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ALSO BY GORDON S. WOOD
The Idea of America
The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Winner of the Bancroft Prize)
The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
The American Revolution: A History
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (Winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award)
Revolutionary Characters
The Purpose of the Past
Empire of Liberty (Winner of the American History Book Prize of the New-York Historical Society)
—
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Copyright © 2017 by Gordon S. Wood
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Illustration credits
Here: Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass , USA/Bridgeman Images; here (top): Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations; here (bottom): Martin Falbisoner / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0; here: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Name: Wood, Gordon S., author.
Title: Friends divided : John Adams and Thomas Jefferson / Gordon S Wood
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2017
Identifiers: LCCN 2017025116 (print) | LCCN 2017027494 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735224728 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735224711 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826 Friends and associates | Adams, John, 1735–1826 Friends and associates. | Presidents United States Biography. | Founding Fathers of the United States Biography. | United States Politics and government 1775–1783. | United States Politics and government 1783–1809. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / Revolutionary Period (1775–1800) | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Political | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Government / General.
Classification: LCC E332.2 (ebook) | LCC E332.2 .W65 2017 (print) | DDC 973.3092/2 dc23
LC record available at https://lccn loc gov/2017025116
Version 1
To the editors of the Papers of John Adams and The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
CONTENTS —
ALSO BY GORDON S. WOOD
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE: The Eulogies
ONE: Contrasts
TWO: Careers, Wives, and Other Women
THREE: The Imperial Crisis
FOUR: Independence
FIVE: Missions Abroad
SIX: Constitutions
SEVEN: The French Revolution
EIGHT: Federalists and Republicans
NINE: The President vs. the Vice President
TEN: The Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800
ELEVEN: Reconciliation
TWELVE: The Great Reversal
EPILOGUE: The National Jubilee
ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES INDEX
THE EULOGIES
THEY DIED ON THE SAME DAY. And it was no ordinary day. It was the Fourth of July, 1826, exactly fifty years from the date the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. This, “our fiftieth anniversary,” as Daniel Webster exclaimed, was “the great day of National Jubilee.”1 Webster’s two-hour eulogy, delivered in Boston on August 2, 1826, was only one of hundreds presented over the months following the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. All the eulogies expressed awe and wonder at this “singular occurrence.” “For one such man to die on such a day,” said Caleb Cushing, a member of the Massachusetts legislature, at Newburyport on July 15, “would have been an event never to be forgotten.” But for both these “glorious founders” to die on that same special day—that was beyond coincidence. “The mathematician was calculating the chance of such a death,” declared the quirky writer and editor of the Boston Commercial Gazette, Samuel L. Knapp, “the superstitious viewed it as miraculous, and the judicious saw in the event the hand of that Providence, without whose notice not a sparrow falls to the ground.”2 Up and down the continent people sought to draw “moral instruction” from the death of the two greatest surviving revolutionary leaders, these “twin sons of Liberty,” as Maryland senator Samuel Smith called them in Baltimore, on such a memorable anniversary. In a lengthy and high-praised eulogy presented to Congress in October 1826, Attorney General William Wirt emphasized how the former political enemies had come
PROLOGUE
together as friends in the last years of their lives. Their final friendship, he said, “reads a lesson of wisdom on the bitterness of party spirit, by which the wise and good will not fail to profit.”3
Nearly all the eulogists compared the personalities and talents of the two men. Adams was praised for “his hearty frankness, his vivacity and the dignified simplicity of his deportment.” He was “a man of robust intellect and of marked feelings.” He possessed an “ardent temperament . . . marked by great fervor and great strength,” which sometimes became “rapid almost to precipitancy,” yet always “immovably fixed in its purposes.”4 By contrast, “Jefferson,” said Samuel Knapp, “was shrewd, quick, philosophical and excursive in his views, and kept at all times such a command over his temper, that no one could discover the workings of his soul.”5
