Passionate Sage (28 page)

Louisa Catherine could never replace Abigail—no one could ever do that—but Adams focused his affectionate energies on her in the period after Abigail's death. If Louisa Catherine found him to be a convenient outlet for her frustrations and fears as the wife of John Quincy, Adams found her to be a helpful depository for the ordinary effusions that would otherwise have been shared with Abigail. He seemed to require—a lifetime with Abigail had rendered the requirement a necessity—regular communication with a strong and intelligent woman. Louisa Catherine may have appeared frail; in fact, when Abigail first met her, she worried that “her frame is so slender and constitution so delicate that I have many fears that she will be of short duration.” And Henry Adams, Louisa Catherine's grandson, remembered her as the epitome of charming delicacy, “like a Romney portrait…an exotic, like her Sèvres china, an object of deference….” But after Abigail's death, Adams saw no reason to treat her daintily or delicately. Instead, he made her his most trusted and regular correspondent and confidante.
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“Wonderful woman,” he exclaimed in a typical letter, “how is it possible for you…to go through such a hurry of visits, dinners and parties, converse with such a variety of Characters, Masculine and Feminine, and at the same time keep so particular a journal[?]” Louisa Catherine had been sending him long segments of her private record of political life among the powers-that-be in Washington. When she apologized for her prejudiced accounts of the debates over slavery in Missouri or John Quincy's dinner table conversation with Andrew Jackson, the patriarch of the Adams family told her not to worry: “I am myself too much under the influence of prejudices to have ever reproached you seriously with yours.” Besides, she was positioned at the center of political life in the capital of the emerging world power, while he was imprisoned by old age in a “part of the World [where] nothing occurs but Morning, Noon and Night, New Moons and full moons, Spring, Summer and Winter.” Without her regular reports he would be forced, as he put it, “to vegetate in solitude.” The snatches from her journal had become “a kind of necessary life to me, I long for it the whole week.” In short, he put the ever insecure Louisa Catherine at ease by assuming the posture of student to her teacher, provincial to her cosmopolitan, sensing instinctively that her impressive intelligence could flow fully only when nurtured and reassured.
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She proclaimed him to be the one member of the Adams family—and this pointedly included her husband in the list of the ignorant—who knew how to unlock her secret thoughts and feelings. She sent him her translations of Plato, copies of her poetry, worried motherly reactions to son George's poor grades at Harvard, extensive descriptions of the Senate debates over the Missouri question. Adams wondered admiringly how “amidst all the ceremonies, frivolities and gravities of a Court and of a Legislature [you] can find time to write so many and so excellent letters to me.” And he speculated approvingly that “Two such Industrious honey Bees as John Quincy Adams and his Wife were never connected together before….”
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When George was expelled from Harvard for flagrant misbehavior and loss of temper, Adams tried to intercede on the boy's behalf. He asked Louisa Catherine to “receive him tenderly, and forgive him.” She was also to inform John Quincy that the senior Adams expected his son to treat his grandson kindly and listen with an open mind to George's side of the story. In effect, the patriarch was throwing his considerable weight behind his recalcitrant grandson, supporting Louisa Catherine's instinct for forgiveness against John Quincy's instinct for severity. It was a small but symbolic gesture that Louisa Catherine always cherished; the missing link in her husband's personality providentially provided, as it were, by the one man in the world John Quincy dared not defy, the one man in the world with the emotional range to match her moods with his own sturdier sentimentalism, the one man in the world temperamentally equipped to encompass her husband's moral standards and her own powers of forgiveness.
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Whatever contribution Adams made to Louisa Catherine's always perilous self-confidence, she helped—albeit from afar—to redress the imbalance created by Abigail's absence. Perhaps it was his congenital perversity, the life-long tendency to counter prevailing trends with his own surge of opposite-minded wisdom. Whatever the reason, he became more buoyant just when advancing age, physical decline, and outliving his generation ought to have made him a curmudgeon. It was all a matter of will, he declared, claiming that “there is in this world so much of dullness and dismals that it is a Moral virtue to…divert attention from gloomy contemplations, which might otherwise drive you Melancholy Mad.”
