The Friendship - Adams and Jefferson

Ellis returns to Adams and Jefferson for his last essay in Founding Brothers. He focuses on their reconciliation and the exchange of letters which continued for 14 years until their deaths within hours of each other on July 4th, 1826.

The contortions involved in their reconciliation, although not as valuable historically as the letters themselves, interests me because of the light it sheds on the personalities -- Adams as the grumpy old man of American politics and Jefferson as the "republican" aristocrat and master of denial. If Adams had a tendency to lacerate himself, Jefferson was equally inclined to believe that nothing was ever his fault.

Reconciling two such stubborn and different men required an intermediary and that was role taken by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.  As they exchanged letters, Rush proposed to Adams  "that they dispense with the usual topics and report to each other on their respective dreams."  In 1809, Rush reported "his most amazing dream yet":

 . . . that Adams had written a short letter to Jefferson congratulating him on his recent retirement from public life. Jefferson had then responded to his magnanimous gesture with equivalent graciousness. The two great patriarchs had then engaged in a correspondence over several years in they candidly acknowledged their mutual mistakes, shared their profound reflections on the meaning of American independence, and recovered their famous friendship.

That fact that this "dream" was to become a reality did not keep Adams from mocking the possibility.  Yet he admitted the bonds of his friendship with Jefferson and noted, "If I should receive a letter from him, I should not fail to acknowledge and answer it."

Rush had also been writing to Jefferson and suggesting "that Adams had indicated he was now eager for a reconciliation and virtually on his deathbed."  But Jefferson would not take the bait, "convinced as he was after his earlier exchange with Abigail that he had already made a heroic effort that had been summarily rejected."

The "reconciliation" came closer in 1811 when Edward Coles, "a Jefferson protege" visited Adams who "let it be known that his political disagreements with Jefferson had never killed his affection for the man."  Yet Jefferson still refused to write.  On Christmas Day of 1811, Adams confronted Rush:

"I perceive plainly, Rush, that you have been teasing Jefferson to write me, as you did me to write him." Adams also knew full well that Rush was sending edited versions of his letters to Jefferson, removing the potentially offensive passages.

In the end, Ellis notes, "it was Adams who made the decisive move."  Why?  As Ellis points out, "the friendship and the mutual trust on which it had rested had, in fact, not been recovered by 1812."  Ellis comes up with two reasons.

[First,] The resumption of his correspondence with Jefferson afforded Adams the opportunity to challenge the Jeffersonian version [of history] and to do so in the form of a written record virtually certain to become a major historical document of its own."  

Second, the reconciliation and ensuing correspondence permitted Adams to join Jefferson as the costar of an artfully arranged final act in the revolutionary drama. Adams had spent most of his retirement years denouncing such contrivances as gross distortions of history. But he had also spent those same years marveling at the benefits that accrued to anyone willing to pose for posterity in the mythical mode. If he could only control himself, if he could only speak the lines that history wanted to hear, if he could yet fit himself into the heroic mold like a kind of living statue, he might yet win his ticket to immortality.

So Adams saw the correspondence with Jefferson as a way to write his own version of history -- and have history pay attention.

The Collaborators - Adams and Jefferson

My title might suggest John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the collaborators, but in reality Ellis's essay describes how their friendship fell apart to be replaced by secondary collaborations -- Adams with his wife, and Jefferson with Madison -- and by partisan politics.

Although they had been close friends for over twenty years, Adams and Jefferson found themselves on opposites sides of the political divide that emerged after the ratification of the Constitution.  The natural tendency is to ask: who was to blame?  The answer is: Jefferson.  He put political considersations above friendship.

Having narrowly defeated Jefferson for president, Adams wanted to bring Jefferson into the circle of his administration-- in a way that Adams had not been during Washington's presidency.  According to Ellis, Adams was "disposed to agree and consider a bipartisan political alliance grounded in the personal trust of the once-great collaboration."

Jefferson seemed to inclined to accept the alliance, but Madison persuaded him against it.  "Jefferson must not permit himself to be drawn into the policy-making process of the Adams administration," the argument ran, "lest it compromise his role as leader of the Republican opposition."

Jefferson presented his "friend" Adams with his decision, and Ellis summarizes the encounter:

On March 6, 1797, Adams and Jefferson dined with Washington at the presidential mansion in Philadelphia. Adams learned that Jefferson was unwilling to join the cabinet and that neither Jefferson nor Madison was willing to be part of the peace delegation to France. Jefferson learned that Adams had been battling his Federalist advisers, who opposed a vigorous Jefferson presence in the administration. They left the dinner together and walked down Market Street to Fifth, two blocks from the very spot where Jefferson had drafted the words of the Declaration of Independence that Adams had so forcefully defended before the Continental Congress almost twenty-one years earlier. As Jefferson remembered it later, "we took leave, and he never after that said one word to me on the subject or ever consulted me as to any measure of government." 

