Passionate Sage (25 page)

Perhaps Adams recognized some piece of himself in the eccentric Virginian, a tendency toward wildly idiosyncratic urges that could easily, as it had in Randolph, expand into a near-maniacal temperament. More likely, the Adams gesture of friendship, for forgiving past political differences, for responding to the elemental humanity inside old enemies as well as old allies, was an established and instinctive habit that required no special explanation.

Just two months before he asked after Randolph's health, for instance, he bemoaned the death of John Wentworth, a Harvard classmate Adams described as “my friend of 70 years standing.” Wentworth had sided with the British during the Revolution, served as the last royal governor of New Hampshire, then fled to Nova Scotia as an exile. But Adams still felt an emotional bond with him. “In spite of Political and National Alienations,” he wrote, “which I find do not reach the heart, I feel the death of Wentworth—as I should a brother.” The same sentiments applied to David Sewall, who after Wentworth's death remained his sole surviving Harvard classmate. “Our political sentiments,” Adams observed to Sewall, “are of no consequence to the community. You & I agreed very well at College…. We have ever since, as I hope, agreed in private friendships. But we have gazed at the great political system of the universe, through different telescopes.” That made little difference, however, as long as their mutual trust allowed them to begin letters with a hearty “How do you do?”
¹⁰

In the classical scheme of things such a capacity to reach past political and ideological disagreements reflected the maturation of the mind, the older and wiser man's development to a stage where cool reason finally established control over unruly passions; serenity, in the form of sober judgment and calm acceptance of life's petty vicissitudes, was an inherently rational condition that usually came with age, when the youthful fires had died down and reasoned decisions at last had the opportunity to assume their place of natural supremacy. But much as he enjoyed making self-congratulatory references to Cicero, Adams never evolved to this allegedly “higher” stage of personal maturity. One of the central ironies of his character was that America's most notorious defender of a classical conception of politics possessed an inherently passionate, non-classical disposition: “The astonishment of your Family at my vivacity is very just,” he had written to Rush just before his closest friend's death, adding that “when a man's vivacity increases with years it becomes frenzy at last.”
¹¹
His vaunted vivacity remained the dominant feature of his personality.

Adams never conquered his passions. They were, in fact, the basis for and source of his infectious amiability. Adams did not overcome long-standing political differences with old friends like Jefferson, Wentworth, or Sewall because of some newfound Ciceronian self-control. Quite the opposite, he retrieved such relationships because he could not control himself. “Had you and I been forty days with Moses on Mount Sinai,” he gushed to Jefferson, “and admitted to behold, the divine Shekinah, and there told that one was three and three, one: We might not have had the courage to deny it, but We could not have believed it.” The urge to share such playful thoughts was spontaneous, the irresistible result of what Adams himself called his “sauciness.” He could forgive and forget, not because he had achieved stoic detachment, but because he had never lost a childlike impulse to share his deepest personal feelings. When, much earlier in his life, Jonathan Sewall commented that “Adams has a heart formed for friendship,” he was making what turned out to be more than a casual observation. Once Adams had established a bond of trust with another, there were no well-placed way stations in his soul where candor could make convenient stops while discretion assessed the implications. Friendship filled too basic a need, satisfied too compelling an impulse, to make it subservient to cautionary restraints.
¹²

Of course, trust could easily get him into trouble. Four years after Benjamin Rush's death his son, Richard Rush, asked Adams about the possible publication of the Adams-Rush correspondence. This would have exposed Adams to a cascade of criticism and humiliation, since his letters to Rush contained his most outrageous bursts of indignation and his most indiscreet judgments on his fellow members of the revolutionary generation. “The correspondence between your Father and me has been for forty years together too intimate and too free, to see the Light at present,” Adams explained. When Richard Rush suggested that perhaps an edited version might not offend, Adams countered that “My Letters to him are of a rougher and coarser Constitution” than public taste, no matter how skillful the editing, “could withstand.” Adams rejected any censored version, insisting that he “would not have one line of them suppressed.” Fortunately, Richard Rush concurred, so Adams was spared the embarrassment of explaining opinions that, even in the twentieth century, possess the power to shock.
¹³

