In ‘Friends Divided,’ John Adams and Thomas Jefferson Beg to Differ
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Version 0 of 1. FRIENDS DIVIDEDJohn Adams and Thomas JeffersonBy Gordon S. WoodIllustrated. 502 pp. Penguin Press. $35. Thomas Jefferson, describing John Adams in a letter, wrote, “He is so amiable, that I pronounce you will love him if you ever become acquainted with him.” The feeling was mutual. “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him,” Adams said when he was an old man. Their friendship lasted (with interruptions) for 51 years, from their meeting in 1775 in the Continental Congress to their deaths on the same day, July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Gordon S. Wood, the Alva O. Way university professor at Brown, who has been writing history as long as Jefferson and Adams knew each other, examines their relationship in “Friends Divided.” There was ample potential for division in this romance. Jefferson was a Virginia aristocrat whose first election to the colonial legislature at age 26 was an easy trot to home plate from third base. Adams, the son of a farmer/shoemaker, thrust himself into the Massachusetts elite by unremitting application as a lawyer and activist. Although both men deplored slavery, Jefferson owned slaves all his life, while Adams never owned any. As an intellectual, Jefferson was a water-strider, skimming over every subject; Adams bored into history. Jefferson wrote for the ages; Adams admitted, “I have never had time to make my poor productions shorter.” Jefferson was shy, gracious and smooth. Adams was warm and ardent with friends, prickly and argumentative with rivals (and friends). Politics brought them together, as radical representatives of the two most radical American colonies at the dawn of the Revolution. Adams was the workhorse of the Continental Congress, laboring on committees and making the case for independence in speeches. Jefferson, a quieter presence, was assigned to put America’s principles and grievances on paper; his stylistic gifts (and some tough editing by his colleagues) made an immortal document. As the Revolutionary struggle ground on, Adams was dispatched to Europe as a diplomat while Jefferson served as governor of Virginia. But in the 1780s the victorious new nation wanted Jefferson’s services as a diplomat too, and the patriots were reunited in Paris and London. There Jefferson, recently widowed, befriended Adams’s formidable wife, Abigail. He talked politics with her and became her personal shopper, informing her that when buying figurines for her dining room he passed on one of Venus because “I thought it out of taste to have two at table at the same time.” Although both men were abroad when the Constitution was written and ratified, each did well under the new system, Adams being elected the first vice president in 1789, and Jefferson becoming the first secretary of state the following year. But in the 1790s their friendship buckled, and finally shattered. Mere ambition would have split them. Everyone assumed that George Washington would be president as long as he wanted the job. But after he retired, only one man could take his place. There was also an issue that separated the two friends: the revolution in America’s sometime ally France (the Bastille fell three months after Washington’s first inauguration). Jefferson thought the French Revolution was glorious: “Rather than it should have failed,” he wrote, “I would have seen half the earth desolated.” Adams thought it was doomed from the start: “To think of Reinstituting Republics … would be to revive Confusion and Carnage, which must again End in despotism.” America’s first two-party system — Jefferson’s Republicans versus Adams’s Federalists — coalesced in part around these opposing estimates of revolutionary France. In the first Washington-less presidential election, in 1796, Adams edged Jefferson by only three electoral votes (which, under the electoral system of the day, made Jefferson vice president). Four years later, in a contest marked by grotesque vituperation, Jefferson beat Adams. Adams refused to attend his successor’s inauguration. Silence fell between the two men. Abigail sent Jefferson a letter of condolence after the death of his daughter Polly in 1804, but their tentative correspondence almost immediately went nuclear. Friendship was finally restored through the efforts of Benjamin Rush, a colleague from the Continental Congress, who conducted a two-year campaign of exhortation, flattery and guile. Among Rush’s stratagems was telling Adams that he had had a dream in which Adams broke the ice by writing Jefferson. Adams finally did so on New Year’s Day, 1812. Enemies no more, the two corresponded until the end. This is an engrossing story, which Wood tells with a mastery of detail and a modern plainness of expression that makes a refreshing contrast with the 18th-century locutions of his subjects. Critiquing one of Adams’s involved and pedantic arguments, Wood says simply, “No one could understand what he meant.” What does their friendship mean to us after almost 200 years? Wood finds relevance in one of their most arcane interests, political theory. Adams, taught by his wide reading of history and his struggles as a sharp-elbowed outsider, held grim views of humanity and politics. Inequality was baked into human nature: Some were born rich, others smart, still others beautiful. Those who enjoyed these advantages were aristocrats, who would ever seek to cement their power as oligarchs. The march to oligarchy would happen here: There was “no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others,” Adams warned. Only a strong, nonpartisan executive could keep grasping aristos in line. Jefferson, by contrast, projected hope. He admitted that humans differed in their abilities — most notoriously in his discussion of slavery in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” which stinks of pseudoscientific racism. Yet at the same time he believed that all people, including blacks, possessed a moral sense, which he defined as “a love of others” and “a sense of duty to them.” The virtual universality of the moral sense made democracy practical, since everyone had the capacity to make the most important judgments. “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor,” Jefferson wrote; “the former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.” Adams’s fascination with oligarchy prefigures the concerns of sociologists as different as Karl Marx, David Brooks and Donald Trump (drain the swamp). Wood acknowledges the force of Adams’s fears. He also clearly admires him as a contrarian: “In all of American history, no political leader of Adams’s stature, and certainly no president, has ever so emphatically denied the belief in American exceptionalism.” Jefferson he finds too sunny for this world. “He was the pure American innocent,” Wood says. “He had little understanding of man’s capacity for evil and had no tragic sense whatsoever.” In the end, however, Wood, almost against his inclinations, declares Jefferson the winner of this philosophical smack-down. The proof of the theory is in the eating. Jefferson explained, as well as anyone, how democracy could work; since America has endured, it is at least possible that Jefferson was right. Jefferson’s power as a poet and sloganeer also makes us want him, and America, to be right. Wood sums up: “Despite or perhaps because of his innocence and naïve optimism, he offered his fellow Americans a set of stirring ideals that has carried them and their country through all of their many ordeals.” Adams’s reputed last words may be the last word: Unaware that Jefferson had died only five hours earlier, he murmured, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” |