Daniel Hannan, a British politician and Member of the European Parliament, writes:
I gave the same message everywhere. Americans should cleave to their Jeffersonian heritage.
Normally I would shoot mental shockwaves of negative energy towards any man who uttered such blasphemy. But I read on and Hannan was kind enough to publish an email from Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Ebell has a much different (and accurate) take on Mr. Jefferson.
Jefferson may have said that that government is best which governs least, but he never had a useful thought about how to keep limits on government except to recommend revolution in every generation. Which is of course disastrous. But he was a very silly man—a true, because superficial and calculating, product of the Enlightenment.
Ebell proceeds to carefully delineate the differences between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Ebell’s preference for Adams shines through.
Unlike Jefferson, Adams was obsessed with how to keep elites in check by dividing power and balancing power against power. In this he is in the tradition of Harrington and Montesquieu and Hume rather than of Locke (Jefferson on the other hand admired Rousseau). He was the deepest thinker of the Revolution and also the most important political figure (as distinguished from leader)—he made the strategy that led to independence, he led the public campaign for independence, and was the leading proponent for independence in the Continental Congress both rhetorically and behind the scenes.
Mr. Ebell, if I ever meet you, the next beer is on me.
I’ll admit to a certain bias when it comes to Mr. Jefferson. My doctoral dissertation was, in essence, a diatribe on why the Jefferson/Rousseau philosophy was leading us down a path of destruction and it continues to annoy and distress me when I see conservatives hold Jefferson up to such lofty standards. The man was no conservative—in any sense of the term. The fact that he claimed to support limited government makes him no different than any of his peers, and in fact—as Ebell aludes to—his ultimate governing philosophy had quite the opposite impact. His true progeny are men like FDR and Barack Obama, not Ronald Reagan.
I’ve said on this very blog that some of these abstract academic musings are somewhat futile because America is not a deeply ideological country. I stand by that, but it is important to have some kind of grasp of our philosophical heritage. We need to understand that there are two decidedly different pathways: the path of Jefferson and Rousseau, and the path of Adams and Edmund Burke. Choose wisely.
August 7th, 2009 | 2:06 pm
Amen. Adams was the force behind the fight for American independence from Great Britain. Adams it was who, more than any other, kept his eyes on the goal and never wavered in his determination to be free of tyranny.
I take it Mr. Ebell believes John Adams was not a leader but I would disagree; he was the one who led the fight, whether through oration or writing, and kept fighting, in America and in Europe, to keep up support for our noble cause.
I wrote a paper in college challenging Jefferson’s pre-eminence over John Adams and asked why there is no monument to Adams in our nation’s capital. Of course, the easy answer is, there is no monument to him because Adams was abrasive and thin-skinned, and used his writing to disparage those he disliked or with whom he disagreed.
It was Adams, along with Franklin and John Jay, who kept in check Jefferson’s propensity writing with rhetorical flourish and made the Declaration of Independence the concise and pointed document it is.
Adams should be on Mount Rushmore!
August 7th, 2009 | 2:57 pm
Wow. Everything I came here to say, Will has said (except his college paper – I didn’t write that, he did). I’ll just add my amen and recommend David McCollough’s wonderful biography.
August 7th, 2009 | 5:37 pm
Being a son of Mr Jefferson’s University and a longtime resident of the Mr Adam’s home turf, I appreciate both men.
One clue is to compare their homes: Monticello and Peacefield. Both were working farms, but the Adamses really worked themselves.
Adams alone of the major Founders never owned a slave; he was the lawyer son of a cobbler deacon – middling trade/professional class, not a merchant king – and embodied the values of his class. In the few months he was in the White House, he and his wife had to hire free servants (think of how many other Presidents before Lincoln owned slaves or permitted slave servants in the White House).
Adams’ major contribution after winning the oral argument in favor of independence was the warp and weft of constitutionalism in the United States: he was the major strategic thinker about written constitutions adopted at the state level, and the fact that he served so much in other capacities during the war meant that Massachusetts adopted its own constitution fairly late in 1780, but reflecting a great deal of Adams’ maturing thought. It alone of that era’s state constitutions endures to this day. He also encouraged the idea of constitutional ratification conventions elected apart from the legislature, which later proved a key medium for the adoption of the federal constitution. We take his sense of constitutionalism for granted when we skip over him and look directly at James Madison, James Wilson and G. Morris as the fathers of that constitution.
Adams was a vexing man, but a true one. He had more deep friendships than any of the other major Founders. Jefferson was more cultured in sociability and political leadership, but he was not a true man; Washington paid him the ultimate insult of the time for the duplicitous role he had in rumormongering against Washington.
Adams died solvent, like Franklin. Jefferson did not.
Most people do not know that Adams’ last tour of public duty came in late 1820. After Federalist Massachusetts finally got rid of the Democratic District of Maine in the Missouri Compromise, it set out to revise Adams’ Constitution. He was elected to the convention at the age of 85; the convention elected him its president, but he demurred. He waged – and lost – two battles during that convention. One was to prevent the elimination of Massachusett’s very intricate 3-tiered franchise system (one tier for men subject to taxation, the next tier for men who paid taxes, the top tier for property holders); that went with the burgeoning tide of opening the franchise to white freeman (a tide that saw the closing of the franchise in many states to blacks and even women). The other battle was to eliminate the established church(es) [in Massachusetts by that time, the Congregational or Unitarian church of your town was established - people today don't realize the Unitarian church was once an established church in places, generally the wealthier towns]; that war was won after his death.
In the fall of 2001, Congress passed a bill to permit the erection of a memorial to John Adams (and Abigail and J Quincy – the First Son of the Republic – would inevitably be included) near but not on the National Mall. I proposed to the memorial foundation at the time that it a monumental column topped by an eternal flame that would be within sight of the Jefferson Memorial, and have a friezed base recounting the story of that great Adams family, and the words to be engraved on the monument be Adams’ jubilee toast to the Republic on the day he died: “Independence Forever!”
Adams would not think highly of either political party in this country right now, and any major politician or party ideologue trying to invoke his favor or aura is an idiot for attempting such.
August 10th, 2009 | 10:23 am
Will:
What did John Jay have to do with writing the Declaration of Independence? Besides Franklin and Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston rounded out the committee. Most scholars agree that from the committee, Jefferson, J. Adams and Franklin were responsible for its contents.
Re Adams himself, though his writing could be incoherent at times, his letters reveal some truly fascinating claims and commentaries. Whatever his political differences with Jefferson, his religious differences were matters of small degree; they both agreed on the basics and were very very heterodox. Some of the things Adams said in 1813 (in private letters to Jefferson) were so heterodox I’ve seen religious conservatives write the man off completely.
August 10th, 2009 | 10:32 am
You may enjoy this commentary on J. Adams’ religion when I guest blogged at Ed Brayton’s Dispatches From the Culture Wars.
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/01/john_adams_the_other_key_found.php
I discuss some of Adams’ heterodox religious sentiments and quote my friend and co-blogger Tom Van Dyke’s distaste for John Adams’ theology (TVD is a devoted First Things reader and co-blogged with Hunter Baker). As Van Dyke wrote:
As for John Adams’ post-presidential theological musings, they’re not mainstream, they’re sophomoric and asinine. I haven’t even bothered to refute his clippings of a quote here and a paragraph there because of their lack of intellectual rigor.
When he writes [to Thomas Jefferson, October 4, 1813],
“θεμις was the goddess of honesty, justice, decency, and right; the wife of Jove, another name for Juno. She presided over all oracles, deliberations, and councils. She commanded all mortals to pray to Jupiter for all lawful benefits and blessings. Now, is not this (so far forth) the essence of Christian devotion?”
I think, no, it’s not the “essence,” rigidly biased ideological reductionism. For one, the Greco-Roman vision of the afterlife as the dull gray Hades has nothing to do with the Christian heaven or the beatific vision. I could go on, but Adams is irrelevant anyway, and often laughable. His theory about the religious wisdom of the ancients being destroyed by some churchly cabal is the stuff of cranks, not mainstream Founding religious thought.
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