Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams Page 4

  The habits of mind and heart that exhibited themselves in mature form during Adams’s presidency were still in the process of congealing in the 1770s, when he made his major contribution to American independence. Between 1774, when he became a delegate to the Continental Congress, and 1778, when he sailed for France to become part of the American delegation in Paris, a great deal of history happened. Not only was the American Revolution launched and set on a successful course, but Adams himself first came into focus as a national leader. He began the period as a moderately successful thirtyeight-year-old lawyer and dabbler in provincial Massachusetts politics. He ended it as one of the two or three most prominent men in the country. The four years between his arrival on the national stage and his emergence as a major figure, while brimming with important events and historical decisions, is also one of the best documented chapters of Adams’s long life, replete with personal letters, official correspondence, an extensive diary, and a colorful, if not always trustworthy, autobiography. We know more about John Adams during this propitious moment in American history than about any other member of the revolutionary generation. For all these reasons, it is the optimum moment to catch an extended glimpse of Adams-in-the-making.19

  The man who travelled on horseback from Boston to Philadelphia in August of 1774 was an intense mixture of political commitment, palpable ambition, and painful insecurity. At thirty-eight he was already old enough to worry that life was leaving him behind. In July he had written Abigail that he was “full of Fears” about his professional prospects, especially since he had associated himself with opposition to British policy. “I will not see Blockheads, whom I have a Right to despise, elevated above me,” he proclaimed. But if his chief problem was an excessive passion for what he called “the Cause and Friends of Liberty,” Adams realized that there was little he could do to suppress it. “I have a Zeal in my Heart, for my Country and her Friends, which I cannot smother or conceal,” he admitted to Abigail, noting that “it will burn out at times and in Companies where it ought to be latent in my Breast.” He was capable of excess when the issue at stake ignited his internal fires.20

  Part of him was not at all sure how to think about the Continental Congress. “I view the Assembly that is to be there, as I do…I know not what,” he confessed, wondering why he had been elected as a delegate from Massachusetts and feeling a personal “insufficiency for this important Business.” But another part of him was already beginning to dream grandly. “It is to be a School of Political Prophets, I suppose,” he wrote James Warren, then his closest friend, “a Nursery of American Statesmen.” As one of the erstwhile prophets, he even wondered out loud to Warren “What Plans would be adopted at the Congress, if a Sully, a Cecil, a Pitt…a Demosthenes or a Cicero were there—or all of them together.” He was clearly conscious of the Continental Congress as a personal opportunity to join his own career with a potentially historic enterprise, to be, as it were, present at the creation.21

  If the official business of this first session of the Continental Congress was to draft a Declaration of Rights and Grievances against Parliament’s authority over the colonies, the main business for Adams was to gauge his talents against those of the other delegates. “Fifty Gentlemen meeting together, all Strangers,” he wrote to Abigail, “are therefore jealous, of each other—fearful, timid, skittish….” Because most of the delegates were leaders in their respective colonies, accustomed to dominating the debate, the deliberations of the Continental Congress initially struck Adams as an endless exercise in preening and conspicuous eloquence: “I believe if it was moved and seconded…that Three and Two make five, We should be entertained with Logick and Rhetorick, Law, History, Politicks and Mathematicks…for two whole Days, and then we should pass the Resolution unanimously in the Affirmative.”22

  Mostly, however, he was trying to assess where he stood in this procession of aspiring statesmen. His diary entries contained brutally clinical portraits of his fellow delegates. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, he decided, was “sprightly but not deep,” and had the unfortunate habit of speaking through his nose. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania, who eventually became a dear friend, was initially dismissed as “too much of a Talker to be a deep Thinker. Elegant but not deep.” Roger Sherman of Connecticut, on the other hand, was properly grave, but otherwise a model of gracelessness:

  There cannot be a more striking contrast to beautiful Action, than the Motions of his Hands. Generally, he stands upright with his Hands before him. The fingers of his left Hand clenched into a Fist, and the Wrist of it, grasped with his right…. But when he moves a Hand, in any thing like Action, Hogarth’s Genius could not have invented a Motion more opposite to grace. It is Stiffness, and Awkwardness itself. Rigid as Starched Linen or Buchram. Awkward as a junior Batchelor, or a Sophomore.23

  After a few weeks of silent watching and calculated comparing of his own gifts with those of the other delegates, his initial insecurity and sense of inferiority began to dissipate. He began to make friends with members of the Virginia delegation. He decided to explore Philadelphia, even attending a Catholic service. “The scenery and Musick [of the Mass] is so callculated to take in Mankind,” he noted in his diary, “that I wonder, the Reformation ever succeeded.” And eventually he began to speak out in the public debates. Before he was finished, he had earned a reputation as “the Atlas of American independence.”24

