Passionate Sage (32 page)

Starting in the 1950s, then continuing throughout the next two decades, Adams became the subject of several scholarly studies that praised his performance as president, refurbished his status as political thinker, and recovered the beguilingly human dimension of his personality. In addition, the discovery by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, and then a host of academic disciples, that the ideology of the revolutionary generation was heavily indebted to republicanism meant that Adams—one of the most forceful and articulate proponents of republican values—began to turn up in the many monographs and textbooks that revised our understanding of the meaning of the American Revolution. Indeed, by the time of the bicentennial of the American Revolution, Adams's reputation within the community of professional historians had recovered the lofty position it had occupied at the time of his death. When Robert Rutland reviewed the several modern editions of the papers of the Founding Fathers, he concluded that there was a fresh scholarly consensus: “Madison was the great intellectual…Jefferson the…unquenchable idealist, and Franklin the most charming and versatile genius, but Adams is the most captivating founding father on most counts.” Rutland predicted that Adams's stock would continue to rise; for as new volumes of
The Adams Papers
rolled off the press, they would come to be regarded as one of the nation's most precious natural resources, “deserving as much public concern as the shale-oil deposits, and in the long run…more valuable.”
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Although the new surge in Adams's reputation was almost entirely a scholarly affair, it did have some impact on the broader public appreciation of his place in American history. Certainly, the most visible manifestation of an enhanced public standing was the broadcast on public television of a thirteen-part series,
The Adams Chronicles
, in 1975. This massively funded and skillfully produced historical docudrama, which devoted six hour-long segments to Adams himself, exposed his accomplishments to the largest audience it had ever enjoyed. In one sense, it made Adams the supreme founding father of them all—in the literal sense of the term; that is, he became the patri arch of what was arguably the most prominent and intellectually distinguished family in American history.
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This proved both a blessing and a burden, for it revitalized his image as a major figure, but did so by conceiving his historical significance almost exclusively in terms of his biological legacy. For better and for worse, the public memory of the original Adams became inextricably imbedded in the fate of his remarkable family. This condition was surreptitiously reinforced by the intriguing fact that, of all the Founding Fathers judged worthy of a modern edition of their papers, only
The Adams Papers
made the entire family rather than the man himself its focus.

Despite his rising stock within the world of professional historians, and despite his enhanced visibility as the sire of a spectacular line of distinguished descendants, Adams's political legacy remains virtually invisible and his intellectual legacy remains a shadowy subject of exclusively academic interest. Even within the scholarly world, his chief contribution to political thought has been to serve as an articulate anachronism, the staunch advocate of a dying version of republicanism, a man who stubbornly resisted the inevitable democratization of American society. And even within the regional culture of his beloved New England—the local taverns, town halls, schools, and churches—he is commonly confused with Sam Adams, who has once again become “the famous Adams” because a popular regional brand of beer has adopted his name. Over two centuries after his French hosts made the same mistake, a distressingly large portion of native New Englanders still think of him as “the other Adams.”
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Perhaps, when all is said and done, he is not the stuff out of which mythologies are made. Perhaps he is too idiosyncratic and iconoclastic ever to become a national icon, too damnably specific and disarmingly honest ever to win an election, even with posterity. Or perhaps we should not think of him as a mainstream figure at all, but should acknowledge that he belongs to that breed of American skeptics—Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, and Thorstein Veblen come to mind—who patrol the margins of our political culture and whose wisdom derives from their alienation. Even though he has come to be regarded by historians as the most engagingly human member of America's founding generation, perhaps he was always miscast as a public figure entrusted with the exercise of political power. That, after all, was the ultimate verdict of Hamilton and the High Federalists. And it is also an explanation that makes more comprehensible the relative serenity and personal balance he was able to achieve only in his retirement years.

