John Adams

by David McCullough

  As part of his medical investigations, Rush had a long-standing interest in dreams. Dreams, he told his students, should be allowed to “sport themselves idly” in their brains. Observed, dreams could provide useful inferences. In the course of his correspondence with Adams, Rush had already related several dreams of his own. Now he had another to report. He had a dream of reading a history of America written at some point in the future, and of a particular page saying that among the “most extraordinary events” of the year 1809 was the renewal of friendship and correspondence between the two former presidents, Mr. John Adams and Mr. Thomas Jefferson. And it was Adams, according to Rush's dream history, who rekindled the old friendship.

  Mr. Adams addressed a short letter to his friend Mr. Jefferson in which he congratulated him upon his escape to the shades of retirement and domestic happiness, and concluded it with assurances of his regard and good wishes for his welfare. This letter did great honor to Mr. Adams. It discovered a magnanimity known only to great minds. Mr. Jefferson replied to this letter and reciprocated expressions of regard and esteem. These letters were followed by a correspondence of several years.

  Delighted by Rush's good-natured performance, Adams replied: “A dream again! I wish you would dream all day and all night, for one of your dreams puts me in spirits for a month. I have no other objections to your dream, but that it is not history. It may be prophecy.”

  But then Adams did nothing, and no more was said of the matter. Silence between Stoneyfield and Monticello continued.

  • • •

  “OUR READING has been all about Russia,” Adams wrote to John Quincy that winter, when it looked for all the world like Russia outside Adams's window and the palsy in his hands was “rather increased” by the severe cold. He wrote of the pleasure he was taking in John Quincy's two sons and of their progress in their studies. He reported on his own son Thomas, who was by now married to Ann Harrod of Haverhill and with his growing family had settled in the old house by Penn's Hill where Adams had been born; and on Elbridge Gerry, who had lately been elected governor of Massachusetts. In October of 1810, Adams celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday.

  He had taken up reading modern epic poems and novels, “romances,” he reported to Rush—Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake, Jane Porter's Scottish Chiefs—and was finding great enjoyment in them.

  “My days glide smoothly away,” he wrote early in the new year of 1811. Snow fell for twelve consecutive days, leaving drifts ten feet high.

  “I am well, my appetite as good as ever,” he reported after another six months had passed. “I sleep well nights. My natural vision is not bad, but I use glasses for ease to my eyes.... My hearing ... is as good as ever.” His only difficulties were the “quiveration” in his hands and a loss of voice. “It would divert you to witness conversation between my ancient friend and colleague Robert T. Paine and me. He is above eighty. I cannot speak and he cannot hear. Yet we converse.”

  But 1811 was to be an almost unbearably difficult and painful year for the Adamses, indeed, “the most afflictive” year they had known. In April, when his horse reared and threw him, Thomas was so badly injured it was feared he would be crippled for life. By early summer Mary Cranch, who suffered from what was probably tuberculosis, appeared to be dying. Then, Sally, Charles's widow, began spitting up blood, which as Adams later reported to Benjamin Rush, confined her under the constant care of physicians for three or four months.

  One night in September, going out in the dark to view a comet, Adams tripped over a stake in the ground and ripped his leg open to the bone, so that for months he too was confined to the house, a doctor “daily hovering” to bathe and dress the wound.

  Abigail, who almost alone of the household remained on her feet, went back and forth across town to the Cranches, nursing her sister as well as those at home. “Neither the morals of Epictetus or the stoic philosophy of the ancients could avail to allay the tumult of grief excited by such a succession of distress,” she wrote to John Quincy.

  But greatest was the anguish over Nabby, about whom Abigail said nothing yet to John Quincy, probably to spare him the worry.

  Nabby had discovered a “hardness” in her right breast, and had come on to Quincy from the farm in upstate New York where she and Colonel Smith had been living for some while in near poverty. She consulted with Cotton Tufts and several physicians in Boston and wrote to Benjamin Rush for his advice. The Boston doctors all advised the surgical removal of her breast, as did Rush in a thoughtful letter to her father. He preferred giving his opinion this way, Rush told Adams, so that he and Abigail could “communicate it gradually.”

  From the experience of more than fifty years in such cases, Rush said, he knew but one remedy, “the knife.” “From her account of the moving state of the tumor, it is now in a proper situation for the operation. Should she wait till it superates or even inflames much, it may be too late... I repeat again, let there be no delay.... Her time of life calls for expedition in this business, for tumors such as hers tend much more rapidly to cancer after 45 than in more early life.” Nabby was forty-six.

  A mastectomy was performed on Nabby in the bedroom beside that of her mother and father on October 8. As Adams wrote to Rush, the operation took twenty-five minutes, the dressing an hour longer. The agony she endured in that day before anesthetics is unimaginable. The four surgeons who performed the operation told Adams afterward that they had never known a patient to show such fortitude.

  Two days later, on October 10, the beloved Richard Cranch died of heart failure at age eighty-five, and the day following, Mary Cranch died at age seventy. For Abigail it was the greatest loss since the death of Charles.

