Friends Divided Read online

  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)

  PENGUIN PRESS

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  New York, New York 10014

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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

  PROLOGUE

  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 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 comm
ittee 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 we
ll-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