Joseph J. Ellis (40 page)

“Your
aristoi,”
he lectured to Jefferson, “are the most difficult Animals to manage, of anything in the Whole Theory and practice of Government.” In his
Defence
, Adams had written three volumes of relentless and seemingly endless prose to show that political power invariably rested in the hands of a few prominent individuals and families. Whether it was the feudal barons of medieval France, the landed gentry of Elizabethan England, the merchant class of colonial New England, or the great planter families of the Chesapeake, history showed that the many always deferred to the few. Why? “I say it is the Ordonance of God Almighty, in the Constitution of human nature, and wrought into the Fabric of the Universe,” Adams answered. “Philosophers and Politicians may nibble and quibble, but they will never get rid of it. Their only resource is to controul it.” In the Adams formulation, aristocracies were to society as the passions were to the individual personality, permanent fixtures susceptible to disciplined containment and artful channeling, but never altogether removable. “You may think you can eliminate it,” Adams warned, but “Aristocracy like Waterfowl dives for Ages and rises again with brighter Plumage.” All the Jeffersonian chants about human equality were delusions that pandered to mankind’s urge to believe an impossible dream. “Inequalities of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in the Constitution of Human Nature,” Adams declared, “that no Art or policy can ever plain them down to a level.”
⁴⁶

Jefferson’s response took the form of two distinctions that together pointed in decidedly more optimistic directions. First, he agreed that there was “a natural aristocracy among men” based on “virtue and talents.” Then there was an artificial or “pseudo-aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.” Was not the whole point of the republican experiment they had helped to launch in America to provide for the selection of the natural aristocrats and block the ascendance of the artificial pretenders, thereby separating “the wheat from the chaff”? And had that, in fact, not occurred during and after the American Revolution, with the “band of brothers” he and Adams had come to symbolize being the obvious beneficiaries of the republican selection process?
⁴⁷

Second, Jefferson suggested that Adams’s description of aristocratic power was appropriate for Europe, where feudal privileges, family
titles, and more limited economic opportunities created conditions that sustained class distinctions. In America, on the other hand, there were no feudal barons or family coats of arms, and “everyone may have land to labor for himself as he causes,” so the endurance of artificial elites was impossible. Jefferson noted, somewhat gratuitously, that perhaps in New England vestiges of feudalism remained and thereby misled Adams. In Massachusetts and Connecticut there still lingered “a traditional reverence for certain families, which has rendered the offices of government nearly hereditary in those families.” In Virginia, however, laws abolishing primogeniture and entail had been passed during the Revolution. “These laws, drawn by myself, laid the axe to the root of the Pseudo-aristocracy,” Jefferson claimed, thereby clearing the ground for the growth of political institutions based on merit and an admittedly imperfect form of equality of opportunity. Jefferson concluded on a gracious note. “I have thus stated my opinion on a point on which we differ,” he observed, “not with a view to controversy, for we are too old to change opinions which are the result of a long life in inquiry and reflection; but on the suggestion of a former letter of yours, that we ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.”
⁴⁸

Adams contested both of Jefferson’s distinctions. Europe was, to be sure, burdened with aristocratic legacies and gross disparities in wealth that were not present to the same degree in America. But unless one believed that human nature underwent some magical metamorphosis in migrating from Europe to America, or unless one believed that the American Revolution had produced a fundamental transformation in the human personality, the competition for wealth and power would also yield unequal results in America: “After all,” Adams observed, “as long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families.… I repeat it, so long as the Idea and Existence of PROPERTY is admitted and established in Society, Accumulations of it will be made, the SNOW ball will grow as it rolls.” Jefferson’s version of a classless American society was therefore a pipe dream, because the source of the problem was not European feudalism but human nature itself. As far as Jefferson’s description of Virginia’s allegedly egalitarian conditions were concerned, “No Romance would be more amusing.” Here Adams confined himself to the still-dominant role played by the
planter class in the Chesapeake region, not even mentioning the fact that 40 percent of the population was enslaved, a feudal remnant of awesome and ominous proportions.
⁴⁹

