The Life and Mind of John Adams
by Roger DonwayJohn Adams. By David McCullough. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. 751 pp. $35.00.)
John Adams & the Spirit of Liberty. By C. Bradley Thompson. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998. 360 pp. $39.95; paper, $17.95.)
"Adams and Liberty!" was the cry in 1775 as John Adams set off for Philadelphia and the First Continental Congress. "Jefferson and Liberty!" was the cry twenty-five years later as John Adams was sent back to Massachusetts by the democratic revolution of 1800. The crown Adams had sought for his career, a second term as president, was denied to him by the nation to which he had given his life. It hurt.
But Adams was a child of the Enlightenment and as such believed that the future would see more clearly than the present. On that basis, he fully expected to be vindicated by posterity. Alas, during the next two centuries, intellectual movement in the field of political philosophy was more regress than progress. The theories of natural rights and sound constitutionalism that Adams advocated were often overshadowed by theories of collectivism and power politics. Even the postwar revival of classical liberalism did not at first work to Adams's advantage, for the sweeping phrases and noble brow of Jefferson provided Enlightenment political philosophy with a more marketable face than the crabbed reasoning and homely visage of Adams.
Now Adams's time of waiting has come to an end. On the two-hundredth anniversary of his banishment, he has returned from his exile in Braintree to reclaim a rightful place in the American pantheon. The two books under review here assure him of it.
Adams as the Un-Jefferson
At 750 pages, one cannot call John Adams a superficial biography. But Adams's life was filled with so much activity, in so many varied places, involving so many other great men, that a reader of McCullough's book senses he is getting a sketch and not a definitive portrait. For that, we will have to wait for a scholar who is prepared to devote his career to Adams and produce a multi-volume work. Here, we have only a highly readable bestseller (forty-two weeks on the New York Times's list) written by a professional author who is evidently infatuated with Adams.
The result, as Richard Brookhiser said in his interview with Navigator last month, is "a love letter." But it is more than that. It is also a reasonably successful attempt to make readers love Adams—and Adams is not an easy man to love. In the nineteenth century, he would have been the quintessential bourgeois: a plump and cross-grained businessman of humble beginnings who rose to great wealth through hard work and financial astuteness. In the era of America's birth, Adams was a middle-class success story of a slightly different kind: a plump and cross-grained farmer-lawyer who rose to great fame and power through hard work and mental acuity. If McCullough induces us to love Adams, it is principally by forcing us to appreciate just how diligently Adams labored for our country.
What is surprising is the method by which McCullough fosters this appreciation: a running comparison between Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Originally, it seems, this book was to be a joint biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and though Jefferson no longer figures in the book's title, the "compare and contrast" structure remains. Thus, John Adams is sold to us as "the un-Jefferson."
Of course, Adams has long been compared with Jefferson, but he has almost always suffered by the comparison. Jefferson was tall, handsome, and gracious; Adams was stout, plain, and pugnacious. But as McCullough recounts the intertwined lives of Jefferson and Adams, he makes us feel that at the deeper levels of personality and character there is nonetheless much to be said for the New Englander. For example, consider the two men as farmers. Who would not rather be Jefferson with his 10,000 acres than Adams with his 40? But then, McCullough reminds us, Adams was a yeoman who worked his own land alongside a few hired men, while Jefferson's plantation was worked by slaves. Who looks better in that light?
Because the two men first served together at the Second Continental Congress (1775-76), McCullough takes the opportunity to offer a lengthy comparison of them at that time. Adams arrived in February and left in October; Jefferson arrived in mid-May and left in early September. Jefferson's gentlemanly reluctance to contradict anyone else made him among the most reserved of those present. By contrast, "Adams joined in floor debate day after day, arguing a point, pleading, persuading, and nearly always with effect. No one spoke more often or with greater force" (p. 98). But although Adams worked for independence, tirelessly, for eight months, on more than two dozen committees, what we remember is that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.
While serving in the Congress, Adams closely observed the men around him and confided his observations to an intimate diary. Jefferson seems to have been utterly uninterested in souls, others' or his own. So, instead of keeping a diary as America headed toward independence, he kept meticulous records of external observations, such as daily temperature readings. On one particularly hot day, he wrote down fourteen separate readings. Says McCullough: "He had nothing like Adams's fascination with human nature and, quite unlike Adams, little sense of humor. 'He is a man of science,' a close observer would later write of Jefferson. 'But . . . he knows little of the nature of man—very little indeed'" (p. 112). Here, one may speculate, lay the root of the differences that would arise between Adams and Jefferson over the issues of radical democracy and the French Revolution.
Something else Jefferson habitually recorded were his expenses, down to the very smallest. Yet he seems to have been a spendthrift in Philadelphia, and indeed all his life. He was apparently unable to deny himself anything, even though he had to buy on credit. As a result, he died "with debts exceeding $100,000, more than the value of Monticello, its land, and all his possessions" (p. 648). Adams, though his life left him little time for money-making, was frugal and died with a net worth of approximately $100,000.
Such comparisons between the aristocratic Virginian and the bourgeois New Englander are repeated often in McCullough's book, until, in the end, the reader becomes exasperated by Jefferson's personal and intellectual self-indulgence. Conversely, one comes to appreciate the dogged plodding of John Adams. One understands how hard won were his victories and his conclusions, and why he treasured them—and one sympathizes with the depths of his bitterness in personal and intellectual defeat, the last and greatest being his loss of the presidency in 1800 to the democratic forces of Jefferson.
In the end, though, Adams's hard work and Stoicism are the backdrop for what is most lovable about him: the fact that his pain runs only so deep. "Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments," he cries out at one point. And yet his next words are: "What then? This is a gay merry world notwithstanding." For discovering this unsuspected joy in John Adams's soul, McCullough's book has quite rightly become the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of 2001.
Adams as a Second Madison
If McCullough makes us appreciate the soul of John Adams, C. Bradley Thompson's John Adams & the Spirit of Liberty makes us appreciate Adams's mind, and particularly his genius as a political scientist. What makes Thompson's achievement so remarkable is the sheer difficulty of figuring out what Adams thought: his political works border on the unreadable, and that is why previous scholars have tended to skip over them lightly—to the detriment of Adams's reputation. Thompson's work, by contrast, began life as a dissertation, done under Brown University's eminent historian of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood. So, whatever one makes of Thompson's argument, one cannot doubt that it rests on a familiarity with the relevant source material.
And what is Thompson's argument for Adams? To simplify: He maintains that John Adams was a child of the Anglo-American Enlightenment, not a child of Puritan New England. He relates (as others have before him) how impressed Adams was by his instruction in Newtonian science at Harvard University, and he goes on to suggest: "At the core of John Adams's political science was the attempt to apply the scientific method of Bacon and Newton to the 'moral and intellectual world'" (p. 119). Thompson is convinced that Adams largely succeeded in this attempt and therefore deserves to be acknowledged as a major political thinker whose ideas rested on Enlightenment epistemology.
Is Thompson's argument convincing? Yes and no. Adams emerges from Thompson's examination as a powerful thinker in the fields of social theory and constitutionalism. But that his thought flowed from Enlightenment science and epistemology is much more doubtful. After all, merely being impressed by Enlightenment science and epistemology (which Adams was) does not guarantee that one's reasoning will embody that epistemology. Spinoza was impressed by the achievements and method of Euclid, but that does not mean Spinoza successfully applied the deductive method to metaphysics and morality.
So, did Adams succeed in applying Enlightenment epistemology to "the moral and intellectual world"? One has to wonder whether he even understood the epistemology of Enlightenment science sufficiently to apply it. Consider a passage in his greatest work: A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. This tract was provoked by a 1784 letter of Baron Turgot that criticized the constitutions of the American states. "The political controversy between Adams and the Turgoists," Thompson tells us, "began and ended on the question of constitutional forms, on whether unicameral or bicameral legislatures would better protect the rights and liberties of all citizens" (p. 233). According to Thompson, this doctrine of legislative balance was one of the "core principles of political architecture that Adams found in reason and nature" (p. 235). These core principles "were not unlike the laws that govern the motion of the heavens and the machines that man was building in the light of a Newtonian cosmos. Adams thought government a piece of clockwork, a machine to be designed and constructed on the basis of 'principles and maxims, as fixed as any in Mechanicks'" (p. 235). In fact, Adams went so far as to invoke Newton's Third Law to justify his advocacy of a bicameral legislature. But the legendary historian of science I. Bernard Cohen has shown (in Science and the Founding Fathers, pp. 228-29) that Adams's attempt to use Newton's Third Law was completely muddled. Specifically, he cited the principle that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But he took it to mean that a body cannot be at rest unless equal and opposite forces operate on it, which has nothing to do with Newton's Third Law and is also false. Thus, at a point where Adams was defending the core of his political science, he was demonstrably employing Enlightenment principles out of all context.
