Joseph J. Ellis (38 page)

On Christmas Day of 1811, Adams apprised Rush that he was fully aware of the benevolent duplicities Rush was performing as intermediary: “I perceive plainly, Rush, that you have been teasing Jefferson to write me, as you did me to write him.” Adams also knew full well that
Rush was sending edited versions of his letters to Jefferson, removing the potentially offensive passages. In the Christmas letter Adams reviewed the full range of political disagreements with Jefferson, mixing together serious controversies (for example, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the French Revolution, the American navy) with a lighthearted list of personal differences (for example, Adams held levees once a week as president, while Jefferson’s entire presidency was a levee; Jefferson thought liberty favored straight hair, while Adams thought curled hair “just as republican as straight”). That was the tone Adams wanted to convey to Jefferson: still feisty and critical of Jefferson’s principles and policies, but fully capable of controlling the dialogue with humor and diplomatic nonchalance; the fires still burned, but the great volcano of the revolutionary generation was at last in remission.
³⁰

In the end, it was Adams who made the decisive move. On January 1, 1812, a short but cordial note went out from Quincy to Monticello, relaying family news and referring to “two pieces of Homespun” coming along by separate packet. Rush was ecstatic, as well as fully convinced that he had orchestrated a reconciliation: “I rejoice in the correspondence which has taken place between you and your old friend Mr. Jefferson,” he declared triumphantly to Adams. “I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it but you and Mr. Jefferson
thought
for us all.” Adams went along with the celebratory mood, hiding his pride behind a mask of jokes and the rather fraudulent pretense that his famous friendship with Jefferson had never really been interrupted: “Your dream is out … your prophecy fulfilled! You have worked wonders! You have made peace between powers that were never at Enmity.… In short, the mighty defunct Potentates of Mount Wollaston and Monticello by your sorceries … are again in being.” In the same self-consciously jocular style he soon began to refer to his Quincy estate as “Montezillo,” which he claimed meant “very little mountain,” in deference to Jefferson’s Monticello, which meant “little mountain.” He insisted that Rush was making more of the reunion with Jefferson than it deserved. Nothing momentous or historic was at stake. “It was only as if one sailor had met a brother sailor, after twenty-five years’ absence,” Adams joked, “and had accosted him, how fare you, Jack?”
³¹

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Adams’s ever
vibrating vanities were now, true enough, under some measure of control. But his dismissive posture toward the rupture in the friendship—what breech and what betrayal?—was obviously only a bravado pose. Even the start of the correspondence exposed the awkward tensions just below the surface. Jefferson presumed, quite plausibly, that the “two pieces of Homespun” Adams was sending along referred to domestically produced clothing, a nice symbol of the American economic response to the embargo and a fitting reminder of the good old days when Adams and Jefferson had first joined the movement for American independence. And so Jefferson responded with a lengthy treatise on the merits of domestic manufacturing and grand memories of the nonimportation movement in the 1760s, only to discover that Adams had intended the homespun reference as a metaphor. His gift turned out to be a copy of John Quincy’s recent two-volume work,
Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory
.

Why, then, did Adams take the fateful step, which led to a fourteen-year exchange of 158 letters, a correspondence that is generally regarded as the intellectual capstone to the achievements of the revolutionary generation and the most impressive correspondence between prominent statesmen in all of American history? The friendship and the mutual trust on which it rested had, in fact, not been recovered by 1812. It took the correspondence to recover the friendship, not the other way around. What, then, motivated Adams to extend his hand across the gap that existed between Quincy and Monticello, then write more than two letters for every one of Jefferson’s?

Two overlapping but competing answers come to mind. First, there was a good deal of unfinished business between the two men, a clear recognition on both sides that they had come to fundamentally different conclusions about what the American Revolution meant. Adams believed that Jefferson’s version of the story, while misguided, was destined to dominate the history books. The resumption of his correspondence with Jefferson afforded Adams the opportunity to challenge the Jeffersonian version and to do so in the form of a written record virtually certain to become a major historical document of its own. “You and I ought not to die,” Adams rather poignantly put it in an early letter, “before We have explained ourselves to each other.” But both men knew they were sending their letters to posterity as much as to each other.
³²

Second, the reconciliation and ensuing correspondence permitted Adams to join Jefferson as the costar of an artfully arranged final act in the revolutionary drama. Adams had spent most of his retirement years denouncing such contrivances as gross distortions of history. But he had also spent those same years marveling at the benefits that accrued to anyone willing to pose for posterity in the mythical mode. If he could only control himself, if he could speak the lines that history wanted to hear, if he could fit himself into the heroic mold like a kind of living statue, he might yet win his ticket to immortality.

B
OTH
A
DAMS
and Jefferson knew their roles by heart, especially in its Ciceronian version as a pair of retired patriarchs now beyond ambition and above controversy. The dialogue they sustained from 1812 to 1826 can be read at several levels, but the chief source of its modern appeal derives from its elegiac tone: the image of two American icons, looking back with seasoned serenity at the Revolution they have wrought, delivering eloquent soliloquies on all the timeless topics, speaking across their political differences to each other and across the ages to us. If we wished to conjure up a mental picture of this rendition of the dialogue, it would feature Jefferson standing tall and straight in his familiar statuesque posture, his arms folded across his chest, as was his custom, while the much shorter Adams paced back and forth around him, jabbing at the air in his nervous and animated style, periodically stopping to grab Jefferson by the lapels to make an irreverent point.