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The one concern that could not be diverted was John Quincy. His son's inexorable advance toward the presidency caused friends and visitors to presume that the senior Adams felt unmitigated pride. The exact opposite was true. “He has a very hard, laborious and unhappy life,” he confided concerning his son, “though he is envied by half the people in the United States for his talents and situation.” When news of John Quincy's election reached him, as old friends offered congratulations, he remained restrained and apprehensive. “No man who ever held the office of President,” he cautioned, “would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.” John Quincy eventually fulfilled his fondest fears by staking out a principled position on federal power that envisioned planned economies and a national system of education and scientific research—notions that were over a century ahead of their time. He was, of course, hurled from office after one term in favor of a popular hero, like his father before him. In what turned out to be the last words of his last letter to Jefferson, Adams expressed his abiding parental worry that his son the president was suffering from “the usual perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be….” John Quincy was going to be chewed up and spit out by a political culture that treated principled probity of the Adams stripe in much the way the lions treated the early Christians. “Our American Chivalry is the worst in the World,” he lamented to Jefferson. “It has no Laws, no bounds, no definitions; it seems to be all a Caprice.” Here was the very theme that his great-grandson would make into an American literary classic: prepared by disposition and training to implement the values of the eighteenth century, John Quincy and then Henry after him were cast adrift into a nineteenth-century world that required a different kind of temperament, a more elastic code of morality, a more devious definition of duty. Adams had long since come to terms with the deuces-wild dynamism of democratic politics and his own alienation from its rhetorical requirements. What he fretted about in his last few years was not the larger pattern, but rather the personal fate of his own flesh and blood, who was caught up in it.
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In fact, he liked to say that the very act of worrying was itself evidence that he had not succumbed to senility. He told Josiah Quincy that “human society, like the ocean, needed commotion to keep it from putrefying.” He wanted to worry; it was a sign of life. “For my own part,” he insisted, “I should not like to live in the Millennium. It would be the most sickish life imaginable.” Biblical descriptions of life in the hereafter seemed thoroughly boring to him. He preferred Cicero's description in
De Senectute
, where the next world was a reunion of old friends and antagonists: “That is just how I feel,” he explained, “I agree with my old friend, Dr. Franklin, who used to say on this subject, ‘We are all invited to a great entertainment. Your carriage comes first to the door; but we shall all meet there.'”
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Gala visits from Lafayette and the entire Corps of Cadets at West Point provided occasions for spirited displays of public oratory, which served to exhibit his persisting powers. But he was happiest and most himself in more informal and intimate gatherings of family, friends, and neighbors. “It is a surprise,” wrote Josiah Quincy in his journal after one visit, “to find a great personage so simple, so perfectly natural, so thoroughly human.”
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Thanks in large part to the young Quincy's journal accounts, we can catch glimpses of his conversation and flashes of the inimitable Adams style still flourishing at the end. At age eighty-nine, for example, he greeted an equally elderly woman whom he had known in his youth with the salutation: “What! Madam, shall we not go walk in Cupid's Grove together?” After an embarrassed pause, the woman, remembering the local lovers' lane of old, replied: “Ah, sir, it would not be the first time we walked together.” Or there was the time he proceeded to demonstrate his innovative approach to statecraft, recalling that he had once confounded the Turkish ambassador by blowing smoke rings throughout their interview, delighting his audience with the same skill as he told the story. Then there was the time a group of young men gathered at the Adams homestead to debate the strengths and weaknesses of the several Christian sects; they were shocked to hear the old sage complain about the intolerance of all Christians, then advocate “the old Roman system of permitting every man to worship how and what he pleased.” When one of the young men observed that this was paganism, Adams agreed that it was, and laughed heartily. Another young man reported hearing that, in the frontier settlements of Kentucky, “everybody was either a bigot or an atheist.” To which Adams replied that “it was pretty much the same all the world over.”
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The last description of his personality in full flight that survives dates from June of 1823. Despite a recent gash on his ankle, which Adams claimed would have healed nicely on its own if the local physicians had been prevented from prescribing “Bathes, Tents, and bandages and lotions,” he walked over a mile to Josiah Quincy's house in order to share company and conversation. According to Quincy, he held forth for more than two hours, recalling local characters of old, speculating that John Jay was really the author of Washington's famous Farewell Address, and then explaining at great length why John Dickinson had worked so hard to prevent the passage of the Declaration of Independence. It seemed to him that Dickinson's real problem was a wife and mother who were devout Quakers; they tormented him with thoughts of pacifism. Poor Dickinson could not serve his country and his family simultaneously. Adams concluded the little story with the confession that, “If I had had such a mother and such a wife, I believe I should have shot myself.”

