Passionate Sage (15 page)

When Jefferson ordered an embargo on all American exports, designed to keep American commercial shipping out of the conflict between England and Napoleonic France, Adams went along with great reluctance, predicting that the embargo would prove more ruinous to the American economy than to the economies of the European belligerents. “I have never approved of Non Importations, Non Intercourses, or Embargoes for more than six weeks,” he told Jefferson years later, suggesting that the real purpose of such measures was more psychological than economic; that is, the embargo produced pain and suffering within the American populace and thereby stiffened the will for war. “You and Mr. Madison had as good a right to your Opinions as I had to mine,” he observed years later, “and I must acknowledge the Nation was with you. But neither your Authority nor that of the Nation has convinced me. Nor, I am bold to pronounce will convince Posterity.” Although he sympathized with the burdens and respected the integrity of his successors to the presidency, noting that the “Talents, the Scholarship, the Genius, the Learning of Jefferson and Madison are not disputed,” he worried about their discomfort with conflict and confrontations and what he called “their total Incapacity for practical Government in War….”
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Nor did he attempt to hide his critical views from Jefferson himself. When negotiations failed and war finally broke out in 1812, Adams chided Jefferson for “the total Neglect and absolute Refusal of all maritime Protection and Defence….” The war had now come and America was, just as he had warned, wholly unprepared for it. Jefferson tried to be gracious in response, congratulating Adams for his foresight “as having been an early and constant advocate of wooden walls,” but then went on to explain that he had opposed a large naval force because England's fleet was too large and powerful for any American navy, no matter how enhanced, to risk combat on the open seas. Adams responded with a mini-lecture on military strategy: the United States had no intention of invading England, so a massive American navy capable of taking on the entire British fleet was unnecessary; the chief battles would be on this side of the Atlantic, mainly on the Great Lakes and coastline. “We must have a Navy now to command The Lakes,” he observed, “if it costs us 100 Ships of the Line; whatever becomes of the Ocean.” He believed that Jefferson had to assume responsibility for America's lack of readiness, for “if only a few Frigates had been ordered to be built,” the war might have gone differently. “Without this,” he wrote pointedly to Monticello, “our Union will be a brittle China Vase, a house of Ice or a Place [Plate? Palace?] of Glass.” Jefferson wisely let the subject drop.
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Even before the fighting began, Adams had decided not only that it was inevitable but also that it was necessary, “necessary against England, necessary to convince France that we are something; and above all necessary to convince ourselves.” The chief effect of the war, he predicted to Rush three years before it began, would be renewed American nationalism. “We hear very often declarations on the demoralizing tendency of war,” he wrote, “but as much as I hate war, I cannot be of the opinion that frequent wars are so corrupting to human nature as long peaces.” It was a tragic comment on mankind, he acknowledged, “that we cannot be virtuous without murdering one another,” but such was the sad historical truth of the matter. A few months before the outbreak of hostilities, Adams repeated in almost poetic language his hope that war with England would recover the national spirit that had faded since the end of the revolutionary war:

 

The winds begin to rustle, the clouds gather, it grows dark; will these airy forces rear up the Ocean to a foaming fury? A spirit seems to be rising; a spirit of contrition and shame at our long apathy and lethargy; a spirit of resentment of injuries, a spirit of indignation at insolence; and what to me is very remarkable, a spirit of greater unanimity than I have ever witnessed in this country for fifty years.
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Adams also tended to view the causes and the conduct of the War of 1812 through the prism of the American Revolution. He was critical of American military strategy, especially the decision to invade Canada, which proved a fiasco, because of British naval supremacy on the Great Lakes. But what he called “the great Comedy of Errors” reminded him of the initial months of the Revolution: “I say we do not make more mistakes now than we did in 1774, '5, '6, '7, '8, '9, '80, '81, '82, '83,” he reminded Rush. “It was patched and pie bald then, as it is now, and ever will be, world without end.” He disclaimed any right “to reproach the present government or the present generation” for its conduct of the war: “We blundered at Lexington, at Bunker's Hill…. Where, indeed, did we not blunder except Saratoga and York[town], where our triumphs redeemed all former disgraces?” Even when the British army closed in on the national capital, Adams told friends not to panic. It was worse during the Revolution, he recalled, “when Congress was chased like a covey of Partridges from Philadelphia to Trenton, from Trenton to Lancaster….”
