Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

This respect for female education did not mean that Adams was a supporter of modern feminism. He never advocated the suffrage for women, and he had nothing good to say about Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, regarding it as another one of those crazy tracts thrown up by the French Revolution. But he was troubled enough by her book to spend hours reading it and filling its margins with his jeering objections.84

  Jefferson never felt the need to confront Wollstonecraft and her ideas. As an aristocrat presiding over his scores of slaves, he took his patriarchy for granted, calling himself at one point “the most blessed of the patriarchs.”85 He regarded his slaves as childlike dependents in his patriarchal household and thus members of what he called his “family.” He believed these patriarchal relationships were important to the health of the nation. Indeed, one of his principal objections to French society, which he otherwise so admired, was the fact that “the domestic bonds” were “absolutely done away,” and there was nothing put in their place. French women were flirtatious and voluptuous, and consequently they continually strained the bonds of marriage. To his great surprise, women in France, he once told Washington, actually engaged in politics. “The manners of the nation allow them to visit, alone, all persons in office, to solicit the affairs of the husband, family, or friends.” By contrast, he said, American women were superior because they looked after their husbands and their households and were devoted to simple republican domesticity.86

  Although Adams was far more permissive about women in politics than Jefferson—encouraging his daughter-in-law Louisa Catherine in her promotion of her husband’s career—he also emphasized the importance of patriarchy to the society. In fact, he claimed that “the Source of Revolution, Democracy, and Jacobinism” was the “Systematical dissolution of true Family Authority.” There could be no regular government in a nation, he told his son Thomas, “without a marked Subordination of Mothers and children to the Father.” But, probably thinking of Abigail, he warned his son not to tell anyone what he had said. “If you divulge it to any one, it will soon be known to all, and will infallibly raise a Rebellion against me.” Unlike Jefferson, Adams could never take patriarchy in his household for granted.87

  Like Adams, many New England leaders tended to be obsessed with stability. Faced with popular instability and disorder that the slaveholding planters of Virginia rarely experienced, the New England Federalists understandably favored order and hierarchy, even to the point of yearning for elements of monarchy and hereditary offices. Unlike Jefferson and the other Virginia aristocrats, who overwhelmingly supported the libertarian and egalitarian ideology of the Republican Party, the New England aristocrats did not have the confidence that the people would always elect the natural aristocracy of the wise and good. It was so much easier to believe in democracy when the aristocratic elites didn’t have to worry about the quirks and whims of the electorate.

  Adams thought Jefferson was engaging in “a little merriment upon this solemn subject of aristocracy.” He agreed with Jefferson that men of talents were the aristocrats. But what did Jefferson mean by talents? For Adams, the talents were innumerable. “Education, Wealth, Strength, Beauty, Stature, Birth, Marriage, graceful Attitudes and Motions, Gait, Air, Complexion, Physiognomy, are Talents, as well as Genius and Science and learning.” Anyone possessing any of these talents that allowed him to command influence in the society was an aristocrat to Adams. All literature, all history, proved “the existence of inequalities, not of rights, but of moral and intellectual and physical inequalities in Families, descents and Generations.”88

  Consequently, concluded Adams, Jefferson’s distinction between natural and artificial aristocracy was not well founded. Some men were born smarter, stronger, and more beautiful than others. These were the natural aristocrats. The only artificial aristocrats Adams recognized were those whose titles and honors were conferred on them by municipal laws and political institutions. These kinds of artificial aristocrats could be easily done away with, but the natural aristocrats that Adams conceived of could never be eliminated, for they were the result of nature, of some individuals being born more intelligent, shrewder, and more wily than others.