  Adams possessed one great advantage over most of the other delegates to the Continental Congress. He had already developed a keen sense that reconciliation with England was highly unlikely, that war was probably unavoidable, and that, if war should come, American military victory was virtually inevitable. While most of the other delegates were trying to find a way to avoid the American Revolution, Adams believed it had already begun. Just before departing for Philadelphia he wrote Abigail about what he called “Moody’s Doctrine,” a cautious piece of wisdom attributed to Samuel Moody, an eccentric New England minister. The essence of “Moody’s Doctrine” was “that when Men knew not what to do, they ought not to do they knew not what.” Adams acknowledged that this “oracular Jingle of Words…contained some good sense,” but it did not apply to him or to the situation America confronted in the summer of 1774. Just as he began his presidency with a clear vision of the foreign policy interests of the United States and the conviction that war must be avoided, he arrived at the Continental Congress with an equally clear vision of where history was headed, which in this case meant that war with England could not be avoided. His autobiographical recollections of this moment exaggerated his prescience only slightly. From the very start his biggest fear was “that we shall oscilate like a Pendelum and fluctuate like the Ocean and…be trimming” rather than “bring the Question to a compleat Decision.” In part because he was from Massachusetts, which was the first colony to bear the brunt of British commercial restrictions and martial law, and in part because of his accurate reading of British intentions, he had little faith in compromise. As he put it in 1775, “I am as fond of Reconciliation…as any Man…[but] the Cancer is too deeply rooted, and too far spread to be cured by any thing short of cutting it out entirely….”25

  This meant that, as events unfolded over the ensuing three years, Adams came to seem more and more like the radical prophet whose predictions kept coming true. “We are waiting…for a Messiah that will never come,” he lamented to Abigail just before the outbreak of hostilities at Bunker Hill. The persistent hope that reconciliation was still possible would prove futile, Adams insisted: “as Arrant an Illusion as ever was hatched in the Brain of an Enthusiast, a Politician, or a Maniac. I have laugh’d at it—scolded at it—grieve’d at it—and I dont know but I may at an unguarded Moment have rip’d [ripped] at it—but it is vain to Reason against such Delusions.” In the current political situation, he told Horatio Gates, just appointed a major general in the Continental Army, “the Middle Way is none at all,” adding that “if We finally fail in this great and glorious Contest, it will b
e by bewildering ourselves in groping after this middle Way…” To those fellow delegates who argued that war with the mightiest military power on earth was suicidal, he replied with an aphorism: during the Reformation, he said, the Catholics had the Pope, as well as kings and emperors, on their side, and “those poor Devils the Protestants, they had nothing on their side but God Almighty.”26

  Each time the crisis escalated to a new level of intensity, Adams already occupied the ground most of the other delegates were still scrambling to reach. He had thought through the relevant constitutional arguments and political strategies and was poised to draft the official resolution. Thus in October of 1774 he became the author of the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, the main business of the First Continental Congress. The following winter and spring he published the Novanglus essays, a self-conscious display of learning and legalistic reasoning in support of the constitutional position taken by the Congress and effectively denying Parliament’s authority over the colonies. Novanglus not only served to make the radical repudiation of Parliament seem respectable and in keeping with the deepest traditions of English common law, it also gave national exposure to Adams’s emerging leadership role in the Congress.27

  During the spring and summer of 1775, in the aftermath of Lexington and Concord, he became the major proponent for the creation of new governments and constitutions for each colony. In his autobiography he recalled that “almost every day, I had something to say about Advizing the States to institute Governments…,” claiming that he had “in my head and at my Tongues End, as many Projects of Government as Mr. Burke says the Abby Seieyes [Sieyès] had in his Pidgeon holes.” By then he was also serving on over thirty committees in the Congress and was besieged with requests from fellow members for advice about the drafting of their respective state constitutions. In response to these requests he published Thoughts on Government in the spring of 1776, which advocated republican governments for all the states, along with a plea for a bicameral legislature and an independent judiciary. His reputation as the leading advocate of independence and the premier political thinker in the Congress had become so widespread that several delegates mistakenly presumed he was the author of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.28

  It was therefore natural that he was chosen to chair the committee charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence and that he delivered the major speech in behalf of its passage. “You have all the Topicks so ready,” he remembered the delegates telling him, even though he claimed to prefer that “someone less obnoxious than myself…[who] was…believed to be the Author of all the Mischief” should have the honor. He was also the obvious choice to draft the Plan of Treaties in July 1776, the document which established the framework for a treaty with France—Adams had been arguing for over a year that such a treaty was essential for American success in the war with England—and which, almost incidentally, laid down the strategic priorities that would shape American foreign policy for over a century.29

  Finally, he was the unanimous choice to head the newly established Board of War and Ordnance, which made him, in effect, a one-man war department responsible for raising, equipping, and assuring civilian control over the entire American military. In this capacity he worked eighteen-hour days for over a year. His mastery of detail was awesome, insisting on grooved muskets because of their superior accuracy, badgering the Harvard faculty to find new ways to produce gunpowder, demanding that the entire army be inoculated, warning recalcitrant generals that he favored “Shooting all [officers] who will not [lead] and getting a new set,” and (or so he claimed later) reading “as much on the military Art and much more on the History of War than any other American officer…General [Richard] Lee excepted.” Along the way he predicted, to the year, how long the war would last, held tenaciously to the strategic assumption that the British army could win battles but could not win the war, and promoted the creation of the infant American navy. Little wonder, as one of the delegates put it in 1777, that it was “the opinion of every man in the house…that he [Adams] possesses the clearest head and firmest heart of any man in the Congress.” His own reputation and the American Revolution had erupted onto the world simultaneously.30