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Lack of support for the war in pockets of Federalist New England reminded him of the foot-draggers and pseudo-Tories of old. In the Congress this timidity took the form of orchestrated delays, which he found nearly treasonable: “I expect to be tortured all winter, to read eternal Speeches in Congress repeating…over and over again a thousand times this common place nonsense,” he complained. “The times require Ships and Cannon, not Sighs and Figures.” His break with the Federalists, which for all intents and purposes had occurred in the last year of his presidency, was now rendered final and complete. When word reached him that New England Federalists were contemplating a convention in Hartford to consider boycotting the war and even seceding from the Union, he was indignant. These traitors should be “made to repeat
in dust and ashes
.” The Hartford Convention would prove a fiasco, he predicted defiantly, claiming that it would produce only lukewarm opposition; or, as he put it more colorfully, it would resemble “The Congress at Vienna, as least as much as an Ignis fatuous resembles a Volcano.”
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Even the excruciatingly prolonged negotiations that eventually led to the Treaty of Ghent ending the war produced in Adams a sharp sense of
déjà vu
. For many of the issues at stake—the impressment of American seamen, British claims to trading rights in the western territories and fishing rights off the Newfoundland coast—were identical to the issues Adams had negotiated as head of the American delegation in Paris at the end of the Revolution. And the head of the American delegation at Ghent was none other than his son, John Quincy Adams.

When President Madison asked his advice about American concessions, Adams tried to be both candid and diplomatic: “All I can say is, that I would continue this war forever, rather than surrender one acre of territory, one iota of the fisheries, as established by the third article of the treaty of 1783, or one sailor impressed from any merchant ship. I will not, however, say this to my son, though I shall be very much obliged to you, if you will give him orders to the same effect.” A few months later, of course, he was writing John Quincy with just the advice offered confidentially to Madison, recommending with relish what he called his own successful “mixture of fluency and impudence” as a diplomat. He warned John Quincy not to trade the coastal fisheries for control of the Mississippi: “Oh, how glad I am, that I am not in his [John Quincy's] place,” he told Benjamin Rush's son. “I should have been tempted to say ‘War! War, interminable, or eternal, rather than any such terms.'” When news of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent reached him, he was relieved that John Quincy would finally be coming home. But when the specific terms of the treaty revealed that both sides had agreed to the
status quo ante
, he was incensed, interpreting the stalemate as a personal affront to his efforts in 1783: “neither George third nor his Son have fulfilled his promises to my Country, made to me, as her Representative.”
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It surely required “a singular Being” to take an entire peace treaty personally. But then, Adams was accustomed to uttering irreverencies out loud, just as he was accustomed to defying established opinions and presenting his strong and often passionate views in a defiant and argumentative format. That was the way he thought and felt and behaved. The most disarming aspect of his arguments about the causes and conduct of the War of 1812 turned out to be that, on virtually every major issue, events proved him correct. And, most disarming of all, this time he did not need to wait for posterity to clinch the verdict. But there was no need to worry about his foresightedness leading to sudden esteem, enhanced popularity, and vaunting vanity. He was safely insulated from such corruptions this time and did not need to take precautions against popularity. For no one, save John Quincy and a few close friends, was paying any attention.

T
HE OUTBREAK OF WAR
with Great Britain in 1812 allowed all the oppositional tendencies of the Adams temperament to align themselves properly, like the moons and planets in a favorable astrological forecast. Whether it was the arrival of a war he had been predicting was inevitable and necessary, or the completion of his long series of self-justifying articles for the
Boston Patriot
, Adams became discernibly more relaxed and outgoing. He had discovered at last his fulcrum or centerpoint, a psychological equivalent of his political ideal of balance.

The pace of his correspondence picked up and more of the Adams playfulness appeared in his prose. “I am as cheerful as ever I was,” he wrote to Thomas McKean, “and my health is as good, excepting a quiveration of the hands.” He then apologized in mock fashion for the word “quiveration,” explaining that “though I borrowed it from an Irish boy, I think it an improvement in our language worthy a place in Webster's dictionary.” When Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat, wrote to him about America's promising contributions to science and technology, Adams refused to sound his customary clarion call against theories of progress. “I am entirely of your opinion,” he assured Fulton, “that the Diamonds in the quarries of science are inexhaustible…and I hope you will be a successful miner.” He concluded on a buoyant note, announcing that if he was “only fifty years younger, I should be happy to dig with you.” The correspondence with Benjamin Rush had always brought out his most exuberant energy, even when he was mired in despair over his declining reputation. But the letters to Rush now reached new heights of frivolity. When Rush began to send reports of his own dreams, Adams offered a diagnosis of the power of dreams to express deep-seated emotional urges, then challenged Rush “dream for dream.” He described a recent nocturnal vision in which a grandiloquent Adams had delivered a calming speech to a menagerie of animals and ideologues in revolutionary France. The Adams bounce was back.
