American Sphinx (42 page)

One such episode in fact was occasioned by the very term “ideology.” This was one of those new words that both men believed should be allowed to fight their way into the lexicon. Jefferson first used it in 1816, in reference to the writings of Destutt de Tracy, a French philosophe who had popularized the term in France. “What does it mean?” asked Adams. “I was delighted with it, upon the Common Principle of delight in every Thing We cannot understand. Does it mean Idiotism? The Science of Non compos Menticism? The Science of Lunacy?” The Adams list of preposterous and humorous definitions went on for several lines, along with the mock suggestion that since this was obviously one of those French words that Jefferson now wished to smuggle into the American language, it should be obliged to pay an import duty. But beneath the comic veneer Adams wanted to smuggle into his own dialogue with Jefferson a deadly serious point—namely, that Jefferson’s style of political thinking was “much indebted to the invention of the word IDEOLOGY” because Jefferson harbored a set of attractive ideals, like the belief in human perfection or social equality, that he mistakenly believed could be implemented in this world merely because they existed in his head. This was the French way of thinking about politics, an a priori and implicitly utopian habit of mind that, as Adams recalled it, he and Jefferson had encountered in prerevolutionary Paris in the conversations of Lafayette, Turgot and Condorcet. It was an intellectual tradition that Adams described as “the school of folly” for its systematic confusion of what one could imagine with what was practical and possible. He was essentially accusing Jefferson of embracing attractive dreams, then condemning all critics of his naiveté as enemies of the goals themselves when in fact they were only criticizing their illusory character. It was the classic criticism of an idealist by a realist.
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Another illuminating airburst occurred in 1816, when Jefferson, while attempting to make the apparently harmless point that one ought not to wallow in grief, asked the rhetorical question “What is the use of grief on the [human] economy, and of what good is it the cause . . . ?” Adams proceeded to explode in a series of tirades on “the uses of grief,” a subject on which he claimed to be one of America’s leading experts. Grief, as he saw it, was a crucial human emotion that “sharpens the Understanding and Softens the heart.” Grief was to human achievement as the thorn was to the roses. Had Jefferson never noticed that the portraits or statues of all the great men of history showed their faces filled with furrows of grief? Jefferson tried to send up the white flag: “To the question indeed on the Utility of Grief, no answer remains to be given. You have exhausted the subject.” But Adams was just getting started. Besides the various “uses of grief” there were many more “abuses of grief,” including—Jefferson could certainly appreciate this one—the misuse of Washington’s reputation by Hamilton to gain support for his banking schemes. Grief, it turned out, was a many-sided and many-splendored emotion.
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Jefferson tried to counter the Adams onslaught with the clever argument that, since there seemed to be an equal number of uses and abuses of grief, then perhaps they canceled each other out and therefore rendered the entire subject superfluous. Adams could not have disagreed more. The study of human emotions was the statesman’s highest duty, Adams claimed: “Our Passions . . . possess so much metaphysical Subtilty and so much overpowering Eloquence, that they insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and convert both to their Party. . . .” Jefferson’s unshakable faith in the eventual triumph of human reason over prejudice and superstition was, Adams conceded, an admirable hope. But as far as he was concerned, and as the whole sweep of history showed, “it would seem that human Reason and human Conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm.” It was the classic debate between a rationalist and an empiricist.
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Finally there was the most sustained and direct exchange over political principles in the entire correspondence. Jefferson accidentally started it with a familiar and, he must have thought, wholly unexceptional statement of the Jeffersonian vision of political parties:

The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed thro’ all time. Whether the power of the people, or that of the
aristoi
should prevail, were questions which kept the states of Greece and Rome in eternal convulsions; as they now schismatize every people whose minds and mouths are not shut up by the gag of a despot. . . . To me it appears that there have been . . . party differences from the first establishment of governments, to the present day . . . every one takes his side in favor of the many, or the few.
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As he quickly realized, Jefferson had wandered into the most dangerous political territory of all. For the Jeffersonian formulation rendered all political history into a moral clash between benevolent popular majorities and despotic elites, which in turn cast Adams and the Federalists in the unsavory role of the corrupt guardians of the privileged few, systematically defying the will of the American majority. Obviously this was not a rhetorical posture that Adams would find comfortable or acceptable.

