A number of eighteenth-century rhetoricians offered prescriptions on letter-writing as part of their treatment of rhetorical style. As it had been in previous ages, letter writing remained in the eighteenth century among the genres of composition commonly taught by rhetoricians. Moreover, as had earlier rhetoricians, the writers of the belles lettres movement turned to Cicero's epistles as the principal model for letter writing style. Charles Rollin, for example, found in Cicero's letters “the proper character of the epistolary style,” while Hugh Blair called them “the most valuable collection of letters, extant, in any language.”¹ These professional assessments of Cicero's letters, however, do not reveal much about the influence of the Roman's epistolary style on the practice of letter writing in the eighteenth century. Nor do these recommendations, concerned exclusively and narrowly with style, suggest the political advantages such a style might afford a letter writer involved, as Cicero was, in the day to day business of statecraft. In at least one case, however, Cicero's epistolary style was consciously adopted and imitated. As this study of certain political letters of John Adams will show, he turned to Cicero as the paradigm for his epistolary discourse.

CICERONIAN STYLE AND POLITICAL JUDGMENT

There was wide agreement among eighteenth-century scholars about those attributes of Cicero's style which made his letters worthy of imitation. William Guthrie, whose translations of Cicero's letters was among the most popular in the eighteenth century, wrote about Cicero's “extremely free” style and his “epistolary familiarity.” Blair believed Cicero's letters were “composed with purity and elegance, but without the least affectation,” a point agreed to by Conyers Middleton who thought the Roman's epistles revealed “the genuine man, without disguise or affectation.” Such revelation was possible, Middleton said, because the letters were written in “the language of conversation.” Rollin noted “the easy, simple, and natural turn in these letters of Tully,” and observed further their “beauty and delicacy of expression.” John Ward also praised the “stile of Cicero's epistles, in which the plainness and simplicity of his diction, is accompanied with something so pleasant and ingaging [sic], that he keeps up the attention of his reader without suffering him to tire.”²

The critical language used to describe Cicero's epistolary style suggests that the letters were widely admired because they answered the impulse toward a “natural language” in eighteenth-century theories of expression. As Jay Fliegelman has recently argued, communication culture in the eighteenth century recommended cultivation of a “living voice” and “conversational freedom” in both public and private discourse. “The conversational ideal,” he writes, “would quickly be impressed into the service of the revolutionary project of defining the distinctiveness of American letters.” Fliegelman's essay begins to show how “the conditions of speaking and writing operative in 1776: what was assumed, but not spoken, in the domain of action and speech,” had a fundamental influence on how politics was perceived and practiced.³ In the specific case of John Adams' letters from the Continental Congress, we see how adoption of the Ciceronian style of writing facilitated his practice of politics. Imitating Cicero's conversational style allowed Adams to use his own letters as a vital medium of political judgment.

In his study of John Dickinson's “Farmer's Letter,” Stephen Browne shows how Dickinson's reliance on pastoral configurations creates “a model of rhetorical judgement.” The pastoral sensibilities heightened by Dickinson's ethos and style, Browne explains, allow the author to “address current issues by redefining the terms of public action and rhetorical judgment.” The “model of judgment implicit in pastoral,” resulting from a “fusion of style and substance,” creates a perspective which “requires distance but mandates action.” The pastoral “can be heard only at a distance and emerges from the quiet haunts of the study, village, and farm.” Dickinson's appropriation of the pastoral for rhetorical ends composes an essentially contemplative voice for his Letter, a persona which embodies “calm, wise judgment,” rooted in the virtues of “distance, reflection, and disinterest.”⁴

Browne's study of Dickinson discovers the model of political judgment implicit in the conventions of a particular literary genre. The pastoral invites a judgment of political events consistent with the vantage of the farmer who has “freely chosen the vita contemplativa, a world and perspective removed from the hectic, distorted scenes of city life.” Although Dickinson's “Farmer” was a fiction, we can easily recognize the possibility of invoking the “cluster of values, most prominently the agrarian virtues of steady perspective and prudence” associated with the pastoral style for other rhetorical purposes. Yet it is also clear that, by definition, the pastoral is reserved for those who are removed, actually or artistically, from the “volatile demands of immediate action.” It cannot answer the rhetorical needs of those immersed in the busy scenes of city politics. Another style and mode of rhetorical judgment must serve those who pursue the vita activa.⁵

