Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams Read online

  He could never rest until he found a worthy cause in which to spend himself; preferably a cause sufficiently large to allow the ferocity of his ambition and the fury of his nearly limitless reservoir of pent-up energy to work in the world. It would also be helpful if the cause made some contribution to the providential advancement of America toward its destiny; the cause would be even more attractive if it had enemies whose vanity and self-aggrandizement allowed him to eviscerate in public those very qualities that he battled inside himself. And the picture would be complete if the cause required leadership that defied conventional methods and popular opinion, thereby demanding independence of style as well as judgment, disdain for worldly measures of success, an attraction to adversity, an urge, indeed a determination, to stand alone.

  Alone he was on the early morning of March 4, 1801, preparing to leave the presidential mansion. He had travelled a course that fit his youthful prescriptions more or less perfectly and arrived at the destination he claimed to foresee. If his thoughts did wander back over that long course from Worcester to Washington before the stage arrived at four o’clock, no trace has remained in the surviving record. We do know that Theodore Sedgwick, the former Speaker of the House and High Federalist leader—he regarded Adams as deranged—was also on the stage. But what they said, or refrained from saying, to each other has also been lost to posterity.

  We do know that it took Adams two weeks to reach Quincy, as he put it, “having trotted the bogs five hundred miles.” His first recorded observation after settling in was characteristically indiscreet: “I found about a hundred loads of sea weed in my barnyard,” he noted. “I thought I had made a good exchange…of honors and virtues for manure.” (This was not necessarily a sign of bitterness. As the most knowledgeable scholar of the Adams correspondence reminds us, throughout his life “John Adams had an irrepressible habit of comparing his own manure piles with others’ and boasting of the superiority of his own.”) On the day of his arrival “a violent equinoctial gale of wind” struck Quincy, which prompted the first cosmic speculation from the retired statesman: “This is so old fashioned a storm,” he reported, “that I begin to hope that nature is returning to her old good-nature and good-humor, and is substituting fermentations in the elements for revolutions in the moral, intellectual and political world.” The calm after the storm inspired him to write a supportive note to Jefferson, perhaps as a way of indicating that the turbulence inside his own soul had also subsided: “This part of the union is in a state of perfect tranquility,” he assured his successor, “and I see nothing to obscure your prospect of a quiet & prosperous administration, which I heartily wish you.”47

  Typically, he had been telling friends contradictory stories about his retirement plans, both of which were undoubtedly honest expressions of his different moods. The dominant line fit the classical model of the serene patriarch who divided his time between work in the fields and reading. “Far removed from all the intrigues,” he explained, “and now out of reach of all the great and little passions that agitate the world…I hope to enjoy more tranquillity than has ever before been my lot.” On the other hand, as he confessed to other friends, there was such a thing as too much peace and quiet. For so many years he had kept up a fast pace: “When such long continued and violent exercise, such frequent agitations of the body, are succeeded by stillness, it may shake an old frame.” With physical as with political constitutions, gradual change was best: “Rapid motion ought not to be succeeded by sudden rest.”48

  Barely a month after his declaration of pastoral serenity he was wondering if he might resume his long-interrupted career as a lawyer. “There I should forget in a moment that I was ever member of Congress, or foreign minister, or President of the United States.” What stood in his way, however, was not a lack of energy or a distaste for the active life, but a lack of teeth. When he rose to address the judge or jury, he worried that he would mumble and slur his words. A toothless mouth meant that “I cannot speak.” Law was out.49

  That left his fields and books to occupy him for what the sixty-six-year-old ex-president presumed was the little time that remained. Abigail spied him working with the haymakers one day in July, talking to himself as he swung the scythe. She mused about the vagaries of nature: “I regret that a fortnight of sharp draught has shorn away many of the beauties we had in rich luxuriance. The verdure of the grass has become a brown, the flowers hang their heads, droop, and fade…yet we still have a pure air.” And John Adams still had a full quarter century of life before him.50

  A view of Peacefield, or Montezillo, the Adams family homestead at Quincy. Artist unknown.