The writings of each were different. Adams’s compositions, declared the eulogies, were marked by dignity and energy and Roman power, Jefferson’s by grace and refinement and Grecian elegance. Jefferson, said young Caleb Cushing, “wears something of the manner of one whose natural talents were assiduously cultivated in the closet, although still with a view to public usefulness; and therefore his writings indicated more originality, are of a more speculative cast, and more visibly traced with the footsteps of solitary investigation.” By contrast, Adams “shows you in every sentence, that his understanding, although richly stored by retired study, was yet trained by the severe discipline of extensive practice at the bar, and active exertion in popular assemblies; and had thus acquired more the habit of prompt and vigorous action, of decisive practical views.”6
Samuel Knapp claimed that the two men had different modes of thinking. “Adams grasped at facts drawn from practical life, and instantly reasoned upon them. Jefferson saw man and his nature through generalities, and formed his opinions from philosophical inductions of a more theoretical cast.” Their compositions exuded different tones. “In the writings of Adams you sometimes find the abruptness and singularity of the language of prophecy; in those of
Jefferson, the sweet wanderings of the descriptive, and the lovely creations of the inventive muse.”7
Despite these differences, however, the careers of the two men, as many of the eulogists noted, were extraordinarily similar. Both were trained as lawyers. Both were leading politicians in their respective colonial assemblies. They represented the two oldest of the colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts, and both these colonies took the lead in opposing the actions of Great Britain. Both were ardent revolutionaries. Both served in the Continental Congress and on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, “and one of them wrote what the other proposed and defended.” Both became ministers abroad, one in France, the other in England. Both wrote important and influential works. Both became vice president and president of the United States. And most marvelous of all, although “they were rival leaders of the two great parties which divided the nation,” in retirement the two patriarchs set aside their partisan differences and became reconciled in friendship. “What a train of curious coincidences,” said Senator Smith of Maryland, “in the lives, the acts, and the deaths of these two great men.”8
MOST OF THE EULOGISTS AGREED that the two patriots tended to complement each other and that both equally belonged in the American pantheon of heroes. Unlike traditional heroes, however, Adams and Jefferson were not military men. Both, said Caleb Cushing, were involved in “purer and nobler pursuits than the deadly trade of war.” They were statesmen. “Theirs were the victories of mind,” asserted Cushing; “their conquests were won by intellectual and moral energies alone.” Neither man commanded armies, but more important, said William Wirt, they “commanded the master springs of the nation on which all its great political as well as military movements depended.” They never fought battles, but they “formed and moved the great machinery of which battles were only a small, and, comparatively, trivial consequence.”9
• • •
Lest this emphasis on the intellectual achievements of Adams and Jefferson detract from the glory of George Washington, several of the eulogists wanted it made clear that Washington remained “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Adams and Jefferson, said Cushing, were “second only to him in station, second only to him in the patriotic energies of souls created for the achievements of a nation’s independence.” Washington, declared Webster, “was in the clear upper sky,” and “these two new stars have now joined the American constellation.”10
DYING ON THE SAME DAY tended to give the two revolutionaries equal standing in the nation’s consciousness, but this equality of eminence did not last. In fact, even some of the eulogists suggested that Jefferson possessed something that Adams lacked. Two of the southern speakers practically ignored Adams, revealing the sectional split that was already apparent. In Richmond the governor of Virginia and the future president, John Tyler, was fulsome in his adoration of Jefferson (“Who now shall set limits to his fame?”), but he mentioned Adams only briefly at the end of his oration. In Charleston, South Carolina, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court William Johnson, though he referred to the “two venerable Patriots” at the outset, actually invoked Adams’s name only as one of the three diplomats in Europe negotiating commercial treaties. Instead, Johnson concentrated, rather ominously, on the “immortal JEFFERSON,” the son of the South, whose spirit breathed “Beware” of all constitutional aggrandizement.11
