Passionate Sage

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Mercy Otis Warren (1763). John Singleton Copley oil on canvas.

  Bequest of Winslow Warren. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

  The claims became more extreme and exaggerated. He was not only one of the earliest revolutionary zealots, he was the real author of the decisive motion in the Continental Congress that produced independence. He singlehandedly negotiated the treaty that ended the war—“For the whole time I was in the commission with Franklin and Lee, I did the whole business of it.” His political writings provided the constitutional model which all the framers acknowledged was the basis for the federal Constitution. Among the entire revolutionary generation, he claimed to “have done more labor, run through more and greater dangers, and made greater sacrifices than any man among my contemporaries living or dead, in the service of my country….” On and on he went, effectively belittling his very real achievements by serving as his own public relations spokesman.28

  Warren responded with a combination of incredulity and mockery. Her History was deficient in Adams’s eyes because, as Warren put it, it was an inadequate “panegyric on your life and character,” and because it failed to demonstrate that “nothing had been done, that nothing could be done, neither in Europe nor America, without [your] sketching and drafting the business, from the first opposition to British measures in the year 1764 to signing the treaty of peace with England in the year 1783.” Warren refused to be the butt of such bombast: “I am so much at a loss for the meaning of your paragraphs, and the rambling manner in which your angry and undigested letters are written, that I scarcely know where to begin my remarks.” She chose to begin candidly. “What is Mrs. Warren to think of your comments?” she asked: “I readily tell you she thinks them the most captious, malignant, irrelevant compositions that have ever been seen.”29

  Adams was engaging less in an argument than a tantrum, and Warren had the courage of her long-term friendship to draw upon in apprising him how much of an embarrassment he was making of himself. “Had not Mr. Adams been suffering suspicions that his fame had not been sufficiently attended to,” she suggested, “he would not have put such a perverse construction on [my] every passage….” As one of “your warmest friends and acquaintances,” she advised him to remember one of his wisest maxims; namely, that “Passions are sometimes the heavenly gales that waft us safely to port, at others the ungovernable gusts that blow us down the steam of absurdity.” Clearly, Adams was currently moving toward the latter location. “The truth I have witnessed from my first acquaintance with you,” Warren recalled, that “your nerves have not always been wound up by the same key.” But the criticisms of her History, she concluded, “cap the climax of rancor, indecency, and vulgarism,” and appear less like the musings of a retired statesman than “like the ravings of a maniac.” He had said that he was “in a blushing mood.” Well, she countered, you can if you wish “blush for Mrs. Warren” and “blush for your country,” but most of all, you should “blush for yourself.”30

  Adams found one particular assertion in Warren’s History even more painful than her failure to make him the central figure of the revolutionary era. In the midst of what any detached reader would have regarded as a very favorable assessment of Adams’s contribution, Warren charged that he went through an important change in the 1780s, that “by living long near the splendor of courts and courtiers” during his eight-year stay in Europe, he became “beclouded by a partiality for monarchy” and suffered “a lapse from [his] former republican principles.” Warren reiterated the charge in a letter to Adams, claiming that “the pure principles of republicanism were contaminated in your breast.”31

  It was the same accusation that the Jeffersonian Republicans had made in the 1790s, this time enshrined in a full-fledged history, where it would function as a tin can tied to the Adams name, rattling through the ages and the pages of subsequent histories. Adams regarded it as the ultimate charge of corruption, “a charge,” he wrote to Warren, “that I cannot and will not bear.” He challenged her, as well as “the whole human race, and angels and evils too, to produce an instance of it from my cradle to this hour.” But given the hyperbolic character of Adams’s other complaints to Warren, and the frantic tone of his entire response to her History, Warren felt justified in lumping this particular lamentation with the rest of Adams’s invective. “I am yet at a loss to conjecture,” she wrote defiantly, “what you have left in your storehouse of thunderbolts….”32

  In fact, Adams was correct in his claim and in the substance, if not the style, of this particular dispute with Warren. Adams had never favored the establishment of a European-styled monarchy or nobility in America. He consistently opposed all inherited titles and privileges. He favored a stronger executive than the Constitution provided, though an executive that derived its power from the consent of the governed offered in frequent elections. Warren’s charge merely repeated the libelous attacks of the Antifederalists in the late 1780s and Jeffersonians in the 1790s, enhancing their credibility while ignoring their inaccuracy. Since being accused of crypto-monarchism was synonymous with being accused of betraying the republican principles of the Revolution, Adams had a legitimate reason to protest.

