Authors: Joseph J. Ellis
Adams’s immediate impulse was to fire off
several illumination rounds designed to expose the inaccuracies in
Jefferson’s account of the Adams presidency, inaccuracies that Jefferson
had already acknowledged: “I have no thought, in this correspondence, but
to satisfy you and myself,” Adams observed, adding, “My Reputation
has been so much the Sport of the public for fifty years and will be with
Posterity, that I hoped it a bubble a Gossameur, that idles in the wanton
Summer Air.” Jefferson had mentioned the Alien and Sedition Acts as a
major source of partisan hatred. “As your name is subscribed to that law,
as Vice President,” Adams declared, “and mine as President, I know
not why you are not as responsible for it as I am.” Jefferson had used
the phrase “the Terrorism of the day” to describe the supercharged
atmosphere of the late 1790s. Adams launched into a frenzied recollection of
the mobs gathered around his house, protesting his decision to send a peace
delegation to France: “I have no doubt you was fast asleep in
philosophical Tranquillity,” Adams noted caustically, “when ten
thousand People, and perhaps many more, were parading the Streets of
Philadelphia.… What think you of Terrorism, Mr. Jefferson?”
Jefferson had blamed the Federalists for the lion’s share of the party
mischief. Adams thought the blame was equally shared: “Both parties have
excited artificial Terrors,” he concluded, “and if I were summoned
as a Witness to say upon Oath … I could not give a more sincere Answer,
than in the vulgar Style. ‘Put them in a bagg and shake them, and then
see which comes out first.’ ” However anachronistic it might
seem to Jefferson, he, John Adams, would go to his grave defying party
politics.
40
This was the
defining moment in the correspondence. In the summer of 1813 the dialogue
ceased being a still-life picture of posed patriarchs and became an argument
between competing versions of the revolutionary legacy. All the unmentionable
subjects were now on the table because a measure of mutual trust had been
recovered. The best bellwether of the Adams psyche was always Abigail, and on
July 15, 1813, she appended a note to her husband’s letter, her first
communication with Jefferson since the lacerating letters she had written him
nine years earlier. “I have been looking for some time for a space in my
good Husbands Letters to add the regards of an old Friend,” she now
wrote, “which are still cherished and preserved through all the changes
and v[ic]issitudes which have taken place since we first became acquainted, and
will I trust remain as long as, A Adams.” Abigail’s voice, as
always, was the surest sign. Jefferson had been forgiven. The friendship, so
long in storage, had never completely died. The recovered sense of common
affection and trust now made it possible to act on Adams’s classic
pronouncement, that they ought not die before they had explained themselves to
each other.
41
Although
Adams tended to set the intellectual agenda in the dialogue that ensued,
Jefferson inadvertently provided the larger framework within which the debate
played out. He was actually trying to make amends for his unfair
characterization of Adams in the Priestley letter as one of the
“ancients.” He now wanted to go on record as agreeing with Adams
that, while the progress of science was indisputable, certain political
principles were eternal verities that the ancients understood as well as the
moderns: “The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have
existed thro’ all time,” he observed. “And in fact the terms
of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history. They denote the
temper and constitution and mind of different individuals.” Was this
Jefferson’s roundabout way of suggesting that he and Adams had in effect
been acting out a timeless political argument? As the lengthy letter proceeded,
it became clear that Jefferson was, in fact, attempting to place his friendship
and eventual rivalry with Adams within a broader context, to see it through the
more detached lens of history.
42
In the
Jeffersonian version of the story, Adams and Jefferson fought
shoulder-to-shoulder against the Tories, served together in Europe as a dynamic
team, then returned to serve again in the new national government. And then the
classic distinction appeared again:
the line of division was again
drawn, we broke into two parties, each wishing to give a different direction to
the government; the one to strengthen the most popular branch, the other the
more permanent branches, and to extend their performance. Here you and I
separated for the first time: and as we had been longer than most in the public
theatre, and our names were more familiar to our countrymen, the party which
considered you as thinking with them placed your name at the head: the other
for the same reason selected mine.… We suffered ourselves, as you so
well expressed it, to be the passive subjects of public discussion. And these
discussions, whether relating to men, measures, or opinions, were conducted by
the parties with an animosity, a bitterness, and an indecency, which had never
been exceeded.… To me then it appears that there have been differences
of opinion, and party differences, from the first establishment of governments,
to the present day; and on the same question which now divides our own country:
that these will continue thro’ all future time: that every one takes his
side in favor of the many, or the few, according to his constitution, and the
circumstances in which he is placed.