Although most of the speakers tended to avoid Adams’s controversial presidency, nearly everyone was happy to applaud Jefferson’s presidency. Even the New England orators praised Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana, his defeat of the Barbary pirates, and his reelection in 1804 by a near unanimous vote. Indeed, the northerners were far more generous to Jefferson than the southerners were to Adams. Peleg Sprague, a member of the House of Representatives from Maine, extolled Jefferson for the ease of his
• • •
manners and for a temperament that was always “constitutionally calm, circumspect, and philosophical.” Jefferson impressed everyone. William Thornton, the architect of the U.S. Capitol, speaking in Alexandria, said that the Virginian was endowed with “an extraordinary power of intense reflection—a spirit of profound and patient investigation—an acuteness in the discovery of truth, and a perspicuity in its development, of which the world has witnessed but few examples.” Indeed, “nothing that was worth knowing, was indifferent to him.”12
OVER THE PAST TWO CENTURIES or so, Jefferson’s star has remained ascendant while Adams’s seems to have virtually disappeared from the firmament. Despite being a slaveholder, Jefferson clearly and perhaps rightly has come to dominate America’s historical memory. We are continually asking ourselves whether Jefferson still survives, or what is still living in the thought of Jefferson; and we quote him on every side of every major question in our history. No figure in our past has embodied so much of our heritage and so many of our hopes. Most Americans think of Jefferson much as America’s first professional biographer, James Parton, did. “If Jefferson was wrong,” wrote Parton in 1874, “America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.”13
No one says that about Adams. Indeed, until recently few Americans paid much attention to Adams, and even now the two men command very different degrees of affection and attention as Founders. While Jefferson has hundreds if not thousands of books devoted to every aspect of his wide-ranging life, Adams has had relatively few works written about him, with many of these focused on his apparently archaic political theory. Jefferson’s mountaintop home, Monticello, has become a World Heritage Site visited every year by hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world. By contrast, Adams’s modest home in Quincy, Massachusetts, maintained by the National Park Service, is hard to get to and receives only a fraction of Monticello’s visitors. Jefferson has a huge
• • •
memorial dedicated to him located on the Tidal Basin just off the Mall in the nation’s capital. Adams has no monument in Washington, and those who would like to erect one have struggled for nearly two decades without success.
In 1776 no American could have predicted that the reputations of Adams and Jefferson would so diverge. Indeed, at the time of independence Adams was the better known of the two. No one had contributed more to the movement for independence than he. Jefferson admired Adams and shared his passion for American rights and for American independence; and the two revolutionaries soon became good friends. During their missions abroad in the 1780s their friendship was enriched and deepened. Then the French Revolution and partisan politics of the 1790s strained their relationship. In 1796 Vice President Adams succeeded Washington as president, with Jefferson elected as vice president. Adams assumed that he, like Washington, would be reelected to a second term. When after a very bitter campaign in 1800 Jefferson defeated him for the presidency, Adams was humiliated, and the break between the former friends seemed irreparable.
But in 1812 as Adams’s partisan passions faded, their earlier friendship was painstakingly restored, almost entirely through the efforts of Dr. Benjamin Rush. Rush admired both men and believed that the nation and posterity required the reconciliation of these two great patriot leaders. He considered Adams and Jefferson “as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but,” he told Adams, “you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.”14 But alas, the two revolutionaries did not think alike.
Although the friendship was resumed in their retirement years, and the two friends exchanged dozens of warm and revealing letters with each other, the reconciliation was somewhat superficial. No doubt Adams and Jefferson had similar careers and no doubt they agreed on the rightness of resisting Great Britain and on the significance of the American Revolution. But despite all that the two patriot leaders shared and experienced together—and the many
things they had in common are impressive—they remained divided in almost every fundamental way: in temperament, in their ideas of government, in their assumptions about human nature, in their notions of society, in their attitude toward religion, in their conception of America, indeed, in every single thing that mattered. Indeed, no two men who claimed to be friends were divided on so many crucial matters as Adams and Jefferson. What follows is the story of that divided friendship.
