Founding Brothers: Chapter Six

When commenting on his other enemies, Adams displayed considerable flair. Tom Paine, for example, came off as “the Satyr of the Age...a mongrel between Pig and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a Butch Wolf.”

In both instances his posture of public probity—slavery should be ended and political parties were evil agents that corrupted republican values—was at odds with his personal behavior and political interest.

But he was not a mover-and-shaker, only a draftsman; the words he wrote were merely the lyrical expression of ideas that had been bandied about in the Congress and the various colonial legislatures for years.

...twitching in and out of control as he attempted to compose his autobiography, which turned into a series of salvos at his political enemies (Hamilton, no surprise, was the chief target) and ended, literally in midsentence, when he realized that it was all catharsis and no coherence...

Warren concluded with a scathing diagnosis of the Adams correspondence with her as a scattered series of verbal impulses and “the most captious, malignant, irrelevant compositions that have ever been seen.”

Instead, they were all “inhabitants of the royal menagerie,” including lions, elephants, wildcats, rats, squirrels, whales, sharks—the litany went on for several paragraphs—who then proceeded to tear one another to pieces as he tried to lecture them on the advantages of “the unadulterated principles of liberty, equality and fraternity among all living creatures.”

Instead, they were all “inhabitants of the royal menagerie,” including lions, elephants, wildcats, rats, squirrels, whales, sharks—the litany went on for several paragraphs—who then proceeded to tear one another to pieces as he tried to lecture them on the advantages of “the unadulterated principles of liberty, equality and fraternity among all living creatures.”

Then, ever playful with Rush, Adams signed off with the following self- deprecating joke: “I must tell you that my wife, who took a fancy to read this letter upon my table, bids me tell you that she ‘thinks my head, too, a little crack,’ and I am half of that mind myself.”

Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence was a perfect example of such dramatic distortions. The Revolution in this romantic rendering became one magical moment of inspiration, leading inexorably to the foregone conclusion of American independence.

“It was patched and piebald policy then, as it is now, ever was, and ever will be, world without end." The real drama of the American Revolution, which was perfectly in accord with Adams's memory as well as with the turbulent conditions of his own soul, was its inherent messiness.

Franklin, for example, was a superb scientist and masterful prose stylist, to be sure, but also a vacuous political thinker and diplomatic fraud, who spent the bulk of his time in Paris flirting with younger women of the salon set.

As he told Rush, “Deceive not thyself. There is not an old friar in France, not in Europe, who looks on a blooming young virgin with sang-froid."

“I have reason to remember it,” Adams recalled, “because my opinion of the French Revolution produced a coldness towards me in all my Revolutionary friends, and an inclination towards Mr. Jefferson, which broke out in violent invectives and false imputations upon me and in flattering panegyrics upon Mr. Jefferson.”

“This is enough for me,” he wrote Rush, adding that he knew Adams to be “always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes incorrect and precipitate in his judgments.”

“It was only as if one sailor had met a brother sailor, after twenty-five years’ absence,” Adams joked, “and had accosted him, how fare you, Jack?”

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

While the Adams style generated a host of memorable epigrammatic flashes, it was the worst-possible vehicle for sustaining the diplomatic niceties.

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.”

“I have no thought, in this correspondence, but to satisfy you and myself,” Adams observed, adding, “My Reputation has been so much the Sport of the public for fifty years and will be with Posterity, that I hoped it a bubble a Gossameur, that idles in the wanton Summer Air.”

The best bellwether of the Adams psyche was always Abigail, and on July 15, 1813, she appended a note to her husband’s letter, her first communication with Jefferson since the lacerating letters she had written him nine years earlier.

He now wanted to go on record as agreeing with Adams that, while the progress of science was indisputable, certain political principles were eternal verities that the ancients understood as well as the moderns: “The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed thro’ all time,” he observed.

“If your objects and opinions have been misunderstood," Jefferson noted, "if the measures and principles of others have been wrongly imputed to you, as I believe they have been, that you should leave an explanation of them, would be an act of justice to yourself.”

Though precisely the same situation obtained for Jefferson, as well—he owned about two hundred slaves and ten thousand acres, a goodly portion inherited from his father-in-law—Adams never confronted him so directly.

Adams loved to bring the subject up in his correspondence with others, especially Benjamin Rush, because events had tended to vindicate his early apprehensions, which had produced the first fissures in his relationship with Jefferson in the early 1790s and then became central ingredients in the Republican polemic against Adams in the presidential campaign of 1800.

But it was Jefferson who first broached the subject in the correspondence, and he did so in a wholly conciliatory way: “Your prophecies...proved truer than mine; and yet fell short of the fact, for instead of a million, the destruction of 8 or 10 millions of human beings has probably been the effect of these convulsions..."

“I have most
 carefully avoided every public act or manifestation on that subject,” he announced, explaining that the abolition of slavery was a task for the next generation, “who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation.”

Adams agreed that memories of the past were all that was left, and he too preferred to remember only the good ones: "I look back with rapture to those golden days when Virginia and Massachusetts lived and acted together like a band of brothers,” he recalled, and though the end was near, “While I breath I shall be your friend.”

Adams concurred that the reunion in heaven would permit them to laugh at their human follies and foibles, though he would talk with Franklin only after the great man did proper penance for his sins.

But the more mundane truth is that they never faced and therefore never fully resolved all their political differences; they simply outlived them.

But the borrowed rhetoric was only one small feature of a uniquely Jeffersonian message that was inherently rhetorical in character—that is, it framed the issues at a rarefied altitude, where all answers were self-evident and no real choices had to be made.

He conceded that the era of the American Revolution had been “a memorable epoch in the annals of the human race,” but the jury was still out on its significance.

He conceded that the era of the American Revolution had been “a memorable epoch in the annals of the human race,” but the jury was still out on its significance.

Without a sanctioned central government to steer the still-fragile American republic, the new crew was certain to founder on that huge rock called slavery, which was lurking dead ahead in the middle distance and that even Jefferson acknowledged to be “a breaker.”