John Adams - SA (16 page)

But in this, too, was the root of differences that ran deep and would prove long-lasting, for the reason that Massachusetts and Virginia were truly different countries. Indeed, it would be difficult for future generations to comprehend how much separated a man raised on a freeholder's farm in coastal New England from a son of Virginia such as Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson had been born to respectable wealth achieved by his father, Peter Jefferson, a man of rugged vitality, tobacco planter and surveyor, and to an unassailable place in the Virginia aristocracy through his mother, Jane, who was a Randolph. His landholdings in Albemarle County, mostly inherited from his father, exceeded 5,000 acres. But where Adams, at his farm by Penn's Hill, lived very much like his father, and among the people of the town, Jefferson, very unlike his father or other Virginia planters, had removed to a mountaintop, removed from contact with everyday life, to create a palatial country seat of his own design in the manner of the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio.

It was a bold undertaking that spoke of unusually cultivated taste and high ambition, and was made possible by the added wealth that came with his marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton, a young widow.

He had started the project at the age of twenty-five, in 1768. Still only partly built, it had the high, columned porticoes of a classic Italian villa and carried a name, Monticello, meaning “little mountain” in old Italian. He had contracted for 100,000 bricks, ordered specially made window frames from London, and in Philadelphia purchased the unexpired servitude of an indentured servant, a stonecutter, to do the columns. It was a house and setting such as John Adams had never seen or could ever have imagined as his own, any more than he could have imagined the scale of Jefferson's domain. On his daily rounds by horseback, surveying his crops and fields, where as many as a hundred black slaves labored, Jefferson would commonly ride ten miles, as far as from Braintree to Boston, without ever leaving his own land. Further, he owned another 5,000-acre plantation to the southwest in Bedford County, an inheritance from his wife's father.

Jefferson had been raised and educated as the perfect landed gentleman of Virginia. He knew no other way. His earliest childhood memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave and in countless ways he had been carried ever since by slaves, though they were never called that, but rather “servants” or “laborers.” It was not just that slaves worked his fields; they cut his firewood, cooked and served his meals, washed and ironed his linen, brushed his suits, nursed his children, cleaned, scrubbed, polished, opened and closed doors for him, saddled his horse, turned down his bed, waited on him hand and foot from dawn to dusk.

By 1776, with the addition of the land inherited from his father-in-law, Jefferson reckoned himself a wealthy man and lived like one. With the inheritance also came substantial debts and still more slaves, but then in Virginia this was seen as a matter of course. The whole economy and way of life were built on slaves and debt, with tobacco planters in particular dependent on slave labor and money borrowed from English creditors against future crops. John Adams, by contrast, had neither debts nor slaves and all his life abhorred the idea of either.

In keeping with his background, Adams was less than dazzled by the Virginia grandees. In Virginia, he would say, “all geese are swans.” Jefferson, for his part, knew little or nothing of New Englanders and counted none as friends. A man of cultivated, even fastidious tastes, Jefferson was later to tell his Virginia neighbor James Madison that he had observed in Adams a certain “want of taste,” this apparently in reference to the fact that Adams was known on occasion to chew tobacco and take his rum more or less straight.

Jefferson had been slower, more cautious and ambivalent than Adams about resolving his views on independence. As recently as August 1775, less than a year past, Jefferson had written to a Tory kinsman, John Randolph, of “looking with fondness towards a reconciliation with Great Britain.” He longed for the “return of the happy period when, consistently with duty, I may withdraw myself totally from the public stage, and pass the rest of my days in domestic ease and tranquillity, banishing every desire of afterwards even hearing what passes in the world.” But in the same letter he declared that “rather than submit to the right of legislating for us assumed by the British parliament and which late experience has shown they will so cruelly exercise,
[I]
would lend my hand to sink the whole island in the ocean.” His commitment now in the spring of 1776 was no less than Adams's own. And it was because of their common zeal for independence, their wholehearted, mutual devotion to the common cause of America, and the certainty that they were taking part in one of history's turning points, that the two were able to concentrate on the common purpose in a spirit of respect and cooperation, putting aside obvious differences, as well as others not so obvious and more serious than they could then have known.

Adams considered Jefferson his protege at Philadelphia; Jefferson, impressed by Adams's clarity and vigor in argument, his “sound head,” looked upon him as a mentor. They served on committees together, and as the pace quickened in the weeks after Jefferson's arrival, they were together much of the time. As would be said, each felt the value of the other in the common task.

*   *   *

IF THERE WAS “a tide in the affairs of men,” as Abigail had reminded John, now was “the flood.” “Every post and every day rolls in upon us independence like a torrent,” he wrote on May 20.

Despite drenching rain, an open-air public meeting that day at the State House Yard drew a throng of thousands who listened as the May 15 resolve was read aloud, then voiced a demand vote for a new Pennsylvania constitution and a new legislature.

At week's end, on Friday, May 24, General Washington arrived for two days of meetings with Congress to report his heightened concern for the situation at New York, where a British attack was expected any time. The King, it was now known, had hired some 17,000 German troops to fight in America. At New York, Washington had at most 7,000 men fit for duty.

Three days later came word that on May 15, the Virginia convention at Williamsburg had resolved unanimously to instruct the Virginia delegation at Philadelphia “to declare the United Colonies free and independent states.” An exultant John Adams wrote to Patrick Henry that the “natural course and order of things” was coming to pass at last. “The decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled, that a more equal liberty than had prevailed in other parts of the earth must be established in America.”