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Whether it was a cause or a consequence of Adams's newfound zest is impossible to know, but the reconciliation with Thomas Jefferson played a crucial role in carrying Adams past the morose resentment of his early retirement years. Beginning in 1812, Adams and Jefferson exchanged letters on a regular basis for fourteen years, until both legendary leaders died on the same day, which also happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Of the 158 letters exchanged, Adams wrote 109, more than doubling the pace of the correspondence from Monticello and usually setting the agenda for the subjects discussed. From the perspective of posterity, it was a friendship made in heaven, interrupted by unpleasant political and party squabbles in the 1790s, now miraculously retrieved in time for the two patriarchs to stroll arm-in-arm toward immortality. “Jefferson is as tough as a lignum vitae knot,” Adams exclaimed to Rush at the start of the exchange, marvelling at the clear and strong handwriting—no quiverations were allowed at Monticello—and admiring the famous Jefferson style: “Not one symptom of decay or decline can I discern in it.”
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Once begun, the correspondence between the two patriarchs proceeded on this affectionate note. And once completed, it quickly became a landmark in American letters and eventually a classic, some would say
the
classic statement of the founding generation. Sensibilities as different as Woodrow Wilson and Ezra Pound have celebrated its intellectual significance. In the twentieth century, theatre companies and public radio stations have sponsored readings from the text; publishers have issued full and abridged editions in paperback; and schoolchildren are occasionally required to memorize the most evocative passages. Adams and Jefferson, as both men surely suspected, were sending letters to posterity as much as to each other.
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The fact that the letters were ever written at all was almost as much a miracle as the simultaneous death of the two patriarchs and constitutes what is probably the clearest sign of Adams's victory over his private demons and doubts. For Adams had to overcome the bitterness and resentment he had been harboring toward Jefferson from the start of the former's term as president and throughout his own early retirement years at Quincy. Jefferson was a “shadow man,” he told friends, whose greatest talent was enigma. His character was “like the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see and make no noise.” When Rush told Adams that he had dreamed that the Sage of Monticello and the Sage of Quincy were reunited, Adams countered that Rush should “take a Nap and dream for my instruction and Edification the character of Jefferson and his administration….” There was no doubt, Adams concluded coldly, that such a dream would turn into a nightmare. When he was governor of Virginia and then again when he was president, Jefferson had exhibited “a total Incapacity for Government or War.” The embargo had been a complete failure; the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson's major achievement, had been accomplished in violation of his own beliefs about federal power; his persistent opposition to the decisions of John Marshall and the Supreme Court threatened the independence of the judiciary; he had left the nation “infinitely worse than he found it, and that from his own error or ignorance.”
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Then there was Jefferson's status as a slaveowner. Adams claimed to give no credence to the scandalous stories about Jefferson's alleged relationship with Sally Hemings, his mulatto slave. As a fellow victim of similarly venomous vendettas, Adams empathized. But he went on to speculate that the allegation was “a natural and almost inevitable consequence of the foul Contagion in the human Character, Negro Slavery.” Jefferson was seriously contaminated by that contagion and could not escape the prevalent suspicion that “there was not a planter in Virginia who could not reckon among his slaves a number of his children.” Even though the Sally Hemings story was probably not true, Adams surmised with obvious satisfaction that it would remain “a blot on his Character” because it symbolized the inherently immoral condition in which all slaveowners, Jefferson included, lived.
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Finally, there was the matter of the past friendship between Adams and Jefferson. There is no question that the two men became close friends during the revolutionary struggle and the peace negotiations in Paris. Abigail even claimed that, in the 1780s, Jefferson was, as she put it, “the only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom and reserve.” And during the 1790s, even as the split between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans generated bitter and impassioned conflict that led to the creation of two political parties, the Hamiltonian wing of the Federalists worried constantly that Adams and Jefferson would draw on their vaunted friendship to strike a political compromise that might leave the High Federalists out of power. To be sure, when Jefferson spurned Adams's offer to play a major role in his administration, he committed the unpardonable sin, at least according to the Adams creed—he chose party over country and personal ambition over friendship. This wound festered and left a scar that, in some respects, never completely healed. But Adams was cordial toward Jefferson in the aftermath of the election of 1800, had him for dinner at the presidential mansion before the inauguration and, in the eyes of the High Federalists, evidenced less hostility toward the man from Monticello than toward his fellow Federalists. As Fisher Ames explained it, Adams had always retained “a strong revolutionary taint in his mind, [and] admires the characters, principles and means which that revolutionary system…seems to legitimate, and…holds cheap any reputation that was not then founded and top'd off.” In short, the brotherly bond established in 1776 linked Adams and Jefferson in ways that Adams would never wholly repudiate.
