Agony and Eloquence: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and a World of Revolution

Copyright © 2016 by Daniel L. Mallock

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Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-528-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-832-2

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Best Letter That Ever Was Written

Chapter 2 An Affection That Can Never Die

Chapter 3 I Would Have Seen Half the Earth Desolated

Chapter 4 The Universal Destroyer

Chapter 5 Their Virtuous Enterprise

Chapter 6 I Know You Too Well to Fear

Chapter 7 We Came to Fifth Street, Where Our Road Separated

Chapter 8 Conceal the Lever

Chapter 9 All Doors Wide Open

Chapter 10 A Civil War Was Expected

Chapter 11 Mr. Jefferson Said I Was Sensitive, Did He!

Chapter 12 We Are All Republicans, We Are All Federalists

Chapter 13 This Is Impossible: How Can a Man Repent of His Virtues?

Chapter 14 Liberty, Friendship, Faith, Thou Wilt Hold Fast

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

THOMAS JEFFERSON AND John Adams first met as members of the Continental Congress; both had signed the Declaration of Independence, and later served as diplomatic colleagues at the leading courts of Europe. Their long friendship was marked by profound mutual respect and deep personal affection until a bitter breach separated them during Adams’s presidency.

When the French Revolution erupted in 1789, Adams and Jefferson, after a brief shared enthusiasm, found themselves on opposite sides. Jefferson wholeheartedly supported the Revolution—regardless of the horrific crimes that its supporters and leaders committed—while Adams came to despise it and accurately predicted its ultimate collapse. Their stridently differing views about the Revolution in France, American relations with the new French Republic, and regarding fundamental matters of government finally destroyed their friendship. Only the tireless efforts of a mutual friend and fellow signer of the Declaration could repair it after ten years of silence.

As different in their views and personalities as one might expect a Massachusetts Puritan would be from a son of the wealthy landed New World Virginia gentry, Adams and Jefferson were first drawn together by their love of liberty and desires for American independence. They shared an adoration of learning and the attainment of knowledge. Both appreciated the other’s great depth and complexity of character. Their friendship was founded upon mutual appreciation and shared personal and public aspirations.

Both men significantly influenced events and national policy. Their political rivalry became the great contest for the future course of the country; in this conflict their professional relationship was the first casualty—their friendship soon suffered the same fate.

This American drama is documented in their extraordinary letters. The Adams-Jefferson correspondence has long been recognized as a landmark achievement in American letters, known as much for the beauty of their language as for its historical importance. Their epistolary discussions included subjects from philosophy to politics, history, literature, science, architecture, and more. They both desired that all of these letters should be published.

In his First Inaugural Address, Jefferson told the American people that without positive associations—friendships—liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. Jefferson publicly identified friendship as essential to the quality of life and fundamental to the proper enjoyment, and even the function, of liberty.

These two great men, friends, colleagues, and then rivals came to be seen in their time as the leaders of the opposing American political parties of the late eighteenth century. The political partisanship of that era is perhaps surpassed only by that of our own time.

Jefferson later came to agree with Adams that the eradication of political partisanship was essential to the continuing existence of the Union, and that friendships immune to the destructiveness of absolutism and party prejudice were crucial to the success and longevity of the new democracy. Long after both had left politics they became convinced that partisanship and rigid political views that left little or no room for compromise were active and perpetual threats to the future success and life of the country.

There is great drama here, internal and external enemies, wars and rumors of wars, great social and political upheavals, and then, finally—at the end of tortuous roads—a mutual realization that friendship was more important than either had previously realized.

The French Revolution, and conflicts with England and France, forms the international backdrop of the larger drama of the new American Republic struggling to retain its independence and democratic character in the face of intense internal and external pressures. It is also the story of events and people in the early years of the United States from Washington’s retirement to Adams’s and Jefferson’s administrations, and on into the long introspective and active years of their retirements.

Every generation has its own times that try the souls of men and women, and each prefers to make its own way unfettered by any debts to the past. The present belongs to the living; in these times that try the souls of our people, there are no bills in arrears-only a gift paid forward by two of the most important men in American history.

We owe no debt to these great men but to learn from the wisdom that they left for us.

1

The Best Letter That Ever Was Written

THE BRISK, LATE autumn winds blowing inland from the Atlantic, and the bitter cold air streaming south from Canada, howled through the cracks in every structure in Quincy, Massachusetts. During that particular early morning, most citizens of the town would have been at their breakfast tables near a warm hearth trying to avoid the chill New England winds of approaching winter that, rolling in off Quincy Bay, made their windows rattle and floors and walls cold to the touch as the first meal of the day was served. So it was at Peace field, the solid and comfortable but not ostentatious home of John Adams, retired second president of the United States.

