Joseph J. Ellis (37 page)

The insight was precocious, anticipating as it did the distinction between history as experienced and history as remembered, most
famously depicted in Leo Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
. (The core insight—that all seamless historical narratives are latter-day constructions—lies at the center of all postmodern critiques of traditional historical explanations.) Under Rush’s prodding influence and in response to his dreamy inspirations, Adams realized that the act of transforming the American Revolution into history placed a premium on selecting events and heroes that fit neatly into a dramatic formula, thereby distorting the more tangled and incoherent experience that participants actually making the history felt at the time. Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence was a perfect example of such dramatic distortions. The Revolution in this romantic rendering became one magical moment of inspiration, leading inexorably to the foregone conclusion of American independence.

As Adams remembered it, on the other hand, “all the great critical questions about men and measures from 1774 to 1778” were desperately contested and highly problematic occasions, usually “decided by the vote of a single state, and that vote was often decided by a single individual.” Nothing was clear, inevitable, or even comprehensible to the soldiers in the field at Saratoga or the statesmen in the corridors at Philadelphia: “It was patched and piebald policy then, as it is now, ever was, and ever will be, world without end.” The real drama of the American Revolution, which was perfectly in accord with Adams’s memory as well as with the turbulent conditions of his own soul, was its inherent messiness. This meant recovering the exciting but terrifying sense that all the major players had at the time—namely, that they were making it up as they went along, improvising on the edge of catastrophe.
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Adams derived his authority for a deconstructed version of the American Revolution from his incontestable claim to have been “present at the creation.” He had been a participant during most, if not all, of the crucial moments from the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 to his own retirement from the presidency in 1801. And he knew all the major players personally. This conferred instant credibility upon his preferred role as designated truth teller, poised to expose the chaotic reality beneath all uplifting accounts of the Revolution. Support for American independence, for example, was always fragile and shifted with each victory or defeat in the field, which was often a matter of pure luck. Or the decision to locate the national capital on the Potomac was a back-room
deal involving so many secret bargains and bribes that no one would ever unravel the full story.
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In the same vein, all the heroic portraits of the great men were romanticized distortions. Franklin, for example, was a superb scientist and masterful prose stylist, to be sure, but also a vacuous political thinker and diplomatic fraud, who spent the bulk of his time in Paris flirting with younger women of the salon set. Washington was an indisputable American patriarch, but more an actor than a leader, brilliant at striking poses “in a strain of Shakespearean … excellence at dramatic exhibitions.” He was also poorly read, seldom wrote his own speeches, and, according to one member of his cabinet, “could not write a sentence without misspelling some word.” In general, the Virginians were the chief beneficiaries of all the highly stylized histories, though, as Adams observed, “not a lad upon the Highlands is more clannish than every Virginian I have ever known.” Virginians were also the most adept at employing what Adams called “puffers,” what we would call “spinners” or public-relations experts. “These puffers, Rush, are the only killers of scandal,” Adams noted. “You and I have never employed them, and therefore scandal has prevailed against us.” When Rush somewhat mischievously suggested that Adams himself enjoyed the support of Federalist “puffers,” specifically mentioning William Cobbett, Adams pleaded total ignorance: “Now I assure you upon my honor and the faith of the friendship between us that I never saw the face of Cobbett; and that I should not know him if I met him in my porridge dish.”
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This last remark, while vintage Adams-Rush banter, also exposed the painfully egotistical motives lurking beneath the entire Adams campaign for a more realistic, nonmythologized version of the American Revolution. While his insistence on a deconstructed history was certainly a precocious intellectual insight, there is also no question that the Adams urge to discredit the dramatic renderings of the revolutionary era was driven by his own wounded vanity. To put it squarely, such versions of the story failed to provide
him
with a starring role in the drama. At its nub, his critique of the historical fictions circulating as seductive truths was much like a campaign to smash all the statues, because the sculptor had failed to render a satisfactory likeness of yours truly.