  As with most eruptions, however, there was a significant amount of collateral damage. It was inevitable that Adams would make enemies. He was surging onto the national scene with strong political opinions; he must have proved infuriating to the more moderate delegates, especially when his views so often proved correct. In later years Adams liked to recall these political collisions, attributing them to personal jealousy and sometimes making far-fetched connections with his subsequent political enemies. The High Federalists who opposed him during his presidency, for example, he claimed were the same men, or the successors of the same men, whom he had dragged, kicking and screaming, into the American Revolution and who had never forgiven him for such treatment.31

  But the human wreckage Adams created went far beyond what one might expect from the inevitable petty jealousies. And his latter-day version of a long-lingering vendetta against him is itself a symptom of the deeper problem. Put simply, Adams showed himself in the Continental Congress to be an intensely sensitive and thin-skinned public figure. On the one hand, that meant that he often took criticism as a personal affront. His diary and letters are full of speculations on the jealousy he aroused in other delegates, even elevating his own hostile reaction to the level of a philosophical principle: “Resentment is a Passion, implanted by Nature for the Preservation of the Individual. Injury is the Object which excites it…. A Man may have the Faculty of concealing his Resentment, or Suppressing it, but he must and ought to feel it. Nay he ought to indulge it, and to cultivate it. It is a Duty.” He seemed to believe not only that it was unnecessary to suffer fools gladly, but also to tell them to their faces that they were fools. It was not the kind of personal philosophy calculated to win over the faint of heart.32

  On the other hand, his personal intensity also meant that he frequently accused those who disagreed with him of being motivated by selfish, personal prejudices. A typical entry in the Adams diary contrasted his own disinterested aims with those motivated by “private Friendships and Enmities, and Provincial Views and Prejudices,” which he regarded as “degrees of Corruption” and “Deviations from the public Interest, and from Rectitude.” The most celebrated scandal in the Continental Congress occurred when several of Adams’s private letters were intercepted by the British, including a letter that described John Dickinson, the leading moderate and advocate of reconciliation, as a man of “great Fortune and piddling Genius whose Fame has been trumpeted so loudly, [but who] has given a silly Cast to our whole doings.” The immediate consequence was an icy relationship between Adams and Dickinson, whose opposition to the radical Adams agenda was clearly based on honest political differences. Adams later claimed that the exposure of his correspondence had the more lasting consequence of publicizing the presence of an independence faction in the Continental Congress and stimulating public discussion of that radical possibility as early as 1775. Perhaps so, but the most obvious effect of the Dickinson episode, at least for our purposes, was to illustrate the Adams penchant for personal animosity.33

  Some of the more unattractive traits identified by Hamilton in the infamous open letter of 1800—Adams’s alleged irritability and reputation for being difficult—seem to have a basis in the record during the Continental Congress. Adams as much as admitted the existence of a problem in two private letters written at the moment of his triumph during the summer of 1776: “Besides if I were to tell you all that I think of all Characters [in Congress], I should appear so illnatured and censorious that I should detest myself,” he wrote to Samuel Chase. “By my Soul, I think very heinously, I can’t think of a better Word, of some People. They think as badly of me, I suppose, and neither of us care a farthing for that.” Similarly, he wrote to James Warren, vowing that he would “not write Strictures upon Characters. I set all Mankind a Swearing, if I do….
I make the Faces of my best Friends a mile long, if I do.” He seemed as dedicated to the task of making enemies as he was to promoting American independence.34

  The primal source of this syndrome lay buried deep in the folds of the Adams psyche, beyond the reach or view of orthodox historical analysis. What is accessible and readily discernible is a clear pattern of behavior. During his service in the Continental Congress, as during his presidency, Adams began with a clear sense of the direction in which the country needed to go, clung to it tenaciously, and had his vision vindicated by events. In both instances he alienated a large number of his peers; in the 1790s much of the blame for his isolation can be attributed to the disloyalty of his own cabinet, the behind-the-scenes plotting of Hamilton and the High Federalists, and the unforeseen emergence of two distinct political parties; in the 1770s some of the blame for the deep animosities that developed can be attributed to the radical implications of the political doctrines he was urging, the understandable reluctance of moderate delegates to move as far or as fast toward American independence, the unavoidable conflict, if you will, between the requirements of his leadership role and the customary civilities. Yet it was all so personal. Although his hostility toward Hamilton exceeded his ill-will toward Dickinson, in both cases he focused his fire on one person who symbolized the opposition. And finally, as a member of the Continental Congress and as president, he embraced a version of virtue that went beyond any mere ideological conviction based on reading in classical or modern texts; for Adams, virtue demanded a level of disinterestedness and a purity of public spiritedness that derived its compulsion from psychological imperative which seemed to require isolation and unpopularity as evidence of its authenticity.