ONE CONTRASTS
THE IRONIES AND PARADOXES expressed in the lives of these two Founders epitomize the strange and wondrous experience of the nation itself. Jefferson was an aristocratic Virginia planter, a well-connected slaveholder, a “patriarch,” as he called himself, reared in a hierarchical slaveholding society. By contrast, Adams was middling-born in a Massachusetts society that was far more egalitarian than any society in the South. Adams had few connections outside of his town of Braintree, and his rise was due almost exclusively to merit. Yet Jefferson the slaveholding aristocrat emerged as the apostle of American democracy; he became the optimistic exponent of American equality and the promoter of the uniqueness of the nation and its special role in the world. Adams, on the other hand, became the representative of a crusty conservatism that emphasized the inequality and vice-ridden nature of American society, a man who believed that “Democracy will infallibly destroy all Civilization.”1 America, said Adams, was not unusual; it was not free from the sins of other societies. Jefferson told the American people what they wanted to hear—how exceptional they were. Adams told them what they needed to know—truths about themselves that were difficult to bear. Over the centuries Americans have tended to avoid Adams’s message; they have much preferred to hear Jefferson’s praise of their uniqueness.
The fundamental differences between the two men could often be subtle and slippery; other differences were more obvious and palpable. Jefferson was tall, perhaps six two or so, and lean, lanky,
and gangling; he had a reddish freckled complexion, bright hazel eyes, and reddish blond hair, which he tended to wear unpowdered in a queue. He was careless of his dress and tended to wear what he wanted to wear, regardless of what was in style. He bowed to everyone he met and tended to talk with his arms folded, a sign of his reserved nature. In 1790 William Maclay, the caustic Scotch-Irish senator from western Pennsylvania, described the secretary of state in the new federal government as “a slender Man” whose “clothes seem too small for him” and whose “whole figure has a loose shackling Air.” Jefferson tended to sit “in a lounging Manner on One hip, . . . with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other.” To Maclay, who disliked anything that smacked of European court life, Jefferson affected a manner of “stiff Gentility, or lofty Gravity.”2
In contrast to Jefferson, Adams was short, five seven or so, and stout; “by my Physical Constitution,” he admitted, “I am but an ordinary Man.” He had sharp blue eyes, and he often covered his thinning light brown hair with a wig. The acerbic Senator Maclay, who had few kind words for anyone in his journal, became increasingly contemptuous of Adams, the vice president in 1789 and thus president of the Senate. Adams, wrote Maclay, was a “Childish Man” with “a very silly Kind of laugh,” who was usually wrapped up “in the Contemplation of his own importance.” Whenever he looked at Adams presiding in his chair with his wig and small sword, Maclay said he could not “help thinking of a Monkey just put into Breeches.”3 There is no doubt that Adams could sometimes appear ridiculous in the eyes of others.
Although Jefferson was often hated and ridiculed in print by his political enemies, no one made fun of him in quite the way they did Adams. Jefferson possessed a dignity that Adams lacked; for many Jefferson was the model of an eighteenth-century gentleman— learned and genteel and possessing perfect self-control and serenity of spirit. His slave Madison Hemings recalled that Jefferson was the “quietist of men,” who was “hardly ever known to get angry.”4 Adams was certainly learned and could be genteel, but he lacked Jefferson’s serenity of spirit. He was too excitable and too irascible
for that. He never knew when to be reserved and silent, something Jefferson was skilled at. Indeed, Jefferson used his affability to keep people at a distance. Adams was just the opposite: familiarity bred his infectious amiability. In 1787 his Harvard classmate Jonathan Sewall, who had become a Loyalist, met Adams in London and was reminded of the appeal Adams had for him. “Adams,” he told a judge back in Massachusetts, “has a heart formed for friendship, and susceptible of it’s finest feelings; he is humane, generous, and open— warm to the friendly Attachments tho’ perhaps rather implacable to those he thinks his enemies.”5
Adams was high-strung and was never as relaxed and easygoing as Jefferson was in company. But once he felt at ease with someone he could be much more jovial and open than Jefferson, more familiar and more revealing of his feelings. As Sewall suggested, people who got to know him well found him utterly likable. His candor and his unvarnished honesty won their hearts. But these qualities of forthrightness did not work well in public. Adams never quite learned to tailor his remarks to his audience in the way Jefferson did. Consequently, he lacked Jefferson’s suave and expert political skills.
BOTH MEN WERE CAUGHT UP in the currents of the Enlightenment. While Jefferson rode these currents and was exhilarated by the experience, Adams often resisted them and questioned their direction. Jefferson had few doubts about the future; indeed, perhaps more than any other American, Jefferson came to personify the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He always dreamed of a new and better world to come; by contrast, Adams always had qualms and uncertainties about the future.
The difference came partly from their contrasting views of human nature. Jefferson was a moral idealist, a child of light. Humans, he believed, were basically good and good-hearted, guided by an instinctive moral sense. Only when people’s good nature was perverted by outside forces, especially by the power and privilege of monarchical government, did they become bad. Adams also believed
• • •
that people possessed an inner moral sense, which enabled them to distinguish between right and wrong, but he never had the confidence in it that Jefferson had. Adams may not have been a child of darkness, but he was not a child of light either. His conception of human nature was stained with a sense of sin inherited from his Puritan ancestors. But his bleak view of human nature and his irascibility were leavened by his often facetious joking, his droll stories, and his sense of the absurdity of things. By contrast, Jefferson was always much more serious about life. He never revealed much of a sense of humor, and when he did it was often so dry as to be barely felt.
Both Adams and Jefferson were extremely learned, and both were avid readers. As a teenager Adams “resolved never to be afraid to read any Book,” however controversial, and that was true of Jefferson as well.6 Although for both men the classics, law, and history dominated their reading, Adams seems to have enjoyed novels as well, especially in his retirement. He claimed to have “read all Sir Walter Scott’s Novels as regularly as they appeared.” He said that he had been “a Lover and a Reader of Romances all my Life. From Don Quixote and Gil Blas to the Scottish Chiefs and an hundred others.”7
Jefferson was different. He admitted that fiction might occasionally be pleasurable, but he considered most novels to be “trash.” He made some exceptions for moral tales, such as the didactic writings of Maria Edgeworth, but generally he believed the passion for novel reading was “a great obstacle to good education.” It was a “poison” that “infects the mind, it destroys it’s tone, and revolts it against wholesome reading.” It resulted in “a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust toward all the real business of life.”8
Learned as both men were, Adams never possessed Jefferson’s breadth of knowledge. In fact, Jefferson had the most spacious and encyclopedic mind of any of his fellow Americans, including even Benjamin Franklin. He was interested in more things and knew more about more things than any other American. When he was abroad he traveled to more varied places in Europe than Adams ever did, and
kept a detailed record of all that he had seen, especially of the many vineyards he visited. He amassed nearly seven thousand books and consulted them constantly; he wanted both his library and his mind to embrace virtually all of human knowledge, and he came as close to that embrace as an eighteenth-century American could. Every aspect of natural history and science fascinated him.
He knew about flowers, plants, birds, and animals, and had a passion for all facets of agriculture. He had a fascination for meteorology, archaeology, and the origins of the American Indians. He loved mathematics and sought to apply mathematical principles to almost everything, from coinage and weights and measures to the frequency of rebellions and the length of people’s lives. He was an inveterate tinkerer and inventor and was constantly thinking of newer and better ways of doing things, whether it was plowing, the copying of handwriting, or measuring distances.
Machines and gadgets fascinated Jefferson. He was especially taken with the “orrery”—a working model of the universe—created by David Rittenhouse of Philadelphia. He concluded that Rittenhouse was one of America’s three great geniuses, along with Washington and Franklin; he claimed that Rittenhouse “has exhibited as great a proof of mechanical genius as the world has ever produced.”9
Jefferson also called himself “an enthusiast on the subject of the arts.” He said music was “the favorite passion of my soul,” and he became quite proficient playing the violin.10 He loved to sing, even when he was alone, and apparently he had a fine clear voice. He was also passionate about architecture and became, according to one historian, “America’s first great native-born architect.”11 As a young man he began making drawings of landscapes, gardens, and buildings, and over his lifetime he accumulated hundreds of these drawings. Nothing was more exciting to the young Virginian provincial than discovering the sixteenth-century Italian Andrea Palladio, whose Four Books of Architecture had long been familiar in Europe but was virtually unknown in America. Jefferson claimed that he would often stand for hours gazing at buildings that attracted him.
