Authors: Joseph J. Ellis
The dominant legacy, of course, was avoidance and silence. Jefferson
objected so strenuously to the debate over the Missouri question because it
violated that legacy. “In the gloomiest moments of the Revolutionary
War,” he wrote in 1820, “I never had any apprehensions equal to
what I feel from this source.” In their last exchange on the topic, Adams
suggested that he, too, would observe the unwritten code and carry his concerns
to the grave: “Slavery in this Country I have seen hanging over it like a
black cloud for half a Century.… I might probably say I had seen Armies
of Negroes marching and counter-marching in the air, shining in Armour. I have
been so terrified with this Phenomenon that I constantly said in former times
to the Southern Gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object; I must leave it to
you. I will vote for forcing no measure against your judgments.” Neither
the Revolution nor the infant republic could have succeeded without the support
of the southern states, so Adams had deferred to the Virginians to assume
leadership of the antislavery movement. By 1820 it was abundantly clear that
they had failed in this mission, with Jefferson himself the most visible symbol
of the failure. But Adams chose to keep his vow of silence, at least with
Jefferson, thereby honoring the etiquette of the friendship above his moral
reservations, and simultaneously making the dialogue between Quincy and
Monticello a final testament to the most problematic legacy of the
revolutionary generation.
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T
HE CORRESPONDENCE
lost its
argumentative edge and shifted back to an elegiac, still-life pattern after
1820. One final flurry occurred in 1819, when a document appeared in the
newspapers purportedly drafted by a group of citizens in Mecklenburg County,
North Carolina, in May of 1775, and containing language eerily similar to
Jefferson’s later draft of the Declaration of Independence. Adams called
Jefferson’s attention to the discovery, noting that he wished he had
known about it back then: “I would have made the Hall of Congress Echo
and re-echo, with it fifteen Months before your Declaration of
Independence.” Nothing could have been better calculated to activate all
of Jefferson’s interior antennae, since his primacy as the author of the
Declaration was his major claim to everlasting fame. He responded promptly,
insisting that “this paper is a fabrication,” urging Adams to
remain skeptical “until positive and solemn proof of its authenticity
shall be provided.” Adams quickly reassured Jefferson that he now
believed “that the Mecklenburg Resolutions are a fiction.”
Meanwhile, however, he was telling other correspondents quite the opposite.
“I could as soon believe that the dozen flowers of the Hydrangia now
before my Eyes were the work of chance,” he joked, “as that the
Mecklenburg Resolutions and Mr. Jefferson’s declaration were not derived
one from the other.”
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Adams
himself derived great satisfaction from the Mecklenburg incident, not so much
because he believed Jefferson was a plagiarist, but because he thought the
whole emphasis on one man, one moment, and one document distorted the true
story of the American Revolution. Even though the Mecklenburg Declaration was
subsequently exposed as a forgery, it accurately reflected the Adams sense that
there were multiple venues or theaters where the drama of the movement for
independence was playing out and multiple culminating moments besides July 4,
1776. In his own memoirs he had selected May 15, 1776, as the most decisive
moment, because that was the day the Continental Congress passed a resolution
calling for new constitutions in each of the states. (Not so coincidentally,
Adams had drafted and moved the resolution.) In the Adams version, this
decision was truly decisive because it created separate and independent
American governments. It also meant that the Revolution was a responsible and
positive commitment to new forms of political discipline rooted in the
experience of the old colonial governments, not just a negative assertion of
separation from England and a complete break with the past, as
Jefferson’s Declaration seemed to suggest. According to Adams, the
Revolution succeeded because of its ties to the past, which meant that, in the
Jeffersonian sense, it was not really a revolution at all.
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Though the
brief exchange over the Mecklenburg Declaration touched on these significant
differences of opinion, the diplomatic imperatives of the dialogue ruled out
full disclosure. By 1820 even Adams had stopped firing off his illumination
rounds and had adopted the Jeffersonian posture of benign duplicity, preferring
to risk hypocrisy rather than the friendship. Though his prose remained
pungent, the more dangerous bursts of candor had subsided, especially after
Abigail passed away in October of 1818. (As she lay in bed dying, Adams
remained composed but told the gathered relatives, “I wish I could lay
down beside her and die too.”) Jefferson had always claimed that each
generation should not linger beyond its allotted time, that one had almost a
moral obligation to clear the ground for the next generation by placing oneself
beneath it. Now both patriarchs seemed to sense that they had outlived their
time. Looking back on life, wrote Jefferson, was “like looking over a
field of battle. All, all dead: and ourselves left alone amidst a new
generation whom we know not, and who know not us.”
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The
vicissitudes of aging began to crowd out the more controversial topics.
“Crippled wrists and fingers make writing slow and laborious,”
Jefferson complained. “But while writing to you, I lose the sense of
these things, in the recollection of ancient times, when youth and health made
happiness out of every thing. I forget for awhile the hoary winter of age when
we can think of nothing but how to keep ourselves warm, and how to get rid of
our heavy hours until the friendly hand of death shall rid us of all at
once.” Adams agreed that memories of the past were all that was left, and
he too preferred to remember only the good ones: “I look back with
rapture to those golden days when Virginia and Massachusetts lived and acted
together like a band of brothers,” he recalled, and though the end was
near, “While I breath I shall be your friend.”
