Passionate Sage (14 page)

Just why Adams chose to make such an extreme case in behalf of such an unconventional figure as Otis is not difficult to discern. Part of the motivation was historically justified: Otis
had
been among the first to challenge the constitutional authority of Great Britain in language that undercut any and all attempts to exercise arbitrary power; the principle he defended in the Writs of Assistance Case was later enshrined in the first amendment to the United States Constitution. And as Adams himself acknowledged, he was committed to “puffing” New Englanders to offset the “puffing” of the Virginian dynasty. Most of all, however, Otis's reputation as an outspoken, vain, and difficult character not only illustrated his point that “the greatest Men have the greatest faults,” and thereby struck a blow for a more realistic appraisal of the founding generation; it also served as a conveniently indirect reminder that another New Englander, also early to answer the tocsin against British rule and also infamous for his faults, deserved more credit than he was receiving from history.
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Eventually, even the inexhaustible Adams grew as weary of defending underappreciated heroes like Otis as he had already grown weary of openly defending himself or reducing the stature of his fellow revolutionaries to human size. Though he relished the fight, it was clearly a losing cause, since Americans obviously needed to believe in myths about their past just as religious devotees needed to believe in potent superstitions. He began, instead, to sound a new note when correspondents pestered him with the same old questions about the Revolution and the worthiest revolutionaries of his time.

“But what do we mean by the American Revolution?” he responded rhetorically to Hezekiah Niles in 1818. “Do we mean the American war?” Then, in an answer to his own question that has become famous, though understood by historians in several different ways, Adams proclaimed: “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religions sentiments of their duties and obligations.”
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This was Adams's most familiar formulation, but it remains susceptible to different readings. It is possible to argue that Adams meant that the fifteen years preceding the outbreak of outright hostilities was the crucial era. This view would be compatible with his celebration of New Englanders like Otis, Sam Adams, and John Hancock, as well as his earlier autobiographical proclamations for himself. And there is some direct evidence to support this interpretation. In a letter to Jefferson, Adams first used language similar to the oft-quoted letter to Hezekiah Niles: “As to the history of the Revolution,” he wrote Jefferson in 1815, “my Ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.”
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According to this interpretation, which became the dominant perspective among historians later in the nineteenth century and then again in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the American Revolution was essentially a constitutional clash between Parliament, which was making a reinvigorated effort to impose its will on the western wing of its empire, and the political and economic leaders of the thirteen colonies, who defied Parliament's right to tax or legislate for them without their consent in highly literate pamphlet and newspaper broadsides. This version of American history put a premium on the role of prominent colonial leaders, on rational, even legalistic, arguments about the source of political legitimacy, and the controlled and surprisingly consistent political reaction within the leadership of the thirteen colonies. Again, Adams seemed to endorse this perspective on several occasions, claiming that the “accomplishment of it [the Revolution], in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind. Thirteen clocks were made to strike together….”
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The bulk of the evidence, however, indicates that Adams meant something different, especially as he grew older. He never abandoned his opinion that the years immediately preceding the war were crucial, or that the thoughts and actions of particular individuals caught in the revolutionary crisis made a difference. But his emphasis turned toward the more long-term and impersonal forces. When the Continental Congress gathered in 1774, he explained to Jefferson, it was like the convening of the Council of Nice: “It assembled the Priests from the E and W the N and the S, who compared notes, engaged in discussions and debaters and formed Results….” But the delegates merely embodied attitudes that had been developing in America for many years, in the local towns, villages, and remote byways of the countryside. Any “true history”—that bedeviling contradiction again—of the real causes of the Revolution would need to reach further back in time and much deeper into the local records of towns and families, where the elemental convictions that finally surfaced in the 1760s and 1770s were congealing. He agreed with Jefferson that “it is difficult to say at what moment the Revolution began,” but in an important sense, “it began as early as the first Plantation of the Country.” If one posed to him the question, “Who, then, was the author, inventor, discoverer of independence?” he would have to reply that the “only true answer must be the first emigrants” the avowed revolutionary leaders of the 1770s were not prime movers so much as mere “awakeners and revivers of the original fundamental principle of colonization.”
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His ultimate verdict—which was a premonition of the scholarly perspective on the Revolution dominant in the last quarter of the twentieth century—focused attention on invisible social, economic, and demographic forces operating at different speeds and in different patterns throughout the colonies. He told James Madison that the perennial question about “Who was the author…of American Independence” was silly and misguided: “We might as well inquire who were the Inventors of Agriculture, Horticulture, Architecture, Musick.” It was not just that certain New Englanders deserved more acclaim than certain Virginians. Or that heroic icons like Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson should be remembered for their blunders as well as their success. The whole emphasis on “great men” was wrong. History was a panoramic process, better viewed through a telescope than a magnifying glass, best understood perhaps by older commentators who had acquired a seasoned sense of change over time and a perspective that carried the debate beyond myopic squabbles about who did what first or who merited the most credit. This was a way of thinking attractive to old man Adams for many reasons, not the least of which being that it was considered unfashionable.
