The Highest Calling, page 6
DR: Let’s talk about Adams and Jefferson. They both died on July the 4th, 1826, exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. They died within five hours of each other. What did people say about it?
GW: Most people thought it was providential, and they certainly thought it was too coincidental. It simply was beyond their imaginations. And of course there was a little maneuvering. They knew that they were dying, and they tried to stay alive to make it to the 4th, but they didn’t know—they were 500 miles apart—that each of them was dying on the same day. It was treated by the country as a miracle of some sort, as you can well imagine. It still boggles the mind to think about it.
DR: Jefferson and Adams had a complicated relationship. As history was unfolding, when they both died, who was the greater figure, Adams or Jefferson?
GW: By the time they die, Jefferson is an international superstar. Adams is not. Adams was very jealous of Jefferson. Jefferson had emerged as the author of the Declaration of Independence, and was publicly credited as such, and by the 18-teens, he realized that that Declaration was important to the nation. Indeed, he told his son-in-law to save the desk on which he had written the Declaration. It would become a relic, he said. When he died, he listed on his tombstone “Author of the Declaration” as the first of his three great accomplishments.
Adams is appalled at that idea. Author? He was a draftsman of a committee report! How could he be the author? Poor John Adams never recovered from the acclaim given Jefferson for the writing of the Declaration. He felt that he had given this young Virginian kid the job because he had arrived at the Continental Congress and wasn’t doing anything else in the Congress. Adams was on at least 24 committees and was chairing many of them, including the Board of War—that is, he was managing the war in 1776. It seemed an incidental matter, this drafting of the Declaration, and it contained nothing that was original, as Jefferson himself later admitted. Jefferson said that he simply put down on paper the enlightened conventional wisdom of the day, although he did it with unusual grace. So it’s no wonder that Adams was jealous and upset by the praise Jefferson was getting.
DR: During the Second Continental Congress, when Congress voted to separate from England, on July the 2nd, Adams wrote to his wife. What did he say?
GW: He thought that July 2nd, the day the Congress voted independence, would be the important date and that would be the one celebrated by bonfires and fireworks and so on. Only later did he come to realize that he was mistaken and that the day the Congress accepted the Declaration would be the one the country would celebrate.
DR: When the Declaration was being put together, it was a committee of five people who were assigned to write it. Who were those people?
GW: Roger Sherman (Connecticut), Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania), John Adams (Massachusetts), Robert Livingston (New York), and Thomas Jefferson (Virginia). It was distributed sectionally. They wanted to involve each part of the continental United States.
DR: The most famous line in the Declaration, and perhaps the most famous sentence in the English language, is “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” ending with “all men are created equal.” Did Jefferson really believe all men, or people, were created equal? Did Adams believe that? What did Jefferson mean?
GW: Jefferson believed that all men were created equal, except for Black Africans. He voiced his suspicions about the inferiority of Blacks in the only book he ever wrote, his Notes on Virginia, published in the 1780s. But conventional liberal wisdom, enlightened wisdom, shared by most educated people said that all men, including Africans, were indeed created equal. Most enlightened men believed that everyone was born with the same blank slate on which the environment and experience operating through the senses carved out the different and unequal adult personalities and characters that made up the society. In other words, nurture, not nature, was what mattered. Even a slaveholding Virginian as aristocratic as William Byrd believed that all men, even men of different ethnicities and races, were born equal and that, as Byrd said, “the principal difference between one people and another proceeds only from the different opportunities for improvement.”
Even climate was important in shaping people. Some thought that Africans’ blackness came from their skin being scorched by the hot African sun and that their skin would eventually lighten in the more temperate climate of North America.
This emphasis on the environment operating on the blank slates of newborns and working to distinguish one person from another is something that I think we Americans deeply believe in. We put a lot of stress on education of the young, and despite all the modern talk of DNA and genes, we continue to believe that a proper education and the right upbringing can level out the differences between people. No one believed more devoutly in education than Jefferson.
Although Adams as a young man shared the enlightened belief that all were born equal, he came to believe that any talk of equality was hogwash. He ended up believing that we were born unequal and we remain unequal, and he put very little stock in education. He didn’t repudiate education, but he said, it’s not going to make much difference. He delighted in telling people that when he was in Paris he went to a foundling hospital and saw babies who were less than four days old. Some were smart. Some were stupid. Some were beautiful. Some were ugly. He believed in nature, not nurture. So they differed in that fundamental belief.
In that respect, and in others too, Adams took on the American myth that everyone was equal. The other myth he challenged was American exceptionalism. Jefferson created the idea of American exceptionalism. We are a special country, he said. We have a special role, to bring democracy to the rest of the world. Adams thought that Jefferson’s view of American exceptionalism was crazy. We are just as sinful, just as corrupt, just as vicious as other nations, he said. There’s no special providence for the United States. So Adams is odd in this respect. He challenges these myths by which many Americans currently live. It’s understandable why Jefferson is celebrated and Adams is not.