Even the ever-combative Sage of Quincy sensed this was heavily mined ground that demanded caution. His first instinct was to search for a safe haven. “Precisely,” he wrote back to Jefferson; the distinction between the few and the many was “as old as Aristotle,” one reason why he had claimed that politics, unlike the other sciences, was “little better understood; little better practiced now than 3 or 4 thousand Years ago.” And if Jefferson meant that the American Revolution had committed the new nation to the Lockean principle of popular sovereignty—that is, the doctrine that all political power derived from the people—then they were in perfect agreement. But, and here Adams began to touch the explosive charges buried beneath their friendship, the simple dichotomy between benign majorities and malevolent elites worked better as rhetoric than as a description of political reality. Danger could come from several directions, from the many as well as the few. “The fundamental Article of my political Creed,” Adams announced defiantly, “is, that Despotism, or unlimited Sovereignty, or absolute Power is the same in a Majority of a popular Assembly, an Aristocratical Counsel, an oligarchical Junto and a single Emperor.”
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The full implications of this exchange were too threatening to the friendship for either man to pursue them to their logical conclusion in the correspondence. Adams moved the dialogue to a collateral issue, the character of aristocracies, which he recalled that Jefferson had urged him to write about when they were together in Paris, claiming that he had been “writing on the Subject ever since,” the only problem being that “I have been so unfortunate as never to make myself understood.” The core of the Adams position was that elites had always been and always would be a permanent fixture in society. Why? Because “Inequalities of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in his constitution of Human Nature that no Art or policy can ever plain them down to a level.” Adams went on a long and colorful tirade against the illusion of social equality, concluding that he had “never read Reasoning more absurd, Sophisty more gross, in proof of the Athanasian Creed, or Transubstantiation, than the subtle labors . . . to demonstrate the Natural Equality of Mankind.” Now it was Adams who was trespassing on Jefferson’s most cherished ground, essentially calling the Jeffersonian ideal of human equality a seductive delusion that mischievously confused a fond hope (i.e., “ideology”) with the messier and less attractive social realities. In effect, he was accusing Jefferson of telling Americans what they wanted to hear, leaving Adams with the more difficult task of telling them what they needed to know.
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Jefferson recognized that the correspondence had drifted into one of those volatile subjects on which he and Adams could never agree. “We are both too old to change opinions,” he acknowledged, “which are the result of a long life of inquiry and reflection.” Nevertheless, he attempted to rescue the exchange from an embarrassing impasse by making what he hoped would be two face-saving distinctions. First, he suggested that Adams’s view of aristocratic power was appropriate for Europe, where feudal privileges, family titles and more limited economic opportunities created conditions that sustained class distinctions. In America, on the other hand, the elimination of primogeniture and entail and the existence of an unspoiled continent meant that “everyone may have land to labor for himself as he chuses,” so enduring elites were highly unlikely here. Second, Jefferson distinguished between the natural aristocracy, based on virtue and talent, and the pseudoaristocracy, “founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.” Adams’s strictures against aristocracy, he suggested, were really warnings against the pseudoaristocracy, which Jefferson agreed was “a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.” Given the favorable laws and the abundant land of America, it was reasonable to expect that “rank, and birth, and tinsel-aristocracy will finally shrink into insignificance. . . .”
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Adams would have none of it. “Your distinction between natural and artificial aristocracy,” he insisted, “does not appear to me well founded.” One might be able to separate wealth and talent in theory or imagine idealistic worlds where they were not mutually dependent (“ideology” again), but in the real world they were inextricably connected in ways that defied Jefferson’s theoretical dissections. Adams was also critical of Jefferson’s vision of a classless American society. “No Romance could be more amusing,” he chided, since the wide-open American environment would only ensure more massive inequalities and more unequal accumulations of property unless government stepped in to redistribute the wealth. Unless one believed that human nature had somehow changed in the migration from Europe to America, the disproportionate power of “the few” would bedevil political life in the American nation too. The Jeffersonian ideal of social equality, in short, was an illusion, and by maintaining the pretense that it was a reality, one only enhanced the likelihood of making matters worse. Here was another classic confrontation, indeed the most explicit political argument in the correspondence, though it defies a simple label. (Liberal versus conservative will not quite do.) Perhaps one can call it the clash between a romantic optimist and an enlightened pessimist.
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When Rush had referred to Adams and Jefferson as “the North and South Poles of the American Revolution,” he was probably intending to make a purely geographic point. But the dialogue between the New Englander and the Virginian revealed that Rush’s metaphor had much more sweeping implications. Beneath the idyllic and somewhat contrived veneer as American sages, the two aging revolutionaries created a dialogue between two distinctive and different understandings of just what the American Revolution meant as a political movement. For most of his adult life Jefferson had regarded “the spirit of ’76” and the doctrines of “pure republicanism” as unequivocally clear expressions of a clean break with the past and with all traditional forms of political organization that imposed unnecessary limitations on personal freedom. He had therefore concluded that the Federalists were traitors, who had betrayed these allegedly self-evident principles in favor of a coercive federal government that restored the very institutional mechanisms the Revolution was intended to remove. Now, here was Adams, whose credentials as a maker and shaper of the American Revolution could not be denied, insisting that this version of the story was not what he remembered, indeed suggesting that Jefferson’s understanding was highly idiosyncratic in its emphasis on a radical break with the past and its antigovernment ethos.