  Courtesy of the Adams National Historic Site

  2

  History and Heroes

  Mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me. I wish them not. Panegyrical romances will never be written, nor flattering orations spoken, to transmit me to posterity in brilliant colors. No, nor in true colors. All but the last I loathe.

  —Adams to Benjamin Rush, March 23, 1809

  When I was running the gauntlet [as a public figure] I refused to suffer in silence. I signed, sobbed, & groaned, and sometimes screeched and screamed. And I must confess to my shame and sorrow, that I sometimes swore.

  —Adams to Harrison Gray Otis, March 29,1823

  FOR THE FIRST TWELVE YEARS of his long retirement, Adams twitched in and out of his preferred posture of pastoral serenity. But when he allowed the old urges to escape, they took the form of an outright obsession with the vicissitudes of recent American history and a private crusade over his proper place in it. “How is it,” he asked Benjamin Rush, now his closest confidant outside the family, “that I, poor, ignorant I, must stand before Posterity as differing from all the other great Men of the Age?” He then went on to list his gallery of “greats”—Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison—and concluded that, even when his own name was admitted onto the list, it was often accompanied by the judgment that Adams was “the most vain, conceited, impudent, arrogant Creature in the World.”1

  In Virginia, where, as Adams observed, “all Geese are Swans,” the great heroes of the Revolution all had magnificent estates. Jefferson had Monticello; Washington had Mount Vernon; Madison had Montpelier. “Every one of these gentlemen had noble sentiments,” he acknowledged; and the nobility of their sentiments were nicely embodied in the splendor of their surroundings. But then there was John Adams, who harbored, as he put it, “the childish vanity to think that in some lucid intervals in my life, I have had some generous sentiments.” Yet he had retired to Peacefield, his modest country home in Quincy that seemed to symbolize his impoverished reputation, a dwelling that one French visitor described as “a small house which a sixth-rate Paris lawyer would disdain to choose for his summer home.”2

  Typically, Adams turned the painful realization that his comfortable but humble home was an accurate reflection of his tattered reputation into a joke. “You may call me,” he told his younger son, “the monarch of Stoney Field, Count of Gull Island, Earl of Mount Arrarat, Marquis of Candlewood Hill, and Baron of Rocky Run.” As the letters began to pour out from Quincy, he soon listed his location with a variety of comical and cynical titles, beginning with “Mount Wollaston” and fastening at last on “Montezillo” as his favorite. “Montezillo,” he explained, “is a little Hill.” Jefferson’s reputation required a grander title: “Monticello is a lofty Mountain.”3

  He could also joke when he thought that sycophants and fawning admirers were stroking his vanity without really understanding what he had accomplished during his public career. “It is become fashionable to call me ‘The Venerable,’” he observed disapprovingly. “It makes me think of the venerable Bede…or the venerable Savannarola….” The title smacked of excessive reverence and religiosity to Adams. He knew it was applied to such patriots as Washington, Jefferson, or Franklin. But he did not wish it applied to John Adams. He also, again part in jest and part i
n pain, swore solemn repudiation of any effort to coat him with a veneer of sanctity: “Don’t call me ‘Godlike Adams,’ ‘The Father of His Country,’ ‘The Founder of the American Republic,’ or ‘The Founder of the American Empire.’ These titles belong to no man, but to the American people in general.”4

  But if laughter and mockery provided his best defense, he could not deny that his abiding preoccupation, indeed obsession, was with the judgment of posterity. Both the laughter and the preoccupation were on display in a story he liked to tell about the American artist John Singleton Copley. It seemed that Copley was painting the portrait of Lord Mansfield in London when Mansfield told him that he was not as famous as his talent justified because he had no “puffers.” To his beloved Rush, Adams confided, semi-seriously, that “these puffers, Rush, are the only killers of Scandal. Washington and Franklin killed off scandal by Puffers. You and I never employed them and therefore scandal has prevailed against us.”