  The horror of Nabby's ordeal brought a marked change in Adams. The old shows of temper were not to be seen again. He became more mellow, more accepting of life, and forgiving. He had felt during Nabby's agony, he said, as if he were living in the Book of Job.

  • • •

  JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Adams heard again from Benjamin Rush, who wished to remind him of a visit Adams had had the summer before from two young men from Virginia. They were brothers named Coles, Albemarle County neighbors of Jefferson's, and in the course of conversation Adams had at length exclaimed, “I always loved Jefferson and I still love him.” This had been carried back to Monticello, and was all Jefferson needed to hear. To Rush he wrote, “I only needed this knowledge to revive towards him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives.”

  “And now, my dear friend,” declared Rush to Adams “permit me again to suggest to you to receive the olive branch offered to you by the hand of a man who still loves you.”

  On New Year's Day 1812, seated at his desk in the second-floor library, Adams took up his pen to write a short letter to Jefferson very like the one Rush had prophesied in his dream.

  • • •

  IT WAS A BRIEF, cordial note to wish Jefferson many happy new years, and to say he could expect to receive a bit of “homespun lately produced in this quarter by one who was honored in his youth with some of your attention and much of your kindness.” Posted separately, the “homespun” was a copy of John Quincy's Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, but before it could arrive, Jefferson had concluded that it must be some article of home-produced clothing, and so in reply to Adams wrote at length about the virtues of the spinning jenny and loom, and of the thriftiness of household manufactures.

  If, as stage-managed by Rush, it had been left to Adams to make the first move, Jefferson more than fulfilled his part. “A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind,” he continued. “It carried me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.”

  Jefferson was fond of images of storm-tossed seas and employed them often, as he did now, though in his own travels at sea he himself had known only smooth sailing.

  Laboring always at the s
ame oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark, we knew not how we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.

  Like Adams, he claimed to be out of touch with politics, which was hardly so. He was kept abreast regularly by Madison and Monroe, among others. “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid,” he wrote, which was also an overstatement, but one certain to please his fellow classical scholar at Quincy.

  Adams answered in high spirits and at greater length than Jefferson had written to him. “What an exchange have you made? Of newspapers for Newton!” he wrote. “Rising from the lower deep of the lowest deep of dullness and bathos to the contemplation of the heavens and the heavens of the heavens.” Responding to Jefferson's figurative storm at sea, Adams recalled again his own real voyage on the Boston, chased by British frigates, struck by “a hideous tempest of thunder and lightning,” the mainmast split, twenty men down, one dead. It was the story of his life, he said.

  “I walk every fair day,” he told Jefferson, “sometimes three and four miles. Ride now and then, but very rarely more than ten or fifteen miles.” The tremble in his hands made it difficult to write at all and impossible to write well, as Jefferson could readily see.

  Adams wrote to Rush to report the new state of affairs. “Your dream is out.... You have wrought wonders! You have made peace between powers that never were at war,” he said, happy about the news but choosing to make light of it, as if no one was supposed ever to think there had been any serious differences between him and the man he had earlier told Rush was a consummate intriguer. Apparently, Adams was ready now both to forgive and to forget.

  Rush was exultant. Nothing could have pleased him more, as he wrote immediately to Adams.

  I rejoice in the correspondence which has taken place between you and your old friend Mr. Jefferson. I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all....

  I admire, as do all my family, the wonderful vivacity and imagery of your letters. Some men's minds wear well, but yours doesn't appear to wear at all! “Oh! King, live forever,” said the eastern nations to their monarchs! Live—live, my venerable friend.

  Rush wrote to Jefferson to assure him that posterity would acclaim the reconciliation and that Jefferson was certain to find Adams a refreshing correspondent. “I view him as a mountain with its head clear and reflecting beams of the sun, while below it is frost and snow.”

  Within months a half dozen letters had traveled the roads between Quincy and Monticello, and one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history—indeed, in the English language—was under way. In two years' time fifty letters went back and forth, and this was but the beginning. They wrote of old friends and their own friendship, of great causes past, common memories, books, politics, education, philosophy, religion, the French, the British, the French Revolution, American Indians, the American navy, their families, their health, slavery—eventually—and their considered views on life, society, and always, repeatedly, the American Revolution.

  “Who shall write the history of the American Revolution?” Adams asked. “Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?”

  “Nobody,” Jefferson answered, “except perhaps its external facts.”

  The level and range of their discourse were always above and beyond the ordinary. At times memory failed; often hyperbole entered in. Often each was writing as much for posterity as for the other. They were two of the leading statesmen of their time, but also two of the finest writers, and they were showing what they could do.

  In fundamental ways each proved consistently true to his nature—they were in what they wrote as they had been through life. Jefferson was far more guarded and circumspect, better organized, dispassionate, more mannered, and refused ever to argue. Adams was warm, loquacious, more personal and opinionated, often humorous and willing to poke fun at himself. When Jefferson wrote of various self-appointed seers and mystics who had taken up his time as president, Adams claimed to have had no problem with such people. “They all assumed the character of ambassadors extraordinary from the Almighty, but as I required miracles in proof of their credentials, and they did not perform any, I never gave public audience to any of them.”

