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  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.

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  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 gramma
r 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

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  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

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  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

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  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 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 develo
ping 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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