Friends Divided Read online

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  BY CONTRAST, Jefferson never felt snubbed in his life, or if he had, he would never have admitted it. And except perhaps when he went to France, he was never overawed by wealth and elegance in the way Adams was. Jefferson was certainly impressed by French culture, especially in the fine arts, but he never expressed such wide-eyed wonder at the world as Adams did. He was too self-confident and felt too cosmopolitan for that.

  Even as a young man, Jefferson was the connoisseur informing his college friends what was to be considered fine in the world and what was to be dismissed as “indifferent,” one of his favorite words of derision. Jefferson told his friends in 1766 that he planned to visit England, but instead at age twenty-three he took a grand tour up the Atlantic seaboard as far north as New York. In Philadelphia he had an introduction from his friend John Page to visit Dr. John Morgan and get inoculated for smallpox. Morgan had an excellent collection of copies of artworks that much impressed young Jefferson.77

  When he toured Maryland, he was quick to condemn the parochialism and backwardness of his fellow colonials. On his visit to Annapolis, which he sarcastically called “this Metropolis,” he described to Page the crude behavior of the colony’s assembly. The old courthouse in which the colonial assembly met, “judging from it’s form and appearance, was built in the year one.” Its members made “as great a noise and hubbub as you will usually observe at a publick meeting of the planters in Virginia. . . . The mob (for such was their appearance) . . . were divided into little clubs amusing themselves in the common chit chat way.” The speaker was “a little old man dressed but indifferently” who had “very little the air of a speaker.” The clerk of the assembly read “a bill then before the houses with a schoolboy tone and an abrupt pause at every half dozen words.” The assemblymen addressed the speaker without rising, spoke “three, four, and five at a time without being checked,” shouted out their votes chaotically, and, in short, seemed unaware of the proper or usual forms of conducting a legislature. Doing things properly and in the right manner was important to Jefferson.78

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  MORE THAN OTHER LEADERS of his generation, Jefferson became fascinated with politeness, the ways in which men and women treated one another. In an important sense politeness, broadly conceived, was central to the Enlightenment, at least in the English-speaking world. The Enlightenment represented not just the spread of science, liberty, or self-government—important as those were—but also the spread of civility or what came to be called civilization.

  Everywhere in the Western world people were making tiny, piecemeal assaults on the crudity and barbarism of the past. Everywhere in small, seemingly insignificant, ways, life was being made sociable, more refined, more comfortable, more enjoyable. Sometimes the contributions to civilization of improvements were quite palpable and material—with the addition of “conveniences,” “decencies,” or “comforts,” as they were called. Did people eat with knives and forks instead of with their hands? Did they sleep on feather mattresses instead of straw? Did they drink out of china cups instead of wooden vessels? These were signs of prosperity, of happiness, of civilization. Jefferson believed that to know the real state of a society’s enlightenment one “must ferret the people out of their hovels, . . . look into their kettle, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretence of resting yourself, but in fact to find out if they are soft.”79

  But most important to Jefferson was the spread of civility, the social and moral behavior of people. People were more benevolent, conversations were more polite, manners were more gracious, than they had been in the past. Everywhere there were more courtesies, amenities, civilities—all designed to add to the sum of human happiness. Not talking loudly in company, not interrupting others’ conversation, not cleaning one’s teeth at the table, were small matters perhaps, but in the aggregate they seemed to be what made human sociability and civility possible. “Human Felicity,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, “is produc’d not so much by great Pieces of good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day.”80 People realized that all those seemingly trivial improvements in social behavior were contributions to civilization, and hence to enlightenment.

  In 1808, after nearly a lifetime of experience, Jefferson knew how to get along with people, even people who were irascible and unfriendly. He advised his grandson that being good-humored was one of the most important sources of sociability. When combined with politeness, it became invaluable. “In truth,” he said, “politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.” Politeness meant “sacrificing to those we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them.” It meant “giving a pleasure and flattering turn to our expressions which will conciliate others, and make them pleased with us as well as themselves.” It also meant “never entering into dispute or argument with another.” He told his grandson, “Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics.”81

  Such politeness—such an acute sensitivity to the feelings of others and a keen desire not to offend—was the secret of much of Jefferson’s success in life. But since his polite words and his artificial good-humored behavior to people could never be an accurate expression of his real feelings, he was always open to accusations of duplicity and deceit. His politeness was a double-edged sword: it cut both ways.

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  JEFFERSON’S ADVICE ON how to win friends and influence people did not have much appeal for a pugnacious John Adams. He had become a gentleman, to be sure, and he tried to behave properly, and when he got to know someone well and felt secure with him, he could be extremely amiable; but, as he often lamented, he knew he had some rough edges and he knew he lacked the gift of silence. He had none of Jefferson’s sophistication, self-confidence, and sense of restraint. He was, as his physician friend Dr. Benjamin Rush described him, “fearless of men and of the consequences of a bold assertion of opinion in all his speeches.” He had a sharp, sarcastic tongue, and he used it often, sometimes in the presence of the recipient of his derision. In the Congress in 1777, he even publicly took on “the veneration which is paid to General Washington.” Adams was not taken with politeness and hiding his feelings. “He was,” as Rush put it, “a stranger to dissimulation”—the very characteristic Jefferson was often accused of having.82

  These two men were so different from each other. How could they ever have become friends?