Mr. John Adams, or the president, as his grandchildren preferred to address him, was eighty-nine years old in November, 1823, unusually long-lived for a man of that or most any time. Most of his friends, and his beloved wife Abigail, had, by then, preceded him to their rewards. Adams, made of sterner stuff than even he had suspected (and sometimes perhaps likely desired) remained, and waited.

Perhaps one of his grandchildren brought the morning’s mail to the elderly statesman that day. All the family assembled around the table would have recognized the now familiar handwriting on the envelope; it was from former President Thomas Jefferson, then Adams’s most important correspondent—his greatest and oldest living friend. His eyes failing, Adams likely asked a favored family member to read the letter to him. Sometimes his correspondence was read to him privately but, for this important missive, Adams could not wait; it must be read aloud, now.

John Adams had rekindled his old friendship with Thomas Jefferson late in 1811 at the incessant yet creative urgings of their mutual friend and fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania. Rush, who had died in 1813, was delighted that he had been the instrument to bring his two old friends back to one another after over a decade of silence between them. Now, at breakfast and with his extended family in his old family home, once called Stoney Fields, then Peace field, then Montezillo as a humorous homage to his greatest friend’s stately and famous home, Monticello, Adams must have felt some trepidation as the envelope from Jefferson was displayed at the table.¹

The cold autumnal winds blowing in from the Atlantic over the low hills of Quincy, much of it Adams land, beating on the hardy frames of Montezillo located on what is now Adams Street in Quincy, Massachusetts, must have been particularly portentous for the former president. An old error in judgment, harsh bitter opinions and recriminations, and an excess of rhetoric and partisanship over a decade old that Adams had hoped and expected would never see the light of day until after his death, if ever, were about to invade his usually peaceful morning meal. Jefferson had no doubt learned of these things; this, then, must be the subject of the letter that Adams’s granddaughter now held in her hand, waiting for the patriarch’s nod to open and read it aloud.

Described by one noted biographer as rude, tactless, and hot-tempered,² John Adams was sometimes injudicious and excessive in his written communications, particularly in his retirement years. Jefferson was also guilty of occasional heated rhetorical indulgences in his correspondences. Like many subjects of mutual interest, this habit of epistolary backbiting and overheated language was an unfortunate indulgence practiced by both men, however much to their own later frustrations and disappointment. Adams’s vanity, irascibility, and garrulousness were widely acknowledged by friends and family; Adams himself admitted to these traits (particularly vanity). His colleagues and enemies were also not unaware of them. His brilliant and supportive wife Abigail had always done her best to keep this part of her husband’s character in check.

Jefferson was also aware of Adams’s lesser qualities. Weighing them against the better parts of Adams’s nature, Jefferson had found his old friend’s more challenging traits forgivable. In a January 1787 letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote that Adams is vain, irritable and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him. He is as disinterested as the Being who made him. He is profound in his views, and accurate in his judgment, except where knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment. He is so amiable, that I pronounce you will love him, if ever you become acquainted with him.³

Seated at the breakfast table with his family around him, a little hand held an as-yet unopened letter from Thomas Jefferson. With his failing eyesight, Adams perhaps looked around him at his large extended family, gripped the arms of his chair just a little tighter, and thought back over a decade to another family breakfast in which the words of a very different correspondent had been the subject of conversation.

* * *

In their retirement years Adams and Jefferson had both taken extraordinary pains to assure that the historical record would present an accurate representation of them to posterity. Adams’s concern for his historical reputation might now be seen as a kind of neurosis, though he was not in any way alone in his concern for how he would be viewed and judged by later generations of Americans. This obsession with posterity prompted many letters, both public and private, from Adams’s pen.

In an August 1812 letter to his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush, Adams asked rhetorically, How is it that I, poor, ignorant I, must stand before posterity as differing from all the great men of the age? Priestley, Price, Franklin, Burke, Fox, Pitt, Mansfield, Camden, Jefferson, Madison! Believing his historical reputation already permanently sullied, Adams speculated that he would be judged the most vain, conceited, impudent, arrogant creature in the world. I tremble when I think of it. I blush. I am ashamed.⁴

Once retired, Adams had engaged in a lengthy and very public defense of his political career by submitting extensive essays and letters to the Boston Patriot newspaper from 1809 to 1812. One Adams historian describes these lengthy, often caustic and critical essays as the final installment in Adams’s long effort to exorcise his personal demons, all undertaken in the guise of ‘setting the record straight.’ ⁵ Few readers of the Boston Patriot—and there were many in Massachusetts and beyond—were favorably impressed by Adams’s essays. Expecting many repercussions and public denunciations, Adams found the reaction to his essays was far more muted than he had supposed. Shortly after the first essay was published, a distant relative wrote to him in an elevated and personally complimentary style expressing interest in his political career, and declaring his support for Adams’s Boston Patriot efforts. Favorably impressed by this writer’s positive reaction to his very public self-defense, Adams began a correspondence with this distant cousin that would later result in unpleasant repercussions and put his most important friendship at risk.