  Before Adams was done talking about aristocracy he came to see it everywhere. Indeed, he ended up democratizing the aristocracy—declaring that anyone who could influence the vote of one other person was an aristocrat, “in my Sense of the Word; whether he obtains his one Vote in Addition to his own, by his Birth Fortune, Figure, Eloquence, Science, learning, Craft Cunning, or even his Character for good fellowship and a bon vivant.” This was a peculiar kind of aristocracy, an enlarged and uniquely middle-class American aristocracy. Such aristocrats—men who could simply influence the vote of one other person—were so numerous as to render the term virtually meaningless.89

  These sorts of aristocracies—middling men with some influence claiming gentlemanly status—were springing up everywhere in America. They were arising, said Adams, “not from Virtues and Talents so much as from Banks and Land Jobbing.” Adams denied over and over to Jefferson that he had ever favored hereditary honors and offices. All he meant to say was “that Mankind have not yet discovered any remedy against irresistible Corruption in Elections in Offices of great Power and Profit, but making them hereditary.”90

  • • •

  ADAMS BOMBARDED JEFFERSON with five letters on aristocracy and religion before his Virginian friend responded. “Give yourself no concern,” he told Jefferson. “Answer my Letters at Your Leisure.” He wrote, he said, only as “a refuge and protection against Ennui.”91

  When Jefferson did finally respond, he avoided Adams’s curious notion of a democratized aristocrat who needed to influence only one other person to become an aristocrat; instead, he chose to return to the more comprehensible subject of religion. He admitted that he had never read many of the histories of religion that Adams had, but he agreed that much about religion had been invented and perverted over the centuries.

  The perversions of religious writers led Jefferson to the fraudulent manipulation of the laws of Alfred, the ninth-century Saxon ruler who had issued an extensive legal code. These in turn reminded him of the ways in which modern English judges had been “willing to lay the yoke of their own opinions on the necks of others,” especially in their efforts to make revealed religion part of the common law. These judges, especially William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, who served as lord chief justice of the King’s Bench for over thirty years, had set forth a “string of authorities all hanging by one another on a single hook, a mistranslation by Finch of the works of Prisot, or on nothing.”

  “Our cunning” Chief Justice Marshall was no better, said Jefferson; he was able to find “many sophisms” with which to twist the law out of all kinds of documents, just “as he did to twist Burr’s neck out of the halter of treason.” Knowing that Adams loved the common law and perhaps eager to pay Adams back a bit for all the needling he was getting, he quoted Jesus: “Woe unto you, ye lawyers, for ye laden men with burdens grievous to bear.”92

  In contrast to Adams’s effusiveness and gushing emotion, Jefferson remained his usual cool and collected self. He liked to be optimistic and disliked those with “gloomy and hypochondriac minds” who were “disgusted with the present and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen.” Too much introspection was unhealthy. Better to be hopeful than to dwell on failure. The emotions and passions ought to be controlled and kept in their place. Indeed, he wondered, for example, about the purpose of the emotion of grief. He wished that “the pathologists” would tell us what use it did have and what good it did do.93

  Jefferson should have realized that such queries were just what Adams craved. Adams exploded with lengthy discourses on grief and its uses and abuses, to which Jefferson could only reply, “You have exhausted the subject.”94 Adams realized, as he told his son John Quincy, that there was “a Rage; a Mania,
a delirium or at least an Enthusiasm” in him that needed to be corrected. He would stop and say to himself, “Be not carried away by sudden blasts of Wind, by unexpected flashes of Lightening, nor terrified by the sharpest Crashes of Thunder.”95

  The dialogue between the two patriots tended to be dominated by Adams. He made comments, often challenging or facetious ones, that Jefferson either ignored entirely or answered earnestly and courteously. When Jefferson mentioned the three volumes on ideology by Antoine Destutt de Tracy—“the ablest writer living on intellectual subjects,” said Jefferson—Adams mocked the work. “3 vols. of Idiology!” he exclaimed. “Pray explain this Neological Title! What does it mean?” When Napoleon first used the word “ideology,” Adams said he had been delighted with it, “upon the Common Principle of delight in every Thing We cannot understand.” Did it mean “Idiotism? . . . The Science of Lunacy? The Theory of Delerium?”96

