Adams was in no position financially to accept this ancient tradition of public service, and in an extraordinary series of letters to his radical English friend John Jebb in 1785, he released all his pent-up anger at those rich aristocrats who claimed a virtuous superiority because they served the public without pay.
He was keenly aware, he said, that “the Word ‘disinterested’ turns the Heads of the People by exciting their Enthusiasm.” By “disinterested,” of course, he did not mean uninterested, as we usually do today; instead, he meant being impartial and possessing the capacity to rise above selfish interests—the meaning that Washington always gave to the term. Adams deeply resented Washington’s serving as commander in chief without salary and his constant claim of being disinterested. Washington, he said, should have been paid a salary. “Would it Lessen his Reputation? Why Should it?” If “the People were perfectly judicious,” paying him a salary would have enhanced his reputation. “But if it did not surely the late revolution was not undertaken to raise one Great reputation to make a sublime Page in History, but for the Good of the People.” Besides, Washington’s example was dangerous. Knaves would take advantage of such promises to serve without salary. Such men would make the people believe that they were “perfectly disinterested” until they gained the people’s confidence and excited their enthusiasm, and then they would “Carry that Confidence and Enthusiasm to market.”
Rarely did Adams express more passion than he did in these letters to Jebb. To avoid the evils of a wealthy and overweening aristocracy, Adams, who certainly saw himself as one of the gentlemen-aristocrats, insisted that officeholders had to be paid a salary. If “no Man should hold an office who had not Private income sufficient for the subsistence and prospects of himself and family,” he knew only too well what the consequence would be: “all offices would be monopolized by the rich—the Poor and the Middling Ranks would be excluded and an Aristocratical Despotism would immediately follow.”73
From the outset of his career, he had seen these arrogant, wealthy aristocrats up close. Even after the expulsion of the Loyalists, rich families continued to dominate Massachusetts politics. The main reason he had wanted an absolute veto for the governor in 1779 was to counter the influence of the wealthy wellborn of the state. He told Elbridge Gerry in November 1780 that Massachusetts society had “so many Men of Wealth, of ambitious Spirits, of Intrigue, of Luxury and Corruption, that incessant Factions will disturb our Peace, without it.”74 Obviously, Adams viewed these Massachusetts elites ambivalently—with good reason: many of them eventually became his bitter enemies.
• • •
ADAMS PUT ALL THESE FEARS and anxieties over the social conflict he saw in America in the 1780s into what he told Jefferson was a “hazardous Enterprise”—his Defence of the United States constitutions. It became the work that he had intended to write on aristocracy, surely one of the most challenging subjects for any American then or now to write about.75
Adams began writing the Defence in October 1786 and completed the bulk of the first volume by the end of the year. He worked rapidly and drew extensively from a wide variety of sources—from historians, philosophers, and political theorists going back to the ancients. That haste and his habit of inserting many of his sources verbatim into the work lay behind the labored and ponderous style of his writing. His letters and diary were spontaneous expressions of his feelings and were always colorful and pungent. But, as the historian Zoltán Haraszti pointed out years ago, Adams lacked the patience to write longer sustained works of intellectual argument. Adams claimed that he didn’t know how to revise, amend, correct, and polish his writing. He was so eager to get his thoughts on the page that in composing the Defence he was unable to digest his many sources and thus he failed to make his writing the product of his mind alone. “My great misfortune, through a pretty long life,” he later admitted, “has been, that I have never had time to make my poor productions shorter.”76
Nevertheless, Adams did display in his Defence a degree of erudition and knowledge of Western culture that few could match. In the preface to the first volume, Adams outlined his main theme of the need to balance the three orders of society in government if civil war was to be avoided. He framed the bulk of the volume as a series of fifty-five letters to his son-in-law, William Stephens Smith. In these letters he traced the history of two dozen or so different republics, including democratical, aristocratical, and monarchical republics. He indiscriminately added letters on the ideas of various philosophers, ranging from Plato and Polybius to Machiavelli and Harrington.
The material was hastily put together, badly organized, and ill digested. Three-quarters of the book consisted of lengthy quotations from other works, some of them carelessly translated and some unattributed. He believed that his argument “would be more useful and effectual” if he laid “facts, principles, examples, and reasoning” before his readers “from the writings of others than my own name.” Unfortunately, he admitted, this borrowing from other writers had “given an air of Pedantry” to his work, but, he said, this was better than to have “contrived with more art, to promote my own reputation.”77
This first volume was published at Adams’s expense in London in January 1787. Adams sent copies to ten or so individuals, including Jefferson. He also sent a hundred copies to his wife’s uncle, Cotton Tufts, instructing him to present two dozen copies to particular persons, with the rest to be turned over to a Boston bookseller. The volume arrived in the United States in mid-April 1787.
The timing was perfect. By more or less coinciding with the suppression of Shays’ Rebellion, an uprising of several thousand debtor farmers in western Massachusetts, and with the creation of the new federal Constitution, the book was greeted favorably, at least at first.
