Joseph J. Ellis (41 page)

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:

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.

The dominant legacy, of course, was avoidance and silence. Jefferson objected so strenuously to the debate over the Missouri question because it violated that legacy. “In the gloomiest moments of the Revolutionary War,” he wrote in 1820, “I never had any apprehensions equal to what I feel from this source.” In their last exchange on the topic, Adams suggested that he, too, would observe the unwritten code and carry his concerns to the grave: “Slavery in this Country I have seen hanging over it like a black cloud for half a Century.… I might probably say I had seen Armies of Negroes marching and counter-marching in the air, shining in Armour. I have been so terrified with this Phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the Southern Gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object; I must leave it to you. I will vote for forcing no measure against your judgments.” Neither the Revolution nor the infant republic could have succeeded without the support of the southern states, so Adams had deferred to the Virginians to assume leadership of the antislavery movement. By 1820 it was abundantly clear that they had failed in this mission, with Jefferson himself the most visible symbol of the failure. But Adams chose to keep his vow of silence, at least with Jefferson, thereby honoring the etiquette of the friendship above his moral reservations, and simultaneously making
the dialogue between Quincy and Monticello a final testament to the most problematic legacy of the revolutionary generation.
⁶⁰

T
HE CORRESPONDENCE
lost its argumentative edge and shifted back to an elegiac, still-life pattern after 1820. One final flurry occurred in 1819, when a document appeared in the newspapers purportedly drafted by a group of citizens in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in May of 1775, and containing language eerily similar to Jefferson’s later draft of the Declaration of Independence. Adams called Jefferson’s attention to the discovery, noting that he wished he had known about it back then: “I would have made the Hall of Congress Echo and reecho, with it fifteen Months before your Declaration of Independence.” Nothing could have been better calculated to activate all of Jefferson’s interior antennae, since his primacy as the author of the Declaration was his major claim to everlasting fame. He responded promptly, insisting that “this paper is a fabrication,” urging Adams to remain skeptical “until positive and solemn proof of its authenticity shall be provided.” Adams quickly reassured Jefferson that he now believed “that the Mecklenburg Resolutions are a fiction.” Meanwhile, however, he was telling other correspondents quite the opposite. “I could as soon believe that the dozen flowers of the Hydrangia now before my Eyes were the work of chance,” he joked, “as that the Mecklenburg Resolutions and Mr. Jefferson’s declaration were not derived one from the other.”
⁶¹

Adams himself derived great satisfaction from the Mecklenburg incident, not so much because he believed Jefferson was a plagiarist, but because he thought the whole emphasis on one man, one moment, and one document distorted the true story of the American Revolution. Even though the Mecklenburg Declaration was subsequently exposed as a forgery, it accurately reflected the Adams sense that there were multiple venues or theaters where the drama of the movement for independence was playing out and multiple culminating moments besides July 4, 1776. In his own memoirs he had selected May 15, 1776, as the most decisive moment, because that was the day the Continental Congress passed a resolution calling for new constitutions in each of the states. (Not so coincidentally, Adams had drafted and moved the resolution.) In the Adams version, this decision was truly decisive
because it created separate and independent American governments. It also meant that the Revolution was a responsible and positive commitment to new forms of political discipline rooted in the experience of the old colonial governments, not just a negative assertion of separation from England and a complete break with the past, as Jefferson’s Declaration seemed to suggest. According to Adams, the Revolution succeeded because of its ties to the past, which meant that, in the Jeffersonian sense, it was not really a revolution at all.
⁶²

Though the brief exchange over the Mecklenburg Declaration touched on these significant differences of opinion, the diplomatic imperatives of the dialogue ruled out full disclosure. By 1820 even Adams had stopped firing off his illumination rounds and had adopted the Jeffersonian posture of benign duplicity, preferring to risk hypocrisy rather than the friendship. Though his prose remained pungent, the more dangerous bursts of candor had subsided, especially after Abigail passed away in October of 1818. (As she lay in bed dying, Adams remained composed but told the gathered relatives, “I wish I could lay down beside her and die too.”) Jefferson had always claimed that each generation should not linger beyond its allotted time, that one had almost a moral obligation to clear the ground for the next generation by placing oneself beneath it. Now both patriarchs seemed to sense that they had outlived their time. Looking back on life, wrote Jefferson, was “like looking over a field of battle. All, all dead: and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know not us.”
⁶³