* * *

John Adams and William Cunningham had corresponded intermittently since 1803. Cunningham, a Federalist journalist and lawyer, was a distant relative of Adams.⁶ It was not however until Adams’s first essay appeared in the Boston Patriot that their correspondence became regular. They mutually agreed that their letters were to be kept confidential and never published until after Adams’s death, if at all.

In an 1804 letter to Cunningham, written during Jefferson’s first term as president, Adams harshly criticized Jefferson and implied that his friendship had been false. Adams also wrote, I shudder at the calamities, which I fear his conduct is preparing for his country: from a mean thirst of popularity, an inordinate ambition, and a want of sincerity. At the close of this letter, Adams reminded his correspondent that I write in confidence in your honor as well as your discretion.⁷

Adams used both the Boston Patriot and his private correspondence with Cunningham as outlets to defend himself from what he perceived as a pervasive negative view of his character and his political record. Hypersensitive, Adams gave his pen and his anger free reign. He would sometimes hit a positive note, however, as he did in this compliment of Jefferson’s political motives. I have great reason to believe, that Mr. Jefferson came into office with the same spirit that I did—that is, with a sincere desire of conciliating parties, as far as he possibly could, consistently with his principles.⁸

The Boston Patriot essays were an important tool for Adams through which he could accuse his enemies with his understanding and interpretation of historical events, and gain a victory by their deafening silence. He explained his purpose to Cunningham in July 1809. I am in a fair way to give my criticks [sic] and enemies food enough to glut their appetites, Adams wrote. They spit their venom and hiss like serpents. But no facts are denied, no arguments confuted. I take no notice of their billingsgate. Let it boil and broil. I have had their secret hatred for ten years, for twenty years, for all my life indeed. And I had rather have their open hostility than their secret.⁹

Over time, however, Cunningham became less a flatterer than a critic of Adams, taking particular umbrage at his repeated and often harsh criticisms of Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.¹⁰ Cunningham’s shift from favor to enmity started slowly before finally arriving at a critical mass. His rhetoric struck such a pitch as to finally overshadow Adams’s own self-indulgence of his ire at his many targets and cause him to pause, and presciently wonder as to Cunningham’s mental stability. The first hint of serious trouble was Cunningham’s letter of June 14, 1809, in which he somewhat inappropriately, via hearsay and gossip, introduced the former president’s family into the discussion.

An elderly and respectable clergyman, on his way home from Boston, Cunningham wrote, called on me last Friday, and continued over night. He informed me without any reserve, that Mr. Whitney, your Minister, represented to him, that your resolution to rescue your reputation from reproach, is regarded by your whole family as an unfortunate determination, but that you are inexorable to their entreaties to desist.¹¹

Adams replied on the twenty-second of the same month. Not yet cognizant of the growing schism between them, and still then not fully aware of Cunningham’s growing ire, Adams responded to the suggestion that his family disapproved of his public essays in the Boston Patriot with kindness and jocular humor. Making matters worse without realizing it, Adams sarcastically described to Cunningham the scene of laughter when he broached the subject at the dinner table.

I most sincerely thank you for your excellent letter of the fourteenth. It contains an abundance of matter that deserves, and shall have my most serious consideration. But at present I have not time to be serious. I had a delicious laugh with my family. I said nothing till we were all at table at dinner: My wife, my two daughters in law, my niece, Miss Louisa Smith, and my two grand daughters, misses, just entering their teens. My son was at Cambridge. I assumed a very grave countenance, and said I had received information, from fifty miles distance, that I had given offence to my family. I was very sorry to hear it, I wished to know which it was, that I might make my apology or give some satisfaction. Lord! Who? What? Why? what, sir, can you mean? sounded instantly from all quarters.

I learn that my family is grieved at my Letters in the Newspapers, and have intreated me to desist, but that I obstinately go on to their mortification. The whole table was in a roar at this. My Wife had read every line, I believe, but one letter, before it went to the press. She was not alarmed. My two daughters declared they had never said a word … Never, sir, was a more groundless report or a more sheer fabrication. Mr. Whitney never could have said any such things.¹²

Adams’s hilarity at Cunningham’s expense was graciously received.¹³ But Adams did not realize until too late that his correspondent’s once-strong support for him and his public attacks on others was changing mightily.

