The Highest Calling, page 7
DR: What does Jefferson do that begins the end of his relationship, for a while, with Adams?
GW: He’s sparring with Hamilton in Washington’s cabinet at the very time he was emerging as the leader of an opposition group organized by Jefferson’s close friend James Madison. It was a republican interest at first, and then it became a Republican Party contesting the administration of the Federalists. By 1792, Jefferson’s position as the leader of the Republican opposition while sitting in Washington’s cabinet became impossible, and he finally resigned and returned to Monticello.
DR: Before it became impossible, was he not hiring agents to write negative articles about George Washington?
GW: He hired the poet Philip Freneau to organize a newspaper in opposition to the Federalist-dominated newspaper. Jefferson plotted with Madison to oppose the Federalist government, which he sincerely believed was being run by Hamilton and his fellow monocrats that were trying to reverse the Revolution and take us back to something resembling the English monarchy. To him it’s a very frightening prospect.
DR: So he resigns as secretary of state and he goes back to Monticello and starts writing letters. Then George Washington decides after two terms he’s had enough, and an election is held. Who is the favorite candidate?
GW: Adams beat Jefferson in the presidential election of 1796, but he won by only three electoral votes, which he found horribly humiliating. Adams expected to get the kind of unanimity that Washington had gotten. Washington of course is the only president who has received all possible electoral votes. Adams saw himself as the heir to the throne, as it were, and he expected to come into the presidency with the same kind of strength and acclaim as Washington had. He’s appalled that he only beat Jefferson by three votes. In those days, the person who came in second in electoral votes became vice president. So we had the curious situation of a president who was a Federalist and a vice president who was a Republican, the leader of the opposition party. Because parties weren’t really acceptable yet, the Federalists never saw themselves as a party; they were just the administration. Jefferson, however, did see himself as leading a party, but it was just a temporary one that would go out of existence once the monocrats were eliminated. It was a very unusual situation.
DR: As vice president, does Jefferson preside over the Senate? Does he stay in Monticello? Does he talk to Adams much?
GW: He sometimes talked to Adams, but the relationship was very cool. Jefferson thought that his being vice president might be good for the country. People were tense and anxious about having the party division and yearned for harmony and stability. Parties suggested partiality and were not what people had expected. Many hoped that the two revolutionaries who had once been friends might somehow collaborate and bring the country together. Jefferson actually wanted to reconcile the parties, and he drafted a letter to Adams suggesting something along the lines of a collaboration. He showed the draft to Madison, who advised Jefferson not to send the letter. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, said Madison, and if the situation became more divisive, the letter could become embarrassing. So Jefferson never sent the letter, and the two former friends remain estranged through the whole period.
DR: Adams is getting ready to run for reelection. I presume that he thinks he’s going to win?
GW: Yes; 1798–99 is one of the crucial moments in our history. We came as close to a civil war as we ever have, except for the actual Civil War in 1860. The Federalists thought the French were going to invade the United States, which helps explain the enactment of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The fear was real. The only other time we’ve been so fearful was in 1942, when we thought the Japanese were going to invade the United States. Many otherwise high-minded people, including Earl Warren, attorney general of California, and President Roosevelt, signed off on the internment of over 100,000 Japanese, the majority of whom were American citizens. In explaining the Alien and Sedition Acts we have to understand the real fear of the French invading. Napoleon was setting up puppet republics all over Europe, in the Netherlands, in northern Italy, in Switzerland, and why not the United States? Especially since the French believed that there were all those Republican Party quislings in America who presumably would welcome a French takeover. Fortunately, the British under Admiral Nelson beat Napoleon in the Battle of the Nile in October of 1798, destroying the French fleet. That eliminated the threat, and the whole idea of an invasion collapsed. The United States and France remained in a quasi-war, which Adams courageously sought to end by sending a delegate to negotiate a peace with France. A convention of peace was signed, but word of peace came after the election. Otherwise, I think he might have been reelected.
DR: When you ran for election or reelection in those days, did you campaign?
GW: Neither man left his home. Adams stayed in Quincy, Jefferson stayed at Monticello. They never spoke publicly. But they had followers who spoke for them. The followers expressed a scurrility that has never been matched, attacking each of these men in the press.
DR: Adams loses to Jefferson. They had been great friends, but strained now because one man had defeated another.
GW: Yes. Adams doesn’t show up for the inauguration. He gets on a 4 a.m. stagecoach to Quincy. His son, John Quincy, did not attend the inauguration of his successor, Andrew Jackson.
DR: How long does it take to go by coach to Massachusetts?
GW: It would have taken a week at least, depending on how many hours a day they traveled.
DR: Jefferson is sworn in. Does he walk to the swearing in?
GW: Yes. He’s a man of the people—sort of like what Jimmy Carter wanted to do. No chariot, no six horses. He walks to his inauguration. His speech to the Congress is written and not delivered in person. That remained the practice until Woodrow Wilson reestablished the oral delivery of the inaugural address.
