More quotes from this extraordinary book:
— The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is a natural manure. — Thomas Jefferson
This was one of the main reasons for the split between Jefferson and Adams, although they also disagreed on the nature of democracy and of government. But Jefferson believed in, and got high off of, a state of almost constant revolution. He found it exhilarating.
Adams had an overwhelming fear of the mob. He thought that the Boston Tea Party was a disgrace. History has proven Adams to be correct. The French Revolution was a debacle.
I am loving reading about the beginnings of our government, how the terms Republican and Democrat came into being, and what they ACTUALLY meant, way back in the beginning. And also: how the divergence of beliefs in what the role of the central government should be are still with us today. Incredible. And yet somehow: Nobody goes to the guillotine. People disagreed vehemently with John Adams, and thought he wanted a return to monarchy … but he wasn’t drawn and quartered, he wasn’t decapitated, his head wasn’t paraded around Philadelphia to screaming throngs …
It was a battle of the newspapers, editorials fired off, etc. Much the same as goes on now.
For example: Alexander Hamilton, who was the first Secretary of the Treasury. Listen to what McCullough has to say about Hamilton, and see how this debate about central government continues on today. It’s amazing:
As one of the principal authors, along with Madison, of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton ranked as a leading proponent of a strong central government … Hamilton’s assumption plan had first been laid before Congress the previous January, 1790, as part of a large report in which he argued that a sound public credit was essential to economic growth and national unity. He had called for the central government to pay off all federal debt and to assume the debt of the states as well, on the grounds that they had been incurred in the common cause of independence. Boldly, Hamilton argued that such an increase in the national debt would be a blessing, for the greater the responsibility of the central government, the greater its authority.
The French Revolution was a turning point for the baby nation of the United States. It divided public opinion.
Jefferson thought that kings everywhere should fall. And if blood was shed, so be it. He said to Abigail Adams that he thought a bloody revolution was a good thing “to clear up the atmosphere”. Abigail was horrified. John Adams thought that any sort of mob rule was awful, terrible, doomed to failure and terror.
Jefferson received a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, which was a furious response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. In The Rights of Man, Paine attacks Burke, and then goes on to defend human rights, liberty, equality. Adams had said earlier about Thomas Paine that he was one of those people more adept at “pulling things down” than building.
Jefferson passed on The Rights of Man to a printer in Philadelphia, wanting to distribute it throughout the states. He wrote a note to the publisher, saying that he, Jefferson, endorsed the essay as a way to combat “the political heresies that have sprung up among us.” The printer went ahead and published The Rights of Man but he also published, on the title page, Jefferson’s endorsement (which was only meant to be a private note … nothing to be broadcast.) Jefferson was not a trouble-maker, at least not openly. He seemed to operate in stealth, in intrigue. But anyway: Jefferson’s endorsement was there, for all the world to see. He was Secretary of State at the time … John Adams was Vice President … so it caused a huge scandal. Jefferson publicly denied that he meant the comment to be aimed at John Adams, but in private he said that he actually was speaking about Adams.
Adams was very hurt, very offended.
John Quincy Adams, Adams’ son, who had very early on displayed the genius for which he would soon be known (he is also known as the most brilliant of any of our presidents … in terms of brain power. Smarter and quicker even than Bill Clinton), wrote an anonymous op-ed piece addressing the accusation of “political heresies”, which Jefferson had thrown about. The points made are phenomenal, and definitely should be heeded by our present-day government, and everybody up on Capitol Hill:
“I am somewhat at a loss to determine what this very respectable gentleman means by political heresies. Does he consider this pamphlet of Mr. Paine’s as a canonical book of political scripture? As containing the true doctrine of popular infallibility, from which it would be heretical to depart in one single point? … I have always understood, sir, that the citizens of these States were possessed of a full and entire freedom of opinion upon all subjects civil as well as religious; they have not yet established any infallible criterion of orthodoxy, either in church or state … and the only political tenet which they could stigmatize with the name of heresy would be that which should attempt to impose an opinion upon their understandings, upon the single principle of authority.”
Brilliant. Noam Chomsky should listen up. So should Pat Buchanan.
Okay, more quotes:
— “I firmly believe if I live ten years longer, I shall see a division of the Southern and Northern states, unless more candor and less intrigue, of which I have no hope, should prevail.” — Abigail Adams, 1792
Even as the tales of terror started pouring in from France, Jefferson did not give up his hope that that revolution was the TRUE revolution, and that the United States should learn from how the French conducted themselves. Here’s a quote, a rather alarming quote, which says it all:
— “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest … rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every continent, and left free, it would be better than it now is.” — Thomas Jefferson
Quotes from the letters of John and Abigail:
— Years subdue the ardor of passion but in lieu thereof friendship and affection deep-rooted subsists which defies the ravages of time, and whilst the vital flame exists. — Abigail to John, 1793
— Your letter is like laudanum. — John to Abigail
— I want to sit down and converse with you, every evening. I sit here alone and brood over possibilities and conjectures. — Abgail to John
— You apologize for the length of your letters. They give me more entertainment than all the speeches I hear. There are more good thoughts, fine strokes, and mother wit in them than I hear in the whole week. — John to Abigail
— I am warm enough at night, but cannot sleep since I left you.” — John to Abigail
These letters were all written when the two of them were in their 60s.
Ah, and I LOVE this quote. John Adams is talking about how the newspapers have gone out of their minds, and all they do is criticize the administration. They have taken it as their main goal to pull everything down.
There must be, however, more employment for the press in favor of the government than there has been, or the sour, angry, peevish, fretful, lying paragraphs which assail it on every side will make an impression on many weak and ignorant people.