Not so fortunately, Adams sent off many letters to less reliable correspondents, strangers or casual acquaintances who were trusted with controversial opinions, which were then published without his permission in local newspapers. The most damaging episode involved William Cunningham, a Federalist polemicist who had engaged Adams in an exchange of letters in the early years of his retirement. The correspondence contained some of Adams's most critical assessments of Jefferson, accusing him of “a mean thirst of popularity, an inordinate ambition, and a want of sincerity.” When Cunningham announced that he intended to publish the letters, Adams was flabbergasted. “The correspondence and conversations that have passed between us have been under the confidential seal of secrecy and friendship,” he claimed, warning that “Any violation of it will be a breach of honour and of plighted faith.” But Cunningham's son eventually published the letters in 1823, as part of a scheme to discredit John Quincy's prospects for the presidency by exposing the elder Adams as an “aristocratical and despotic” creature, whose reputation would have been best served “if his public labours had ceased, with the termination of the revolution….” This was a harsh and prejudicial judgment based on statements Adams had made in offguard moments and in his most resentful moods. But it represented the kind of price Adams paid for trusting near strangers with his unbridled, often excessive, opinionated declarations.
¹⁴

The most glaring example of his out-of-control style had been the heated exchange with Mercy Otis Warren in 1807. If Warren had seen fit to publish any of the Adams harangues against her treatment of his role in the American Revolution, it would have confirmed the most critical judgments of his worst enemies. But Warren was a long standing friend of the family, who kept the offensive letters private. Probably under prodding from Abigail, Adams began to repair the damage he had done with Warren, so that by 1814 the friendship was fully reinstated. Instead of asking explicitly for her forgiveness, he leapt to her defense when several newspaper accounts questioned her authorship of
The Group
, a propagandistic play she had written during the American Revolution but which skeptics claimed could not have been written by a woman. Adams testified that a woman had, indeed, written the play and that Warren was the woman, in his view the most intellectually accomplished and politically astute woman of his generation. These male skeptics, he assured Warren, were like the Tory disbelievers of old; he reminded her that “Through the whole Revolution the Tories sat on our skirts and were a dead weight to us.” Warren then invited Adams to come down to Plymouth for a family visit to seal the reconciliation. He declined, but wanted her to know that his rejection should not be interpreted as a qualification of his renewed affection for her. “Three score and nineteen years have reduced me to the situation, the temper and humor of Mr. Selden,” he explained, “who Clarendon says, would not have slept out of his own bed for any office the King could have given him.”
¹⁵

The recovered friendship with Mercy Otis Warren fit the same pattern as the renewed relationships with Jefferson, John Taylor, and former college friends like Sewall and Wentworth. In each case deep political and ideological disagreements proved less powerful than Adams's craving for emotional affinity. But the Warren friendship was different in one obvious and important way: it was a friendship between a woman and a man. While not unprecedented in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America, it was far from commonplace. And given the character of the friendship between Adams and Warren—the presumption of intellectual equality, the tendency on the part of Adams to treat Warren as a fellow member in the small gallery of greats who helped to make the American Revolution, the infrequency of any gender-based decorum, chivalric patronizing, or gentlemanly poses—the friendship seems rare indeed. Obviously the life-long relationship with Abigail had educated Adams to the possibility that women could possess first-rate minds and strong personalities worthy of his respect. But the friendship with Warren had started in the years before the American Revolution, before the lifetime experience with Abigail could have worn away some of his traditional assumptions about the purportedly proper relationship between women and men. Even when he was lambasting her for her treatment of him in her
History
, Adams always interacted with Warren as if she were on the same plane as Jefferson, Rush, Taylor, and his other prominent friends. No other male member of the revolutionary generation treated Warren with this kind of presumed equity. And no other male member of the revolutionary generation seemed capable of the kind of unalloyed, unromantic intimacy with strong-willed American women that Adams achieved with Warren.