DR: Jefferson is president of the United States. Adams is back in Massachusetts. Are they corresponding?
GW: No, not at all. They’re bitter, both of them. Adams feels humiliated, because somehow it seemed natural that he should have served two terms the way Washington had.
DR: What about the relationship between Abigail Adams and Jefferson? They were friendly when they were in Europe. What happened to that relationship?
GW: Both Abigail and Jefferson thought the world of each other in the 1780s and they even flirted a bit in their letters. In 1804 Abigail broke the estrangement by writing a letter of condolence to Jefferson, whose daughter had died, the daughter whom Abigail had hosted in London in 1787. Jefferson responded eagerly to her letter, perhaps thinking that this might be an opening to a reconciliation. He was warm enough and recalled their friendship, but then he made the mistake of trying to explain why he and Abigail’s husband were at odds. He said that there was only one thing that Adams as president did that bothered him—all those midnight judges that he appointed. After Adams had lost the election in November 1800—the new president didn’t take office until March 1801, so from November to March we had a lame-duck president—in accordance with a new Federalist Judiciary Act he appointed a whole lot of judges, including Chief Justice John Marshall. Jefferson was appalled and angry at this, and he told Abigail so. She comes back harshly in defense of her husband. Jefferson tried to respond, to defend himself, and Abigail comes back even more harshly. And that was it. Jefferson said, “Uh oh,” and just lets it go.
DR: Explain this to me. Adams appoints a lot of people right at the end—midnight appointments. I thought you said in your book that Jefferson got rid of those people. But they were judges. Weren’t they appointed for life?
GW: Yes, the new federal appellate judges presumably had lifetime appointments.
DR: How did they lose them?
GW: The new Republican-dominated Congress came into power and in the Judiciary Act of 1802 did away with the Judiciary Act of 1801, and in the process eliminated the 16 new appellate judges. It could easily have been seen as a violation of the Constitution.
DR: Jefferson serves eight years as president. He goes back to Monticello. He has no relationship with Adams. They don’t write anymore?
GW: That’s right. No letters.
DR: There was a man who tried to bring them back in touch with each other. Who was that?
GW: Dr. Benjamin Rush, the most famous physician of the period, a resident of Philadelphia. He knew both of them. He knew both men but Adams better. He believed that these two Revolutionary leaders represented the two parts of the American Revolution, the North and the South, and that their reconciliation was important for posterity. He worked for two years to bring them together, telling each that the other one loved him. Finally he convinced Adams that Jefferson was open to a reconciliation, and Adams sent a letter to Jefferson along with what he calls a piece of Massachusetts manufacturing. It was actually two volumes of his son’s lectures at Harvard. But Jefferson, a literal-minded guy, without much of a sense of humor, took Adams at his word, and in his response to Adams he launched into a long discussion of manufacturing in Virginia. Because the two volumes didn’t accompany Adams’s letter and came later, Jefferson was embarrassed when they arrived and apologized to Adams. Adams was delighted at the resumption of the friendship, and from that moment on the ice is broken and they begin exchanging letters.
DR: How many did they write between each other?
GW: A hundred and fifty-eight letters, with Adams writing at least twice as many as Jefferson. But that’s understandable. Adams was embarrassed by his volubility and wondered whether Jefferson had many more correspondents than he. So he asked Jefferson, in 1820 or so, how many letters he had received during the previous year. Jefferson told him 1,267, most of which he answered. Adams was stunned. He had received only 123, a tenth of Jefferson’s total. Jefferson was an international superstar, corresponding with everyone from the czar of Russia to the great German naturalist Alexander Humboldt. By comparison, Adams was small potatoes. He was not in the same celebrity league with Jefferson. And he’s still not, as we know from the lack of a memorial to him in Washington.
DR: They didn’t have a Xerox machine. How do we know what they wrote in their letters?
GW: They saved everything.
DR: They wrote two copies of each letter?
GW: They copied most of them. Jefferson especially was scrupulous about keeping copies of his papers. Adams kept copies too. He had people copy for him. In his old age, he was going blind, and he would dictate the letters.
DR: When Adams would write to Jefferson, he would sometimes write insulting things. Did Jefferson respond?
GW: Adams loved to razz his friends. By 1815, Napoleon was defeated and the Bourbons were back on the throne of France. And Adams would say to Jefferson something like, “Mr. Jefferson, what do you think of the French Revolution now?” This kind of teasing, this kind of taunting, Adams loved to do that. He was taking risks, because any normal person might have cut him off. But Jefferson valued the relationship and just swallowed that kind of teasing. He was very polite. It’s one of the secrets of Jefferson’s success. He was utterly polite to everyone. Of course, when you’re polite to your enemies, that can seem two-faced, and Jefferson had a reputation for being hypocritical and disingenuous. Adams never had that reputation. He was very frank with people.
DR: When they both die on July the 4th, 1826, are both equally celebrated, or does Jefferson get more attention?
