Passionate Sage (29 page)

One could already detect the sectional bias that their lives allegedly warned against in some of the orations. John Tyler's address in Richmond, Virginia, focused almost exclusively on Jefferson, merely noting as an afterthought Adams's simultaneous demise. The eulogist in Charleston, South Carolina, ignored Adams altogether. On the other hand, New England orators tended to devote more space to Adams and to accord him primacy, claiming that “we owe our Independence more to John Adams than to any other created being, and that he was the
GREAT LEADER
of the American Revolution.” Interestingly, neither man garnered much praise for his presidential policies. The Boston eulogist put the matter diplomatically: “Of him [Adams] as President we shall say nothing, for fear of bringing up, in the minds of some, an allusion to politics, which are banished from these consecrated walls on this day.” Other speakers said much the same thing about Jefferson's presidency, studiously ignoring the disastrous embargo, preferring to avoid striking “a single chord that might not be attuned to harmony.” The focus was on the great political collaborations of the 1770s and 1780s, then the great renewal of friendship in old age, with a studied avoidance of “that period of their lives when they were at the head of contending parties.”
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Despite the sectional slightings and the evasiveness toward the political wars of the 1790s, most of the commentators concurred that both Adams and Jefferson deserved to be inducted into the same exclusive section of the American pantheon previously occupied only by George Washington. Both William Wirt, who delivered the eulogy in the nation's capital, and Daniel Webster, who spoke in Boston, made a point of ranking Adams and Jefferson right next to the great icon himself. “Washington is in the clear upper sky,” said Webster, and now “these two new stars have joined the American constellation….” Wirt even seemed relieved that America now could claim two heroes whose greatness did not depend at all on military or martial exploits, but rather on what he called “the triumph of the mind.” This was a refrain running throughout several of the eulogies; namely, that Adams and Jefferson were distinctive American heroes whose fame rested on their intellectual leadership and their thoughtful statesmanship, unlike European heroes such as Caesar or Napoleon, who won renown with the sword.
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Taken together, the many testimonials delivered throughout the summer and fall of 1826 reflected a clear consensus that the two recently departed sages had made roughly equal contributions to the shaping of American history and deserved to be remembered as they had lived—even more remarkably as they had died—as equal partners in the grand, still unfolding saga of America's experiment with republicanism. There would be other heroes, of course, and Daniel Webster's bombastic testimonial before four thousand proper Bostonians at Faneuil Hall suggested that he had hopes of being one of them. But nothing quite like this brilliant pair of compatible opposites, so the eulogists concluded, was likely ever again to appear on the national scene.

Any detached assessment about the abiding reputation of John Adams made from the perspective of 1826, then, would have concluded that he was securely enshrined. Although his presidency was still too controversial to allow for an appreciation of his executive independence, the ghost of Hamilton's personal criticisms was apparently banished forever. His leading role in the making of the American Revolution was now acknowledged by all; a few of the eulogists had even endorsed his old insistence that the debates and decisions of May 1776 were more crucial than the approval of the Declaration in July; and many more quoted Jefferson himself on Adams's colossal role in the Continental Congress. Throughout New England, he was given credit for warning Americans against the excesses of the French Revolution. A few of the testimonials even managed to cite his youthful premonition of American destiny while teaching at Worcester, thereby enhancing his reputation as a prophet. Finally, he was linked historically with Jefferson as the supreme embodiment of the American dialogue: he was the words and Jefferson was the music of the ongoing pageant begun in 1776; he was the “is,” Jefferson the “ought” of American politics. Not only were the respective reputations of Monticello and Quincy able to bask in the reflected glory of the other, their differences defined the proper limits of posterity's debate over the original intentions of the founding generation.
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Or so it seemed in the wake of their exquisitely timed exit. Within a few short years, however, a wholly different pattern began to become visible, a pattern that no one had predicted, one that would have surprised the eulogists of 1826 while confirming the most caustic prophecies of Adams himself.
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At the most elemental level, neither Adams nor Jefferson, nor any other member of the revolutionary generation for that matter, immediately ascended to the transcendent level of Washington. The notion that Adams and Jefferson were the rough equivalents of Washington and that they together “embodied the spirit of the revolution itself, in all its purity and force,” died along with the echoes of the eulogists. There was Washington, to be sure, and then there was everyone else. And the latter group, which included Adams and Jefferson, also included Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Jay, plus a host of others, membership depending on the political affiliation and regional loyalty of the person compiling the list. Most often, specific identities were subsumed under the collective label “the founders,” or just as often, “the fathers,” an aggregate of semi-sacred figures whose particular accomplishments and singular achievements were decidedly less important than their sheer presence as a powerful but faceless symbol of past greatness. For the generation of national leaders coming of age in the 1820s and 1830s—men like Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun—“the founders” represented a heroic but anonymous abstraction whose long shadow fell across all followers and whose legendary accomplishments defied comparison. “We can win no laurels in a war for independence,” Webster acknowledged in 1825. “Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all. Nor are there places for us…[as] the founders of states. Our fathers have filled them. But there remains to us a great duty of defence and preservation.”
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If the major theme was reverence, the minor theme, barely suppressed, was resentment, the awkward sense of sons who would never be able to measure up. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who burst onto the cultural scene in the 1830s with a message designed to mobilize these suppressed resentments into a liberating philosophy, articulated most forcefully and most eloquently the frustrations of the rising generation: “Our age is retrospective,” he observed in
Nature
. “It builds the sepulchres of the fathers…. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” But while Emerson's formulation called for rebellion instead of reverence, it sustained the convention of “the fathers” as a noble but anonymous aggregate, a convention that allowed filiopiety and hostility to co-exist without apparent contradiction.
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The exception, of course, was Washington. The ultimate “father,” Washington's achievements as the military leader in the war for independence and the precedent-setting first president of the new nation defied detached appraisal and catapulted his reputation beyond the reach of critics. But his actual achievements proved less important than his character, the stoical, classically inspired disposition emblematic of republican virtue. The best-selling and highly fictionalized biography by Mason Weems early in the century set the pattern for schoolbooks and patriotic orations throughout the antebellum era, making Washington the model of disciplined decorum and principled self-control, the man of unshakable morality and majestic magnanimity whose greatness, as Adams had predicted, flowed mysteriously out of his enigmatic silences and his sculpted serenity. If there was a Mount Olympus in the storybook version of American history in the middle third of the nineteenth century, Washington was the only occupant of the heights; and he was there less for what he had done than for what his alleged character symbolized. All the other members of the revolutionary generation, Adams and Jefferson included, were grouped together in a kind of generic cluster called “the founders,” situated somewhere short of the pinnacle. And if an astute Adams advocate was perched in mid-air, attempting to gauge the prospects of the Sage of Quincy breaking free of the pack and dashing up the final ascent to join Washington at the top, the signs were discouraging. For if character was the key, and if coolness and dignified self-effacement were the hallmarks of character, then a man famous for his impetuous outbursts and indecorous candor was hardly a candidate for promotion.
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In fact, anyone committed to an Adams campaign for the votes of posterity soon encountered indirect but ominous evidence that it was Jefferson, not Adams, who had begun to ascend. Strictly speaking, Jefferson's reputation was soaring and diving at the same time, contingent upon one's location north or south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The clearest manifestation of the trend manifested itself in 1830 during the Webster-Hayne debate.