Here’s an extended excerpt about the repercussions of the French Revolution and the terror that followed on the American continent:
What vexed Adams most was Jefferson’s “blind spirit of party.” In theory, Jefferson deplored parties or faction no less than did Adams or anyone. In practice, however, he was proving remarkably adept at party politics. As always, he avoided open dispute, debate, controversy, or any kind of confrontation, but behind the scenes he was unrelenting and extremely effective. To Jefferson it was a matter of necessity, given his hatred of [Alexander] Hamilton and all that was riding on what he called the “beautiful” revolution in France. To Adams, Jefferson had become a fanatic. There was not a Jacobin in France more devoted to faction, he told Abigail.
Continuing accounts of the chaos and bloodshed in France left both Adamses filled with pity and contempty. The French government was by now fully in the grip of the extreme radicals, and Adams shuddered at the thought. “Danton, Robespierre, Marat, and company are furies,” he wrote. “Dragon’s teeth have been sown in France and come up monsters.”
It was known that the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, philosopher and lover of liberty, one of the first in France to translate the Declaration of Independence, and one of the first, with his mother, to befriend Adams in Paris, had been stoned to death by a mob before his mother’s eyes. Louis XVI, stripped of all power, was to go on trial for treason. But Adams was incapable of exulting as others were over the plight of the French monarch. He had no heart for “king-killing,” Adams said. Indeed, he was tired of reading all newspapers, he told Abigail on the eve of Washington’s second inauguration. “The whole drama of the world is such tragedy that I am weary of the spectacle.”
Damn, dude, I couldn’t agree more.
Jefferson, on the other hand, thought it was great that Lous XVI was being chased down like a dog… Kings deserved what they got.
Jefferson wrote:
Mankind is now enlightened. They can discover that kings are like other men, especially with respect to the commission of crimes and an inordinate thirst for power. Reason and liberty are overspreading the world, nor will progress be impeded until the towering crown shall fall, and the spectre of royalty be broken in pieces, in every part of the globe. Monarchy and aristocracy must be annhiliated, and the rights of the people firmly established.
Lovely sentiments. But the French Revolution began turning on its own.
Also, it reminds me a bit of the whole “the president is not above the law” conversation that happened 5 million years ago, when impeachment charges were brought against Clinton and everything was so nasty. And the Supreme Court ruling that the Paula Jones suit could go on while the President was in office, that the office of the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, did not protect him from civil law suits, while in office. That seems to me to be a TERRIBLE precedent to set.
And the smugness of those who kept saying, “The president is not above the law”, blah blah blah … not giving a SHIT at what the entire debacle looked like to the rest of the world, not caring at all that by tearing Clinton down we were tearing ourselves down … not recognizing that, regardless of the political party a president represents, he represents ALL of us to the world. So we want him to do well … we don’t want him to be humiliated and diminished. How is that good for us? Why would we want that? The zealots on the right hated him so much that they did not care that by humiliating Clinton so badly they made us look like lunatics, soft weak over-reactive lunatics, to the rest of the world, who were watching the whole thing very very closely.
Those wackos who hated Clinton and who tracked him down for 8 years, and who saw to it that the guy was publicly humiliated, made the office of the Presidency very very small. Even though Bill Clinton probably wouldn’t admit it, the role of President is bigger than HIM, the office is bigger than the man. We all lost sight of that. It was frigging awful. I hated every second of it.
I basically thought Clinton was a smarmy dishonest charmer. But still: he is the president of MY country and I don’t want to see him sweating and squirming and lying because of a BLOWJOB. Let’s ask him about why he didn’t intervene in Rwanda, let’s ask him about the aspirin factory in the Sudan, let’s ask him about Mogadishu … but THAT? By focusing on that, those right-wing-nuts made us all look like jerks.
Back to John Adams.
A funny quote about his role as Vice President:
— My country in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived. — John to Abigail
And lastly: here is an excerpt from the book, focusing on John Adams’ feelings about equality. All men are NOT created equal, in terms of ability. Any jerk-off with two eyes can see that. If I have to move a massive bookcase, I will call up my big burly male friends. I will not call up my 95 pound gymnast friends. If I have to work out my finances, I am not going to call up my starving-poet friend who counts out his change to buy a cup of coffee. I am going to call up my accountant. Additionally: and I want to scream this from the hilltop: EQUAL OPPORTUNITY DOES NOT MEAN EQUAL OUTCOMES.
You put 5 people in a room, all of different backgrounds, give them the same damn test, you will get 5 different results. You give 5 people the same task … the same possibility of a promotion, or a project … and some, because of higher brain power, or more energy, or whatever, will get the job done faster, with more confidence, with more aplomb. Some people are just quicker than others. Some people’s brains process information in a way that helps them with deductive reasoning … other people (and I KNOW SOME) have no deductive reasoning capabilities at all.
My 5 year old nephew Cashel has more deductive reasoning capacity than some of the adults I know.
Anyway. John Adams was a big believer that we are all equal in God’s eyes … but that we do not all have equal abilities … and that to state this, unequivocally, would be dishonest.
With Charles [his son] he shared his private views on the current clamor over the subject of equality. “How the present age can boast of this principle as a discovery, as new light and modern knowledge, I know not.” The root of equality, Adams said, was the Golden Rule — “Love your negihbor as yourself.” Equality was at the heart of Christianity. When he had written in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights that “all men are by nature free and equal,” he meant “not a physical but a moral equality.”
“Common sense was sufficient to determine that it could not mean that all men were equal in fact, but in right, not all equally tall, strong, wise, handsom, active, but equally men … the work of the same Artist, children in the same cases entitled to the same justice.”
I have two rehearsals today: one for Cannibals (Irish accent), and one for the piece I am doing about Gertrude Bell (English accent). Hope I can keep them all straight.
