Authors: Joseph J. Ellis
Although Jefferson probably presumed that Abigail was
sharing their correspondence with her husband, Adams himself never saw the
letters until several months later. After reading over the exchange, he made
this written comment for the record: “The whole of this correspondence
was begun and conducted without my Knowledge or Suspicion, and this morning at
the desire of Mrs. Adams I read the whole. I have no remarks to make upon it at
this time and in this place.” A steely silence thereupon settled over the
dialogue between Quincy and Monticello for the following eight years.
10
D
URING THAT
time Jefferson was too busy
to indulge in retrospective fretting over the loss of a friend. His first term
as president would go down as one of the most brilliantly successful in
American history, capped off by the Louisiana Purchase (1803), which
effectively doubled the size of the national domain. His second term, on the
other hand, proved to be a series of domestic tribulations and foreign policy
failures, capped off by the infamous Embargo Act (1807), which devastated the
economy while failing to avert the looming war with England. Adams’s
assessment of Jefferson’s presidency mixed fair-minded criticism of his
policies with prejudicial comments on his character:
Mr. Jefferson
has reason to reflect upon himself. How he will get rid of his remorse in
retirement, I know not. He must know that he leaves the government infinitely
worse than he found it, and that from his own error or ignorance. I wish his
telescopes and mathematical instruments, however, may secure his felicity. But
if I have not mismeasured his ambition … the sword will cut away the
scabbard.… I have no resentment against him, although he has honored and
salaried almost every villain he could find who had been an enemy to me.
11
Despite
his brave posturings of nonchalance and indifference, Adams was, in fact,
obsessed with Jefferson’s growing reputation as one of the major figures
of the age. As Adams remembered it, Jefferson had played a decidedly minor role
in the Continental Congress. While he, John Adams, was delivering the fiery
speeches that eventually moved their reluctant colleagues to make the decisive
break with England, Jefferson lingered in the background like a shy schoolboy,
so subdued that “during the whole Time I sat with him in Congress, I
never heard him utter three sentences together.” Now, however, because of
the annual celebrations on July 4, the symbolic significance of the Declaration
of Independence was looming larger in the public memory, blotting out the
messier but more historically correct version of the story, transforming
Jefferson from a secondary character to a star player in the drama. “Was
there ever a Coup de Theatre,” Adams complained, “that had so great
an effect as Jefferson’s Penmanship of the Declaration of
Independence.” Jefferson was an elegant stylist, to be sure, which was
one of the main reasons that he, John Adams, had selected him to draft the
famous document in the first place. But he was not a mover-and-shaker, only a
draftsman; the words he wrote were merely the lyrical expression of ideas that
had been bandied about in the Congress and the various colonial legislatures
for years. Adams had actually led the debate in the Congress that produced its
passage, as Jefferson sat silently and sullenly while the delegates revised his
language. What was really just “a theatrical side show” was now
being enshrined in memory as the defining moment in the revolutionary drama.
“Jefferson ran away with the stage effect,” Adams lamented,
“and all the glory of it.”
12
Adams was
not the kind of man to suffer in silence. His jealousy of Jefferson was
palpable, and his throbbing vanity became patently obvious as he relived the
contested moments from the past in the privacy of his own memory, then reported
on his admittedly self-serving findings to trusted confidants like Benjamin
Rush. For the simple truth was that the aging Sage of Quincy had nothing else
to do. Jefferson had the all-consuming duties of the presidency, then two major
retirement projects—the completion of his architectural renovations of
Monticello and the creation of the University of Virginia. But the sole project
for Adams lay within himself. His focus, indeed his obsession, was the interior
architecture of his own remembrances, the construction of an Adams version of
American history, a spacious room of his own within the American pantheon.
