Founding Brothers (37 page)

Adams
contested both of Jefferson’s distinctions. Europe was, to be sure,
burdened with aristocratic legacies and gross disparities in wealth that were
not present to the same degree in America. But unless one believed that human
nature underwent some magical metamorphosis in migrating from Europe to
America, or unless one believed that the American Revolution had produced a
fundamental transformation in the human personality, the competition for wealth
and power would also yield unequal results in America: “After all,”
Adams observed, “as long as Property exists, it will accumulate in
Individuals and Families.… I repeat it, so long as the Idea and
Existence of PROPERTY is admitted and established in Society, Accumulations of
it will be made, the SNOW ball will grow as it rolls.” Jefferson’s
version of a classless American society was therefore a pipe dream, because the
source of the problem was not European feudalism but human nature itself. As
far as Jefferson’s description of Virginia’s allegedly egalitarian
conditions were concerned, “No Romance would be more amusing.” Here
Adams confined himself to the still-dominant role played by the planter class
in the Chesapeake region, not even mentioning the fact that 40 percent of the
population was enslaved, a feudal remnant of awesome and ominous
proportions.
⁴⁹

Finally,
Adams apprised Jefferson: “Your distinction between natural and
artificial Aristocracy does not appear to me well founded.” One might be
able to separate wealth from talent in theory, but in practice, and in all
societies, they were inextricably connected: “The five Pillars of
Aristocracy,” he argued, “are Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius and
Virtues. Any one of the three first, can at any time, over bear any one or both
of the two last.” But it would never come to that anyway, because the
qualities Jefferson regarded as artificial and those he regarded as natural
were all mixed together inside human nature, then mixed together again within
society, in blended patterns that defied Jefferson’s neat
dissections.
⁵⁰

In a
separate correspondence about the same time with John Taylor, another prominent
Virginia planter and political thinker who had also questioned Adams’s
views on aristocracy, Adams called attention to the irony of the situation. The
son of a New England farmer and shoemaker was being accused of aristocratic
allegiances by an owner of slaves with vast estates, much of both inherited
from his wife’s side of the family. “If you complain that this is
personal,” Adams explained to Taylor, “I confess it, and intend it
should be personal, that it might be more striking to you.” 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. (The
closest he came was his running joke about the difference between Monticello
and Montezillo.) Adams was fully prepared to include Jefferson as a charter
member of the natural aristocracy that made and then secured the American
Revolution. Along with most of the Virginia dynasty, however, his ascent into
the revolutionary elite was not the exclusive function of talent and
virtue.
⁵¹

What Adams could never quite fathom, and Jefferson understood intuitively,
was that the very word “aristocracy” had become an epithet in the
political culture of postrevolutionary America. Even though Adams was surely
correct about the disproportionate power exercised by elites throughout
history, and even though the revolutionary generation had succeeded in
establishing a republican government in large part because a small group of
talented statesmen had managed the enterprise throughout its earliest and most
vulnerable phrases, a “republican aristocracy” seemed the same
contradiction in terms as a “republican king.” It violated the
central premise of the revolutionary legacy—namely, that the people at
large were the sovereign source of all political authority. Therefore, the only
kind of political elite permissible was one that repudiated its elite status
and claimed to speak for “the many” rather than “the
few.” The Republicans had been the first to grasp this elemental fact of
American political culture in the 1790s. The Federalists, who were no more a
social or economic elite than the Republicans, had come to ruin because they
never grasped it. Adams could argue till doomsday that the American experiment
in republicanism had succeeded because it had managed to harness the energies
and talents of its best and brightest citizens, the very “band of
brothers” he and Jefferson supposedly symbolized, but as long as he
referred to them as an “aristocracy,” whether natural or
artificial, he seemed to be defying the republican legacy itself.

Another argumentative thread, which began in 1815 and then ran throughout
the remainder of the correspondence, concerned the French Revolution. 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 did not, in 89, believe they would have lasted so long, nor have cost so much
blood.” Jefferson went on to acknowledge that Adams’s critical
perspective on the French Revolution had been a major source of his
unpopularity. Now that Napoleon was finally defeated—word of Waterloo had
just reached America—and the outcome was perfectly clear, Jefferson
graciously observed that Adams was due an apology for “the breach of
confidence of which you so justly complain, and of which no one has more
frequent occasion of fellow-feeling than myself.”
⁵²

Only
someone thoroughly familiar with the political history of the 1790s could
recognize what a major concession and personal confession of regret Jefferson
was making. Adams caught the message immediately. “I know not what to say
of your Letter,” he wrote, “but that it is one of the most
consolatory I have ever received.” For Jefferson was not only admitting
that his optimistic assessment of events in revolutionary France had been
misguided; he was also conceding that the Republican party, to include himself,
had played politics with the French Revolution in order to undermine the Adams
presidency. Jefferson was making amends for what the Adams family had
understandably regarded as “the singular act” of betrayal. He was
saying, at last, that he was sorry.
⁵³

Adams
suggested that Jefferson had misread the meaning of the French
Revolution—sincerely misread it and
not
just manipulated it for
political purposes—because of a faulty way of thinking conveniently
conveyed by the new French word, “ideology.” Napoleon had
popularized the word, which had first been used by the French philosophe
Destutt de Tracy, whom Jefferson had read and admired enormously. Adams claimed
to be fascinated by the new word “upon the Common Principle of delight in
every Thing We cannot understand.” What was an “ideology”? he
asked playfully: “Does it mean Idiotism? The Science of Non Compos
Menticism. The Science of Lunacy? The Theory of Delerium?” As Adams
explained it, the French philosophes had invented the word, which became a
central part of their utopian style of thinking and a major tenet in their
“school of folly.” It referred to a set of ideals and hopes, like
human perfection or social equality, that philosophers mistakenly believed
could be implemented in the world because it existed in their heads. Jefferson
himself thought in this French fashion, Adams claimed, confusing the seductive
prospects envisioned in his imagination with the more limited possibilities
history permitted. Critics of Jefferson’s visionary projections, like
Adams, were then accused of rejecting the ideals themselves, when in fact they
were merely exposing their illusory character.
⁵⁴