  This was a typical exchange with Rush, who became Adams’s chief outlet outside the family. When they first met in 1774, Adams had thought the Philadelphia physician and political gadfly was a bit too talkative and eccentric in his opinions. But in the ensuing years, Rush’s gregariousness had become beguiling and his mad-hatter approach to letterwriting had made him into Adams’s alter ego at the writing desk, an intimate who could be trusted to respond in kind to Adams’s most idiosyncratic and lovably outrageous notions. While the correspondence he eventually established with Jefferson is more stately and justifiably famous, the letters to Rush are the most revealing, the most relaxed and candid he ever wrote. Like two poker players who kept calling and raising each other in a game of high-stakes honesty, Adams and Rush turned the painful episodes that tortured Adams’s memory into self-deprecating jokes about the lunacy of all political life.5

  His eldest son, John Quincy, sensing the wounded pride that festered beneath the jokes, recommended a more direct approach: he suggested that his father write an autobiography in order to set the record straight and deal directly with his personal demons; that is, John Quincy was encouraging his father to write an autobiography as a form of what we would call therapy. “You have recommended to me, a Work, which instead of increasing my indifference to public affairs, would engage my feelings and enflame my passions,” complained father to son: “I wish not to be reminded of my Mortifications, Disappointments or Resentments. As to my good deeds…I shall never be rewarded, nor will they ever be acknowledged upon Earth.” But, in typical Adams self-contradiction, when he wrote these words in 1804, he had already been working for two years on the very autobiography that his son suggested and that he honestly claimed to disdain.6

  Lurking in the recesses of Adams’s mind was a sophisticated understanding of how the American Revolution had happened and why the new nation, unlike France after its revolution, had been able to consolidate its revolutionary energies by means of stable political institutions and constitutions. It was a story he was eminently qualified to tell. In fact, Adams’s understanding of the revolutionary era foreshadowed many of the major scholarly interpretations proposed by modern historians in the twentieth century. But lurking in his heart was a frantic and uncontrollable craving for personal vindication, a lust for fame that was so obsessive, and so poisoned by his accurate awareness that history would not do him justice, that he often appeared less like a worthy member of the American gallery of greats than a beleaguered and pathetic madman.

  For twelve years, from his retirement at the Adams homestead in 1801 to the resumption of his friendship with Jefferson in 1812, Adams’s heart and his obsession with personal vindication were in ascendance. “If I were to go over my Life again,” he declared in this moody phase, “I would be a Shoemaker rather than an American Statesman.” The autobiography, begun in October of 1802 and then composed in fits and starts until he stopped, literally in mid-sentence, in 1807, was a series of vituperative salvos at his enemies. But the barrage of invective never really lifted, because in the summer of 1807 he began an extensive correspondence with Mercy Otis Warren concerning her three-volume History of the American Revolution. No sooner had this embarrassing exhibition of wounded pride run its course than Adams launched an apparently interminable attack in defense of his actions as diplomat and president in the pages of the Boston Patriot. This series ran for three years and several hundred thousand words. Adams admitted that, in deciding to publish his views in the newspapers, he had committed himself to a war of attrition in a losing cause: “I shall be so tedious,” he wrote Rush, “that I shall have neither Readers nor Printers. I dare say that as much as you love me you have not read, and it would be impossible you should read all that I have published, much less all that I shall publish….”7

  All these angry words and embattled arguments about American history and his role in its making—the fragmented autobiographical essay, the petulant exchange with Mercy Otis Warren, and the pedantic series of articles in the Boston Patriot—showed Adams at his worst. If he had chosen to suffer in silence, to imitate what he called “the eternal Taciturnity of Washington and Franklin,” his reputation would surely have recovered some semblance of its one-time lustre.8 But silence was not in him. He needed to exorcise demons, do just the kind of painfully difficult therapy that John Quincy had misguidedly recommended. He needed to settle scores, expend himself in a worthy, if hopeless, cause.

