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Drafting the Article 1 Contending for the Mantle of Enlightenment: The Philosophical Exchanges of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams Darren Staloff Between 1812 and 1826, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson renewed one of the most remarkable epistolary exchanges in early American letters. The range of topics they discussed was dizzying. From science and theology to history and literatures, with plenty of politics thrown in, the two aging legends covered almost every major issue of their day. One of the most common topics they engaged was philosophy. In fact, over one third of their retirement correspondence touched on some philosophic issue or author.1 These philosophical debates ultimately served to vindicate each interlocutors claim to the mantle of Enlightenment. What made these debates so pointed and compelling was the fact that these statesmen represented wildly divergent philosophical positions and traditions each of which claimed to speak for the Enlightened republic of letters. As such they shed some light on how we understand that movement and its politics. In many ways, these philosophic exchanges are deeply revealing. If nothing else, they remind us of the remarkable breadth of learning shared by these two great founders. Both ex-presidents displayed a keen knowledge of ancient speculation, debating the metaphysics and politics of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, contrasting the ethical strictures of Stoicism and Epicureanism, and examining the doctrines of Philo, Pythagoras, Euclid, Xenophon and Cicero. Their familiarity with modern philosophy was even more impressive; with the notable exceptions of Spinoza, Vico, and Kant, Adams and Jefferson discussed every major philosopher of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as a frightening proportion of the minor ones.2 Far more significant are what these exchanges reveal about the basic philosophical convictions of the interlocutors. Nowhere is Adams’ persistent prudential skepticism expressed more clearly and forcefully. And, of course, it is to these exchanges that we owe the most complete and thoughtful articulation of Jefferson’s monistic materialism. Two remarkable letters penned in 1820 2 lay out his metaphysical convictions in a detail and cogency found nowhere else in his writings. From sense alone, Jefferson claimed, “we may erect all the certainties we can have or need,” including the reductive belief that thought was the residue of “a material organ of peculiar structure,” namely the brain. By contrast, Jefferson insisted, “once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind.” Particularly vacuous were such “hyperphysical and anti-physical” notions as immaterial mind or spirit “of which we can have neither evidence nor idea.”3 Far more than merely academic, these philosophic discussions are critical to understanding the political thought of Adams and Jefferson. For both founders, the articulation of their theories of government and politics were profoundly colored by their larger philosophic postures. A careful examination of their philosophical debates thus offers us a deeper insight into their political theories as well as their respective relations to the larger politics of Enlightenment. The decision to turn to philosophy was decidedly Adams’s. This is hardly surprising given his overall dominance of their correspondence. Where Jefferson had written the majority of letters they exchanged before their retirement, Adams produced over two thirds of their subsequent correspondence.4 Adams’s missives were not only more frequent, they were also longer and more pointed. Predictably, Jefferson played his cards close to the vest while Adams practically thrust his in his friend’s face. Adams dominated their correspondence – he was the one, after all, who initiated their rapproachment – because he was the more “needy” interlocutor. Convinced that he had been bested by Jefferson in public opinion, he suspected the Virginian would similarly eclipse him in the eyes of posterity. What Adams needed, then, was to know how his great and dear friend had become his political rival and nemesis. Their famed collaboration in the Continental Congress in the cause of independence – Benjamin Rush later described them as “the North and South Poles of the American Revolution” – deepened into intimate friendship during their shared diplomatic duties in the 1780s.5 A portrait of Jefferson hung in the Adams home, and Abigail described the lanky Virginian as “the only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom, and unreserve.”6 For his part, Jefferson confessed to a clearly hostile James Madison that Adams was vain and irascible but extolled his honesty, profundity, and judgment, pointedly insisting “I pronounce that you will love him if ever you become acquainted 3 with him.”7 Despite growing political differences which would see them representing opposing parties, their mutual esteem and affection survived. Indeed, when Jefferson was assured of his old friend’s victory in their first presidential contest, he drafted a congratulatory letter whose purpose was, as he told Madison, to recruit him to the cause of Republicanism as “the only sure barrier against Hamilton” and “come to a good understanding with him as to his future elections.”8 Yet within a few short years they were no longer speaking and Jefferson had hired the notorious grub street “assassin” James Thompson Callender to heap calumny on his old comrade.9 More than anything, Adams needed to know how this had happened, how his old friend had turned on him so abruptly and with such ferocity. This need is palpable in his pathetic plea; “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”10 Adams sought his explanation in the realm of philosophy in part because there was nowhere else to look. In terms of practical politics, there was very little distance between them. Both responded to America’s newly declared independence by drafting constitutions structurally similar to that subsequently adopted by the federal republic with a bicameral legislature balanced by a separate executive and independent judiciary. Both, in principle at least, shared Washington’s foreign policy of strict neutrality toward the warring parties in Europe. Adams was of one mind with Jefferson’s agrarian-tinged liberal political economy as well as his mistrust of corporations and banks. Not surprisingly, neither was particularly enamored with Hamilton’s financial plan although both acceded to its practical utility. And when it came to Hamilton, both shared a deep seated loathing of the crafty New Yorker and his fellow High Federalists: Jefferson characterized his whole career as “a tissue of machination against the liberty of the country” while Adams dismissed him curtly as “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.”11 Their one great disagreement had been about the likely course of the French Revolution, “the first time” Adams reminded his old friend, “that you and I differed in Opinion in any material Question.” From the outset Jefferson had been sanguine in his expectations while Adams was equally certain that “it was all madness.”12 Yet even here Jefferson forthrightly confessed that “your prophecies” had “proved truer than mine.”13 Given their like-mindedness in matters of practical political judgment, Adams could only hope to plumb their differences in the realm of speculative theory. 4 Adams, however, had other reasons to pursue his dialogue with Jefferson on the philosophical plane. He was, in fact, convinced that their real disagreement was ultimately philosophical. Of all the criticisms that Jefferson leveled against his old friend, the most painful was contained in a published letter to Joseph Priestly where the Virginian claimed that Adams had rejected the belief in scientific progress in favor of a reactionary “Bigotry in politics and religion.” The obvious implication was that by rejecting belief in science and progress Adams and his partisans had abandoned the Enlightenment and its politics. Adams utterly rejected this charge as “totally incongruous to every principle” he had held “for Threescore Years at least.”14 True, he had averred and continued to believe that some truths, like the general principles of Christianity and liberty, were “eternal and immutable,” but such a claim was hardly inconsistent with an enlightened politics. “I could fill Sheets of quotations from Frederick of Prussia, from Hume, Gibbon, Bolingbroke, Rousseau and Voltaire, as well as Newton and Locke” Adams insisted, “in favour of the general Principles in Phylosophy, Religion, and Government.”15 With all its “Errors and Vices,” Adams wholeheartedly embraced the age of Enlightenment as “the most honourable to human Nature. Knowledge and Virtues were increased and diffused, Arts, Sciences useful to Men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal Period.”16 To then charge him, as Jefferson had, with abandoning that embrace in his mature political thought and action struck Adams as bordering on calumny. “I might have flattered myself that my Sentiments were sufficiently known” he complained to his friend, “to have protected me against Suspicions of narrow thoughts, contrasted Sentiments, biggotted, enthusiastic or superstitious Principles civil political, philosophical, or ecclesiastical.”17 Jefferson sought to mollify Adams. He never considered the views his old friend expressed as “your deliberate opinion.” Adams had “too much science” himself to have rejected the Enlightenment tout court. But he did not back
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