Joseph J. Ellis (36 page)

Abigail was having none of it. As she saw it, Jefferson’s denials only offered further evidence of his duplicity. His complicity in behind-the-scenes political plotting was common knowledge. Abigail had initially resisted the obvious because, as she put it, “the Heart is long, very long in receiving the convictions that is forced upon it by reason.” Even now, she acknowledged, “affection still lingers in the Bosom, even after esteem has taken its flight.” But there was no denying
that Jefferson had mortgaged his honor to win an election. His Federalist critics had always accused him of being a man of party rather than principle. “Pardon me, Sir, if I say,” Abigail concluded, “that I fear you are.”
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We can be reasonably sure that Abigail was speaking for her husband as well as herself in this brief volley of letters. The Adams team, then, was charging Jefferson with two serious offenses against the unwritten code of political honor purportedly binding on the leadership class of the revolutionary generation. The first offense, which has a quaint and wholly anachronistic sound to our modern ears, was that Jefferson was personally involved in his own campaign for the presidency and that he conducted that campaign with only one goal in mind—namely, winning the election. This was the essence of the charge that he was a “party man.” Such behavior became an accepted, even expected, feature of the political landscape during the middle third of the nineteenth century and has remained so ever since. Within the context of the revolutionary generation, however, giving one’s allegiance to a political party remained illegitimate. It violated the core of virtue and disinterestedness presumed essential for anyone properly equipped to oversee public affairs. Neither Washington nor Adams had ever played a direct role in their own campaigns for office. And even Jefferson, who was the first president to break with that tradition, felt obliged to do so surreptitiously, then issue blanket denials when confronted by Abigail. Jefferson, in fact, was on record as making one of the strongest statements of the era against the influence of political parties. He described party allegiance as “the last degradation of a free and moral agent” and claimed that “if I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”
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Jefferson’s position on political parties, like his stance on slavery, seemed to straddle a rather massive contradiction. In both instances his posture of public probity—slavery should be ended and political parties were evil agents that corrupted republican values—was at odds with his personal behavior and political interest. And in both instances, Jefferson managed to convince himself that these apparent contradictions were, well, merely apparent. In the case of his active role behind the scenes during the presidential campaign of 1800, Jefferson sincerely believed that a Federalist victory meant the demise of the spirit of ’76. Anything that avoided that horrible outcome ought to be justifiable.
He then issued so many denials of his direct involvement in the campaign that he probably came to believe his own lies. That is why Abigail’s relentless refusal to accept his personal testimonials on this score struck a nerve. He was not accustomed to having his word questioned and his excuses exposed, not even by himself.

His second offense was more personal. Namely, he had vilified a man whom he claimed was a long-standing friend. He had sponsored Callender’s polemics against the Adams administration even though he knew them to be gross misrepresentations. Adams had no monarchical ambitions, though he did believe in a strong executive. He did not want war with France, though he did think that American neutrality should take precedence over the Franco-American alliance. Both positions were in accord with Washington’s preferred policy. Unlike Washington, however, Adams had political vulnerabilities, which Jefferson exploited for his own political advantage. If the gross distortions had been orchestrated by Madison or any number of lesser political operatives, it would have been bad enough. But for Jefferson himself to have sanctioned the defamation was the essence of betrayal. It was akin to Hamilton’s behind-the-scenes slandering of Burr, except in the case of Adams, the slander was more contemptible because essentially untrue. If Adams had been a believer in the
code duello
, which he was not (nor, for that matter, was Jefferson), this defamation of the Adams character would have presented a prime opportunity for a resolution with pistols on the field of honor. For at the highest level of political life in the early republic, relationships remained resolutely personal, dependent on mutual trust, and therefore vulnerable to betrayals whenever the public and private overlapped.

