Passionate Sage (24 page)

If the dishevelled condition of his political writings conveyed an important insight into the limitations of language and political theory, it also obscured his legacy. Adams was fond of telling friends and family that his reputation suffered for the lack of “puffers,” what we would call publicists or lobbyists. (The deeper problem, of course, was that, even if such creatures had made themselves available to Adams, he would never have listened to them.) What he really needed was a skillful editor, someone to play the role of monitor of his political writings, a role Madison played with Jefferson, someone to rescue his erudition from his inveterate effusiveness. For if Adams should not be seen, indeed did not wish to be seen, as a political theorist or philosopher, he does merit recognition as one of America's most notable political thinkers.
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What might a thoughtful editor have selected as the central features of the Adams political legacy? Well, the core impulse of his political thought was adversarial, contrarian, and dialectical, an exact intellectual expression of his personal temperament. For this reason all scholarly attempts to locate logical inconsistencies in his thought, or to accuse him of shifting his ideological position after the American Revolution, are misguided ventures that fail to grasp the animating principle of his political mentality. While a firm believer in the classical political categories, he was obsessed with a
dynamic
version of the classical ideal of balance. This meant that he could be counted on to oppose the reigning
Zeitgeist
, whether it was blowing toward the left or the right. Dramatic shifts of emphasis were an integral part of his avowed system. He regarded all political movements and social trends as addictions; like the vanities and ambitions coursing through his own soul, they required countering correctives lest they fly out of control. He was unparalleled among his peers in understanding the doctrine of checks and balances in ways that went beyond erector-set rationality.

Finally, Adams was the supreme political realist of the revolutionary generation. His lifelong habit of mistrusting himself effectively immunized him against illusory solutions to the problem of political power provided by both the older classical and newer liberal traditions. The classical belief in virtue, while a noble ideal, struck him as a naive and at best short-lived hope, for it asked more of human nature than could possibly be sustained. Meanwhile the various liberal antidotes to the virus of political power—an enlightened people, a benign marketplace, the expansive borders of an enlarged republic—struck him as a wholly inadequate, or as seductive delusions that usually made matters worse. Among America's dominant political theologians, he remained the avowed agnostic and therefore the most astute analyst of political power's inherent intractability. In the end, he could not bring himself to believe that there were any ultimate answers to the overlapping problems of self-government or national government, at least none that did not contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction.

A
S THE RETIREMENT YEARS
at Quincy rolled on and Adams entered his eighties, his vision of public affairs remained connected to incessant explorations of his own boisterous personality. When he looked backwards into history or outward into the emerging nation he had helped to establish, he saw the same emotional ingredients throbbing and pulsating and influencing events as when he looked inside himself. Politics for him remained psychology writ large, a heaving collection of irrational urges that moved across the social landscape like the ambitions and vanities he felt surging through his own soul. More than any member of the revolutionary generation, Adams thought of statecraft as a public application of the skills required for self-management, regarded political analysis as a public version of introspection.

The emotions or passions were not merely abstract concepts to think or write about in splendid isolation from their effects; they were forces he experienced personally. As Bernard Bailyn has so nicely put it, Adams “felt the world, directly and sensitively, before he thought about it,” so that his most profound and perceptive insights into what we call political theory were not, for him at least, theoretical at all. They were vivid projections onto a larger social screen of the images he saw inside himself; or, more accurately, they were intellectual expressions of the emotions he felt most deeply. His mind and heart were wired together in such a fashion as to preclude purely abstract expression; thought and feeling were so intermingled inside him that he was literally incapable of rational detachment.
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One reason Adams kept rereading his
Discourses on Davila
with approval throughout his retirement was that its central argument—that emotional rather than rational forces inevitably shaped history and the men who made it—confirmed his personal experience with his own interior demons; it also somewhat sanctioned his own temperamental volatility. And one reason Adams had to contend with a reputation for unpredictable outbursts unbecoming a classical hero of the American republic was that he remained maddeningly and irreverently outspoken in public as well as private situations.