Upset by Adams’s harsh criticism of Jefferson, and of the tragically deceased Alexander Hamilton, Cunningham’s tone changed from flattery to one of deep, bitter anger. Eventually, Cunningham threatened to publish their correspondence. Horrified at Cunningham’s catastrophic shift against him, and alarmed at his harsh, threatening rhetoric, Adams soon realized the dangerous situation he himself had created by opening his unedited heart and soul to this distant relative and one-time friend.

Replying to a flurry of three letters in which Cunningham asserted that he would breach their agreement of confidentiality and go public with the letters, Adams wrote on January 16, 1810, I have received your three last letters. The correspondence and conversations which have passed between us have been under the confidential seal of secrecy and friendship. Any violation of it will be a breach of honour and of plighted faith. I shall never release you from it …¹⁴

Believing that Cunningham’s argumentative, accusatory, and alarming tone signaled not only personal and political disagreements but perhaps a profound mental disturbance or break, Adams continued, I hope you will consider, before you plunge yourself into an abyss, which the melancholy and disturbed state of mind you appear to be in seems to render you at this time incapable of perceiving before you. Adams signed this letter, In hopes you will soon be more calm, I am your well wisher, John Adams.¹⁵

Despite his threats, William Cunningham kept his original promise to Adams and did not publish their letters. Cunningham’s final letter to Adams was sent in January of 1812. Cunningham wrote, I have been cruelly and unjustly treated by you—I have, nevertheless, in all that I have done, been sparing.¹⁶ This concluded their communications; there is no record of Adams having replied. Adams’s fears that his trust in Cunningham had been misplaced would rest for ten years.

Confirming Adams’s concerns for his emotional stability, William Cunningham was swallowed by the abyss. Cunningham committed suicide in 1823.¹⁷ His death would not, however, put the matter of their unfortunate correspondence to rest.

When Cunningham died, the 1824 presidential election campaign was underway. Adams’s son, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, was running against war hero and populist General Andrew Jackson in a heated political environment in which partisanship was the order of the day. In 1823, the abyss reached out for John Adams through Cunningham’s son.

Soon after his father’s death, Cunningham’s son Ephraim May Cunningham, a partisan Jackson supporter, published the confidential and damning correspondence between his late father and John Adams.

When Thomas Jefferson’s expected letter arrived at Montezillo in Quincy, Massachusetts, on that November morning in 1823 as Adams was sitting for breakfast, the Adams-Cunningham correspondence had already by then been widely distributed. Adams fully understood that what he had written to Cunningham could be used to undermine his son’s presidential aspirations, as well as do significant damage to his own admittedly limited future (not to mention his historical reputation). More personally significant, as the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the republic approached, his most important friendship was now at stake—a friendship that pre-dated the republic.

* * *

A letter from Mr. Jefferson, says I, I know what the substance is before I open it. There is no secrets between between Mr. Jefferson and me [sic], and I cannot read it; therefore you may open and read it, Adams wrote to Jefferson on November 10, 1823. He was describing the scene in his kitchen as Jefferson’s letter of October twelfth was received, and opened.¹⁸

Though his vision had by then become so poor as to make reading difficult, perhaps in having his grandchildren read the letter aloud he was quietly communicating his fear also; he couldn’t bear to read the letter himself knowing that it might include Jefferson’s ire at his ill-tempered and unfortunate correspondence with Cunningham. There is humility and fear in Adams, and regret; the renewed Adams-Jefferson friendship, which, by 1823, was then eleven years old, had become for Adams his most important correspondence and non-family relationship; he did not want it to die.

I do not write with the ease which your letter of September 18 supposes, began Jefferson. Crippled wrists and fingers make writing slow and laborious. But, while writing to you, I lose the sense of these things, in the recollection of antient [sic] times, when youth and health made happiness out of every thing. I forget for a while the hoary winter of age … until the friendly hand of death shall rid us of all at once.¹⁹

The child continued reading aloud, the entire company enraptured by the prose of the sage of Monticello. As Jefferson described his efforts to create the University of Virginia, Adams must have been distracted with suspense, but not for long.