The vicissitudes of aging began to crowd out the more controversial topics. “Crippled wrists and fingers make writing slow and laborious,” Jefferson complained. “But while writing to you, I lose the sense of these things, in the recollection of ancient times, when youth and health made happiness out of every thing. I forget for awhile the hoary winter of age when we can think of nothing but how to keep ourselves warm, and how to get rid of our heavy hours until the friendly hand of death shall rid us of all at once.” Adams agreed that memories of the past were all that was left, and he too preferred to remember only the good ones: “I look back with rapture to those golden days when Virginia and Massachusetts lived and acted together like a band of brothers,” he recalled, and though the end was near, “While I breath I shall be your friend.”
⁶⁴

They referred to life in the hereafter, not as a chance to see God so
much as an opportunity to converse with each other and the other “band of brothers.” As Jefferson put it, “May we meet there again … with our antient Colleagues, and receive with them the seal of approbation.” Adams concurred that the reunion in heaven would permit them to laugh at their human follies and foibles, though he would talk with Franklin only after the great man did proper penance for his sins. Neither man was completely convinced that heaven was anything more than a metaphor. Adams was on record as thinking that the belief in life everlasting was more important than the thing itself. “If it would be revealed or demonstrated that there is no future state,” he apprised one friend, “my advice to every man, woman, and child would be, as our existence would be in our own power, to take opium.” Or as he put it to Jefferson, “if we are disappointed, we shall never know it.” Each man was hedging his bets on the hereafter by preparing his private papers for posterity, the one place where they knew their prospects of immortality were assured. And both men regarded the letters they were writing to each other as the capstone to that final project.
⁶⁵

There is no question that the emotional bond between the two patriarchs was restored and the friendship recovered toward the end. They no longer had to pose as partners; or what amounts to the same thing, the posing reflected a deeply felt sense of affinity. In part, the bonding occurred because the correspondence of their twilight years permitted both sages to confront and argue out their different notions of the history they had lived and made together. Jefferson had made his amends and some crucial concessions. Adams had expressed his feisty and passionate objections to the Jeffersonian constructions in one last catharsis. One would like to believe, and there is some basis for the belief, that each man came to recognize in the other the intellectual and temperamental qualities lacking in himself; that they, in effect, completed each other; that only when joined could the pieces of the story of the American Revolution come together to make a whole. But the more mundane truth is that they never faced and therefore never fully resolved all their political differences; they simply outlived them.

At the start of the correspondence Adams had felt deep resentment toward Jefferson for the libels he had sponsored during the Adams presidency. By 1823 the whole subject of scandal had become a nostalgic joke. Adams read in the newspapers that Jefferson had compiled “a Magazine of slips of newspapers, and pamphlets, vilifying, calumniating
and defaming you.” This was an inspired idea that Adams wished he had had first: “What a dunce I have been all my days, and what lubbers my Children, and Grand Children, were, that none of us have ever thought to make a similar collection. If we had I am confident I could have produced a more splendid Mass than yours.” Jefferson regretted to inform Adams that the story was untrue; he had not compiled a collection of the libels against himself. If he had, however, “it would not indeed have been a single volume, but an Encyclopedia in bulk.”
⁶⁶

They had become living relics. In 1824 the Marquis de Lafayette, the great French champion of American independence, paid a final visit to America. Monticello and Quincy were obligatory stops on his tour. In each location the reunion drew large crowds, in which witnesses claimed they saw two ghosts from a bygone era materializing one final time for the benefit of the present generation. The American sculptor John Henri Browere also visited both sages, who were asked to sit for “life masks” designed to produce reliable likenesses of their faces and heads—in effect, to make realistic icons of the icons. (Jefferson found the process, which required pouring successive coats of a hot plasterlike liquid over the head, so uncomfortable that he vowed to “bid adieu for ever to busts and portraits.”) His final adieu to Adams conveyed the same strange sense of being regarded as living statues. He entrusted his last letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who was traveling to Boston and would make a stop in Quincy: “Like other young people, he wishes to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has learnt of the Heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the Argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.” For most Americans coming of age in the 1820s, the American Revolution had long since been enshrined as a sacred moment in the distant past, when a gallery of heroes had been privileged to see God face-to-face. It was awkward to realize that a few of them were still alive.
⁶⁷

But they were. And as the fiftieth anniversary of Independence Day approached, requests poured into Monticello and Quincy from across the land, asking the patriarchs to share their wisdom and memories about the meaning of it all. Though seriously ill with an intestinal disorder that would eventually prove fatal, Jefferson summoned up the energy for one final spasm of eloquence. For several days, he worked over the draft of a letter to the committee responsible for the Independence
Day ceremonies in Washington, crossing out and revising the language with as much attention to detail as he had given the original Declaration. He regretted that his deteriorating health prevented him from attending the ceremonies in person and joining “the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies who joined with us on that day.” (Only three of the original signers survived: Adams, Jefferson, and Charles Carroll of Maryland.) Then he offered the Jeffersonian version of what the “host of worthies” had done: