Passionate Sage (16 page)

 

It quickly recovered, as both men demonstrated that they required no instruction in rhetoric from John Quincy or anyone else. “And so we have gone on,” wrote Jefferson in his lyrical style, “and so we shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man.” The “puzzled and prospering” phrase was vintage Jeffersonian prose, a melodic and alliterative choice of words conveying the paradoxical character of America's march toward its destiny. Not to be outdone, Adams shot back with an eloquent alliteration of his own. “Whatever a peevish Patriarch might say,” he apprised Jefferson, “I have never seen the day in which I could say I had no Pleasure; or that I have had more Pain than Pleasure.” The playful word duel continued throughout the correspondence. When Jefferson wrote: “My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving fear astern,” Adams replied in kind: “I admire your Navigation and should like to sail with you, either in your Bark or in my own, alongside of yours; Hope with her gay Ensigns displayed at the Prow; fear with her Hobgoblins behind the Stern.” Both men were, of course, splendid stylists, with Jefferson heading Adams's personal list of prominent Americans who knew how to write a sentence. (That was the major reason, Adams liked to remind his friends, he had chosen Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence in the first place.) Throughout the correspondence, however, and most especially at its start, the formality and elegance of the language suggests a level of self-conscious literary craftsmanship uncommon even for two of the most accomplished letterwriters of the era.
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Beyond their calculated eloquence, the early letters are careful, diplomatic, eager to avoid the political controversies which might still be tender topics for the other man: “But whither is senile garrulity leading me?” asked Jefferson rhetorically: “Into politics, of which I have taken 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 the happier.” Quite conscious of Adams's easily aroused irritability and sense of propriety, Jefferson felt compelled to wonder whether “in the race of life, you do not keep, in its physical decline, the same distance ahead of me which you have done in political honors and achievements.” This gracious gesture, which indirectly endorsed Adams's earlier opinion to Rush that Jefferson was his protégé, prompted a gracious response from Quincy. Jefferson had now taken the lead on all counts, Adams acknowledged; Adams was only leading in the sense that he would be first to the grave.

Later on, Adams took refuge in one of the recurrent motifs that both men used as a safe haven throughout the correspondence—the dwindling list of surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence: “I may rationally hope to be the first to depart,” he apprised Jefferson, “and as you are the youngest and the most energetic in mind and body, you may therefore rationally hope to be the last to take your flight.” Like the last person to retire from the hearth in the evening, Jefferson would be the last one “to set up and rake the ashes over the coals….” But danger lurked behind even the most careful remarks. If Jefferson thought the reference to Thucydides and Tacitus would keep the dialogue a safe distance from politics, Adams reminded him that even the classics, especially those particular authors, spoke directly to his own pessimism. The old nerve endings were still vibrating. “I have read Thucydides and Tacitus, so often, and at such distant Periods of my Life,” he recalled, “that elegant, profound and enchanting is their Style, I am weary of them,” claiming that their descriptions of Athens and Greece in decline were strikingly reminiscent of “my own Times and my own Life.” Then he apologized for this outbreak of self-pity, joking that “My Senectutal Loquacity has more than retaliated your ‘Senile Garrulity.'”
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A mutual sense of the delicacy and fragility of their newly recovered friendship explains in part the initial politeness and obvious care with which each man composed his thoughts and arranged his words. Their trust was newly won and incomplete; nor, for that matter, would it ever be total. For example, when Adams asked Jefferson to assist in obtaining a judgeship for Samuel Malcolm, the former private secretary to Adams, Jefferson promised he would try. He then wrote Madison to say Malcolm was “a strong federalist” and therefore an inappropriate choice. Later he wrote Adams to express regret at failing to place Malcolm, claiming the request to President Madison had arrived too late.
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Adams was guilty of similar acts of duplicity. In 1819, he reported reading a copy of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, a document purportedly drafted by a group of citizens in North Carolina in May of 1775 and containing language similar to Jefferson's later version of the Declaration. Jefferson responded immediately, contesting the authenticity of the Mecklenburg document, which seemed to cast doubts on the originality of his own famous draft. Adams promptly reassured Jefferson that he believed “the Mecklenburg Resolutions are a fiction” and that it had always seemed “utterly incredible that they should be genuine.” Meanwhile, however, he was telling other correspondents just the opposite. “I could as soon believe that the dozen flowers of the Hydrangia now before my Eyes were the work of chance,” he snickered, “as that the Mecklenburg Resolutions and Mr. Jefferson's declaration were not derived one from the other.”
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The special character of the correspondence—the sheer literary quality, the classical references and proses, letters that take on the tone of treatises—followed naturally from their mutual realization that these private letters also had a public audience. Jefferson expressed amazement “that a printer has had the effrontery to propose to me the letting him publish it [the correspondence with Adams],” then wondered why “these people think they have a right to everything secret or sacred.” Adams was more realistic, or perhaps more forthright. “This correspondence,” he joked to Jefferson, “I hope will be concealed as long as Hutchinsons and Olivers,” referring to the secret letters of Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver that were intercepted by American revolutionaries and published as evidence of a British conspiracy to abolish colonial liberties. The most important readers, however, were not contemporary snoopers, but subsequent generations. Adams said as much to Jefferson, envisioning the day when “your letters will all be published in volumes…which will be read with delight in future ages.” Adams's obsession with his historic reputation, of course, was both obvious and notorious. Jefferson's concern was equally powerful, but more disguised and controlled. It seems fair to conclude that both men sat down to write the other in a more self-conscious frame of mind than they adopted when corresponding with less renowned friends and associates. This was not a casual correspondence. Words were chosen with one eye on posterity.
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What gave the correspondence its intellectual zest, and carried it beyond polite exchanges about old age, daily exercise discussions, and comparative reading lists, was Adams's inveterate effusiveness. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how often he reminded himself to avoid controversy, no matter how frequently he vowed to provide posterity with a more serene, scrubbed-up image of himself as the classical hero, Adams found it impossible to behave like a proper patriarch: “Whenever I sett down to write to you,” he admitted to Jefferson in 1813, “I am precisely in the Situation of the Wood Cutter on Mount Ida: I can not see Wood for Trees. So many Subjects Crowd upon me that I know not, with which to begin.” It was the characteristically maddening and beguiling Adams impetuosity again. Soon, all the troublesome and forbidden subjects were breaking through with a velocity and ferocity that overwhelmed Jefferson's capacity to keep up.
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Jefferson, for example, had used the phrase “mighty Wave of public opinion” in passing, intending it as a favorable commentary on the benign power of the popular will. Adams repeated it mockingly, then unleashed a verbal barrage. Claiming that “these Letters of yours require Volumes from me,” he went into a tirade against popular movements of several sorts: the Crusades, the French Revolution, the Thirty Years War, hurricanes in the Gulf Stream (!), corrupt elections, Christian and Muslim massacres, and a host of other catastrophes, creating a veritable wave of his own political rhetoric that was intended to wash over Jefferson's presumption that the will of the people was always benign. “Upon this Subject I despair of making myself understood by Posterity, by the present Age, and even by you,” he thundered. On many occasions the “mighty Wave of public opinion,” he went on, took the shape of a mob that committed terrorist acts against the public interest. Recalling a popular demonstration against the government in 1799, Adams chided Jefferson: “I have no doubt You was fast asleep in philosophical Tranquility, when ten thousand People, and perhaps many more, were parading the Streets of Philadelphia.”
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Adams returned regularly to his outspokenly critical attitude toward popular movements. If not restrained by law, evangelical Christians in America would “whip and crop, and pillory and roast” just as they did throughout European history. “The multitude and diversity of them, You will Say, is our Security against them all. God grant it,” he acknowledged. But the same emotional forces that propelled religious fanatics to commit unspeakable acts against humanity operated with equivalent ferocity in the political arena. “I wish that Superstition in Religion exciting Superstition in Politicks…may never blow up all your benevolent and phylanthropic Lucubrations,” he warned Jefferson, but “the History of all Ages is against you.” When Jefferson tried to respond in an accommodating way, agreeing that religious fanaticism had certainly proven destructive in Europe, Adams reiterated that irrational energies were not confined by any psychological embargo to the other side of the Atlantic. “I can only say at present,” he concluded, “that it would seem that human Reason and human Conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm.”