Indeed, some New Englanders thought his volume had contributed to the antipopulist atmosphere that helped create the Constitution. In March 1788 James Freeman, a Boston clergyman with Unitarian leanings, sent a copy of the Massachusetts ratification debates to a fellow clergyman in London. He warned his correspondent that the Constitution was “less democratick, than might be expected from a people who are so fond of liberty.” Freeman suggested that among the causes that had “conspired to render republican sentiments unfashionable” were “a late insurrection in the state of Massachusetts, . . . the corrupt proceedings of the legislature of Rhode Island,” and “Mr. J. Adams’s publications.”78
With doubts about republicanism at a fever pitch in Massachusetts, praise from friends and relatives flooded in on him. Cotton Tufts thought that Adams’s “Description of the Miseries of an unbalanced Democracy, is well calculated to serve as a Beacon to warn the People here of the Ruin that awaits them.”79 Abigail’s brother-in-law, Richard Cranch, told him that the “Litterati” of Massachusetts were “amazed at the vastness of your Reading on the subject of Legislation and Government.”80 Because Adams’s suggested ideal structure of government—with a bicameral legislature and an independent executive that shared in the law-making authority—closely matched that in the new federal Constitution, the Defence was warmly applauded; it seemed to be as much a defense of that new national Constitution as of the several state constitutions. With such praise it’s not surprising that Adams immediately began working on a second and third volume.
From the outset, however, Adams sensed that his Defence would sooner or later get him in trouble with his countrymen. He told Benjamin Franklin that the work was his “confession of political faith, and if it is heresy, I shall, I suppose, be cast out of communion. But it is the only sense in which I am or ever was a Republican.” “Popularity,” he said to his friend James Warren, “was never my Mistress, nor was I ever, or shall I ever be a popular Man. This Book will make me unpopular.”81
He had every reason to worry, for his Defence offered a devastating view of his fellow Americans.
SEVEN
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
THE FRENCH REVO
LUTION severely strained the relationship of the two friends and brought to the surface differences that had remained latent and largely unacknowledged. But this awareness of difference did not occur suddenly. Thomas Jefferson and most Americans welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 as a promising expression of a people seeking merely to make their monarchical constitution less autocratic and more balanced. John Adams was unusual in not joining in this initial common enthusiasm; he was immediately skeptical of what the French were doing. Europe, he said at the outset, was trying to reconcile popular government with monarchy and the contradictory experiment would never work. When the ferocity of the French Revolution began to intensify, Adams’s initial skepticism turned to outright horror. Under these circumstances, the two American statesmen sought desperately to hold their friendship together. In the end, they could do so only by ignoring what each other said and believed.
Adams wasn’t just skeptical about the capacity of the French for self-government. He was skeptical about the character of his fellow Americans as well. Even before he knew of the outbreak of the French Revolution, he had worked out a chilling assessment of the moral fiber of his own countrymen, one that prepared him to see the worst of people everywhere.
Right from the beginning of his own American Revolution, Adams had deep misgivings about whether his fellow citizens had the proper moral character needed to sustain their republican governments. “The only foundation of a free Constitution,” he said on the eve of America’s declaring independence, “is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure, than they have it now, They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty.”1
During his long service abroad, Adams increasingly felt that his fellow Americans were showing less and less appreciation of virtue, particularly his virtue. By the mid-1780s Adams was filling his letters to confidants with complaints about the praise being lavished on Franklin and Washington while he was being ignored and mistreated. His hatred of Franklin knew no bounds. “His whole Life,” he said, “has been one continued Insult to good Manners and to Decency.” But worse, Franklin was dishonest and a liar. His reputation was grossly exaggerated. Indeed, “no Man that ever existed had such a reputation for Wisdom and such an Influence, with so many stupid opinions.”2 That someone like Franklin should be so celebrated was a reflection on America itself. Adams knew that the United States “was destined beyond doubt to be the greatest Power on Earth, and that within the Life of Man,” but could that great power remain a republic?3 He told his cousin Samuel Adams that for years he had “been in the belief that our Countrymen have in them a more ungovernable passion for Luxury than any People upon earth.”4
For Adams the creation of the Society of the Cincinnati in 1783 especially seemed to be a sign of increasing American decadence. “It is sowing the Seeds of all that European Courts wish to grow up among Us, vizt. of Vanity, Ambition, Corruption, Discord, & Sedition.” The country was clearly heading in the wrong direction. “While Reputations are so indiscreetly puffed; while Thanks and Statues are so childishly awarded, and the greatest real services are so coldly received, I had almost Said censured,” he told his friend Elbridge Gerry, “we are in the high Road to have no Virtues left, and nothing but Ambition, Wealth and Power must keep them Company.”5
By 1787 what he had feared all along had become too obvious to him to be denied. His fellow Americans had “never merited the Character of very exalted Virtue,” and it was foolish to have “expected that they should have grown much better.”6 At the outset and even in 1779, when he drafted the Massachusetts constitution, he had hoped that education and the regenerative effects of republican government would be able to mold the character of the people—to extinguish their follies and vices and inspire their virtues and abilities. As late as 1786, he told a British acquaintance that education was still important. Before government could be studied and developed in the same way as geometry and astrometry had been studied and developed, he wrote, “a memorable change must be made in the system of Education and Knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of Society.” Education of the nation must no longer be confined to a few; it “must become the National Care and expence, for the Information of the Many.”7
But by the time he came to write his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America a year later, he had lost much of his confidence that Americans could be educated to behave differently. Citizens in a small community might be taught to be wise and virtuous. “But the education of a great nation can never accomplish so great an end. Millions must be brought up, whom no principles, no sentiments derived from education can restrain from trampling on the laws.”8
Something else would be required to save Americans from eventual tyranny and destruction, from the fate of Europe, indeed, from the fate of every people in history. He wrote the Defence to save his fellow Americans from ruin. “It appeared to me,” he told the English radical Richard Price, “that my Countrymen were running wild, and into danger, from a too ardent and inconsiderate pursuit of erroneous opinions of Government.”9 They were too attracted to the ideas of Thomas Paine and the French philosophes, including the Marquis de Condorcet, La Rochefoucauld, and Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours, the sorts of reform-minded dreamy intellectuals with whom Jefferson was most friendly.