“Ideology,” then, had provided Jefferson with a politically
attractive pro-French platform, which had turned out to have enormous
rhetorical advantages no matter how wrong it proved in reality. Jefferson had
thought that France was the wave of the future and England was a relic of the
past. “I am charmed by the fluency and rapidity of your Reasoning,”
Adams observed, “but I doubt your Conclusion.” England, not France,
was destined to become the dominant European power of the nineteenth century,
Adams correctly predicted, though he, like Jefferson, retained a deep suspicion
of English designs on America, a permanent legacy of their mutual experience as
American revolutionaries. “They have been taught from their Cradles to
despise, scorn, insult and abuse Us,” Adams wrote of the English, adding
in his most relentlessly realistic mode that “Britain will never be our
Friend, till we are her Master.” Both Adams and Jefferson, it turned out,
were too deeply shaped by the desperate struggle against England to foresee the
Anglo-American alliance that flourished throughout the Victorian era and
beyond.
⁵⁵

They both did anticipate, albeit from decidedly different perspectives, the
looming sectional crisis between North and South that their own partnership
stretched across. “I fear there will be greater difficulties to preserve
our Union,” Adams warned, “than You and I, our Fathers Brothers
Disciples and Sons have had to form it.” Jefferson concurred, though the
subject touched the most explosive issue of all—namely, the unmentionable
fact of slavery. Even the ever-candid Adams recognized that this was the
forbidden topic, the one piece of ground declared off-limits by mutual consent.
With one notable exception, the dialogue between Adams and Jefferson, so
revealing in its engagement of the conflicting ideas and impulses that shaped
the American Revolution, also symbolized the unofficial policy of silence
within the revolutionary generation on the most glaring disagreement of
all.
⁵⁶

The exception occurred in 1819, prompted by the debate then raging over
passage of the Missouri Compromise. Prior to that time, Adams and Jefferson had
not only avoided the subject in their correspondence; they had also
independently declared the matter intractable: “More than fifty years has
it attracted my thoughts and given me much anxiety,” Adams confessed in
1817. “A Folio Volume would not contain my Lucubrations on this Subject.
And at the End of it, I should leave my reader and myself at a loss, what to do
with it, as at the beginning.” For his part, Jefferson kept repeating the
avoidance argument he had fashioned in 1805. “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.”
⁵⁷

Even though
the congressional debate over the Missouri question was essentially an argument
about the extension of slavery into the territories, the code of silence
governed the lengthy exchanges in the House of Representatives, which focused
exclusively on the constitutional question of federal versus state jurisdiction
rather than on the problem of slavery itself. Jefferson, for his part, was
outraged that the issue was being discussed at all: “But the Missouri
question is a breaker on which we lose the Missouri country by revolt, and what
more God only knows,” he complained to Adams. “From the battle of
Bunker’s hill to the treaty of Paris we never had so ominous a
question.” Jefferson understood full well that the constitutional
argument over federal jurisdiction merely masked the deeper issue at stake, and
he said so to Adams:

The real question, as seen in the states
afflicted with this unfortunate population, is Are our slaves to be presented
with freedom and a dagger? For if Congress has a power to regulate the
conditions of the inhabitants of states, within the states, it will be but
another exercise of that power to declare that all shall be free. Are we then
to … wage another Peloponessian War to settle the ascendancy between
them. That question remains to be seen: but not I hope by you or me. Surely
they will parlay awhile, and give us time to get out of the way.
⁵⁸

Adams,
usually the more apocalyptic member of the team, in this instance adopted the
more sanguine Jeffersonian posture. “I hope some good natured way or
other will be found out to untie this very intricate knot,” he counseled.
With his other correspondents, though not with Jefferson, he was much more
forthright. “Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude,” he
wrote to William Tudor, “and I am utterly averse to the admission of
Slavery into the Missouri Territory.” What’s more, he welcomed the
very debate that Jefferson abhorred. “We must settle the question of
slavery’s extension now,” he told his daughter-in-law,
“otherwise it will stamp our National Character and lay a Foundation for
calamities, if not disunion.” As for the constitutional question, he
regarded federal jurisdiction over the western territories as a clear precedent
that had been established, irony of ironies, by Jefferson’s executive
action in the Louisiana Purchase.
⁵⁹

Over the
course of the next four decades, the national debate over slavery and its
expansion into the West was often framed as an argument over the intent of the
founders. Here were two of the unequivocally original patriarchs, declaring
that their respective understandings of the Revolution’s legacy
concerning slavery were fundamentally different. Jefferson’s version led
directly to the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” embraced by
Stephen Douglas, to the states’ rights position of John C. Calhoun and
then the Confederacy. Adams’s version led directly to the “house
divided” position of Abraham Lincoln, the conviction that abolishing
slavery was a moral imperative bequeathed by the revolutionary generation to
their successors, and the doctrine of federal sovereignty established by the
victory of the Union in the Civil War. When it came to slavery, it would seem,
there was no singular vision, only contradictory original intentions.