  And thanks in large part to the impressive body of historical scholarship on the ideology of the revolutionary era that has appeared over the past twenty years, it is possible to recover the quite different definitions of “republicanism” that Adams and Warren harbored in their respective heads. For both of them, the phrase “republican principles” resonated with more meaning than any mere description of a representative form of government, without kings or lords or divine right presumptions, could convey.33

  Adams sensed the source of disagreement, without being able to clarify the specific differences. “There is not a more unintelligible word in the English language than republicanism,” he warned Warren, adding that “the word republican is so loose and indefinite that successive predominant factions will put glosses and constructions on it as different as light and darkness….” (Twentieth-century historians would prove him right here.) He accused Warren of imposing in her History, and then upon him, a particularly naive and misleading use of the term: “The only effect of it [Warren’s use] that I could ever see is to deceive the people,” something Adams himself claimed he would never countenance since he, unlike his critics, was “no Pharisee, Jesuit, or Machiavellian.”34

  Again, Adams was historically correct, even though he stated his disagreement with Warren in the belligerent style of a wronged defendant rather than in the spirit of accommodation. For Warren clung tenaciously to a radical version of republicanism that had flourished only briefly in the heady wartime years of the 1770s, a version that then was used by many of the Jeffersonians as the basis for their ideological opposition to the Federalists in the 1790s. It presumed that the American Revolution had effected a clean break not only from English rule, but also a complete separation from the historic corruptions of European society. Warren and her History embodied “pure republicanism,” the conviction that the very character of American society, once purged of European contaminations, was forever changed. Much like the radical theorists of the French Revolution, and later revolutionaries in Russia and China, Warren believed that America had experienced a fundamental break with the past, that American citizens were now capable of truly disinterested and virtuous behavior, that powerful political institutions were unnecessary impediments to the inherently civic-minded instincts and habits of the populace.35

  This was why she regarded the suppression of Shays’ Rebellion as the repudiation of the very ideals on which the Revolution rested. This was why she interpreted the Constitution and the Federalist political leadership as embodiments of the very arbitrary power the Revolution was intended to eliminate. And this was why John Adams, who held with equal tenacity to fundamentally different notions of republicanism and the meaning of the American Revolution, served Warren’s interpretive purpose perfectly in the History, as the example of the b
etrayal and corruption of an austere classical ideal.

  All of which helps to explain, if not excuse, Adams’s fanatical reaction in the summer of 1807; for he believed, quite correctly, that his own reputation was being stigmatized in order to manipulate the meaning of the Revolution to suit one historian’s idiosyncratic interpretation. This was not the occasion for him to spell out fully his own interpretation of the Revolution or his own definition of the deeper meanings of republicanism. He was too enraged to make much sense anyway.

  But he did offer Warren one anecdotal clue. He repeated the story of a trip he once made to Antwerp, where he was able to view the masterpieces of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck. One of the paintings depicted Jesus “in the midst of the twelve apostles, leaning familiarly on the shoulder of the beloved disciple [John], and distinguishing him from all the other eleven by some peculiar marks of attention and kindness.” The truly revealing feature in the painting, however, was the reaction of the other apostles, “the jealousy painted on every countenance,” especially the face of Peter, which was “transported with rage,” his eyes bulging out of the sockets, lips seeming to quiver and teeth clenched so that “you are apt to fancy you hear them grit against each other.” This was human nature as it really existed in the world, in America as well as Europe, among divinely sanctioned disciples as well as secular political leaders and followers. No revolution, not even the successful one he had helped promote, could ever change that intractable fact.36

  The final installment in Adams’s long effort to exorcise his personal demons, all undertaken in the guise of “setting the record straight,” took three years. From 1809 to 1812 he submitted regular essays to the newly founded Boston Patriot. “Let the jackasses bray or laugh at all this, as they did at the finger of God,” he wrote to his sometime friend William Cunningham when the series began. “I am in a fair way to give my criticks and enemies food enough to glut their appetites,” he announced defiantly: “I take no notice of their billingsgate.” The Patriot series proved to be his final spasm of unbridled self-vindication, Adams’s last futile effort at overwhelming his real and imagined enemies with the sheer energy of his rage. He expected immediate responses and recriminations and was surprised, at first, that a “most profound silence is observed relative to my scribbles…. The Newspapers are still as midnight.” But, on second thought, he suspected his enemies were gathering silently in the darkness. “I suppose the sulphureous combustibles are preparing under ground,” he wrote Cunningham, “and the electrical fire collecting in the clouds…. If I am neither drowned in the rain, nor pierced with the bolts, nor blown into the atmosphere by the eruptions, I must be invulnerable.” Only the muted self-mockery of his characterization saved him from the charge of being close to crazy.37

  The central theme of the nearly interminable series in the Patriot was Adams’s accomplishments as a diplomat and maker of American foreign policy. While he covered his career in Europe and England in the 1780s, the major episode on which he focused his obsessions, predictably, was his decision as president to negotiate with the French government in 1799–1800 rather than declare war. Adams declared, over and over again, that he was prepared to “defend my missions to France, as long as I have an eye to direct my hand, or a finger to hold my pen. They were the most disinterested and meritorious actions of my life.” He even went so far to request that his tombstone contain only one inscription: “Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.”38