43
Here was
the classic Jeffersonian vision, and the beautiful simplicity of its narrative
structure makes it even more clear why Adams was absolutely right to admire
Jefferson’s knack for fitting himself into a story line with immense
appeal to future historians. Jefferson’s mind consistently saw the world
in terms of clashing dichotomies: Whigs versus Tories; moderns versus ancients;
America versus Europe; rural conditions versus urban; whites versus blacks. The
list could go on, but it always came down to the forces of light against the
forces of darkness, with no room for anything in between. What Adams called a
romance was actually a melodrama. And the specific version Jefferson was now
offering Adams cast the Federalists in the role of latter-day Tories who had
betrayed the expansive legacy of the American Revolution, the corrupt guardians
of the privileged “few” aligned defiantly against the Jeffersonian
“many.”
But how could this be? Even Jefferson seemed to
acknowledge that Adams did not quite fit into this rigid formula. “If
your objects and opinions have been misunderstood,” Jefferson noted,
“if the measures and principles of others have been wrongly imputed to
you, as I believe they have been, that you should leave an explanation of them,
would be an act of justice to yourself.” In effect, if Adams had a
different story to tell, if he saw a different pattern in the historical swirl
they had both lived through, he should write out his account and let posterity
judge.
44
Adams, of course, had been trying to do just that for over a decade. And,
as we have seen, the result had been a bewildering jumble of tortured
protestations, endless harangues, and futile displays of wounded pride, all
leading to the rather disquieting conclusion that there was no pattern to be
discovered, only one invented by fiction writers masquerading as historians.
Glimmers of an un-Jeffersonian outline peeked through the cloud of words Adams
had spewed out. The neat divisions between Whigs and Tories did not accord with
the Adams sense of the political landscape during the 1770s. Between a third
and a half of the American people, he guessed, had been indifferent and floated
with the prevailing tide of the moment. The divisions of the 1790s did not
match up with Jefferson’s categories, either, since those supporting and
those opposing a more powerful national government had all been good Whigs.
Certainly neither he nor Washington had viewed themselves as traitors to the
revolutionary cause. They had regarded their Federalist programs as a
fulfillment, rather than a betrayal, of American independence. Nor did
Jefferson’s distinction between the “few” and the
“many” work very well south of the Potomac, except in the ironic
sense that only a few Virginians were willing to address the forbidden subject
that shaped their lives, their fortunes, and that cast a long shadow over their
sacred honor.
But glimmerings do not a story make. Jefferson had a
story. In the absence of a coherent alternative with equivalently compelling
appeal, his story was destined to dominate the history books. Adams sensed that
it was not the true story, even doubted whether such a thing as a true story
existed. But once Jefferson laid it out before him so elegantly in the summer
of 1813, Adams at last possessed a target on which to focus his considerable
firepower. He was utterly hopeless as a grand designer of narratives, and he
knew it. The artifice required to shape a major work of history or philosophy
was not in him. But he was a natural contrarian, a born critic, whose fullest
energies manifested themselves in the act of doing intellectual isometric
exercises against the fixed objects presented by someone else’s ideas.
Jefferson now became the fixed object against which he strained.
The
conversational format of the correspondence with Jefferson also suited his
temperament perfectly, since it permitted topics to pop up, recede, then appear
again episodically, without any pretense of some overall design, the
give-and-take rhythms of the dialogue matching nicely the episodic surgings of
his own mind. As a result, no neatly arranged rendering of the running argument
Adams had with Jefferson after 1813 can do justice to its dynamic character.
All one can do is to identify the major points of contention, then impose a
thematic order that draws out the deeper implications of the argument, all the
while knowing that the coherence that results is itself a construction.