Perhaps more than any other historical character known to the men of the eighteenth century, Cicero embodied the vita activa. Cicero's complete immersion in the stormy political life of the late Roman republic is immediately evident from his letters. In his study of Cicero's letters to Atticus, Robert Hariman identifies the epistles as part of the “literature of political thought.” Cicero's letters, he explains, articulate the “republican style, which is the style designed to maximize the political opportunities inherent to republican government.” As manifestations of the republican style, the letters become “a hermeneutical space,” a “medium of understanding,” by which Cicero discerns “the preferable from other courses of action.” Hariman concludes that Cicero's letters are the chief means by which the Roman composes his public character. Cicero must constantly answer the question “how is he to comport himself—in all of his decisions, from selecting his place of residence to choosing his allies to concluding his next speech—in order to be the public figure he wishes to become?”⁶ Cicero's “republican style,” therefore, offers a counterweight to the pastoral configurations of John Dickinson. The Ciceronian voice speaks to the vita activa, it reveals a character seeking a medium for political judgment amidst the busy scenes of Roman politics.

John Adams reveled in the vita activa. “I swear I will renounce the Contemplative, and betake myself to an active roving Life,” he remarked in an early diary entry. “I will push myself into Business. I will watch my Opportunity, to speak in Court, and will strike with surprize—surprize Bench, Bar, Jury, Auditors and all. Activity, Boldness, Forwardness, will draw attention. Ile not lean with my Elbows on the Table, forever like Read, Swift, Fitch, Skinner Story, &c.” Later he confessed his desire to “move and stir from one scene of Action and Debate and Business, and Pleasure, and Conversation, to another and grow weary of all before I shall feel the strong Desire of retiring to contemplation.”⁷

Yet when Adams learned he would represent Massachusetts in the Continental Congress, he was overwhelmed by the political burden he faced. At first, he did not even know what to think of the forthcoming assembly. Did it compare to “the Court of Ariopagus, the Council of the Amphyctions,” or was it “a Conclave, a Sanhedrin, A Divan?” “It is to be a School of Political Prophets I Suppose,” he concluded. “A Nursery of American Statesmen.”⁸ The many doubts he expressed about his inability to succeed in Congress were much more than conventional office-taking fare. “I wander alone, and ponder,” he wrote in his diary. “I muse, I mope, I ruminate.—I am often In Reveries and Brown Studies.” Adams thought the task of Congress was “Too grand, and multifarious” for his comprehension, and he regretted the lack of trained politicians in America. “We have not Men, fit for the Times,” he complained. “We are deficient in Genius, in Education, in Travel, in Fortune—in every Thing. I feel unutterable Anxiety.”⁹

JOHN ADAMS AND CICERO'S LETTERS

Believing he and his colleagues lacked the capacity for competent political judgment, Adams gained some confidence by emulating Cicero, the Roman patriot who had excelled in oratory and statesmanship during the period of ancient history that was most familiar to Adams and his contemporaries. Increasingly as the events of the Revolution developed and engulfed him, Adams was inclined to view Anglo-American politics in Roman terms. Not only did he see broad historical parallels between the decline of Rome and the corruption in Great Britain, but he envisioned a specific role for himself in the repeating drama. Just before leaving Braintree to attend the First Continental Congress, for example, Adams recalled Cicero's first political mission away from Rome. He wrote to William Tudor about the virtue of “this great and excellent orator, and Statesman,” telling him that Cicero “did not receive this office, as Persons do now a days, as a Gift,” but rather as “a public Trust.” Cicero considered his office to be “a Theatre, in which the Eyes of the World, were upon him,” said Adams, and “he determined to devote himself to it, and deny himself every Pleasure, which could interfere with a laudable Discharge of it.”¹⁰ Chosen to attend the most important political meeting in colonial history, Adams must have questioned whether his own character and service would satisfy or even surpass the Ciceronian standard. During his service in Congress Adams thought of himself as an “American Senator” (a term not yet applied to American legislators but quite familiar to students of ancient Rome), and wondered in a letter to James Warren “what Plans would be adopted at the Congress if … a Demosthenes or a Cicero were there.”¹¹

But Adams did more than admire Cicero. There is ample evidence to show that this American patriot consciously imitated his Roman hero's letter writing style. Adams probably first encountered Cicero's letters as a young scholar preparing to enter Harvard, since the epistles were commonly assigned by Latin tutors to prepare students for college entrance examinations. Later Adams read the letters in Latin in the third volume of Cicero's Opera Omnia.¹² In 1758, as he prepared to take the attorney's oath in Boston, he told Jeremiah Gridley he had recently read “Cicero's Orations and Epistles.”¹³ Adams also read many of Cicero's letters in English in Conyers Middleton's Life of M. Tullius Cicero.¹⁴ In the course of his biography, Middleton translated and reprinted, in whole or in part, more than 130 of Cicero's letters. He also included hundreds of additional epistolary excerpts in Latin in the footnotes of his work. Adams may also have read one or more of the English translations of Cicero's letters available in eighteenth-century America, the most popular of which were William Guthrie's 1752 edition of Cicero's letters to Atticus, and William Melmoth's 1755 collection of Cicero's epistles to his friends.¹⁵ Given the importance of Cicero's letters in rhetorical tradition, their popularity in the eighteenth century, and Adams' easy access to them in both Latin and English, it is not surprising to find Adams selecting Cicero as his epistolary paradigm.