In the 1760s Jefferson pored through European art books and drew up ambitious lists of what experts considered the best paintings and sculptures in the world. When the earnest dilettante went abroad, he collected copies of some of these masterpieces and eventually installed a sizable collection of canvases, prints, medallions, and sculptures in his home.12
But even before he had gone to Europe he had developed an extraordinary reputation for the range of his knowledge and for the many talents he possessed. He was proud of his intellectual abilities. He claimed that he had learned Spanish by reading Don Quixote along with a grammar book on his nineteen-day voyage to Europe in 1784; “but,” as John Quincy Adams commented on hearing Jefferson in 1804 describe this remarkable accomplishment, “Mr. Jefferson tells large stories.” Indeed, said the young Adams, “you can never be an hour in this man’s company without something of the marvelous.”13
By the early 1780s Jefferson had become, as the French visitor the Marquis de Chastellux noted, “an American who, without having quitted his own country, is a Musician, Draftsman, Surveyor, Astronomer, Natural Philosopher, Jurist, and Statesman.”14
ADAMS HAD LITTLE OF JEFFERSON’S fascination with gadgets and architecture, and he had none of Jefferson’s interest in collecting paintings and sculptures and displaying them in his home. Late in life he told a French sculptor that he “would not give sixpence for a picture of Raphael or a statue of Phidias.”15 He had no interest in playing a musical instrument and never encouraged his children or grandchildren to have a taste for music. He advised one grandson to “renounce your Flute. If you must have Musick, get a fiddle.”16
Yet Adams was far more sensuous than Jefferson, responding to works of art with more intensity. Indeed, Adams was the most sensuous of the Founders. He experienced the world with all his senses and reacted to it palpably. He felt everything directly and
• • •
immediately, and he could express his feelings in the most vivid and powerful prose. Most impressive was his visual memory. He could recall objects he had seen—whether waxworks, gardens, or paintings —with incredible lucidity and accuracy. In 1779, while serving in Paris as one of the commissioners, he described to Henry Laurens in remarkably precise detail a painting by the Italian artist Francesco Casanova, The Collapse of a Wooden Bridge, which he had viewed in the gallery of the French foreign minister.17 He even could call to mind paintings he had seen decades earlier, especially if the painting revealed a passion that obsessed him, as did a picture displaying jealousy among Jesus’s disciples that he had seen in Antwerp during one of his missions abroad.18
Adams’s sensuousness gave him an acute sense of the power of art. In fact, he said in 1777, insofar as America possessed the arts —“Painting, Sculpture, Statuary, and Poetry”—they ought to be enlisted on behalf of the American cause. Since people were not apt to be aroused by reason alone, Adams believed that the arts were needed to show to the world “the horrid deeds of our Enemies.” “The public may be clearly convinced that a War is just, and yet, until their Passions are excited, will carry it languidly on.”19
Yet at the same time, sensuous as he was, Adams was often alarmed by the effect of art on people. When he experienced the beauty of Paris—its gardens, its buildings, its statues, and its paintings—he was overwhelmed. But his Puritan sensibilities told him to beware of his own powerful feelings. Despite all the bewitching charms of Paris, he told his wife, Abigail, “it must be remembered there is every Thing here too, which can seduce, betray, deceive, deprave, corrupt and debauch.” Adams was torn between the beauty of art and the corruption that he believed it represented. No wonder the Choice of Hercules, caught between a life of virtue and a life of sloth, became his favorite classical allegory.20
• • •
JEFFERSON HAD NONE OF ADAMS’S ambivalence in his approach to the arts. Although he recognized the role of the arts in promoting virtue, he seems to have had none of Adams’s fears of their corrupting power. In fact, he regarded his countrymen as in such desperate need of refinement and cultivation that they could not have too much fine art; and consequently he became eager to introduce his fellow Americans to the best and most enlightened aspects of European culture. His object, he said, was always “to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world, procure them it’s praise.”21
When Virginians in the 1780s realized that a statue of George Washington was needed for their state capitol, “there could be no question raised,” Jefferson wrote from Paris, “as to the Sculptor who should be employed, the reputation of Monsr. [Jean-Antoine] Houdon of this city being unrivalled in Europe.” Washington was unwilling, as he told Jefferson, “to oppose my judgment to the taste of Connoisseurs,” and thus would accept having his statue done in whatever manner Jefferson thought “decent and proper.” He hoped, however, that instead of “the garb of antiquity” there might be “some little deviation in favor” of a modern costume. Fortunately, that turned out to be the case: Houdon did the statue in Washington’s military dress.