Adams "was left alone with Abigail, the only collaborator he could truly trust." This is what he wrote to her:

"I never wanted your advice and assistance more in my life. . . . The times are critical and dangerous and I must have you here to assist me. . . . You must leave the farm to the mercy of the winds. I can do nothing without you." 

The Farewell - George Washington

I've been away from this blog a considerable time. An election has come and gone (though it seemed to most an agonizingly long and expensive election); a president has been re-elected for a second term. Barack Obama grew tearful at the thought of those who had worked so hard for him in his "last" campaign.

The fact that an American president only has two terms was a precedent set by George Washington. In this section of Joseph Ellis's historical sketches, he focuses on Washington's famous Farewell Address, the letter to the American people in which Washington declared he was retiring and would not run for a third term. 

Ellis declares that Washington's "Farewell Address achieved transcendental status, ranking alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address as a seminal statement of America's abiding principles."  (That may have been true twenty or thirty years ago, but in the American Literature anthology I taught from it no longer puts in an appearance.) 

What were the "abiding principles" expressed in Washington's "letter"?  (It was never really an address, never spoken publicly; instead it was, by design, a letter published in newspapers.)  According to Ellis: 

Washington devoted several paragraphs to the need for national unity. He denounced excessive partisanship, most especially when it took the form of political parties pursuing a vested ideological agenda or sectional interest groups oblivious to the advantages of cooperation.  The rest of the address was devoted to foreign policy, calling for strict American neutrality and diplomatic independence from the tangled affairs of Europe.

His admonishment against "excessive partisanship" has obviously not been heeded, though everyone still pays lip service to it.  And his call for "strict American neutrality" seems woefully outdated, though there are still those who call for it.

What was important about the Farewell Address was not just its admonitions but the simple fact that it announced Washington's retirement.  "By resigning voluntarily," Ellis states, "he was declaring that his deepest allegiances, like those of his critics, were thoroughly republican."  In other words, "Washington was making his ultimate statement as America's first and last benevolent monarch."

The Silence - Franklin and Madison

This chapter is about one of Benjamin Franklin's last acts -- his attempt to break the official silence about the institution of slavery.  Franklin's action was in the form of his signature on a petition from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society that arrived at the House of Representatives on February 12, 1790.

It urged the Congress to "take such measures in their wisdom, as the powers with which they are invested will authorize, for promoting the abolition of slavery, and discouraging every species of traffic in slaves." . . . this new petition made two additional points. . . First, it claimed that both slavery ands the slave trade were incompatible with the values for which the American Revolution had been fought . . . Second, it challenged the claim that the Constitution prohibited any legislation by the federal government against the slave trade for twenty years, suggesting instead that the "general welfare" clause of the Constitution empowered the Congress to take whatever action it deemed "necessary and proper" to eliminate the stigma of traffic in human beings and to "Countenance the Restoration of Liberty for all Negroes."

The reaction from the representatives of the southern states was strong:

. . . several representatives from South Carolina . . . objected to the suggestion that the petitions should be read along in the halls of Congress.  Aedanus Burke . . . warned that the petitioners were "blowing the trumpet of sedition" and demanded that the galleries be cleared of all spectators and newspaper reporters. . . . The position of all the speakers from the Deep South seemed to be that the Constitution not only prohibited the Congress from legislating about slavery or the slave trade; it forbade anyone in Congress from even mentioning those subjects publicly.

Hence the name of the chapter -- "The Silence."

Although James Jackson from Georgia was the major spokesman for those who opposed the petition, the politician who did the most, not only to defeat the petition but to strengthen the Southern position, was James Madison.

Madison's position on slavery captured the essence of what might be called "the Virginia straddle." On the one hand, he found the blatantly proslavery arguments "shamefully indecent" and described his colleagues from South Carolina and Georgia as "intemperate beyond all example and even all decorum." . . . But a fault line ran through the center of his thinking, a kind of mysterious region where ideas entered going in one direction but then emerged headed the opposite way.

Ellis goes on to explain as best he can:

In the midst of this willful confusion, one Madisonian conviction shone through . . . -- namely, that slavery was an explosive topic that must be removed from the political agenda of the new nation. It was taboo because it exposed the inherent contradictions of the Virginia position, which was much closer to the position of the Deep South than Madison wished to acknowledge, even to himself. And it was taboo because, more than any other controversy, it possessed the political potential to destroy the union. 

The contrast between Franklin and Madison is summed up as follows:

Franklin wanted to put slavery onto the national agenda before it was too late to take decisive action in accord with the principles of the Revolution. Madison wanted to take slavery off the national agenda because he believed that decisive action would result in the destruction of either the Virginia planter class or the nation itself.

Franklin lost, and Madison won. But Madison's "victory" went far beyond defeating the petition: "Madison wanted to use the vote on the committee report to create the equivalent of a landmark decision prohibiting any national scheme for emancipation."

When Madision succeeded, even George Washington was "relieved," writing to a Virginia friend that "the slave business has at last [been] put to rest and will scarce awake."

Of course, it would awake again, and the full awakening would be called the Civil War.