  TWO

  CAREERS, WIVES, AND OTHER WOMEN

  REARED BY THE RANDOLPHS, Jefferson had no doubt that he would go to college. His maternal grandfather, Isham Randolph, and that grandfather’s five brothers had attended the colony’s college, which had been founded in 1693, the second college after Harvard in the North American colonies. Therefore it was natural that Jefferson would likewise attend the College of William and Mary, as he did in 1760, at age seventeen.

  The situation at the college was not conducive to learning. The faculty was largely composed of Anglican clergymen who were embroiled in controversy. But fortunately for Jefferson the professor of natural philosophy, William Small, was not a clergyman. Small took Jefferson under his wing and opened his mind to the world of mathematics, science, and the liberal arts. Later Jefferson recalled that he had studied hard and read industriously under Small’s influence. He believed that this Scottish professor had fixed the destiny of his life.

  Yet based on the few surviving letters of Jefferson’s college years, all of his time was scarcely spent studying. Jefferson immediately found friends and mingled easily with the sons of the great families of Virginia. John Page of Rosewell, the largest and one of the grandest houses in the colony, became his closest companion. He and Page became members of the Flat Hat Society, America’s oldest collegiate fraternity, fou
nded at William and Mary in 1750. The society committed itself to friendship, mirth, learning, and perhaps, most important, holding parties in the taverns of Williamsburg. Although Jefferson had a reputation for burying his head in a book, he and his college friends obviously spent a good deal of time dancing and flirting with the young women of the colony. From the evidence in his early letters it seems that he and his close-knit social circle did little else but gossip about courtships and marriage.

  One surviving letter, however, which was only recently discovered, reveals that the young student was thinking about some serious matters. He was interested in spiritual speculations and asked a friend when exactly he thought the soul departed from the body—an ancient issue that had fascinated even Homer. Jefferson was anxious that the “doubts” he had of the traditional religious opinion that the soul left the body at the instant of death might come to light and “do injustice to a man’s moral principles in the eyes of persons of narrow and confined views.” Consequently, to keep prying eyes from discovering their thoughts, he suggested that the two friends not address their letters or sign them.1

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH ADAMS AS A BOY may have expressed some doubts about attending college, he seems to have readily adapted to Harvard. The early entries to his diary, which he began at college in the early 1750s, were perfunctory, usually describing the weather. Although every once in a while he offered his thoughts on a chemistry experiment or a professor’s lecture, he said nothing about his social life. In 1753, in one of his fullest entries, he briefly described a trip he and a cousin, a young preacher named Ebenezer Adams, took to New Hampshire, apparently the first time the undergraduate had traveled any distance. Only later, in 1821, did he fill out his memory of the trip. He recalled visiting the Reverend Joseph Whipple in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. After dinner Parson Whipple invited Adams and his cousin to have a smoke in another room. Whipple’s wife came in the room, “lifted up her hands and cried out” that she was “astonished to see that pretty little boy with a pipe in his mouth smoking that nasty poisonous tobacco.” She said she couldn’t “bear the sight.” But young Adams was not about to give up his pipe. “I was as bashful and timorous as a girl,” he remembered, “but resented so being called a little boy at 15 or 16 years of age and as stout as her husband, that I determined not to be frightened out of my pipe.”2

  Only after Adams had graduated from Harvard in 1755 did he begin to reveal to his diary his innermost thoughts and feelings, and then they came in torrents, and for good reason. Both he and Jefferson faced major issues upon leaving college: What career to follow and when and whom to marry?

  In college Adams initially thought he might follow his father’s wishes and become a minister, a career that was inconceivable for Jefferson. Adams, unlike Jefferson, had a strong religious sensibility, and “my Inclination I think was to preach.”3 He paid close attention to the debates taking place in Massachusetts over the strictness of traditional Calvinist determinism and its emphasis on original sin and the depravity of all humanity. While at college, he later told Jefferson, he thought he was “a Mighty Metaphis[ic]ian,” and his friends “thought me so too; for We were forever disputing, though in great good humor.” In order to impress them on his mind, he copied out in longhand various tracts and sermons, especially the popular writings of Dr. John Tillotson, the liberal late-seventeenth-century Anglican clergyman who had softened the harshness of orthodox Calvinism. Adams clearly responded to Tillotson’s sermons, which were probably the most widely read religious writings in America during the first half of the eighteenth century. In place of what he called the “Frigid John Calvin,” Adams came to favor a latitudinarian Congregationalism that played down the divinity of Christ and stressed the individual’s moral agency in bringing about a better world.4 But could he become a clergyman?

  In his diary and letters to classmates, Adams expressed his mixed emotions over a possible career. Whatever he did, he said, had to be moral and uplifting. “Our proper business in Life,” he wrote in 1756, “is not to accumulate large Fortunes, not to gain high Honours and important offices in the State, not to waste our Health and Spirits in Pursuit of the Sciences, but constantly to improve ourselves in Habits of Piety and Virtue.”5 Becoming a clergyman would accomplish that and please his father. But, as he recalled in his autobiography, he came to realize that the study of theology and becoming a minister “would involve me in endless Altercations and make my Life miserable, without any prospect of doing any good to my fellow Men.”6

  The law was tempting and offered the possibility of fame, of making a name for himself. But could that career be reconciled with habits of virtue and piety? “The Study and Practice of Law, I am sure,” he wrote, “does not dissolve the obligations of morality or of Religion.”7 Besides, as he told a classmate in 1756, a career in law had its own problems of altercation. Not only did the law involve “fumbling and raking amidst the rubbish of Writs, indightments, Pleas, ejectments, enfiefed, illatebration and 1000 other lignum Vitae words that have neither harmony nor meaning,” but it “often foments more quarrells” than it composes. The law seemed to end up enriching the lawyers “at the expense of impoverishing others more honest and deserving.”8 Uncertain of what to do, twenty-year-old Adams accepted a temporary post as a schoolmaster in Worcester.

  After nearly two years of teaching, Adams finally contracted with James Putnam in Worcester to begin an apprenticeship in the law. “The study of Law,” he told his Harvard classmate Charles Cushing, did have the advantage of being “an Avenue to the more important offices of the state, and the happiness of human Society is an object worth the pursuit of any man.” But to Cushing at least, he played down the likelihood of this avenue opening up to him. “The Acquisition of these important offices depends upon [so] many Circumstances of Birth and fortune, not to mention Capacity, which I have not, that I can have no hopes of Being Usefull that way.” Later in his life he told Cushing’s son that what he had really wanted to do in 1756 was enlist in the army. Only the lack of influence and patronage, he said, had prevented him from becoming a soldier.9

  Adams was confident enough of his legal abilities that he turned down an offer to practice law in Worcester. Instead in 1758 he moved back to Braintree and the possibility of practicing law in the wider arena of Boston. He met with several senior Boston attorneys, including Jeremiah Gridley, the dean of the Boston bar. Gridley advised him not to marry too early and to avoid too much socializing, which would keep him from his law books. Most important, Gridley said, was “to pursue the Study of the Law rather than the Gain of it.” But Adams was already reading philosophical works that were well beyond what other aspiring lawyers were reading. Adams knew what Gridley was getting at, for even before he met Gridley he had criticized a distant relative for his want of ambition in his legal career. “He is negligent of the Theory of his Profession, and will live and die unknown.—These driveling souls, oh! He aims not at fame, only at a Living and fortune.” He criticized others too who were without “Courage enough to harbor a Thought of acquiring a great Character.” 10

  Adams knew he was different from these other lawyers. He had the capacity for “hard study” and the passion for fame that the others lacked. His ambition was palpable. He desperately wanted to succeed in life, but could he do so in a manner worthy of that success? “Men of the most exalted Genius and active minds,” he said, “are generally perfect slaves to the Love of Fame.” He aspired to be one of those men of genius, but he mistrusted the pride that fed that desire. He knew that “the greatest men have been the most envious, malicious, and revengeful.”11

  Knowing something of Adams’s ambitions, his friend Jonathan Sewall playfully held up the example of Cicero to him. As “Cicero’s Name has been handed down thro’ many Ages,” he told Adams, “so may yours.” It wasn’t Cicero’s offices or orations that created his fame. Fame, said Sewall, came when “a Man’s Worth riseth in proportion to the Gre
atness of his Country.” Perhaps it will happen to you, he told Adams in 1760. “Who knows but in future Ages, when New England shall have risen to its intended Grandeur, it shall be as carefully recorded among the Registrars of the Leterati, that Adams flourished in the second Century after the Exode of its first Settlers from Great Britain, as it is now, that Cicero was born in the Six-Hundred & Forty-Seventh Year after the Building of Rome.”12

  Adams replied that he was willing to join Sewall in “renouncing the reasoning of some of our last Letters”—all those fanciful expressions of youthful yearning. He admitted that he expected “to be totally forgotten within 70 Years of the present Hour.” Nevertheless, he did not want to end up as one of “the common Herd of Mankind, who are to be born and eat and sleep and die, and be forgotten.” As poor as his future possibilities seemed in 1760, he said that he was “not ashamed to own that a Prospect of an Immortality in the Memories of all the Worthy, to [the] end of Time would be a high Gratification of my Wishes.”13

  Adams hoped that once he had acquired not just expertise in the various kinds of law—natural, civil, common, and provincial—but also familiarity with the poetry, history, and oratory in Greek, Latin, French, and English, great results would follow. All this “critical Knowledge . . . will draw upon me the Esteem and perhaps Admiration, (tho possibly the Envy too) of the Judges of both Courts, of the Lawyers and of Juries, who will spread my Fame thro the Province.” Still, were his motives in pursuing his legal career pure and proper? “Am I grasping at Money, or Scheming for Power? Am I planning the Illustration of my Family or the Welfare of my Country? These are great Questions,” he said, and they were questions that he continually asked himself.14