BENJAMIN RUSH HAD BEEN A GOOD FRIEND of both Adams and Jefferson ever since the meeting of the Continental Congress in 1775. When Adams returned from Europe in 1789, he and Rush had become especially close, with Adams feeling free to express the most outrageous opinions—opinions that sometimes left Rush flabbergasted. Although Rush’s support for Jefferson and the Republicans in the 1790s had cooled the relationship, it didn’t prevent President Adams from helping Rush out financially by appointing him treasurer of the Mint in 1797. Rush was grateful but told Adams that he was not changing his political principles. According to Rush, Adams took him “by the hand and with great kindness said, ‘You have not more pleasure in receiving the office I have given you, than I had in conferring it upon an old Whig.’”1
In 1805 Adams and Rush were thus emotionally prepared to renew their friendship. Adams initiated the correspondence by telling Rush “that you and I ought not to die without saying Goodbye or bidding each other Adieu.”2 Rush responded warmly and for the next eight years the letters flowed back and forth, with Adams once again engaging in his usual “facetiousness” on some subjects, which unfortunately was “seldom understood,” except by those, like Rush, who knew him well.3
• • •
AS ADAMS AND RUSH EXCHANGED LETTERS, they were bound to mention Jefferson. When Jefferson’s second term was nearing its end in 1808, Adams wondered how the president would deal with his guilt after he retired. “He must know,” he said to Rush, “that he leaves the Government infinitely worse than he found it and that from his own error or Ignorance.” But since Jefferson had “a good Taste for Letters and an ardent curiosity for Science,” Adams assumed that the president would be able to amuse and console himself after leaving office. He told Rush that he had no resentment toward Jefferson, “though he has honoured and salaried almost every villain he could find who had been an enemy to me.”4
On the day in March 1809 that Jefferson turned over the presidency to his friend James Madison, Adams asked Rush, who had often spoken of his many dreams, “to take a Nap, and dream for my Instruction and edification a Character of Jefferson and his Administration.”5 Rush didn’t respond to this request, but seven months later, in October, he told Adams of a dream he did have, involving “one of the most extraordinary events” of the year 1809—“the renewal of the friendship” of Adams and Jefferson. In the dream Rush briefly related the careers of the two ex-presidents, who were now retired to their homes just waiting to be reconciled. According to the dream, Adams had written a short note to Jefferson congratulating him “upon his escape to the shades of retirement and domestic happiness” and expressing “good wishes for his welfare.” Only a man like Adams, someone possessing “a Magnanimity known only to great minds,” could initiate the renewal of the friendship.
Rush went on to describe the letters between these two great patriots that followed from the renewal of their friendship, letters full of “many precious aphorisms, the result of observation, experience, and profound reflection.” After these two “rival friends” had outlived their parties and were “sunk into the grave nearly at the same time,” the nation would benefit greatly from such a correspondence.6
“A Dream again!” exclaimed Adams in his quick response. “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 objection to your Dream, but that it is not History. It may be Prophecy.”7
As indeed it was, but not immediately. In the meantime, Rush knew he had to work on Jefferson and prepare him for a renewal of the friendship. Although he corresponded regularly with Jefferson, two or three letters a year, Rush did not have an intimate relationship with him, certainly nothing like the one he had with Adams.
On January 2, 1811, Rush wrote to Jefferson and in the middle of his letter casually mentioned that “now and then” he exchanged letters with Adams, who, he said, glowed with his recollections of the patriot years of 1774–1776. Knowing how Jefferson felt about banks, Rush cited some hostile remarks that Adams had made about banks and the aristocracy they bred. After softening Jefferson up in this way, he mentioned Jefferson’s “early attachment” to Adams and stressed the degree to which their concerted labors had contributed to independence. Finally Rush told Jefferson how much he “ardently wished a friendly and epistolary intercourse might be revived” between him and Adams before they died. Such an exchange of letters, he said, not only would honor their talents and their patriotism, but would also be useful to republicanism in the United States and all over the world. “Posterity will revere the friendship of two ex-Presidents that were once opposed to each other.”8
Jefferson soon answered Rush in a long letter, explaining that he was not responsible for the discontinuance of the correspondence. He recalled that during the early years of the Revolution he and Adams had possessed “a high degree of mutual respect & esteem” for each other. “Certainly no man,” he said of Adams, “was ever truer than he was, in that day, to those principles of rational republicanism” that underlay America’s new governments. “Altho’ he swerved afterwards towards the principles of the English constitution, our friendship did not abate on that account.” Unlike Hamilton, Jefferson said, “Adams was honest as a politician as well as a man.” But during the crisis of 1798, Adams, overwhelmed by lurid accounts of the ferocities of the French Revolution, had gleefully expressed his “new principles of government” to Jefferson, mingling his kindness with “a little superciliousness.” Even Mrs. Adams, “with all her good sense & prudence,” had been “sensibly flushed.”
He described his immediate anger over Adams’s “midnight appointments,” but he told Rush how “a little time and reflection” had restored to him “that just estimate” of Adams’s “virtues & passions” made familiar by their long friendship. Knowing that Adams “was not rich,” he had first considered appointing him to a lucrative office in Massachusetts. But when his fellow Republicans objected, he “dropped the idea.” Still, he yearned for an opportunity to renew the friendship, but he believed that his awkward exchange with Mrs. Adams in 1804 made any reconciliation very difficult. To convince Rush of his good intentions, he sent the 1804 correspondence with Abigail to Rush for his perusal.