Finally, Adams apprised Jefferson: “Your distinction between natural and artificial Aristocracy does not appear to me well founded.” One might be able to separate wealth from talent in theory, but in practice, and in all societies, they were inextricably connected: “The five Pillars of Aristocracy,” he argued, “are Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius and Virtues. Any one of the three first, can at any time, over bear any one or both of the two last.” But it would never come to that anyway, because the qualities Jefferson regarded as artificial and those he regarded as natural were all mixed together inside human nature, then mixed together again within society, in blended patterns that defied Jefferson’s neat dissections.
⁵⁰

In a separate correspondence about the same time with John Taylor, another prominent Virginia planter and political thinker who had also questioned Adams’s views on aristocracy, Adams called attention to the irony of the situation. The son of a New England farmer and shoemaker was being accused of aristocratic allegiances by an owner of slaves with vast estates, much of both inherited from his wife’s side of the family. “If you complain that this is personal,” Adams explained to Taylor, “I confess it, and intend it should be personal, that it might be more striking to you.” Though precisely the same situation obtained for Jefferson, as well—he owned about two hundred slaves and ten thousand acres, a goodly portion inherited from his father-in-law—Adams never confronted him so directly. (The closest he came was his running joke about the difference between Monticello and Montezillo.) Adams was fully prepared to include Jefferson as a charter member of the natural aristocracy that made and then secured the American Revolution. Along with most of the Virginia dynasty, however, his ascent into the revolutionary elite was not the exclusive function of talent and virtue.
⁵¹

What Adams could never quite fathom, and Jefferson understood intuitively, was that the very word “aristocracy” had become an epithet in the political culture of postrevolutionary America. Even though Adams was surely correct about the disproportionate power exercised by elites throughout history, and even though the revolutionary generation had
succeeded in establishing a republican government in large part because a small group of talented statesmen had managed the enterprise throughout its earliest and most vulnerable phrases, a “republican aristocracy” seemed the same contradiction in terms as a “republican king.” It violated the central premise of the revolutionary legacy—namely, that the people at large were the sovereign source of all political authority. Therefore, the only kind of political elite permissible was one that repudiated its elite status and claimed to speak for “the many” rather than “the few.” The Republicans had been the first to grasp this elemental fact of American political culture in the 1790s. The Federalists, who were no more a social or economic elite than the Republicans, had come to ruin because they never grasped it. Adams could argue till doomsday that the American experiment in republicanism had succeeded because it had managed to harness the energies and talents of its best and brightest citizens, the very “band of brothers” he and Jefferson supposedly symbolized, but as long as he referred to them as an “aristocracy,” whether natural or artificial, he seemed to be defying the republican legacy itself.

Another argumentative thread, which began in 1815 and then ran throughout the remainder of the correspondence, concerned the French Revolution. Adams loved to bring the subject up in his correspondence with others, especially Benjamin Rush, because events had tended to vindicate his early apprehensions, which had produced the first fissures in his relationship with Jefferson in the early 1790s and then became central ingredients in the Republican polemic against Adams in the presidential campaign of 1800. But it was Jefferson who first broached the subject in the correspondence, and he did so in a wholly conciliatory way: “Your prophecies … proved truer than mine; and yet fell short of the fact, for instead of a million, the destruction of 8 or 10 millions of human beings has probably been the effect of these convulsions. I did not, in 89, believe they would have lasted so long, nor have cost so much blood.” Jefferson went on to acknowledge that Adams’s critical perspective on the French Revolution had been a major source of his unpopularity. Now that Napoleon was finally defeated—word of Waterloo had just reached America—and the outcome was perfectly clear, Jefferson graciously observed that Adams was due an apology for “the breach of confidence of which you so justly complain,
and of which no one has more frequent occasion of fellow-feeling than myself.”
⁵²