But there is also a distinct possibility that the problem is not primarily personal or psychological, but ideological. Which is to say that perhaps it is not so much that Adams's character steadfastly resists mythmaking, but rather that he represents a cluster of political principles that do not fit comfortably within the framework of our national political mythology. Memorials will only be erected to him, according to this train of thought, when the rhetoric of Jeffersonian liberalism ceases to dominate mainstream American culture; when the exaltation of “the people” is replaced by a quasi-sacred devotion to “the public” when the cult of the liberated individual is superseded by the celebration of self-denial; when national development must vie for seductiveness with conservation; when the deepest sense of personal satisfaction comes not from consumption but production; when the acceptance of national and personal limitations seems less like defeatism than a symptom of maturity. In this sense, the time of John Adams has passed and not yet come again.

W
E ARE WHOLLY DESTITUTE
of any direct evidence about the state of Adams's mind on the last morning of his life, as he sat alone in the upstairs study of the Adams homestead. It seems safe to presume that at least a portion of his mind was occupied with thoughts of Independence Day. Fifty years earlier, in what proved to be a prophetic letter to Abigail, he had predicted that the great day would be celebrated “by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival,” and would be “solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
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Characteristically, his prophetic powers had gotten the story correct with almost eerie accuracy, right down to the fireworks, but still managed to put him out of step with his fellow Americans. For he had identified the date of Independence Day as “The Second Day of July 1776,” which was the day he believed the clinching debate had occurred in the Continental Congress. His last words of tribute to Jefferson, muttered later that afternoon in 1826, suggest that he had finally reconciled himself to the Virginian's enshrinement as the author of independence. It is tempting to speculate that the last and most symbolic act of his life, which was to expire on July 4, represented an ultimate effort to bring his feisty and idiosyncratic personality into alignment with the official patriotic calendar, to reconcile the death if not the life of John Adams with the customs of his countrymen.

He had proven himself capable of similar gestures of accommodation with the emerging national ethos on several occasions during his quarter century of retirement. When aging Federalists bemoaned the decline of standards and the passing of the revolutionary generation, he loved to lecture them on the superiority of the rising generation of American statesmen. Pessimists who presumed that the Master of Montezillo would concur with their gruesome forecasts of an inevitable clash between erstwhile American aristocrats and democrats were surprised to hear him turn their fatalism into a joke: “That the first want of man is his dinner, and the second his girl,” he observed, were truths “held in common by every democrat and aristocrat,” and these primal urges would bind Americans together despite the apocalyptic predictions of factionalism by the faint of heart. “Our Country is or at least ought to be happy,” he proclaimed to a downcast governor of New Hampshire, despite “gloomy forebodings into Futurity” by ignorant forecasters, who, he warned, tended to confuse their own personal despair with national decline. “If ever there existed upon this Globe a Nation of People who had so many causes and motives for Thanksgiving as our American Nation,” he proclaimed, “it has never fallen under my observation or within my reading.” In 1822 he reassured John Jay that, despite the Adams reputation for pessimism, in his old age he had “always endeavored to contemplate objects on the bright side.” As proof of his sanguine temperament he apprised Jay that he was telling all visitors that “Our prospects at present are beyond example and beyond all comprehension.” The only caveat he felt obliged to add—it was a paradox, Adams insisted, but not a contradiction—was that “this globe, and as far as we can see this Universe, is a theatre of vicissitudes.”
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The caveat, of course, was the abiding Adams message. And the enduring Adams legacy, if such a thing can be said to exist at all, tends to take the form of a sober and realistic caveat to America's buoyant optimism and nationalistic pretensions. Adams was a pessimist by conviction and an optimist only when he felt the need to play contrarian. He rarely indulged in optimistic predictions except when presented with visitors or correspondents who, thinking he would agree, offered pessimistic estimates of the fate of the American republic. Then he would, as he put it, “jump upon the great See-Saw” and balance the political equation with reassuring observations that “the Federal Union…will last longer than we shall live,” or that neither monarchy nor dictatorship will ever take root in America “unless Napoleon should make Aaron Burr a King…which I do not believe he is either willing or able to attempt.” His optimistic forecasts, in short, were almost always expressions of his oppositional disposition, his instinct to serve as an alter ego to the dominant political wisdom of the moment, to make himself into the great American caveat.
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It would have been completely in character, then, for the old man sitting in his favorite chair that final morning to resist the swells of satisfaction he might be expected to feel on that special day. The whole country, after all, was celebrating an event that he, more than anyone else, had helped bring about. And the current occupant of the presidency, who officially presided over the nation's Independence Day festivities, was his own flesh and blood. The surges of pride and vanity generated by such historic triumphs must not be allowed to get out of hand, at least not in an Adams. Balance must be restored. Sagacity must prevail over passion.

