Passionate Sage

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Adams could barely contain himself. He covered Wollstonecraft’s paragraphs with critical commentary. Her notion of a sovereign legislature representing all the varied interests of society was: “a savage theory. A barbarous theory. Indians, Negroes, Tartars, Hottentots would have refined it more.” Her assertion that government should be simple was equally stupid. “The clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels,” he wrote, “but it would not tell the time of day.” Then he listed a long string of items, including a farmer’s barn, a ship, a city, even the solar system, that would not function if deprived of their complexity. He concluded sardonically that the “simplest of all governments is a despotism in one.” Wollstonecraft’s naive assumption that the ultimate purpose of government was to “get out of the way” and thereby allow for the free expression of individual energies and opinions guaranteed disaster, since such a course assured that “jealousy, envy and revenge [will] govern with as absolute a sway as ever.” The ultimate purpose of government, he insisted, was not to release individual energies but to constrain and balance them. In order to do that, “Power must be opposed to power, force to force, strength to strength, interest to interest…and passion to passion.”19

  One can almost see him hunched over Wollstonecraft’s book in the library at Quincy, his hands shaking from the combination of palsy and excitement, the walls around him laden with books that had also received the same furious attention, most of the authors, including Mary Wollstonecraft, long since dead, but the ideas contained in the books still alive, simultaneously enlightening and deceiving nations and mankind, waiting for the shaky pen of the cantankerous patriarch to deliver its verdicts, the old man arguing with the books into the night.

  The tendency to define his own position against either an established or popular point of view did not necessarily mean that Adams only delivered bad news. His deep-rooted suspicion of all celebrities made him supportive of younger leaders traumatized by the larger-than-life depictions of his fellow American revolutionaries as they began to appear early in the nineteenth century. Especially after he emerged from his long effort at self-vindication, he enjoyed countering accounts of the American Revolution, or of what was becoming known as the “Founding Fathers,” that verged on ancestor worship and inevitably left younger Americans feeling that all history was now epilogue. “I ought not to object to your reverence for your fathers,” he wrote to Josiah Quincy in 1811, “meaning…those concerned with the direction of public affairs…. But, to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I have no reason to believe we were better than you are.” He sensed that romanticized versions of the American Revolution paralyzed what he called “the rising generation” with a patriotic storyline populated by demigods who spoke soliloquies reminiscent of the patriarchs in the Old Testament.20

  Adams launched a personal campaign to shatter these sentimental tableaux and to assume a protective and almost grandfatherly posture toward the younger generation. The conduct of the American Revolution, he insisted, was less a religious crusade led by saints than an unholy political mess managed, with varying degrees of effectiveness, by imperfect human beings. “Every measure of Congress, from 1774 to 1787 inclusively,” he wrote to one young supplicant with stars in his eyes, “was disputed with acrimony, and decided by as small majorities as any question is decided these days.” He reminded Rush to tell all the young political aspirants in Pennsylvania that “the Majorities in Congress in ’74 on all the essential points and Principles were only one, two, or three votes…though they went out to the World as wholly unanimous.”21

  Even though he was already on record as belittling the historical significance of the Declaration of Independence, the signing of the Declaration was a symbolic event that so many correspondents asked him about that Adams developed a veritable arsenal of critical weapons designed to smash idealized accounts. “I could not see their hearts,” he told one of the several hundred questioners about the signing ceremony, “but, as far as I could penetrate the intricate foldings of their souls, I then believed, and have not since altered my opinion, that there were several who signed with regret, and several others, with many doubts and much lukewarmness.” He reopened a correspondence with Thomas McKean, a former delegate from Pennsylvania at the Continental Congress who had also been “present at the creation,” to check his own memory. McKean confirmed that many state delegations had been divided on the question of independence and, as far as he could remember, only a few actually signed the document on July 4. This encouraged Adams to denounce the famous painting of the scene by John Trumbull, which hung (and still hangs) in the Capitol rotunda, as a gross misrepresentation. Not only was Trumbull’s painting bad art—Adams objected to the misleading serenity of the scene and called Trumbull’s depiction of the Constitutional Convention “the shin piece” because it seemed to focus the eye on the extended legs and ankles of the signers—it was also bad history because there was never one moment or even one day when all the delegates gathered to record their signatures to the Declaration. The war had already begun by that date and members scurried in and out of Philadelphia throughout the summer, affixing their names to the now hallowed parchment whenever they happened to be in town.22

  By contesting these patriotic fictions Adams hoped to blow away the golden haze that was settling over the founding generation, including himself, and help provide the leaders of the rising generation with more realistic expectations for themselves. “If you should live to be an octogenarian,” he informed one young man, “you will know by experience the delight that is felt by those who are stepping off the stage at the sights of such proofs of genius, information and patriotism in those who are stepping on.” In fact, Adams claimed there was more intellectual talent available in the new nation than there had ever been before. “I see a succession of able and honorable characters,” he told McKean, “from members of Congress down to bachelors and students in our universities, who will take care of the liberties which you have cherished and done so much to support.” The only problem, as he saw it, was that the next generation of statesmen would be transfixed by the idols being propped up by mindless devotees of patriotic mythology. He even hypothesized that one of the major reasons for the successes enjoyed by the founders of independence and framers of constitutions was the relative scarcity of available talent, which allowed the ablest thinkers and leaders more readily to satisfy their personal ambitions. The greatest danger facing the current crop of American leaders, he speculated, was not a lack but an overabundance of talent: “their numbers are so great, and their pretensions will be so high, that rivalries pernicious to the nation and her union may arise.”23

  Resisting inflated interpretations of the revolutionary generation was, in several senses, an old Adams custom, rooted in his intense hostility to utopian schemes of all sorts, whether they be Condorcet’s or Wollstonecraft’s depiction of a perfect democratic society in the future or historical treatments of godlike leaders of the recent American past. What was different, starting around 1812, was the absence of whining or moaning in the background, the elimination of most pleas for his own reputation, and the visible effort to enhance the status of others. Not that delivering praise was ever an easy or simple gesture for Adams. Praise, after all, like popularity, courted vanity. So it was usually dispensed in conjunction with a harsh message—the current generation could be encouraged if such encouragement was coupled with criticism of the fabricated stories of an earlier Augustan era—as if public opinion was a seesaw he was determined to keep in equilibrium much the same way he thought his own disposition and a well-structured constitution should be balanced. And when Adams first got wind of the surging historical reputations of southern, especially Virginian, participants in the Revolution, all the internal wires, fulcrums, levers, gears, and gyroscopes in his complicated psyche went into action.

  The immediate cause of the reaction was the publication of a new biography of Patrick
Henry. The author, William Wirt, was no superficial sentimentalist. Adams conceded that he was impressed with Wirt’s scholarship, had always admired Henry himself, and that the book vividly, if somewhat melodramatically, recreated the texture of past events he had nearly forgotten. In fact, as he explained to John Quincy, Wirt’s biography “called up so many Ghosts and they appear so much more venerable to me than they did when I lived and suffered with them, that I am almost as much terrified as the Old Lady of Endor was at the sight of Samuel.” The ascendance of Patrick Henry’s reputation, however, triggered Adams’s intense suspicion that all the Virginia geese were being transformed into swans again, and that New Englanders were being forgotten altogether. He began, in earnest, to redress the balance.24

  Adams launched a campaign to recover the memory of New England’s special contribution to the Revolution. Since Jefferson and his southern friends had “made the Revolution a game of billiards,” he wrote, “I will make it a game of shuttlecock. [Patrick] Henry might give the first impulse to the ball in Virginia, but [James] Otis’ battledore had struck the shuttlecock up in air in Massachusetts…before Henry’s ball was torched.” This was a colorfully roundabout way of saying that James Otis had defied the authority of Parliament years before Henry did the same so eloquently in the Virginia House of Burgesses. But then Otis was not alone. “You say Mr. S. Adams ‘had too much sternness and pious bigotry,’” he complained to William Tudor. Well, he lectured Tudor, your criticism merely documents your naievté: “A man in his situation and circumstances must possess a large fund of sternness of stuff, or he soon will be annihilated…. Mr. [Sam] Adams was born and tempered a wedge of steel to split the knot…which tied North America to Great Britain.” Successful revolutions required just that kind of intransigence. In fact, it took all kinds to make a revolution. He indignantly rejected the accusation that he had ever demeaned John Hancock for his foppish affectations: “I can say with truth,” he pleaded with Tudor, “that I profoundly admired him, and even more profoundly loved him. If he had vanity and caprice, so had I. And if his vanity and caprice made him sometimes sputter…mine, I well know, had a similar affect upon him.” Despite these petty disagreements—what Adams described as “little flickerings of little passions”—Hancock had been his abiding friend and (a gentle jibe here) a more stalwart supporter of independence than most of the slaveowning patriots living south of the Potomac.25

  But the most intense campaign was waged in behalf of James Otis. Adams claimed that “Otis was the real father and founder of the American empire more certainly than Romulus was of the Roman.” He knew that such an extreme statement would be greeted with incredulous laughter, because Otis was generally regarded as an early but minor voice opposing British sovereignty over the colonies, an eloquent but irascible character who eventually lost his mind and died before the Revolution actually began. But such criticism, Adams noted, did not bother him any more than “the barking of ladies’ lap dogs [which] though they frighten sheep, only amuse me.” He insisted that he believed Otis “to have been the earliest and the principal Founder of one of the greatest political Revolutions that ever occurred among men.” When William Tudor completed a biography of Otis that Adams had long encouraged, Adams pronounced it “the most important volume of American Biography that I have ever read….” He also encouraged John Trumbull to do a massive painting of Otis at the moment of his greatest triumph, arguing the Writs of Assistance Case before Thomas Hutchinson in the Boston State House in 1761, with a young John Adams taking notes in the background of the scene, “looking like a short, thick Archbishop of Canterbury.”26

  Just why Adams chose to make such an extreme case in behalf of such an unconventional figure as Otis is not difficult to discern. Part of the motivation was historically justified: Otis had been among the first to challenge the constitutional authority of Great Britain in language that undercut any and all attempts to exercise arbitrary power; the principle he defended in the Writs of Assistance Case was later enshrined in the first amendment to the United States Constitution. And as Adams himself acknowledged, he was committed to “puffing” New Englanders to offset the “puffing” of the Virginian dynasty. Most of all, however, Otis’s reputation as an outspoken, vain, and difficult character not only illustrated his point that “the greatest Men have the greatest faults,” and thereby struck a blow for a more realistic appraisal of the founding generation; it also served as a conveniently indirect reminder that another New Englander, also early to answer the tocsin against British rule and also infamous for his faults, deserved more credit than he was receiving from history.27

  Eventually, even the inexhaustible Adams grew as weary of defending underappreciated heroes like Otis as he had already grown weary of openly defending himself or reducing the stature of his fellow revolutionaries to human size. Though he relished the fight, it was clearly a losing cause, since Americans obviously needed to believe in myths about their past just as religious devotees needed to believe in potent superstitions. He began, instead, to sound a new note when correspondents pestered him with the same old questions about the Revolution and the worthiest revolutionaries of his time.

  “But what do we mean by the American Revolution?” he responded rhetorically to Hezekiah Niles in 1818. “Do we mean the American war?” Then, in an answer to his own question that has become famous, though understood by historians in several different ways, Adams proclaimed: “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religions sentiments of their duties and obligations.”28

  This was Adams’s most familiar formulation, but it remains susceptible to different readings. It is possible to argue that Adams meant that the fifteen years preceding the outbreak of outright hostilities was the crucial era. This view would be compatible with his celebration of New Englanders like Otis, Sam Adams, and John Hancock, as well as his earlier autobiographical proclamations for himself. And there is some direct evidence to support this interpretation. In a letter to Jefferson, Adams first used language similar to the oft-quoted letter to Hezekiah Niles: “As to the history of the Revolution,” he wrote Jefferson in 1815, “my Ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was 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.”29

  According to this interpretation, which became the dominant perspective among historians later in the nineteenth century and then again in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the American Revolution was essentially a constitutional clash between Parliament, which was making a reinvigorated effort to impose its will on the western wing of its empire, and the political and economic leaders of the thirteen colonies, who defied Parliament’s right to tax or legislate for them without their consent in highly literate pamphlet and newspaper broadsides. This version of American history put a premium on the role of prominent colonial leaders, on rational, even legalistic, arguments about the source of political legitimacy, and the controlled and surprisingly consistent political reaction within the leadership of the thirteen colonies. Again, Adams seemed to endorse this perspective on several occasions, claiming that the “accomplishment of it [the Revolution], in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind. Thirteen clocks were made to strike together….”30

  The bulk of the evidence, however, indicates that Adams meant something different, especially as he grew older. He never abandoned his opinion that the years immediately preceding the war were crucial, or that the thoughts and actions of particular individuals caught in the revolutionary crisis made a difference. But his emphasis turned toward the more long-term and impersonal forces. When the Continental Congress gathered in 1774, he explained to Jefferson, it was like the convening of the Council of Nice: “It
assembled the Priests from the E and W the N and the S, who compared notes, engaged in discussions and debaters and formed Results….” But the delegates merely embodied attitudes that had been developing in America for many years, in the local towns, villages, and remote byways of the countryside. Any “true history”—that bedeviling contradiction again—of the real causes of the Revolution would need to reach further back in time and much deeper into the local records of towns and families, where the elemental convictions that finally surfaced in the 1760s and 1770s were congealing. He agreed with Jefferson that “it is difficult to say at what moment the Revolution began,” but in an important sense, “it began as early as the first Plantation of the Country.” If one posed to him the question, “Who, then, was the author, inventor, discoverer of independence?” he would have to reply that the “only true answer must be the first emigrants” the avowed revolutionary leaders of the 1770s were not prime movers so much as mere “awakeners and revivers of the original fundamental principle of colonization.”31

  His ultimate verdict—which was a premonition of the scholarly perspective on the Revolution dominant in the last quarter of the twentieth century—focused attention on invisible social, economic, and demographic forces operating at different speeds and in different patterns throughout the colonies. He told James Madison that the perennial question about “Who was the author…of American Independence” was silly and misguided: “We might as well inquire who were the Inventors of Agriculture, Horticulture, Architecture, Musick.” It was not just that certain New Englanders deserved more acclaim than certain Virginians. Or that heroic icons like Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson should be remembered for their blunders as well as their success. The whole emphasis on “great men” was wrong. History was a panoramic process, better viewed through a telescope than a magnifying glass, best understood perhaps by older commentators who had acquired a seasoned sense of change over time and a perspective that carried the debate beyond myopic squabbles about who did what first or who merited the most credit. This was a way of thinking attractive to old man Adams for many reasons, not the least of which being that it was considered unfashionable.32