Passionate Sage (6 page)

Some of the more unattractive traits identified by Hamilton in the infamous open letter of 1800—Adams's alleged irritability and reputation for being difficult—seem to have a basis in the record during the Continental Congress. Adams as much as admitted the existence of a problem in two private letters written at the moment of his triumph during the summer of 1776: “Besides if I were to tell you all that I think of all Characters [in Congress], I should appear so illnatured and censorious that I should detest myself,” he wrote to Samuel Chase. “By my Soul, I think very heinously, I can't think of a better Word, of some People. They think as badly of me, I suppose, and neither of us care a farthing for that.” Similarly, he wrote to James Warren, vowing that he would “not write Strictures upon Characters. I set all Mankind a Swearing, if I do…. I make the Faces of my best Friends a mile long, if I do.” He seemed as dedicated to the task of making enemies as he was to promoting American independence.
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The primal source of this syndrome lay buried deep in the folds of the Adams psyche, beyond the reach or view of orthodox historical analysis. What is accessible and readily discernible is a clear pattern of behavior. During his service in the Continental Congress, as during his presidency, Adams began with a clear sense of the direction in which the country needed to go, clung to it tenaciously, and had his vision vindicated by events. In both instances he alienated a large number of his peers; in the 1790s much of the blame for his isolation can be attributed to the disloyalty of his own cabinet, the behind-the-scenes plotting of Hamilton and the High Federalists, and the unforeseen emergence of two distinct political parties; in the 1770s some of the blame for the deep animosities that developed can be attributed to the radical implications of the political doctrines he was urging, the understandable reluctance of moderate delegates to move as far or as fast toward American independence, the unavoidable conflict, if you will, between the requirements of his leadership role and the customary civilities. Yet it was all so
personal
. Although his hostility toward Hamilton exceeded his ill-will toward Dickinson, in both cases he focused his fire on one person who symbolized the opposition. And finally, as a member of the Continental Congress and as president, he embraced a version of virtue that went beyond any mere ideological conviction based on reading in classical or modern texts; for Adams, virtue demanded a level of disinterestedness and a purity of public spiritedness that derived its compulsion from psychological imperative which seemed to
require
isolation and unpopularity as evidence of its authenticity.

The ultimate source of this syndrome is unclear, but it seems to have been triggered by Adams's fear of success. In 1777, while complaining to Abigail about the in-fighting between military officers who were, as he put it, “Scrambling for Rank and Pay like Apes for Nuts,” Adams for the first time articulated in full form what was to become a central tenet of his mature political thought:

 

I believe there is no one Principle, which predominates in human Nature so much in every Stage of Life, from the Cradle to the Grave, in Males and females, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, high and low, as this Passion for Superiority…. Every human Being compares itself in its own Imagination, with every other round about it, and will find some Superiority over every other…or it will die of Grief and Vexation.
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His own compulsion to excel in the Continental Congress, and to be acknowledged as having done so by the other delegates who were also vying for recognition, was, in this view, an inherent, irresistible human urge. Adams was uncomfortably aware of his ambition, and claimed that to deny its presence and power was to engage in self-delusion. Here was one source of his public relations problem: what others so often saw as arrogance and vanity was, in Adams's view, simply a case of candor; or, to put it somewhat differently, Adams could not imagine how he appeared to others who did not share his own realistic estimate of human nature or his own habit of honest introspection. Why should he not speak to
them
with the same kind of brutal honesty that he practiced on
himself?

But if he could acknowledge ambition, he could not quite tolerate success. In the spring of 1776, as his own reputation and American independence ascended together, he confessed to Abigail the pride he felt in influencing “the great Events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing….” Three weeks later he announced to his wife that he had “purchased a Folio Book…and intend to write all my Letters to you in it from this Time forward.” He would copy his private correspondence in what amounted to a personal declaration of his own historical significance.
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Whatever satisfaction and sense of fulfillment Adams derived from his success, however, was more than offset by his self-doubt; not about his contribution to the American cause—he was supremely confident about that—but about his capacity to survive success. Men, like nations, advanced toward greatness, reached the apogee of their ascent, then spiralled downwards into decadence and sloth, corrupted by the very affluence and pride that was the reward for their success. England was the prime example of this familiar cycle among nations. And his diagnosis of corruption within English society and politics was central to Adams's advocacy of American independence. He was profoundly conscious of repeating on a microscopic scale the same pattern England had traced at the macroscopic level. He distrusted his own popularity for much the same reason he recommended that governments establish checks against the unrestrained democratic impulses of a single-house legislature; namely, there were powerful passions deep in the individual soul and in the people-at-large that required restraint. What struck some of his colleagues as irritability was actually a by-product of the internal struggle with his own vanity and ambition, the nervous energy generated by the incessant operation of his own internal checks and balances.

All of which helps to illuminate the sources for Adams's personal intensity as they developed with full force in the 1770s: he thought about politics and the entire world “out there” in terms of forces he felt throbbing inside himself. Virtually all of his political convictions, especially his most piercing political insights, derived from introspection, or what we would call psychology. Just as James Madison established a reputation as “Father of the Constitution” because of his leading role in the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Adams established his reputation as the premier political theorist of the American Revolution because of his leadership in the Continental Congress. But if Madison is the master sociologist of American political theory, Adams is the master psychologist. Virtue was not an abstract concept he learned about simply by reading Montesquieu, David Hume, or the writers of the English Commonwealth tradition. It was a principle of self-denial he harbored in his heart and kept preaching to himself in his diary. A state constitution was not just an agreed-upon framework of social customs and laws. It was a public replica of one's internal order or constitution. The very idea of government itself was the act of implementing in the world the lessons learned in dealing with one's own internal demons.