  Jefferson ignored Adams’s flippancy and replied to his lighthearted taunts with a serious explanation of Destutt de Tracy’s work. He told Adams that William Duane had published Destutt de Tracy’s Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in 1811. Without mentioning that he had once called it “the most valuable political work of the present age” and had actually translated the section of the book on public liberty and constitutions, Jefferson promised to have a copy sent to Adams if it was still in print. Despite the scorn Adams had expressed for Destutt de Tracy’s books, Jefferson sought to make a strong case for their importance. The Frenchman’s logic, he said, “occupies exactly the ground of Locke’s work on the understanding.”97

  When the copy of Destutt de Tracy’s book on Montesquieu arrived as promised, Adams, obviously embarrassed by his ridiculing of the Frenchman, replied that “in our good old English language of Gratitude” he was deeply in Jefferson’s debt. He had read a hundred pages of the book and would read the rest. Destutt de Tracy was “a sensible Man and is easily understood,” not like another one of Jefferson’s former French friends, that “abstruse, mysterious, incomprehensible Condorcet.” Even while praising Destutt de Tracy, Adams couldn’t help pointing out that he was really just another idealistic French philosophe who “supposes that Men are rational and conscientious Creatures.” He said he agreed with that, but lest Jefferson think he was getting soft, he couldn’t let it rest there; he had to add that men’s “passions and Interests generally prevail over their Reason and their conscience; and if Society does not contrive some means of controlling and restrain[in]g the former the World will go on as it has done.”

  Adams then went on to criticize other writers whose works contained “a compleat drought of the Superstitions, Credulity and Despotism of our terrestrial Universe.” They had shown how all the sciences and all the fine arts of architecture, painting, statuary, poetry, music, eloquence—“which you love so well and taste so exquisitely”—had been used everywhere to support priests and kings at the expense of the poor.

  Adams ended his letter by saying that it would be delivered by a young man eager to meet Jefferson. In fact, he added, all the young gentlemen of New England who had any sort of mind and the money to travel had “an ardent Curiosity to visit, what shell I say? the Man of the Mountain? The Sage of Monticello? Or the celebrated Philosopher and Statesman of Virginia.”98

  To make all these sorts of taunting and teasing remarks, Adams must have become completely confident of his relationship with Jefferson. Jefferson was so self-contained, so polite, and so smart that Adams knew deep in his soul that the Sage of Monticello had something that he, Adams, would never have, and that no matter how many books he read and how many wisecracks he made, Jefferson would always be his superior.

  TWELVE

  THE GREAT REVERSAL

  AMERICANS COMMONLY REGARDED the War of 1812 as their second American Revolution. With Andrew Jackson’s overwhelming victory over the British army at New Orleans in January 1815—two weeks after the peace treaty had been signed in Ghent, Belgium—they celebrated what they took to be a reaffirmation of their independence from the former mother country. The war had vindicated their republican institutions and had established their national character, the existence of which so many seemed to have doubted. John Adams appreciated this renewed sense of nationhood and mischievously suggested to Thomas Jefferson that his revolution of 1800 might not have been so important after all, not compared with what his successor had accomplished. “Notwithstand[ing] a thousand Faults and blunders,” he told Jefferson, James Madison’s administration had “acquired more glory, and established more Union than all his three Predecessors, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, put together.”

  Jefferson agreed that the war had secured the nation. The Federalists were discredited and the threat they once posed was gone. “Our government is now so firmly put on its republican tack,” Jefferson assured Lafayette, “that it will not be easily monarchised by forms.”1

  Suddenly everyone seemed interested in the original Revolution. Many realized that documents from the Revolution were being neglected and in danger of disappearing. The men who had led the Revolution were dying off and the survivors needed to be interviewed before they passed on. Antiquarians and would-be historians wrote Adams and Jefferson, along with the other revolutionary leaders, requesting information about the great events they had experienced. Some suggested that the two great revolutionaries ought to write their own histories of the Revolution.