  Adams’s autobiography began on a typically self-defeating note: “As the lives of Phylosophers, Statesmen or Historians written by themselves have generally been suspected of vanity, and therefore few People have been able to read them without disgust; there is no reason to expect that any sketches I may leave of my own Times would be received by the Public with any favour, or read by individuals with much interest.” He claimed to be writing, not for the public but for posterity, and “for my Children.”9

  He was really writing for himself. As Peter Shaw, Adams’s most insightful biographer, has so nicely observed, the Adams effort at autobiography contrasts almost perfectly with Benjamin Franklin’s classical account of his own life. Both men began their careers as poor New England colonists. By dint of hard work and personal investment in a successful revolutionary cause, they rose to national and even international prominence. But Franklin managed his autobiography with the same cunning, guile, and self-control that he managed his life. The result was an artfully conceived success story in which both the subject and the author conceal from the reader the deepest sources of motivation. The emotional seams, cracks, fissures, and failures are hidden beneath a facade of psychological artifices, which are in turn hidden beneath a variety of effectively playful literary masks.10

  Adams’s autobiography, on the other hand, was less like a well-crafted work of literature than an open wound, a text that requires no “deconstructing” because it was never “constructed” in the first place. Like Adams’s life, it was impulsive, exuberant, and candid. And its theme, as well as its form, was the exact opposite of Franklin’s. It was about self-doubt and failure rather than self-fulfillment and success, about the ironic ravages of history rather than the triumph of the individual. When Adams eventually read Franklin’s autobiography in 1818, he admitted defeat: “My own appears, upon retrospection, a dull dreary unfruitful Waste.” But then defeat and failure in the face of American popular opinion had always been his dominant message. In that sense, Adams’s autobiography was a clumsy model for his great-grandson’s masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, as well as an anguished expression of the dark and hidden underside of Franklin’s beguilingly happy narrative.11

  Villains and intrigues had always played a crucial role in Adams’s thinking about the American Revolution, although it was usually British leaders like Lord North or American Loyalists like Thomas Hutchinson who bore the brunt of Adams’s accusations of conspiracy in the 1760s and 1770s. (As Adams once put it, “Mr. Hutchinson never drank a Cup of Tea in his life without Contemplating the Connection between that Tea, and his Promoti
on.”)12 Now, in the autobiography, after an opening section that described his early years as a student, grammar school teacher, and country lawyer, he got down to the serious business of eviscerating his enemies on the American side.

  Alexander Hamilton—no surprise here—was the chief villain. The fact that Hamilton had only recently died in a duel with Aaron Burr, Adams declared, was no cause for mercy. Adams claimed to feel no obligation “to suffer my Character to lie under infamous Calumnies, because the Author of them, with a Pistol Bullet through his Spinal Marrow, died a Penitent.” During the final year of his presidency Adams had periodically terrified the High Federalists and startled the members of his cabinet with outbursts against Hamilton. But he had not seen fit to record his personal feelings toward the unofficial leader of the Federalist faithful. And he had adopted a stately pose in the wake of Hamilton’s slanderous and scandalous Letter…Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams…. All the while, however, the suppressed anger had been throbbing away inside him. Now the invective poured out. Hamilton was a “Creole Bolingbroke…Born on a Speck more obscure than Corsica…as ambitious as Bonaparte, though less courageous, and, save for me, would have involved us in a foreign war with France & a civil war with ourselves.” Writing to his good friend Judge Francis Vanderkemp at the same time, he amplified his accusations: Hamilton was “a bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,” who lived constantly “in a delirium of Ambition” and who “had fixed his Eye on the highest Station in America and…hated every man young or old who Stood in his Way.” To Rush, he acknowledged that such diatribes against the man regarded as “the Sovereign Pontiff of Federalism” would probably cause “all his Cardinals…to excite the whole Church to excommunicate and Anathematize me.” But Adams claimed to be unfazed, adding: “It was time for a Protestant Separation.” It was the closest he ever came to a direct assertion of what was his de facto desertion of the Federalist Party. If Hamilton was, as his worshippers claimed, the guiding light of Federalism, it was a light that deserved to go out.13