“I have one head, four limbs and five Senses,” he responded mockingly to one of the innumerable inquiries about his physical condition in old age, adding that he was “Five feet seven or nine Inches, I really know not which.” As for his reputation for emotional outbursts that resembled tantrums, he claimed that his political enemies had exaggerated the tendency: “My temper in general has been tranquil except when any Instance of extraordinary Madness, Deceit, Hypocricy, Ingratitude, Treachery or Perfidy has suddenly struck me. Then I have always been irascible enough, and in three or four Instances too much so.” This was a concession he would never have made in the earliest years of his retirement. As he entered his eighties, he wanted the world to know that, whatever storms still brewed inside him, they were now under control and that “Anger never rested in the bosom.”
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Anger, of course, was only one kind of emotion. There were many others, which Adams could readily exhibit whenever roused to action by what he considered an impertinent remark about his political values or an uninformed question about the meaning of the American Revolution. Then his verbal artillery would blast away and the words would explode on the page or in the air, usually in a long series of capitalized or emphasized abstractions that defined a whole range of emotions. Years earlier, during his most active service on behalf of the American Revolution, Adams had confided to his diary that he was, by nature, a calm and even languid character. Then he added: “Yet some great Events, Some cutting Expressions, Some mean Hypocrisies, have at Times, thrown this Assemblage of Sloth, Sleep, and littleness into Rage a little like a Lion.” What impressed visitors to Quincy who called upon the septuagenarian patriarch was the abiding ferocity of his feelings, the sheer energy and animated intelligence that remained vibrant and powerful even as his physical condition succumbed to the inevitable ravages of old age. As one visitor put it, there was not “the smallest chip of an iceberg in his composition.”
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The last portrait done of Adams, painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1823, captured the lionlike fury, with its steely-eyed gaze and rumpled hair that floated around his head and down to his shoulders like a mane. “Stuart caught a glimpse of the living spirit shining through the feeble and decrepit body,” observed Josiah Quincy, adding that it fixed the final image of the old man “at one of those happy moments when the intelligence lights up the wasted envelope….” Despite the wrinkled skin, reddened eyes, arthritic hands, and stooped posture, the spirit of the man remained incandescent, always at risk of becoming inflammable.
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Bronze casting of John Adams, by John Henri Isaac Brownere,
based on plaster “life mask” of 1825, depicting Adams
as the American Cicero.
Courtesy New York Historical Association, Cooperstown

The older he got, the more Adams tried to fit himself into the role of the stoic Roman statesman, living out a life of rustic simplicity as depicted in Cicero's
De Senectute
. “I can read Cicero's de Senectute, because I have read him for almost seventy years,” he wrote in 1820, “and seem to have him almost by heart.” But the heart was always the problem for Adams, whose temperament precluded stoicism in much the same way that fire melted ice. In his eighty-fifth year, while rereading Cicero's advice on self-control and seasoned serenity, he acknowledged that his admiration for the stoical message was at odds with his visceral reaction to the text. “I never delighted much in contemplating commas and colons, or in spelling or measuring syllables,” he admitted—and this from a writer whose cavalier approach to punctuation and spelling defied generations of accomplished editors—“but now, while reading Cato, if I look at these little objects, I find my imagination, in spite of all my exertions, roaming in the Milky Way….” Even the punctuation in a Latin sentence, it seems, could set him off, catapulting his mind beyond simple translation and into some idiosyncratic realm where his own eccentricities were free to roam. He had always been, and always remained, too passionate and slightly out of control to fit neatly into the classical mold, too sentient and singular a being to appear properly enigmatic.
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Even as he grew into a very old man, his efforts to adopt Ciceronian poses usually failed miserably, victims of his penchant for candor and the tendency to transform dignified requests for his wisdom into jokes. In response to a touchingly laudatory letter from John Jay, Adams refused to accept the praise or behave like a sage. “I am too feeble and have been confined to the house the greatest part of the winter,” he wrote to Jay in 1821, “but I hope to crawl out like a Turtle in the Spring.” One visitor who expected to encounter a sedate and sober old man came away shaking his head and reporting that, unlike all other professed sages, Adams “could not keep his mouth shut.” When a correspondent asked him the secret of his longevity, he replied that every day he drank lots of cider, water, lemonade, and “no more than a pint of wine,” and always tried to have chocolate for breakfast. Then he pleaded for relief from such questions, claiming that “the history of my Physical habits according to the best estimate I can make, would fill a Volume in folio as large as the life of Richard Baxter.”
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In 1820, when a friend apprised him that the new Maine constitution set an age limit for judges, he dashed off a comic retort that self-consciously mocked his own reputation for vanity as well as the infamous Adams vituperative style: “I consider this as a personal affront to me as an Old Man,” he joked; it was also a repudiation of the wisdom of the ages and of the classics and, if these revered authorities carried no weight with the voters of Maine, they should be informed that the Master of Montezillo had declared the new law “against the Precepts and practice of the Bible.” His daily exercise habits inspired the same self-deprecating exuberance. As he told Charles Francis, his grandson and eventual editor, he liked to ride his horse, Rosenante, two or three miles a day, but would much prefer to ride around his property on a less majestic and much shorter beast: “Six and thirty years ago as your father can tell you,” he recalled in 1815, “I rode over a great part of the Asturian & Pyrenian mountains in Spain, on a beautiful mule, and I would give more for that little animal for any use now, than for the best horse at the new market races.” The erstwhile Cicero of American politics kept behaving like Sancho Panza.
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Adams's inveterate effusiveness, the sheer volume of emotional energy that he expended in talk, letterwriting, friendships, and even in solitary thinking, deserves more than casual notice as an intriguing aside that supplements, in merely ornamental fashion, an intellectual assessment of his thought and character. His emotional intensity, and the free-flowing manner in which it expressed itself, was a central feature of his personality. It was the major reason he found it impossible to produce a coherent statement of his political philosophy in a single volume or treatise; it underlay his inability to craft his autobiography with the manipulative artifice of a Franklin or—to peer into the future of the Adams family—with the ironic orchestrations of his great-grandson, Henry; it shaped, often in a decisive way, the opinions of friends, enemies and, even more tellingly, associates who did not know him well, by creating an impression of unpredictable volatility and almost dangerous honesty; and it prevented him from being conveyed to the world or to posterity in the guise of a classical hero with a dignified deportment, deliberative demeanor, and a temperament sufficiently elusive to serve as a Rorschach test for subsequent generations. In all these ways, the passionate energy of his personality was the electrical current that animated his very being and defined what even he came to call his “singular character.”

 

The very same emotional excesses that so often got him into trouble in public life—his candor, flat-out style of argument, and proclivity to engage whenever challenged—usually had the opposite effect in his private life. Most of those who came within his orbit, even when that orbit was delineated by his withering criticisms and hostile opinions, ended up concluding that Adams was irresistibly likable. For example, in 1824 John Taylor saw fit to compose an affectionate final letter to Adams. “During a long illness from which I am not yet recovered,” Taylor wrote, “the reveries which usually amuse sick people visited me; and among them the idea of writing a farewell letter to you.” Taylor knew better than most how difficult and contentious Adams could be. But as he lay dying, Taylor felt the urge to record his respect and affection for the man whose political theory he had spent twenty years attacking. However much they might disagree about politics, however irascible Adams had been in responding to Taylor's criticism of his
Defence
, Taylor wanted to go to his grave acknowledging Adams's personal greatness. His farewell letter “will not be suspected of adulation,” wrote Taylor, given their long record of disagreement and Taylor's fatal illness; it was intended only “to file among your archives some facts, which may meet the eye of a historian, as well as to give some pleasure to a patriot.”

Among the facts was Taylor's assessment that Adams ranked “next to Washington” in the American pantheon, a rather remarkable placement for an avid Jeffersonian to make, especially one whom Adams had confronted in thirty-two long, accusatory, and explanatory letters. But the candor, the unvarnished sincerity and human engagement that Adams displayed in the extended conversation with Taylor won over the Virginian's heart despite their irreconcilable differences as political thinkers. The bond Taylor claimed to feel defied logic or reasoned argument. Having encountered the palpable vivacity of the essential Adams, it was simply impossible not to like him.
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Usually, however, it was Adams who defied conventional expectations to reach out for a personal connection in spite of public disagreement. The resumption of the friendship with Jefferson illustrated this tendency, which Jefferson then responded to with his characteristic geniality. But the rekindling of the Adams-Jefferson relationship was but the most famous example of a decided pattern that recurred regularly throughout the latter years at Quincy. In 1820, for example, Adams wrote Louisa Catherine that there were “reports in circulation here that Mr. Randolph of Roanoke is in a state of insanity….” The reference was to John Randolph, the eccentric Virginia congressman, avid defender of states' rights, slavery, and agrarian values—Randolph might be described as a slightly deranged man-child whose eloquent tantrums on the floor of the Congress on behalf of what he gleefully acknowledged was a lost cause became the prototype for the doomed Cavalier of southern fiction. Adams admitted that Randolph “has appeared through his whole public life to be possessed of a Demonical Spirit of Malice and Vengeance without cause against me.” And this was no Adams exaggeration. (Randolph had expressed the hope that the entire male side of the Adams family should be tortured to death by Indians.) Nevertheless, Adams confided to his daughter-in-law that “I have ever considered him [Randolph] gifted by nature with some amiable qualities and therefore have always felt a kind of respect for him.” He asked Louisa Catherine to convey his wish for a quick recovery and a resumption of the inimitable Randolph style.
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