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Throughout the early years of his retirement, however, as the anger over his defeat stewed and brewed inside him, Adams denied that a friendship with Jefferson had ever existed. “You are much mistaken,” he explained to William Cunningham in 1804, “when you say that no man living have so much knowledge of Mr. Jefferson's transactions as myself.” Adams claimed that he and Jefferson were never close: “I know but little concerning him.” Then he went on to describe the almost constant personal interaction between the two men, from the Continental Congress in 1775–76, through the negotiations in Paris and the diplomatic efforts in London, then as fellow members of the Washington administration. The narrative conveyed just the opposite conclusion that Adams intended; no one in public life, save Madison, knew Jefferson so well and so intimately. But Adams held firmly to his denial of a close relationship. Although the Virginian “always proferred great friendship,” he observed cynically, Jefferson had secretly supported and salaried “almost every villain he could find who had been an enemy to me.” They were not now and never had been friends, Adams insisted, as if shouting the point more loudly would somehow make it true.
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Chinks in the Adams armor began to appear in 1809. Under the pressure of Rush's incessant prodding and his reported dream of a reconciliation between the two patriarchs, Adams reiterated his disingenuous claim that he felt “no Resentment or Animosity against the Gentleman and abhor the Idea of blackening his Character or transmitting him in odious Colours to Posterity.” Then he opened a small crack in his pride through which the old friendship might crawl. “If I should receive a Letter from him however,” Adams observed curtly, “I should not fail to acknowledge and answer it.” A correspondence was not out of the question, he was suggesting, but Jefferson would have to go first.
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The melting away of pride and resentment continued over the ensuing months, helped along by Rush's persistent dreams and by Adams's emerging capacity to poke fun at his own stubbornness. Perhaps Jefferson should be excused for whatever mistakes he had made, Adams conceded, because he was a mere youth: “Jefferson was always but a Boy to me…. I am bold to say that I was his Preceptor on Politicks and taught him every thing that has been good and solid in his whole Political Conduct.” How could one hold a grudge against a disciple? In this buoyant and jocular mood it was even difficult to recall just what had caused the break between the two men. “It lay as a confused recollection in my own head,” Adams wrote Rush, “that the only Flit between Jefferson and me…was occasioned by a Motion for Congress to sit on Saturday.” Or was the source of the trouble the argument that he and Jefferson once had with Washington about hairstyles? Jefferson preferred it straight and he preferred it curled. Or was it the other way around?
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Then, in 1811, Adams was visited at Quincy by Edward Coles, a Virginian close to Jefferson. In the course of the conversation Adams let it be known that his political disagreements with Jefferson had never destroyed his affection for the man. “I always loved Jefferson,” he told Coles, “and still love him.” When news of this exchange reached Monticello, as Adams knew it would, Jefferson responded heartily, if a bit less affectionately. “This is enough for me,” he wrote Rush, adding that he “knew him [Adams] to be always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes incorrect and precipitate in his judgments.” The major caveat, however, came at the end, when Jefferson told Rush that he had always defended Adams's character to others, “with the single exception as to his political opinions.” This was like claiming that the Pope was usually reliable, except when he declared himself on matters of faith and morals. Here Rush performed his mischievous magic. He silently edited out the offensive passages and forwarded the favorable remarks to Quincy. That was how it stood at the close of the year, the two former friends and living legends sniffing around the edges of a possible reconciliation; but like wary old dogs, they were still reluctant to close the distance.
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In the end it was Adams who made the decisive move. The first letter went out from Quincy to Monticello on January 1, 1812, timing that suggests Adams had decided to revive the relationship as one of his resolutions for the new year. It was a short and cordial note, relaying family news and referring to “two pieces of Homespun” which he had sent along as a gift by separate packet. He apprised Rush soon thereafter, protecting his pride behind a barrage of jokes: “Your dream is out…. You have wrought wonders! You have made peace between powers that never were at War! You have reconciled Friends that never were at Enmity…. In short, the mighty defunct Potentates of Mount Wollaston and Monticello by your sorceries…are again in being.” This was the playfully evasive and self-consciously nonchalant posture he maintained whenever the question of his reconciliation with Jefferson came up. There was nothing momentous or historic about the reunion, he insisted. There had never been any serious break between the two men most responsible for the Declaration of Independence. “It was only as if one sailor had met a brother sailor, after twenty-five years' absence,” Adams quipped, “and had accosted him, how fare you, Jack?”
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There was a discernible awkwardness as well as a slight stumble at the start of the correspondence. Jefferson presumed, quite plausibly, that the “two pieces of Homespun” Adams was sending referred to domestically produced clothing, a nice symbol of the American economic response to the embargo; it also recalled the colonial response to British taxation policies in the 1760s, a fitting reminder of the good old days when Adams and Jefferson first joined the movement for American independence. And so Jefferson responded with a lengthy letter on the benefits of domestic manufacturing, only to discover afterwards that Adams had intended the homespun reference as a metaphor. His gift turned out to be a copy of John Quincy's two-volume work,
Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory
. The exchange had begun on the same note that the friendship had floundered, an elemental misunderstanding.
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