Next Daily Excerpt:
Next book in my American history section is Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams
In addition to Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Here’s an excerpt from Passionate Sage – where Ellis talks about Adams’ autobiography. All of the founders were aware that future generations would be watching them – Adams more than most. Adams felt he got the short end of the stick, in terms of securing a legacy for himself. I love John Adams for a ton of reasons that have to do with what he actually DID – but I also love John Adams the most of all “those guys” because of how openly human he was. There he is – warts and all. His insecurities, his vanities, his never-ending yowl of “It’s not FAIR … why does HE get the credit for that??”
From Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams
Adams’ autobiography, on the other hand, was less like a well-crafted work of literature than an open wound, a text that requires no “deconstructing” because it was never “constructed” in the first place. Like Adams’s life, it was impulsive, exuberant, and candid. And its theme, as well as its form, was the exact opposite of Franklin’s. It was about self-doubt and failure rather than self-fulfillment and success, about the ironic ravages of history rather than the triumph of the individual. When Adams eventually read Franklin’s autobiography in 1818, he admitted defeat: “My own appears, upon retrospection, a dull dreary unfruitful Waste.” But then defeat and failure in the face of American popular opinion had always been his dominant message. In that sense, Adams’s autobiography was a clumsy model for his great-grandson’s masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, as well as an anguished exprssion of the dark and hidden underside of Franklin’s beguilingly happy narrative.
Villains and intriuges had always played a crucial role in Adams’s thinking about the American Revolution, although it was usually British leaders like Lord North or American Loyalists like Thomas Hutchinson who bore the brunt of Adams’s accusations of conspiracy in the 1760s and 1770s. (As Adams once put it, “Mr. Hutchinson never drank a Cup of Tea in his life without Contemplating the Connectio between that Tea, and his Promotion.”) Now, in the autobiography, after an opening section that described his early years as a student, grammar school teacher, and country lawyer, he got down to the serious business of eviscerating his enemies on the American side.
Alexander Hamilton – no surprise here – was the chief villain. The fact that Hamilton had only recently died in a duel with Aaron Burr, Adams declared, was no cause for mercy. Adams claimed to feel no obligation “to suffer my Character to lie under infamous Calumnies, because the Author of them, with a Pistol Bullet through his Spinal Marrow, died a Penitent.” During the final year of his presidency Adams had periodically terrified the High Federalists and startled the members of his cabinet with outbursts against Hamilton. But he had not seen fit to record his personal feelings toward the unofficial leader of the Federalist faithful. And he had adopted a stately pose in the wake of Hamilton’s slanderous and scandalous Letter … Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams… All the while, however, the suppressed anger had been throbbing away inside him. Now the invective poured out. Hamilton was a “Creole Bolingbroke … Born on a Speck more obscure than Corsica … as ambitious as Bonaparte, though less courageous, and, save for me, would have involved us in a foreign war with France & a civil war with ourselves.” Writing to his good friend Judge Francis Vanderkemp at the same time, he amplified his accusation: Hamilton was “a bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,” who lived constantly “in a delirium of Ambition” and who “had fixed his Eye on the highest Station in America and … hated every man young or old who Stood in his Way.” To Rush, he acknowledged that such diatribes against the man regarded as “the Sovereign Pontiff of Federalism” would probably cause “all his Cardinals … to excite the whole Church to excommunicate and Anathematize me.” But Adams claimed to be unfazed, adding: “It was time for a Protestant Separation.” It was the closest he ever came to a direct assertion of what was his de facto desertion of the Federalist Party. If Hamilton was, as his worshippers claimed, the guiding light of Federalism, it was a light that deserved to go out.
Tom Paine ranked as second only to Hamilton in Adams’s version of the American rogues gallery. Paine, wrote Adams, was “a Disastrous Meteor”, “a disgrace to the moral Character and Understanding of the Age.” Everyone knew that Benjamin Rush had given him the title for his wildly popular pamphlet, Common Sense, and that the arguments about the inevitability of American independence that Pain advanced had, in fact, been circulating throughout the colonies since 1760. In the midst of the accelerating events of early 1776, when Common Sense first appeared, Adams’s initial reaction had been more generous, though even then he was somewhat wary. Paine’s pamphlet, he oted then, contained “a great deal of good sense, delivered in a clear, simple, concise and nervous Style.” In fact, it was the electricity and accessibility of the prose that caught his attention, causing Adams to recognize that Paine’s message was identical to his won — the American Revolution was both inevitable and natural — but that he himself “could not have written anything in so manly and striking a style …” What worried him then was Paine’s endorsement of a single house legislature as the prescribed form of government for the new states, a prescription that revealed that “this Writer has a better Hand at pulling down than building.” What worried him in his autobiography was the credit Paine had received for his elegant statement of the obvious. Paine was a mere cypher, a nonentity in the Continental Congress. Worse, Paine was “the Satyr of the Age … a mongrel between Pigg and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a Butch Wolf.” Only if one wished to call the eighteenth century “the Age of Frivolity” could one call it “the Age of Paine”.
The verdict on what he called “the American untouchables” — Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington — was decidedly less vitriolic, but sufficiently equivocal to sense Adams’s ego throbbing just beneath the surface. All three American greats served as an illustration of the principle “that Eloquence in public Assemblies is not the surest road to Fame and Preferment, at least unless it be used with great caution, very rarely, and with great Reserve.” This was the lesson of “eternal taciturnity” that Adams preached to John Quincy and anyone else who would listen, and it derived from Adams’s sure but somewhat neurotic sense that, as “the Atlas of Indepedence” who made the fierce and ferocious speeches that were needed to assure separation from England in the Continental Congress, he inevitably made lifelong enemies. The rule seemed to be that men who played leading roles in controversies became controversial. Jefferson, on the other hand, “had attended his duty in the House [the Second Continental Congress] but a very small part of the time and when there had never spoken in public.” Adams recalled, with a mingled sense of admiration and accusation, that “during the whole Time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.”
