Passionate Sage (9 page)

None of this history of mutual trust and respect, however, could rescue Adams from the demons that were still eating away at his soul. In July of 1807, after reading Warren's
History of the American Revolution
, Adams wrote the first of ten lengthy letters to his old friend that, in effect, continued the therapy begun with the autobiography. “I shall observe no order in selecting the passages,” he began, “but take them up as they occur by accident.” For any seasoned Adams-watcher this was a bad sign, an indication that the sage was in mid-explosion. No sensible or systematic rebuttal of Warren's version of the American Revolution was possible when Adams felt the furies, like waves, rising inside himself.
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“A man never looks so silly as when he is talking or writing concerning himself,” Adams admitted, “but Mrs. Warren's severity has reduced me to the necessity of pouring out all myself.” And pour he did. Adams charged that Warren had willfully reduced his role in the making and securing of the Revolution. Warren, he claimed, had taken no notice of his contribution to the debate over Parliament's authority to tax the colonies in the 1760s. “I ought to have been considered in your History as a figure on the stage from 1761 to 1774,” he complained, “call it the figure of a doorkeeper, a livery servant, a dancer, a singer, or a harlequin, if you will.” He was one of the earliest advocates of independence. He had not been one of those Johnny-come-latelies to the American cause. Adams reminded Warren that James Otis, her famous brother, had called attention to his contribution and had predicted that “John Adams would one day be the greatest man in America.”
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Mercy Otis Warren (1763). John Singleton Copley oil on canvas.
Bequest of Winslow Warren. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The claims became more extreme and exaggerated. He was not only one of the earliest revolutionary zealots, he was the real author of the decisive motion in the Continental Congress that produced independence. He singlehandedly negotiated the treaty that ended the war—“For the whole time I was in the commission with Franklin and Lee, I did the whole business of it.” His political writings provided the constitutional model which all the framers acknowledged was the basis for the federal Constitution. Among the entire revolutionary generation, he claimed to “have done more labor, run through more and greater dangers, and made greater sacrifices than any man among my contemporaries living or dead, in the service of my country….” On and on he went, effectively belittling his very real achievements by serving as his own public relations spokesman.
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Warren responded with a combination of incredulity and mockery. Her
History
was deficient in Adams's eyes because, as Warren put it, it was an inadequate “panegyric on your life and character,” and because it failed to demonstrate that “nothing had been done, that nothing could be done, neither in Europe nor America, without [your] sketching and drafting the business, from the first opposition to British measures in the year 1764 to signing the treaty of peace with England in the year 1783.” Warren refused to be the butt of such bombast: “I am so much at a loss for the meaning of your paragraphs, and the rambling manner in which your angry and undigested letters are written, that I scarcely know where to begin my remarks.” She chose to begin candidly. “What is Mrs. Warren to think of your comments?” she asked: “I readily tell you she thinks them the most captious, malignant, irrelevant compositions that have ever been seen.”
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Adams was engaging less in an argument than a tantrum, and Warren had the courage of her long-term friendship to draw upon in apprising him how much of an embarrassment he was making of himself. “Had not Mr. Adams been suffering suspicions that his fame had not been sufficiently attended to,” she suggested, “he would not have put such a perverse construction on [my] every passage….” As one of “your warmest friends and acquaintances,” she advised him to remember one of his wisest maxims; namely, that “Passions are sometimes the heavenly gales that waft us safely to port, at others the ungovernable gusts that blow us down the steam of absurdity.” Clearly, Adams was currently moving toward the latter location. “The truth I have witnessed from my first acquaintance with you,” Warren recalled, that “your nerves have not always been wound up by the same key.” But the criticisms of her
History
, she concluded, “cap the climax of rancor, indecency, and vulgarism,” and appear less like the musings of a retired statesman than “like the ravings of a maniac.” He had said that he was “in a blushing mood.” Well, she countered, you can if you wish “blush for Mrs. Warren” and “blush for your country,” but most of all, you should “blush for yourself.”
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Adams found one particular assertion in Warren's
History
even more painful than her failure to make him the central figure of the revolutionary era. In the midst of what any detached reader would have regarded as a very favorable assessment of Adams's contribution, Warren charged that he went through an important change in the 1780s, that “by living long near the splendor of courts and courtiers” during his eight-year stay in Europe, he became “beclouded by a partiality for monarchy” and suffered “a lapse from [his] former republican principles.” Warren reiterated the charge in a letter to Adams, claiming that “the pure principles of republicanism were contaminated in your breast.”
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It was the same accusation that the Jeffersonian Republicans had made in the 1790s, this time enshrined in a full-fledged history, where it would function as a tin can tied to the Adams name, rattling through the ages and the pages of subsequent histories. Adams regarded it as the ultimate charge of corruption, “a charge,” he wrote to Warren, “that I cannot and will not bear.” He challenged her, as well as “the whole human race, and angels and evils too, to produce an instance of it from my cradle to this hour.” But given the hyperbolic character of Adams's other complaints to Warren, and the frantic tone of his entire response to her
History
, Warren felt justified in lumping this particular lamentation with the rest of Adams's invective. “I am yet at a loss to conjecture,” she wrote defiantly, “what you have left in your storehouse of thunderbolts….”
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In fact, Adams was correct in his claim and in the substance, if not the style, of this particular dispute with Warren. Adams had never favored the establishment of a European-styled monarchy or nobility in America. He consistently opposed all inherited titles and privileges. He favored a stronger executive than the Constitution provided, though an executive that derived its power from the consent of the governed offered in frequent elections. Warren's charge merely repeated the libelous attacks of the Antifederalists in the late 1780s and Jeffersonians in the 1790s, enhancing their credibility while ignoring their inaccuracy. Since being accused of crypto-monarchism was synonymous with being accused of betraying the republican principles of the Revolution, Adams had a legitimate reason to protest.

And thanks in large part to the impressive body of historical scholarship on the ideology of the revolutionary era that has appeared over the past twenty years, it is possible to recover the quite different definitions of “republicanism” that Adams and Warren harbored in their respective heads. For both of them, the phrase “republican principles” resonated with more meaning than any mere description of a representative form of government, without kings or lords or divine right presumptions, could convey.
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Adams sensed the source of disagreement, without being able to clarify the specific differences. “There is not a more unintelligible word in the English language than republicanism,” he warned Warren, adding that “the word republican is so loose and indefinite that successive predominant factions will put glosses and constructions on it as different as light and darkness….” (Twentieth-century historians would prove him right here.) He accused Warren of imposing in her
History
, and then upon him, a particularly naive and misleading use of the term: “The only effect of it [Warren's use] that I could ever see is to deceive the people,” something Adams himself claimed he would never countenance since he, unlike his critics, was “no Pharisee, Jesuit, or Machiavellian.”
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Again, Adams was historically correct, even though he stated his disagreement with Warren in the belligerent style of a wronged defendant rather than in the spirit of accommodation. For Warren clung tenaciously to a radical version of republicanism that had flourished only briefly in the heady wartime years of the 1770s, a version that then was used by many of the Jeffersonians as the basis for their ideological opposition to the Federalists in the 1790s. It presumed that the American Revolution had effected a clean break not only from English rule, but also a complete separation from the historic corruptions of European society. Warren and her
History
embodied “pure republicanism,” the conviction that the very character of American society, once purged of European contaminations, was forever changed. Much like the radical theorists of the French Revolution, and later revolutionaries in Russia and China, Warren believed that America had experienced a fundamental break with the past, that American citizens were now capable of truly disinterested and virtuous behavior, that powerful political institutions were unnecessary impediments to the inherently civic-minded instincts and habits of the populace.
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This was why she regarded the suppression of Shays' Rebellion as the repudiation of the very ideals on which the Revolution rested. This was why she interpreted the Constitution and the Federalist political leadership as embodiments of the very arbitrary power the Revolution was intended to eliminate. And this was why John Adams, who held with equal tenacity to fundamentally different notions of republicanism and the meaning of the American Revolution, served Warren's interpretive purpose perfectly in the
History
, as the example of the betrayal and corruption of an austere classical ideal.

All of which helps to explain, if not excuse, Adams's fanatical reaction in the summer of 1807; for he believed, quite correctly, that his own reputation was being stigmatized in order to manipulate the meaning of the Revolution to suit one historian's idiosyncratic interpretation. This was not the occasion for him to spell out fully his own interpretation of the Revolution or his own definition of the deeper meanings of republicanism. He was too enraged to make much sense anyway.

But he did offer Warren one anecdotal clue. He repeated the story of a trip he once made to Antwerp, where he was able to view the masterpieces of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck. One of the paintings depicted Jesus “in the midst of the twelve apostles, leaning familiarly on the shoulder of the beloved disciple [John], and distinguishing him from all the other eleven by some peculiar marks of attention and kindness.” The truly revealing feature in the painting, however, was the reaction of the other apostles, “the jealousy painted on every countenance,” especially the face of Peter, which was “transported with rage,” his eyes bulging out of the sockets, lips seeming to quiver and teeth clenched so that “you are apt to fancy you hear them grit against each other.” This was human nature as it really existed in the world, in America as well as Europe, among divinely sanctioned disciples as well as secular political leaders and followers. No revolution, not even the successful one he had helped promote, could ever change that intractable fact.
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The final installment in Adams's long effort to exorcise his personal demons, all undertaken in the guise of “setting the record straight,” took three years. From 1809 to 1812 he submitted regular essays to the newly founded
Boston Patriot
. “Let the jackasses bray or laugh at all this, as they did at the finger of God,” he wrote to his sometime friend William Cunningham when the series began. “I am in a fair way to give my criticks and enemies food enough to glut their appetites,” he announced defiantly: “I take no notice of their billingsgate.” The
Patriot
series proved to be his final spasm of unbridled self-vindication, Adams's last futile effort at overwhelming his real and imagined enemies with the sheer energy of his rage. He expected immediate responses and recriminations and was surprised, at first, that a “most profound silence is observed relative to my scribbles…. The Newspapers are still as midnight.” But, on second thought, he suspected his enemies were gathering silently in the darkness. “I suppose the sulphureous combustibles are preparing under ground,” he wrote Cunningham, “and the electrical fire collecting in the clouds…. If I am neither drowned in the rain, nor pierced with the bolts, nor blown into the atmosphere by the eruptions, I must be invulnerable.” Only the muted self-mockery of his characterization saved him from the charge of being close to crazy.
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