GW: It’s interesting to look at the eulogies. The ones from the South barely mention Adams, sometimes ignoring his death entirely. Jefferson is the Southern hero, keeping the dangerous federal government at bay. There’s no doubt that by 1826 Jefferson was by far the more famous of the two men, largely because of the Declaration of Independence and his leadership of the Democratic-Republican Party. Still, he was not yet the Founder that he became. It’s Abraham Lincoln who really establishes the modern reputation of the Founders. In the Antebellum period, when people talked about the Founders, they didn’t mean Jefferson and Adams and Hamilton. They meant the seventeenth-century founders, John Smith, William Bradford, and William Penn. But Lincoln in a series of speeches in the 1850s gave honor to Mr. Jefferson, and used his phrase “All men are created equal” to mobilize the North for the struggle over slavery that lay ahead.
DR: But Jefferson was not against slavery. Is that correct?
GW: No. As a young man, Jefferson knew that slavery violated what America stood for, and he tried to abolish it in Virginia. He was way out ahead of his fellow planters. He pushed for a number of enlightened reforms in the Virginia legislature, including the abolition of slavery, but his colleagues accepted a few of his reforms but not the abolition of slavery. His fellow planters admired him because he knew so much, more than any other single person in North America, and I include Benjamin Franklin in that. But as he aged, Jefferson became much more defensive about the South and slavery. His letters from his later years reveal Jefferson as a Southern fire-eater in his attitudes, frightened by what was coming and envious of New England where his granddaughter had settled. He and Adams both knew that slavery was creating a sectional crisis that threatened to break up the Union.
So the sectional issue, especially after the Missouri Crisis of 1819–20, created some tension in their relationship. They don’t talk about slavery much. Adams hated slavery and never owned a slave. But he realized that this was one issue that he dared not tease Jefferson about. He thought it was a Southern problem and that Jefferson and his fellow southerners would have to solve it. Adams avoided the issue, but Jefferson mentioned it briefly over the Missouri crisis. He was apprehensive about what it meant for the South. In his last years Jefferson, Pollyanna that he was, was far less happy than Adams. Adams the cynic and pessimist had never expected much of the future and thus was less surprised than Jefferson by what was happening.
DR: If you could have dinner with only one of these two men, who would you have dinner with?
GW: That’s a tough one. Jefferson would have been a gracious and fascinating dinner companion because he knew everything, and he would regale you with his knowledge. Adams had a good sense of humor and with his sarcastic take on the world would have been very entertaining. As a New Englander, I guess I have to go with Adams.
DR: If you had the chance to ask a question each of Jefferson and Adams, what would you ask them?
GW: I’d ask Jefferson why he didn’t take a stronger stand late in his life against slavery. And Adams? I’d ask him why he, who had done so much for the country, was so jealous of everyone else.
3 ANNETTE GORDON-REED
on Thomas Jefferson
(1743–1826; president from 1801 to 1809)
For most who serve as president, it is the highlight of their lives. For generals who led the country to victory in a major war, like Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, perhaps being president was the second most important professional accomplishment. For one president, however, it was not even in his top three achievements. That was made clear by Thomas Jefferson when he indicated that his epitaph should include three accomplishments, in this order: author of the Declaration of American Independence; author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom; and father of the University of Virginia.
In Jefferson’s mind, his presidency might not have ranked with the enduring value of those other three accomplishments, but it was not an insignificant eight-year period. He did consummate the Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubled the size of the United States (providing resources and opportunities that paved the way for the country to eventually encompass all the land leading to the Pacific Ocean, as well as all the land needed to help make the United States the economic and geopolitical power that it became). And Jefferson brought to the presidency an intellectual mind, recognized years later by President Kennedy when hosting a dinner for Nobel Prize winners: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
For most Americans, the Declaration of Independence ensures Jefferson’s memory lives forever, as he correctly surmised in his epitaph. Ironically, he probably spent no more than a few days writing his draft Declaration; and he was bitterly upset that the delegates to the Second Continental Congress made many changes (more than 60) to his draft (“mutilating” it, in his view).
But Jefferson ultimately took pride in the document, for it was the most complete statement about why the colonies made their historic decision to separate from England. In the Preamble, he wrote a sentence that did not receive much attention then but which has probably become one of the most famous sentences in the English language: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….” (He initially wrote “sacred and undeniable,” and Benjamin Franklin, always the editor, substituted “self-evident.”)
It can fairly be asked how Jefferson could write that all men are created equal when slavery was permitted in the U.S. and he owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime (and had a slave with him in Philadelphia). And why did he not include women in his statement?
There are, of course, answers to these questions. In brief, Jefferson did not regard slaves or even freed Blacks as equals to whites, and women were not considered then to be equal to men in any undertaking. But that one sentence could be said to have become in time the creed of the U.S.: that all people are equal—that is, for men and women, all races, to have equal opportunities and equal legal treatment. While the U.S. has struggled from its start to live up to them, Jefferson’s words are what the country, certainly in more recent times, is committed to achieving.