Then he launched into a longer tale about old Judge Edmund Quincy, Josiah's grandfather, who was once accosted on the local road by a robber. As Adams reached the stirring climax of the story, he rose from his seat and lifted up his cane to demonstrate how the judge beat off the attacker, but the cane accidentally struck and demolished a picture hanging behind him. Adams began to laugh uncontrollably at his blunder, claiming he had not had such a good time in months. “If I was to come here once a day,” he announced, “I should live half a year longer.” When one of the guests countered that, if the spirited company had such a positive effect on the old man's health, he might consider coming “twice a day, and live a year longer,” Adams noted the wisdom of the suggestion and declared that he planned to return again later in the day. And he did.
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In the annals of early American history there are several moments frozen in time by a memorable, if often romanticized, recounting of the illustrative events—Washington crossing the Delaware, Patrick Henry hurling his thunderous challenge at George III, Benjamin Franklin sauntering into Philadelphia as an aspiring youth with only the clothes on his back and two loaves of bread under his arm. Adams's choice for a tableau, which never materialized, was the early and impassioned defense of colonial rights by James Otis, a scene in which Adams himself appeared only in the background. But if Adams had possessed Franklin's genius for self-promotion, or if Josiah Quincy had chosen to dedicate his life to playing James Boswell to Adams's Samuel Johnson, they might plausibly have selected that afternoon at Quincy's house to memorialize.

The account would have depicted a very old, quite rumpled and wrinkled Adams, holding forth in his garrulous and animated style, telling all the old and slightly indiscreet anecdotes about his fellow members of the revolutionary generation, explaining why the true story of the American Revolution would never find its way into the history books, reviewing the litany of Adams lessons about balanced constitutions in state and self, the dangerous but unavoidable power of aristocracies, the seductive influence of political illusions. At the end, the account might have the patriarch murmuring to himself about paradoxes he had forgotten to mention as he trundled back to the Adams homestead or—a bit of fictional improvement here—rode home on his favorite donkey. Words and visual images would come together to convey the absence of pretense or self-delusion, the candor about himself and about his country, the reckless release of honest affection that could only find its fullest expression in the safety of an intimate circle of trusted friends.

A
S THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY
of the Declaration of Independence approached, both Adams and Jefferson, along with Charles Carroll of Maryland, the only other surviving signer, were deluged with requests to attend official celebrations of the national birthday. Both men responded by pleading old age and ill-health, offering regrets, then providing self-consciously eloquent testimonials that they knew would be read out loud to the assembled guests. It was an ironic opportunity for Adams, who had spent much of his retirement criticizing the historical significance of the Declaration as anything more than an ornamental epilogue to the real story of the American Revolution. But the annual celebration on July 4 was now too well established to make his criticism sound like anything more than mindless carping. So for about a decade he had stopped complaining and accepted the fact that, misguided or not, this was the day when Americans remembered the great cause.