Putting aside these things however for the present, Jefferson continued, I write this letter as due to a friendship co-eval with our government, and now attempted to be poisoned.²⁰ This was the signal to Adams that Jefferson was, at least, aware of the Cunningham letters. I had for some time observed, continued Jefferson, dark hints and mysterious innuendos of a correspondence of yours with a friend, to whom you had opened your bosom without reserve, and which was to be made public by that friend, or his representative. And now it is said to be actually published. It has not yet reached us, but extracts have been given, and such as seemed most likely to draw a curtain of separation between you and myself.²¹

Jefferson acknowledged that throughout their lives their friends and supporters had placed us in a state of apparent opposition, which some might suppose to be personal also. More importantly, there were those who wished to make it so, by filling our ears with malignant falsehoods, by dressing up hideous phantoms of their own creation, presenting them to you under my name, to me under your’s. Jefferson wrote that men who have seen the false colours under which passion sometimes dresses the actions and motives of others, have seen also these passions subsiding … dissipating, like mists before the rising sun.²²

Embracing this idea that schemers, partisans, and men without honor and compassion could not destroy their friendship, Jefferson concluded this extraordinary letter of forgiveness and affection with assurances and loyalty. Be assured, my dear Sir, that I am incapable of receiving the slightest impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth, and wisdom, and to sow tares between friends who have been such for near half a century. Beseeching you then, Jefferson continued, not to suffer your mind to be disquieted by this wicked attempt to poison its peace, and praying you to throw it by, among the things which have never happened, I add sincere assurances of my unabated, and constant attachment, friendship and respect.²³ The response at Montezillo’s breakfast table to Jefferson’s sincere letter of appreciation, friendship, and forgiveness was electric.

Replying on the tenth of November, Adams wrote that when the reading of the letter was done, it was followed by an [sic] universal exclamation, The best letter that ever was written, and round it went through the whole table—How generous! how noble! how magnanimous! I said it was just such a letter as I expected, only it was infinitely better expressed. A universal cry that the letter ought to be printed. No, hold, certainly not without Mr. Jefferson’s express leave.²⁴ Adams concluded his grateful letter to Jefferson with, I salute your fire-side with cordial esteem and affection. J. A. in the 89 year of his age and still too fat to last much longer.²⁵ Though it was clear to Adams that there could be little time remaining to him he had no fear of death.

Fully aware that he was then at the conclusion of his life and that the final act must be fast approaching, Adams welcomed life’s next phase. Jefferson, too, at age eighty, was keenly conscious of his mortality, and felt his increasingly fragile health heavily. Both men notably retained their intellectual vigor to their very last days, with Adams reasonably expecting to precede Jefferson in death. I am now the oldest of the little Congressional group that remain, Adams wrote Jefferson in 1821. I may therefore rationally hope to be the first to depart; and as you are the youngest and most energetic in mind and body, you may therefore rationally hope to be the last to take your flight.²⁶

2

An Affection That Can Never Die

SINCE THE RENEWAL of their long friendship after a decade of silence, the correspondence between the two founders and retired presidents had not gone unnoticed. Their letters from 1812 to 1826 cover an extraordinarily wide range of topics, which was entirely understandable as both men were much more than retired ex-presidents of the United States. The Sage of Monticello and the contentious philosopher of Montezillo, once described by Jefferson toward the end of his life as having been a colossus on the floor of Congress,¹ together produced not only a great monument of American literature² through their letters, but one of the most learned and provocative correspondences—literary, philosophical, political, and scientific—in the history of the American republic.³ Adams had once mentioned that he would have no personal Objection to the Publication of it in the national Intelligencer.⁴ Two years later, Jefferson informed Adams that our correspondence has been observed at the post offices … Would you believe that a printer has had the effrontery to propose to me the letting him publish it?⁵ Later, Adams suggested that Jefferson’s letters alone should be brought before the public. I hope one day your letters will be all published in volumes; they will not always appear Orthodox, or liberal in politicks; but they will exhibit a Mass of Taste, Sense, Literature and Science, presented in a sweet simplicity and a neat elegance of Stile, which will be read with delight in future ages.⁶

Their letters to each other took on a vast importance for both men. The disparity in the number of letters passing between Quincy and Monticello has been characterized by some historians as evidence that the relationship was more important to Adams than it was for Jefferson. One historian of the Revolution notes, Of the 158 letters exchanged, Adams wrote 109, more than doubling the pace of the correspondence from Monticello.⁷ Page Smith in his two-volume biography of Adams wrote that, the correspondence between the two men was fitful. Sometimes as much as six months would pass, with three or four letters from Adams, before Jefferson replied. When he did, Adams would invariably dash off an answering letter within a few days.⁸ Dumas Malone, in his massive, award-winning biography of Jefferson, wrote that Adams appears on the whole, and especially at first, to have gained more pleasure from their renewed friendship than his correspondent did. The older, lonelier, and the less occupied of the two, he seems to have had more need of it. It was precious to both of them, however, and well deserves its renown.⁹