• • •
ADAMS’S EXPERIENCE IN EUROPE was different from Jefferson’s. For Jefferson the luxury and sophistication of Europe only made American simplicity and virtue appear dearer, while for Adams Europe represented what America was fast becoming—a society consumed by luxury and vice and fundamentally riven by a struggle between rich and poor, gentlemen and commoners.
All of Adams’s long-simmering feelings and opinions—all his irritations, jealousies, and resentments—finally boiled over onto the pages of his Defence. In this huge, sprawling compilation of history and philosophy, Adams brought a lifetime of reading and personal experience to the working out of what he believed was the best scientific solution to the political problem of social inequality and the persistence of elites. The Defence, he said, was “an attempt to place Government upon the only Philosophy which can support it, the real constitution of human nature, not upon any wild Visions of its perfectibility.”10
The years riding circuit in his law practice, the months spent in the Continental Congress since independence, his involvement with Massachusetts politics during the drafting of the state’s constitution, the duplicitous behavior of diplomats abroad, his ill treatment by the Congress, the descriptions from home of the luxury and self-interestedness prevalent everywhere in the States, especially the news of the explosive conflict between western debtors and eastern creditors in his home state of Massachusetts—a conflict that led some to advocate abolishing the senate and creating a unicameral legislature—and above all, an understanding of human nature that sprang from his own tormented soul, all combined to shape his understanding of the ways societies were structured and worked.
In his rambling and long-winded volumes, Adams painted as dark and as pessimistic a portrait of the American people as anyone has ever rendered. Americans, said Adams, were as driven by the passions for wealth and superiority as any people in history. Ambition and avarice, not virtue and benevolence, were the stuff of American society. Those philosophers like Turgot who contended that the American republics were founded on equality could not have been more wrong. The promise of the Declaration of Independence could never be fulfilled. All men were not created equal; they were decidedly born unequal, which was why inequalities predominated in all societies everywhere. “Was there, or will there ever be,” he asked, “a nation, whose individuals were all equal in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches?” Every society, he said, had inequalities “which no human legislator ever can eradicate.”11
To be sure, said Adams, in Americ
a there were “as yet” no legal or artificial inequalities—no hereditary dignities symbolized by garters, titles, and ribbons. And in America there were no political and moral inequalities of rights and duties. Everyone was equal before the law. But these were superficial equalities. What really mattered in America, and, in fact in every nation, said Adams, was the overwhelming presence of real and fundamental inequalities—inequalities of wealth, of birth, of talent. These inequalities were of momentous importance to any legislator faced with the need to create a constitution; for they had “a natural and inevitable influence in society.”12 Every society contained a hierarchy of inequalities, with the few aristocratic-gentry at the top. “Some individuals, whether by descent from their ancestors, or from greater skill, industry, and success in business, have estates both in lands and goods of great value,” while others at the very bottom of society “have no property at all.” Between these two extremes existed “all the variety of degrees” of middling sorts who constituted the bulk of common people.13
• • •
THESE MIDDLING SORTS RANGED from someone like William Findley, an ex-weaver from western Pennsylvania, to someone like William Manning, a farmer and small-time entrepreneur from Billerica, Massachusetts. These were men “in the various trades, manufactures, and occupations” who had to work for a living; and by work was meant not just laboring with one’s hands but also running a business or trade. A master printer with a dozen or more journeymen and apprentices working for him was still considered to be a middling commoner. However wealthy he might be, as long as he was running his printing shop and engaging in trade, he was not generally regarded as a gentleman. By the 1780s and ’90s these middling sorts were increasingly setting themselves in opposition to those aristocratic-gentry, as Manning put it, who “live without Labour.”14
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