On Friday, June 7, at the State House, Richard Henry Lee rose to speak. Sunshine streamed through the high windows. Lee, slim and elegant, was a spirited orator who was said to practice his gestures before a mirror. In a hunting accident years before, he had lost the fingers of his left hand, which he kept wrapped in a black handkerchief, and this, with his lithe figure and aquiline nose, gave him a decidedly theatrical presence. The importance of the moment was understood by everyone in the room.

Resolved
[Lee began]
:... That these United Colonies are, and of a right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

Adams immediately seconded the motion and the day following, Saturday, June 8, the debate began. Speaking in opposition, John Dickinson, James Wilson, Robert Livingston, and Edward Rutledge declared, according to notes kept by Jefferson, that while “friends of the measure,” they opposed any declaration of independence until “the voice of the people” drove them to it. Further, should Congress proceed before hearing the “voice,” then certain colonies “might secede from the union.” It was the threat Dickinson in his anger had used earlier against Adams, but whether it was Dickinson speaking now, Jefferson did not record. Nor did he record what Adams, Lee, and George Wythe said, only that they declared public opinion to be ahead of Congress: that “the people wait for us to lead the way,” that the European powers would neither trade nor treat with the colonies until they established independence, that “the present
[military]
campaign may be unsuccessful, and therefore we had better propose an alliance while our affairs wear a hopeful aspect.” And that it was essential “to lose no time.”

Intense debate continued past dark. Candles were brought in. “The sensible part of the house opposed the motion,” wrote an irate Edward Rutledge. “No reason could be assigned for pressing into this measure, but the reason of every madman.”

On Monday, June 10, after President John Hancock reconvened the assembly, Rutledge and the “cool party” succeeded in having the final vote delayed for twenty days, until July 1, to allow delegates from the middle colonies time to send for new instructions. Nonetheless, it was agreed that no time be lost in preparing a declaration of independence. A committee was appointed, the Committee of Five, as it became known, consisting of Jefferson, Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Benjamin Franklin, who had by now returned from his expedition to Canada but was ill and exhausted and rarely seen.

On the floor above, meantime, in the Banqueting Hall of the State House, another revolution was transpiring as the Pennsylvania Assembly struggled over what instructions to give its delegation.

Adams, who had not written a word to Abigail in nearly two weeks, dashed off a letter saying, “Great things are on the tapis.”

*   *   *

JEFFERSON WAS TO DRAFT the declaration. But how this was agreed to was never made altogether clear. He and Adams would have differing explanations, each writing long after the fact.

According to Adams, Jefferson proposed that he, Adams, do the writing, but that he declined, telling Jefferson he must do it.

“Why?” Jefferson asked, as Adams would recount.

“Reasons enough,” Adams said.

“What can be your reasons?”

“Reason first: you are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: You can write ten times better than I can.”

Jefferson would recall no such exchange. As Jefferson remembered, the committee simply met and unanimously chose him to undertake the draft. “I consented: I drew it
[up]
.”

Possibly neither of their memories served, and possibly both were correct. Jefferson may well have been the choice of the committee and out of deference or natural courtesy, he may well have offered Adams the honor. If there is anything that seems not in keeping, it is the tone of Adams's self-deprecation, which is more that of the old man he became than the Adams of 1776, who was anything but inadequate as a writer and who was by no means as unpopular as he later said. If he was thought “obnoxious,” it would have been only by a few, and only he himself is known to have used the word. In all the surviving record of official and private papers pertaining to the Continental Congress, there is only one member or eyewitness to events in Philadelphia in 1776 who wrote disparagingly of John Adams, and that was Adams writing long years afterward. As critical as he could be in his assessment of others, the man he was inclined to criticize most severely was himself. In fact, the respect he commanded at Philadelphia that spring appears to have been second to none.

Unquestionably, Adams did value Jefferson's literary talents, but he knew also how much else he must attend to in the little time available, and the outcome of the “great question” was by no means certain. Already Adams was serving on twenty-three committees, and that same week was assigned to three more, including an all-important new Continental Board of War and Ordnance, of which he was to be the president.

That there would be political advantage in having the declaration written by a Virginian was clear, for the same reason there had been political advantage in having the Virginian Washington in command of the army. But be that as it may, Jefferson, with his “peculiar felicity of expression,” as Adams said, was the best choice for the task, just as Washington had been the best choice to command the Continental Army, and again Adams had played a key part. Had his contribution as a member of Congress been only that of casting the two Virginians in their respective, fateful roles, his service to the American cause would have been very great.

*   *   *

ALONE IN HIS UPSTAIRS PARLOR at Seventh and Market, Jefferson went to work, seated in an unusual revolving Windsor chair and holding on his lap a portable writing box, a small folding desk of his own design which, like the chair, he had had specially made for him by a Philadelphia cabinetmaker. Traffic rattled by below the open windows. The June days and nights turned increasingly warm.

He worked rapidly and, to judge by surviving drafts, with a sure command of his material. He had none of his books with him, nor needed any, he later claimed. It was not his objective to be original, he would explain, only “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.”

Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.

He borrowed readily from his own previous writing, particularly from a recent draft for a new Virginia constitution, but also from a declaration of rights for Virginia, which appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on June 12. It had been drawn up by George Mason, who wrote that “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights... among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty.” And there was a pamphlet written by the Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson, published in Philadelphia in 1774, that declared, “All men are, by nature equal and free: no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent: all lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it.”