  Jefferson wrote as an elegant stylist performing for a select audience, as Adams fully appreciated, telling him his letters should be published for the delight of future generations. Adams wrote as he talked, bouncing subjects about with no thought to organization. Adams later told a friend he had no more thought of publishing a letter as he wrote it than he had of giving an account to the press of his going to bed that night. “I considered when I wrote to Mr. J. that I was not writing psalms... nor sermons, nor prayers. It was only, as if one sailor had met a brother sailor, after 25 years absence, and had accosted him, ‘How fare you, Jack?’ ”

  By late spring of 1812, the year the correspondence began, the country was again at war with Great Britain, twenty-nine years after the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783. Continuing British impressment of American seamen was the principal issue—“injuries and indignities heaped upon our country,” in the words of President Madison. And though the country was ill prepared to fight, war was declared on June 19. Five days later Napoleon and his Grande Armee invaded Russia, which, with John Quincy and his family in St. Petersburg, was to the Adamses a matter of extreme interest.

  If only a few more frigates had been built, Adams wrote to Jefferson, who had cut the navy drastically. “Without this our Union will be a brittle china vase.” But then in August the Constitution defeated the British ship Guerriere off Nova Scotia, and later sank the British frigate Java, near Brazil. The Wasp, an American sloop of war, defeated the Frolic, the Hornet sank the Peacock, and in a letter to Adams, Jefferson generously gave credit where credit was due. “I sincerely congratulate you on the success of our little navy, which must be more gratifying to you than to most men, as having been the early and constant advocate of wooden walls.”

  As the War of 1812 went on, as Madison was elected for a second term with Elbridge Gerry his Vice President, as the seasons came and went at Quincy and Monticello, the letters continued on. It was not an even exchange. Adams wrote at greater length than Jefferson, and he wrote more often. On average Adams wrote two letters for every one from Jefferson, but this was of no matter to him. During one stretch of several months, Adams wrote twelve times before he had an answer from Jefferson. “Nevermind... if I write four letters to your one,” Adams told him, “your one is worth more than my four.”

  For a while, when addressing letters to Jefferson, Adams would even refer to his farm as “Montezillo.” “Mr. Jefferson lives at Monticello, the lofty mountain. I live at Montezillo, a little hill,” Adams would explain, apparently unaware that both words mean “little mountain.”

  At first, Adams tried to draw Jefferson out on a variety of matters important to him. “Whether you or I were right posterity must judge,” Adams would observe equably, then launch headlong into what he thought. “I never have approved and never can approve the repeal of taxes, the repeal of the judiciary system, or the neglect of the navy.” He brought up the Alien Law, claiming absurdly that since Jefferson had signed it, too, as Vice President, he therefore shared in the responsibility for it. “Checks and balances, Jefferson, however you and your party may have ridiculed them, are our only security,” he wrote in another letter.

  The patriots of the French Revolution, Adams declared, knowing perfectly well how it would provoke Jefferson, were like drunken sailors on wild horses, “lashing and speering till they would kill the horses and break their own necks.” Recalling the Jacobin threat to America, he accused Jefferson of having been “fast asleep in philosophical tranquility.” “What think you of terrorism, Mr. Jefferson?” Adams demanded, as if he were back in c
ourt and Jefferson on the witness stand.

  “My friend! You and I have passed our lives in serious times,” he reminded Jefferson, and, as an example, pointed to the all-too-serious perils of sedition contained in the Kentucky Resolutions, unaware that Jefferson had been their author.

  “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other,” Adams wrote, still trying to draw Jefferson out.

  But Jefferson, who must have wondered what he had gotten himself into, refused to engage in wrangling or dispute. “The summum bonum with me is now truly Epicurean, ease of body and tranquility of mind,” he wrote, “and to these I wish to consign my remaining days.”

  My mind has been long fixed to bow to the judgment of the world, who will judge me by my acts and will never take counsel from me as to what the judgment will be. If your objects and opinions have been misunderstood, if the measures and principles of others have wrongly been imputed to you, as I believe they have been, that you should leave an explanation of them would be an act of justice to yourself. I will add that it has been hoped you would leave such explanations as would place every saddle on its right horse, and replace on the shoulders of others the burdens they shifted on yours.

  But all this, my friend, is offered merely for your consideration and judgment, without presuming to anticipate what you alone are qualified to decide for yourself. I mean to express my own purpose only, and the reflections which have led to it. To me then it appears that there have been differences of opinion, and party differences, from the establishment of governments to the present day, and on the same question which now divides our country, that these will continue through all future times: that everyone takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few, according to his constitution and the circumstances in which he is placed, that opinions, which are equally honest on both sides, should not effect personal esteem or social intercourse... nothing new can be added by you or me to what has been said by others, and will be said in every age.