  As we have seen, what has come to be called the “quasi-war” with France was the dominant event of Adams’s presidency. And as we have also seen, the detailed history of this early chapter in American foreign policy is enormously complex—it took Adams the rough equivalent of one thousand pages to tell his version of the story in the Patriot—for it involved such formidable characters as Hamilton, Jefferson, and Talleyrand, the split of the Federalists, the emergence of the Jeffersonian Republicans as the majority party, the bribery of American ministers to France, negotiations with a constantly changing French government still in the trauma of revolution and headed for dictatorship under Napoleon, systematic piracy by both French and English naval vessels, and all the vacillations and misunderstandings rendered inevitable by the communication problems of an era ignorant of the telephone or telegraph. That said, the elemental political and strategic issues at stake in the crisis were straightforward. And Adams did a decent job of accurately identifying them later in his retirement:

  two Parties…existed in this Country headed by Men of the most determined Ambition, the one [Jeffersonian] inclined to France the other [Federalist] to England. One was for closer connection to France and going to War with England…the other was for an Alliance Offensive and Defensive with Great Britain. It was my destiny to run the Gauntlet between these two factions, in support of a Neutrality….39

  Most, in fact virtually all, modern-day historians concur that Adams made the correct decision to avoid war, and that it took considerable courage, as well as principled resistance to popular opinion and party pressure, to assert the long-term interests of the nation in the face of overheated patriotic and party zeal. In that sense, history has vindicated both Adams’s most crucial presidential decision and his frequently expressed judgment that “it was the most splendid diamond in my crown; or, if anyone thinks this expression too monarchical, I will say the most brilliant feather in my cap.”40

  But that was not the considered opinion in 1809 when Adams began to write for the Patriot. Nor was Adams’s confidence that posterity would vindicate him sufficient to allay his throbbing sense of having been wronged. Years later he could write a friend, Nicholas Boylston: “Voltaire boasted that he made four presses groan for Sixty Years—but I have to repent that I made the Patriot groan for Three Years,” admitting that he was on a fool’s errand “in vindicating my Conduct…against the charges and insinuations of conceited Blockheads.” He conveyed a clear notion of his tortured personal anguish in one of the first Patriot pieces. There he compared himself to “an animal I have seen take hold of the end of a cord with his teeth, and be drawn slowly up by pulleys, through a storm of squils, crackers, and rockets, flashing and blazing around him every moment.” And although the “scorching flames made him groan, and mourn, and roar, he would not let go….”41

  So much was at stake for Adams because his handling of this crisis epitomized his self-image as the man who could stand above party in behalf of national interests. It was his defining moment in American history, at least in retrospect. Small wonder, then, that Hamilton was the chief villain in the story Adams told, or rather the chief defendant in Adams’s lengthy case, which often read like a legal brief written by a slightly deranged polemicist. Only “the disturbed imagination of Alexander Hamilton,” Adams argued, could find fault with his handling of the foreign crisis, “though Hamilton was pleased to wield it as a poisoned weapon with the express purpose of destroying me.” He backhandedly thanked Hamilton for his treachery, claiming petulantly, “it has given me eight years, incomparably the happiest of my life, whereas, had I been chosen President again, I am certain I could not have lived another year.” Hamilton was determined to make himself head of the army in a war with France, Adams charged, then launch a military expedition to conquer the continent and liberate South America. This turned out to be factually accurate, as we now know from the modern edition of Hamilton’s private correspondence. But in Adams’s hands the account smacked of self-serving slander, or worse, a paranoid pomposity. He claimed that not even Cicero—the comparison was plausible but, again, self-defeating—was “sacrificed to the vengeance of Anthony more egregiously than John Adams was to the unbridled and unbounded ambition of Alexander Hamilton and the American triumvirate.” In opposition to “all their diabolical intrigues,” Adams boasted, he “hardily pursued my own System in 1799 and 1800, made Peace with France at the expense of all my consequence in the World, and their unanimous and immortal hatred.
”42

  The accuracies and inaccuracies of Adams’s account cannot easily be sorted out. In a historical episode as complex as Adams’s handling of the French question, and as dependent for its complexity on the collision of mutually exclusive perceptions by all participants, the very notion that there is a single true or objective version of the story probably requires scrutiny. But the crucial historical question raised by the Boston Patriot series is not, What is the true story?, so much as Why did Adams feel compelled to put his version before the public? What cries out for an explanation is his persistence for three years in a cause that was so obviously beyond his capacity to affect. It bears repeating: the pieces in the Patriot were interminable; and Adams acknowledged to Rush and other close friends that he realized his efforts were futile; in some perverse sense, and again he acknowledged this too, he was motivated by the very futility of it all. He was churning out page after page on the details of a decade-old chapter in American relations with France at just the time when public attention was focused on the looming War of 1812 with England. Finally, the vendetta-like tone of his prose, the accusatory style of his argument, the sheer massiveness of his self-defense, all robbed his writing of any semblance of credibility or persuasiveness. And it hardly bears mentioning that, even if his tales of corruption and betrayal by his cabinet were essentially accurate, he was the last person to set the record straight. Much like Hamilton’s notorious Letter…Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams…, which it was intended to refute, the series in the Boston Patriot was a misguided and self-defeating performance explicable only in terms of compulsive urges that defy logic.