This, of course, is the constructed or posed version that ought to provoke our immediate skepticism. (In Adams’s terms, this is not history, but romance.) For several reasons, however, this beguiling depiction cannot be summarily dismissed. First of all, the friendship
was
, in fact, recovered and the reconciliation realized during the course of the correspondence. The clinching evidence comes late, in 1823, when Jefferson responded to a series of letters that appeared in the newspapers. Adams had written them much earlier and had described Jefferson as a duplicitous political partisan. “Be assured, my dear Sir,” Jefferson wrote Adams, “that I am incapable of receiving the slightest impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth, and wisdom, and to sow tares between friends who have been such for nearly half a century. Beseeching you then not to suffer your mind to
be disquieted by this wicked attempt to poison its peace, and praying you to throw it by.” Adams was overjoyed. He insisted that Jefferson’s letter be read aloud to his entire extended family at the breakfast table, calling it “the best letter that ever was written … just such a letter as I expected, only it was infinitely better expressed.” He concluded with an Adams salvo against “the peevish and fretful effusions of politicians,” then signed off as “J.A. In the 89 year of his age still too fat to last much longer.” Clearly, this was no dramatic contrivance. The old trust had been fully recovered.
³³

Second, the improbably symmetrical ending to the dialogue casts an irresistibly dramatic spell over the entire story and the way to tell it. Rush had predicted that the two patriarchs would reconcile, then go to their graves “at nearly the same time.” But their mutual exit was even more exquisitely timed than Rush had dreamed. (No serious novelist would ever dare to make this up.) They died within five hours of each other, on the fiftieth anniversary to the day and almost to the hour of the official announcement of American independence to the world in 1776. Call it a miracle, an accident, or a case of two powerful personalities willing themselves to expire on schedule and according to script. But it happened.

Third, the correspondence can be read as an extended conversation between two gods on Mount Olympus because both men were determined to project that impression: “But wither is senile garrulity leading me?” Jefferson asked rhetorically. “Into politics, of which I have taken final leave.… I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much happier.” Adams then responded with his own display of classical learning and literary flair: “I have read Thucydides and Tacitus so often, and at such distant periods of my Life, that elegant, profound and enchanting is their Style, I am weary of them,” then joked that “My Senectutal Loquacity has more than retaliated your ‘Senile Garrulity.’ ”
³⁴

Many of the most memorable exchanges required no staging or self-conscious posing whatsoever, since there was a host of safe subjects the two sages could engage without risking conflict and that afforded occasions for conspicuous displays of their verbal prowess. They were, after all, two of the most accomplished letter writers of the era, men who had fashioned over long careers at the writing desk distinctive prose styles that expressed their different personalities perfectly. Thus, Jeffer
son waxed eloquent on the aging process and their mutual intimations of mortality: “But our machines have now been running for 70 or 80 years,” he observed stoically, “and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way, and however we may tinker with them for awhile, all will at length surcease motion.” Adams responded in kind but with a caveat: “I am sometimes afraid that my ‘Machine’ will not ‘surcease motion’ soon enough; for I dread nothing so much as ‘dying at the top,’ ” meaning becoming senile and a burden to his family. He then went on to chide Jefferson for talking like an old man. Of all the original signers of the Declaration of Independence, “You are the youngest and the most energetic in mind and body,” and therefore most likely to be the final survivor. Like the last person in the household to retire for the night, it would be Jefferson’s responsibility to close up the fireplace and “rake the ashes over the coals.”
³⁵

Most modern readers come to the correspondence fully aware of Jefferson’s proficiency with a pen, and are therefore somewhat surprised to discover that Adams could more than hold his own in the verbal dueling, indeed delivered the most quotable lines. For example, after Jefferson produced a lengthy exegesis on the origins of the Native American population of North America, Adams dismissed all the current theories about the original occupants of the continent: “I should as soon suppose that the Prodigal Son, in a frolic with one of his Girls, made a trip to America in one of Mother Carey’s Eggsels, and left the fruits of their amours here.” Or when Jefferson embraced the development of an indigenous American language, arguing that everyday usage “is the workshop in which new ones [words] are elaborated,” rather than the English dictionaries compiled by the likes of Samuel Johnson, Adams went into a colorful tirade. All English dictionaries, he declared, were vestiges of the same British tyranny that the American Revolution destroyed forever. “We are no more bound by Johnson’s Dictionary,” he pronounced, “than by the Cannon
[sic]
Law of England.” By what right did Samuel Johnson deny him, John Adams, the freedom to fashion his own vocabulary? “I have as good a right to make a Word,” he insisted, “as that Pedant Bigot Cynic and Monk.”
³⁶

Speaking of words, the pungency of the Adams prose comes through so impressively in the correspondence in part because Adams
invested himself in the exchange more than Jefferson. He composed more memorable passages because he wrote many more words. When the torrent from Quincy threatened to flood Monticello, he apologized for getting so far out ahead. Jefferson then apologized in return, claiming that he received over twelve hundred letters a year, all of which required responses, so it was difficult for him to match the Adams pace. Adams replied that he received only a fraction of that number but chose not to answer most of them, which allowed him to focus all his allegedly waning energies on Jefferson.

Beyond sheer verbal volume, the punch so evident in the Adams prose reflected his more aggressive and confrontational temperament. The Jefferson style was fluid, lyrical, cadenced, and melodious. Words for him were like calming breezes that floated across the pages. The Adams style was excited, jumpy, exclamatory, naughty. Words for him were like weapons designed to pierce the pages or explode above them in illuminating airbursts. While the Adams style generated a host of memorable epigrammatic flashes, it was the worst-possible vehicle for sustaining the diplomatic niceties. Jefferson was perfectly capable of remaining on script and in role as philosopher-king to the end. If it had been up to him, the demigod version of the Adams-Jefferson dialogue would have captured its essence and ultimate meaning as a staged performance for posterity. Adams, however, despite all his vows of Ciceronian serenity, was congenitally incapable of staying in character. For him, the only meaningful kind of conversation was an argument. And that, in the end, is what the dialogue with Jefferson became, and the best way to understand its historical significance.