Authors: Joseph J. Ellis
This last
remark, while vintage Adams-Rush banter, also exposed the painfully egotistical
motives lurking beneath the entire Adams campaign for a more realistic,
nonmythologized version of the American Revolution. While his insistence on a
deconstructed history was certainly a precocious intellectual insight, there is
also no question that the Adams urge to discredit the dramatic renderings of
the revolutionary era was driven by his own wounded vanity. To put it squarely,
such versions of the story failed to provide
him
with a starring role
in the drama. At its nub, his critique of the historical fictions circulating
as seductive truths was much like a campaign to smash all the statues, because
the sculptor had failed to render a satisfactory likeness of yours truly.
On the other hand, Adams possessed a congenital affinity for deconstructed
interpretations of history, of his own life, indeed of practically everything.
It was the way he saw the world. By temperament, he was inherently impulsive,
highly combustible, instinctively irreverent. All his major published works on
political philosophy, including his
Defence of the Constitution of the
United States of America
and
Discourses on Davila,
along with his
unpublished autobiography, lacked coherent form. They were less books than
notebooks, filled with rambling transcriptions of his own internal
conversations that ricocheted off one another at unpredictable angles. While
his most devoted enemies, chiefly Franklin and Hamilton, claimed that his
erratic habits of mind were symptomatic of mental illness, some recent
scholarship has suggested the problem was physical, that he might well have
been afflicted with hyperthyroidism, or Graves’ disease. For our
purposes, however, the ultimate cause of the condition is less important than
its systemic manifestation, which was a congenital inability to separate his
thoughts from his feelings about them. This caused him to mistrust all purely
rational descriptions of human behavior as incompatible with the more
passionate stirrings he felt within his own personality. As he told Rush,
“Deceive not thyself. There is not an old friar in France, not in Europe,
who looks on a blooming young virgin with
sang-froid.
” These
same internal stirrings also predisposed him to regard all perfectly
symmetrical narratives or stories preaching an obvious moral message and
populated by larger-than-life heroes as utter fabrications. Like straight lines
in nature, such things did not exist for him.
21
They did,
however, for his former friend at Monticello, who had spent the bulk of his
adult life keeping his head and his heart in separate chambers of his
personality. Starting in 1807, Jefferson’s name began to come up
sporadically in Adams’s letters to Rush. Prior to that time, Jefferson
had remained a forbidden subject. When asked to comment on his renowned
partnership with Jefferson during the early days of the American Revolution,
Adams developed a standard statement of denial: “You are much mistaken
when you say that no man living have so much knowledge of Mr. Jefferson’s
transactions as myself,” Adams insisted. “I know but little
concerning him.” With Rush, however, Adams began to slip Jefferson into
their conversation as an example of the kind of enigmatic temperament destined
to flourish in the history books.
22
He recalled
Jefferson’s retirement from the Washington administration in 1793, quite
obviously a shrewd tactical retreat designed to position Jefferson for his
ascent “toward the summit of the pyramid”—that is, the
presidency—but which was described by the Republican press “as
unambitious, unavaricious, and perfectly disinterested.” Somehow,
Jefferson was even able to persuade himself that he was beyond temptation and
happily ensconced on his mountaintop for the duration. “When a man has
one of the two greatest parties in a nation interested in representing him to
be disinterested,” Adams observed with amazement, “even those who
believe it to be a lie will repeat it so often to one another that at last they
will seem to believe it to be true.”
23
The same
pattern materialized later in the 1790s, when Jefferson embraced two misguided
propositions about European affairs. The first was that England was
“tottering to her fall,” that her economy was collapsing and
“she must soon be a bankrupt and unable to maintain her naval
superiority.” The second misguided opinion, “still more erroneous
and still more fatal,” was that France was the wave of the future, that
she “would establish a free republican government and even a leveling
democracy, and that monarchy and nobility would forever be abolished in
France,” all of which would occur peacefully and bloodlessly. In both
instances, events proved Jefferson wrong. In both instances Adams had disagreed
with Jefferson and been proven right. But despite his underestimation of
England and his overestimation of France, Jefferson’s reputation and
popularity soared. “I have reason to remember it,” Adams recalled,
“because my opinion of the French Revolution produced a coldness towards
me in all my Revolutionary friends, and an inclination towards Mr. Jefferson,
which broke out in violent invectives and false imputations upon me and in
flattering panegyrics upon Mr. Jefferson.”
