Founding Brothers (35 page)

Why, then, did Adams take the fateful step, which led to
a fourteen-year exchange of 158 letters, a correspondence that is generally
regarded as the intellectual capstone to the achievements of the revolutionary
generation and the most impressive correspondence between prominent statesmen
in all of American history? The friendship and the mutual trust on which it
rested had, in fact, not been recovered by 1812. It took the correspondence to
recover the friendship, not the other way around. What, then, motivated Adams
to extend his hand across the gap that existed between Quincy and Monticello,
then write more than two letters for every one of Jefferson’s?

Two overlapping but competing answers come to mind. First, there was a good
deal of unfinished business between the two men, a clear recognition on both
sides that they had come to fundamentally different conclusions about what the
American Revolution meant. Adams believed that Jefferson’s version of the
story, while misguided, was destined to dominate the history books. The
resumption of his correspondence with Jefferson afforded Adams the opportunity
to challenge the Jeffersonian version and to do so in the form of a written
record virtually certain to become a major historical document of its own.
“You and I ought not to die,” Adams rather poignantly put it in an
early letter, “before We have explained ourselves to each other.”
But both men knew they were sending their letters to posterity as much as to
each other.
³²

Second, the
reconciliation and ensuing correspondence permitted Adams to join Jefferson as
the costar of an artfully arranged final act in the revolutionary drama. Adams
had spent most of his retirement years denouncing such contrivances as gross
distortions of history. But he had also spent those same years marveling at the
benefits that accrued to anyone willing to pose for posterity in the mythical
mode. If he could only control himself, if he could speak the lines that
history wanted to hear, if he could fit himself into the heroic mold like a
kind of living statue, he might yet win his ticket to immortality.

B
OTH
A
DAMS
and Jefferson
knew their roles by heart, especially in its Ciceronian version as a pair of
retired patriarchs now beyond ambition and above controversy. The dialogue they
sustained from 1812 to 1826 can be read at several levels, but the chief source
of its modern appeal derives from its elegiac tone: the image of two American
icons, looking back with seasoned serenity at the Revolution they have wrought,
delivering eloquent soliloquies on all the timeless topics, speaking across
their political differences to each other and across the ages to us. If we
wished to conjure up a mental picture of this rendition of the dialogue, it
would feature Jefferson standing tall and straight in his familiar statuesque
posture, his arms folded across his chest, as was his custom, while the much
shorter Adams paced back and forth around him, jabbing at the air in his
nervous and animated style, periodically stopping to grab Jefferson by the
lapels to make an irreverent point.

This, of course, is the
constructed or posed version that ought to provoke our immediate skepticism.
(In Adams’s terms, this is not history, but romance.) For several
reasons, however, this beguiling depiction cannot be summarily dismissed. First
of all, the friendship
was,
in fact, recovered and the reconciliation
realized during the course of the correspondence. The clinching evidence comes
late, in 1823, when Jefferson responded to a series of letters that appeared in
the newspapers. Adams had written them much earlier and had described Jefferson
as a duplicitous political partisan. “Be assured, my dear Sir,”
Jefferson wrote Adams, “that I am incapable of receiving the slightest
impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age,
worth, and wisdom, and to sow tares between friends who have been such for
nearly half a century. Beseeching you then not to suffer your mind to be
disquieted by this wicked attempt to poison its peace, and praying you to throw
it by.” Adams was overjoyed. He insisted that Jefferson’s letter be
read aloud to his entire extended family at the breakfast table, calling it
“the best letter that ever was written … just such a letter as I
expected, only it was infinitely better expressed.” He concluded with an
Adams salvo against “the peevish and fretful effusions of
politicians,” then signed off as “J.A. In the 89 year of his age
still too fat to last much longer.” Clearly, this was no dramatic
contrivance. The old trust had been fully recovered.
³³

Second, the
improbably symmetrical ending to the dialogue casts an irresistibly dramatic
spell over the entire story and the way to tell it. Rush had predicted that the
two patriarchs would reconcile, then go to their graves “at nearly the
same time.” But their mutual exit was even more exquisitely timed than
Rush had dreamed. (No serious novelist would ever dare to make this up.) They
died within five hours of each other, on the fiftieth anniversary to the day
and almost to the hour of the official announcement of American independence to
the world in 1776. Call it a miracle, an accident, or a case of two powerful
personalities willing themselves to expire on schedule and according to script.
But it happened.