Jefferson said that he believed Adams to be “an honest man” and “a powerful advocate” for independence. Unfortunately, however, Adams had become alienated from him by listening to lies “contrived for electioneering purposes”—lies that accused Jefferson of having been involved in the intrigues against and slander of his former friend. He believed that Adams’s conduct had been likewise honorable toward him, but that it was “part of his character to suspect foul play in those of whom he is jealous,” and it was not easy for him “to relinquish his suspicions.” Jefferson told Rush that he supplied all these details so that he might have a full picture of the relationship in order to be able to judge the possibility of a revival of the friendship.9
Rush quickly replied, assuring Jefferson that he had been more than fair with Mrs. Adams. Indeed, he was struck by “the kindness, benevolence, and even friendship” expressed in his letters to Mrs. Adams—“genuine effusions of your heart.” Many, he said, were “the evils of a political life,” but none was so great “as the dissolution of friendships.” He repeated his hope that he and Adams might be brought back together and mentioned again how much Adams hated banks and that he had “expressed favorable sentiments towards you.”10
Something was needed to break the impasse—something that would convince Jefferson that the bad ending of his correspondence with Abigail in 1804 was not irreparable. In the summer of 1811, two young Virginian brothers, John and Edward Coles, who were neighbors and friends of Jefferson, traveled north and paid a two-day visit to Adams in Quincy. They reported their discussion to Jefferson, who in turn related to Rush the nature of their conversation with Adams. During the Coleses’ visit, Adams apparently spoke very freely, “without any reserve,” about his presidential administration. He said that “his masters, as he called his heads of departments,” had acted “above his control, & often against his opinions.”11
According to a much fuller account given by Edward Coles in 1857 to Jefferson’s biographer Henry S. Randall, Adams had voiced his grievances over the way he had been treated by Jefferson in the election of 1800. The Coleses told Adams that they could not reconcile his remarks with the complimentary things they had often heard Jefferson say about Adams, even to his fellow Republicans. After the election results were known, Jefferson had hesitated about paying a call on Adams, unsure of the proper time, “fearing that if he called too soon, it might have the appearance of exulting over him,” but at the same time afraid that if he delayed too long, Adams’s “sensitive feelings might construe it into a slight, or the turning a cold shoulder to him.” When Jefferson finally made his call, he realized that it was gone too soon, for Adams was “deeply agitated.” Only with difficulty did Jefferson compose him by stressing that their competition was political, not personal. Adams apparently agreed with the brothers’ account of the meeting, but was “astonished” to learn that Jefferson had given so much thought to the timing of his visit. At this he burst out, “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him.”12
This last spontaneous outburst, so characteristic of Adams, Edward Coles had relayed to Jefferson. Deeply touched, Jefferson in turn related this cherished remark to Rush, concluding, “this is enough for me.” All he needed, he said, was this knowledge of Adams’s feelings “to revive towards him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives.” He told Rush he would change only a single part of Franklin’s famous characterization of Adams, by replacing “absolutely out of his senses” with “sometimes incorrect & precipitate in his judgments.” Since Adams possessed “so many other estimable qualities, why should we be dissocialized by mere differences of opinion in politics, in religion in philosophy, or any thing else”—an extraordinary statement that revealed Jefferson’s deep affection for Adams the man. He went on to say that Adams’s “opinions are as honestly formed as my own,” and concluded in good Lockean sensationalist manner that their different views on the same subject were “the result of a difference in our organization & experience.” Since he had never withdrawn from the society of anyone because of these sorts of differences of opinion, “altho’ many have done it from me,” why would he do so with someone “with whom I had gone thro’ with hand & heart, so many trying scenes”?
He told Rush that all he needed was an appropriate occasion in order to express to Adams his “unchanged affections for him.” He realized that because of his previous correspondence with Mrs. Adams that she must be separated from any resumption of “this fusion of mutual affections.” So much had he been taken aback by her coldness that he thought that it would “only be necessary that I never name her.” He hoped that Rush’s suggestion to Adams of his “continued cordiality towards him” might prompt “the natural warmth of his heart” into writing.13
Rush wrote immediately to Adams, incorporating passages from Jefferson’s letter that expressed Jefferson’s “unchanged affection” for his former colleague. “And now, my dear friend,” said Rush, “permit me again to suggest to you to receive the olive which has been offered to you by the hand of a man who still loves you.”
Rush then launched into a peroration that he hoped would clinch his appeal: “Fellow laborers in erecting the great fabric of American independence!—fellow sufferers in calumnies and falsehoods of party rage!—fellow heirs of the gratitude and affection of posterity!—and fellow passengers in a stage that must shortly convey you both into the presence of a Judge with whom the forgiveness and love of enemies is the condition of acceptance!—embrace—embrace each other!”
Rush told Adams to forget all that had caused the separation. Explanations may be required between lovers, he said, “but are never so between divided friends.” If he were with Adams, he would put a pen in his hand and guide it to write: “Friend and fellow laborer in the cause of the liberty and independence of our common country, I salute you with the most cordial good wishes for your health and happiness.”14
The next day, December 17, 1811, Rush wrote to Jefferson, telling him what he had said to Adams, including his peroration. He hoped this second effort to revive the friendship would be successful. “Patriotism, liberty, science, and religion would all gain a triumph by it.”15
Adams replied to Rush on Christmas with self-protective joshing. How should he answer Rush’s letter? he asked. “Shall I assume a sober Face and write a grave Essay on Religion philosophy, Laws or Government? Shall I laugh like Bacchus among his Grapes, wine vats and Bottles? or Shall I assume the Man of the World, the Fine Gentleman, the Courtier and Bow and scrape, with a smooth smiling Face, Soft Words, many Compliments and Apologies? think myself highly honoured, bound in gratitude? &c. &c. &c.”
Realizing that Rush had been teasing him and Jefferson to write to each other, Adams said the image of an olive branch was misplaced, since he and Jefferson had never been at war. He claimed that he and Jefferson had no difference of opinion over “the Constitution, or Forms of Government in General.” Then Adams outlined the differences he did have over several measures of Jefferson’s administration. But he had raised no public clamor over these measures. “The Nation approved them, and what is my Judgment against that of the Nation.” They had differed over the French Revolution. Jefferson “thought it wise and good and that it would end in the Establishment of a free Republick.” He, on the other hand, had seen through the falseness of the Revolution, even before it broke out, and had predicted that it would “end only in a Restoration of the Bourbons or a military Despotism, after deluging France and Europe in blood.” Since Rush had likewise supported the French Revolution and he and Adams were still friends, Adams saw no reason that issue should make enemies of him and Jefferson.
He then went on to describe the differences he had with Jefferson over republicanism as trivial and meaningless: they were differences of speeches over messages, and levees over dinners. Eager to belittle what after all had been very serious disagreements, Adams joked that Jefferson was “for Liberty and Strait Hair,” while he “thought curled Hair was as Republican as Strait.” Rush had been so solemn and sincere in his exhortations that Adams couldn’t restrain his “inclination to be ludicrous” with him. “Why do you make so much ado about nothing.” What use could an exchange of letters between him and Jefferson have? Neither could have anything to say to each other except to wish each other “an easy Journey to Heaven when he goes.” But Adams ended his letter by hinting that time and chance, “or possibly design,” might soon produce a letter between him and Jefferson.16
He meant it. A week later, on New Year’s Day 1812, he sent Jefferson a humorous and affable letter. Knowing that Jefferson was a friend of American manufactures, he had taken the liberty of sending him “a Packett containing two Pieces of Homespun lately produced in this quarter by One who was honoured in his youth with some of your Attention and much of your kindness.”17 The “two Pieces of Homespun” were the two volumes of John Quincy’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, prepared while he was a professor at Harvard in 1806–1809.