  Both Adams and Jefferson doubted that anyone would be able to write a really accurate history of the Revolution. “Who can write it?” asked Adams. “Who would ever be able to write it?” The most essential documents—the debates and deliberations in Congress from 1774 to 1783—were “all in secret, and are now lost forever.” Most of the speeches in the Congress, including his, had been “universally extemporaneous,” and had never been written down. Adams was reminded of the problem by reading a review in the May 1815 issue of the Analetic Magazine of a history of the American Revolution by the Italian Carlo Botta. The reviewer, said Adams, claimed that Botta’s book “is the best history of the revolution that ever has been written.” Botta, like the historians of ancient Greece and Rome, solved the problem of the lack of documents by simply “composing speeches for his Generals and Orators.” “How faithful” to reality were these speeches Adams left Jefferson to judge.2

  Jefferson agreed that no one could write an accurate history of the Revolution. For that reason, he worried about how he would be treated. “We have been too careless of our future reputation while our tories will omit nothing to place us in the wrong,” he complained to Supreme Court justice William Johnson of South Carolina in 1823. He thought that Adams’s biography would be left to his son John Quincy, “whose pen, you know, is pointed and his prejudices not in our favor.”3 Somehow he sensed that his legacy might depend on a comparison between him and Adams—that any praise of Adams would mean a diminution of him.

  At any rate, said Jefferson, historians would get only the “external facts” of history. All the designs and discussions were behind closed doors, and since no one, as far as he knew, had taken notes, all the “life and soul of history must forever be unknown.” Despite Botta’s practice of inventing speeches and putting them in the mouths of characters who never made them, Jefferson thought that his book, published in Italian in Paris in 1809 and soon translated into French and English, was “a good one, more judicious, more chaste, more classical, and more true than the party diatribe” of The Life of George Washington (1804–1807) written by Chief Justice John Marshall during Jefferson’s presidency. Botta’s “greatest fault” was that he borrowed too much from Marshall.

  Jefferson had an abiding dislike of his Federalist cousin, who had been Adams’s secretary of state and had been appointed to the Supreme Court by Adams. Not only did Jefferson despise the way Marshall was using the Court to strengthen the national government at the expense of the states, but he resented the fact that in his Life of Washingt
on Marshall had relegated Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence to a footnote. Marshall had written in that footnote that “the draft reported by the committee has been generally attributed to Mr. Jefferson”—a remarkable playing down of Jefferson’s actual contribution.4

  Since Adams several years earlier had dismissed Marshall’s biography as a mere moneymaking “Mausolaeum,” he sidestepped Jefferson’s effort to bait him. What he wanted to do instead was set forth what he regarded as his “peculiar, perhaps singular” ideas about a history of the Revolution. “The War?” he said. That was no part of the Revolution. “It was only an Effect and a Consequence of it.” The real Revolution took place not on the battlefield but in the minds of the people, and “this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.”5

  No doubt Adams’s view of the Revolution, which he repeated to many of his correspondents, was self-serving. Instead of Washington and his military exploits, what counted in the Revolution were all the publications of men like Adams that preceded the clash of arms. By all these writings, he said, “the public Opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the Authority of Parliament over the Colonies.” He knew the world would think he was envious, but he could not help objecting to orators calling Washington the “Father of his Country.” He thought that lawgivers ought to be exalted above military heroes, but he realized that “military glory dazzles the Eyes and Eclipses all civil and political Lustre.”6

  As someone who read a lot of history, Adams had long thought about the nature of history writing. He had told Benjamin Rush in 1806 that he took the duties of a historian seriously. He repeatedly had declared that no history should be written except under the oath of the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou: “To the truth of my history I invoke God himself as a witness.” If someone could write a history of the period from 1760 to 1806 and at the end truly repeat Thou’s maxim, that work, Adams told Rush, would be “a great blessing to Mankind.”7