Passionate Sage (11 page)

Part of the problem, as Adams saw it, was the inevitably incomplete historical record—the lost documents and the crucial decisions and conversations that never were recorded in the first place. In addition, the contemporary urge to mythologize and romanticize messy realities would undoubtably contaminate future accounts. So the concept of “true history” was an oxymoron. It never existed and never would exist. “It is a common observation in Europe that nothing is so false as modern history,” he told one friend; “I should say nothing is so false as modern history except ancient history and I would add nothing is so false as ancient or modern history in Europe except modern American history.”
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It was perfectly natural for Adams to diagnose a situation as impossible and then proceed to try to do something about it. “Tell Mr. A,” he wrote in 1818 to Louisa Catherine, John Quincy's wife, “that I am assiduously and sedulously employed in Exertions to save him trouble, by collecting all my Papers. What a Mass!” The public and private papers he had saved over the years were, in truth, the largest such collection, by far, preserved by any member of the revolutionary generation. When he composed his autobiography, Adams had begun the habit of inserting original documents and letters into the record. That trickle had become a flood by the time he got to the
Boston Patriot
articles, where readers were bludgeoned to death with stacks of documentary evidence to clinch even minor points, as Adams himself withdrew as narrator and let the primary sources do the talking. The growing tendency to consult his collection of papers reached its logical culmination in the decision to let them, and them alone, speak to posterity.

He described himself to John Quincy as “deeply immersed in researches, not astro[no]mical or mineralogical or metaphysical; but after old Papers. Trunks, Boxes, Desks, Drawers, locked up for thirty years have been broken open because the Keys are lost. Nothing stands in my Way.” The same impulsive energy that had gone into the earlier efforts at self-vindication had at last found the proper outlet, and the proper motive. “Every Scrap shall be found and preserved for your Affliction [or] for your good,” he wrote lecturingly to his son: “I shall leave you an inheritance sufficiently tormenting [that it will make you] Alternately laugh and cry, fret and fume, stamp and scold as they do me.” In one of his last letters to Rush, in 1812, he cried out: “Have mercy on me Posterity, if you should ever see any of my Letters.” But his deepest and most abiding hope was that those letters, uncontaminated by the prejudices of historians, full of the human weaknesses that went with real life, would prove his eventual ticket into the American pantheon.
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W
HEN ADAMS'S GRANDSON
, Charles Francis Adams, sat down in 1850 to write the introduction to his ten-volume edition of the papers and letters that the family patriarch had so meticulously preserved, he too asked, however subtly, for a measure of mercy. “At no time in his life was John Adams a man of many concealments,” he warned readers accustomed to a Victorian code of etiquette and self-restraint. But there was “no hypocrisy in him whilst alive,” he noted correctly, “and it would scarcely be doing him justice to invest him with a share of it after his death.” Then the grandson repeated a refrain that his famous grandfather had shouted to friends and muttered to himself throughout his retirement. “We are beginning to forget that the patriots of former days were men like ourselves,” wrote Charles Francis, “acting and acted upon like the present race, and we are almost irresistibly led to ascribe to them in our imaginations certain gigantic proportions and superhuman qualities, without reflecting that this at once robs their character of consistency and their virtues of all merit.”
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John Adams often made the same point, usually as part of a critical assessment of such heroic patriots as Washington and Franklin, whom Adams considered competitors for a prominent placement in the American pantheon. His argument therefore smacked of jealousy and self-vindication. And especially during the earliest years of his retirement, when his pugnacious energies flowed so fully into the campaign in behalf of his own reputation, the argument had a defensive tone, as if lowering the standards used to measure historic greatness would assist the elevation of his own cause. Or, to put the same point somewhat differently, Adams was complaining that he was being penalized for his candor, that he said out loud what others only whispered, or wrote down what others shrewdly kept to themselves.

There was unquestionably some truth to the notion that Adams felt compelled to reveal himself more fully than any prominent leader of the revolutionary generation. He claimed that his impulsive candor was a life-long habit, that two boyhood friends “used to tell me I had a little capillary vein of satire, meandering about in my soul, and it broke out so strangely, suddenly, and irregularly that it was impossible ever to foresee when it would come or how it would appear.” Certain feelings seemed to move instantaneously from his soul to his mouth or pen, without passing through any filter in his head. Once, when Abigail saw a letter he was writing to Rush in which he was comparing the scientific writers of the day to a group of lunatics who should be confined to an asylum, she told her husband, as Adams reported, “that he ‘thinks my head, too, a little crack[ed].'” (Adams, ever playful with Rush, admitted, “I am half of that mind myself.”) Adams was aware of his reputation for indiscretion, but counted it an intractable part of his personality, beyond redemption. “The astonishment of your Family at my vivacity is very just,” he told Rush, adding: “Nothing is indeed more ridiculous than an old man more than three quarters of a hundred rattling like a boy of fifteen at School or at College. I am ashamed of it yet ten to one I shall fall into it again before I finish this letter.”
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And he invariably did, rattling on with colorful irreverencies that endeared him to friends and often embarrassed the unsuspecting. When, for example, Jefferson mentioned several new theories proposed by European writers on the origin of Native Americans, Adams responded in his typically pungent style. “I should as soon suppose,” he wrote, “that the Prodigal Son, in a frolic with one of his Girls made a trip to America in one of Mother Carey's Eggshells, and left the fruits of their Amours here, as believe any of the grave hypotheses and solemn reasonings of Philosophers or Divines upon the Subject of the Peopling of America.”