Although Jefferson probably presumed that Abigail was sharing their correspondence with her husband, Adams himself never saw the letters until several months later. After reading over the exchange, he made this written comment for the record: “The whole of this correspondence was begun and conducted without my Knowledge or Suspicion, and this morning at the desire of Mrs. Adams I read the whole. I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place.” A steely silence thereupon settled over the dialogue between Quincy and Monticello for the following eight years.
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•   •   •

D
URING THAT
time Jefferson was too busy to indulge in retrospective fretting over the loss of a friend. His first term as president would go down as one of the most brilliantly successful in American history, capped off by the Louisiana Purchase (1803), which effectively doubled the size of the national domain. His second term, on the other hand, proved to be a series of domestic tribulations and foreign policy failures, capped off by the infamous Embargo Act (1807), which devastated the economy while failing to avert the looming war with England. Adams’s assessment of Jefferson’s presidency mixed fair-minded criticism of his policies with prejudicial comments on his character:

Despite his brave posturings of nonchalance and indifference, Adams was, in fact, obsessed with Jefferson’s growing reputation as one of the major figures of the age. As Adams remembered it, Jefferson had played a decidedly minor role in the Continental Congress. While he, John Adams, was delivering the fiery speeches that eventually moved their reluctant colleagues to make the decisive break with England, Jefferson lingered in the background like a shy schoolboy, so subdued that “during the whole Time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.” Now, however, because of the annual celebrations on July 4, the symbolic significance of the Declaration of Independence was looming larger in the public memory, blotting out the messier but more historically correct version of the story, transforming Jefferson from a secondary character to a star player in the drama. “Was there ever a Coup de Theatre,” Adams complained, “that had so great an effect as Jefferson’s Penmanship of the Declaration of Independence.” Jefferson was an elegant stylist, to be sure, which was
one of the main reasons that he, John Adams, had selected him to draft the famous document in the first place. But he was not a mover-and-shaker, only a draftsman; the words he wrote were merely the lyrical expression of ideas that had been bandied about in the Congress and the various colonial legislatures for years. Adams had actually led the debate in the Congress that produced its passage, as Jefferson sat silently and sullenly while the delegates revised his language. What was really just “a theatrical side show” was now being enshrined in memory as the defining moment in the revolutionary drama. “Jefferson ran away with the stage effect,” Adams lamented, “and all the glory of it.”
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Adams was not the kind of man to suffer in silence. His jealousy of Jefferson was palpable, and his throbbing vanity became patently obvious as he relived the contested moments from the past in the privacy of his own memory, then reported on his admittedly self-serving findings to trusted confidants like Benjamin Rush. For the simple truth was that the aging Sage of Quincy had nothing else to do. Jefferson had the all-consuming duties of the presidency, then two major retirement projects—the completion of his architectural renovations of Monticello and the creation of the University of Virginia. But the sole project for Adams lay within himself. His focus, indeed his obsession, was the interior architecture of his own remembrances, the construction of an Adams version of American history, a spacious room of his own within the American pantheon.

He was doing what we would now call therapy: thrashing about inside himself in endless debate with his internal demons while seated by the fireside in what he self-mockingly called “my throne”; twitching in and out of control as he attempted to compose his autobiography, which turned into a series of salvos at his political enemies (Hamilton, no surprise, was the chief target) and ended, literally in midsentence, when he realized that it was all catharsis and no coherence; outraging his old friend Mercy Otis Warren with embarrassing tantrums because her three-volume
History of the American Revolution
(1805) failed to make him the major player in the story. Warren responded in kind: “I am so much at a loss for the meaning of your paragraphs, and the rambling manner in which your angry and undigested letters are written,” she explained, “that I scarcely know where to begin my remarks.” Warren concluded with a scathing diagnosis of the Adams correspondence with her as a scattered series of verbal impulses
and “the most captious, malignant, irrelevant compositions that have ever been seen.”