Although he received requests to participate in what was being called “the Jubilee of Independence” from as far away as Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, his most resonant reply went to the organizers of the Quincy celebration. After lamenting that his physical condition precluded attendance, Adams defied the customary sentiments and solemnities by declaring, in effect, that the ultimate meaning of the American Revolution was still problematic. He acknowledged that the revolutionary era had been “a memorable epoch in the annals of the human race,” but the jury was still out on its significance. He warned that America was “destined in future history to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall in time to come be shaped by the
human mind
.” Posterity, in short, would not only judge, it would play an active role in shaping the outcome. This was a disconcerting message for patriotic celebrants gathered to dispense praise rather than accept a challenge, but it was also vintage Adams irreverence. When a delegation from Quincy called on him a few days later to request a clarifying statement that might be presented as a toast in his behalf at the celebration, Adams uncharacteristically offered only an enigma: “I will give you
INDEPENDENCE FOREVER
,” he replied. When prodded to enumerate, he refused. “Not a word,” he insisted.
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Meanwhile, down at Monticello, the other great patriarch was receiving the same kind of requests. Jefferson was also too old and infirm to leave his mountaintop, but he, more than Adams, sensed that this might be the last occasion to register his personal stamp on the public understanding of just what the American Revolution had meant. His most eloquent response was sent to the committee responsible for the Independence Day ceremonies in Washington. Although his intestinal disorder had become nearly incapacitating, Jefferson worked over the draft of his reply with great care, correcting and revising with the same attention to detail that he had brought to the original draft of the Declaration, producing one of his most inspired and inspiring renditions of the Jeffersonian message. After gracefully excusing himself from the ceremonies at the nation's capital, he regretted his absence from “the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election…between submission and the sword” then he offered his distilled understanding of just what the band of worthies had done:

 

Thomas Jefferson's “last letter,” June 24, 1826, declining the invitation to attend the Independence Day celebration in Washington, D.C.
Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
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May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government…. All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.
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Both the lyrical language and the uplifting theme were vintage Jefferson, and were immediately recognized as such when read aloud before the distinguished gathering in Washington on the Fourth. Some of the language, it turns out, had been borrowed, either inadvertently or surreptitiously, from a famous seventeenth-century speech by Richard Rumford, an old, one-eyed Cromwellian soldier executed for treason by James II in 1685. The memorable image of mankind being born without “saddles on their backs,” and the passage about “a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them,” came straight from Rumford's oration at the execution block. Jefferson owned copies of several English histories that reprinted the Rumford speech; certain telling phrases had obviously lodged themselves in his memory, then leapt into his mind as he wrote.
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But even if the felicity of the style was in part secondhand, the content provided a fresh and vigorous statement that contrasted nicely with Adams's more cautious message. For Jefferson, the American Revolution was the opening shot in what would eventually become a global struggle for liberation from all forms of oppression. Moreover, the final victory in that struggle was foreordained—“to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all”—and the end result toward which destiny was driving mankind, with America in the lead, was a freer individual and a more egalitarian as well as more prosperous social order. Adams, on the other hand, went out of his way to undercut intimations of American destiny, emphasizing the precarious and fragile character of the American experiment in republican government, challenging subsequent generations of Americans to meet the inevitable threats to national survival with the same realistic rationality that his and Jefferson's generation had managed to muster at the very beginning.

Adams's message, it is now abundantly clear, was much truer to and representative of the traditional values of the passing generation that he and Jefferson had come to symbolize, most especially in its unsentimental recognition that the corrosive forces that had undermined other nations and empires were a persistent threat to America as well. Jefferson, on the other hand, spoke a different, more unabashedly liberal, political rhetoric and idiom, one that emphasized the unprecedented impact of individual energies released into the world now that encrusted traditions and feudal privileges had been blown away. There was a providential, even fatalistic dimension to Jefferson's formulation, for it suggested that something wonderful and elemental had
already happened
, that it had occurred in America during the preceding fifty years, and that, like an explosion or natural force such as a river or lava flow, it was destined to run its course regardless of human foibles and intrusions. Perhaps the most beguiling feature of Jefferson's vision was its confident sense that, now that the American Revolution had propelled the country into a leadership role as the global model for what he called “self government,” the fate of the American political experiment was no longer either in doubt or in human hands.

The Adams formulation suggested exactly the opposite: the destiny of the new nation was contingent upon wise and skillful leadership if it hoped to avoid the sad fate of all other republics and eventually all other empires. Whatever superiority the Adams version had as an accurate expression of his generation's best wisdom on the question of America's prospects, the rhetorical superiority of the Jefferson version was already obvious. Anyone poised to assess their relative appeal to posterity would have been forced to conclude that Adams's chances were just as problematic as his diagnosis of America's future.