Shortly after the renewal of their friendship in 1813, from June 28 to August 14, Adams sent twelve letters to Jefferson before finally receiving a lengthy response in early September. Acknowledging the disparity, Adams wrote humorously and with self-deprecation in the midst of the deluge of letters he sent from Quincy to Monticello, Never mind it, my dear Sir, if I write four Letters to your one; your one is worth more than my four.¹⁰ This should not be misconstrued as false modesty on Adams’s part but rather seen in context as a demonstration among many made by Adams throughout the correspondence with which Adams expressed deep affection and respect for Jefferson. These feelings were entirely reciprocated by Adams’s former vice president, and expressions of mutual care, regard, concern, and deep fondness went back and forth from Quincy and Charlottesville with every communication between them. For example, Jefferson’s response to Adams’s twelve-letter flurry closed with a declaration of affection that he would expound upon repeatedly, ending his letter with, ever and affectionately your’s.¹¹ These statements of mutual affection are essential signals in gaining further insight into Adams and Jefferson as individuals, and the value that both placed upon this most important and long-lived friendship. Though these signals of mutual affection now seem clear, it had not always been so.

Page Smith, a noted biographer of Adams, believed that it was revealing of the two men that Adams in his letters to Jefferson signed himself, ‘Yours affectionately’; ‘With the most cordial esteem, your friend and servant’; ‘My dear friend, adieu’; while Jefferson never varied from the correctly formal, ‘Dear Sir, your most obedient humble servant.’ ¹² However, Smith’s assertion that Jefferson never varied his letter closings from the formal, somewhat emotionally distant style is not correct. The warmth and affection of their relationship, to be sure, had been rather more in John and Abigail than in Jefferson, wrote Smith. As with most charming men, the Virginian held something of himself in reserve. There was in him an ultimate area, a kind of interior arctic region—remote and lonely and cold. It might be said that Jefferson was so gracious, so affable, so easy to know, that few men ever knew him; Adams, on the other hand, awkward and stiff, often repelled people on slight acquaintance, but when he gave his friendship he gave it as he gave everything without reservation or restraint, abandoning his defenses and opening his heart.¹³

Smith mistakenly and somewhat controversially concluded that it might be said that Adams loved Jefferson, while Jefferson liked Adams.¹⁴ Jefferson’s own attestations of his affection for both Abigail and John Adams were often described to them directly in his letters, as will be shown, which further illustrate Smith’s error. Jefferson’s emotional reserve as noted by Smith and many others has long been accepted as a component of Jefferson’s character, as have Adams’s garrulousness, vanity, and contentiousness. The great value in the relationship between Adams and Jefferson as played out and recorded not by others but by each other through their personal letters is that it illuminates deeper facets of these great men that no biographer or historian can properly summarize in a line, or a thumbnail sketch. It is simply a mistaken over-simplification to suggest that Adams and Jefferson did not love each other, as respect and affection is inscribed in numerous expressions and turns of phrase in almost every letter that passed between them.

By the time their friendship was renewed many of the sharp edges of partisan bitterness, disappointment, and hurt had been softened by the passage of time, particularly for Adams. Jefferson for his part knew that this was so—his magnanimous response to Adams regarding the publication of the Cunningham letters was sure proof. What in past decades could easily have destroyed their friendship was allowed to dissipate like a wisp of cold November wind against the sturdy walls of Monticello or Montezillo.

What the Adams-Jefferson friendship and correspondence shows is nothing less than two great men who had reached the height of their intellectual and emotional development and who would, in the course of their conversations, set a pattern of understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness that ranks their letters as a monument to human compassion and grace.

In attempting to understand the scope and complexity of the lives of these great men—diplomats, presidents, philosophers, national heroes—the importance of this series of letters between Adams and Jefferson had sometimes been minimized. There has long been a reasonable desire to get to the heart of an historical person, to find some otherwise missed, previously unseen essential quality or action that explains that person and his or her life. The consequence of this pursuit of essentials, a kind of misleading oversimplification and deconstructionism, can only result in an insufficient approach to comprehension. The depth and breadth of their correspondence necessarily overturns any analytical approach based on simplification and reductive essentialism. A recent reassessment of the founding fathers is a case in point.

The author of a recent history of the American revolutionary leaders described the consequences of Adams’s and Jefferson’s return from diplomatic service in Europe. After their long years in Europe, the two men, the historian wrote, were out of synch with things in America. On his return, Jefferson found his countrymen entranced by trade, commerce, and the quest for luxury goods, and eager to embrace policies of public finance and customs of hierarchy and deference. To his eyes, such things were symptoms of incipient monarchy and aristocracy, the political equivalent of smallpox and the plague, and he responded with all the vehemence, eloquence, and horror of which his humorless, thin-skinned soul was capable.¹⁵ Had the author juxtaposed Mr. Jefferson’s magnanimous letter to Adams of October 12, 1823, in which Jefferson forgave his old friend for the harsh criticisms he had read in excerpts of Adams’s letters to Cunningham, the term thin-skinned would perhaps not have been employed.

