Passionate Sage

by Joseph J. Ellis

  The clearest example of this tendency is currently housed in the Boston Public Library. There the bulk of the approximately three thousand books that Adams accumulated and kept around himself in the Quincy house have been preserved. Next to Abigail and their grandchildren, books were his most valued companions throughout his retirement, and he talked back to them in marginal notes as if their authors were sitting around the fireside in the library. Zoltán Haraszti, the modern scholar who was responsible for overseeing the Adams collection and first called attention to the voluminous marginal commentary contained within their musty bindings, claimed that the Adams library was “the largest private collection of its day in America.” Whether or not this is correct—Jefferson scholars plausibly dispute the claim—Adams had a huge number of books at his disposal throughout his retirement. And Adams did not just collect books; he read them. He was, by the common consensus of his contemporaries, the best-read member of his remarkably literate generation. Even Jefferson acknowledged that he could not match the prodigious Adams pace. After Adams described his reading list for 1816, for example, Jefferson admitted amazement: “Forty-three volumes read in one year,” Jefferson exclaimed, “and twelve of them quartos! Dear Sir, how I envy you! Half a dozen 8 vols [octavos] in that space of time are as much as I am allowed.”5

  But Adams did not just read books. He battled them. The casual presumption that there is some kind of rough correlation between the books in the library of any prominent historical figure and the person’s cast of mind would encounter catastrophe with Adams, because he tended to buy and read books with which he profoundly disagreed. Then, as he read, he recorded in the margins and at the bottom of pages his usually hostile opinions of the arguments and authors. Rousseau was “a coxcomb and…satyr” Voltaire a “liar” and “complete scoundrel” Condorcet a “quack,” “a fool,” and “a mathematical Charlatan” d’Alembert a “Louse, Flea, Tick, Ant, Wasp, or…Vermin….” But beyond such epithets, Adams commented at length on the substance of major works of philosophy, literature, and political theory, sometimes writing as many words in the margins as contained in the original text. Indeed, it is possible to argue—as Haraszti has in fact done—that the Adams marginalia constitute evidence more revealing of his convictions about political theory than any of his official publications. They also constitute dramatic illustrations of the way he defined his own elemental ideas in conflict with opposing versions, the way thought for Adams was synonymous with argument.6

  One of his favorite authors was Bolingbroke. Henry St. John Viscount Bolingbroke had been a leader of the opposition against the ministry of Robert Walpole in England during the middle third of the eighteenth century. Bolingbroke helped shape the Whig tradition which American revolutionaries, including Adams, borrowed from so effectively in fashioning their own arguments against arbitrary power, political corruption, and British degeneration. Adams first read him soon after his graduation from Harvard, then reread him five or six times, twice during his retirement.7

  Even though Bolingbroke’s major insights—a belief in the efficacy of “mixed government,” the relentless power of self-interest, and the endorsement of “Country” over “Court” values—were also bedrock commitments for Adams, the comments he made, first in 1804 and then again in 1811, suggest a reader relishing the opportunity to disagree. In his Dissertation Upon Parties, for example, Bolingbroke ridiculed the silly pretense that “the king never dies,” a notion that buttressed the belief in the abiding continuity of monarchic authority. Adams reacted caustically: “What is the silliest? That the King never dies or that the King can do no wrong? Rather too debonair, my Lord.” And when in his Study and Use of History Bolingbroke endorsed the ancient Roman custom of placing images or busts of ancestors in the vestibules of their houses in order to recall “the glorious actions of the dead,” Adams unleashed his own counter-theory of emulation: “But images of fools and knaves are as easily made as those of patriots and heroes. The images of the Gracchi were made as well as those of Scipio, the images of Caesar, Anthony, and Augustus as well as those of Cicero, Pompey, Brutus, and Cassius.” He then went on to berate Bolingbroke’s limited understanding of art’s complex contribution to both the elevation and corruption of human morality. “Statues, paintings, panegyrics, in short all the fine arts,” he scribbled in the margin, “promote virtue while virtue is in fashion. After that they promote luxury, effeminacy, corruption, prostitution, and every species of abandoned depravity.”