DR: The Library of Congress has Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration. But the copy that was used by the printer, with the corrections or additions resulting from the internal debate on the Declaration, does not exist any longer. Is that right?
GW: Right.
DR: If you go to the National Archives, you see the Declaration of Independence signed in August, not July. The delegates came back and signed it in August of 1776. Later it was fading so much that John Quincy Adams, as secretary of state, wanted everybody to see what the Declaration originally looked like. As a result, 200 perfect copies were made by a printing process that took a lot of the ink off the original. When the New York Times on the 4th of July runs a copy of the Declaration of Independence, what you’re seeing is a copy of a so-called Stone copy, named for Willian Stone, the printer. Now there are maybe 40 to 50 Stone copies left. The original broadside printed after the text was agreed to by the delegates of the Second Continental Congress and given to people in July of 1776 is called a Dunlap copy. Dunlaps were printed on July the 5th and those broadsides were the document sent to George Washington to read to the troops, to each of the colonies, and to King George. (There are about 25 Dunlap copies extant.)
Back to Adams and Jefferson. Let’s talk about their background briefly. Jefferson was from a wealthy family, Adams from not a wealthy family?
GW: Jefferson inherited slaves and land from his father but also many more slaves and land from his father-in-law, so he became one of the wealthiest members of the Virginia aristocracy. Adams was different. He came from a middling background, and the wealth that he acquired came almost entirely from his law practice. He was a very successful attorney, certainly the most successful attorney in Boston by 1770. He was the top lawyer in the colony of Massachusetts.
DR: Who was the better writer?
GW: It depends on what you want to read. Adams’s diary is unbelievably rich and is well worth reading. There is nothing like it from Jefferson. But in their public documents, Adams is turgid and heavy and Jefferson is smooth and graceful. So Jefferson is by far the better stylist in public writings.
DR: Who was the better talker?
GW: Adams. Jefferson was not good at public speaking, and he did not speak in public very often. Adams did, and he was the leading advocate for independence in the Congress. That’s why the two men bonded, because they were both radicals in favor of independence. Jefferson became ill and couldn’t make the First Continental Congress, but he sent a document along that was published without his approval. This Summary View of the Rights of British Americans (1774) became the most radical pamphlet written by any American until Thomas Paine’s Common Sense two years later. So when Jefferson showed up in the Second Continental Congress, Adams knew he had a fellow radical, and one who could write well. They bonded in their enthusiasm for breaking from the British.
DR: At that time, who was more famous?
GW: Adams was by far more famous.
DR: And Adams was roughly seven years older?
GW: Eight years older. He treated Jefferson as a kind of son, a protégé, and Jefferson played that role. That made the friendship work.
DR: The first time they ever met was during the Second Continental Congress. They had never met before.
GW: That’s right.
DR: After the Declaration of Independence is issued and we go to war, what does each man do?
GW: Adams went abroad as a diplomatic commissioner in Paris to try to negotiate peace and also to raise money from the Dutch for the war effort. Jefferson went back to Virginia. He retired, and his Virginian colleagues don’t understand what he’s doing. He claimed that he had to study philosophy. It was more important than public service. But then his colleagues elected him governor to get him back into politics, and his governorship was something of a disaster. He was actually censured by the legislature of Virginia. It’s an embarrassing moment, the most embarrassing moment in his career. So he’s only reluctantly brought back into government while Adams is abroad. When Jefferson’s wife dies, he’s free to go abroad, himself, and he joined Adams in the early 1780s as a commissioner to arrange treaties of trade with the various European states.
DR: Jefferson’s wife dies when Jefferson is 39 years old, and he then goes to Europe. Both he and Adams are in France with Benjamin Franklin. What are they all doing there?
GW: The treaty of peace has already been signed by the time Jefferson gets to Paris. The commissioners had been assigned by the Congress to negotiate treaties of commerce with various states in Europe. The Americans, especially Jefferson, have a very naïve notion of the willingness of European nations to open their borders to free trade and the free movement of people. Jefferson is an enlightened radical. He wants open borders. He wants to do away with monarchy, because monarchs were the source of war and republics were naturally pacific. Although Adams had written the model treaty which the commissioners were supposed to promote, he had become increasingly conservative and doubtful of their mission. “No facts are believed, but defensive military conquests,” he said. “No arguments are attended to in Europe but force.” He would be a hard-liner in the context of our politics now. By contrast, Jefferson was the ultraliberal, dreaming of revolutions overthrowing monarchs everywhere and people opening up their states to everyone.
DR: Under the Articles of Confederation, Adams becomes our ambassador to England?
GW: Not ambassador, but minister to Great Britain, the former mother country. We didn’t have ambassadors until the 1880s. We sent only ministers abroad. We thought the rank of ambassador was too expensive. Having the lesser rank of minister was often embarrassing to our diplomats.
DR: Did King George receive him?