On the other hand, Adams possessed a congenital affinity for
deconstructed interpretations of history, of his own life, indeed of practically everything. It was the way he saw the world. By temperament, he was inherently impulsive, highly combustible, instinctively irreverent. All his major published works on political philosophy, including his
Defence of the Constitution of the United States of America
and
Discourses on Davila
, along with his unpublished autobiography, lacked coherent form. They were less books than notebooks, filled with rambling transcriptions of his own internal conversations that ricocheted off one another at unpredictable angles. While his most devoted enemies, chiefly Franklin and Hamilton, claimed that his erratic habits of mind were symptomatic of mental illness, some recent scholarship has suggested the problem was physical, that he might well have been afflicted with hyperthyroidism, or Graves’ disease. For our purposes, however, the ultimate cause of the condition is less important than its systemic manifestation, which was a congenital inability to separate his thoughts from his feelings about them. This caused him to mistrust all purely rational descriptions of human behavior as incompatible with the more passionate stirrings he felt within his own personality. As he told Rush, “Deceive not thyself. There is not an old friar in France, not in Europe, who looks on a blooming young virgin with
sang-froid
.” These same internal stirrings also predisposed him to regard all perfectly symmetrical narratives or stories preaching an obvious moral message and populated by larger-than-life heroes as utter fabrications. Like straight lines in nature, such things did not exist for him.
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They did, however, for his former friend at Monticello, who had spent the bulk of his adult life keeping his head and his heart in separate chambers of his personality. Starting in 1807, Jefferson’s name began to come up sporadically in Adams’s letters to Rush. Prior to that time, Jefferson had remained a forbidden subject. When asked to comment on his renowned partnership with Jefferson during the early days of the American Revolution, Adams developed a standard statement of denial: “You are much mistaken when you say that no man living have so much knowledge of Mr. Jefferson’s transactions as myself,” Adams insisted. “I know but little concerning him.” With Rush, however, Adams began to slip Jefferson into their conversation as an example of the kind of enigmatic temperament destined to flourish in the history books.
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He recalled Jefferson’s retirement from the Washington administration
in 1793, quite obviously a shrewd tactical retreat designed to position Jefferson for his ascent “toward the summit of the pyramid”—that is, the presidency—but which was described by the Republican press “as unambitious, unavaricious, and perfectly disinterested.” Somehow, Jefferson was even able to persuade himself that he was beyond temptation and happily ensconced on his mountaintop for the duration. “When a man has one of the two greatest parties in a nation interested in representing him to be disinterested,” Adams observed with amazement, “even those who believe it to be a lie will repeat it so often to one another that at last they will seem to believe it to be true.”
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The same pattern materialized later in the 1790s, when Jefferson embraced two misguided propositions about European affairs. The first was that England was “tottering to her fall,” that her economy was collapsing and “she must soon be a bankrupt and unable to maintain her naval superiority.” The second misguided opinion, “still more erroneous and still more fatal,” was that France was the wave of the future, that she “would establish a free republican government and even a leveling democracy, and that monarchy and nobility would forever be abolished in France,” all of which would occur peacefully and bloodlessly. In both instances, events proved Jefferson wrong. In both instances Adams had disagreed with Jefferson and been proven right. But despite his underestimation of England and his overestimation of France, Jefferson’s reputation and popularity soared. “I have reason to remember it,” Adams recalled, “because my opinion of the French Revolution produced a coldness towards me in all my Revolutionary friends, and an inclination towards Mr. Jefferson, which broke out in violent invectives and false imputations upon me and in flattering panegyrics upon Mr. Jefferson.”