But two decades later tastes had changed. For a new commemorative statue of Washington for the state capitol of North Carolina, Jefferson now suggested “old [Antonio] Canove, of Rome,” who, he claimed, “for 30 years, within my own knoledge, . . . had been considered by all Europe, as without a rival.” The costume, however, was going to be different. Since Jefferson believed that “our boots & regimentals have a very puny effect,” he concluded that the modern dress that Houdon had once favored was no longer fashionable. He was now “sure the artist and every person of taste in Europe would be for the Roman” style—in a toga. In everything— from scriptures to paintings, from gardening to poetry—Jefferson wanted the latest in European taste.22
Despite all of his knowledge of the arts, there seems something forced and affected about Jefferson’s appreciation of them. Aside from music and perhaps architecture, his response to the arts appears more intellectual, more rational, more studied than sensuous. His knowledge came not from experience but from books. And because he had more books than anyone else, he took pride in knowing what others didn’t know. Nothing pleased him more than to draw up a list of books for a young person eager to learn what was the best in the world. Even his fascination with the supposed poet Ossian from the third century AD seems studied and strained. Although critics were accusing the presumed translator, James Macpherson, of fraud, of composing the poetry himself, Jefferson was convinced that “this rude bard of the North [was] the greatest poet that has ever existed.” Maybe he reached this extraordinary judgment simply because Dr. William Small, Jefferson’s beloved teacher in college and a classmate of Macpherson, had recommended Ossian to him. But despite the mounting evidence of Macpherson’s duplicity, Jefferson continued to believe that Ossian was genuine.23 When Jefferson went to Europe, he was initially insecure about his taste for art and sought out advice about what paintings should be properly appreciated. When he returned to America, however, he had acquired enough confidence in his taste to see himself as a kind of impresario for the new nation, the connoisseur rescuing his countrymen from barbarism. Once he had acquired the best and finest of European culture, with his easy, genial manner he could graciously impress people with the extent of his knowledge and taste. Unlike Adams, however, he never bothered to describe his feelings about any of the masterpieces that he had had copied in Europe and had brought home to Virginia; it was enough to own them.24
ALTHOUGH ADAMS WAS VISUALLY SENSITIVE to works of art, they were never foremost in his thinking. As he explained to Abigail in 1780, it was “not indeed the fine Arts, which our Country requires.” Since America was “a young Country, as yet simple and not far advanced in
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Luxury,” it was “the mechanic Arts” that were most needed. Jefferson wanted the mechanic arts developed too, but he also believed that if America was to escape its barbarism, it had to acquire the arts and sciences without any delay whatsoever. By contrast, Adams thought it would take time—several generations at least. America first needed to defeat the British and get its governments in order before it could begin to acquire the arts and sciences. It was his duty to begin the process, “to study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy . . . Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce, and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”25
Because he saw the arts and sciences developing through several generations, Adams, unlike Jefferson, had little immediate interest in the natural sciences, mathematics, or meteorology; and he was not inclined to practice scientific agriculture on his farm in the way Jefferson tried to do.26 In fact, the only science that truly fascinated Adams was the one he dedicated his life to—the “Divine Science of Politicks.” He realized, as he told Benjamin Franklin, that this “Science of Government” was many centuries behind the other sciences; but since it was “the first in Importance,” he hoped that eventually “it may overtake the rest, and that Mankind may find their Account in it.”27
Perhaps because of their different sensibilities, the two men had different feelings about the role of religion in society. Jefferson was about as secular-minded on religious matters as eighteenth-century America allowed. Except for his many affirmations of religious freedom, he claimed that “I rarely permit myself to speak” on the subject of religion, and then “never but in a reasonable society,” meaning only among friends who shared his derisive views of organized religion.28 He had little or no emotional commitment to any religion and usually referred to the different religious faiths as “religious opinions,” as if one could pick them up and discard them at will. Although both Jefferson and Adams denied the miracles of
the Bible and the divinity of Christ, Adams always retained a respect for the religiosity of people that Jefferson never had; in fact, Jefferson tended in private company to mock religious feelings.