He was doing what we would now call therapy: thrashing about inside himself
in endless debate with his internal demons while seated by the fireside in what
he self-mockingly called “my throne”; twitching in and out of
control as he attempted to compose his autobiography, which turned into a
series of salvos at his political enemies (Hamilton, no surprise, was the chief
target) and ended, literally in midsentence, when he realized that it was all
catharsis and no coherence; outraging his old friend Mercy Otis Warren with
embarrassing tantrums because her three-volume
History of the American
Revolution
(1805) failed to make him the major player in the story. Warren
responded in kind: “I am so much at a loss for the meaning of your
paragraphs, and the rambling manner in which your angry and undigested letters
are written,” she explained, “that I scarcely know where to begin
my remarks.” Warren concluded with a scathing diagnosis of the Adams
correspondence with her as a scattered series of verbal impulses and “the
most captious, malignant, irrelevant compositions that have ever been
seen.”
Undeterred, he launched another round of his memoirs in
the
Boston Patriot,
designed to “set the record straight,”
an act that quickly gave rise to another cascade of emotional eruptions.
“Let the jackasses bray or laugh at this,” he declared defiantly:
“I am in a fair way to give my criticks and enemies food enough to glut
their appetites.… I take no notice of their billingsgate.” While
drafting the nearly interminable essays for the
Patriot,
he compared
himself to a wild animal who had “grabbed the end of a cord with his
teeth, and was drawn slowly up by pulleys, through a storm of squills,
crackers, and rockets, flashing and blazing around him every moment,” and
although the “scorching flames made him groan, and mourn, and roar, he
would not let go.” He was, to put it bluntly, driving himself half-crazy
in frantic but futile attempts at self-vindication. Every effort to redeem his
reputation only confirmed what Hamilton had claimed in his infamous pamphlet
during the presidential campaign of 1800—namely, that Adams was an
inherently erratic character who often lacked control over his own emotional
impulses.
13
In 1805
Adams resumed a correspondence with Benjamin Rush, in which he actually seemed
to embrace that very conclusion: “There have been many times in my life
when I have been so agitated in my own mind,” Adams confessed, “as
to have no consideration at all of the light in which my words, actions, and
even writings would be considered by others.… The few traces that remain
of me must, I believe, go down to posterity in much confusion and distraction,
as my life has been passed.” The correspondence with Rush, which lasted
for eight years, permitted Adams to confront his personal demons and exorcise
them in a series of remarkable exchanges that, taken together, are the most
colorful, playful, and revealing letters he ever wrote. Rush set the terms for
what became a high-stakes game of honesty by proposing that they dispense with
the usual topics and report to each other on their respective dreams.
14
Adams leapt
at the suggestion and declared himself prepared to match his old friend
“dream for dream.” Rush began with “a singular dream”
set in 1790 and focusing on a crazed derelict who was promising a crowd that he
could “produce rain and sunshine and cause the wind to blow from any
quarter he pleased.” Rush interpreted this eloquent lunatic as a symbolic
figure representing all those political leaders in the infant nation who
claimed they could shape public opinion. Adams subsequently countered: “I
dreamed that I was mounted on a lofty scaffold in the center of a great plain
in Versailles, surrounded by an innumerable congregation of five and twenty
millions.” But the crowd was not comprised of people. Instead, they were
all “inhabitants of the royal menagerie,” including lions,
elephants, wildcats, rats, squirrels, whales, sharks—the litany went on
for several paragraphs—who then proceeded to tear one another to pieces
as he tried to lecture them on the advantages of “the unadulterated
principles of liberty, equality and fraternity among all living
creatures.” At the end of the dream, he was forced to flee the scene with
“my clothes torn from my back and my skin lacerated from head to
foot.”
15
As befits a
dialogue framed around reports from the subconscious regions, the Adams-Rush
correspondence tended to emphasize the power of the irrational. Adams recalled
a French barber in Boston who used the phrase “a little crack,”
meaning slightly crazy: “I have long thought the philosophers of the
eighteenth century and almost all the men of science and letters
‘crack’ … and that the sun, moon, and stars send all their
lunatics here for confinement.” Then, ever playful with Rush, Adams
signed off with the following self-deprecating joke: “I must tell you
that my wife, who took a fancy to read this letter upon my table, bids me tell
you that she ‘thinks my head, too, a little crack,’ and I am half
of that mind myself.”