The reason why Adams seemed to take the making of American policy in the 1770s super-seriously is obvious: he realized before most others that the future of a nation was at stake. Even that realization, however, was at least partially indebted to the overlap between America's fate and his own ascent. And the reason he seemed to take public decisions so personally emerged out of the same overlapping habit: his political commitments were, quite literally, projections onto the world of his own layered and paradoxical personality. He was the kind of man, as his critics put it, who could unfailingly mistake a prejudice for a conviction, but it was all part of a larger confusion in the Adams mind between private and public affairs, which kept intersecting and interacting in patterns that defied neat separation.

 

If his behavior in the Continental Congress affords the best glimpse at Adams as he emerged as a national figure, he was less fully formed twenty years earlier. The pieces of the Adams puzzle had yet to align themselves in any discernible pattern in the fall of 1755, when he was still a young man grappling with his purpose in life. He had just graduated from Harvard the previous summer, was unsure whether he should pursue a career in the ministry or the law, and needed time to mull over his prospects. An offer from the minister at Worcester, about forty miles west of Boston, promised to provide a small salary and a large space in which to ruminate in return for his services as a schoolmaster. During the three years he remained in Worcester Adams read much, brooded even more and, most importantly for our purposes, began to keep a diary in which he recorded a good deal more than the weather. In that rather remarkable diary, one can already discern if only dimly the paunchy, balding, toothless patriarch and president sitting in the semi-darkness of the presidential mansion nearly a half century later. If the origins and sources of his complex character left any traces in the historical record, this is surely the place to look for them.
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The Adams diary begins, quite literally, with a jolt: “We had a severe Shock of an Earthquake,” he noted, describing the considerable damage done to New England houses and chimneys by the seismic movements that, unbeknown to the young Adams, had virtually levelled the city of Lisbon on the other side of the Atlantic. The seismic shiftings occurring inside Adams himself at the time were less visible but just as disconcerting. A half century earlier the question over which he was anguishing would have had a decidedly religious cast: Am I saved or damned? By the middle of the eighteenth century the form of the question had changed, although the underlying psychological forces set in motion in the rite of passage to adulthood were still saturated with moral and religious meanings that had not lost their power. For Adams, the questions he was posing to himself were more recognizably modern: what should I do with my life? what is my proper calling? who am I? But his way of answering them remained indebted to Puritan traditions as old as New England and as compelling for young Adams as an earthquake.
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In one sense, the essential Adams qualities were already visible in 1755, eminently discernible once one knows what to look for. The eerily accurate sense of what was in store for America, which gave Adams such a headstart over his colleagues in the Continental Congress and then shaped his policy toward France as president, had already assumed articulate form. In a letter to Nathan Webb, a longtime friend and distant relative, Adams first sketched out his vision of an expanding American empire. “If we look into History we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings, and spreading their influence, 'till the whole Globe is subjected to their sway,” he wrote in October of 1755. Rome was obviously the illustrative example for the ancient world. And England was clearly the heir to Rome's greatness in the modern world. But history demonstrated that whenever great nations reach “the summit of Grandeur, some minute and unsuspected Cause commonly effects their Ruin, and the Empire of the world is transferr'd to some other place.” Just what the “unsuspected Cause” that would unseat England might be, Adams could not say for sure. The growing population of North America, however, which “in another century [will] become more numerous than England itself,” suggested the time would eventually be ripe for transferring “the great seat of Empire into America,” a development, Adams predicted, that “looks likely to me.” Much later, during his retirement years, when Adams was given a copy of this youthful letter, he showed it to friends and made it available for publication, joking that he had forgotten how prophetic he had once been. Strictly speaking, his early prediction of an independent America did
not
foresee a violent rupture with England, but rather a gradual evolution (
à la
Canada) rather than a revolution. But the young man did have an instinct for the flow of history.
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The famous, or perhaps infamous, Adams ambition was also fully present. The job of schoolmaster, he needed to assure his friends, was a mere way station; he was not about to romanticize the life of the classroom, which struck him as “a school of affliction, [with] a large number of little runtlings, just capable of lisping A.B.C. and troubling the Master.” Uplifting talk to his diary about “Cultivating and pruning these tender Plants in the garden of Worcester” never lasted long. The realistic truth was that “keeping this school any length of Time would make a base weed and ignoble shrub of me.” If the ultimate destination of his already quite palpable ambitions was not yet clear, it surely lay beyond the provincial world of Worcester, perhaps along the ascending slope that America seemed fated to travel.
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What proved to be a life-long internal dialogue with those ambitions had also begun by this time. Which is to say that he was already painfully aware of the passions that were to bedevil him throughout his long life. “Vanity I am sensible, is my cardinal Vice and cardinal Folly,” he lectured himself, “and I am in continual Danger, when in Company, of being led an ignis fatuus Chase by it, without the strictest Caution and watchfulness over my self.” He must be more careful and restrained in groups, he kept reminding himself, so that his conversation did not betray his sense of superiority. “A puffy, vain, conceited Conversation, never fails to bring a Man into Contempt,” he told his diary, “altho his natural Endowments be ever so great, and his Application and Industry ever so intense.” He must rein in his congenital pugnacity, his urge “to shew my own Importance or Superiority, by remarking the Foibles, Vices, or Inferiority of others,” which only alienated the very people he wished to impress. In general, he must lash down his passions: “Untamed they are lawless Bulls,” he wrote to himself, “they roar and bluster, defy all Controul, and some times murder their proper owner.” Too often, however, his imagination would form an alliance with his ambition, easily snapping all ties and overwhelming all injunctions. For example, in March of 1756, he recorded this daydream about his little schoolroom as a model “of the great World in miniature”: