Passionate Sage (10 page)

The central theme of the nearly interminable series in the
Patriot
was Adams's accomplishments as a diplomat and maker of American foreign policy. While he covered his career in Europe and England in the 1780s, the major episode on which he focused his obsessions, predictably, was his decision as president to negotiate with the French government in 1799–1800 rather than declare war. Adams declared, over and over again, that he was prepared to “defend my missions to France, as long as I have an eye to direct my hand, or a finger to hold my pen. They were the most disinterested and meritorious actions of my life.” He even went so far to request that his tombstone contain only one inscription: “Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.”
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As we have seen, what has come to be called the “quasi-war” with France was the dominant event of Adams's presidency. And as we have also seen, the detailed history of this early chapter in American foreign policy is enormously complex—it took Adams the rough equivalent of one thousand pages to tell his version of the story in the
Patriot—
for it involved such formidable characters as Hamilton, Jefferson, and Talleyrand, the split of the Federalists, the emergence of the Jeffersonian Republicans as the majority party, the bribery of American ministers to France, negotiations with a constantly changing French government still in the trauma of revolution and headed for dictatorship under Napoleon, systematic piracy by both French and English naval vessels, and all the vacillations and misunderstandings rendered inevitable by the communication problems of an era ignorant of the telephone or telegraph. That said, the elemental political and strategic issues at stake in the crisis were straightforward. And Adams did a decent job of accurately identifying them later in his retirement:

 

two Parties…existed in this Country headed by Men of the most determined Ambition, the one [Jeffersonian] inclined to France the other [Federalist] to England. One was for closer connection to France and going to War with England…the other was for an Alliance Offensive and Defensive with Great Britain. It was my destiny to run the Gauntlet between these two factions, in support of a Neutrality….
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Most, in fact virtually all, modern-day historians concur that Adams made the correct decision to avoid war, and that it took considerable courage, as well as principled resistance to popular opinion and party pressure, to assert the long-term interests of the nation in the face of overheated patriotic and party zeal. In that sense, history has vindicated both Adams's most crucial presidential decision and his frequently expressed judgment that “it was the most splendid diamond in my crown; or, if anyone thinks this expression too monarchical, I will say the most brilliant feather in my cap.”
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But that was not the considered opinion in 1809 when Adams began to write for the
Patriot
. Nor was Adams's confidence that posterity would vindicate him sufficient to allay his throbbing sense of having been wronged. Years later he could write a friend, Nicholas Boylston: “Voltaire boasted that he made four presses groan for Sixty Years—but I have to repent that I made the Patriot groan for Three Years,” admitting that he was on a fool's errand “in vindicating my Conduct…against the charges and insinuations of conceited Blockheads.” He conveyed a clear notion of his tortured personal anguish in one of the first
Patriot
pieces. There he compared himself to “an animal I have seen take hold of the end of a cord with his teeth, and be drawn slowly up by pulleys, through a storm of squils, crackers, and rockets, flashing and blazing around him every moment.” And although the “scorching flames made him groan, and mourn, and roar, he would not let go….”
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So much was at stake for Adams because his handling of this crisis epitomized his self-image as the man who could stand above party in behalf of national interests. It was his defining moment in American history, at least in retrospect. Small wonder, then, that Hamilton was the chief villain in the story Adams told, or rather the chief defendant in Adams's lengthy case, which often read like a legal brief written by a slightly deranged polemicist. Only “the disturbed imagination of Alexander Hamilton,” Adams argued, could find fault with his handling of the foreign crisis, “though Hamilton was pleased to wield it as a poisoned weapon with the express purpose of destroying me.” He backhandedly thanked Hamilton for his treachery, claiming petulantly, “it has given me eight years, incomparably the happiest of my life, whereas, had I been chosen President again, I am certain I could not have lived another year.” Hamilton was determined to make himself head of the army in a war with France, Adams charged, then launch a military expedition to conquer the continent and liberate South America. This turned out to be factually accurate, as we now know from the modern edition of Hamilton's private correspondence. But in Adams's hands the account smacked of self-serving slander, or worse, a paranoid pomposity. He claimed that not even Cicero—the comparison was plausible but, again, self-defeating—was “sacrificed to the vengeance of Anthony more egregiously than John Adams was to the unbridled and unbounded ambition of Alexander Hamilton and the American triumvirate.” In opposition to “all their diabolical intrigues,” Adams boasted, he “hardily pursued my own System in 1799 and 1800, made Peace with France at the expense of all my consequence in the World, and their unanimous and immortal hatred.”
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The accuracies and inaccuracies of Adams's account cannot easily be sorted out. In a historical episode as complex as Adams's handling of the French question, and as dependent for its complexity on the collision of mutually exclusive perceptions by all participants, the very notion that there is a single true or objective version of the story probably requires scrutiny. But the crucial historical question raised by the
Boston Patriot
series is not, What is the true story?, so much as Why did Adams feel compelled to put his version before the public? What cries out for an explanation is his persistence for three years in a cause that was so obviously beyond his capacity to affect. It bears repeating: the pieces in the
Patriot
were interminable; and Adams acknowledged to Rush and other close friends that he realized his efforts were futile; in some perverse sense, and again he acknowledged this too, he was motivated by the very futility of it all. He was churning out page after page on the details of a decade-old chapter in American relations with France at just the time when public attention was focused on the looming War of 1812 with England. Finally, the vendetta-like tone of his prose, the accusatory style of his argument, the sheer massiveness of his self-defense, all robbed his writing of any semblance of credibility or persuasiveness. And it hardly bears mentioning that, even if his tales of corruption and betrayal by his cabinet were essentially accurate, he was the last person to set the record straight. Much like Hamilton's notorious
Letter…Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams…
, which it was intended to refute, the series in the
Boston Patriot
was a misguided and self-defeating performance explicable only in terms of compulsive urges that defy logic.

There are, however, at least two ways of making Adams's compulsions comprehensible. First, Adams needed to purge himself of all the accumulated animosity toward the High Federalists—especially Hamilton—that had built up inside him. Seen in conjunction with his autobiography and then his exchange with Mercy Otis Warren, the
Boston Patriot
writings constituted his final spasm of vindicative energy, the last extended eruption of the Adams volcano. Unlike Jefferson, who suffered similar wounds in his public career, Adams could not lick his wounds in private and allow them to heal silently over time. In Adams's case, wounds did not heal; they festered; he kept reopening them. The sheer massiveness and often inchoate character of the
Patriot
pieces accurately indicated how much anger Adams had been suppressing. Only after it had all poured out was he capable of authentic tranquility. In this sense his monumental vituperations in the public press were not so much efforts to rewrite history as they were culminations of his personal catharsis.

Secondly, and somewhat contradictorily, the energy he gave to the rebuttal of Warren and the revision of his actions as president also accurately reflect how much Adams cared about his place in history. Despite his incessant denials, and what became an almost formulaic denunciation of history's capacity to comprehend the way it
really
was, he desperately wanted to be appreciated in the annals of history. And this desperation, illustrated in the singular ferocity with which he defended his reputation during the first twelve years of his retirement, possessed a special poignance for him precisely because of his habitual aversion to conventional forms of popularity and worldly success. If traditional success must be avoided because it inevitably carried with it the seeds of a great man's destruction—Caesar, Napoleon, and Hamilton were his favorite examples—it then followed that posterity was the only safe place left for him to achieve heroic stature. It was the only place because he had personally destroyed his prospects for popularity in his own lifetime. And it was the only safe place because popularity beyond the grave presented no temptation to his vaunted vanity. Only posthumous fame avoided the risk of self-corruption. Only in the minds and memories of subsequent generations could a virtuous public figure rest easy with acclaim. Here was the one necessary condition that all true heroes had to satisfy in the Adams schema: they had to be dead.

 

The major problem with posthumous fame, what in fact made it such an effective antidote to vanity, of course, was that one was not around to enjoy it. With the completion of the
Boston Patriot
series, Adams began to accept the implications of that incontrovertible fact. Perhaps, after the enormous expenditure of energy in the
Patriot
, he was simply played out. Or perhaps the lengthy therapy that had begun with the autobiography reached the kind of conclusion commonly achieved: not brilliant new insights or discoveries, but a steadier and more balanced perspective on his life and the intractable ingredients of his personality. Whatever the reason, Adams mellowed discernibly. “I have prattled and scribbled two [sic] much and too freely,” he wrote the publisher Mathew Carey, adding the old refrain that “the unsearchable reserve and eternal taciturnity of Franklin and Washington are the only sure passports to Fame and immortality in the Poets and Politicians Creed.” At last, however, he seemed capable of heeding his own advice.
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Through the good offices of their old friend Elbridge Gerry, a reconciliation was arranged with Mercy Otis Warren before her death in 1814. And Benjamin Rush's genial intercessions recovered the long-latent friendship with Jefferson. Letters between Monticello and Montezillo started flowing in 1812. The news, incorrect as it turned out, that Jefferson kept a huge scrapbook filled with the most scurrilous libels against his own reputation, led Adams to scold his grandchildren, who “ought to have done the same thing for me.” Such a valuable volume “would have been the most splendid of all,” for he would have had it “bound in Moroccan leather with gold gilt.” Critics, he claimed, for some strange reason just did not seem to bother him as much. “What shall we do with the Insects that buzz about us?” he wrote to John Quincy, who was soon to assume the office of Secretary of State. “Their bite in former times tingled,” he confessed, “but I am grown almost as insensible, as a Boston Dray Horse in September.”
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Embracing one's former enemies and errors proved exhilarating and rekindled the old playfulness. He fended off requests for a published version of his life with dismissive caricatures: any true account must be “a bundle of weakness and error & petulance” or, perhaps recalling Warren's language, “I should blush to see it committed to writing” or, instead of writing his own life, he would write a history of all the major errors of the founding generation, in which the volume on John Adams would be “the only folio Volume,” twice as large as the others, and would begin with his original sin, “birth on the Eastern Side of the Hudson River.” When Harrison Gray Otis, the prominent Massachusetts Federalist, chided him that a commissioned biography was owed the public because his character was the property of the public, Adams protested: “So it is, but in what money scales it will be weighed by posterity, I know not. If it is to be estimated by the newspapers…it will be found to be of less value, than the meanest drug in an apothecary shop.”
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The fact that the great volcano of American statesmanship was in apparent remission did not mean that the fires had gone out. Nor that hope in the judgment of posterity had cooled. “The inquiring mind in future times will find reasons to diminish the glories of some and to increase the esteem of others,” he noted without mentioning names. “Some characters now obscured under a cloud of unpopularity”—no names necessary here—“will come out with more lustre.”
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But counting on posterity was not quite the same thing as trusting in historians. Written history, Adams was more convinced than ever, “seems like Romance. It shows Mankind in such a light I can hardly believe any of it. Though I cannot keep my Eyes off it.” He bet Rush one hundred dollars that there would never be a true history of the Whiskey Rebellion and offered another “hundred thousand eagles for a true history of the American Revolution.” When Jedidiah Morse petitioned him for information to be included in his history of Revolution, Adams said it was futile: “I know not whether to laugh or cry. I have little faith in history. I read it as I do romance….” Hezekiah Niles, another aspiring historian making the same request, got the same treatment: “In plain English, and in few words Mr. Niles, I consider the true history of the American Revolution & the establishing of our present Constitution as lost forever. And nothing but misrepresentation or partial account of it, ever will be recovered.”
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