Joseph J. Ellis (39 page)

A
DAMS REMAINED
on his best behavior for over a year. There were a few brief flurries, chiefly jabs at Jefferson’s failure to prepare the nation for the War of 1812, especially his negligence in building up the American navy, which had always been an Adams hobbyhorse. Ever diplomatic, Jefferson never quite conceded that Adams had been right about a larger navy, but when the American fleet won some early battles in the war, Jefferson graciously noted that “the success of our little navy … must be more gratifying to you than to most men, as having been the early and constant advocate of wooden walls.” The
potentially explosive issues lay buried further back in the past. Both men recognized that touching them placed the newly established reconciliation at risk.
³⁷

The first Adams eruption occurred in June of 1813, followed immediately by a chain reaction of explosions over the ensuing six months. (Adams wrote thirty letters, Jefferson five.) The detonating device was publication of a letter Jefferson had written in 1801 to Joseph Priestley, the English scientist and renowned critic of Christianity. In that letter Jefferson had mentioned Adams in passing as a retrograde thinker opposed to all forms of progress, one of the “ancients” rather than “moderns.” “The sentiment that you have attributed to me in your letter to Dr. Priestley I totally disclaim,” Adams protested, “and I demand in the French sense of the word demand of you the proof.” Sensing that Adams was in mid-explosion, Jefferson responded at length. The Priestley letter was “a confidential communication” that was “never meant to trouble the public mind.” He then went on to remind Adams that the party wars were still raging back then, that both sides had been guilty of some rather extreme denunciations of the others, and that his real target had been the Federalists, who had defamed his own notions of government as dangerous innovations.
³⁸

Then came the crucial acknowledgment and quasi-apology. Adams had been targeted for criticism because he was the standard-bearer for the Federalist party. But Jefferson had always realized that Adams did not fit into the party grooves: “I happened to cite it from you, [though] the whole letter shows I had them only in view,” Jefferson explained. “In truth, my dear Sir, we were far from considering you as the author of all the measures we blamed. They were placed under the protection of your name, but we were satisfied they wanted much of your approbation.” (Notice the collective “we,” an inadvertent acknowledgment of the coordinated campaign of the Republican party.) Adams, in effect, happened to be in the line of fire, which was really directed at the Hamiltonian wing of the Federalist party: “You would do me great injustice therefore,” Jefferson concluded, “by taking to yourself what was intended for men who were your secret, as they are now your open enemies.”
³⁹

Jefferson’s explanation was ingenious. It shifted the blame for the rupture of the friendship onto the Hamiltonians, whom he knew
Adams utterly despised, then invited Adams to align himself, at least retrospectively, with the Republican side of the debate. The trouble with Adams, of course, was that he was unwilling to align himself with any political party; indeed, his trademark had always been to embody the virtuous ideal, the Washington quasi-monarchical model of executive leadership, and stand above party. The clear, if unspoken, message of Jefferson’s letter was that this admirable posture was no longer possible in American politics. Adams had gotten himself caught in the cross fire created by the new conditions and the partisan imperatives they generated. Most important, from the point of view of the friendship, Jefferson admitted that his behind-the-scenes criticism of Adams had been a willful misrepresentation. While not really an apology—indeed, forces beyond his control had dictated his actions—this was at least a major concession.

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:

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 18131814 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