Once again, Jefferson
seemed uniquely equipped to become the chief beneficiary of romanticized
versions of history, in part because his own capacity for self-deception
permitted him to deny, and with utter sincerity, the vanities and ambitions
lurking in his own soul, and in part because the moralistic categories that
shaped all his political thinking fit perfectly the romantic formula that
history writing seemed to require. The fact that these categories were blatant
illusions (for example, the French Revolution was not a European version of the
American Revolution) seemed to matter less than the fact that they confirmed a
potent and seductive mythology that was more appealing than the messier
reality. Through some complex combination of duplicity and disposition,
Jefferson had come to embody the will to believe. He was not so much living a
lie as living a fiction that he had come to believe himself.
24
Adams had
come to see himself as the mirror image of Jefferson: “Mausoleums,
statues monuments will never be erected to me,” he wrote with resignation
to Rush. “Panegyrical romances will never be written, nor flattering
orations spoken, to transmit me to posterity in brilliant colors. No, nor in
true colors. All but the last I loathe.” Facing that unattractive truth
took time, a full decade of shouting and pouting, relieved by converting his
despair into comedy with Rush, but it also came naturally to Adams, whose
entire career had been spent preaching the unattractive truths to everybody
else. If Jefferson seemed predestined to tell people what they wanted to hear,
Adams now acknowledged that his own destiny was just the opposite: to tell them
what they needed to know.
25
This was
Adams’s resigned but bittersweet mood in 1809, when Rush reported his
most amazing dream yet. He dreamed that Adams had written a short letter to
Jefferson, congratulating him on his recent retirement from public life.
Jefferson had then responded to this magnanimous gesture with equivalent
graciousness. The two great patriarchs had then engaged in a correspondence
over several years in which they candidly acknowledged their mutual mistakes,
shared their profound reflections on the meaning of American independence, and
recovered their famous friendship. Then the two philosopher-kings “sunk
into the grave nearly at the same time, full of years and rich in the gratitude
and praises of their country … and to their numerous merits and honors
posterity has added that they were rival friends.”
26
Adams
responded immediately: “A DREAM AGAIN! I have no other objection to your
dream but that it is not history. It may be prophecy.” Then he offered a
satirical account of his relationship with Jefferson, claiming that
“there has never been the smallest interruption of the personal
friendship between Mr. Jefferson that I know of.” This convenient lie was
then followed by a humorous piece of bravado: “You should remember that
Jefferson was but a boy to me. I was at least ten years older than him in age
and more than twenty years older in politics. I am bold to say I was his
preceptor in politics and taught him everything that was good and solid in his
whole political conduct.” How could one hold a grudge against a disciple?
On the other hand, given Jefferson’s junior status, was it not more
appropriate for him to initiate the reconciliation? “If I should receive
a letter from him,” Adams concluded tartly, “I should not fail to
acknowledge and answer it.” Jefferson, in short, would have to extend the
hand first.
27
That was not
going to happen. Rush was simultaneously writing Jefferson, somewhat
misleadingly suggesting that Adams had indicated he was now eager for a
reconciliation and virtually on his deathbed: “I am sure an advance on
your side will be a cordial to the heart of Mr. Adams,” Rush explained.
“Tottering over the grave, he now leans wholly upon the shoulders of his
old Revolutionary friends.” But Jefferson would not rise to the bait,
convinced as he was after his earlier exchange with Abigail that he had already
made a heroic effort that had been summarily rejected. It was now Adams’s
turn to attempt a bridging of the gap. That was how it stood for more than two
ensuing years: the two sages circling each other, marking off their territory
like old dogs, sniffing around the edges of a possible reconciliation,
reluctant to close the distance.