The Adams-Jefferson correspondence, and the friendship that it represents, defeats every attempt at thumbnail sketching either man—those terse blocks of supposed definitive statements and descriptions by which some authors hope to provide their readers with an accurate and insightful biographical summation.

Though the many negative decades of Adams’s historical reputation in the public mind now are apparently receding, that of Mr. Jefferson has been rocked by an old shadow recently made more solid than when it first appeared as a disturbing political smear in 1802.

The shadow of impropriety and hypocrisy that fell across the memory of Mr. Jefferson at the end of the twentieth century is one from which, for some, the third president is unlikely to ever fully emerge. Though Jefferson’s historical reputation had previously been a generally and consistently positive (if not entirely enthusiastic) one, events in the late twentieth century have fundamentally and forever challenged Jefferson’s legacy. DNA tests that appear to confirm the legitimacy of old, slanderous-appearing accusations involving Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings have resulted in significant damage to Jefferson’s stature in both academic and popular thought.¹⁶

While Jefferson’s memory now suffers a fate worse than that of Adams’s, that of the second president has long suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous characterizations. One scholar, in a 2006 article¹⁷ that compares the leadership styles of the first three presidents, acknowledged that his negative portrayal of Adams is in conflict with more positive characterizations from recent biographers such as David McCullough and Joseph Ellis.¹⁸ Admitting his emphasis on Adams’s shortcomings as chief executive the author suggested that his was nevertheless an accurate portrayal, as opposed to the more positive portraits by overly enthusiastic historians who were mistakenly enraptured and misguided by the wealth of fascinating source materials left to posterity by Adams. The same qualities of biting honesty, prolix writing, and determined independence that so offended colleagues have endeared Adams to scholars, the historian asserted. They delight in his vivid quotations, exhaustive documentation, and utter inability to hide his feelings or cover his tracks. He is such a remarkably instructive and cooperative historical source precisely because he was so difficult for most of his contemporaries to work with.¹⁹

The political careers of Adams and Jefferson, their successes and errors, have generated a depth and breadth of opinion not only wide-ranging and long-lived, but entirely disparate, from worshipful veneration to insulting dismissal, to disgust and anger. Their complexity prevents either of them from being readily pigeonholed, thumbnailed,or even easily understood. One segment alone of their long lives is not sufficient a sample from which to assume general truths. Jefferson and Adams knew full well that some historians would indulge in these types of over-simplified characterizations of them.Knowing that their letters to each other would likely be posthumously published, their correspondence took on a far greater importance to them in that it would always stand as explanation and counterargument to future critics whose thumbnails were smaller and sharper than they ought to be.

You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other,²⁰ Adams wrote, early into their renewed friendship. There was much to be hashed out between the two, old friends now brought back together after over a decade of silence. Some water runs slow under the bridges of life—their letters did much to move the stream along, swifter and with fewer obstructions. There is much discussion, friendly debate, an abundance of mutual respect and affection, and sometimes heated words amid all the explanations. They reviewed their lives together through letters, and smoothed out the rough edges and misunderstandings that still remained as best they could. In much the same way that Adams and Jefferson were writing to one another, they were also documenting themselves for future generations.

Their correspondence is a record of a deep friendship marked by profound affection between two of America’s greatest men, leaders of their generation, and founders of a new democratic republic never seen before in the history of governments and humanity. Adams and Jefferson worked closely together as members of the Continental Congress, then later as fellow diplomats representing the United States at the seats of government of Great Britain and France. Adams returned to the United States from his post as first minister to London in 1788, followed by Jefferson a year later as revolution shattered France. Jefferson had been the second American minister to the Court of Louis XVI (Benjamin Franklin had been the first) when he returned home from Europe in 1789, and was appointed secretary of state in Washington’s administration soon thereafter.²¹

Adams’s departure from Europe brought a flurry of affection and regrets from both Jefferson and Adams at their impending separation (which would be short-lived). There are but two Circumstances, which will be regretted by me, when I leave Europe, Adams wrote. One is the opportunity Searching any questions … in any books that may be wanted, and the other will be the Interruption of that intimate Correspondence with you, which is one of the most agreeable Events in my Life.²² When Jefferson first heard of Adams’s decision to return to America (and to take Abigail with him, of course) Jefferson wrote, I learn with real pain the resolution you have taken of quitting Europe … I shall now feel bewidowed.²³