The same irreverence applied to great philosophers. When asked his opinion of Plato, he claimed to have learned “Two things only,” even though he had struggled through the original Greek version of
The Republic
with the help of a Latin translation: first, that Franklin's wild idea that farmers and seamen should be exempted from the horrors of war was borrowed, which is to say stolen, from Plato; and second, “that sneezing is a cure for the Hiccups.” Devout Christians got the same treatment when invited to speculate on the possibility that there was no God; he announced that, if it could “be revealed or demonstrated that there is no future state, my advice to every man, woman, and child would be, as our existence would be in our own power, to take opium.”
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Presidential decorum was fair game. Jefferson once bemoaned the self-proclaimed prophets and mystics who took up so much of his time as president. Adams replied that visitors who claimed to be seers had posed no problem for him: “They all assumed the Character of Ambassadors extraordinary from the Almighty; but as I required miracles in proof of their credentials, and they did not perform any, I never gave public Audience to any of them.” Or when, during his final months as president, the Secretary of State asked his reaction to a request from the German authorities for a group of writers and artists to emigrate to America, Adams wrote back from Quincy that “The German letter…will require no answer….” Since the aspiring immigrants were just the kind of dreamers to be seduced by Tom Paine's doctrines, Adams preferred they remain in Europe. “I had rather countenance the introduction of Ariel and Caliban,” he claimed colorfully, “with a troop of spirits the most mischievous from fairy land.”
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His own style was itself mischievous, as well as being a finely crafted expression of the contradictory impulses within his personality: colorful and tart in its choice of language; willing to run risks in its allusions, metaphors, and verbal juxtapositions; prone to irreverent conclusions designed to surprise or startle; capable of remarkable incisiveness and almost photographic specificity when the issue at stake did not arouse his ire; but when it did, given to litanies of abstract nouns brought to the end of their frenzied march across the page by insulting verbs, which went off like a series of exploding skyrockets.

Conventional wisdom, as Adams saw it, seldom got very close to the truth, which was always paradoxical and, like history itself, maddeningly resistant to any all-encompassing perspective. His style in letters—appropriately unorthodox and sufficiently flexible to convey different moods and meanings simultaneously—was an excellent vehicle for his personal complexity, an instrument shaped over the years to express his layered disposition. And the most discernible shape that the style and disposition consistently took was what we might call “oppositional.” In his old age as well as his youth, Adams instinctively mobilized his enormous verbal and intellectual energies in opposition to established conventions, personal enemies, or fashionable ideas. He was only comfortable in dialogue and he was most invigorated when the dialogue took the form of an argument. What many commentators on his life diagnosed as sheer irascibility was less a mood than a habit of mind. It was related to his urge toward alienation and an isolated version of independence—the kind of tendency best illustrated in his behavior as president. But what we might call his dialectical style had a separate set of causes and consequences most closely associated with his almost instinctive need to establish balance in conversations and political arguments. He felt great satisfaction in defending the British troops in the wake of the Boston Massacre in 1770, for example, not just because their right to a fair trial was a principle of English law he respected, but also because doing so offset the surging patriotism of the Boston mob. He had been known to rise in crowded rooms during debates over the Stamp Act to insist that the rights of suspected collaborators not be trampled in the march toward colonial independence. Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, he loved to correct his Federalist friends whenever they expressed apprehension about the viability of popular government. Jefferson and his followers got lectures on stability; Fisher Ames was told about the dangers of a smug, self-appointed aristocracy. When John Trumbull, the prominent artist, asked for advice about revolutionary scenes worthy of memoralizing, he was informed that the fine arts were dangerous weapons almost always allied with despotism and superstition. Adams seemed to seek out the illusions and excesses of the age, then press against them all with his might, as if he equated thinking with performing a set of mental isometric exercises.

