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

  There are, however, at least two ways of making Adams’s compulsions comprehensible. First, Adams needed to purge himself of all the accumulated animosity toward the High Federalists—especially Hamilton—that had built up inside him. Seen in conjunction with his autobiography and then his exchange with Mercy Otis Warren, the Boston Patriot writings constituted his final spasm of vindicative energy, the last extended eruption of the Adams volcano. Unlike Jefferson, who suffered similar wounds in his public career, Adams could not lick his wounds in private and allow them to heal silently over time. In Adams’s case, wounds did not heal; they festered; he kept reopening them. The sheer massiveness and often inchoate character of the Patriot pieces accurately indicated how much anger Adams had been suppressing. Only after it had all poured out was he capable of authentic tranquility. In this sense his monumental vituperations in the public press were not so much efforts to rewrite history as they were culminations of his personal catharsis.

  Secondly, and somewhat contradictorily, the energy he gave to the rebuttal of Warren and the revision of his actions as president also accurately reflect how much Adams cared about his place in history. Despite his incessant denials, and what became an almost formulaic denunciation of history’s capacity to comprehend the way it really was, he desperately wanted to be appreciated in the annals of history. And this desperation, illustrated in the singular ferocity with which he defended his reputation during the first twelve years of his retirement, possessed a special poignance for him precisely because of his habitual aversion to conventional forms of popularity and worldly success. If traditional success must be avoided because it inevitably carried with it the seeds of a great man’s destruction—Caesar, Napoleon, and Hamilton were his favorite examples—it then followed that posterity was the only safe place left for him to achieve heroic stature. It was the only place because he had personally destroyed his prospects for popularity in his own lifetime. And it was the only safe place because popularity beyond the grave presented no temptation to his vaunted vanity. Only posthumous fame avoided the risk of self-corruption. Only in the minds and memories of subsequent generations could a virtuous public figure rest easy with acclaim. Here was the one necessary condition that all true heroes had to satisfy in the Adams schema: they had to be dead.

  The major problem with posthumous fame, what in fact made it such an effective antidote to vanity, of course, was that one was not around to enjoy it. With the completion of the Boston Patriot series, Adams began to accept the implications of that incontrovertible fact. Perhaps, after the enormous expenditure of energy in the Patriot, he was simply played out. Or perhaps the lengthy therapy that had begun with the autobiography reached the kind of conclusion commonly achieved: not brilliant new insights or discoveries, but a steadier and more balanced perspective on his life and the intractable ingredients of his personality. Whatever the reason, Adams mellowed discernibly. “I have prattled and scribbled two [sic] much and too freely,” he wrote the publisher Mathew Carey, adding the old refrain that “the unsearchable reserve and eternal taciturnity of Franklin and Washington are the only sure passports to Fame and immortality in the Poets and Politicians Creed.” At last, however, he seemed capable of heeding his own advice.43

  Through the good offices of their old friend Elbridge Gerry, a reconciliation was arranged with Mercy Otis Warren before her death in 1814. And Benjamin Rush’s genial intercessions recovered the long-latent friendship with Jefferson. Letters between Monticello and Montezillo started flowing in 1812. The news, incorrect as it turned out, that Jefferson kept a huge scrapbook filled with the most scurrilous libels against his own reputation, led Adams to scold his grandchildren, who “ought to have done the same thing for me.” Such a valuable volume “would have been the most splendid of all,” for he would have had it “bound in Moroccan leather with gold gilt.” Critics, he claimed, for some strange reason just did not seem to bother him as much. “What shall we do with the Insects that buzz about us?” he wrote to John Quincy, who was soon to assume the office of Secretary of State. “Their bite in former times tingled,” he confessed, “but I am grown almost as insensible, as a Boston Dray Horse in September.”44

  Embracing one’s former enemies and errors proved exhilarating and rekindled the old playfulness. He fended off requests for a published version of his life with dismissive caricatures: any true account must be “a bundle of weakness and error & petulance” or, perhaps recalling Warren’s language, “I should blush to see it committed to writing” or, instead of writing his own life, he would write a history of all the major errors of the founding generation, in which the volume on John Adams would be “the only folio Volume,” twice as large as the others, and would begin with his original sin, “birth on the Eastern Side of the Hudson River.” When Harrison Gray Otis, the prominent Massachusetts Federalist, chided him that a commissioned biography was owed the public because his character was the property of the public, Adams protested: “So it is, but in what money scales it will be weighed by posterity, I know not. If it is to be estimated by the newspapers…it will be found to be of less value, than the meanest drug in an apothecary shop.”45

  The fact that the great volcano of American statesmanship was in apparent remission did not mean that the fires had gone out. Nor that hope in the judgment of posterity had cooled. “The inquiring mind in future times will find reasons to diminish the glories of some and to increase the esteem of others,” he noted without mentioning names. “Some characters now obscured under a cloud of unpopularity”—no names necessary here—“will come out with more lustre.”46

  But counting on posterity was not quite the same thing as trusting in historians. Written history, Adams was more convinced than ever, “seems like Romance. It shows Mankind in such a light I can hardly believe any of it. Though I cannot keep my Eyes off it.” He bet Rush one hundred dollars that there would never be a true history of the Whiskey Rebellion and offered another “hundred thousand eagles for a true history of the American Revolution.” When Jedidiah Morse petitioned him for information to be included in his history of Revolution, Adams said it was futile: “I know not whether to laugh or cry. I have little faith in history. I read it as I do romance….” Hezekiah Niles, another aspiring historian making the same request, got the same treatment: “In plain English, and in few words Mr. Niles, I consider the true history of the American Revolution & the establishing of our present Constitution as lost forever. And nothing but misrepresentation or partial account of it, ever will be recovered.”47

  Part of the problem, as Adams saw it, was the inevitably incomplete historical record—the lost documents and the crucial decisions and conversations that never were recorded in the first place. In addition, the contemporary urge to mythologize and romanticize messy realities would undoubtably contaminate future accounts. So the concept of “true history” was an oxymoron. It never existed and never would exist. “It is a common observation in Europe that nothing is so false as modern history,” he told one friend; “I should say nothing is so false as modern history except ancient history and I would add nothing is so false as ancient or modern history in Europe except modern American history.”48

  It was perfectly natural for Adams to diagnose a situation as impossible and then proceed to try to do something about it. “Tell Mr. A,” he wrote in 1818 to Louisa Catherine, John Quincy’s wife, “that I am assiduously and sedulously employed in Exertions to save him trouble, by collecting all my Papers. What a Mass!” The public and private papers he had saved over the years were, in truth, the largest such collection, by far, preserved by any member of the revolutionary generation. When he composed his autobiography, Adams had begun the habit of inserting original documents and letters into the record. That trickle had become a flood by the time he got to the Boston Patriot articles, where readers were bludgeoned to death with stacks of documentary evidence to clinch even minor points, as Adams himself withdrew as narrator and let the primary sources do the talking. The g
rowing tendency to consult his collection of papers reached its logical culmination in the decision to let them, and them alone, speak to posterity.

  He described himself to John Quincy as “deeply immersed in researches, not astro[no]mical or mineralogical or metaphysical; but after old Papers. Trunks, Boxes, Desks, Drawers, locked up for thirty years have been broken open because the Keys are lost. Nothing stands in my Way.” The same impulsive energy that had gone into the earlier efforts at self-vindication had at last found the proper outlet, and the proper motive. “Every Scrap shall be found and preserved for your Affliction [or] for your good,” he wrote lecturingly to his son: “I shall leave you an inheritance sufficiently tormenting [that it will make you] Alternately laugh and cry, fret and fume, stamp and scold as they do me.” In one of his last letters to Rush, in 1812, he cried out: “Have mercy on me Posterity, if you should ever see any of my Letters.” But his deepest and most abiding hope was that those letters, uncontaminated by the prejudices of historians, full of the human weaknesses that went with real life, would prove his eventual ticket into the American pantheon.49

  3

  Irreverencies and Oppositions

  My nerves were so vibrated, that I seem to hear the Dongle at this moment. “Dongle!” there is no such Word in Johnson. What then? I have as good a right to make a Word, as that Pedant Bigot Cynic and Monk.

