American Sphinx (41 page)

They wrote each other with similar gusto and self-conscious flair about a host of safe subjects: the aging process; the beauties and the corruptions of Christianity; the bizarre and sometimes loony characters who inflicted themselves on busy presidents (Adams claiming that whenever self-styled prophets requested an interview during his presidency, he required that they perform miracles beforehand, thereby avoiding all such wasteful encounters); the books worth rereading; the impressive development of an indigenous American language. Jefferson was particularly outspoken about the need to allow new words like “belittle” and “neologism” into usage. “Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage,” he observed, and everyday conversation “is the workshop in which new ones are elaborated.” Adams agreed wholeheartedly, arguing that they should join forces again to oppose British tyranny, this time repudiating England’s despotic control over words. “We are no more bound by Johnson’s Dictionary,” Adams observed, “than by the . . . Cannon Law of England.”

Adams acknowledged that words were Jefferson’s special province. (It was one of the reasons, he liked to tell friends, that he had asked the young Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence.) “We shall all be asterisked very soon,” Adams noted in 1821, adding, “Sic transit Gloriola (is there such a Latin Word?) mundi.” Jefferson concurred about the dwindling size of the survivors from 1776, then confirmed that Cicero himself had used the word “Gloriola,” which meant “little bit of glory,” an appropriately modest description of what he and Adams and their revolutionary compatriots were due. Adams countered with the prediction that Jefferson, “as you are the youngest and the most energetic in mind and body,” would be the final survivor. Like the last person in the household to retire at night, it was therefore Jefferson’s responsibility to close up the fireplace “and rake the ashes over the coals. . . .”
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The emotional climax of the correspondence as a classical dialogue between reunited patriarchs came in 1823. During the early years of his retirement Adams had written several letters in which he had condemned Jefferson for his duplicity and criticized his policies as president. When several of these letters were published in the newspapers in 1823 without his permission, Adams was embarrassed and worried that they would undermine the newly recovered friendship. But Jefferson rose to the occasion with great style: “Be assured, my dear Sir,” he wrote, “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, insisting that Jefferson’s letter be read aloud to his family at the breakfast table. It was “the best letter that ever was written . . . , just such a letter as I expected, only it was infinitely better expressed.” He closed with another typically Adams salvo against “the peevish and fretful effusions of politicians . . . [who] are not worth remembering, much less of laying to heart. . . . I salute your fire-side with cordial esteem and affection,” then signed off as “J. A. In the 89 year of his age still too fat to last much longer.”
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And so, even though both men were posturing for posterity, there is considerable truth in the classical portrait of Adams and Jefferson as reunited sages, speaking to each other and then across the ages to us, in their unique role as American originals. (At least one would be hard pressed, and at the same point reduced to sardonic laughter, to find an equivalent level of literacy and intellectual sophistication among all the retired presidents of American history.) Another picture, however, contains additional pieces of the truth that are especially important for an understanding of Jefferson’s mentality in his final years. In this picture Jefferson is standing tall and straight with arms folded across his chest, as was his custom, and Adams is briskly pacing back and forth in front of him, talking in his mile-a-minute style, periodically stopping to grab Jefferson by the lapels to make his controversial and animated points. There really was a good deal of unfinished business between the two patriarchs, especially if Adams was determined to take seriously, as he obviously was, his conviction that they ought not to die before explaining themselves to each other. Adams was perhaps the one man in the world capable of challenging, often in a defiantly aggressive fashion, Jefferson’s most cherished convictions about what the American Revolution had truly meant.

Jefferson liked to distinguish between his genuine affection for Adams as a wise and courageous man of unimpeachable character, one of the original “band of brothers” who made the American Revolution happen, and his disagreement with the Adams brand of political thinking. As he put it to Rush, he had always defended Adams’s character “with the single exception as to political opinions.” But given Adams’s seamless integration of politics and personality, this was a bit like saying that one always listened loyally to the pope except when he spoke on matters of faith and morals. In addition, Adams enjoyed a certain psychological superiority over Jefferson on the bases of age and of having preceded Jefferson in each of their mutual missions: in the Continental Congress in the 1770s, Europe in the 1780s, vice president in the 1790s, and then the presidency. Although Adams was joking when he described Jefferson as his youthful disciple, there was at least a kernel of truth to the joke. For all these reasons, Jefferson tended to defer to Adams in much the same manner that his own protégés—Madison, Monroe, Gallatin—deferred to him. Moreover, while the other Federalist leaders, chiefly Hamilton and Marshall, were unadulterated enemies who stood clearly on the far side of the moral line in Jefferson’s mind that separated the forces of light and the forces of darkness, Adams seemed to straddle that line, in fact to deny that such a line even existed. He simply did not fit neatly into any of the Jeffersonian categories. To top it all off, Adams had a maddeningly effusive style of writing that accurately mirrored his famously unbuckled brand of conversation, in which one idea ricocheted off another at such unpredictable angles and high velocities that the notion of a prudent and diplomatic exchange that avoided the unsafe subjects was inherently impossible.
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Perhaps the most graphic point of contention, which also exposed how much both men had invested in shaping the story of the Revolution to enhance their own respective reputations, involved their memories of the Declaration of Independence. When the document was first published and sent out to the world in 1776, only the delegates to the Continental Congress had known that Jefferson was the principal author. Not until the middle of the 1780s, when Jefferson was in Paris, was there any public recognition of a linkage between the words of the Declaration and any one person. Over the ensuing years, however, as the Fourth of July became the established occasion to celebrate the nation’s birthday, Jefferson’s association with the language of the Declaration became firmly established, and his reputation ascended alongside the hallowed text. Madison’s last official act as president, in the spring of 1817, was to select four paintings by John Trumbull for the Capitol Rotunda, which was being restored after being burned by jthe British during the War of 1812. The first selection was Trumbull’s depiction of Jefferson handing over his draft of the Declaration to the president of the Continental Congress, with Adams and the other members of the drafting committee in the background.
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One can sense the throbbing Adams ego just beneath the surface of all his complaints about the symbolism of this scene. In 1819, for example, a document surfaced in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, purporting to date from March 1775, more than a year before the Declaration was written, and containing language that was eerily similar to the sacred text itself. The implication was clear: If authentic, the Mecklenburg Resolves cast a shadow over Jefferson’s claim to originality. Adams rather mischievously asked Jefferson whether he knew anything about this surprising discovery. Jefferson responded immediately, suggesting that the Mecklenburg Resolves were almost certainly a forgery, and in any event he had never seen them before. Although Adams wrote back to Jefferson to say he took him at his word, he told other friends just the opposite. “I could as soon believe that the dozen flowers of the Hydrangia now before my Eyes were the work of chance,” he gossiped, “as that the Mecklenburg Resolutions and Mr. Jefferson’s declaration were not derived the one from the other.”
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In general, however, Adams tended not to question the authenticity of Jefferson’s authorship so much as the significance of the drafting process or even the Declaration itself. In the Adams version of the story, first presented in his autobiography and then subsequently conveyed in letters to anyone who asked, the drafting committee had appointed him chair of the two-person subcommittee composed of Jefferson and himself. Then he had delegated the actual drafting chore to Jefferson. When this version got back to Jefferson, he immediately recognized that Adams was attempting to steal a share of the credit and agency for the magic words (pushing himself forward in the Trumbull portrait, if you will), and he quickly issued a polite but firm rejoinder: “Mr. Adams’ memory has led him into unquestionable error. At the age of 88, and 47 years after the transactions of Independence, this is not wonderful. Nor should I, at the age of 80, on the small advantage of that difference only, venture to oppose my memory to his, were it not supported by written notes, taken by myself at the moment and on the spot.” Jefferson’s notes, which he transcribed into his own autobiography, showed that he and Adams had indeed consulted before the drafting process began, but that the consultation had then been “misremembered into the actings of a sub-committee.” There was no partnership, even of an administrative sort, at the moment of creation. Jefferson went out of his way to disavow any pretense of philosophical originality in the Declaration. As Madison so succinctly put it, Jefferson’s goal “was to assert not to discover truths, and to make them the basis of the Revolutionary Act.” But in so doing, Jefferson insisted, he acted alone.