Once again, Jefferson seemed uniquely equipped to become the chief beneficiary of romanticized versions of history, in part because his own capacity for self-deception permitted him to deny, and with utter sincerity, the vanities and ambitions lurking in his own soul, and in part because the moralistic categories that shaped all his political thinking fit perfectly the romantic formula that history writing seemed to require. The fact that these categories were blatant illusions (for example, the French Revolution was not a European version of the American Revolution) seemed to matter less than the fact that they confirmed a potent and seductive mythology that was more appealing
than the messier reality. Through some complex combination of duplicity and disposition, Jefferson had come to embody the will to believe. He was not so much living a lie as living a fiction that he had come to believe himself.
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Adams had come to see himself as the mirror image of Jefferson: “Mausoleums, statues monuments will never be erected to me,” he wrote with resignation to Rush. “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.” Facing that unattractive truth took time, a full decade of shouting and pouting, relieved by converting his despair into comedy with Rush, but it also came naturally to Adams, whose entire career had been spent preaching the unattractive truths to everybody else. If Jefferson seemed predestined to tell people what they wanted to hear, Adams now acknowledged that his own destiny was just the opposite: to tell them what they needed to know.
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This was Adams’s resigned but bittersweet mood in 1809, when Rush reported his most amazing dream yet. He dreamed that Adams had written a short letter to Jefferson, congratulating him on his recent retirement from public life. Jefferson had then responded to this magnanimous gesture with equivalent graciousness. The two great patriarchs had then engaged in a correspondence over several years in which they candidly acknowledged their mutual mistakes, shared their profound reflections on the meaning of American independence, and recovered their famous friendship. Then the two philosopher-kings “sunk into the grave nearly at the same time, full of years and rich in the gratitude and praises of their country … and to their numerous merits and honors posterity has added that they were rival friends.”
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Adams responded immediately: “A DREAM AGAIN! I have no other objection to your dream but that it is not history. It may be prophecy.” Then he offered a satirical account of his relationship with Jefferson, claiming that “there has never been the smallest interruption of the personal friendship between Mr. Jefferson that I know of.” This convenient lie was then followed by a humorous piece of bravado: “You should remember that Jefferson was but a boy to me. I was at least ten years older than him in age and more than twenty years older in politics. I am bold to say I was his preceptor in politics and taught him everything that was good and solid in his whole political conduct.”
How could one hold a grudge against a disciple? On the other hand, given Jefferson’s junior status, was it not more appropriate for him to initiate the reconciliation? “If I should receive a letter from him,” Adams concluded tartly, “I should not fail to acknowledge and answer it.” Jefferson, in short, would have to extend the hand first.
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That was not going to happen. Rush was simultaneously writing Jefferson, somewhat misleadingly suggesting that Adams had indicated he was now eager for a reconciliation and virtually on his deathbed: “I am sure an advance on your side will be a cordial to the heart of Mr. Adams,” Rush explained. “Tottering over the grave, he now leans wholly upon the shoulders of his old Revolutionary friends.” But Jefferson would not rise to the bait, convinced as he was after his earlier exchange with Abigail that he had already made a heroic effort that had been summarily rejected. It was now Adams’s turn to attempt a bridging of the gap. That was how it stood for more than two ensuing years: the two sages circling each other, marking off their territory like old dogs, sniffing around the edges of a possible reconciliation, reluctant to close the distance.
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The distance was reduced in 1811 when Edward Coles, a Jefferson protégé who was attempting, in vain it turned out, to persuade his mentor to assume a more forthright position opposing slavery, visited Adams in Quincy. Adams let it be known that his political disagreements with Jefferson had never killed his affection for the man. “I always loved Jefferson,” he told Coles, “and still love him.” When word of this exchange reached Jefferson, as Adams knew it would, Jefferson declared his conversion. “This is enough for me,” he wrote Rush, adding that he knew Adams to be “always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes incorrect and precipitate in his judgments.” This latter caveat rewidened the gap that the earlier statement had seemed to close. The gap became a chasm when Jefferson went on to explain that he had always valued Adams’s judgment, “with the single exception as to his political opinions,” a statement roughly equivalent to claiming that the Pope was otherwise infallible, except when he declared himself on matters of faith and morals.
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