When Cunningham announced that he intended to publish the letters, Adams was flabbergasted. “The correspondence and conversations that have passed between us have been under the confidential seal of secrecy and friendship,” he claimed, warning that “Any violation of it will be a breach of honour and of plighted faith.” But Cunningham’s son eventually published the letters in 1823, as part of a scheme to discredit John Quincy’s prospects for the presidency by exposing the elder Adams as an “aristocratical and despotic” creature, whose reputation would have been best served “if his public labours had ceased, with the termination of the revolution….” This was a harsh and prejudicial judgment based on statements Adams had made in offguard moments and in his most resentful moods. But it represented the kind of price Adams paid for trusting near strangers with his unbridled, often excessive, opinionated declarations.14

  The most glaring example of his out-of-control style had been the heated exchange with Mercy Otis Warren in 1807. If Warren had seen fit to publish any of the Adams harangues against her treatment of his role in the American Revolution, it would have confirmed the most critical judgments of his worst enemies. But Warren was a long standing friend of the family, who kept the offensive letters private. Probably under prodding from Abigail, Adams began to repair the damage he had done with Warren, so that by 1814 the friendship was fully reinstated. Instead of asking explicitly for her forgiveness, he leapt to her defense when several newspaper accounts questioned her authorship of The Group, a propagandistic play she had written during the American Revolution but which skeptics claimed could not have been written by a woman. Adams testified that a woman had, indeed, written the play and that Warren was the woman, in his view the most intellectually accomplished and
politically astute woman of his generation. These male skeptics, he assured Warren, were like the Tory disbelievers of old; he reminded her that “Through the whole Revolution the Tories sat on our skirts and were a dead weight to us.” Warren then invited Adams to come down to Plymouth for a family visit to seal the reconciliation. He declined, but wanted her to know that his rejection should not be interpreted as a qualification of his renewed affection for her. “Three score and nineteen years have reduced me to the situation, the temper and humor of Mr. Selden,” he explained, “who Clarendon says, would not have slept out of his own bed for any office the King could have given him.”15

  The recovered friendship with Mercy Otis Warren fit the same pattern as the renewed relationships with Jefferson, John Taylor, and former college friends like Sewall and Wentworth. In each case deep political and ideological disagreements proved less powerful than Adams’s craving for emotional affinity. But the Warren friendship was different in one obvious and important way: it was a friendship between a woman and a man. While not unprecedented in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America, it was far from commonplace. And given the character of the friendship between Adams and Warren—the presumption of intellectual equality, the tendency on the part of Adams to treat Warren as a fellow member in the small gallery of greats who helped to make the American Revolution, the infrequency of any gender-based decorum, chivalric patronizing, or gentlemanly poses—the friendship seems rare indeed. Obviously the life-long relationship with Abigail had educated Adams to the possibility that women could possess first-rate minds and strong personalities worthy of his respect. But the friendship with Warren had started in the years before the American Revolution, before the lifetime experience with Abigail could have worn away some of his traditional assumptions about the purportedly proper relationship between women and men. Even when he was lambasting her for her treatment of him in her History, Adams always interacted with Warren as if she were on the same plane as Jefferson, Rush, Taylor, and his other prominent friends. No other male member of the revolutionary generation treated Warren with this kind of presumed equity. And no other male member of the revolutionary generation seemed capable of the kind of unalloyed, unromantic intimacy with strong-willed American women that Adams achieved with Warren.