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Historical jockeying of this sort might seem petty in retrospect, but it graphically illustrated how both men fully recognized the symbolic significance the Declaration had achieved, even in their lifetimes, and therefore how much their places in the American pantheon depended upon their association with its creation. That very fact rankled Adams more than anything else. “Was there ever a Coup de Theatre, that had so great an effect as Jefferson’s Penmanship of the Declaration of Independence?” he asked Rush. He was candid enough to tell Jefferson that the significance of the Declaration was vastly overrated; it was “like children’s play at marbles or push pin. . . . Dress and ornament rather than Body, Soul and substance.” No one at the Continental Congress, he claimed, regarded the language of the Declaration as anything more than eloquent propaganda. It was merely “a theatrical side show” that subsequent generations had made into the main event. As a result, “Jefferson ran away with the stage effect . . . and all the glory of it.”
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What, then, was the true story of the American Revolution? Both men agreed that it would probably go to the grave with them and never find its way into the history books. Adams liked to note the proliferation of falsified accounts already contaminating the record and the self-serving memoirs that, as he and Jefferson could testify, were fictitious versions of what was really said in the corridors and at private meetings where the real decisions were made. Jefferson concurred that only the “external facts” would ever get into the written histories and that “the life and soul of history must forever be unknown.” In the Adams version of the true story, however, the culminating moment was not July 4, 1776, and the decisive document was not the Declaration of Independence. The war itself was already raging by that time. Most of the delegates to the Continental Congress regarded the Declaration as a ceremonial confirmation of what had already occurred; its chief practical value, apart from publicizing a foregone conclusion in lyrical terms, was to enhance the prospects of a wartime alliance with France, and all the revolutionary leaders understood the French alliance to be the urgent issue at the time. Jefferson’s Declaration was like the thunder in an electrical storm; it made much noise, but the lightning had flashed earlier and already done the real work.
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For Adams the culminating moment had occurred on May 15, 1776, when the Continental Congress passed a resolution—not so coincidentally, he had proposed it—calling for new constitutions in each of the states. This was the decisive act, as Adams saw it, for three reasons: First, it was the decision that required the creation of separate and independent American governments; second, the resolution stipulated that each state call a convention to draft its constitution, thereby endorsing the doctrine of popular sovereignty, the hallowed idea that “the People were the Source of all Authority and [the] Original of all Power”; third, and most tellingly for the Adams version, it meant that the American Revolution was a responsible and positive commitment to new forms of political discipline, not just an irresponsible and negative assertion of separation from England based on a seductive promise of unlimited liberation. According to Adams, Jefferson was one of the few, perhaps the only participant in the debates, to take the language of the natural rights section of the Declaration seriously as a clean and thoroughgoing break with the accumulated political wisdom of the past. On the other hand, according to Jefferson, if Adams was right, the American Revolution was not really a revolution at all.
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This seminal disagreement exposed the underlying tension throughout the Adams-Jefferson correspondence. It never came completely to the surface for a full and free exchange of views because neither man wished to place their latter-day reconciliation at risk. The diplomatic imperatives of the dialogue in effect made it impossible for the American patriarchs to fulfill the Adams promise and explain themselves to each other before they died. Indeed, if Jefferson had had his way, the sensitive subjects would have been avoided altogether, in part because he despised conflict just as much as Adams relished it and in part because his affection for Adams was more important to him than any clarification of their political differences. As a result, their correspondence is like those high-level diplomatic statements that policy specialists study for pregnant silences and shaded meanings. The central dynamic of the dialogue tended to follow an episodic pattern: Jefferson would inadvertently raise one of the volatile issues and touch off a round of Adams’s verbal airbursts, which momentarily illuminated their ideological differences; then the exchange would settle back to its idyllic mode.