 

The clearest example of this tendency is currently housed in the Boston Public Library. There the bulk of the approximately three thousand books that Adams accumulated and kept around himself in the Quincy house have been preserved. Next to Abigail and their grandchildren, books were his most valued companions throughout his retirement, and he talked back to them in marginal notes as if their authors were sitting around the fireside in the library. Zoltán Haraszti, the modern scholar who was responsible for overseeing the Adams collection and first called attention to the voluminous marginal commentary contained within their musty bindings, claimed that the Adams library was “the largest private collection of its day in America.” Whether or not this is correct—Jefferson scholars plausibly dispute the claim—Adams had a huge number of books at his disposal throughout his retirement. And Adams did not just collect books; he read them. He was, by the common consensus of his contemporaries, the best-read member of his remarkably literate generation. Even Jefferson acknowledged that he could not match the prodigious Adams pace. After Adams described his reading list for 1816, for example, Jefferson admitted amazement: “Forty-three volumes read in one year,” Jefferson exclaimed, “and twelve of them quartos! Dear Sir, how I envy you! Half a dozen 8 vols [octavos] in that space of time are as much as I am allowed.”
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But Adams did not just read books. He battled them. The casual presumption that there is some kind of rough correlation between the books in the library of any prominent historical figure and the person's cast of mind would encounter catastrophe with Adams, because he tended to buy and read books with which he profoundly disagreed. Then, as he read, he recorded in the margins and at the bottom of pages his usually hostile opinions of the arguments and authors. Rousseau was “a coxcomb and…satyr” Voltaire a “liar” and “complete scoundrel” Condorcet a “quack,” “a fool,” and “a mathematical Charlatan” d'Alembert a “Louse, Flea, Tick, Ant, Wasp, or…Vermin….” But beyond such epithets, Adams commented at length on the substance of major works of philosophy, literature, and political theory, sometimes writing as many words in the margins as contained in the original text. Indeed, it is possible to argue—as Haraszti has in fact done—that the Adams marginalia constitute evidence more revealing of his convictions about political theory than any of his official publications. They also constitute dramatic illustrations of the way he defined his own elemental ideas in conflict with opposing versions, the way thought for Adams was synonymous with argument.
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One of his favorite authors was Bolingbroke. Henry St. John Viscount Bolingbroke had been a leader of the opposition against the ministry of Robert Walpole in England during the middle third of the eighteenth century. Bolingbroke helped shape the Whig tradition which American revolutionaries, including Adams, borrowed from so effectively in fashioning their own arguments against arbitrary power, political corruption, and British degeneration. Adams first read him soon after his graduation from Harvard, then reread him five or six times, twice during his retirement.
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Even though Bolingbroke's major insights—a belief in the efficacy of “mixed government,” the relentless power of self-interest, and the endorsement of “Country” over “Court” values—were also bedrock commitments for Adams, the comments he made, first in 1804 and then again in 1811, suggest a reader relishing the opportunity to disagree. In his
Dissertation Upon Parties
, for example, Bolingbroke ridiculed the silly pretense that “the king never dies,” a notion that buttressed the belief in the abiding continuity of monarchic authority. Adams reacted caustically: “What is the silliest? That the King never dies or that the King can do no wrong? Rather too debonair, my Lord.” And when in his
Study and Use of History
Bolingbroke endorsed the ancient Roman custom of placing images or busts of ancestors in the vestibules of their houses in order to recall “the glorious actions of the dead,” Adams unleashed his own counter-theory of emulation: “But images of fools and knaves are as easily made as those of patriots and heroes. The images of the Gracchi were made as well as those of Scipio, the images of Caesar, Anthony, and Augustus as well as those of Cicero, Pompey, Brutus, and Cassius.” He then went on to berate Bolingbroke's limited understanding of art's complex contribution to both the elevation and corruption of human morality. “Statues, paintings, panegyrics, in short all the fine arts,” he scribbled in the margin, “promote virtue while virtue is in fashion. After that they promote luxury, effeminacy, corruption, prostitution, and every species of abandoned depravity.”

In his
Remarks on the History of England
, which Adams reread in 1804, Bolingbroke celebrated the “patriot king,” contending that if “one great, brave, disinterested, active man [should] arise, he will be received, followed, and almost adored, as the guardian genius of these kingdoms.” Adams scoffed: “Like Bonaparte, or Hamilton, or Burr.” And when Bolingbroke claimed that history almost always punishes villains, or at least that virtuous leaders are invariably acknowledged by posterity, Adams, probably thinking of himself, countered, “Not always,” adding that “Tradition and history are radically corrupted.” He went on like this, bantering with Bolingbroke paragraph by paragraph, often sentence by sentence, eventually writing about twelve thousand words of his own.
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