Joseph J. Ellis (42 page)

Here was the vintage Jeffersonian vision. It viewed the American Revolution as an explosion that dislodged America from England, from Europe, from the past itself, the opening shot in a global struggle for liberation from all forms of oppression that was destined to sweep around the world. In this formulation, all forms of authority not originating within the self were stigmatized and placed on the permanent defensive. The American Revolution had not just repudiated the tyranny of the English king and Parliament; it had defied all political institutions with coercive powers of any sort, including the kind of national government established by the Federalists in the 1790s.

The inspirational rhetoric of the statement was not original. The phrases “saddles on their backs” and “a favored few, booted and spurred” had been lifted from a famous speech delivered by Col. Richard Rumbold, a Puritan soldier convicted of treason in 1685, who spoke the words from the gallows. Jefferson owned several copies of English histories that reprinted the Rumbold speech. (Perhaps as a
dying man, like Rumbold, Jefferson thought he had every right to claim a favorite piece of eloquence as his own.) But the borrowed rhetoric was only one small feature of a uniquely Jeffersonian message that was
inherently
rhetorical in character—that is, it framed the issues at a rarefied altitude, where all answers were self-evident and no real choices had to be made. And that was the ultimate source of its beguiling charm. The Jeffersonian vision floated. It functioned at inspirational levels above the bedeviling particularities, like a big bang theory of the American Revolution, now destined to expand throughout the world naturally and inevitably, no longer in doubt or in human hands.
⁶⁹

Adams also received many requests from federal and state committees charged with organizing the celebration of what was being called “the Jubilee of Independence.” Irreverent to the end, for a time he resisted, insisting that the Fourth of July was not really the right date, indeed there was no one right date, and the passage of the Declaration of Independence was merely an ornamental occasion bereft of any larger historical significance. When a delegation from Quincy came out to visit him to request words for a toast at the local celebration, he was curt. “I will give you INDEPENDENCE FOREVER,” he replied. When asked to enumerate or explain, he refused. “Not a word,” he insisted.

Eventually, several family friends prodded a few amplifying rewards from the otherwise-loquacious patriarch. He conceded that the era of the American Revolution had been “a memorable epoch in the annals of the human race,” but the jury was still out on its significance. He doubted whether the republican principles planted by the founding generation would grow in foreign soil. Neither Europe nor Latin America were ready for them. Even within the United States, the fate of those principles was still problematic. He warned that America was “destined in future history to form the brightest or blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall in time to come be shaped by the
human mind.”
Asked to pose for posterity, he chose to go out hurling it a challenge.
⁷⁰

The Adams formulation was precisely the opposite of Jefferson’s. It lacked the lyrical eloquence and the floating optimism of the Jeffersonian version because it was grounded in the palpable sense of contingency Adams had internalized over his long career. For Adams, the
American Revolution was still an experiment, a sail into uncharted waters that no other ship of state had ever successfully navigated. There were no maps or charts to guide a republican government claiming to derive its authority and legitimacy from public opinion, that murky source of sovereignty that could be as choppy and unpredictable as waves on the ocean. He had been a member of the crew on this maiden voyage, even taken his turn at the helm, so he knew as well as anyone, better than most, that they had nearly crashed and sunk on several occasions, had argued bitterly among themselves throughout the 1790s about the proper course. Jefferson seemed to think that, once unmoored from British docks and unburdened of European baggage, the ship would sail itself into the proverbial sunset. Adams thought he knew better, and he also would go to his grave believing that a fully empowered federal government on the Federalist model was a fulfillment, rather than a betrayal, of the course they had set at the start. Without a sanctioned central government to steer the still-fragile American republic, the new crew was certain to founder on that huge rock called slavery, which was lurking dead ahead in the middle distance and that even Jefferson acknowledged to be “a breaker.”

