THE IRONIES AND PARADOXES expressed in the lives of these two Founders epitomize the strange and wondrous experience of the nation itself. Jefferson was an aristocratic Virginia planter, a well-connected slaveholder, a “patriarch,” as he called himself, reared in a hierarchical slaveholding society. By contrast, Adams was middling-born in a Massachusetts society that was far more egalitarian than any society in the South. Adams had few connections outside of his town of Braintree, and his rise was due almost exclusively to merit. Yet Jefferson the slaveholding aristocrat emerged as the apostle of American democracy; he became the optimistic exponent of American equality and the promoter of the uniqueness of the nation and its special role in the world. Adams, on the other hand, became the representative of a crusty conservatism that emphasized the inequality and vice-ridden nature of American society, a man who believed that “Democracy will infallibly destroy all Civilization.”1 America, said Adams, was not unusual; it was not free from the sins of other societies. Jefferson told the American people what they wanted to hear—how exceptional they were. Adams told them what they needed to know—truths about themselves that were difficult to bear. Over the centuries Americans have tended to avoid Adams’s message; they have much preferred to hear Jefferson’s praise of their uniqueness.
The fundamental differences between the two men could often be subtle and slippery; other differences were more obvious and palpable. Jefferson was tall, perhaps six two or so, and lean, lanky, and gangling; he had a reddish freckled complexion, bright hazel eyes, and reddish blond hair, which he tended to wear unpowdered in a queue. He was careless of his dress and tended to wear what he wanted to wear, regardless of what was in style. He bowed to everyone he met and tended to talk with his arms folded, a sign of his reserved nature. In 1790 William Maclay, the caustic Scotch-Irish senator from western Pennsylvania, described the secretary of state in the new federal government as “a slender Man” whose “clothes seem too small for him” and whose “whole figure has a loose shackling Air.” Jefferson tended to sit “in a lounging Manner on One hip, . . . with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other.” To Maclay, who disliked anything that smacked of European court life, Jefferson affected a manner of “stiff Gentility, or lofty Gravity.”2
In contrast to Jefferson, Adams was short, five seven or so, and stout; “by my Physical Constitution,” he admitted, “I am but an ordinary Man.” He had sharp blue eyes, and he often covered his thinning light brown hair with a wig. The acerbic Senator Maclay, who had few kind words for anyone in his journal, became increasingly contemptuous of Adams, the vice president in 1789 and thus president of the Senate. Adams, wrote Maclay, was a “Childish Man” with “a very silly Kind of laugh,” who was usually wrapped up “in the Contemplation of his own importance.” Whenever he looked at Adams presiding in his chair with his wig and small sword, Maclay said he could not “help thinking of a Monkey just put into Breeches.”3 There is no doubt that Adams could sometimes appear ridiculous in the eyes of others.
Although Jefferson was often hated and ridiculed in print by his political enemies, no one made fun of him in quite the way they did Adams. Jefferson possessed a dignity that Adams lacked; for many Jefferson was the model of an eighteenth-century gentleman—learned and genteel and possessing perfect self-control and serenity of spirit. His slave Madison Hemings recalled that Jefferson was the “quietist of men,” who was “hardly ever known to get angry.”4
Adams was certainly learned and could be genteel, but he lacked Jefferson’s serenity of spirit. He was too excitable and too irascible for that. He never knew when to be reserved and silent, something Jefferson was skilled at. Indeed, Jefferson used his affability to keep people at a distance. Adams was just the opposite: familiarity bred his infectious amiability. In 1787 his Harvard classmate Jonathan Sewall, who had become a Loyalist, met Adams in London and was reminded of the appeal Adams had for him. “Adams,” he told a judge back in Massachusetts, “has a heart formed for friendship, and susceptible of it’s finest feelings; he is humane, generous, and open—warm to the friendly Attachments tho’ perhaps rather implacable to those he thinks his enemies.”5
Adams was high-strung and was never as relaxed and easygoing as Jefferson was in company. But once he felt at ease with someone he could be much more jovial and open than Jefferson, more familiar and more revealing of his feelings. As Sewall suggested, people who got to know him well found him utterly likable. His candor and his unvarnished honesty won their hearts. But these qualities of forthrightness did not work well in public. Adams never quite learned to tailor his remarks to his audience in the way Jefferson did. Consequently, he lacked Jefferson’s suave and expert political skills.
• • •
BOTH MEN WERE CAUGHT UP in the currents of the Enlightenment. While Jefferson rode these currents and was exhilarated by the experience, Adams often resisted them and questioned their direction. Jefferson had few doubts about the future; indeed, perhaps more than any other American, Jefferson came to personify the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He always dreamed of a new and better world to come; by contrast, Adams always had qualms and uncertainties about the future.
The difference came partly from their contrasting views of human nature. Jefferson was a moral idealist, a child of light. Humans, he believed, were basically good and good-hearted, guided by an instinctive moral sense. Only when people’s good nature was perverted by outside forces, especially by the power and privilege of monarchical government, did they become bad. Adams also believed that people possessed an inner moral sense, which enabled them to distinguish between right and wrong, but he never had the confidence in it that Jefferson had. Adams may not have been a child of darkness, but he was not a child of light either. His conception of human nature was stained with a sense of sin inherited from his Puritan ancestors. But his bleak view of human nature and his irascibility were leavened by his often facetious joking, his droll stories, and his sense of the absurdity of things. By contrast, Jefferson was always much more serious about life. He never revealed much of a sense of humor, and when he did it was often so dry as to be barely felt.
Both Adams and Jefferson were extremely learned, and both were avid readers. As a teenager Adams “resolved never to be afraid to read any Book,” however controversial, and that was true of Jefferson as well.6 Although for both men the classics, law, and history dominated their reading, Adams seems to have enjoyed novels as well, especially in his retirement. He claimed to have “read all Sir Walter Scott’s Novels as regularly as they appeared.” He said that he had been “a Lover and a Reader of Romances all my Life. From Don Quixote and Gil Blas to the Scottish Chiefs and an hundred others.”7
Jefferson was different. He admitted that fiction might occasionally be pleasurable, but he considered most novels to be “trash.” He made some exceptions for moral tales, such as the didactic writings of Maria Edgeworth, but generally he believed the passion for novel reading was “a great obstacle to good education.” It was a “poison” that “infects the mind, it destroys it’s tone, and revolts it against wholesome reading.” It resulted in “a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust toward all the real business of life.”8
Learned as both men were, Adams never possessed Jefferson’s breadth of knowledge. In fact, Jefferson had the most spacious and encyclopedic mind of any of his fellow Americans, including even Benjamin Franklin. He was interested in more things and knew more about more things than any other American. When he was abroad he traveled to more varied places in Europe than Adams ever did, and kept a detailed record of all that he had seen, especially of the many vineyards he visited. He amassed nearly seven thousand books and consulted them constantly; he wanted both his library and his mind to embrace virtually all of human knowledge, and he came as close to that embrace as an eighteenth-century American could. Every aspect of natural history and science fascinated him.