  —Adams to Catherine Rush, February 23, 1815

  Five and forty years ago, when any terrible News arrived from England of their hostile designs against our Liberties, when the people, gaping and staring, pale and trembling, asked me, “What I thought of the News,” my invariable Answer was, “The worse, the better.”

  —Adams to Elbridge Gerry, July 14, 1814

  WHEN ADAMS’S GRANDSON, Charles Francis Adams, sat down in 1850 to write the introduction to his ten-volume edition of the papers and letters that the family patriarch had so meticulously preserved, he too asked, however subtly, for a measure of mercy. “At no time in his life was John Adams a man of many concealments,” he warned readers accustomed to a Victorian code of etiquette and self-restraint. But there was “no hypocrisy in him whilst alive,” he noted correctly, “and it would scarcely be doing him justice to invest him with a share of it after his death.” Then the grandson repeated a refrain that his famous grandfather had shouted to friends and muttered to himself throughout his retirement. “We are beginning to forget that the patriots of former days were men like ourselves,” wrote Charles Francis, “acting and acted upon like the present race, and we are almost irresistibly led to ascribe to them in our imaginations certain gigantic proportions and superhuman qualities, without reflecting that this at once robs their character of consistency and their virtues of all merit.”1

  John Adams often made the same point, usually as part of a critical assessment of such heroic patriots as Washington and Franklin, whom Adams considered competitors for a prominent placement in the American pantheon. His argument therefore smacked of jealousy and self-vindication. And especially during the earliest years of his retirement, when his pugnacious energies flowed so fully into the campaign in behalf of his own reputation, the argument had a defensive tone, as if lowering the standards used to measure historic greatness would assist the elevation of his own cause. Or, to put the same point somewhat differently, Adams was complaining that he was being penalized for his candor, that he said out loud what others only whispered, or wrote down what others shrewdly kept to themselves.

  There was unquestionably some truth to the notion that Adams felt compelled to reveal himself more fully than any prominent leader of the revolutionary generation. He claimed that his impulsive candor was a life-long habit, that two boyhood friends “used to tell me I had a little capillary vein of satire, meandering about in my soul, and it broke out so strangely, suddenly, and irregularly that it was impossible ever to foresee when it would come or how it would appear.” Certain feelings seemed to move instantaneously from his soul to his mouth or pen, without passing through any filter in his head. Once, when Abigail saw a letter he was writing to Rush in which he was comparing the scientific writers of the day to a group of lunatics who should be confined to an asylum, she told her husband, as Adams reported, “that he ‘thinks my head, too, a little crack[ed].’” (Adams, ever playful with Rush, admitted, “I am half of that mind myself.”) Adams was aware of his reputation for indiscretion, but counted it an intractable part of his personality, beyond redemption. “The astonishment of your Family at my vivacity is very just,” he told Rush, adding: “Nothing is indeed more ridiculous than an old man more than three quarters of a hundred rattling like a boy of fifteen at School or at College. I am ashamed of it yet ten to one I shall fall into it again before I finish this letter.”2

  And he invariably did, rattling on with colorful irreverencies that endeared him to friends and often embarrassed the unsuspecting. When, for example, Jefferson mentioned several new theories proposed by European writers on the origin of Native Americans, Adams responded in his typically pungent style. “I should as soon suppose,” he wrote, “that the Prodigal Son, in a frolic with one of his Girls made a trip to America in one of Mother Carey’s Eggshells, and left the fruits of their Amours here, as believe any of the grave hypotheses and solemn reasonings of Philosophers or Divines upon the Subject of the Peopling of America.”