Third, the correspondence can be read as an extended
conversation between two gods on Mount Olympus because both men were determined
to project that impression: “But wither is senile garrulity leading
me?” Jefferson asked rhetorically. “Into politics, of which I have
taken final leave.… I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus
and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much happier.”
Adams then responded with his own display of classical learning and literary
flair: “I have read Thucydides and Tacitus so often, and at such distant
periods of my Life, that elegant, profound and enchanting is their Style, I am
weary of them,” then joked that “My Senectutal Loquacity has more
than retaliated your ‘Senile Garrulity.’ ”
³⁴

Many of the
most memorable exchanges required no staging or self-conscious posing
whatsoever, since there was a host of safe subjects the two sages could engage
without risking conflict and that afforded occasions for conspicuous displays
of their verbal prowess. They were, after all, two of the most accomplished
letter writers of the era, men who had fashioned over long careers at the
writing desk distinctive prose styles that expressed their different
personalities perfectly. Thus, Jefferson waxed eloquent on the aging process
and their mutual intimations of mortality: “But our machines have now
been running for 70 or 80 years,” he observed stoically, “and we
must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion,
next a spring, will be giving way, and however we may tinker with them for
awhile, all will at length surcease motion.” Adams responded in kind but
with a caveat: “I am sometimes afraid that my ‘Machine’ will
not ‘surcease motion’ soon enough; for I dread nothing so much as
‘dying at the top,’ ” meaning becoming senile and a
burden to his family. He then went on to chide Jefferson for talking like an
old man. Of all the original signers of the Declaration of Independence,
“You are the youngest and the most energetic in mind and body,” and
therefore most likely to be the final survivor. Like the last person in the
household to retire for the night, it would be Jefferson’s responsibility
to close up the fireplace and “rake the ashes over the
coals.”
³⁵

Most modern
readers come to the correspondence fully aware of Jefferson’s proficiency
with a pen, and are therefore somewhat surprised to discover that Adams could
more than hold his own in the verbal dueling, indeed delivered the most
quotable lines. For example, after Jefferson produced a lengthy exegesis on the
origins of the Native American population of North America, Adams dismissed all
the current theories about the original occupants of the continent: “I
should as soon suppose that the Prodigal Son, in a frolic with one of his
Girls, made a trip to America in one of Mother Carey’s Eggsels, and left
the fruits of their amours here.” Or when Jefferson embraced the
development of an indigenous American language, arguing that everyday usage
“is the workshop in which new ones [words] are elaborated,” rather
than the English dictionaries compiled by the likes of Samuel Johnson, Adams
went into a colorful tirade. All English dictionaries, he declared, were
vestiges of the same British tyranny that the American Revolution destroyed
forever. “We are no more bound by Johnson’s Dictionary,” he
pronounced, “than by the Cannon [
sic
] Law of England.” By
what right did Samuel Johnson deny him, John Adams, the freedom to fashion his
own vocabulary? “I have as good a right to make a Word,” he
insisted, “as that Pedant Bigot Cynic and Monk.”
³⁶

Speaking of
words, the pungency of the Adams prose comes through so impressively in the
correspondence in part because Adams invested himself in the exchange more than
Jefferson. He composed more memorable passages because he wrote many more
words. When the torrent from Quincy threatened to flood Monticello, he
apologized for getting so far out ahead. Jefferson then apologized in return,
claiming that he received over twelve hundred letters a year, all of which
required responses, so it was difficult for him to match the Adams pace. Adams
replied that he received only a fraction of that number but chose not to answer
most of them, which allowed him to focus all his allegedly waning energies on
Jefferson.