16
Adams had a
lifelong tendency to view the world “out there” as a projection of
the emotions he felt swirling inside himself. The overriding honesty and
intimacy of the correspondence with Rush permitted this projection to express
itself without restraint. The question he had posed to others, simultaneously
poignant and pathetic, had the authentic ring of a
cri de coeur:
“How is it that I, poor ignorant I, must stand before Posterity as
differing from all the other great Men of the Age?” In his monthly
exchanges with Rush, Adams worked out his answer to that question. There is a
Mad Hatter character to the Adams-Rush correspondence, as both men swapped
stories and shared anecdotes in a kind of “Adams and Rush in
Wonderland” mode. But there was a deadly serious insight buried within
the comedy.
17
The insight
was precocious, anticipating as it did the distinction between history as
experienced and history as remembered, most famously depicted in Leo
Tolstoy’s
War and Peace.
(The core insight—that all
seamless historical narratives are latter-day constructions—lies at the
center of all postmodern critiques of traditional historical explanations.)
Under Rush’s prodding influence and in response to his dreamy
inspirations, Adams realized that the act of transforming the American
Revolution into history placed a premium on selecting events and heroes that
fit neatly into a dramatic formula, thereby distorting the more tangled and
incoherent experience that participants actually making the history felt at the
time. Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence was a
perfect example of such dramatic distortions. The Revolution in this romantic
rendering became one magical moment of inspiration, leading inexorably to the
foregone conclusion of American independence.
As Adams remembered it,
on the other hand, “all the great critical questions about men and
measures from 1774 to 1778” were desperately contested and highly
problematic occasions, usually “decided by the vote of a single state,
and that vote was often decided by a single individual.” Nothing was
clear, inevitable, or even comprehensible to the soldiers in the field at
Saratoga or the statesmen in the corridors at Philadelphia: “It was
patched and piebald policy then, as it is now, ever was, and ever will be,
world without end.” The real drama of the American Revolution, which was
perfectly in accord with Adams’s memory as well as with the turbulent
conditions of his own soul, was its inherent messiness. This meant recovering
the exciting but terrifying sense that all the major players had at the
time—namely, that they were making it up as they went along, improvising
on the edge of catastrophe.
18
Adams
derived his authority for a deconstructed version of the American Revolution
from his incontestable claim to have been “present at the
creation.” He had been a participant during most, if not all, of the
crucial moments from the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 to his own retirement from
the presidency in 1801. And he knew all the major players personally. This
conferred instant credibility upon his preferred role as designated truth
teller, poised to expose the chaotic reality beneath all uplifting accounts of
the Revolution. Support for American independence, for example, was always
fragile and shifted with each victory or defeat in the field, which was often a
matter of pure luck. Or the decision to locate the national capital on the
Potomac was a back-room deal involving so many secret bargains and bribes that
no one would ever unravel the full story.
19
In the same
vein, all the heroic portraits of the great men were romanticized distortions.
Franklin, for example, was a superb scientist and masterful prose stylist, to
be sure, but also a vacuous political thinker and diplomatic fraud, who spent
the bulk of his time in Paris flirting with younger women of the salon set.
Washington was an indisputable American patriarch, but more an actor than a
leader, brilliant at striking poses “in a strain of Shakespearean
… excellence at dramatic exhibitions.” He was also poorly read,
seldom wrote his own speeches, and, according to one member of his cabinet,
“could not write a sentence without misspelling some word.” In
general, the Virginians were the chief beneficiaries of all the highly stylized
histories, though, as Adams observed, “not a lad upon the Highlands is
more clannish than every Virginian I have ever known.” Virginians were
also the most adept at employing what Adams called “puffers,” what
we would call “spinners” or public-relations experts. “These
puffers, Rush, are the only killers of scandal,” Adams noted. “You
and I have never employed them, and therefore scandal has prevailed against
us.” When Rush somewhat mischievously suggested that Adams himself
enjoyed the support of Federalist “puffers,” specifically
mentioning William Cobbett, Adams pleaded total ignorance: “Now I assure
you upon my honor and the faith of the friendship between us that I never saw
the face of Cobbett; and that I should not know him if I met him in my porridge
dish.”
20