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They
referred to life in the hereafter, not as a chance to see God so much as an
opportunity to converse with each other and the other “band of
brothers.” As Jefferson put it, “May we meet there again …
with our antient Colleagues, and receive with them the seal of
approbation.” Adams concurred that the reunion in heaven would permit
them to laugh at their human follies and foibles, though he would talk with
Franklin only after the great man did proper penance for his sins. Neither man
was completely convinced that heaven was anything more than a metaphor. Adams
was on record as thinking that the belief in life everlasting was more
important than the thing itself. “If it would be revealed or demonstrated
that there is no future state,” he apprised one friend, “my advice
to every man, woman, and child would be, as our existence would be in our own
power, to take opium.” Or as he put it to Jefferson, “if we are
disappointed, we shall never know it.” Each man was hedging his bets on
the hereafter by preparing his private papers for posterity, the one place
where they knew their prospects of immortality were assured. And both men
regarded the letters they were writing to each other as the capstone to that
final project.
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There is no
question that the emotional bond between the two patriarchs was restored and
the friendship recovered toward the end. They no longer had to pose as
partners; or what amounts to the same thing, the posing reflected a deeply felt
sense of affinity. In part, the bonding occurred because the correspondence of
their twilight years permitted both sages to confront and argue out their
different notions of the history they had lived and made together. Jefferson
had made his amends and some crucial concessions. Adams had expressed his
feisty and passionate objections to the Jeffersonian constructions in one last
catharsis. One would like to believe, and there is some basis for the belief,
that each man came to recognize in the other the intellectual and temperamental
qualities lacking in himself; that they, in effect, completed each other; that
only when joined could the pieces of the story of the American Revolution come
together to make a whole. But the more mundane truth is that they never faced
and therefore never fully resolved all their political differences; they simply
outlived them.
At the start of the correspondence Adams had felt deep
resentment toward Jefferson for the libels he had sponsored during the Adams
presidency. By 1823 the whole subject of scandal had become a nostalgic joke.
Adams read in the newspapers that Jefferson had compiled “a Magazine of
slips of newspapers, and pamphlets, vilifying, calumniating and defaming
you.” This was an inspired idea that Adams wished he had had first:
“What a dunce I have been all my days, and what lubbers my Children, and
Grand Children, were, that none of us have ever thought to make a similar
collection. If we had I am confident I could have produced a more splendid Mass
than yours.” Jefferson regretted to inform Adams that the story was
untrue; he had not compiled a collection of the libels against himself. If he
had, however, “it would not indeed have been a single volume, but an
Encyclopedia in bulk.”
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They had
become living relics. In 1824 the Marquis de Lafayette, the great French
champion of American independence, paid a final visit to America. Monticello
and Quincy were obligatory stops on his tour. In each location the reunion drew
large crowds, in which witnesses claimed they saw two ghosts from a bygone era
materializing one final time for the benefit of the present generation. The
American sculptor John Henri Browere also visited both sages, who were asked to
sit for “life masks” designed to produce reliable likenesses of
their faces and heads—in effect, to make realistic icons of the icons.
(Jefferson found the process, which required pouring successive coats of a hot
plasterlike liquid over the head, so uncomfortable that he vowed to “bid
adieu for ever to busts and portraits.”) His final adieu to Adams
conveyed the same strange sense of being regarded as living statues. He
entrusted his last letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who was
traveling to Boston and would make a stop in Quincy: “Like other young
people, he wishes to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to
those around him what he has learnt of the Heroic age preceding his birth, and
which of the Argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.” For
most Americans coming of age in the 1820s, the American Revolution had long
since been enshrined as a sacred moment in the distant past, when a gallery of
heroes had been privileged to see God face-to-face. It was awkward to realize
that a few of them were still alive.
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But they
were. And as the fiftieth anniversary of Independence Day approached, requests
poured into Monticello and Quincy from across the land, asking the patriarchs
to share their wisdom and memories about the meaning of it all. Though
seriously ill with an intestinal disorder that would eventually prove fatal,
Jefferson summoned up the energy for one final spasm of eloquence. For several
days, he worked over the draft of a letter to the committee responsible for the
Independence Day ceremonies in Washington, crossing out and revising the
language with as much attention to detail as he had given the original
Declaration. He regretted that his deteriorating health prevented him from
attending the ceremonies in person and joining “the small band, the
remnant of that host of worthies who joined with us on that day.” (Only
three of the original signers survived: Adams, Jefferson, and Charles Carroll
of Maryland.) Then he offered the Jeffersonian version of what the “host
of worthies” had done:
May it be to the world, what I believe
it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the
signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and
superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings
and security of self-government.… All eyes are opened or opening to the
rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open
to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born
with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to
ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for
others; for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our
recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.
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Here was
the vintage Jeffersonian vision. It viewed the American Revolution as an
explosion that dislodged America from England, from Europe, from the past
itself, the opening shot in a global struggle for liberation from all forms of
oppression that was destined to sweep around the world. In this formulation,
all forms of authority not originating within the self were stigmatized and
placed on the permanent defensive. The American Revolution had not just
repudiated the tyranny of the English king and Parliament; it had defied all
political institutions with coercive powers of any sort, including the kind of
national government established by the Federalists in the 1790s.
The
inspirational rhetoric of the statement was not original. The phrases
“saddles on their backs” and “a favored few, booted and
spurred” had been lifted from a famous speech delivered by Col. Richard
Rumbold, a Puritan soldier convicted of treason in 1685, who spoke the words
from the gallows. Jefferson owned several copies of English histories that
reprinted the Rumbold speech. (Perhaps as a dying man, like Rumbold, Jefferson
thought he had every right to claim a favorite piece of eloquence as his own.)
But the borrowed rhetoric was only one small feature of a uniquely Jeffersonian
message that was
inherently
rhetorical in character—that is, it
framed the issues at a rarefied altitude, where all answers were self-evident
and no real choices had to be made. And that was the ultimate source of its
beguiling charm. The Jeffersonian vision floated. It functioned at
inspirational levels above the bedeviling particularities, like a big bang
theory of the American Revolution, now destined to expand throughout the world
naturally and inevitably, no longer in doubt or in human hands.
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