  In his Remarks on the History of England, which Adams reread in 1804, Bolingbroke celebrated the “patriot king,” contending that if “one great, brave, disinterested, active man [should] arise, he will be received, followed, and almost adored, as the guardian genius of these kingdoms.” Adams scoffed: “Like Bonaparte, or Hamilton, or Burr.” And when Bolingbroke claimed that history almost always punishes villains, or at least that virtuous leaders are invariably acknowledged by posterity, Adams, probably thinking of himself, countered, “Not always,” adding that “Tradition and history are radically corrupted.” He went on like this, bantering with Bolingbroke paragraph by paragraph, often sentence by sentence, eventually writing about twelve thousand words of his own.8

  Adams read most of the French philosophes several times, too. These were the writers who had promulgated the doctrines on which the ideals of the French Revolution were based. Adams regarded the whole group of them, including Rousseau, Voltaire, Turgot, and Condorcet, as naive romantics. “Not one of them takes human nature as its foundation,” he commented after rereading Condorcet’s Progress of the Human Mind in 1811. “Equality is one of those equivocal words which the philosophy of the 18th Century has made fraudulent,” he continued: “In the last twenty-five years it has cheated millions out of their lives and tens of millions out of their property.”9

  The Abbé de Mably was one of the more popular French philosophers of his day and an ardent advocate of a classless society. Adams had met him in 1782 at a dinner party in Paris and described him then as “polite, good-humored and sensible.” But when he read Mably’s De la legislation in 1806 and encountered Mably’s endorsement of community ownership of all property, Adams scribbled “Stark mad” in the margin, then, in a gentler mood: “Abby, thou comprehendest not.” As the mounting marginalia eventually made clear, it was not Mably’s belief in the power of property that offended Adams, who shared a recognition of the disastrous impact that a grossly unequal distribution of property and wealth had on all hopes for social justice. Adams objected, instead, to the romantic notion that it was possible to achieve economic equality by social engineering, and, more interestingly, to the assumption that the truly primal human emotions were driven solely by material rewards. “The Abby has not seen the true source of the passions,” he wrote. “Ambition springs from the desire of esteem and from emulation, not from property.” Because of his encounter with Mably’s radical version of economic equality, Adams was driven to articulate in stark form what was, in fact, one of his most elemental political principles: that psychological imperatives, “the passions,” were more powerful forces than the impulses to accumulate wealth. The human craving for social distinction actually underlay the quest for riches, he thought, so all social engineering that aimed at economic equality was fighting a vain, delusive, and inevitably losing battle with what Adams considered the most basic and dominant forces in the human personality.10

  If Bolingbroke made him expose his urge to dissent, even with the ultimate English dissenter, if Condorcet drew out his antipathy toward all utopian schemes, if Mably encouraged him to deny the primacy of purely economic motivations, it was Mary Wollstonecraft who called out of his heart and mind Adams’s deepest reservations about the assumptions—Adams thought them illusions—that had produced the horror, the devastation, and the seductive pathology of the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft was a brilliant young Englishwoman who had achieved sudden fame in her own day, and is still remembered in ours, for her authorship of A Vindicatio
n of the Rights of Woman (1792), which presented the first sustained and comprehensive argument for sexual equality in recorded history. But the book that attracted Adams’s attention and ire was her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794). He first read it in 1796, just before taking office as president, then reread it in 1812, making notes on virtually every one of its 532 pages, thereby generating a veritable book of his own and what one scholar described as “his own version of the [French] Revolution.”11