At the symbolic and psychological level Jefferson’s fourteen-year dialogue with Adams is important because Jefferson found it impossible to dismiss his irascible old colleague. Despite his aversion to conflict, he allowed Adams to draw him into an extended argument that created a literary monument to their beloved Revolution as a complex event with multiple meanings. They were the proverbial opposites that attracted. Or if the American Revolution had become a national hymn, they were its words and its music. The ironies abound, since the self-made son of a New England farmer and shoemaker was insisting that neither individual freedom nor social equality was ever a goal of the revolutionary generation, while the Virginia aristocrat with an inherited plantation of lands and slaves was insisting that both were. At the same time that Jefferson was beginning to develop his idea of the University of Virginia as a capstone to his career and a monument to his legacy, he was inadvertently, and at times against his own instincts, creating with Adams what turned out to be the ultimate literary monument to the American Revolution as an ongoing argument between idealistic and realistic impulses.

In his last letter to Adams, written just before he slid into his final illness, Jefferson asked if his grandson and namesake, Thomas Jefferson Randolph (or “Jeffy”), might pay a visit to the Sage of Quincy during his visit to Boston. “Like other young people,” Jefferson explained, “he wishes to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has heard and learnt of the Heroic age . . . and which of the Argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.” Like mythical gods frozen into classical postures, Jefferson and Adams had become living statues to the rising generation. What their correspondence preserved for posterity was the dynamic and contentious character of the Revolution they had mutually fought and wrought.
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RETROSPECTIVES

I
F THEIR CORRESPONDENCE
was a bit like a posed picture, periodically rescued from a still-life version of the American Revolution by Adams’s inability to sit still or hold his tongue, it is worth noting that both men had been posing for many years. Like all the leading members of the revolutionary generation, Adams and Jefferson had early on developed a keen sense of themselves as Founding Fathers with a prominent place in the history books. (Adams, after all, had begun to make copies of all his letters in 1776, and Jefferson had been preserving most of his correspondence since 1782.) Alfred North Whitehead once observed that there were only two instances in recorded history when the political leadership of an emerging empire performed as well as one could realistically expect: The first was Rome under Caesar Augustus, and the second was the United States in the revolutionary era. While historians have offered several explanations for this remarkable explosion of leadership at the very start of the American republic—and it truly was remarkable—the self-conscious sense that the future was watching elevated the standards and expectations for all concerned. At least in a small way, we are complicitous in their achievement because we were the ultimate audience for their performances.
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