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In 1812, Adams described a magnificent three-year-old colt that he had just considered purchasing. It was “seventeen or eighteen hands high, bones like mossy timbers, ribbed quite to the Hips, every way broad, strong and well filled in proportion.” The colt was also tame and gentle, as “good natured and good humored as a Cosset Lamb.” Adams explained that the analogy to America came to him immediately: “Thinks I to myself, This noble Creature is the exact Emblem of my dear Country.” Adams was hardly alone in believing that America was a spirited and sturdy colt-of-a-nation, blessed with nearly limitless natural resources, an exploding population and economy, a stable political system that both released and harnessed the energies of its citizenry, a nation destined at some time in the future to dominate the Western Hemisphere for a good stretch of human history. Nor was Adams alone in arguing that the foreign policy of the infant nation should be guided by the principle of neutrality. As he put it to Rush in the characteristic Adams formulation, he believed that the United States “should make no treaties or alliance with any European power; that we should consent to none but treaties of commerce; that we should separate ourselves as far as possible and as long as possible from all European politics and wars.” These twin beliefs—that America was destined for greatness and that international neutrality was the wisest course—had been bedrock convictions within the political leadership of both major parties since the Washington presidency.
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But in two significant ways the Adams version of these elemental convictions differed from the versions embraced by most of his contemporaries. First, Adams refused to attribute the buoyant prospects of America to divine providence; he did not think that Americans were a special people rendered immune by God's grace from the customary ravages of history. He had always been clear about this. Throughout his letters and formal political writings in the 1780s, for example, he had warned that “there is no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others.” The steady flow of letters from Quincy after his retirement frequently reiterated the point. “There is no special Providence for us,” he wrote Rush. “We are not a chosen people that I know of, or if we are, we deserve it as little as the Jews…. We must and we shall go the way of all earth….” Americans were just as susceptible to vanity, folly, and delusion as any other people—the notion that God watched over them being a singular example of such superstitious stupidity—while the strategic strengths and the “advantages we have over Europe,” he noted caustically, “are chiefly geographical.”
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Second, Adams's notion of American neutrality was neither as isolationist as the Jeffersonians preferred nor as pro-English as the policies of most New England Federalists. “The government of the United States from 1789 has been but a company of Engine Men,” he wrote Vanderkemp, complaining that the chief job of every president, from Washington to Madison, “has been to spout Cold Water upon our raw habitations…to prevent them being scorched by the Flames from Europe.” Neutrality was both a wise and noble ideal, because America needed time to consolidate its continental resources and resolve its sectional differences. But Adams never believed that Europe would leave America alone, or that the commercial interests of New England merchants and southern planters would allow for complete insulation from European problems: “Thus our beloved country,” he confided to Rush, “is indeed in a very dangerous situation. It is between two great fires in Europe [i.e., England and France] and between two ignited Parties at home, smoking, sparkling and flaming, ready to burst into Conflagration.” Despite the Atlantic Ocean and our “geographical advantages,” America could never completely separate itself from the rest of the world and ought not to try.
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These variations on dominant American themes, or what we might call Adams's corollaries to the guiding principles of early American foreign policy (and what Adams himself simply called “my system”), gave him an unusual if not unique perspective on the events that led up to the War of 1812. “I am, I know, a singular Being,” he wrote one congressman in 1813, “for Nobody will agree with me.” But he nevertheless thought he was just as right now about the proper American policy as he had been in 1776 when he counselled war with England and in 1799 when he counselled compromise with France. He conceded to his old friend and physician Benjamin Waterhouse in 1813 that he might not have “the Foresight of the Tumble-Bug. Yet in my Conscience, I believe, I had seen more and clearer, than this Nation or its Government for fourteen years past.”
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To his Federalist friends in New England, who were dedicated to preserving commercial relations with England at almost any cost, Adams delivered lectures against myopia. “Is it not wonderful that some persons among us are so eager to rush into the arms of Great Britain,” he chided, “but it is unaccountable that there should be so many….” At some elemental level, the hostility toward England that had been generated in Adams's breast during the war for independence had never died. And, more importantly, he insisted that England's hatred for America was also still intact. “She has looked at us from our first settlement to this moment, with eyes of jealousy, envy, hatred and contempt,” he claimed. As early as 1805 he predicted to John Quincy that a second war with England was likely: “Our Confusions will be very great, but she [England] will suffer most in the end,” he declared, adding the hope that “Another war will transmit an eternal hatred of England to our American Posterity.” But he realized that his prophecies were regarded as somewhere between treason and insanity by most of his New England friends. “Croak! Croak! Croak! Croak J Q Adams Esq.,” he shouted in frustration to his son. “I can do nothing but croak, in the present state of things.” He argued that he knew the English better than most, that Parliament was like an arrogant aristocrat who believed he had the right to impress American seamen and dictate terms about trade. Neither the Whig nor Tory leaders in London had a kind thought for America, he believed, and as for the mass of English citizens, “those millions of people who are not politicians, neither know, nor care, any more about us, than they do about the Seminole Indians.”
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To the Jeffersonians, who also distrusted England but wished to avoid war at almost any cost, he gave sermons on military preparedness, especially the need for a larger navy. “The counsel which Themistocles gave to Athens, Pompey to Rome, Cromwell to England…and Colbert to France, I have always given and shall continue to give to my countrymen,” he wrote as early as 1802; because “the great questions of commerce and power between nations and empires…are determined at sea, all reasonable encouragement should be given the navy.” Then he added a slogan repeated over and over in his correspondence from Quincy: “The trident of Neptune is the sceptre of the world.” American neutrality and aversion to war were both noble principles, he agreed, but the sincerity of the Jefferson administration's commitment to such principles was no guarantee of their ultimate triumph. Adams advocated a major naval build-up to protect the coastline and to secure control of the Great Lakes in the event of war, all the while negotiating just as strenuously in the hope that war might be avoided. It was the same position he had advocated during his own presidency when the danger was war with France. But this time Adams suspected that the English would spurn all American efforts at peaceful compromises.
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