Beyond sheer verbal volume, the punch so evident in the
Adams prose reflected his more aggressive and confrontational temperament. The
Jefferson style was fluid, lyrical, cadenced, and melodious. Words for him were
like calming breezes that floated across the pages. The Adams style was
excited, jumpy, exclamatory, naughty. Words for him were like weapons designed
to pierce the pages or explode above them in illuminating airbursts. While the
Adams style generated a host of memorable epigrammatic flashes, it was the
worst-possible vehicle for sustaining the diplomatic niceties. Jefferson was
perfectly capable of remaining on script and in role as philosopher-king to the
end. If it had been up to him, the demigod version of the Adams-Jefferson
dialogue would have captured its essence and ultimate meaning as a staged
performance for posterity. Adams, however, despite all his vows of Ciceronian
serenity, was congenitally incapable of staying in character. For him, the only
meaningful kind of conversation was an argument. And that, in the end, is what
the dialogue with Jefferson became, and the best way to understand its
historical significance.

A
DAMS
REMAINED
on his best behavior for over a year. There were a few brief
flurries, chiefly jabs at Jefferson’s failure to prepare the nation for
the War of 1812, especially his negligence in building up the American navy,
which had always been an Adams hobbyhorse. Ever diplomatic, Jefferson never
quite conceded that Adams had been right about a larger navy, but when the
American fleet won some early battles in the war, Jefferson graciously noted
that “the success of our little navy … must be more gratifying to
you than to most men, as having been the early and constant advocate of wooden
walls.” The potentially explosive issues lay buried further back in the
past. Both men recognized that touching them placed the newly established
reconciliation at risk.
³⁷

The first
Adams eruption occurred in June of 1813, followed immediately by a chain
reaction of explosions over the ensuing six months. (Adams wrote thirty
letters, Jefferson five.) The detonating device was publication of a letter
Jefferson had written in 1801 to Joseph Priestley, the English scientist and
renowned critic of Christianity. In that letter Jefferson had mentioned Adams
in passing as a retrograde thinker opposed to all forms of progress, one of the
“ancients” rather than “moderns.” “The sentiment
that you have attributed to me in your letter to Dr. Priestley I totally
disclaim,” Adams protested, “and I demand in the French sense of
the word demand of you the proof.” Sensing that Adams was in
mid-explosion, Jefferson responded at length. The Priestley letter was “a
confidential communication” that was “never meant to trouble the
public mind.” He then went on to remind Adams that the party wars were
still raging back then, that both sides had been guilty of some rather extreme
denunciations of the others, and that his real target had been the Federalists,
who had defamed his own notions of government as dangerous innovations.
³⁸

Then came
the crucial acknowledgment and quasi-apology. Adams had been targeted for
criticism because he was the standard-bearer for the Federalist party. But
Jefferson had always realized that Adams did not fit into the party grooves:
“I happened to cite it from you, [though] the whole letter shows I had
them only in view,” Jefferson explained. “In truth, my dear Sir, we
were far from considering you as the author of all the measures we blamed. They
were placed under the protection of your name, but we were satisfied they
wanted much of your approbation.” (Notice the collective
“we,” an inadvertent acknowledgment of the coordinated campaign of
the Republican party.) Adams, in effect, happened to be in the line of fire,
which was really directed at the Hamiltonian wing of the Federalist party:
“You would do me great injustice therefore,” Jefferson concluded,
“by taking to yourself what was intended for men who were your secret, as
they are now your open enemies.”
³⁹

Jefferson’s explanation was ingenious. It shifted the blame for the
rupture of the friendship onto the Hamiltonians, whom he knew Adams utterly
despised, then invited Adams to align himself, at least retrospectively, with
the Republican side of the debate. The trouble with Adams, of course, was that
he was unwilling to align himself with any political party; indeed, his
trademark had always been to embody the virtuous ideal, the Washington
quasi-monarchical model of executive leadership, and stand above party. The
clear, if unspoken, message of Jefferson’s letter was that this admirable
posture was no longer possible in American politics. Adams had gotten himself
caught in the cross fire created by the new conditions and the partisan
imperatives they generated. Most important, from the point of view of the
friendship, Jefferson admitted that his behind-the-scenes criticism of Adams
had been a willful misrepresentation. While not really an apology—indeed,
forces beyond his control had dictated his actions—this was at least a
major concession.