He knew about flowers, plants, birds, and animals, and had a passion for all facets of agriculture. He had a fascination for meteorology, archaeology, and the origins of the American Indians. He loved mathematics and sought to apply mathematical principles to almost everything, from coinage and weights and measures to the frequency of rebellions and the length of people’s lives. He was an inveterate tinkerer and inventor and was constantly thinking of newer and better ways of doing things, whether it was plowing, the copying of handwriting, or measuring distances.
Machines and gadgets fascinated Jefferson. He was especially taken with the “orrery”—a working model of the universe—created by David Rittenhouse of Philadelphia. He concluded that Rittenhouse was one of America’s three great geniuses, along with Washington and Franklin; he claimed that Rittenhouse “has exhibited as great a proof of mechanical genius as the world has ever produced.”9
Jefferson also called himself “an enthusiast on the subject of the arts.” He said music was “the favorite passion of my soul,” and he became quite proficient playing the violin.10 He loved to sing, even when he was alone, and apparently he had a fine clear voice. He was also passionate about architecture and became, according to one historian, “America’s first great native-born architect.”11 As a young man he began making drawings of landscapes, gardens, and buildings, and over his lifetime he accumulated hundreds of these drawings. Nothing was more exciting to the young Virginian provincial than discovering the sixteenth-century Italian Andrea Palladio, whose Four Books of Architecture had long been familiar in Europe but was virtually unknown in America. Jefferson claimed that he would often stand for hours gazing at buildings that attracted him.
In the 1760s Jefferson pored through European art books and drew up ambitious lists of what experts considered the best paintings and sculptures in the world. When the earnest dilettante went abroad, he collected copies of some of these masterpieces and eventually installed a sizable collection of canvases, prints, medallions, and sculptures in his home.12
But even before he had gone to Europe he had developed an extraordinary reputation for the range of his knowledge and for the many talents he possessed. He was proud of his intellectual abilities. He claimed that he had learned Spanish by reading Don Quixote along with a grammar book on his nineteen-day voyage to Europe in 1784; “but,” as John Quincy Adams commented on hearing Jefferson in 1804 describe this remarkable accomplishment, “Mr. Jefferson tells large stories.” Indeed, said the young Adams, “you can never be an hour in this man’s company without something of the marvelous.”13
By the early 1780s Jefferson had become, as the French visitor the Marquis de Chastellux noted, “an American who, without having quitted his own country, is a Musician, Draftsman, Surveyor, Astronomer, Natural Philosopher, Jurist, and Statesman.”14
• • •
ADAMS HAD LITTLE OF JEFFERSON’S fascination with gadgets and architecture, and he had none of Jefferson’s interest in collecting paintings and sculptures and displaying them in his home. Late in life he told a French sculptor that he “would not give sixpence for a picture of Raphael or a statue of Phidias.”15 He had no interest in playing a musical instrument and never encouraged his children or grandchildren to have a taste for music. He advised one grandson to “renounce your Flute. If you must have Musick, get a fiddle.”16
Yet Adams was far more sensuous than Jefferson, responding to works of art with more intensity. Indeed, Adams was the most sensuous of the Founders. He experienced the world with all his senses and reacted to it palpably. He felt everything directly and immediately, and he could express his feelings in the most vivid and powerful prose. Most impressive was his visual memory. He could recall objects he had seen—whether waxworks, gardens, or paintings—with incredible lucidity and accuracy. In 1779, while serving in Paris as one of the commissioners, he described to Henry Laurens in remarkably precise detail a painting by the Italian artist Francesco Casanova, The Collapse of a Wooden Bridge, which he had viewed in the gallery of the French foreign minister.17 He even could call to mind paintings he had seen decades earlier, especially if the painting revealed a passion that obsessed him, as did a picture displaying jealousy among Jesus’s disciples that he had seen in Antwerp during one of his missions abroad.18
Adams’s sensuousness gave him an acute sense of the power of art. In fact, he said in 1777, insofar as America possessed the arts—“Painting, Sculpture, Statuary, and Poetry”—they ought to be enlisted on behalf of the American cause. Since people were not apt to be aroused by reason alone, Adams believed that the arts were needed to show to the world “the horrid deeds of our Enemies.” “The public may be clearly convinced that a War is just, and yet, until their Passions are excited, will carry it languidly on.”19
Yet at the same time, sensuous as he was, Adams was often alarmed by the effect of art on people. When he experienced the beauty of Paris—its gardens, its buildings, its statues, and its paintings—he was overwhelmed. But his Puritan sensibilities told him to beware of his own powerful feelings. Despite all the bewitching charms of Paris, he told his wife, Abigail, “it must be remembered there is every Thing here too, which can seduce, betray, deceive, deprave, corrupt and debauch.” Adams was torn between the beauty of art and the corruption that he believed it represented. No wonder the Choice of Hercules, caught between a life of virtue and a life of sloth, became his favorite classical allegory.20
• • •
JEFFERSON HAD NONE OF ADAMS’S ambivalence in his approach to the arts. Although he recognized the role of the arts in promoting virtue, he seems to have had none of Adams’s fears of their corrupting power. In fact, he regarded his countrymen as in such desperate need of refinement and cultivation that they could not have too much fine art; and consequently he became eager to introduce his fellow Americans to the best and most enlightened aspects of European culture. His object, he said, was always “to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world, procure them it’s praise.”21
When Virginians in the 1780s realized that a statue of George Washington was needed for their state capitol, “there could be no question raised,” Jefferson wrote from Paris, “as to the Sculptor who should be employed, the reputation of Monsr. [Jean-Antoine] Houdon of this city being unrivalled in Europe.” Washington was unwilling, as he told Jefferson, “to oppose my judgment to the taste of Connoisseurs,” and thus would accept having his statue done in whatever manner Jefferson thought “decent and proper.” He hoped, however, that instead of “the garb of antiquity” there might be “some little deviation in favor” of a modern costume. Fortunately, that turned out to be the case: Houdon did the statue in Washington’s military dress.
But two decades later tastes had changed. For a new commemorative statue of Washington for the state capitol of North Carolina, Jefferson now suggested “old [Antonio] Canove, of Rome,” who, he claimed, “for 30 years, within my own knoledge, . . . had been considered by all Europe, as without a rival.” The costume, however, was going to be different. Since Jefferson believed that “our boots & regimentals have a very puny effect,” he concluded that the modern dress that Houdon had once favored was no longer fashionable. He was now “sure the artist and every person of taste in Europe would be for the Roman” style—in a toga. In everything—from scriptures to paintings, from gardening to poetry—Jefferson wanted the latest in European taste.22
Despite all of his knowledge of the arts, there seems something forced and affected about Jefferson’s appreciation of them. Aside from music and perhaps architecture, his response to the arts appears more intellectual, more rational, more studied than sensuous. His knowledge came not from experience but from books. And because he had more books than anyone else, he took pride in knowing what others didn’t know. Nothing pleased him more than to draw up a list of books for a young person eager to learn what was the best in the world. Even his fascination with the supposed poet Ossian from the third century AD seems studied and strained. Although critics were accusing the presumed translator, James Macpherson, of fraud, of composing the poetry himself, Jefferson was convinced that “this rude bard of the North [was] the greatest poet that has ever existed.” Maybe he reached this extraordinary judgment simply because Dr. William Small, Jefferson’s beloved teacher in college and a classmate of Macpherson, had recommended Ossian to him. But despite the mounting evidence of Macpherson’s duplicity, Jefferson continued to believe that Ossian was genuine.23
When Jefferson went to Europe, he was initially insecure about his taste for art and sought out advice about what paintings should be properly appreciated. When he returned to America, however, he had acquired enough confidence in his taste to see himself as a kind of impresario for the new nation, the connoisseur rescuing his countrymen from barbarism. Once he had acquired the best and finest of European culture, with his easy, genial manner he could graciously impress people with the extent of his knowledge and taste. Unlike Adams, however, he never bothered to describe his feelings about any of the masterpieces that he had had copied in Europe and had brought home to Virginia; it was enough to own them.24
• • •
ALTHOUGH ADAMS WAS VISUALLY SENSITIVE to works of art, they were never foremost in his thinking. As he explained to Abigail in 1780, it was “not indeed the fine Arts, which our Country requires.” Since America was “a young Country, as yet simple and not far advanced in Luxury,” it was “the mechanic Arts” that were most needed. Jefferson wanted the mechanic arts developed too, but he also believed that if America was to escape its barbarism, it had to acquire the arts and sciences without any delay whatsoever. By contrast, Adams thought it would take time—several generations at least. America first needed to defeat the British and get its governments in order before it could begin to acquire the arts and sciences. It was his duty to begin the process, “to study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy . . . Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce, and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”25
Because he saw the arts and sciences developing through several generations, Adams, unlike Jefferson, had little immediate interest in the natural sciences, mathematics, or meteorology; and he was not inclined to practice scientific agriculture on his farm in the way Jefferson tried to do.26 In fact, the only science that truly fascinated Adams was the one he dedicated his life to—the “Divine Science of Politicks.” He realized, as he told Benjamin Franklin, that this “Science of Government” was many centuries behind the other sciences; but since it was “the first in Importance,” he hoped that eventually “it may overtake the rest, and that Mankind may find their Account in it.”27
Perhaps because of their different sensibilities, the two men had different feelings about the role of religion in society. Jefferson was about as secular-minded on religious matters as eighteenth-century America allowed. Except for his many affirmations of religious freedom, he claimed that “I rarely permit myself to speak” on the subject of religion, and then “never but in a reasonable society,” meaning only among friends who shared his derisive views of organized religion.28 He had little or no emotional commitment to any religion and usually referred to the different religious faiths as “religious opinions,” as if one could pick them up and discard them at will. Although both Jefferson and Adams denied the miracles of the Bible and the divinity of Christ, Adams always retained a respect for the religiosity of people that Jefferson never had; in fact, Jefferson tended in private company to mock religious feelings.
• • •
JEFFERSON AND ADAMS HAD DIFFERENT ranges of knowledge and different sensibilities, but what more than anything else distinguished the two patriots from each other were the backgrounds and environments in which they were raised. Both men knew this, and Jefferson actually voiced it when he told Adams that their differences of opinion about important matters were probably “produced by a difference of character in those among whom we live.”29
The environments in which they were raised were profoundly different. Jefferson’s Virginia was not only the oldest British colony in North America, but the largest in territory and the richest and most populous. In 1760 it had a population of 340,000. Most important, 40 percent of that population—136,000—constituted the labor force of black slaves.
Adams’s Massachusetts was the second-oldest colony, and with a population on the eve of the Revolution of about 280,000, it was close to being the second most populous one, just behind Pennsylvania, with both far behind Virginia. Out of the Massachusetts population, fewer than 5,000 were African slaves. Nothing distinguished the societies of the two places from each other more than this fact.
Jefferson was raised and lived with slaves all around him. Slavery was woven into the fabric of Virginia life and could scarcely have been evaded. Jefferson’s earliest memory, according to family lore, was being carried at age three or so on a pillow by a mounted slave from his father’s home, Shadwell, in western Virginia to Tuckahoe, a Randolph plantation on the James River. Since the Randolphs were one of the most distinguished families in Virginia, by marrying Jane Randolph in 1742, Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, a surveyor and substantial planter, gained for his family extensive and influential connections that otherwise would not have been possible. Young Jefferson grew up in a privileged aristocratic world; and yet he tended to deny that he belonged to that world and indeed during the heady days of the Revolution he tried to change that world.
Virginia was largely rural, with very few towns. Its economy was dependent on production of a staple crop—tobacco—that had direct markets in Britain and that required a minimum of distribution and handling. This was why towns in Virginia were so few and far between. When on the eve of the Revolution some of the planters in the upper South turned to the production of wheat and other grains, which had diverse markets that required special handling and distribution centers, towns such as Norfolk and Baltimore suddenly emerged to market the grain. Still, Virginia’s society remained overwhelmingly rural and agricultural, dominated by slavery.
Although it was slavery more than anything else that separated Virginia from Massachusetts, Jefferson could at times be amazingly blind to that fact. He knew there were great differences between the people of the North and those in the South, but he attributed these differences mostly to differences of climate. In 1785 he outlined to a French friend his sense of the sectional differences. The northerners were “cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others, interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion.” By contrast, said Jefferson, the southerners were “fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, [and] without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.” Jefferson implied that there was an intimate connection between the southerners’ zeal for liberty and their capacity to trample on the liberty of others.30
By the end of their lives, the distinction between Adams’s Massachusetts and Jefferson’s Virginia had become ever more glaring. When Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge moved north in 1825 with her husband, Joseph, she was immediately struck by the vast difference between New England and her native Virginia. She marveled at the “multitude of beautiful villages” in Adams’s New England that stood in stark contrast to the depleted and unimproved rurality of her grandfather’s Virginia, and she was amazed by the fecundity that the hardworking Yankee farmers had wrung from “the hard bosom of a stubborn and ungrateful land.” For her the reason for the difference was obvious. The southern states, she told her grandfather, could not begin to match “the prosperity and the improvement” of the northern states “whilst the canker of slavery eats into their hearts, and diseases the whole body by this ulcer at the core.”31
There were other contrasts between Virginia and Massachusetts. Virginia had no public school system resembling that of Massachusetts and its literacy rate was nowhere near that of Massachusetts, which had one of the most literate societies in the world. By the middle of the eighteenth century, 70 percent of males and 45 percent of females in Massachusetts were literate. Unlike colonial Virginia, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had no laws of primogeniture (by which the eldest son inherited the estate) and no laws of entail (by which the estate was kept in the stem line of the family). New Englanders prided themselves on the relative equality of their societies, which they believed flowed from their early abandonment of these aristocratic laws.
Although Massachusetts’s economy, like Virginia’s, was mainly agricultural, the colony had many more towns, especially on the seacoast and along the rivers. The bulk of the population was composed of middling farmers, most of whom traded with one another. Yet there was considerable overseas trade, both to Britain and elsewhere in Europe and to the other colonies and the West Indies. There was no single staple product; fish and rum probably came closest to playing that role. Artisans and mechanics existed everywhere and manufactured the tools and products that in Virginia were mainly made by slaves. Slavery was legal in colonial Massachusetts, but the province had relatively few slaves, perhaps comprising less than 2 percent of the population; and most of these were household servants in Boston and the other towns of the colony. However, many merchants in Massachusetts and in the other New England colonies were deeply involved in the slave trade, bringing blacks from Africa to the southern and Caribbean colonies.
Although slavery was not officially abolished in Massachusetts until 1784, well before independence it was already a dying institution in the colony; and the courts were reluctant to enforce it. Adams, recalling a case in 1766 in which an enslaved woman sued for her freedom and won, declared, “I never knew a Jury by a Verdict to determine a Negro to be a Slave—They always found them free.”32 Still, in the middle of the eighteenth century, one out of every five families in Boston owned at least one slave.33 Although neither Adams nor his family ever owned any slaves, he later admitted that in colonial Massachusetts the owning of slaves “was not disgraceful,” and “the best men in my Vicinity—thought it not inconsistent with their Characters.”34 His refusal to emulate them, he claimed, “cost me thousands of dollars for the Labour and Subsistence of free men which I might have saved by the purchase of negroes in times when they were very Cheap.”35
• • •
DIFFERENT AS THEY WERE, the colonial societies of Virginia and Massachusetts were still both hierarchies. Indeed, prior to the Revolution it was almost impossible to conceive of a civilized society not being a vertically organized hierarchy of some sort in which people were more aware of those above and below than of those alongside them. Everyone and everything could be located in the great chain of being and be made part of what Adams called the “regular and uniform Subordination of one Tribe to another down to the apparently insignificant animalcules in pepper Water.”36
Jefferson certainly saw the society of colonial Virginia as a hierarchy. Later in his life William Wirt, who was writing a biography of Patrick Henry, asked Jefferson to describe the society he grew up in. In his response Jefferson emphasized the colonial society’s insular and immobile character, the better to demonstrate the transformation that he believed he and the other revolutionaries had brought about. Colonial Virginia had been an utterly provincial society, he told Wirt, separated from both its sister colonies and the greater European world, and seldom visited by foreigners. It had experienced little social mobility. “Certain families had risen to splendor by wealth” and had preserved that wealth from generation to generation by the legal devices of primogeniture and entail. “Families in general had remained stationary on the grounds of their forefathers,” because migration to the west had scarcely begun. Hostile Indians were still present on the other side of the mountains. In the mid-1760s parties of Indians attacked white settlements in the valley of Burke’s Garden and wiped out entire households; as recently as 1768 the Cherokees and Shawnees had fought a ferocious two-day battle with each other near Rich Mountain in Tazewell County.37 Prior to the Revolution, said Jefferson, only rough Scotch-Irish frontiersmen had moved into the valleys beyond the Blue Ridge, and few easterners had as yet chosen to settle among them.
This static hierarchical society, said Jefferson, was composed of “several strata, separated by no marked lines, but shading off imperceptibly, from top to bottom, nothing disturbing the order of their repose.” At the top were the “aristocrats,” whom Jefferson defined as “the great landholders who had seated themselves below the tide water on the main rivers.” These would be the Randolphs, Lees, Carters, Byrds, and others—the families that came closest to emulating the English landed gentry. Only instead of tenants paying rents that supported the English landed gentry, the great Virginia planters possessed African slaves, hundreds of them on each of their plantations. Many of these great planters would lead the resistance against Great Britain. They were, as northern and British travelers often noted, “haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior power.”38
Just below these great slaveholding planters, said Jefferson, were their descendants, their younger sons and daughters—“half breeds,” Jefferson called them—who inherited the pride of their ancestors, without their wealth. Next came those whom Jefferson disdainfully labeled “the pretenders”—those “who from vanity, or the impulse of growing wealth, or from that enterprize which is natural to talents, sought to detach themselves from the plebeian ranks to which they properly belonged, and imitated, at some distance, the manners and habits of the great.”
Jefferson’s calling such men “pretenders” is surprising, since the republicanism of the Revolution presumably had justified such social mobility. Below the pretenders were those he always placed most trust in—the “solid and independent yeomanry” who, he said in his Notes on the State of Virginia, were free from the “casualties and caprice of customers.” They were the stabilizing backbone of the society, “the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people.” They were more or less content with their middling status, “looking askance at those above them, yet not venturing to jostle them.” At the bottom of this hierarchy, said Jefferson, were “a feculum of beings called Overseers, the most abject, degraded, unprincipled race, always cap in hand to the Dons who employed them, and furnishing materials for the exercise of their pride, insolence, and spirit of domination.”39
Yet whom did these overseers oversee? In his description of Virginia’s colonial society, Jefferson never mentioned the tens of thousands of black slaves who constituted nearly half of Virginia’s population. He possessed hundreds of slaves himself; indeed, he became the second-largest slaveholder in Albemarle County and one of the largest slave owners in all of Virginia. In his eyes, however, it was as if the slaves were not part of Virginia’s society at all.
But in some sense neither was he. In his social hierarchy he had no place for himself. Although he was in fact one of the “aristocrats,” who, he said, “lived in a style of luxury and extravagance, insupportable by the other inhabitants,” he did not want to be classed as such. But neither did he want to be a pretender or a half-breed. Although he sometimes saw himself as a western frontiersman with some of the qualities of an independent yeoman, he knew that given his wealth and status he could never really be that. And despite his admiration of the yeoman farmers, he himself had no natural affinity for farming, and later in his life he admitted as much, saying that he was “not fit to be a farmer with the kind of labour” that existed in Virginia. Tobacco was a major product of his plantations; nevertheless, he confessed in 1801 that he had never in his entire life seen a leaf of his tobacco packed in a hogshead.40 By contrast, Adams may not have done much farming, but when he did he was much more hands-on than Jefferson—concerned, for example, with such matters as the proper mixture of constituents for the manure used for fertilizer.
In the 1790s, like other Virginia planters, Jefferson shifted from tobacco production, which was depleting the land, to wheat. Since the production of wheat required only one-fifth the labor of tobacco, Jefferson was able to diversify and improve his plantation holdings. But his incompetence as a farmer hurt his transition to wheat production. His county had no mill large enough to handle all the wheat; by the time he built a mill complex on his Monticello plantation, it had taken years of hired labor and an enormous sum of money, and it never worked efficiently. Although corn was a staple of the diet of his slaves and livestock, he put all his land into wheat production and made no provision for growing corn; consequently, he ended up having to buy corn from his neighbors at high prices. Even his newly designed moldboard plow, which was supposed to save labor, cut the furrows in such a way as to aggravate the washing away of topsoil from the fields. His inadequacies as a farmer were graphically revealed when his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph took over management of the Monticello plantation in 1815 and tripled the yield of wheat.41
• • •
JEFFERSON MAY HAVE BEEN the patriarch of his self-contained extended family, both free and enslaved, but managing a successful and profitable plantation was never his greatest ambition. What he really wanted to be was the enlightened intellectual leader of his Virginia society, standing above it, superior to it, and reforming it.
Jefferson was born in 1743 at Shadwell on the wild edge of western settlement in Virginia. Although he became as cultivated as any eighteenth-century American, he always remained proud of his frontier origins. When Jefferson was only fourteen years old, his father died. Peter Jefferson’s estate was not grand, but it was substantial—at least seventy-five hundred acres and over sixty slaves—of which his eldest son got his fair share. Jefferson was brought up by his mother’s family, the socially prestigious Randolphs. Somehow or other, that Randolph experience made him question the benefits of inherited privilege. Jefferson scarcely mentions his mother in all his writings; by contrast, he tended to idolize his father as a hardy product of the wilderness.42
Both Jefferson and Adams wrote autobiographies, with Adams’s being about four times longer than Jefferson’s. Jefferson began his in 1821, at the age of seventy-seven. Although it is often perfunctory and not very revealing, beneath its placid surface one can detect Jefferson’s restrained dislike of the dominant aristocracy of Virginia. He described his efforts in 1776 to bring down that “Patrician order, distinguished by the splendor and luxury of their establishments.” No doubt he was thinking especially of the Randolphs. Perhaps his maternal grandmother had often corrected his teenage manners and blamed his uneducated father for the boy’s rough edges. At any rate Jefferson came to value his frontier father—a man of “strong mind, sound judgment, and eager after information,” a man who had “improved himself”—in a way that he did not value his refined Randolph mother, whose status was inherited. (Her death in 1776 produced the briefest of comments and that one was totally without sentiment.)43 Jefferson came to believe that the privileges of this “aristocracy of wealth” needed to be destroyed in order “to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent,” of which he considered himself a prime example.44
To us the wealthy slaveholding Jefferson does not seem all that different from the “Patrician order” he challenged, but he obviously saw a difference. In the opening pages of his autobiography, Jefferson tells us that the lineage of his Welsh father was lost in obscurity and he was able to find in the British records only a couple of references to his father’s family. His mother, on the other hand, was a Randolph, one of the first families of Virginia. The Randolphs, he said with dry derision, “trace their pedigree far back in England & Scotland, to which let every one ascribe the faith & merit he chooses.”45
• • •
ADAMS’S BACKGROUND WAS VERY DIFFERENT. He was born in 1735 in Braintree, Massachusetts, the eldest son of a substantial but nevertheless ungenteel farmer and shoemaker; in other words, despite his being a militia officer, a deacon in the local church, and a recently elected selectman of the town, his father remained one of what were called the “middling sort.” Adams’s mother, however, was a Boylston, a fairly distinguished family, which, like the Randolphs and Jefferson, gave Adams some social cachet. When he enrolled in Harvard in 1751, entering students were still ranked in accord with their “dignity of family.” Because his mother was a Boylston and his father was a deacon in the Congregational Church, Adams was listed socially higher than he otherwise might have been—fourteenth out of twenty-five.
Like Jefferson, Adams admired his father more than his mother, not, as in Jefferson’s case, for his rough manliness, but for his moral integrity and his selfless public virtue. “He was,” said Adams, “the honestest Man I ever knew,” and “in proportion to his Education and Sphere of Life, I have never seen his Superiour.” Possessing a great “Admiration of Learning,” his father was determined “to give his first son a liberal Education.”46
As a boy Adams apparently had some doubts about attending college. In his autobiography, which he began writing in 1802 at age sixty-seven, he says that as a schoolboy he initially told his father to “lay aside the thoughts of sending me to Colledge.” His father replied, “What would you do Child? Be a Farmer. A Farmer?” His father then proceeded to show exactly what it meant to be a farmer. He worked his son hard all one day at farming. That evening he asked young Adams what he thought of farming now. “Though the Labour had been very hard and very muddy I answered I like it very well Sir.” His father responded, “Ay but I don’t like it so well: so you shall go to School” and, as his eldest son, prepare for college. In 1751, the year he entered college, Adams began his personal library with a purchase of an edition of Cicero’s orations.47
When Adams enrolled in Harvard, he also began keeping a diary. Keeping as full and honest a diary as he did was part of the inheritance passed on from his Puritan ancestors; but it was also an inevitable response to his acute self-awareness. None of his colleagues and in fact no American in the eighteenth century kept a diary like that of Adams. In it he poured out all his feelings—all his anxieties and ambitions, all his jealousies and resentments.
It is impossible to imagine Jefferson writing such a journal. Jefferson was always reserved and self-possessed and, unlike Adams, he scarcely ever revealed much of his inner self. Jefferson seemed to open up to no one, while Adams at times seemed to open up to everyone. He certainly opened up to his diary. “Honesty, Sincerity, and openness, I esteem essential marks of a good mind,” he wrote, and once he got going his candid entries bore out that judgment.48
Adams used his diary to begin a lifelong struggle with what he often considered his unworthy pride and passions. “He is not a wise man and is unfit to fill any important Station in Society, that has left one Passion in his Soul unsubdued.”49 Like his seventeenth-century Puritan ancestors, he could not have success without guilt.
Although Adams was anything but an orthodox Puritan in his religious views, he often tormented himself in the early years of his diary as if he were one. And the kind of acute self-awareness that Adams had could lead to self-loathing. “Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal Vice and cardinal Folly,” and he continually rebuked himself for it and sought to suppress it.50 He confided in his diary all his feelings of self-conscious awkwardness. “I have not conversed enough with the World, to behave rightly,” he confessed in January 1759, at age twenty-three. “I talk to [Robert Treat] Paine about Greek, that makes him laugh. I talk to Sam Quincy about Resolutions, and being a great Man, and study and improving Time, which makes him laugh. I talk to Ned [Quincy], about the Folly of affecting to a Heretick, which makes him mad. . . . Besides this I have insensibly fallen into a Habit of affecting Wit and Humour, of Shrugging my Shoulders, and moving [and] distorting the Muscles of my face. My Motions are stiff and uneasy, ungraceful, and my attention is unsteady and irregular.” All these, he said, were “faults, Defects, Fopperies and follies, and Disadvantages. Can I mend these faults and supply these Defects?” 51
Adams admonished himself for even the smallest expressions of vanity and self-conceit. “Oh,” he said, “that I could wear out of my mind every mean and base affectation, conquer my natural Pride and Self Conceit, . . . acquire that meekness and humility, which are the sure marks and Characters of a great and generous Soul.” Every social occasion called forth this self-conscious adolescent-like wincing and worrying, and he was in his midtwenties. Too often—in fact, “to a very heinous Degree”—he had tried to show off his learning, too often he had sought to make “a shining Figure in gay Company,” and too often he had displayed “a childish Affectation of Wit and Gaiety.” And all he ever did, he rued, was make a fool of himself. He reproached himself over and over and resolved to act more sensibly in the future—“Let it therefore be my constant endeavor to reform these great faults.” Yet the self-criticism continued.52
• • •
JEFFERSON KEPT NO DIARY, and if he had, he would never have expressed any self-loathing in it. Instead of a diary, Jefferson kept records—records, it seems, of everything, with what he called “scrupulous fidelity.”53 He religiously recorded the weather, taking the temperature twice a day, once in the morning and again at four in the afternoon. He entered into memorandum books every financial transaction, every source of income and every expenditure, no matter how small or how large—seven pennies for chickens or thousands of dollars for a land sale. Unfortunately, he never added up his earnings and his expenses. Since his painstaking bookkeeping was not double entry, he never fully appreciated his overall financial situation. His daily and detailed record keeping gave him a false sense of control over his world that in the end played him false.54
He kept a variety of specialized books, including several commonplace books—a legal book, an equity book, and a literary book, in which he copied passages from his reading that he found important or interesting.55 He also kept a case book and a fee book, for tracking work and income from his legal career as long as it lasted; a farm book, in which he entered, among other things, the births and sales of slaves as well as farm animals; and a garden book. In his garden book, he made such notations as how many peas he was planting would fill a pint measure, how much fodder a horse would eat in a night, and how many cucumbers fifty hills would yield in a season.
His habit of calculating everything even included the production of slaves. In a notorious letter in 1819 he told his steward to restrain the overseers from overworking the female slaves who were breeding children. “A child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” Although the labor of female slaves was important, it was, he said, “their increase which is the first consideration with us.”56
• • •
WHEN ADAMS WENT OFF TO HARVARD, his father expected him to become a minister, which was what Deacon Adams believed an education at Harvard was all about. But young Adams knew that the liberal education he would receive at Harvard would do more than prepare him for a career. It would give the right to call himself a gentleman—a very important and distinctive status in the eighteenth century.
Both the societies of colonial Virginia and of colonial Massachusetts were vertically organized in hierarchies. There was, however, a horizontal division running through those hierarchical societies that was often more meaningful to people in the eighteenth century than the separation between free and slave that is so horrible to us today: that was the distinction between gentlemen and commoners.
In Virginia the distinction was there practically from birth. “Before a boy knows his right hand from his left, can discern black from white, or good from evil, who knows who made him, or how he exists, he is,” declared one sardonic observer, “a Gentleman.” And as a gentleman, “it would derogate greatly from his character, to learn a trade; or to put his hand to any servile employment.”57 Work, after all, was mean and despicable, as Aristotle and all of antiquity had said, and fit only for the lowly, which to the Virginian gentry meant African slaves.
In Virginia the great leisured gentry were few in numbers, constituting perhaps only 2 or 3 percent of the population. If there should be any doubt who the Virginia squires were, they had ways of displaying their presence among the common people. Only after their families and the ordinary people had been seated in the church on Sunday did the Virginia gentry enter as a body and tramp booted down the aisle to take their seats in their pews at the front; they exited the church in the same way, with women and ordinary folk waiting in their seats until the gentlemen had left.58
• • •
TO A NEW ENGLANDER LIKE ADAMS the South always seemed aristocratic, even though he had never been there. When he initially met the southern leaders in the Continental Congress, his prejudices were confirmed. The large slaveholding planters possessed an arrogant and patrician notion of themselves. Their separation from the common people, who were “very ignorant and very poor,” was much greater than in New England.59 Indeed, the southern aristocrats, claimed Adams, came close to thinking that the common people had distinct natures from themselves.
Adams actually feared that the South was so different from New England that unifying the sections in the cause of resisting British tyranny was going to be very difficult. But when Virginia and the other southern colonies began to draw up their new state constitutions in 1776, Adams expressed relief in seeing “the Pride of the Haughty” brought down “a little” by the revolutionary movement.60
• • •
COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND was obviously much more egalitarian than Virginia. The distinction between gentry and commoners was certainly less clear there, but it did exist, with perhaps 12 percent of the population designated as gentlemen.61 Arthur Browne, an Anglican clergyman who lived in Newport, Boston, and Portsmouth, was sure that inequality had to exist everywhere, even in New England, which liked to pride itself on its lack of a nobility. The bigger New England towns, said Browne, were actually breeding grounds for gentlemen. Their inhabitants, by possessing “more information, better polish and greater intercourse with strangers, insensibly acquired an ascendency over the farmer of the country; the richer merchants of these towns, together with the clergy, lawyers, physicians and officers of the English navy who had occasionally settled there, were considered as gentry.”62
Still, as Browne admitted, there was enough leveling and equality-mindedness in New England that the country folk sometimes mocked the gentry’s pretensions to superiority. When General George Washington came to Massachusetts in the summer of 1775 to take command of the Continental Army, as a good Virginian militia officer he expected to find the soldiers paying due respect to their superiors. Instead, he found the opposite. The New Englanders—“an exceedingly dirty & nasty people,” he called them—lacked all sense of discipline, order, and subordination. The problem, Washington realized, was that these New Englanders had “from their Infancy imbibed Ideas of the most contrary Kind.”63 The “lower class of these people” was ignorant, and its members were full of themselves, which was not surprising since they even elected their militia officers. But the officers themselves were little better. They were, complained Washington, “nearly of the same Kidney with the Privates,” often artisans and tradesmen and certainly not gentlemen. It was difficult if not impossible, he said, to get “Officers of this stamp to exert themselves in carrying orders into execution.” Instead, they sought “to curry favour with the men (by whom they were chosen, & on whose Smiles possibly they may think they may again rely).” Most of the New England officers, he concluded, were “the most indifferent kind of People I ever saw.”64
Although the division between gentleman and commoner may have been more difficult to sustain in New England, Adams always felt that he knew the difference. The distinction between “Yeoman and Gentleman,” he said in 1761, was the “most ancient and universal of all Divisions of the People.”65 It persisted even in law. The colony’s courts, for example, scrupulously sought to determine whether or not plaintiffs and defendants were properly identified as gentlemen. Adams especially knew when someone was not a gentleman. A person who springs “from ordinary Parents,” who “can scarcely write his Name,” whose “Business is Boating,” who “never had any Commissions”—to call such a person a gentleman, he said in 1761, was “an arrant Prostitution of the Title.”66
In fact, this distinction between gentlemen and ordinary folk was far more meaningful for Adams than it ever was for Jefferson, who took his gentry status for granted. Adams was always more self-conscious about this social cleavage, and he thought and talked about it all the time; indeed, this division between patricians and plebeians undergirded the political theory that he worked out over the course of his life.
Adams knew that ordinary individuals could become gentlemen, mainly by gaining enough wealth so they didn’t have to work for a living. Adams noted, for example, that Philip Livingston of New York had once been “in Trade,” but he became “rich, and now lives upon his Income.”67 But for Adams himself, who lacked that degree of wealth, it was his Harvard degree that mattered. In his mind gentlemen were “all those who have received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences.”68
• • •
ALTHOUGH ADAMS ALWAYS divided society into two unequal parts—gentry-aristocrats and commoners—in the way most Virginians did, what really characterized his society of Massachusetts was the growing number of those who were called the “middling sort.” These middling sorts, like Adams’s farmer-shoemaker father, were middling because they could not easily be classified either as gentlemen or as out-and-out commoners. Yet because Adams’s ideas of political science required that society be divided into two parts, he always classified the middling people as commoners.
In Adams’s eyes and in the eyes of many others, these middling types could not be gentlemen, because they had occupations and worked for a living with their hands. Even artisans or mechanics who employed dozens of journeymen were regarded as something less than gentlemen. At the same time, however, these middling artisans, such as the successful Boston silversmith Paul Revere, were often too well off or too distinguished and knowledgeable to be placed among “the lower sort” or “the meaner sort.” Indeed, many of these middling sorts were becoming quite well-to-do. Of the three thousand adult males in Boston in 1790, eighteen hundred, or 60 percent, made up this middling sort. Yet these artisans were not poor; they held 36 percent of the taxable wealth of the city and constituted the majority of its property holders. Although Revere the silversmith was wealthy and often moved in the highest circles of Massachusetts society, he remained an artisan; and despite his desperate desire to improve his status, he was never able to get the Massachusetts gentry to recognize him as one of them.69
From the beginning of the eighteenth century, thinkers like Daniel Defoe had tried to explain and justify these emerging middling people, including the “working trades, who labour hard but feel no want.”70 These well-to-do working people with property, like Benjamin Franklin as a young printer, increasingly had prided themselves on their separation from the idleness and dissipation shared by both the gentry above them and the propertyless poor beneath them. The middling sort combined work with the owning of a decent amount of property. This distinguished them, on the one hand, from the gentry who owned a good deal of property but did not engage in productive labor, at least not with their hands, and, on the other hand, from the wage earners who labored but owned very little if any property. These artisans, petty merchants, clerks, traders, and commercial farmers, who tended to dominate the towns of Massachusetts, were the beginnings of what would become the middle class of the nineteenth century.71
Although most yeoman farmers in Virginia were not big slaveholders or even slaveholders at all, most of them did not have the kind of middling consciousness that marked the commercial farmers and artisans of Massachusetts. They saw themselves as potential slaveholding planters, not as some middling stratum caught between the gentry and the slaves. Since slaves performed many of the tasks that artisans and craftsmen in Massachusetts did, a middling population and middling consciousness were slow to develop in the South. Although Jefferson often hired white supervisors on his plantation, most of the skilled workers—blacksmiths, coopers, carpenters, painters, nail- and textile-makers, charcoal burners, and other craftsmen—were black slaves. Compared with New England, the colonial South had virtually little or no middle class. In the end this made all the difference.
• • •
PRECISELY BECAUSE OF his middling origins, Adams was always keenly aware of the aristocrats of Massachusetts. Just as Virginia had its first families of Carters, Lees, Byrds, and Randolphs, so too did colonial Massachusetts, as Adams noted, have its grand families of Winslows, Hutchinsons, Saltonstals, Leonards, and others.72 But Adams’s reaction to these families and their pretensions was different from Jefferson’s response to the great families of Virginia. Although both men saw themselves as outsiders in their respective societies, their positions were very different. Jefferson was thoroughly one of the Virginia aristocrats and confidently criticized his peers from a position of intellectual and cultural superiority. Adams, by contrast, never felt himself to be fully part of the Massachusetts aristocracy and thus came to criticize it ambivalently from a position of social inferiority.