Because the volumes hadn’t yet arrived by the time Jefferson received Adams’s letter and had replied, he had forgotten how facetious Adams could be and simply assumed that some real manufactured items were on their way to him. Consequently, in response he wrote a short dissertation on the state of manufacturing in Virginia that must have amused Adams.18
At the same time Jefferson wrote a brief note to Rush, enclosing copies of his and Adams’s letters. He told Rush that because of his “kind interposition” in bringing two old friends together, he had a right to know how the first approaches had been made. He explained that he had written “a rambling, gossiping epistle” to Adams in order to avoid mentioning “the subject of his family,” meaning Abigail, “on which I could say nothing.” But he hoped his letter expressed his “sincere feelings” and would at least furnish Adams with “ground of reciprocation.”19
When the two books Adams had sent arrived a day after his letter, an embarrassed Jefferson sent off a quick letter to Adams, apologizing that “a little more sagacity of conjecture” on his part would have saved Adams from having to read his “long dissertation” on manufacturing in Virginia. Jefferson recovered nicely by showering praise on John Quincy’s books, saying they were “a mine of learning and taste” that revealed that young Adams, who had written some acute reviews of the works of leading Federalists, excelled “in more than one character of writing.” By making a point of equally criticizing both France and England, describing “one as a den of robbers, and the other of pirates,” Jefferson, courteous as always, revealed his acute sensitivity to Adams’s feelings. Perhaps realizing what had happened with his correspondence with Abigail in 1804, Jefferson was determined from the outset to make this reconciliation work. Without his patience and courtesy and willingness to put up with numerous affronts and provocations, the correspondence could easily have been terminated.20
• • •
WITH THE ICE FINALLY BROKEN, the letters began flowing freely. Adams immediately answered Jefferson with two letters, a week apart, explaining the actual nature of the gift and telling Jefferson that his dissertation on Virginia’s manufacturing was “a feast to me.” He then responded to Jefferson’s claim that he had given up politics and newspapers “in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid.” Adams said that he wished he had spent more time with Newton, contemplating the heavens instead of wasting time “on Plato, and Aristotle, Bacon, (Nat) Acherly, Bolingbroke, De Lolme, Harrington, Sidney, Hobbes, Plato Redivivus, Marchmont Nedham, with twenty others upon Subjects which Mankind is determined never to Understand, and those who do Understand them are resolved never to practice, or countenance.” He then went on to complain about how he had sacrificed his popularity in New England for the sake of the Union. But instead of receiving thanks from the great families of Virginia he had suffered their mistreatment.21
This initial exchange clearly revealed the nature of the 158 letters the two men would write to each other over the next fourteen years. Adams seemed to enjoy the correspondence more than Jefferson, telling Jefferson that he couldn’t write “a hundredth part of what” he wished to say to him. Although he apologized at one point for writing four letters to one of Jefferson’s (“Never mind it, my dear Sir . . . ; your one is worth more than my four”), overall he actually wrote only three times as many as Jefferson.22 In the summer of 1813, he wrote a dozen letters in a row before Jefferson replied. But, of course, Jefferson was an international celebrity, “the man,” said the French philosophe Antoine Destutt de Tracy, “whom I respect most in the universe and from whom I crave approval the most.”23 Since Jefferson’s many correspondents ranged from the tsar of Russia to the Polish patriot Tadeusz Kosciuszko, from the wife of Napoleon’s youngest brother to the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Jefferson had many more letters to write than Adams. In 1822 Jefferson claimed that he had received 1,267 letters in 1820, most of which he answered. By contrast, in that same year of 1820, Adams received 123 letters and wrote 121, a mere fraction of Jefferson’s enormous correspondence. It’s not surprising that Adams put more into his exchanges than Jefferson did.24
Adams knew very well that he was in a different celebrity league from Jefferson. He was embarrassed that “all the literary Gentlemen” of New England had “an Ambitious Curiosity to see the Philosopher and Statesman of Monticello,” and they all applied to him for introductions. If only he had received one introduction from Jefferson, he said he wouldn’t feel so bad in foisting so many young men on Jefferson.25
Jefferson’s relationship with Abigail remained stilted. In July 1813, at the end of one of Adams’s letters to Jefferson, Abigail broke the silence by penning a short note, in which she offered “the regards of an old Friend, which are still cherished and preserved through all the changes and v[ic]issitudes which have taken place since we first became acquainted.”26 Jefferson responded awkwardly, explaining that his neglect of his “duty of saluting you with friendship and respect” was due to “the unremitting labors of public engagement.” He went on to ask after her health, to describe a bit of his health, and to compare numbers of grandchildren.27
Abigail responded with a letter full of her feelings over the loss of Nabby, who had died at age forty-eight after a terrible struggle with breast cancer. Aware that Jefferson had suffered a similar loss of an adult daughter, she knew he could “sympathize with your bereaved Friend.” Although political calumny had interrupted their “friendly intercourse and harmony,” she was pleased that “it is again renewed.”28
Since Jefferson had been initially told of Nabby’s death by Adams, he did not reply directly to Abigail, but expressed his condolences to both Adamses in a letter to John.29 Fifteen months later Abigail sent some letters written by John Quincy that contained accounts of the Destutt de Tracy family that she thought Jefferson might be interested in. She expressed her continued friendship with “the philosopher of Monticello.”30 Jefferson replied politely enough, but the correspondence between him and Abigail never achieved the intimacy it had possessed in the 1780s. Before her death in October 1818, Abigail wrote one more businesslike letter to Jefferson, requesting a letter of introduction for a young Massachusetts man traveling to France.31
Thus the exchanges were almost totally confined to the two revolutionary heroes. “You and I,” said Adams at one point, “ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”32 But they were writing to posterity as well as to themselves. Their styles expressed their personalities. Adams’s writing spewed forth from him with extraordinary exuberance and unrestrained passion (he called it “incoherent rattle”); and it was often loaded with provocative and sometimes facetious remarks.33 Sometimes the provocations could be cruel. Knowing that Jefferson had greatly admired the engineer-scientist David Rittenhouse, Adams nevertheless described him as “a good simple ignorant well meaning Franklinian Democrat, totally ignorant of the World, as an Anachorite, an honest Dupe of the French Revolution.”34
Whenever Adams sat down to write to Jefferson, he said he could not see the forest for the trees; “so many Subjects crowd upon me,” he said, “that I know not, with which to begin.”35 Besides, what could he say to the man who knew everything? Writing Jefferson about any subject was like “sending Coal to Newcastle.” Nevertheless, Adams continually reported what he was reading and made all sorts of joshing comments about it. John Marshall’s five-volume Life of George Washington he described as “a Mausolaeum, 100 feet square at the base, and 200 feet high.”36 But other times he could be quite serious, as when he quoted extensively from the account by the French revolutionary Armand-Gaston Camus concerning the fifty-two volumes entitled Acta Sanctorum (Acts of the Saints). Adams concluded that the work was “the most complete History of the corruptions of Christianity, that has ever appeared.”37
Adams told anecdotes from his reading in ancient literature and related gossip from the present. A scandal involving the wife of James Bowdoin III, son of the former governor of Massachusetts, set him off on a chaotic account of the race of Boudouins in France that went back to the twelfth century. He ended the story by telling Jefferson that in 1804 he, President Jefferson, had immortalized the name Bowdoin by appointing this cuckold as minister to Spain. In commenting on John Taylor’s prolix writing style, which was based on Taylor’s precept “Gather up the Fragments that nothing be lost,” he said that such a rule was “of inestimable Value in Agriculture and Horticulture,” but perhaps not for books. “Every Weed Cob, Husk Stalk ought to be saved for manure.” He agreed completely with Jefferson’s view that Plato’s Republic was full of “sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities.” All he ever got out of “the tedious toil” of reading Plato were two things: one, that Franklin’s idea of exempting farmers and mariners from military service was borrowed from Plato, and two, “that Sneezing is a cure for the Hickups.” Adams’s persistent theme, he said, was drawn from Horace: “What forbids a man to speak the truth by joking.”38
Jefferson was always graceful and polite in response to Adams’s effusive and often teasing banter, and he tended to ignore Adams’s flippant provocations. Indeed, anyone else might have broken off the correspondence; but Jefferson knew that beneath Adams’s outward irascibility lay a warm and amiable heart.
Occasionally Jefferson did try to match some of Adams’s playfulness; and his letters became less somber and serious than was usual in his correspondence. Both men enjoyed showing off their wide knowledge of Greek, Latin, and modern literature. Indeed, their letters often exploded with kaleidoscopic displays of learning in classical and Christian texts that are bound to leave a modern reader thoroughly abashed. At age seventy-five, Jefferson offered a long disquisition on the difference between the pronunciation of ancient and modern Greek, followed by a learned discussion of the changes in the pronunciation of American English. For his part Adams once mentioned Archytas, the fourth-century BC Greek philosopher, and followed that up by pointing out that “John Gram a learned and honourable Dane has given a handsome Edition of his Works with a latin translation and an ample Account of his Life and Writings.”39
Jefferson fed Adams’s vanity by expressing wonder over Adams’s extensive reading. “Forty three volumes read in one year, and 12 of them quartos! Dear Sir, how I envy you!” Adams’s reading of the twelve volumes of Charles François Dupuis’s Origine de tours les cultes was, he said, “a degree of heroism to which I could not have aspired even in my younger days.” But Jefferson had an explanation for why he could not match Adams’s reading: He didn’t have the time, he was so busy answering his many correspondents, some of whom he had “never before heard.” All his letter writing, he said, was “the burden of my life.” He wished he could get rid of the strangers and concentrate on friends he loved like Adams. He was mortified that he had not been able to keep up with his letters.
Adams had his own answers to this burden. One was to simply ignore many of the letter writers and neglect to answer their letters, which, he said, he had done, and it had cost him many correspondents from whom he might have learned something. The other expedient was to give “gruff, short, unintelligible, mysterious, enigmatical, or pedantical Answers.” He told Jefferson that this solution was “out of your power,” since it was “not in your nature.”40
• • •
OF COURSE, PUBLISHERS eventually discovered that the two former presidents were exchanging letters and, much to Jefferson’s disgust, wanted to publish them. “These people,” he said, “think they have a right to everything however secret or sacred.” Adams confessed that no printer had approached him, but that was not surprising, since Jefferson’s writing was famous and his was not. He said that “our Correspondence is thought such an oddity by both Parties, that the Printers imagine an Edition would soon go off and yield them a Profit.”41
Although Adams realized that both he and Jefferson were “weary of Politicks,” he nevertheless couldn’t stay away from the subject. He used the fact that he had received some books on Virginian prophets as an excuse to mock all those prophets of the 1780s and ’90s, including Joseph Priestley, who had predicted that the French Revolution was the beginning of the millennium. Priestley, Adams reported, had told him, “soberly, cooly and deliberately,” that “he fully believed upon the Authority of Prophecy that the French Nation would establish a free Government and that the King of France who had been executed, was the first of the Ten Horns of the great Beast, and that all the other Nine Monarchs were soon to fall off after him.”42 Knowing what Jefferson had thought about the French Revolution, Adams obviously was trying to get a rise out of him.
Because Adams in passing had mentioned the Prophet of the Wabash, Tenskwatawa, who with his brother Tecumseh had been defeated in November 1811 at the Battle of Tippecanoe, Jefferson was able to ignore Adams’s provocative statements about the French Revolution and instead concentrate on giving Adams a detailed description of the beliefs and visions of this Shawnee religious leader.43 It was a technique that Jefferson used over and over to deflect Adams’s baiting comments. It didn’t stop Adams, however, from coming right back at Jefferson with another attempt at needling. After thanking Jefferson for his account of the Shawnee Prophet, Adams suggested that all modern prophets ought to be put in the stocks as they had been in biblical times: they might thus be prevented “from spreading so many delusions and shedding so much blood.”44
Adams brought up the case of Timothy Pickering and the other extreme Federalists who had earlier tried to separate the northeastern states from the Union. He told Jefferson he had long opposed these High Federalists, at a cost of his popularity in New England, but if the national government under the Republican administrations continued to employ embargoes and oppose a buildup of naval power, it would play into the hands of these arch-Federalists, resulting not only in making Adams and his son John Quincy more unpopular in New England than they already were, but, more alarming, in provoking “a Convulsion as certainly as there is a Sky over our heads.”45
When Adams asked about books on Indian antiquities, Jefferson jumped at the opportunity to get away from sensitive subjects, and he responded with a scholarly and informative discussion of the issue. He respected the Indians and knew a great deal about their culture and languages. Adams, by contrast, confessed that he knew very little about Indians and had never collected any books on the subject. He remembered seeing Indians in his youth, but he thought, mistakenly, that they had disappeared from New England. He was not very sympathetic to their plight. He conceded that they had “a Right to Life Liberty and Property in common with all Men.” But could “a few handful of Scattering Tribes of Savages have a right of Dominion or Property over a quarter of the Globe capable of nourishing hundreds of Millions of happy human Beings?” He admitted that his ancestors had not puzzled themselves with the “Refinements” over who actually possessed the land prior to “civil Society,” but had simply entered into negotiations with the Indians, “purchased and paid for their Rights and Claims whatever they were, and procured Deeds, Grants and Quit-Claims of all their Lands, leaving them their Habitations Arms Utensils huntings and Plantations.” For Adams, the land unquestionably belonged to the whites. During the Revolutionary War, he had told Abigail that any tribes that fought on the side of the British “deserve Extermination.”46
Jefferson was never so harsh, but by 1812 he did believe that those Indians who were not becoming civilized and were falling under the sway of the English in Canada would soon be conquered. This was a measure of his confidence in the outcome of the war that was soon to be declared against Great Britain.47
• • •
AS LONG AS THE LETTERS were confined to the history of Mount Wollaston in New England and the origins and nature of the Indians, they went on swimmingly. But when Adams discovered a volume that contained several of Jefferson’s letters to Joseph Priestley in 1801 and 1803, there was a moment of tense embarrassment. One was the letter in which Jefferson criticized the Federalists for being “barbarians,” and Adams in particular, for looking backward and not forward in his 1798 “To the Young Men of the City of Philadelphia.” Adams denied Jefferson’s charge and explained that he had written so many answers to addresses in that hectic year that he couldn’t recall what he had said. But he couldn’t drop the issue and had to defend his statement about our ancestors being the best source of knowledge by suggesting that by ancestors he meant none other than Jefferson and himself. In fact, he said, Americans were so different in religion and ethnicity that only the general principles coming out of the Revolution could unite them. Those were, he said, “the general Principles of Christianity, in which all those Sects were United: and the general Principles of English and American Liberty.”48
Adams was very upset by Jefferson’s letters to Priestley and had a hard time letting them go. He anguished over what Jefferson had said about his election in 1800 being something new under the sun. He told Jefferson he had been elected by merely the narrowest margin, and that had been made possible by one Federalist changing his vote; consequently, he mocked Jefferson’s phrase about his election resulting from a mighty wave of public opinion rolling over the nation. “Oh! Mr. Jefferson!” he exclaimed. “What a Wave of public Opinion has rolled over the Universe.” And he went on to describe all the many waves of changing opinion in Western history.49