T
HE MAJOR
argument running through the
letters throughout 1813–1814 concerned their different definitions of
social equality and the role of elites in leading and governing the American
republic. Without ever saying so directly, they were talking about themselves
and the other prominent members of the revolutionary generation. The argument
was prompted by Jefferson’s long letter on the “few” and the
“many” and his accompanying assertion that the eternal political
question had always been “Whether the power of the people, or that of the
aristoi
should prevail.” Even the ever-combative Adams realized
that this was heavily mined ground, so he began on an agreeable note.
“Precisely,” he told Jefferson, the distinction between “the
few and the many … was as old as Aristotle,” and the timeless
clash between them was the major reason he believed that the ancients had much
to teach the moderns about politics. Having established some common ground,
Adams then veered off in a direction that had always gotten him into political
trouble—namely, the inevitable role that elites play in making history
happen. He recalled that it was Jefferson himself who had first encouraged him
“to write something upon Aristocracy” when they were together in
London thirty years earlier. “I soon began, and have been writing Upon
that Subject ever since. I have been so unfortunate as never to make myself
understood.”
45
“Your
aristoi,
” he lectured to Jefferson, “are
the most difficult Animals to manage, of anything in the Whole Theory and
practice of Government.” In his
Defence,
Adams had written three
volumes of relentless and seemingly endless prose to show that political power
invariably rested in the hands of a few prominent individuals and families.
Whether it was the feudal barons of medieval France, the landed gentry of
Elizabethan England, the merchant class of colonial New England, or the great
planter families of the Chesapeake, history showed that the many always
deferred to the few. Why? “I say it is the Ordonance of God Almighty, in
the Constitution of human nature, and wrought into the Fabric of the
Universe,” Adams answered. “Philosophers and Politicians may nibble
and quibble, but they will never get rid of it. Their only resource is to
controul it.” In the Adams formulation, aristocracies were to society as
the passions were to the individual personality, permanent fixtures susceptible
to disciplined containment and artful channeling, but never altogether
removable. “You may think you can eliminate it,” Adams warned, but
“Aristocracy like Waterfowl dives for Ages and rises again with brighter
Plumage.” All the Jeffersonian chants about human equality were delusions
that pandered to mankind’s urge to believe an impossible dream.
“Inequalities of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in the
Constitution of Human Nature,” Adams declared, “that no Art or
policy can ever plain them down to a level.”
46
Jefferson’s response took the form of two distinctions that together
pointed in decidedly more optimistic directions. First, he agreed that there
was “a natural aristocracy among men” based on “virtue and
talents.” Then there was an artificial or “pseudo-aristocracy
founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.” Was not
the whole point of the republican experiment they had helped to launch in
America to provide for the selection of the natural aristocrats and block the
ascendance of the artificial pretenders, thereby separating “the wheat
from the chaff”? And had that, in fact, not occurred during and after the
American Revolution, with the “band of brothers” he and Adams had
come to symbolize being the obvious beneficiaries of the republican selection
process?
47
Second, Jefferson suggested that Adams’s description of aristocratic
power was appropriate for Europe, where feudal privileges, family titles, and
more limited economic opportunities created conditions that sustained class
distinctions. In America, on the other hand, there were no feudal barons or
family coats of arms, and “everyone may have land to labor for himself as
he causes,” so the endurance of artificial elites was impossible.
Jefferson noted, somewhat gratuitously, that perhaps in New England vestiges of
feudalism remained and thereby misled Adams. In Massachusetts and Connecticut
there still lingered “a traditional reverence for certain families, which
has rendered the offices of government nearly hereditary in those
families.” In Virginia, however, laws abolishing primogeniture and entail
had been passed during the Revolution. “These laws, drawn by myself, laid
the axe to the root of the Pseudo-aristocracy,” Jefferson claimed,
thereby clearing the ground for the growth of political institutions based on
merit and an admittedly imperfect form of equality of opportunity. Jefferson
concluded on a gracious note. “I have thus stated my opinion on a point
on which we differ,” he observed, “not with a view to controversy,
for we are too old to change opinions which are the result of a long life in
inquiry and reflection; but on the suggestion of a former letter of yours, that
we ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each
other.”
48