The more providential Jeffersonian version of the story triumphed in the history books, as Adams knew it would, helped along by one final act of fate that everyone, then and now, regarded as the unmistakable voice of God. On the evening of July 3, 1826, Jefferson fell into a coma. His last discernible words, uttered to the physician and family gathered around the bedside, indicated he was hoping to time his exit in dramatic fashion: “Is it the Fourth?” It was not, but he lingered in a semiconscious condition until shortly after noon on the magic day. That same morning, Adams collapsed in his favorite reading chair. He lapsed into unconsciousness at almost the exact moment Jefferson died. The end came quickly, at about five-thirty that afternoon. He wakened for a brief moment, indicated that nothing more should be done to prolong the inevitable, then, with obvious effort, gave a final salute to his old friend with his last words: “Thomas Jefferson survives,” or, by another account, “Thomas Jefferson still lives.” Whatever the version, he was wrong for the moment but right for the ages.
⁷¹

The notes that follow represent my attempt to adopt a sensible approach to the customary rules of scholarly citation. A full accounting of all the books and articles consulted would produce as many pages of notes as there are of text. This strikes me as cumbersome, more than most readers want, and a clear case of conspicuous erudition. I have cited all primary sources quoted in the text, plus those secondary sources that seem to me seminal or those that had a decided impact on my thinking. The awkward truth is that this book represents a distillation of my reading in the historical literature on the revolutionary era over the past thirty years. A faithful recounting of all the scholarly influences that have shaped my interpretation of the revolutionary generation would entail a massive listing that would still fail to capture the whole truth. In partial compensation for my sins of omission, I have littered the notes below with my assessment of the sources cited, thereby giving them the occasional flavor of a bibliographic essay.

ABBREVIATIONS

  1.
Adams to Nathan Webb, 12 October 1755,
Works
, vol. 1, 23–34; Adams to Abigail Adams, 2 June 1776, Lyman Butterfield, ed.,
Adams Family Correspondence
, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1963), vol. 2, 3; Adams to Benjamin Rush, 21 May 1807,
Spur
, 89.

  2.
Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
(New York, 1993).

  3.
Benjamin Rush to Adams, 20 July 1811,
Spur, 1
83.

  4.
Ira Gruber,
The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution
(Williamsburg, 1972); Kevin Phillips,
The Cousins’ War: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America
(New York, 1999), 291–299.

  5.
Writings
, 517.

  6.
The seminal study of republican ideology as a defiant repudiation of consolidated power is Bernard Bailyn,
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge, 1967); as applied to the 1780s, the classic work is Gordon Wood,
The Creation of the American Republic
(Chapel Hill, 1969); as applied to the 1790s, the standard source is Lance Banning,
The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1978).

  7.
Adams to Benjamin Rush, 10 July 1812,
Spur
, 231–232.

  8.
T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution:
Revisions
Once More
in Need of Revising,”
JAH
84 (June 1997): 13–39; John Murrin, “A Roof Without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, Edward Carter, eds.,
Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity
(Chapel Hill, 1987), 334–38.

  9.
Jefferson to William Fleming, 1 July 1776, Boyd, vol. 1, 411–12; U.S. Bureau of Census,
First Census
(Baltimore, 1966), 6–8.

10.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,
A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1185–1812
(New York, 1990); Robert E. Desrochers, Jr., “ ‘Not Fade Away’: The Narrative of Venture Smith, an African American in the Early Republic,”
JAH
84 (June 1997): 40–66. Another approach has been to study the political culture “from below,” meaning the way attitudes were shaped at the local level in public ceremonies and rituals. The best analysis of emerging nationalism in this mode is David Waldstreicher,
In the Midst of Perpetual Fêtes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1176–1820
(Chapel Hill, 1997).

11.
Mercy Otis Warren,
History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution
, 3 vols. (Boston, 1805); John Marshall,
The Life of George Washington
, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1804–1807).

12.
My thinking about the circularity of the debate on the American Revolution was stimulated by the same analysis of the French Revolution by François Furet,
Interpreting the French Revolution
, trans. Elburg Foster (Cambridge, England, 1981).