Only someone thoroughly familiar with the political history of the 1790s could recognize what a major concession and personal confession of regret Jefferson was making. Adams caught the message immediately. “I know not what to say of your Letter,” he wrote, “but that it is one of the most consolatory I have ever received.” For Jefferson was not only admitting that his optimistic assessment of events in revolutionary France had been misguided; he was also conceding that the Republican party, to include himself, had played politics with the French Revolution in order to undermine the Adams presidency. Jefferson was making amends for what the Adams family had understandably regarded as “the singular act” of betrayal. He was saying, at last, that he was sorry.
⁵³

Adams suggested that Jefferson had misread the meaning of the French Revolution—sincerely misread it and
not
just manipulated it for political purposes—because of a faulty way of thinking conveniently conveyed by the new French word, “ideology.” Napoleon had popularized the word, which had first been used by the French philosophe Destutt de Tracy, whom Jefferson had read and admired enormously. Adams claimed to be fascinated by the new word “upon the Common Principle of delight in every Thing We cannot understand.” What was an “ideology”? he asked playfully: “Does it mean Idiotism? The Science of Non Compos Menticism. The Science of Lunacy? The Theory of Delerium?” As Adams explained it, the French philosophes had invented the word, which became a central part of their utopian style of thinking and a major tenet in their “school of folly.” It referred to a set of ideals and hopes, like human perfection or social equality, that philosophers mistakenly believed could be implemented in the world because it existed in their heads. Jefferson himself thought in this French fashion, Adams claimed, confusing the seductive prospects envisioned in his imagination with the more limited possibilities history permitted. Critics of Jefferson’s visionary projections, like Adams, were then accused of rejecting the ideals themselves, when in fact they were merely exposing their illusory character.
⁵⁴

“Ideology,” then, had provided Jefferson with a politically attractive pro-French platform, which had turned out to have enormous rhetorical advantages no matter how wrong it proved in reality. Jefferson had
thought that France was the wave of the future and England was a relic of the past. “I am charmed by the fluency and rapidity of your Reasoning,” Adams observed, “but I doubt your Conclusion.” England, not France, was destined to become the dominant European power of the nineteenth century, Adams correctly predicted, though he, like Jefferson, retained a deep suspicion of English designs on America, a permanent legacy of their mutual experience as American revolutionaries. “They have been taught from their Cradles to despise, scorn, insult and abuse Us,” Adams wrote of the English, adding in his most relentlessly realistic mode that “Britain will never be our Friend, till we are her Master.” Both Adams and Jefferson, it turned out, were too deeply shaped by the desperate struggle against England to foresee the Anglo-American alliance that flourished throughout the Victorian era and beyond.
⁵⁵

They both did anticipate, albeit from decidedly different perspectives, the looming sectional crisis between North and South that their own partnership stretched across. “I fear there will be greater difficulties to preserve our Union,” Adams warned, “than You and I, our Fathers Brothers Disciples and Sons have had to form it.” Jefferson concurred, though the subject touched the most explosive issue of all—namely, the unmentionable fact of slavery. Even the ever-candid Adams recognized that this was the forbidden topic, the one piece of ground declared off-limits by mutual consent. With one notable exception, the dialogue between Adams and Jefferson, so revealing in its engagement of the conflicting ideas and impulses that shaped the American Revolution, also symbolized the unofficial policy of silence within the revolutionary generation on the most glaring disagreement of all.
⁵⁶

The exception occurred in 1819, prompted by the debate then raging over passage of the Missouri Compromise. Prior to that time, Adams and Jefferson had not only avoided the subject in their correspondence; they had also independently declared the matter intractable: “More than fifty years has it attracted my thoughts and given me much anxiety,” Adams confessed in 1817. “A Folio Volume would not contain my Lucubrations on this Subject. And at the End of it, I should leave my reader and myself at a loss, what to do with it, as at the beginning.” For his part, Jefferson kept repeating the avoidance argument he had fashioned in 1805. “I have most
carefully avoided every public act or manifestation on that subject,” he announced, explaining that the abolition of slavery was a task for the next generation, “who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation.”
⁵⁷