If he remained true to his most prevailing version of political sagacity and sobriety, Adams would have encountered the prideful swells with healthy doses of apprehension. As for John Quincy's glorious political achievements, for example, there was good reason to regard them as short-lived and, like his father before him, the son was destined for defeat in the next election. “Our government will be a game of leap-frog,” Adams had observed throughout his retirement, predicting that the dominant political parties would “be leaping over one another's backs about once in twelve years, according to my computation.” It was one of his favorite metaphors.
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The notion that American politics operated on a twelve-year cycle eventually became a special trademark of the Adams family's version of American history. Henry Adams provided the most precise description of the cyclical thesis in his
History
. “A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum,” he wrote: “After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.” Wars and depressions could lengthen or shorten the cycle, but the great-grandfather of Henry Adams, who originated the theory, emphasized the regularity of the pattern. “It is always so,” he had written to Rush in 1812: “When a party grows Strong and feels its power, it becomes intoxicated, grows presumptuous and extravagant and breaks to pieces. You may depend upon it. It is a Game of Leapfrog every twelve years.” And it was the singular misfortune of the Adams family always to reach the presidency just when the cycle was ending. Or as Adams put it, Washington had inherited “a bowl of Punch, half brandy or Whiskey,” but by the time Adams took office in 1796, the bowl had become “half Water with a large mixture of Sour Drops without a grain of Sugar.” As for John Quincy's prospects, well, Andrew Jackson was already waiting in the wings, ready to play the role of Jefferson to John Quincy's version of his father in the next election and to catch the political cycle on its next lurch upward. As the nation prepared to set off firecrackers and lose itself in festivals and parades, the most comfortable and natural posture for the patriarch of the Adams clan was as the sober sentry, defiantly guarding the harsher truths that the family and the nation would need to remember once the parades ended.
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If John Quincy was fated to suffer the political defeat that seemed to stalk the Adams line—and he was—what about the nation itself? This was a question about the future that visitors and correspondents asked him almost as often as they asked about his recollections of crucial moments in the past, especially the revolutionary years. His characteristic response to both kinds of inquiries was to declare the questions absurd and the answers unknowable. One could no more foresee what was in store for the American people, he would lecture, than one could fathom what was in the minds of all the members of the Continental Congress fifty years ago. But invariably he would then contradict his own declaration of ignorance and revoke his vow of silence, recalling that about half the delegates who voted for American independence in 1776 did so with reluctance, or predicting that the sectional crisis would eventually lead to bloodshed if the slavery issue were not faced squarely by the rising generation.