Jefferson was clearly embarrassed by the revelation of his letters to Priestley. He said his letters were private communications only, not intended to be made public. He went on to explain that each political party would interpret the events of 1798–1799 differently and posterity would have to judge between them. He said that he did not consider Adams’s statement about respecting only his ancestors’ views as “your deliberate opinion.” Jefferson tried to suggest that his comments were directed at the Federalists, whom both he and Adams hated, and not at Adams himself. He followed with another letter emphasizing that he had no intention of reviving these “useless and irksome” quarrels of the past. It was clear that Jefferson was acutely worried that the Priestley letters might wreck the restored friendship.50
Adams quickly reassured him. “Be not surprised or alarmed.” The statements in the Priestley letters “will do no harm to you or me.” Neither man wanted to endanger the reconciliation that had been so long in coming. Adams assured Jefferson that he had no intention of publishing their letters in the way someone had published Jefferson’s letters to Priestley. If they were eventually published, he told Jefferson, “your Letters will do you no dishonor.” As for his own letters, Adams cared “not a farthing.” His reputation had been “the Sport of the public for fifty years, and will be with Posterity, . . . a bubble, a Gossameur, that idles the wonton Summer Air.”51
Adams made this kind of self-deprecating remark over and over, but always wished that it were not so. He was not wrong, however, about how posterity would view his reputation. He told Jefferson he had suffered from more terror, often verbal terror, than any other American. “Name another if you can.” He had “been disgraced and degraded,” and he had “a right to complain.” But he had “always expected it,” and had “always submitted to it, perhaps often with too much tameness.” He had been treated “with the Utmost Contempt” by Republicans in the Congress, including being threatened “with Impeachment for the murder of Jonathan Robbins,” the British sailor who falsely claimed to be an American when the British had impressed and executed him.52
Adams knew what future histories of their respective presidencies would say. “Your Administration,” he told Jefferson, “will be quoted by Philosophers, as a model, of profound Wisdom; by Politicians, as weak, superficial and short sighted.” “Mine . . . will have no Character at all.” Adams’s complaints were endless. “How many Gauntletts am I destined to run? How many Martyrdoms must I suffer.” Jefferson, he said, knew him better than most, “yet you know little of the Life I have led, the hazards I have run.”53
When reading all of Adams’s moaning and groaning, Jefferson must have shaken his head and smiled—but with affection. He realized that this was the warmhearted friend he had always known.
• • •
AFTER WRITING SIX LETTERS in a row in two weeks during the summer of 1813, Adams was thoroughly wound up and was able to release the tension only by reminding Jefferson once again of his wrongheaded support for the French Revolution. It was, he said, the first issue on which they had differed. What he most hated about the French Revolution, he told Jefferson, was the way it set back, perhaps for a century or more, the progress that was “advancing by slow but sure Steps towards an Amelioration of the conditions of Man, in Religion and Government, in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity Knowledge Civilization and Humanity.” The French patriots were like young students or sailors flushed with recent pay, mounted on wild horses, lashing and spurring, until they killed the horses and broke their own necks.
He had written his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America and Davila essays to try to head things off. Although his “poor, unprotected, unpatronised Books” had said new things about government that other theorists—from Locke to Montesquieu to Rousseau—had never said, his books never had a chance. They were “overborne by Misrepresentations and will perish in Obscurity.” Unfortunately, his works laid the foundation of the immense unpopularity that had befallen him, while “your steady defence of democratical Principles,” he told Jefferson, “laid the foundation of your Unbounded Popularity.”54
Adams enjoyed needling Jefferson over the apparent failure of the French Revolution. All those naïve French philosophes—Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot, Rousseau, and others—could have been of some service to humanity “if they had possessed Common Sense. But they were all totally destitute of it.” They assumed that all of Christendom was as convinced as they were that every religion was visionary and that “their effulgent Lights had illuminated the World.” These dreamers seemed to believe that “whole Nations and Continents had been changed in their Principles Opinions Habits and Feelings by the Sovereign Grace of their Almighty Philosophy.” Their effort “to perfect human Nature and convert the Earth into Paradise of Pleasure” had come to nothing.55
Where now were the “Perfection and perfectibility of human Nature?” he asked Jefferson, who in Adams’s mind had been as dreamy as the philosophes. “Where is now the progress of the human Mind? Where is the Amelioration of Society?” The ravings of men like Dr. Thomas Young and Thomas Paine who attacked all organized religion were no answer; “for,” said Adams, “I hold there can be no Philosophy without Religion.”56 He then picked up on Jefferson’s statement in one of his letters to Priestley, in which he had said that Christianity, though benevolent, was also “the most perverted System that ever shone on Man.” Priestley had said that Jefferson was “generally considered an unbeliever.”57
Adams said he considered Jefferson to be as good a Christian as Priestley. But that was not much of a compliment, since Adams later went out of his way to disparage Priestley “as absurd inconsistent, credulous and incomprehensible as Athanasius” and no different from all those other so-called “rational Creatures,” the utopian French philosophes. Adams claimed that he had been a student of religion for sixty years and had read books whose titles Jefferson had never seen. Although Priestley had been dead for ten years, Adams said that he had many questions about the Apocryphal epistles of the Bible that he would ask Priestley about—“when I see him.” 58
Jefferson took all this amiably enough and suggested that people did not differ in religious opinions as much as was supposed. He agreed with Priestley, who had declared that if people candidly examined themselves, “they would find that Unitarianism was the religion of all.” It was “too late in the day,” Jefferson said, “for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet the one is not three, and the three are not one.”59
Along with the French Revolution, religion was a major issue that divided the two men. Both Jefferson and Adams agreed in the belief in a supreme being who organized the universe, and both, like many other enlightened rationalists of the age, denied the divinity of Christ and thus the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity. For Jefferson, Jesus was just “an extraordinary man,” and for Adams, claims for the divinity of Jesus had become an “awful blasphemy.”60
Nevertheless, Adams had a much more acceptable view of religion than Jefferson. Although he did not put much stock in creeds or ecclesiastical authorities, he never became as hostile to organized religion or to orthodox Christianity as Jefferson. Adams certainly agreed that ancient Christianity had been corrupted and debased by “Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, and Christian Factions, above all the Catholicks”—“Miracles after Miracles have rolled down in Torrents”—but he never mocked the Trinity as Jefferson did, never ridiculed it as “mere Abracadabra” foisted on the people by “the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.”61 Although Adams was certainly a Unitarian in his beliefs, he treated “the doctrine of the Trinity” not as a joke but as “a Part of an immense system of doctrines of too inormous faith for me to digest.” “Let the Wits joke; the Phylosophers sneer!” he said, but that was not his approach to religion. He always was, as he said in 1811, “a Church going Animal.”62
Adams believed that there was “in human nature, a solid, unchangeable and eternal foundation of Religion.” All he felt was awe and adoration in the face of “the Author of the Universe,” a universe that was infinite and eternal and in which Adams himself was “but an Atom, a Molecule.” Indeed, to Adams God was so beyond all human understanding, so “altogether incomprehensible, and incredible” that he could just “as soon believe the Athanasian Creed, which asserted the traditional Roman Catholic belief in the Trinity.”63
Adams’s sense of religious liberty and ecumenical toleration—“all Religions have Something good in them”—came from this sense of humility in an “inscrutable and incomprehensible” universe, from his deeply held belief that Christianity was “Resignation to God.” When Adams was minister to Great Britain, he had worked hard to get the Anglican hierarchy to consecrate American bishops in the Episcopal Church without having to swear allegiance to the king. In fact, he said in 1814 that “there is no part of my Life, on which I look back and reflect with more Satisfaction, than the part I took, bold, daring and hazardous as it was to myself and mine, in the introduction of Episcopacy into America.” He even admired the Episcopal Church service. It was “very humane and benevolent, and sometimes pathetic & affecting: but rarely gloomy, if ever.” It was certainly “more cheerful and comfortable” than the Presbyterian Calvinists, but he really couldn’t criticize the Calvinists either. Since all his family and his ancestors were Calvinists, he would have to be “a very unnatural Son to entertain any prejudices against Calvinists or Calvinism.” Indeed, he had “never known any better people than the Calvinists.” And as infidelity became associated with Jefferson and Paine’s beloved French Revolution, Adams’s esteem for Christianity went up. Christianity, Adams told his diary in 1796, was the “Religion of Wisdom, Virtue, Equity and Humanity, let the Blackguard Paine say what he will.”64
Jefferson never conceived of himself as an insignificant speck in an infinite universe, nor did he ever have anything good to say about the Episcopal hierarchy or Calvinism. As far as he was concerned, Calvinism had “introduced into the Christian religion more new absurdities than its leader had purged it of old ones.”65
But what most separated Jefferson from Adams was Jefferson’s view, at least as he expressed it in his younger years, that religion was exclusively private and personal and did not have much to do with society. Not only had Jefferson revealed in his Notes on the State of Virginia his indifference to the social significance of religion, but in the first section of his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which had taken effect in Virginia in 1786, he had claimed that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics and geometry.”66
This was a position that most Americans, including Adams, found totally unacceptable. However liberal and however tolerant American leaders might have become, nearly all of them continued to believe that religion was essential for the maintenance of order and morality in society, which was especially important for a republic. Indeed, in contrast to Jefferson, most Americans were convinced that America’s civic rights were absolutely dependent on religion. And religion for them was a matter of faith, not, as it was for Jefferson, a mere matter of opinion. As president, Jefferson would have nothing to do with proclaiming national days of fasting and prayer as Adams had done; they were anathema to him.
Although Adams, like Jefferson, had come to deny the divinity of Jesus and the miracles of the Bible, he never doubted the need the society had for Christianity. At the outset of the Revolution, he told Abigail that New England was superior to other parts of America because it obliged “every Parish to have a Minister, and every Person to go to Meeting.”67 Adams later said he was not responsible for article III in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, which authorized the state legislature to maintain an established church in the towns, and in the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1820 he favored complete religious freedom. Nevertheless, he was not opposed to the public support of religion. As much as he worried that the clergy, especially the New England divines, could foster “spiritual tyranny and ecclesiastical Dominion” and endanger liberty, he nevertheless believed that America could not “do without them in this wicked world.” He even regretted that the federal Constitution did not at least pay “Homage to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.”68
Although both men proclaimed themselves Unitarians, they could not have differed more on religious matters. It was inconceivable that Jefferson would ever have said, as Adams did in 1817, that “without Religion this world would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell.”69
During the election for the presidency in 1800, Jefferson’s radical comments on religion had come back to haunt him. The Federalists had accused him of being an atheist, an infidel, and a Paine-like opponent of Christianity. If he were to become president, they warned, all religion and morality would be destroyed and the bonds of society would come apart. So vicious had been the criticism of his religious views that Jefferson felt the need to explain his understanding of the role of Christianity in society. He had been anticlerical since his college years, but reading the works of Joseph Priestley helped to clarify his religious ideas and to reconcile them with Christianity.
When Jefferson read Priestley’s History of the Corruption of Christianity sometime in the mid-1790s, he had been deeply impressed. Priestley had argued that Christianity was originally a simple religion subsequently corrupted by the church and that Jesus was not divine but a great moral teacher. By 1801 Jefferson was telling correspondents that “the Christian religion when divested of the rags in which [the clergy] have inveloped it, and brought to the original purity & simplicity of it’s benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansions of the human mind.”70 Priestley’s work helped Jefferson to conceive of himself as a genuine Christian.
In reading Priestley’s new pamphlet, Socrates and Jesus Compared, in 1803, Jefferson realized that he could give the ancients “their just due, & yet maintain that the morality of Jesus, as taught by himself & freed from the corruptions of later times, is far superior” to that of the ancient philosophers.71 In 1803 Jefferson wrote out his thoughts in what he called his “Syllabus of an Estimate on the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, compared with Those of Others.” Anxious to dispel the impression held by many that he was antireligious and especially anti-Christian, Jefferson sent copies of this thousand-word essay to several friends and members of his cabinet and family. (He belatedly sent a copy to Adams in 1813.)
In 1804 Jefferson followed up this essay with a scissors-and-paste version of the New Testament in which he cut out all references to supernatural miracles and Christ’s divinity and kept all the passages in which Jesus preached love and the Golden Rule. He called this collection “The Philosophy of Jesus.” He told a friend that this “wee little book” was “proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel, and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what it’s Author never said nor saw.”72 In 1820 Jefferson expanded his work into the “Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” By 1819 he had become, he said, “a sect by myself.”73
Although both Jefferson and Adams denied miracles and the divinity of Jesus, they both accepted the existence of a hereafter. Jefferson was somewhat more circumspect than Adams. When he was young, he had hoped to gain “some insight into that hidden country,” but eventually had come to rest easy with his ignorance and simply trust in God’s goodness. Adams assumed that God would not have created all these human beings if there were no life after death. “Take away hope and What remains?” he asked Jefferson. People wouldn’t put up with earthly existence if there were no hope of a hereafter. He said if he did not believe in “a future state I should believe in no God.” Adams put it more colorfully to his friend Francis Adrian Van der Kemp: “Let it once be revealed or demonstrated that there is no future State, and my Advice to every Man Woman and Child would be, as our Existence would be in our own power, to take opium.”74 In other words, if there were no afterlife, life on earth would not be worth living—a truly extraordinary notion.