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Of course, for Adams to insist on the power of the passions was like a devout Christian proclaiming the power of prayer. It came to him just as naturally, though surely more effusively, as silence and self-restraint came to Jefferson. A lifetime of introspection and daily entries in his diary had provided Adams with a palpable sense of his own emotional excesses. And his reading of history had confirmed that irrational forces usually shaped the behavior, not just of mass movements but also of aristocratic elites and individual despots. He could launch into a lecture on this theme with all the impetuous energy that graphically illustrated its point, thereby making his own passionate disposition an important part of his discourse on the irresistible power of human emotion.

Jefferson was not temperamentally disposed to find the discourse interesting. He tended not so much to deny the influence of the emotional and irrational as to believe that they were best ignored. He was as constitutionally cool as Adams was warm. An inveterate record keeper who logged all his letters, kept track of daily weather changes, and maintained elaborate files on his library, Indian languages, and garden plantings, Jefferson never kept a diary or any account of his deepest feelings. Introspection struck him as self-indulgent. In 1816 he made the mistake of declaring this opinion to Adams, wondering why otherwise intelligent people allowed themselves to probe their private feelings and become preoccupied with depressing emotions like gloom and grief. “I wish the pathologists then would tell us,” Jefferson asked rhetorically, “what is the use of grief on the economy, and of what good it is the cause….”
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It was as if he had dropped a match in a munitions factory. Adams felt obliged to deliver a series of lectures on “the uses of grief,” a subject on which he claimed to be one of America's experts. Grief, he explained, was not just a futile form of sorrow. Under its spell men are driven into “habits of serious Reflection….” It “sharpens the Understanding and Softens the heart.” The furrows depicted in the portraits and statues of great men “were all ploughed in the Countenance, by Grief.”
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Jefferson tried to drop the subject: “To the question indeed on the Utility of Grief, no answer remains to be given. You have exhausted the subject.” But Adams had just gotten started. There were many more “uses of grief,” all of which required enumeration. Then there were the equally important “abuses of grief,” which required documentation with examples drawn from the classics, Christianity, and even the misuse of Washington's reputation by the High Federalists under Hamilton to sustain support for their banking schemes. Grief, it turned out, was a many-sided and many-splendored emotion. Jefferson tried to fight off the last lecture-of-a-letter on the subject by concluding that the uses and the abuses of grief seemed to cancel themselves out, allowing him to cling to his original contention that “we may consider its value in the economy of the human being, as equivocal at least.” Adams could not have disagreed more, since he regarded the controlling of human passion as the ultimate function of government. But he let the matter drop.
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By then, however, the pattern was set. Adams was writing over two letters for every one of Jefferson's, setting the intellectual agenda of the correspondence so that it accorded with his most passionate preoccupations. “Answer my letters at your Leisure,” he advised Jefferson as it became clear that the stream of words from Quincy was threatening to flood Monticello. “Give yourself no concern,” Adams added, explaining that the correspondence had become a major emotional outlet for him, “a refuge and protection against Ennui.” Jefferson apologized for his failure to keep up, claiming that he received over twelve hundred letters each year, all of which required answers. Adams replied that he received only a fraction of that number, but chose not to answer most of them so he could focus his allegedly waning energies on Jefferson, whom he called the only person “on this side of Monticello, who can give me any Information upon Subjects that I am now
analysing
and
investigating:
if I may be permitted to Use the pompous Words now in fashion.” Adams declared that he was not going to take a “stand upon Epistolary Etiquette…though I have written two Letters, yet unnoticed I must write a third.” If Jefferson felt somewhat overwhelmed, Adams assured him that he was only writing “a hundredth part of what I wish to say to you.” And after all, Adams pleaded to his famous friend, “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”
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