But if Adams was not a practitioner of Enlightenment epistemology, how can one explain the many remarks Thompson cites in which Adams speaks favorably of induction and reason? More to the point, how can one explain his genuine insights into society and law? Perhaps the most obvious explanation is that Adams was a fine lawyer and rhetorician, accustomed to marshalling facts, making arguments, and justifying important conclusions about society and politics in good lawyerly fashion. What more natural, during the late Enlightenment, than that such a lawyer and statesman would dress up traditional persuasive techniques by invoking principles and names made prestigious by the new sciences? Seen in that light, Adams's confused attempt to use Newton's Third Law in defense of bicameralism is just what one might expect.
Curiously, Thompson cites Cohen's work when arguing that instruction in physics at Harvard "introduced Adams to the new philosophic rationalism associated with the modern revolution in the natural sciences" (pp. 6, 284 n. 9). But he does not mention Cohen's analysis of the bicameral debate or his conclusion that Adams "no longer had any recollection of what [Newton's Third Law] meant or how it was to be applied" (Science and the Founding Fathers, p. 229). And this silence prompts a question. Is Thompson an objective analyst of Adams's intellectual outlook and achievement? Evidently, Thompson is a partisan of both Enlightenment philosophy and John Adams. So, a reader must ask: How much of his own philosophical thinking is Thompson reading into the mind of his hero?
Look at an example that is not in Thompson's book but in an article he wrote for the April 1998 William and Mary Quarterly: "Following Locke, Adams held that knowledge begins with two basic axioms: something exists that one perceives, and one exists possessing consciousness or the means of perceiving that which exists" (p. 271). No reader of Navigator will fail to recognize this as a close (unfootnoted) paraphrase of a famous line in John Galt's speech: "'Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.'" Did Adams formulate the fundamental axioms of Objectivism two centuries before Ayn Rand? Clearly not. Did even Locke formulate Rand's axioms? No. One might argue that they were implicit in Locke, but then they were implicit in Thomas Aquinas, perhaps more so as Thomas was not a Lockean representationalist. Apparently, Thompson is here ascribing to John Adams his own belief in the Objectivist axioms of metaphysics and epistemology.
To be sure, in the first chapter of his book (which is said in the Introduction to be a reprint of the article cited above), Thompson has toned down the relevant sentence: "Following Locke, Adams held implicitly the view that the natural world exists independent of human cognition, and furthermore that reason is man's faculty for recognizing, identifying, and knowing that reality" (p. 14). This may appease Objectivists, but it does not demonstrate that Thompson has repressed the impulse that first led him to allege Ayn Rand's formulations were "held" by John Adams.
In the end, therefore, we must conclude that Thompson's book is a meritorious brief for considering John Adams to be a major Enlightenment political thinker, deserving of respect and study. But the book is also a reminder that major Enlightenment thinkers could arrive at valuable conclusions by applying traditional methods of argument and proof, as well as by applying the new epistemology of scientific induction.
The Relevance of John Adams
The preservation of American liberty depends upon the checks and balances provided by our Constitution: the executive branch, the courts, and the legislature. But it depends no less upon the checks and balances provided by our Founding Fathers. When we forget Washington, we forget that a country needs a president who is a leader, not just a CEO. When we forget Jefferson, we forget that a country needs a constitution that provides for human freedom, not just for governmental procedures. When we forget Adams, we forget that a country needs public servants who are statesmen, not just politicians and bureaucrats.
Today, all three truths are being forgotten but none so thoroughly as the last. Adams sought high office, but not for the sake of personal power. He sought office to secure a stable system of freedom for the United States—and he expected, in return, to receive the honor owed a statesman. Two centuries ago, that honor was denied him. And so it is altogether fitting and proper that his countrymen are once again raising the cry of "Adams and Liberty!"
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