The larger pattern, which he discerned in both the past and the future, was the cycle, the flow of empires and nations that rose and fell with the same regularity and for essentially the same reasons that political parties came and went. The Adams version of the cyclical pattern was less a formal theory than an instinctive way of thinking. Since he regarded it as a matter of common sense—indeed, Tom Paine's famous pamphlet of the same name depended on the presumption that Britain and America were experiencing different stages of the historical cycle—Adams never felt the need to explain its major features. He regarded the cyclical pattern of nations as a commonplace assumption shared by most members of the revolutionary generation, one of those self-evident truths with a darker side that Jefferson had neglected to mention in the Declaration. In fact, it was a way of thinking rapidly going out of style by the time of his death. It then became nearly extinct in America for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though it always enjoyed great favor among subsequent generations of the Adams family. In the late twentieth century it has made a modest but discernible comeback, largely as a consequence of America's relative decline as a global economic power. For old man Adams, sitting in his Quincy study that last morning, the historical cycle possessed all the inevitability and undeniability of the biological imperatives about to carry him to the hereafter.
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The essence of the theory was that all societies go through the same developmental stages and the same aging process as human beings. The Adams version of the cyclical perspective—this bears repeating—represented a variation on a habit of mind shared by most of his generation, who believed that all nation-states had limited life-spans. His view was distinctive primarily in the sense that he gave special prominence to the influence that irrational forces exerted on human motivations; the engines which drove nations up and then down the cycle, as Adams conceived it, were fuelled by the emotions he had spent a lifetime exploring inside himself. And perhaps it is also true that Adams seemed to derive perverse satisfaction from noting the exquisite charms of the cyclical pattern and its applicability to America as well as Europe.
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In the typical Adams formulation, every aspiring nation-state was like an enterprising young man. His ambition produces worldly success, which then corrupts his character until, sapped of his earlier energy and work habits, he descends into depravity. “Former ages have never discovered any remedy against the universal gangrene of avarice,” he wrote in a characteristic version of the story, and “the steady advance of Wealth…has overturned every Republic from the beginning of time.” The dramatic economic and geographic expansion the United States was experiencing throughout his retirement years, therefore, made him simultaneously proud and nervous. For while “our country is rising with astonishing rapidity in population and wealth,” it was also “proportionally sinking in Luxury, Sloth and Vice.” The idea of the historical cycle was such a fixture in Adams's mind that virtually every major event affecting America's social and economic development was made to fit into this developmental scheme, which functioned as a kind of plot outline that history had made available for all enlightened statesmen, who could presumably calculate where on the cycle their country was located and make policy accordingly. Indeed, Adams's ultimate definition of the natural aristocrat—utterly and obviously autobiographical—was the leader who had conquered his own internal demons, had thereby reached a fuller understanding of the emotional forces driving the cyclical dynamo and, therefore, could apply the appropriate social controls required at the current stage of national evolution.
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Given the cyclical mentality, however, and given his preoccupation with the irrational forces propelling the country through the cycle, Adams consistently preferred policies that
reduced
the pace of historical change. After all, if the ultimate destination was decline, the last thing the nation needed was leaders who accelerated social and economic development. “When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition,” he had explained to John Taylor, “it is hard to resist the temptation.” But that was what responsible American leaders should do—resist the temptations presented by an undeveloped continent and a land of unprecedented opportunity. They should monitor and manage demographic and economic growth in order to delay the day when America would become “more populous, more commercial, more wealthy, and more luxurious.” For Jeffersonians and Jacksonians of the emerging liberal tradition, the primary task facing America's political leaders was to liberate individual energies, to destroy the institutional impediments to human progress. For Adams, the primary task was just the opposite—to make government a brake that slowed down the rate of change and thereby postponed America's inevitable encounter with history.
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It was axiomatic to Adams that the United States was destined to become a world power with a burgeoning population—he once estimated “more than two hundred millions”—and a flourishing capitalistic economy. Part of the reason for his certainty on this score was what he always called “our geographical advantages,” meaning the isolation from Europe and the favorable soil and climate of North America. Another reason was the political institutions his generation had created, which he believed were the best instruments yet devised for balancing the dynamic interests of an expanding society. But perhaps the major reason was historical. The ubiquitous cycle on which America was travelling was actually a spiral: it simultaneously moved forward as well as revolving, so that each nation which repeated the age-old pattern of rise and fall also moved the human condition ahead a few notches in terms of the physical comfort, economic prosperity, and the social justice enjoyed by the overall population. Here was yet another instance when Adams and his old friend at Monticello shared a common vision of America's future but emphasized different features of the vision. Although Jefferson also harbored apprehensions about the long-term prospects for the country, after the continent was fully populated and the agrarian life he idealized gave way to cities and factories, he tended to focus attention on the robust years of the nation's lifespan and the progressive unfolding of America's destiny. He emphasized the forward movement of the American cycle, in short, while Adams emphasized its circularity. The glass was always half-full at Monticello and half-empty at Quincy, even though it was the same glass.