• • •
ADAMS KEPT INTERRUPTING the discussion of religion with what interested him even more—his old bugaboo, aristocracy. Perhaps because he was surrounded by all those Essex Junto Federalists who were plotting secession in opposition to “Mr. Madison’s War,” he couldn’t stay away from the subject. He reminded Jefferson in 1813 that thirty years before, Jefferson had encouraged him to write something on aristocracy, and he had “been writing Upon that Subject ever since.” No society, including republican America, could rid itself of its aristocracy. “It is entailed upon us forever.” All we could do, he said, was manage our aristocrats, but they were “the most difficult Animals to manage” in every kind of government. “They not only exert all their own Subtilty Industry and courage, but they employ the Commonalty to knock to pieces every Plan and Model that the most honest Architects in Legislation can invent to keep them within bounds.” And unfortunately, said Adams, the aristocrats were usually not the best men in the society. “Birth and Wealth together have prevailed over Virtue and Talents in all ages.”75
Jefferson told Adams that parties, such as Whigs versus Tories, had always existed and would continue to exist, one taking the side of the many, the other the few. Adams agreed. The aristocracy and the democracy would always quarrel, and all those like Rousseau and Helvétius (and, he might have added, Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence) who proclaimed “the natural Equality of Mankind” were wrong. “Inequalities of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in his constitution of Human Nature that no Art or policy can ever plain them down to a Level.” The only equality Adams would admit was equality before the law, but he knew that was not at all what Jefferson and most others in 1776 had meant by equality.76
Jefferson understood there was a natural aristocracy in every society, but he wanted that natural aristocracy distinguished from those he called an artificial or pseudo-aristocracy, which, he said, was “founded on wealth or birth, without either virtue or talents.” He considered the natural aristocracy based on wisdom and virtue to be “the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.” In fact, he said, governments should be judged by their capacity to ensure that these natural aristocrats were selected into the offices of government.77
He realized that Adams had a different take on this issue. “You think it best to put the Pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where they may be a protection to wealth against the Agrarian and plundering enterprises of the Majority of the people.” This was a mistake, he told Adams. Giving the wealthy aristocrats power in order to prevent them from doing mischief was “arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.” He didn’t feel that wealthy aristocrats had to be protected anyhow. “Enough of them will find their way into every branch of the legislation to protect themselves.” The best remedy was to let the citizens in free elections separate the natural aristocrats from the pseudo-aristocrats, the wheat from the chaff. “In general,” he said, “they will elect the real good and wise.” Only in a few instances would the citizens be corrupted by wealth and birth, but never enough to endanger the society. This, of course, was the view of an aristocrat who had never lost an election in his life.78
Jefferson accounted for their differing opinions on the aristocracy from the different societies in which he and Adams lived. Because of the established Calvinist churches in Massachusetts and Connecticut, Jefferson claimed that the New England clergy tended to encourage “a traditional reverence for certain families.”79 This was not true in Virginia, he claimed. The clergy had no influence over the people, and the great families that had been allied with the Crown had been discredited by the Revolution and undone by the abolition of primogeniture and entail and the separation of the church from the state.
Jefferson only regretted that his plans for a system of public education in which the geniuses and future leaders would be “raked from the rubbish annually” had not been implemented by the Virginia legislature.80 He went on to describe his plans for small wards of four or five miles square that would be responsible for the schools and for local self-government in Virginia. When finally put into effect, these plans for public education and small ward-republics would raise “the mass of the people to the high ground of moral responsibility necessary to their own safety,” and would qualify them “to select the veritable aristoi, for the trusts of government, to the exclusion of the Pseudalists.”81
Jefferson’s plan for publicly supported education had no place for women. In fact, he admitted he had never systematically contemplated the subject, and had thought about it only insofar as his daughters were concerned. Their education was designed so that when they became mothers they could educate their own daughters; they would not be responsible for educating their sons unless the “fathers be lost, be incapable, or be inattentive.” Although women might read some great poets—Pope, Dryden, Shakespeare—“with pleasure and improvement,” Jefferson advised that “too much poetry should not be indulged,” and novel reading should be avoided altogether. Because the French language was the universal language among nations and “now the depository of all science,” it was “an indispensable part of education for both sexes.” Education allowed for some attention to be paid to the amusements of life, and for women these were “dancing, drawing & musick.”82
Adams had a different approach to women’s education. Marriage to Abigail helped to make him remarkably respectful of women of intelligence and learning. He even joked with his friend Van der Kemp that he was terrified of “learned Ladies”; he felt “such a consciousness of Inferiority to them” that he could “scarcely speak in their presence.” That may have been true with some aristocratic women he had known in France, but once a learned lady, such as Mercy Otis Warren or John Quincy’s wife, Louisa Catherine, became his friend, he treated her as his intellectual equal. When in 1820 the educator and women’s rights activist Emma Willard sent Adams her pamphlet proposing publicly supported women’s seminaries, Adams endorsed the plan enthusiastically. “The Feminine Moiety of Mankind,” he told Willard, “deserve as much honour Esteem, and Respect, as the Male.” He advised his granddaughter that since she would be responsible for educating all her children, sons and daughters alike, she should become acquainted with all the great writers, bar none, who had dealt with both the “little Aerial World within us”—of intelligence and sensibility—as well as “the great World without us—of Heaven, Earth and Seas.”83
This respect for female education did not mean that Adams was a supporter of modern feminism. He never advocated the suffrage for women, and he had nothing good to say about Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, regarding it as another one of those crazy tracts thrown up by the French Revolution. But he was troubled enough by her book to spend hours reading it and filling its margins with his jeering objections.84
Jefferson never felt the need to confront Wollstonecraft and her ideas. As an aristocrat presiding over his scores of slaves, he took his patriarchy for granted, calling himself at one point “the most blessed of the patriarchs.”85 He regarded his slaves as childlike dependents in his patriarchal household and thus members of what he called his “family.” He believed these patriarchal relationships were important to the health of the nation. Indeed, one of his principal objections to French society, which he otherwise so admired, was the fact that “the domestic bonds” were “absolutely done away,” and there was nothing put in their place. French women were flirtatious and voluptuous, and consequently they continually strained the bonds of marriage. To his great surprise, women in France, he once told Washington, actually engaged in politics. “The manners of the nation allow them to visit, alone, all persons in office, to solicit the affairs of the husband, family, or friends.” By contrast, he said, American women were superior because they looked after their husbands and their households and were devoted to simple republican domesticity.86
Although Adams was far more permissive about women in politics than Jefferson—encouraging his daughter-in-law Louisa Catherine in her promotion of her husband’s career—he also emphasized the importance of patriarchy to the society. In fact, he claimed that “the Source of Revolution, Democracy, and Jacobinism” was the “Systematical dissolution of true Family Authority.” There could be no regular government in a nation, he told his son Thomas, “without a marked Subordination of Mothers and children to the Father.” But, probably thinking of Abigail, he warned his son not to tell anyone what he had said. “If you divulge it to any one, it will soon be known to all, and will infallibly raise a Rebellion against me.” Unlike Jefferson, Adams could never take patriarchy in his household for granted.87
Like Adams, many New England leaders tended to be obsessed with stability. Faced with popular instability and disorder that the slaveholding planters of Virginia rarely experienced, the New England Federalists understandably favored order and hierarchy, even to the point of yearning for elements of monarchy and hereditary offices. Unlike Jefferson and the other Virginia aristocrats, who overwhelmingly supported the libertarian and egalitarian ideology of the Republican Party, the New England aristocrats did not have the confidence that the people would always elect the natural aristocracy of the wise and good. It was so much easier to believe in democracy when the aristocratic elites didn’t have to worry about the quirks and whims of the electorate.
