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37. Reconciliation With John Adams
here is nothing more beautiful in the history of the retirement of this great man than his exertions to revive the revolutionary affections between Mr. Adams and himself that had been interrupted by the factional conflicts of political opinion. They had ceased in expression only, not in their existence or cordiality, on the part of Mr. Jefferson, who regarded the discontinuance of friendly correspondence between them as "one of the most painful occurrences" in his life. With Mr. Adams, they had been affected, though never destroyed, partly by the sanguine cast of his constitution, but principally by the artful and imposing suggestions of busy intriguers that Mr. Jefferson perhaps participated in the electioneering activity and licentiousness of the contest which was overthrowing his administration. The injustice of this imputation is apparent from the fact that in his most confidential letters, he never alluded to Mr. Adams with personal disrespect and even charged the errors of his administration upon his ministers and advisers, not upon him. An instance of magnanimity towards his contender has been recorded of him by a political opponent, who was an eye-witness of the scene. In Virginia, where the opposition to the federal ascendency ran high, the younger spirits of the day, catching their tone from the public journals, imputed to Mr. Adams on various occasions in the presence of Mr. Jefferson a concealed design to overturn the republic and supply its place with a monarchy on the British model. The answer of Mr. Jefferson to this charge will never be forgotten by those who heard it, of whom there were many besides the particular narrator. It was this: "Gentlemen, you do not know that man. There is not upon this earth a more perfectly honest man than John Adams. Concealment is no part of his character; of that he is utterly incapable. It is not in his nature to meditate anything that he would not publish to the world. The measures of the general government are a fair subject for difference of opinion. But do not found your opinions on the notion that there is the smallest spice of dishonesty, moral or political, in the character of John Adams; for I know him well, and I repeat it: that a man more perfectly honest never issued from the hands of his Creator." (Wirt's Eulogy)
Two or three years after, to wit, in 1804, Mr. Jefferson having had the misfortune to lose a daughter, between whom and Mrs. Adams there had been considerable intimacy, she made it the occasion of writing Mr. Jefferson a letter of condolence in which, with sentiments of concern for the event, she avoided a single expression of friendship towards himself and even concluded it with the wishes "of her who once took pleasure in subscribing herself your friend," etc. Unpromising as was the complexion of this letter, he seized the partial opening which it offered to make an effort towards removing the clouds from between them. The answer of Mr. Jefferson expressed the warmest sensibility for the kindness manifested towards his daughter, went largely into explanations of the circumstances which had seemed to draw a line of separation between them, and breathed fervent wishes for a reconciliation with herself and Mr. Adams. In conclusion he wrote:
"I have thus, my dear Madam, opened myself to you without reserve, which I have long wished an opportunity of doing; and without knowing how it will be received, I feel relief from being unbosomed. And I have now only to entreat your forgiveness for this transition from a subject of domestic affliction to one which seems of a different aspect. But though connected with political events, it has been viewed by me most strongly in its unfortunate bearings on my private friendships. The injury these have sustained has been a heavy price for what has never given me equal pleasure. That you may both be favored with health, tranquility, and long life, is the prayer of one who tenders you the assurances of his highest consideration and esteem." (June 13, 1804. ME 11:30)
This letter was followed by a further correspondence between the parties from which, soon finding that reconciliation was desperate, he yielded to an intimation in the last letter of Mrs. Adams and ceased from further explanation.
eing now retired from all connection with the political world, with every ground of jealousy removed, his determination together with his hopes revived to make another effort towards restoring a friendly understanding with his revolutionary colleague. To this end he opened a correspondence with Dr. Rush, a mutual friend, upon the subject to whom he gave a history of all that had happened between them, enclosed to him the late unsuccessful correspondence, and expressed his undiminished attachment to Mr. Adams with the wish that he would use his endeavors to re-establish ancient dispositions between them. A short time after, two of Mr. Jefferson's neighbors and friends while on a tour to the northward fell in company with Mr. Adams at Boston and passed a day with him at Braintree. In the freedom and enthusiasm of the occasion, he spoke out on everything that came uppermost without reserve, dwelt particularly upon his own administration, and alluded to his masters, as he called his heads of department, representing them as having acted above his control and often against his opinions. Among other topics, he adverted to the unprincipled licentiousness of the press against Mr. Jefferson, adding, "I always loved Jefferson and still love him."
The moment Mr. Jefferson received this intelligence, he again wrote to his friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush:
"This is enough for me. I only needed this knowledge to revive towards him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives. Changing a single word only in Dr. Franklin's character of him, I knew him to be always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes incorrect and precipitate in his judgments; and it is known to those who have ever heard me speak of Mr. Adams that I have ever done him justice myself and defended him when assailed by others, with the single exception as to his political opinions. But with a man possessing so many other estimable qualities, why should we be dissocialized by mere differences of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, or anything else? His opinions are as honestly formed as my own. Our different views of the same subject are the result of a difference in our organization and experience. I never withdrew from the society of any man on this account, although many have done it from me; much less should I do it from one with whom I had gone through with hand and heart so many trying scenes. I wish, therefore, but for an apposite occasion to express to Mr. Adams my unchanged affections for him. There is an awkwardness which hangs over the resuming a correspondence so long discontinued unless something could arise which should call for a letter. Time and chance may perhaps generate such an occasion, of which I shall not be wanting in promptitude to avail myself. From this fusion of mutual affections, Mrs. Adams is, of course, separated. It will only be necessary that I never name her. In your letters to Mr. Adams, you can perhaps suggest my continued cordiality towards him, and knowing this, should an occasion of writing first present itself to him, he will perhaps avail himself of it as I certainly will, should it first occur to me. No ground for jealousy now existing, he will certainly give fair play to the natural warmth of his heart. Perhaps I may open the way in some letter to my old friend Gerry, who I know is in habits of the greatest intimacy with him.