  The same irreverence applied to great philosophers. When asked his opinion of Plato, he claimed to have learned “Two things only,” even though he had struggled through the original Greek version of The Republic with the help of a Latin translation: first, that Franklin’s wild idea that farmers and seamen should be exempted from the horrors of war was borrowed, which is to say stolen, from Plato; and second, “that sneezing is a cure for the Hiccups.” Devout Christians got the same treatment when invited to speculate on the possibility that there was no God; he announced that, if it could “be revealed or demonstrated that there is no future state, my advice to every man, woman, and child would be, as our existence would be in our own power, to take opium.”3

  Presidential decorum was fair game. Jefferson once bemoaned the self-proclaimed prophets and mystics who took up so much of his time as president. Adams replied that visitors who claimed to be seers had posed no problem for him: “They all assumed the Character of Ambassadors extraordinary from the Almighty; but as I required miracles in proof of their credentials, and they did not perform any, I never gave public Audience to any of them.” Or when, during his final months as president, the Secretary of State asked his reaction to a request from the German authorities for a group of writers and artists to emigrate to America, Adams wrote back from Quincy that “The German letter…will require no answer….” Since the aspiring immigrants were just the kind of dreamers to be seduced by Tom Paine’s doctrines, Adams preferred they remain in Europe. “I had rather countenance the introduction of Ariel and Caliban,” he claimed colorfully, “with a troop of spirits the most mischievous from fairy land.”4

  His own style was itself mischievous, as well as being a finely crafted expression of the contradictory impulses within his personality: colorful and tart in its choice of language; willing to run risks in its allusions, metaphors, and verbal juxtapositions; prone to irreverent conclusions designed to surprise or startle; capable of remarkable incisiveness and almost photographic specificity when the issue at stake did not arouse his ire; but when it did, given to litanies of abstract nouns brought to the end of their frenzied march across the page by insulting verbs, which went off like a series of exploding skyrockets.

  Conventional wisdom, as Adams saw it, seldom got very close to the truth, which was always paradoxical and, like history itself, maddeningly resistant to any all-encompassing perspective. His style in letters—appropriately unorthodox and sufficiently flexible to convey different moods and meanings simultaneously—was an excellent vehicle for his personal complexity, an instrument shaped over the years to express his layered disposition. And the most discerni
ble shape that the style and disposition consistently took was what we might call “oppositional.” In his old age as well as his youth, Adams instinctively mobilized his enormous verbal and intellectual energies in opposition to established conventions, personal enemies, or fashionable ideas. He was only comfortable in dialogue and he was most invigorated when the dialogue took the form of an argument. What many commentators on his life diagnosed as sheer irascibility was less a mood than a habit of mind. It was related to his urge toward alienation and an isolated version of independence—the kind of tendency best illustrated in his behavior as president. But what we might call his dialectical style had a separate set of causes and consequences most closely associated with his almost instinctive need to establish balance in conversations and political arguments. He felt great satisfaction in defending the British troops in the wake of the Boston Massacre in 1770, for example, not just because their right to a fair trial was a principle of English law he respected, but also because doing so offset the surging patriotism of the Boston mob. He had been known to rise in crowded rooms during debates over the Stamp Act to insist that the rights of suspected collaborators not be trampled in the march toward colonial independence. Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, he loved to correct his Federalist friends whenever they expressed apprehension about the viability of popular government. Jefferson and his followers got lectures on stability; Fisher Ames was told about the dangers of a smug, self-appointed aristocracy. When John Trumbull, the prominent artist, asked for advice about revolutionary scenes worthy of memoralizing, he was informed that the fine arts were dangerous weapons almost always allied with despotism and superstition. Adams seemed to seek out the illusions and excesses of the age, then press against them all with his might, as if he equated thinking with performing a set of mental isometric exercises.