Undeterred, he launched another round of his memoirs in the
Boston Patriot
, designed to “set the record straight,” an act that quickly gave rise to another cascade of emotional eruptions. “Let the jackasses bray or laugh at this,” he declared defiantly: “I am in a fair way to give my criticks and enemies food enough to glut their appetites.… I take no notice of their billingsgate.” While drafting the nearly interminable essays for the
Patriot
, he compared himself to a wild animal who had “grabbed the end of a cord with his teeth, and was drawn slowly up by pulleys, through a storm of squills, crackers, and rockets, flashing and blazing around him every moment,” and although the “scorching flames made him groan, and mourn, and roar, he would not let go.” He was, to put it bluntly, driving himself half-crazy in frantic but futile attempts at self-vindication. Every effort to redeem his reputation only confirmed what Hamilton had claimed in his infamous pamphlet during the presidential campaign of 1800—namely, that Adams was an inherently erratic character who often lacked control over his own emotional impulses.
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In 1805 Adams resumed a correspondence with Benjamin Rush, in which he actually seemed to embrace that very conclusion: “There have been many times in my life when I have been so agitated in my own mind,” Adams confessed, “as to have no consideration at all of the light in which my words, actions, and even writings would be considered by others.… The few traces that remain of me must, I believe, go down to posterity in much confusion and distraction, as my life has been passed.” The correspondence with Rush, which lasted for eight years, permitted Adams to confront his personal demons and exorcise them in a series of remarkable exchanges that, taken together, are the most colorful, playful, and revealing letters he ever wrote. Rush set the terms for what became a high-stakes game of honesty by proposing that they dispense with the usual topics and report to each other on their respective dreams.
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Adams leapt at the suggestion and declared himself prepared to match his old friend “dream for dream.” Rush began with “a singular dream” set in 1790 and focusing on a crazed derelict who was promising a crowd that he could “produce rain and sunshine and cause the wind to blow from any quarter he pleased.” Rush interpreted this eloquent
lunatic as a symbolic figure representing all those political leaders in the infant nation who claimed they could shape public opinion. Adams subsequently countered: “I dreamed that I was mounted on a lofty scaffold in the center of a great plain in Versailles, surrounded by an innumerable congregation of five and twenty millions.” But the crowd was not comprised of people. Instead, they were all “inhabitants of the royal menagerie,” including lions, elephants, wildcats, rats, squirrels, whales, sharks—the litany went on for several paragraphs—who then proceeded to tear one another to pieces as he tried to lecture them on the advantages of “the unadulterated principles of liberty, equality and fraternity among all living creatures.” At the end of the dream, he was forced to flee the scene with “my clothes torn from my back and my skin lacerated from head to foot.”
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As befits a dialogue framed around reports from the subconscious regions, the Adams-Rush correspondence tended to emphasize the power of the irrational. Adams recalled a French barber in Boston who used the phrase “a little crack,” meaning slightly crazy: “I have long thought the philosophers of the eighteenth century and almost all the men of science and letters ‘crack’ … and that the sun, moon, and stars send all their lunatics here for confinement.” Then, ever playful with Rush, Adams signed off with the following self-deprecating joke: “I must tell you that my wife, who took a fancy to read this letter upon my table, bids me tell you that she ‘thinks my head, too, a little crack,’ and I am half of that mind myself.”
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Adams had a lifelong tendency to view the world “out there” as a projection of the emotions he felt swirling inside himself. The overriding honesty and intimacy of the correspondence with Rush permitted this projection to express itself without restraint. The question he had posed to others, simultaneously poignant and pathetic, had the authentic ring of a
cri de coeur:
“How is it that I, poor ignorant I, must stand before Posterity as differing from all the other great Men of the Age?” In his monthly exchanges with Rush, Adams worked out his answer to that question. There is a Mad Hatter character to the Adams-Rush correspondence, as both men swapped stories and shared anecdotes in a kind of “Adams and Rush in Wonderland” mode. But there was a deadly serious insight buried within the comedy.
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