"I have thus, my friend, laid open my heart to you because you were so kind as to take an interest in healing again revolutionary affections which have ceased in expression only, but not in their existence. God ever bless you and preserve you in life and health." (Dec. 5, 1811. ME 13:116)
In the course of another month, these two patriarchs of the revolution were brought together after a ten years' suspension of all friendly intercommunication. The correspondence which passed between them is highly interesting. It has been well described as resembling more than anything else one of those conversations in the Elysium of the ancients which the shades of the departed great were supposed to hold with regard to the affairs of the world they had left. This exchange, which has already been presented to the world in its entirety, makes up a volume of itself. A few disjointed fragments of a personal and desultory kind, taken promiscuously from Mr. Jefferson's letters of different dates, are all that can be entered here into this general view of the correspondence.
"A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind. It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port. Still we did not expect to be without rubs and difficulties; and we have had them. First the detention of the Western posts: then the coalition of Pilnitz, outlawing our commerce with France, and the British enforcement of the outlawry. In your day French depredations: in mine English, and the Berlin and Milan decrees: now the English orders of council and the piracies they authorize: when these shall be over, it will be the impressment of our seamen, or something else: and so we have gone on, and so we shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man. And I do believe we shall continue to grow, to multiply and prosper until we exhibit an association, powerful, wise, and happy beyond what has yet been seen by men." (Jan. 21, 1812)
"I have thus stated my opinion on a point on which we differ, not with a view to controversy, for we are both too old to change opinions which are the result of a long life of inquiry and reflection, but on the suggestion of a former letter of yours that we ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other. We acted in perfect harmony through a long and perilous contest for our liberty and independence. A constitution has been acquired which, though neither of us think perfect, yet both consider as competent to render our fellow citizens the happiest and the securest on whom the sun has ever shone. If we do not think exactly alike as to its imperfections, it matters little to our country which, after devoting to it long lives of disinterested labor, we have delivered over to our successors in life, who will be able to take care of it and of themselves." (Oct. 28, 1813. ME 13:402)
"I learned with great regret the serious illness mentioned in your letter, and I hope Mr. Rives will be able to tell me you are entirely restored. But our machines have now been running for seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way: and however we may tinker them up for awhile, all will at length surcease motion. Our watches, with works of brass and steel, wear out within that period. Shall you and I last to see the course the seven-fold wonders of the times will take? The Attila of the age dethroned, the ruthless destroyer of ten millions of the human race, whose thirst for blood appeared unquenchable, the great oppressor of the rights and liberties of the world, shut up within the circuit of a little island of the Mediterranean and dwindled to the condition of an humble and degraded pensioner on the bounty of those he had most injured. How miserably, how meanly, has he closed his inflated career! What a sample of the Bathos will his history present! He should have perished on the swords of his enemies under the walls of Paris." (July 5, 1814. ME 14:144)
"You ask if I would agree to live my seventy or rather seventy-three years over again? To which I say, Yea. I think with you that it is a good world on the whole, that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us. There are indeed (who might say Nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say, How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened! My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy. There are, I acknowledge, even in the happiest life some terrible convulsions, heavy set-offs against the opposite page of the account. I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have a useful object. And the perfection of the moral character is, not in a Stoical apathy, so hypocritically vaunted, and so untruly too, because impossible, but in a just equilibrium of all the passions. I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote." (Apr. 8, 1816. ME 14:467)
"The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding. Tried myself in the school of affliction by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that, for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicine. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both that the term is not very distant at which we are to deposit in the same cerement our sorrows and suffering bodies and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction." (Nov. 13, 1818. ME 15:174)
"Putting aside these things however for the present, I write this letter as due to a friendship coeval with our government, and now attempted to be poisoned [note] when too late in life to be replaced by new affections. I had for some time observed in the public papers dark hints and mysterious innuendoes of a correspondence of yours with a friend to whom you had opened your bosom without reserve, and which was to be made public by that friend or his representative. And now it is said to be actually published. It has not yet reached us, but extracts have been given and such as seemed most likely to draw a curtain of separation between you and myself. Were there no other motive than that of indignation against the author of this outrage on private confidence, whose shaft seems to have been aimed at yourself more particularly, this would make it the duty of every honorable mind to disappoint that aim by opposing to its impression a seven-fold shield of apathy and insensibility. With me however no such armor is needed. The circumstances of the times in which we have happened to live and the partiality of our friends at a particular period placed us in a state of apparent opposition, which some might suppose to be personal also; and there might not be wanting those who wished to make it so by filling our ears with malignant falsehoods, by dressing up hideous phantoms of their own creation, presenting them to you under my name, to me under your's, and endeavoring to instill into our minds things concerning each other the most destitute of truth. And if there had been at any time a moment when we were off our guard and in a temper to let the whispers of these people make us forget what we had known of each other for so many years, and years of so much trial, yet all men who have attended to the workings of the human mind, who have seen the false colors under which passion sometimes dresses the actions and motives of others, have seen also these passions subsiding with time and reflection, dissipating, like mists before the rising sun, and restoring to us the sight of all things in their true shape and colors. It would be strange indeed if, at our years, we were to go an age back to hunt up imaginary or forgotten facts to disturb the repose of affections so sweetening to the evening of our lives. Be assured, my dear Sir, that I am incapable of receiving the slightest impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth, and wisdom, and to sow tares between friends who have been such for near half a century. Beseeching you then not to suffer your mind to be disquieted by this wicked attempt to poison its peace and praying you to throw it by among the things which have never happened, I add sincere assurances of my unabated and constant attachment, friendship, and respect." (Oct. 12, 1823. ME 15:474)
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