28
The distance
was reduced in 1811 when Edward Coles, a Jefferson protégé who
was attempting, in vain it turned out, to persuade his mentor to assume a more
forthright position opposing slavery, visited Adams in Quincy. Adams let it be
known that his political disagreements with Jefferson had never killed his
affection for the man. “I always loved Jefferson,” he told Coles,
“and still love him.” When word of this exchange reached Jefferson,
as Adams knew it would, Jefferson declared his conversion. “This is
enough for me,” he wrote Rush, adding that he knew Adams to be
“always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes incorrect and
precipitate in his judgments.” This latter caveat rewidened the gap that
the earlier statement had seemed to close. The gap became a chasm when
Jefferson went on to explain that he had always valued Adams’s judgment,
“with the single exception as to his political opinions,” a
statement roughly equivalent to claiming that the Pope was otherwise
infallible, except when he declared himself on matters of faith and
morals.
29
On Christmas Day of 1811, Adams apprised Rush that he was fully aware of
the benevolent duplicities Rush was performing as intermediary: “I
perceive plainly, Rush, that you have been teasing Jefferson to write me, as
you did me to write him.” Adams also knew full well that Rush was sending
edited versions of his letters to Jefferson, removing the potentially offensive
passages. In the Christmas letter Adams reviewed the full range of political
disagreements with Jefferson, mixing together serious controversies (for
example, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the French Revolution, the American navy)
with a lighthearted list of personal differences (for example, Adams held
levees once a week as president, while Jefferson’s entire presidency was
a levee; Jefferson thought liberty favored straight hair, while Adams thought
curled hair “just as republican as straight”). That was the tone
Adams wanted to convey to Jefferson: still feisty and critical of
Jefferson’s principles and policies, but fully capable of controlling the
dialogue with humor and diplomatic nonchalance; the fires still burned, but the
great volcano of the revolutionary generation was at last in remission.
30
In the end,
it was Adams who made the decisive move. On January 1, 1812, a short but
cordial note went out from Quincy to Monticello, relaying family news and
referring to “two pieces of Homespun” coming along by separate
packet. Rush was ecstatic, as well as fully convinced that he had orchestrated
a reconciliation: “I rejoice in the correspondence which has taken place
between you and your old friend Mr. Jefferson,” he declared triumphantly
to Adams. “I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the
American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and
establish it but you and Mr. Jefferson
thought
for us all.”
Adams went along with the celebratory mood, hiding his pride behind a mask of
jokes and the rather fraudulent pretense that his famous friendship with
Jefferson had never really been interrupted: “Your dream is out …
your prophecy fulfilled! You have worked wonders! You have made peace between
powers that were never at Enmity.… In short, the mighty defunct
Potentates of Mount Wollaston and Monticello by your sorceries … are
again in being.” In the same self-consciously jocular style he soon began
to refer to his Quincy estate as “Montezillo,” which he claimed
meant “very little mountain,” in deference to Jefferson’s
Monticello, which meant “little mountain.” He insisted that Rush
was making more of the reunion with Jefferson than it deserved. Nothing
momentous or historic was at stake. “It was only as if one sailor had met
a brother sailor, after twenty-five years’ absence,” Adams joked,
“and had accosted him, how fare you, Jack?”
31
Nothing
could have been further from the truth. Adams’s ever-vibrating vanities
were now, true enough, under some measure of control. But his dismissive
posture toward the rupture in the friendship—what breech and what
betrayal?—was obviously only a bravado pose. Even the start of the
correspondence exposed the awkward tensions just below the surface. Jefferson
presumed, quite plausibly, that the “two pieces of Homespun” Adams
was sending along referred to domestically produced clothing, a nice symbol of
the American economic response to the embargo and a fitting reminder of the
good old days when Adams and Jefferson had first joined the movement for
American independence. And so Jefferson responded with a lengthy treatise on
the merits of domestic manufacturing and grand memories of the nonimportation
movement in the 1760s, only to discover that Adams had intended the homespun
reference as a metaphor. His gift turned out to be a copy of John
Quincy’s recent two-volume work,
Lectures on Rhetoric and
Oratory.