Moving originally on the edges of the genteel Boston world, he was awed by the wealth, sophistication, and elegance that he witnessed. When he dined in 1766 at the home of the wealthy merchant and future Loyalist Nicholas Boylston, his distant relative, he was overwhelmed. Such a dinner! Such a house! Such furniture, “which alone cost a thousand Pounds sterling.” Boylston’s home, Adams told his diary, was a seat “for a noble Man, a Prince. The Turkey Carpets, the painted Hangings, the Marble Tables, the rich Beds with crimson Damask Curtains and Counterpins, the beautiful Chimney Clock, the spacious Garden, are the most magnificent of any Thing I have ever seen.”73
For Adams the world was always larger and more impressive than he expected, and he was constantly taken aback by displays of wealth and refinement. After a day in court in 1758, where he “felt Shy, under Awe and concern,” he attended a “Consort” where he “saw the most Spacious and elegant Room, the gayest Company of Gentlemen and the finest Row of Ladies, that I ever saw.” In 1774 at the house of wealthy New Yorker Jeremiah Platt, he was shown “into as elegant a Chamber as I ever saw—the furniture as rich and splendid as any of Mr. Boylstones.” In the home of John Morin Scott, another rich New Yorker, “a more elegant Breakfast, I never saw—rich plate—a very large Silver Coffee Pot, a very large Silver Tea Pott—Napkins of the very finest Materials, and toast and bread and butter to near Perfection.”74
But Adams despised this world of affluence and elegance even as he envied it. Although he told his diary in 1772 that he was “wearied to death, with gazing wherever I go, at a Profusion of unmeaning Wealth and Magnificence,” he couldn’t help being fascinated. The very rich, he said, feel their fortunes. “They feel the Strength and Importance, which their Riches give them in the World . . . their imaginations are inflated by them.”75 Because he had personally felt “the Pride and Vanity” of the “great ones” of Massachusetts, he could not help but denounce them for their “certain Airs of Wisdom and Superiority” and their “Scorn and Contempt and turning up of the Nose.”76
• • •
BY CONTRAST, Jefferson never felt snubbed in his life, or if he had, he would never have admitted it. And except perhaps when he went to France, he was never overawed by wealth and elegance in the way Adams was. Jefferson was certainly impressed by French culture, especially in the fine arts, but he never expressed such wide-eyed wonder at the world as Adams did. He was too self-confident and felt too cosmopolitan for that.
Even as a young man, Jefferson was the connoisseur informing his college friends what was to be considered fine in the world and what was to be dismissed as “indifferent,” one of his favorite words of derision. Jefferson told his friends in 1766 that he planned to visit England, but instead at age twenty-three he took a grand tour up the Atlantic seaboard as far north as New York. In Philadelphia he had an introduction from his friend John Page to visit Dr. John Morgan and get inoculated for smallpox. Morgan had an excellent collection of copies of artworks that much impressed young Jefferson.77
When he toured Maryland, he was quick to condemn the parochialism and backwardness of his fellow colonials. On his visit to Annapolis, which he sarcastically called “this Metropolis,” he described to Page the crude behavior of the colony’s assembly. The old courthouse in which the colonial assembly met, “judging from it’s form and appearance, was built in the year one.” Its members made “as great a noise and hubbub as you will usually observe at a publick meeting of the planters in Virginia. . . . The mob (for such was their appearance) . . . were divided into little clubs amusing themselves in the common chit chat way.” The speaker was “a little old man dressed but indifferently” who had “very little the air of a speaker.” The clerk of the assembly read “a bill then before the houses with a schoolboy tone and an abrupt pause at every half dozen words.” The assemblymen addressed the speaker without rising, spoke “three, four, and five at a time without being checked,” shouted out their votes chaotically, and, in short, seemed unaware of the proper or usual forms of conducting a legislature. Doing things properly and in the right manner was important to Jefferson.78
• • •
MORE THAN OTHER LEADERS of his generation, Jefferson became fascinated with politeness, the ways in which men and women treated one another. In an important sense politeness, broadly conceived, was central to the Enlightenment, at least in the English-speaking world. The Enlightenment represented not just the spread of science, liberty, or self-government—important as those were—but also the spread of civility or what came to be called civilization.
Everywhere in the Western world people were making tiny, piecemeal assaults on the crudity and barbarism of the past. Everywhere in small, seemingly insignificant, ways, life was being made sociable, more refined, more comfortable, more enjoyable. Sometimes the contributions to civilization of improvements were quite palpable and material—with the addition of “conveniences,” “decencies,” or “comforts,” as they were called. Did people eat with knives and forks instead of with their hands? Did they sleep on feather mattresses instead of straw? Did they drink out of china cups instead of wooden vessels? These were signs of prosperity, of happiness, of civilization. Jefferson believed that to know the real state of a society’s enlightenment one “must ferret the people out of their hovels, . . . look into their kettle, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretence of resting yourself, but in fact to find out if they are soft.”79
But most important to Jefferson was the spread of civility, the social and moral behavior of people. People were more benevolent, conversations were more polite, manners were more gracious, than they had been in the past. Everywhere there were more courtesies, amenities, civilities—all designed to add to the sum of human happiness. Not talking loudly in company, not interrupting others’ conversation, not cleaning one’s teeth at the table, were small matters perhaps, but in the aggregate they seemed to be what made human sociability and civility possible. “Human Felicity,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, “is produc’d not so much by great Pieces of good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day.”80 People realized that all those seemingly trivial improvements in social behavior were contributions to civilization, and hence to enlightenment.
In 1808, after nearly a lifetime of experience, Jefferson knew how to get along with people, even people who were irascible and unfriendly. He advised his grandson that being good-humored was one of the most important sources of sociability. When combined with politeness, it became invaluable. “In truth,” he said, “politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.” Politeness meant “sacrificing to those we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them.” It meant “giving a pleasure and flattering turn to our expressions which will conciliate others, and make them pleased with us as well as themselves.” It also meant “never entering into dispute or argument with another.” He told his grandson, “Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics.”81
Such politeness—such an acute sensitivity to the feelings of others and a keen desire not to offend—was the secret of much of Jefferson’s success in life. But since his polite words and his artificial good-humored behavior to people could never be an accurate expression of his real feelings, he was always open to accusations of duplicity and deceit. His politeness was a double-edged sword: it cut both ways.
• • •
JEFFERSON’S ADVICE ON how to win friends and influence people did not have much appeal for a pugnacious John Adams. He had become a gentleman, to be sure, and he tried to behave properly, and when he got to know someone well and felt secure with him, he could be extremely amiable; but, as he often lamented, he knew he had some rough edges and he knew he lacked the gift of silence. He had none of Jefferson’s sophistication, self-confidence, and sense of restraint. He was, as his physician friend Dr. Benjamin Rush described him, “fearless of men and of the consequences of a bold assertion of opinion in all his speeches.” He had a sharp, sarcastic tongue, and he used it often, sometimes in the presence of the recipient of his derision. In the Congress in 1777, he even publicly took on “the veneration which is paid to General Washington.” Adams was not taken with politeness and hiding his feelings. “He was,” as Rush put it, “a stranger to dissimulation”—the very characteristic Jefferson was often accused of having.82
These two men were so different from each other. How could they ever have become friends?