This dramatic confrontation on the floor of the Senate pitted Robert Hayne of South Carolina against Daniel Webster of Massachusetts in an oratorical duel over the relative powers of the state and federal governments. In a series of much-quoted speeches that offered a kind of dress rehearsal for the sectional conflict that would lead to civil war, Hayne cited Jefferson as the chief defender of states' rights and the sacred source for southern opposition to what he called “federal tyranny.” Webster, on the other hand, whose ringing oration in behalf of the Union became a political catechism that northern schoolchildren were required to memorize for decades, mentioned Adams only in passing.
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Explaining an absence in history is usually a frustrating and ultimately futile exercise. Certainly Webster was aware of Adams's stature and political contribution; he had delivered one of the major eulogies in his behalf less than four years earlier. He was fully informed about Adams's lifelong insistence that national priorities must take precedence over sectional interests; he also knew that Adams was one of the most prominent New Englanders to condemn the Federalist threat of secession at the Hartford Convention in 1815. All of which made Adams the perfect and readily available foil for Webster to wield against Hayne's version of Jefferson. Whether he considered but rejected the idea, or whether it simply never occurred to him, the result was the same: in the first major national debate that focused on the political legacy of the founding generation, Adams was conspicuous only by his absence. The Webster-Hayne debate, it turned out, was as much a preview of what would happen to the relative reputations of Adams and Jefferson as it was a preview of the sectional divisions that would produce the Civil War.
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The most inadvertently prophetic words that Adams ever uttered were his last: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” For it was the Jeffersonian image that broke free of the aggregated anonymity, “the founders” or “the fathers,” and eventually ascended into heaven with Washington. During the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jeffersonian legacy became the most adaptable and all-purpose political touchstone in American political history. The story of the Jeffersonian legacy is so long and so astoundingly complex that the authoritative account by the leading Jeffersonian scholar of our time has required a book over five hundred pages in length, an account which necessarily touches on virtually every major political movement in modern American history. Jefferson has proved to be not just a man for all seasons, but also the patron saint of warring political camps: hero to the secessionist advocates in the antebellum South as well as to Abraham Lincoln and northern abolitionists, who drew inspiration from the Declaration of Independence; model for American intellectuals and educators as well as for religious fundamentalists like William Jennings Bryant, who made a pilgrimage to Monticello just before leading the assault on Darwin's theory of evolution in the Scopes Trial; Franklin Delano Roosevelt's favorite American, despite the fact that the New Deal represented a direct repudiation of Jeffersonian strictures against federal authority. The dedication of the Jeffersonian Memorial on the Tidal Basin in the nation's capital in 1943 culminated the story, in the sense that it represented the official enshrinement of Jefferson's memory as a national icon alongside Washington and Lincoln and beyond the reach of historical criticism or controversy.
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The search for the Adams political legacy, on the other hand, is more like the proverbial snipe hunt. Even before one begins, the futility of the quest is signalled by the awkward realization that there is no familiar and readily available word to characterize the Adams legacy. To speak of an “Adamite” or “Adamsian” tradition is to commit a verbal travesty, whereas “Jeffersonian,” and even “Madisonian,” roll off the tongue. But beyond the question of sonorous sounds, references to Adams's political wisdom simply do not show up in the historical locations where one might reasonably expect to find them.

A few examples must suffice to make the point, which is, after all, the kind of negative argument that could go on forever without exhausting the possibilities. Just as one might anticipate seeing Adams referred to at length in the Webster-Hayne debate, he also might be expected to turn up in the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. The issue at stake in those famous exchanges was the future of slavery in the western territories. During the campaign for the Senate seat in Illinois, Stephen Douglas called for the repudiation of the geographical compromise reached over the Missouri question in 1820 and advocated the doctrine of popular sovereignty, whereby the settlers in each new territory would decide to admit or deny slavery by the time-tested practice of a democratic vote. Lincoln opposed popular sovereignty on the grounds that it had led only to violent confrontations and bloodshed in Kansas two years earlier and, more tellingly, that permitting the extension of slavery defied the wisdom of “the fathers,” who had, in Lincoln's view, attempted to confine the institution to the South.
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