GW: He did receive him. Adams made a wonderful speech about how much he loved England and its constitution. But he told George III that he was now a patriotic American. The king responded warmly, telling Adams that he was impressed by his devotion to his country. Later, Jefferson joined Adams for a little vacation in England, and the two of them attended the king’s court, where we’re told King George turned his back on them.
DR: Jefferson and Adams at that time were close?
GW: Very close.
DR: Ultimately the Constitutional Convention is held. Jefferson and Adams are still overseas?
GW: They’re abroad.
DR: So they have nothing to do with the Constitution.
GW: Except indirectly. Adams in 1776 had written his Thoughts on Government that had a profound effect on the state constitution-making in 1776–77. These state constitutions create separation of powers which barred members of the legislature from holding executive office, the prerequisite for parliamentary cabinet government. Adams believed in checks and balances. In some respects these revolutionary state constitutions are more important than the later federal Constitution, which was derived from them. Adams also wrote an earlier document, the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which created a strong senate and a governor who had a limited veto. Adams wanted an absolute veto, but the limited veto that could be overridden by two-thirds of the legislature is adopted by the Constitutional Convention in 1787. So Adams is very important in constitution-making. Although he was not physically present, he had an influence on the people in Philadelphia in’87.
DR: While Adams is liking the British constitution and many of the checks and balances there, Jefferson falls in love with France?
GW: Jefferson was a complete Francophile, and he was totally supportive of the French Revolution in all of its stages. As the minister to France, he committed all kinds of improprieties. With French radical aristocrats plotting changes in France’s constitution, Jefferson as the American minister got involved. He invited the liberal French aristocrats to his quarters where they sit around and plot revolution. This activity is very inappropriate for a minister from another country, to say the least, and Jefferson has to apologize to the French foreign minister for his behavior. He became an enthusiast for the French Revolution, naïvely thinking it was over with the fall of the Bastille. But he came to accept the Terror of 1793 as a necessary stage in the Revolution.
Adams is doubtful of the French from the beginning. He predicted that the Revolution would be a disaster. The French, he thought, weren’t up to democracy or republicanism. And of course Adams turns out to be more correct than Jefferson.
DR: Speaking of improprieties, at this point Jefferson has his youngest daughter sent to France. Who brought her over?
GW: Sally Hemings is supposed to be attending her. She’s only about fourteen at this point, in charge of a nine-year-old. I accept the argument that Annette Gordon-Reed has made—a sophisticated argument, very persuasive—that Sally became Thomas Jefferson’s concubine. Sally’s brother James accompanied her with the aim of learning how to become a French chef in order to make French food for Mr. Jefferson at Monticello. But both siblings realize they could walk out and be free in France, where there was no basis for slavery. Under that threat, James Hemings agrees to go back with Jefferson to America and train another slave in French cooking if in return Jefferson would free him. The agreement worked out and Jefferson did indeed free James. According to the later account of one of Sally’s children, Jefferson made the same type of deal with Sally. In return for her becoming Jefferson’s concubine, her children would be freed when they reached maturity. Jefferson fulfilled that bargain too. It was not a love relationship. It seems to have been strictly a physical relationship to meet Jefferson’s sexual needs, a tough relationship.
Jefferson certainly didn’t treat Sally’s children (his children) with any kindness or affection. When the children were born, he entered their births in his Farm Book as “child born of Sally Hemings.” These births were listed along with the births of new heifers and new hogs. As the children later lamented, Jefferson paid no attention to his offspring. This was unusual, because many of the other planters who had mixed-race offspring often gave them gifts at Christmas and showed them some kind of attention and affection. Jefferson did none of that. For him the relationship seems to have simply been physical.
DR: The Constitution is ratified. George Washington is elected president of the United States. Who’s elected vice president?
GW: Adams. He was the most famous Northerner. And since the electors could not vote for more than one person from a state, they couldn’t vote for both Jefferson and Washington, so Adams is elected as vice president.
DR: Does he think he’s deserving of that position?
GW: Oh, yes. He understood that Washington had a superior rank in the eyes of the public, but he thought he was second in status.
DR: What about Jefferson? What happens to him?
GW: Jefferson was appointed secretary of state by Washington even before he arrived back from France. He was surprised because he thought he was coming back to the States for just a short time and would return to France. Alexander Hamilton was appointed secretary of the Treasury, a more powerful office in Washington’s administration. That’s one other thing that Jefferson and Adams later had in common—their bitter hatred of Alexander Hamilton.
DR: When Adams is vice president, he’s presiding over the Senate. Does he spend a lot of time doing that? Does he spend a lot of time in Washington?
GW: He took being president of the Senate very seriously. Unlike vice presidents today, who occasionally show up in the Senate to cast a tiebreaking vote, Adams not only voted in many cases where there were ties, but he participated fully in the debates. He was very eager to have a monocratic-type title given to the president, something like “His Benign Highness.”