It would be misleading to explain his relationship with Warren as evidence that he was an early advocate of sexual equality in anything like the modern sense. Adams explicitly opposed the extension of the suffrage to women during his speech at the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention. And he had only critical things to say about Mary Wollstonecraft's argument for women's rights in her
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, which he regarded as another utopian tract infected by the same dangerously seductive ideas she had championed in her glowing endorsement of the French Revolution, which he despised. On the other hand, his attitude toward women whom he knew personally, friends like Warren and the female members of the extended Adams family, was often remarkably egalitarian. And he was prepared to accept, even encourage, intellectual achievement by women within the circle defined by family and close friends. There was, in effect, a line drawn through his thinking about women that separated his public from his private positions. It was not just that Adams endorsed the notion of “separate spheres,” the emerging belief that women should be granted considerable authority within the parameters defined by their domestic duties. It was rather that he found it difficult to enforce any kind of gender-based subordination of women once they entered his private world of friends and family; that is, once he established a personal and emotional bond with them.
¹⁶

Warren obviously crossed that line and entered that world. The fact that Warren was a woman became incidental, even irrelevant, once the bond of intimacy had been established and the Adams impulse for friendship began to flow. His urge to connect simply overwhelmed other constraints. With Jefferson, the bond of friendship had proven sufficient to overcome their significant ideological differences. With Warren, the bond was sufficiently powerful to overwhelm his conventional convictions about the proper role for women and, even more telling, what he admitted with typical Adams candor was his nervousness whenever around intellectually accomplished women. As he confessed to Vanderkemp in 1815:

 

I have as great a Terror of learned Ladies, as you have. I have such a consciousness of Inferiority to them, as mortifies and humiliates my self-love, to such a degree that I can scarcely speak in their presence. Very few of these Ladies have ever had the condescention to allow me to talk. And when it has so happened, I have always come off mortified at the discovery of my Inferiority.
¹⁷

 

Although this was probably a playful exaggeration, and a remark referring primarily to the aristocratic French women he had encountered during his diplomatic years, Warren's deft and deadly response to the Adams tirades against her
History
in 1807 fit his description of the “learned Ladies” perfectly. He seemed to believe that accomplished women like Warren possessed emotional and instinctive powers unique to their sex, and that, when combined with the intellectual virtues of a liberal education, generated energies that few men could match. The fusion of affective and intellectual strengths was, of course, not a uniquely feminine capability—Adams himself came at the combination from the male side of the gender equation, though with him the balance of emotion and intellect was often precarious, sometimes pugnacious, and always masculine in its directness and ferocity. Nevertheless, he told John Quincy, the new nation he had helped to found, if it was to live up to its highest ideals, ought to adopt a symbolic nomenclature that enshrined womanly rather than manly qualities. “We have no word in our language that implies the exact idea of the Patria of the Romans, the Fatherland of the Dutch or the Patrie of the French,” he explained in 1815. “Why should we not introduce Matria, instead of Patria? Mankind in general love their Mothers, I believe, rather more tenderly than their fathers, & perhaps have more reason for it.”
¹⁸

Meanwhile, despite the insecurity that, by his own admission, made him feel mortified in the presence of intellectual women, Adams endorsed the principle that women should receive the same education as men. When Emma Willard wrote him in 1819 to request his support for a school designed to introduce young women to the classics and a college-level curriculum, he agreed wholeheartedly. Mothers and wives ought to be educated like men, he explained, because they had the responsibility to educate the rising generation of male leaders for the American republic. Nor was this merely agreeable rhetoric on his part. He preached the same message to the female members of his own family: “The female mind is estimated at a much higher gradation in the scale, than it was a hundred years ago,” he wrote to his granddaughter. “May you, and your contemporaries, exert yourselves to raise it still higher.”
¹⁹