Adams thought Jefferson was engaging in “a little merriment upon this solemn subject of aristocracy.” He agreed with Jefferson that men of talents were the aristocrats. But what did Jefferson mean by talents? For Adams, the talents were innumerable. “Education, Wealth, Strength, Beauty, Stature, Birth, Marriage, graceful Attitudes and Motions, Gait, Air, Complexion, Physiognomy, are Talents, as well as Genius and Science and learning.” Anyone possessing any of these talents that allowed him to command influence in the society was an aristocrat to Adams. All literature, all history, proved “the existence of inequalities, not of rights, but of moral and intellectual and physical inequalities in Families, descents and Generations.”88
Consequently, concluded Adams, Jefferson’s distinction between natural and artificial aristocracy was not well founded. Some men were born smarter, stronger, and more beautiful than others. These were the natural aristocrats. The only artificial aristocrats Adams recognized were those whose titles and honors were conferred on them by municipal laws and political institutions. These kinds of artificial aristocrats could be easily done away with, but the natural aristocrats that Adams conceived of could never be eliminated, for they were the result of nature, of some individuals being born more intelligent, shrewder, and more wily than others.
Before Adams was done talking about aristocracy he came to see it everywhere. Indeed, he ended up democratizing the aristocracy—declaring that anyone who could influence the vote of one other person was an aristocrat, “in my Sense of the Word; whether he obtains his one Vote in Addition to his own, by his Birth Fortune, Figure, Eloquence, Science, learning, Craft Cunning, or even his Character for good fellowship and a bon vivant.” This was a peculiar kind of aristocracy, an enlarged and uniquely middle-class American aristocracy. Such aristocrats—men who could simply influence the vote of one other person—were so numerous as to render the term virtually meaningless.89
These sorts of aristocracies—middling men with some influence claiming gentlemanly status—were springing up everywhere in America. They were arising, said Adams, “not from Virtues and Talents so much as from Banks and Land Jobbing.” Adams denied over and over to Jefferson that he had ever favored hereditary honors and offices. All he meant to say was “that Mankind have not yet discovered any remedy against irresistible Corruption in Elections in Offices of great Power and Profit, but making them hereditary.”90
• • •
ADAMS BOMBARDED JEFFERSON with five letters on aristocracy and religion before his Virginian friend responded. “Give yourself no concern,” he told Jefferson. “Answer my Letters at Your Leisure.” He wrote, he said, only as “a refuge and protection against Ennui.”91
When Jefferson did finally respond, he avoided Adams’s curious notion of a democratized aristocrat who needed to influence only one other person to become an aristocrat; instead, he chose to return to the more comprehensible subject of religion. He admitted that he had never read many of the histories of religion that Adams had, but he agreed that much about religion had been invented and perverted over the centuries.
The perversions of religious writers led Jefferson to the fraudulent manipulation of the laws of Alfred, the ninth-century Saxon ruler who had issued an extensive legal code. These in turn reminded him of the ways in which modern English judges had been “willing to lay the yoke of their own opinions on the necks of others,” especially in their efforts to make revealed religion part of the common law. These judges, especially William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, who served as lord chief justice of the King’s Bench for over thirty years, had set forth a “string of authorities all hanging by one another on a single hook, a mistranslation by Finch of the works of Prisot, or on nothing.”
“Our cunning” Chief Justice Marshall was no better, said Jefferson; he was able to find “many sophisms” with which to twist the law out of all kinds of documents, just “as he did to twist Burr’s neck out of the halter of treason.” Knowing that Adams loved the common law and perhaps eager to pay Adams back a bit for all the needling he was getting, he quoted Jesus: “Woe unto you, ye lawyers, for ye laden men with burdens grievous to bear.”92
In contrast to Adams’s effusiveness and gushing emotion, Jefferson remained his usual cool and collected self. He liked to be optimistic and disliked those with “gloomy and hypochondriac minds” who were “disgusted with the present and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen.” Too much introspection was unhealthy. Better to be hopeful than to dwell on failure. The emotions and passions ought to be controlled and kept in their place. Indeed, he wondered, for example, about the purpose of the emotion of grief. He wished that “the pathologists” would tell us what use it did have and what good it did do.93
Jefferson should have realized that such queries were just what Adams craved. Adams exploded with lengthy discourses on grief and its uses and abuses, to which Jefferson could only reply, “You have exhausted the subject.”94 Adams realized, as he told his son John Quincy, that there was “a Rage; a Mania, a delirium or at least an Enthusiasm” in him that needed to be corrected. He would stop and say to himself, “Be not carried away by sudden blasts of Wind, by unexpected flashes of Lightening, nor terrified by the sharpest Crashes of Thunder.”95
The dialogue between the two patriots tended to be dominated by Adams. He made comments, often challenging or facetious ones, that Jefferson either ignored entirely or answered earnestly and courteously. When Jefferson mentioned the three volumes on ideology by Antoine Destutt de Tracy—“the ablest writer living on intellectual subjects,” said Jefferson—Adams mocked the work. “3 vols. of Idiology!” he exclaimed. “Pray explain this Neological Title! What does it mean?” When Napoleon first used the word “ideology,” Adams said he had been delighted with it, “upon the Common Principle of delight in every Thing We cannot understand.” Did it mean “Idiotism? . . . The Science of Lunacy? The Theory of Delerium?”96
Jefferson ignored Adams’s flippancy and replied to his lighthearted taunts with a serious explanation of Destutt de Tracy’s work. He told Adams that William Duane had published Destutt de Tracy’s Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in 1811. Without mentioning that he had once called it “the most valuable political work of the present age” and had actually translated the section of the book on public liberty and constitutions, Jefferson promised to have a copy sent to Adams if it was still in print. Despite the scorn Adams had expressed for Destutt de Tracy’s books, Jefferson sought to make a strong case for their importance. The Frenchman’s logic, he said, “occupies exactly the ground of Locke’s work on the understanding.”97
When the copy of Destutt de Tracy’s book on Montesquieu arrived as promised, Adams, obviously embarrassed by his ridiculing of the Frenchman, replied that “in our good old English language of Gratitude” he was deeply in Jefferson’s debt. He had read a hundred pages of the book and would read the rest. Destutt de Tracy was “a sensible Man and is easily understood,” not like another one of Jefferson’s former French friends, that “abstruse, mysterious, incomprehensible Condorcet.” Even while praising Destutt de Tracy, Adams couldn’t help pointing out that he was really just another idealistic French philosophe who “supposes that Men are rational and conscientious Creatures.” He said he agreed with that, but lest Jefferson think he was getting soft, he couldn’t let it rest there; he had to add that men’s “passions and Interests generally prevail over their Reason and their conscience; and if Society does not contrive some means of controlling and restrain[in]g the former the World will go on as it has done.”
Adams then went on to criticize other writers whose works contained “a compleat drought of the Superstitions, Credulity and Despotism of our terrestrial Universe.” They had shown how all the sciences and all the fine arts of architecture, painting, statuary, poetry, music, eloquence—“which you love so well and taste so exquisitely”—had been used everywhere to support priests and kings at the expense of the poor.
Adams ended his letter by saying that it would be delivered by a young man eager to meet Jefferson. In fact, he added, all the young gentlemen of New England who had any sort of mind and the money to travel had “an ardent Curiosity to visit, what shell I say? the Man of the Mountain? The Sage of Monticello? Or the celebrated Philosopher and Statesman of Virginia.”98
To make all these sorts of taunting and teasing remarks, Adams must have become completely confident of his relationship with Jefferson. Jefferson was so self-contained, so polite, and so smart that Adams knew deep in his soul that the Sage of Monticello had something that he, Adams, would never have, and that no matter how many books he read and how many wisecracks he made, Jefferson would always be his superior.