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JEFFERSON AND ADAMS HAD DIFFERENT ranges of knowledge and different sensibilities, but what more than anything else distinguished the two patriots from each other were the backgrounds and environments in which they were raised. Both men knew this, and Jefferson actually voiced it when he told Adams that their differences of opinion about important matters were probably “produced by a difference of character in those among whom we live.”29
The environments in which they were raised were profoundly different. Jefferson’s Virginia was not only the oldest British colony in North America, but the largest in territory and the richest and most populous. In 1760 it had a population of 340,000. Most important, 40 percent of that population—136,000—constituted the labor force of black slaves.
Adams’s Massachusetts was the second-oldest colony, and with a population on the eve of the Revolution of about 280,000, it was close to being the second most populous one, just behind Pennsylvania, with both far behind Virginia. Out of the Massachusetts population, fewer than 5,000 were African slaves. Nothing distinguished the societies of the two places from each other more than this fact.
Jefferson was raised and lived with slaves all around him. Slavery was woven into the fabric of Virginia life and could scarcely have been evaded. Jefferson’s earliest memory, according to family lore, was being carried at age three or so on a pillow by a mounted slave from his father’s home, Shadwell, in western Virginia to Tuckahoe, a Randolph plantation on the James River. Since the Randolphs were one of the most distinguished families in Virginia, by marrying Jane Randolph in 1742, Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, a surveyor and substantial planter, gained for his family extensive and influential
connections that otherwise would not have been possible. Young Jefferson grew up in a privileged aristocratic world; and yet he tended to deny that he belonged to that world and indeed during the heady days of the Revolution he tried to change that world.
Virginia was largely rural, with very few towns. Its economy was dependent on production of a staple crop—tobacco—that had direct markets in Britain and that required a minimum of distribution and handling. This was why towns in Virginia were so few and far between. When on the eve of the Revolution some of the planters in the upper South turned to the production of wheat and other grains, which had diverse markets that required special handling and distribution centers, towns such as Norfolk and Baltimore suddenly emerged to market the grain. Still, Virginia’s society remained overwhelmingly rural and agricultural, dominated by slavery.
Although it was slavery more than anything else that separated Virginia from Massachusetts, Jefferson could at times be amazingly blind to that fact. He knew there were great differences between the people of the North and those in the South, but he attributed these differences mostly to differences of climate. In 1785 he outlined to a French friend his sense of the sectional differences. The northerners were “cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others, interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion.” By contrast, said Jefferson, the southerners were “fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, [and] without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.” Jefferson implied that there was an intimate connection between the southerners’ zeal for liberty and their capacity to trample on the liberty of others.30
By the end of their lives, the distinction between Adams’s Massachusetts and Jefferson’s Virginia had become ever more glaring. When Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge moved north in 1825 with her husband, Joseph, she was immediately struck by the vast difference between New England and her native Virginia. She marveled at the “multitude of beautiful villages” in