Jefferson’s friendship and professional association with John Adams also included Abigail Adams. A brilliant and articulate woman, Jefferson wrote to Abigail just as he did with any of his great and close friends. Bound by mutual affection and common purposes while in Europe, Abigail and Jefferson had by then already shared a long correspondence characterized by deep friendship that would later be put painfully aside due to political differences and personal hurts. As their departure for America approached, Jefferson saw their leaving as the beginning of an era for him that he expected would be one of unhappiness and loneliness. I have considered you while in London as my neighbor, and look forward to the moment of your departure from thence as to an epoch of much regret and concern for me, Jefferson wrote from Paris to Abigail in London. Insulated and friendless on this side of the globe, with such an ocean between me and everything to which I am attached the days will seem long which are to be counted over before I too am to rejoin my native country.²⁴

Commenting late in 1787 on the political upheavals in France that would soon explode as the French Revolution, and later prove to be the foundations of the greatest challenge of his administration, Adams observed, All Europe resounds with Projects for reviving, States and Assemblies, I think: and France is taking the lead.—How such assemblies will mix, with Simple Monarchies, is the question. Suggesting that such a mix (between popular government and monarchism) was not possible, Adams presciently concluded that attempts to reconcile Contradictions will not succeed, and to think of Reinstituting Republics, as absurdly constituted as were the most which the world has seen, would be to revive Confusion and Carnage, which must again End in despotism.²⁵ Adams prepared for his return to the United States and closed his letter to Jefferson of December 10, 1787, with the tenderest Affection of Friendship.²⁶ After his arrival in Braintree (a part of which would later be incorporated into a new town called Quincy) in January 1798, Adams reiterated his deep connection with Jefferson by closing a short official letter of introduction for John Coffin Jones, Esqr, an eminent Merchant of Boston and a late Member of the Legislature from that Town, by asserting that I am with an affection that can never die, your Friend and Servant, John Adams.²⁷

Acknowledging Adams’s letter of introduction for Mr. Jones, Jefferson informed him from Paris, on May 10, 1789, that he intended to use the man as a channel of evidencing to you how much I esteem whatever comes from you. Jefferson closed the letter affectionately, including his expectations of the near future. "Present me affectionately to Mrs. Adams, Colonel and Mrs. Smith.²⁸ I hope to see you all this summer, and to return this fall to my prison;²⁹ for all Europe would be a prison to me, were it ten times as big. Adieu my dear friend."³⁰

Jefferson’s views of the likely outcome of the French Revolution and the possibility of war between England and France were quite different, and not nearly as accurate as those of his diplomatic colleague and friend. The lunacy of the king of England will probably place the affairs of that country under a regency; and as regencies are generally pacific, we may expect that they will concur with this country (France) in an unwillingness to enter into war, Jefferson wrote to Adams on December 5, 1788. The internal tranquility of this country (France), which had never been so far compromitted as to produce bloodshed, was entirely reestablished by the announcing of the States general early in the next year, the reestablishment of the parliament and the substitution of Mr. Neckar in the department of finance instead of the Archbishop of Sens.³¹ The attack on the Bastille and the attendant bloodshed which accompanied that significant moment of victory for the French revolutionaries occurred only some eight months after Jefferson had written his hopeful letter of December 5, 1788. The horrific brutality and murders at the Bastille marked the centrality of violence, and social and civic upheaval which would become so characteristic of the French Revolution—an eventual whirlwind of horrors from which the United States had escaped during its Revolution. The political changes that eventually engulfed France soon would affect all of Europe, including Great Britain, and the United States. In fact, relations with France, and the serious possibility of war with that country, America’s first ally, would be the central challenge of John Adams’s presidency (1797–1801).

French maritime and diplomatic policies toward the United States (and the Adams administration’s responses to them) would be the foremost among those issues that separated the two American national political parties of the day, the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans (often known as Republicans, and later the Democratic Party). As leaders of their respective parties,³² Adams and Jefferson, though president and vice president respectively, did not view matters regarding France eye-to-eye. The two old friends, who had said goodbye to one another in Europe in 1788 with such affection, soon became bitter political opponents.

Though he was vice president during Adams’s presidency, Jefferson was not at all in accord with administration policies toward France. Very much a Francophile, Jefferson was a devotee of French wines, architecture, cuisine, culture, history, etc., while Adams and his fellow Federalists were not. The Ancien Regime of Louis XVI, (essentially, monarchist pre-revolutionary France) whose military and financial support had been so important to American victory over the British during the American Revolution, was, by the time Adams became president, eradicated—and Louis himself executed by the National Convention in 1793.

When Adams took his oath of office in March 1797, France and Great Britain were then at war, one of numerous conflicts involving revolutionary France and her neighbors (including