  Not that Adams had exactly suppressed his strong opinions on the French Revolution apart from his private criticisms of Wollstone craft’s defense. The French Revolution, in fact, was an event—perhaps the most decisively shaping event of modern history—that Adams frequently used as a kind of backboard for his own political values, a dramatic example of how not to affect social change. In his Discourses on Davila, composed in the year the French Revolution began, when most American observers were flush with enthusiasm for a revolutionary cause that looked so similar to their own, he had indicated his sense of foreboding at the misguided hope that a whole new chapter in human history was beginning. “Amidst all the exultations,” he wrote in 1789, “Americans and Frenchmen should remember that the perfectibility of man is only human and terrestrial perfectibility. Cold will still freeze, and fire will never cease to burn; disease and vice will continue to disorder, and death to terrify mankind.” The following year he had written to the English radical Richard Price that “the Revolution in France could not be indifferent to me; but I have learned an awful experience, to rejoice with trembling… and I own to you, I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.”12

  As events in France carried the Revolution from exhilaration to subsequent phases of terror, mass violence, and despotism, Adams’s initial apprehensions proved prophetic, and the French Revolution became a familiar touchstone that Adams often referred to in letters, combining an “I told you so” bravado with a colorful characterization of the reasons why disaster had been inevitable. “I acknowledge that the most unaccountable phenomenon I ever beheld, in the seventy-seven, almost, years that I lived,” he wrote to his old revolutionary colleague Thomas McKean in 1812, “was to see men of the most extensive knowledge and deepest reflection entertain for a moment an opinion that a democratic republic could be erected in a nation of five-and-twenty millions people, four-and-twenty millions and five hundred thousand of whom could neither read nor write.” The following year he not-so-tactfully reminded Jefferson of the same lesson: “You was well persuaded in your own mind that the Nation [France] would succeed in establishing a free Republican Government. I was as well persuaded, in mine, that a project of such a Government…was an unnatural irrational and impractical, as it would be over the Elephants Lions Tigers Panthers and Bears in the Royal Menagerie, at Versailles.”13

  Jefferson preferred to let the subject drop, but Adams would not desist. “The French Patriots appeared to me,” he wrote in 1813, “like young Schollars from a Colledge or Sailors flushed with recent pay or prize money, mounted on wild Horses, lashing and speering, till they kill the Horses and break their own Necks.” When Jefferson eventually admitted that the French Revolution had not turned out as he had hoped, Adams told friends, somewhat misleadingly, that “the learned and scientific President Jefferson has, in letters to me, acknowledged that I was right, and that he was wrong.” While he often lamented the carnage and the countless human tragedies created unwittingly by the French radicals, there was a sense in which the French Revolution became a providential episode for Adams, an event that God or history gave to the world in order to illustrate the wisdom of evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary change. Adams had once confided to Rush that he saw himself as the Sancho Panza of American politics, destined to tilt at windmills and win his few victories with a burlesque style that concealed his utter seriousness of purpose: “I love the people of America,” he wrote. “They have been, they may be and they are deceived. It is the duty of somebody to undeceive them.” Reviewing the lessons of the French Revolution offered him the ideal occasion to do his duty.14

  OVERLEAF

  Marginalia of John Adams in his copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794).

  Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library.

  And commenting on Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution prompted Adams to spell out more specifically than anywhere else just why he opposed all modern efforts at radical or revolutionary social change for which the French Revolution was the prototype. As was his custom, Adams spent much of his time and energy hurling epithets without explaining the basis for his disagreement. When Wollstonecraft described a post-revolutionary world where “men will do unto others, what they wish they should do unto them,” for example, Adams rolled his eyes and wrote, “Heavenly times!” Or when Wollstonecraft attributed the excesses of the Revolution to the lingering vanities and human weaknesses left over from the ancien régime that would eventually be obliterated, he noted simply, “Alas! Poor girl!” But the bulk of his jottings consisted of sustained commentary in which his own political principles took shape against the articulated expectations of Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary creed.15

