First Family (38 page)

His more revealing, and more honest, explanation came a few years later:

Was this merely bravado? Or did he mean what he said, that he genuinely had forgiven Jefferson for his multiple duplicities?
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The clearest answer came more than a year into the correspondence, when Abigail appended a note to one of John’s letters: “I have been looking for some time for a space in my good Husband’s Letters to add the regards of an old Friend,” she jotted at the bottom of the page, “which are still cherished and preserved through all the changes and vicissitudes which have taken place … and will I trust remain as long as, A. Adams.” As Jefferson surely knew, Abigail was the ultimate protector of her husband’s reputation, as the volleys she had fired at Monticello a decade earlier made abundantly and painfully clear. Her endorsement meant that the wounds Jefferson had inflicted on the Adams family had healed, or at least been forgiven. His chief sin had been to place political interest above friendship. Abigail, speaking for the Adams family, had made the recovery of friendship their highest priority. They were the ones making the magnanimous gesture.
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Unlike the correspondence with Rush, which resembled free verse, John’s letters to Jefferson, especially at the beginning, were more self-consciously classical occasions in which both men assumed the role of philosopher-king in the Ciceronian mode: “But wither is senile garrulity leading me?” Jefferson asked rhetorically. “Into politics, of
which I have taken final leave. I think little of them and say less. I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much happier.” John responded in the same elegiac manner: “I have read Thucydides and Tacitus, so often, and at such distant periods of my life,” he observed, “that elegant, profound and enchanting is their style, I am weary of them.” Fully aware that their letters would eventually become part of the historical record, both men were posing for posterity.
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Posing was a natural act for Jefferson, who regarded argument as a dissonant noise that created static instead of his preferred harmonies. For John, on the other hand, argument was the ideal conversation. He could no more stay on script in his dialogue with Jefferson than he could impersonate Franklin-like diplomacy with Vergennes. Such etiquette was not in him, since all his instincts were argumentative: “You and I ought not to die,” he proposed to Jefferson, “before We have explained ourselves to each other.” A graphic depiction of the correspondence, then, would have Jefferson standing erectly in a stately pose with arms folded across his chest while John paced back and forth, periodically pausing to pull on Jefferson’s lapels or poke a finger into his chest. It was the closest thing that history allowed for the two sides of the American Revolution to engage in a dialogue.
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There were several safe subjects on which both sages could easily agree and in the process display their patriarchal wisdom. For example, here is Jefferson on aging: “But our machines have now been running for 70 or 80 years, 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 them up for a while, all will at last surcease motion.” John retorted that he was “sometimes afraid that my ‘Machine’ will not ‘surcease motion’ soon enough; for I dread nothing so much as ‘dying at the top,’ and thereby becoming a weeping helpless object of compassion for years.” He had seen this happen to Sam Adams, and feared dementia more than death.
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After a year of polite foreplay, John began to raise more controversial issues. He chided Jefferson for failing to prepare the nation for the War of 1812, most especially in dismantling the American navy, which
had always been John’s hobbyhorse. Jefferson never responded directly but instead parried the thrust by noting recent American victories against the British fleet on the Great Lakes, graciously observing that “these must be more gratifying to you than most men, as having been an early and constant advocate of wooden walls.”
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Jefferson was even more conciliatory when it came to their differences over the French Revolution: “Your prophecies … proved truer than mine,” he acknowledged, “and yet fell short of the fact, for instead of a million, the destruction of 8 or 10 millions of human beings has probably been the effect of the convulsions. I did not, in 89 believe they would have lasted so long, nor have cost so much blood.” What’s more, John had predicted that Great Britain would eventually win the competition for European supremacy with France, and the recent defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo had proved him right.
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This was a huge concession. For Jefferson was not only admitting that his optimistic estimate of events in revolutionary France had proved misguided. He was also acknowledging that on the dominant foreign policy issue of John’s presidency, the insistence on neutrality toward France, which Jefferson and the Republicans had used as a political club to beat him out of office, history had vindicated John’s policy. John recognized the implications of Jefferson’s admission immediately: “I know not what to say of your Letter,” he wrote, “but that it is one of the most consolatory I have ever received.”
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On two equivalently seminal disagreements, however, Jefferson stood his ground, and the exchange exposed the underlying reasons for the political chasm that had opened between them in the 1790s. Because the correspondence was more like a conversation that bounced off one topic after another without a moderator to reel in extraneous diversions, core differences between the two patriarchs remained somewhat blurry and elliptical. However, with the advantage of hindsight (the historian’s only advantage), two elemental differences emerged more clearly than ever before.

First, in an exchange in the summer of 1813 prompted by Jefferson’s insistence that the distinction between “the few and the many” was an eternal political division, it became clear that the two founders disagreed
about what had, in fact, been founded. John believed that the creation of a nation-state at the Constitutional Convention was the culmination and political fulfillment of “the spirit of ’76.” Jefferson believed that it was a betrayal of that spirit and had created a central government with powers akin to the despotic Parliament and king that he and John together had so eloquently and effectively opposed. There were, in effect, two founding moments. John regarded both as essential; Jefferson regarded only the first as legitimate.
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Second, in a nearly simultaneous exchange over the role of “the aristoi” (aristocracies or elites) throughout history, Jefferson argued that the American Revolution had “laid the axe to the root of the Pseudo-aristocracy … founded on wealth and birth without either virtue or talents.” In that sense, the American Revolution represented a clean break with the vestiges of European feudalism and had thereby cleared the ground for a new kind of egalitarian society in the United States based on merit and equality of opportunity.