But before the historic reputations of the two patriarchs could diverge, their lives were joined one final time in an episode that almost all the commentators described as an act of divine providence. On the evening of July 3, Jefferson, whose health had been declining since February, fell into unconsciousness. He awoke momentarily that night and uttered his last discernible words: “Is it the Fourth?” As midnight approached, his family, which had gathered around his bedside for the death watch, offered a prayer for “a few minutes of prolonged life.” As if in response to their prayers, life lingered in him until the next morning and he died at twenty minutes past twelve noon on July 4.
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Meanwhile, Adams rose at his customarily early hour, wishing to keep his routine despite the special distinction of the day, and asked to be placed in his favorite reading chair in the study. Around mid-morning, however, he began to falter and family members moved him back to his bedroom. Word went out to relatives attending the Independence Day celebration in Boston and to John Quincy in Washington to hurry home, that the founding father was dying. He lapsed into unconsciousness at almost the exact moment that Jefferson died. The end then came quickly, at about five-thirty in the late afternoon of July 4. He wakened for a brief moment, indicated his awareness that death was near and, with obvious effort, spoke his last words: “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
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News of the nearly simultaneous death of America's two most eminent elder statesmen seeped out to the world over the next few weeks. The prominent mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch calculated that “the chance that two of the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 should survive half a century, and die on the 4th of July, was only one in twelve hundred millions.” Richard Rush observed that most people were stunned at the coincidence. “We should pronounce it romantic,” he declared, “did we not believe it providential.” In what became a common image, Rush envisioned Adams and Jefferson “hand in hand ascending into heaven.” Throughout the cities and states, and eventually in the nation's capital, plans for memorial services honoring the paired patriarchs proceeded apace. One of the few sour notes came from Horace Binney, the old Philadelphia Federalist, who despised Jefferson and recalled the long-standing political differences between the two men. “The most extraordinary feature of their history is that of a joint or consociated celebration,” Binney noted. “Their tempers and dispositions toward one another would at one time have made a very tolerable salad…[and] it never entered into my conception…to admit one and the same apotheosis.”
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Actually, the notion that Adams and Jefferson represented opposing impulses in the life of the early republic that blended together like the oil and vinegar of “a very tolerable salad” was one of the dominant themes in the eulogies. It was the old suggestion of Benjamin Rush; namely, that the two statesmen embodied “the North and South Poles of the American Revolution,” but now orators from Maine to Tennessee developed the idea as a major reason for the success of the founding generation.

Adams was “the bold and eloquent debater…big with the fate of empires,” while Jefferson was the skilled writer, who “embodied the principles of liberty in the language of inspiration….” Adams represented the vigorous values of Rome; Jefferson the deep serenities of Greece. Adams drew upon the English political and constitutional tradition for his intellectual inspiration; Jefferson preferred the French
philosophes
. Adams was a noble descendant of the original Puritan settlers of New England; Jefferson could trace his ancestry back to the Cavalier dynasty of Virginia. Adams possessed an “ardent temperament…marked with great fervor and great strength…[and] characterized by active moral courage” Jefferson was “calm, circumspective, reflective,” and “kept at all times such a command over his temper, that no one could discover the workings of his soul.” The correspondence between the “Sage of Quincy” and the “Sage of Monticello”—and these titles were now recognized as semi-official designations—even revealed compensating differences between the writing styles of the two patriarchs: Adams's prose was “plain, nervous and emphatic, and striking with a kind of epigrammatic force” Jefferson's was “light and flowing with easy and careless melody.” In short, Adams and Jefferson represented a kind of matched pair of minds and dispositions that allowed the infant republic to meet diverse challenges because “whatsoever quality appeared deficient in the one, was to be found in the character or talents of the other.” Finally, an important emphasis for several of the eulogists was the claim that both the New Englander and the Virginian embraced a truly national vision and that “the two great chieftains of the North and South” thereby served as telling symbols of the need to defy sectional divisions.
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