  First, Adams actually described Wollstonecraft’s arguments as a creed, a form of religion, and her belief in the Revolution as most akin to a religious enthusiasm. Her major convictions about human nature and social change were, he thought, “divine objects which her enthusiasm beholds in beatific vision. Alas, how airy and baseless a fabric.” Adams had no trouble understanding the seductive attractiveness of such doctrines. In the manner of the modern historian Carl Becker, however, he diagnosed the mentality of revolutionary advocates as reminiscent of Christian belief systems in the Middle Ages, burdened with fanciful superstitions, baseless notions of the possible and the convenient transferral of heaven’s rewards to this world “after the Revolution.” Although Adams thought that Wollstonecraft’s way of thinking was distressingly familiar, he claimed that a new word had been coined to express the concept: “The political and literary world are much indebted to the invention of the word IDEOLOGY,” he noted to himself. “Our English words Ideocy, or Ideotism, express not the force of meaning of it…. It was taught in the school of folly, but alas, Franklin, Turgot, Rochefoucauld and Condorcet, under Tom Paine, were the great masters of that Academy.” In Adams’s lexicon, “ideology” was a set of ideals and hopes, like human perfection or social equality, that philosophers mistakenly believed could be implemented on earth merely because they existed in their heads. To imagine was to believe, and to believe was to regard as possible. The revolutionary ideology of Wollstonecraft, he suggested, was a secular version of what Marx would later insist all religion represented, a drug or an opiate that prevented people from thinking clearly or realistically.16

  Moreover, Adams characterized Wollstonecraft’s specific creed as a particularly evangelical brand of religion cum ideology, because of the speed with which she assumed lasting social changes could be effected. “Did this lady think three months time enough to form a free constitution for twenty-five millions of Frenchmen?” he asked rhetorically, adding that he suspected “300 years would be well spent in procuring so great a blessing….” Here Adams surreptitiously suggested one of his most elemental convictions: that most enduring political, social, and economic transformations were evolutionary rather than revolutionary, that successful revolutions, like the one he had helped lead in America, were merely the final and most visible stages of what was, in fact, a long process of preparation. When radicals like Wollstonecraft attempted to foment sudden change for which the society was unprepared, the result was political extremism that mirrored the excesses of the regime they intended to overthrow; this then led to an institutionalization of competing pathologies; and this then led inevitably to a permanent despotism. It was therefore “absurd, ridiculous [and] delirious,” he conclude
d, to believe that “a revolution in France, per saltum, from monarchy to democracy” would ever work. “I thought so in 1785 when it was first talked of,” he scribbled in the margin, and, “I thought so in all the intermediate time, and I think so in 1812.”17

  Second, Adams disagreed with Wollstonecraft’s somewhat hazy assumptions about the relationship between government and society. Her views were not expressed fully, because she considered them such elementary articles of faith that they required minimal argumentation. But the whole thrust of her analysis depended on the presumption that, if there was social injustice in ancien régime France and throughout Europe, governments were the major causes of the problem and had little to contribute toward their solution. Adams, on the other hand, believed that the source of the problem existed inside human beings—their jealousy and passion for distinction—which then created a craving for wealth in which the stronger and richer pressed their advantage and generated greater social inequality. Corrupt governments institutionalized these inequities, but did not create them. The sources of mischief would not go away once the corrupt government was toppled. They would fester and eventually insinuate themselves into the post-revolutionary society, replicating in new forms the old evils thought to be obliterated. Government for Adams, then, was not a mere impediment to the natural virtue of a disinterested citizenry. It was the crucial ingredient that disciplined human passions and thereby secured the revolution. “She will not admit,” Adams lamented, “the only means that can accomplish any part of her ardent prophesies: forms of government…to restrain the passions of all orders of men.”18

  Third, and finally, since Wollstonecraft regarded government as an artifice that distorted and blocked the benign natural instincts of citizens, she gave little thought to its shape or structure. But then why should she, given her view that the primary accomplishment of any revolution should be to remove government? And once removed, she felt certain that liberated popular energies would opt for a simple and direct form of representative government, a single-house legislature that would reflect the collective opinions of the citizenry and conduct its necessary business with a minimum of bother.