John disagreed, arguing that the problem was not European feudalism but human nature itself, which had not undergone any magical transformation in crossing the Atlantic. Jefferson’s vision of a classless American society was, therefore, a romantic pipe dream. “After all,” John observed, “as long as property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families and … the Snow ball will grow as it rolls.” Pretending that the new American republic would be immune to the social inequalities of Europe was Jefferson’s seductive version of the grand illusion. And at the political level, elites would always exist here as well as in Europe, and exercise disproportionate influence unless managed by government.
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Again, with hindsight as the guide, one could argue that John’s position on the first disagreement was vindicated by the Civil War; his position on the second, by the New Deal. But in the crucible of the moment, such prescience was unavailable, and Jefferson’s more optimistic forecast enjoyed a decided rhetorical advantage. The more historically correct conclusion would be that the Adams-Jefferson correspondence had exposed the two conflicting versions of America’s original intentions, each passionately embraced by founders with unmatched revolutionary credentials.

Although John’s recovered friendship with Jefferson eventually became famous, even legendary, for its symbolic significance, his all-time dearest friend—no one else came close—was Abigail. And the feeling was mutual. When her sister somewhat mischievously asked her if she would marry John if she could live her life over, Abigail responded with an unambiguous declaration: “Yet after half a century, I can say my first choice would be the same if I again had my youth and opportunity to make it.” This was in February 1814, when she was still recovering from Nabby’s death, another bout with rheumatism had confined her to bed, and her sister Mary and the ever-faithful Juno had just passed away. But the dominant Adams pattern, for Abigail as well as for John, was to rally in the face of adversity. “I bend to disease, totter under it,” she explained, “but rise again … feel grateful for the reprieve and wish so to number my days as to apply my mind to wisdom.” She and John had not only lived so much life together, they had also suffered so much pain together that it was impossible to imagine doing it with anyone else.
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Unlike the renewed friendship with Jefferson, which was recorded in letters, no correspondence between Abigail and John was necessary because they were together all the time. And, in fact, the routine intimacies that did not make it into the historical record were the most emotionally important moments: John reading a recent letter from Jefferson by the fireside while Abigail sorted laundry; Abigail reading to John from Shakespeare, her favorite writer, late at night, when the candles could not compensate for John’s failing eyesight; John fulminating over Mary Wollstonecraft’s romantic delusions about the French Revolution while Abigail silently shelled beans and eventually announced it was time for bed.
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As their friends, close relatives, even their own children died around them, as the irrevocable aging process and accompanying physical failures made each look into the mirror a moment of horror, as the extended family that surrounded them at Quincy came to resemble a menagerie of wounded animals, Abigail and John remained resolute, infinitely resilient, the invulnerable center that would always
hold. If love, like leadership, could never be defined, only recognized when it presented itself in its most ideal form, they embodied it. The long melody played on.

Their mutual obsession was John Quincy, who now single-handedly carried the prospects of the Adams family for the next generation. For this reason, they wanted him to have a brilliant political career, presumably culminating in the presidency. Yet the more they aged, the more dependent they became on his proximity. And so his appointment as American ambassador to Russia in 1809, which should have been greeted as another step toward his appointment with destiny, became a bittersweet occasion: “I find it very difficult to reconcile my mind to it,” Abigail lamented. “At the advanced years both of his father and myself, we can have very little expectation of meeting again upon this mortal theatre … Both his father and I have looked to him as the prop and support of our advanced and declining years.” For the next seven years, Abigail claimed to be clinging to life until her eldest son returned home.
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John Quincy was gone so long because history seemed to have a larger claim on him than his family obligations. (Louisa Catherine also opposed the Russian posting, deeply resenting that George and John had to be left behind with their grandparents at Quincy.) His presence lent stature to the American mission at St. Petersburg, where the British minister observed that “he sat among us like a bulldog among spaniels.” In 1815 he was ordered from St. Petersburg to Ghent, where he negotiated the treaty with Great Britain that ended the War of 1812, repeating his father’s triumph thirty years earlier in the Treaty of Paris. Then, again like his father, he was dispatched to London as America’s first postwar ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Then his star rose even higher in 1816, when President James Monroe tapped him to serve as secretary of state, which had become the acknowledged stepping-stone to the presidency.
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One would expect Abigail and John to be thrilled that their child prodigy was fulfilling his promise, and at some level they obviously were. But they also wanted him nearby during their own last chapter, as John forcefully apprised him in 1816: “One thing is clear in my mind, and that is you ought to be home … My sphere is reduced to
my Garden and so must yours be. The wandering life that you have lived, as I have done before you is not compatible with human nature. It was not made for it.” As if John Quincy had not gotten the point, John wrote him again two weeks later: “You must return to Montezillo, renounce all public employment forever, and lay down your bones here with your Ancestors.”
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This was not going to happen, as John surely realized, since John Quincy had been programmed for success on the public stage from early childhood, and the same lust for fame that had propelled his father to answer every call also consumed the son. While John’s request—almost an order—had a somewhat selfish sound, his primary motive was protective. He saw John Quincy following in his own footsteps, and he worried that his son would suffer the same bitter disappointment in the end.