Adams, like other letter writers of his time, had many examples to emulate, and although he considered several models to be worthwhile, he left no doubt about that which guided his own correspondence. “Among the ancients,” he told his wife, “there are two illustrious Examples of the Epistolary style, Cicero and Pliny.” The letters of these two Romans, Adams thought, “present you with Modells of fine Writing, which has borne the Criticism of almost two thousand Years.” Those ancient writers, he said, conveyed “the Sublime, the beautifull, the Novell, and the Pathetick,” and did so with “as much Simplicity, Ease, Freedom, and familiarity, as Language is capable of.”¹⁶ Later, however, Adams revised his opinion of Pliny's productions and pared his list of great epistolary models to one. Pliny's letters, he finally decided, “are too studied and too elegant. Cicero's are the only ones of perfect simplicity, confidence, and familiarity.”¹⁷ This view of Cicero's letters echoes Adams' own philosophy of the epistolary art. Letter writing, he wrote, had “all the advantages of Conversation” and “was essentially different from the oratorical, and the Historical style.” Letters, he thought, “like conversations, should be free, easy and familiar.”¹⁸

ADAMS AND THE CICERONIAN STYLE

Like Cicero, Adams wrote letters which comfortably blended private communication with public business. His epistolary style, like that of Cicero, was colloquial, exclamatory, metaphorical, interrogatory, and often elliptical. His letters echoed the passionate, often hurried, sometimes in complete style of conversational discourse and, like those of Cicero, often contained an element of drama.

The dramatic character of Adams' epistolary style is especially evident in those letters in which he reconstructs a dialogue, such as that he composed to Abigail on June 29, 1774. “We had a curious Dialogue Yesterday, at Dinner, between our Justices Trowbridge and Hutchinson,” Adams wrote.

T. said he had seen a Letter, from England, in which it was said that the Conduct of the Chief Justice was highly approved, and that of the other Judges highly disapproved, at the Court End of the Town.—T. added, I dont know whether they impute it all to me or not.—Aye says H. but it was all owing to you. You laid Brother Ropes, Cushing and me, under the Necessity of refusing the Royal Grant, and accepting the Province Salary.¹⁹

The dialogue continues in this fashion for several more paragraphs with Adams both writing the lines and providing editorial comment.

Adams, of course, may have naturally resorted to dialogue to heighten the dramatic effect of his composition. But we must note that Cicero, too, often reported Roman events in dialogue form. In a letter to Atticus, for example, Cicero relates an exchange between him and Clodius which occurred in the Roman Senate:

Our little Beauty gets on his feet and accuses me of having been at Baiae—not true, but anyhow, “Well,” I reply, “is that like saying I intruded on the Mysteries?” “What business has an Arpinum man with the waters?” “Tell that to your counsel,” I retorted; “He was keen enough to get certain of them that belonged to an Arpinum man” (you know Marius' place of course). “How long,” cried he, “are we going to put up with the king?” “You talk about kings,” I answered, “when Rex didn't have a word to say about you?” (he had hoped to have the squandering of Rex's money). “So you've bought a house,” said he. I rejoined, “one might think he was saying that I had bought a jury.” “They didn't credit you on oath.” “On the contrary 25 jurymen gave me credit and 31 gave you none—they got their money in advance!” The roars of applause were too much for him and he collapsed into silence.²⁰

Despite the gap in the centuries and the differences in content, there is little stylistically to separate Adams' letter from that of Cicero.

At times of less leisure, Adams communicated the political atmosphere in short bursts. On September 14, 1774, he wrote to Abigail from Philadelphia: “My time is totally filled from the Moment I get out of Bed, untill I return to it. Visits, Ceremonies, Company, Business, News Papers, Pamphlets &c. &c. &c.” He also assured her that “A Tory here is the most despicable Animal in the Creation. Spiders, Toads, Snakes, are their only proper Emblems.”²¹ Adams' hurried pace is evident in these excerpts. The style, as much as the content, conveys the message clearly. Yet the letter is written without apparent art or formal construction. Conjunctions are missing and sentences rush to their completion. The thought and passion are more important than the formalities of composition. Reading Adams' letter is like having him present to lament his busy life or spout his venom at the Tories.²² And, it is much like the style used by Cicero in his busiest moments. “He's jealous,” Cicero wrote to Atticus about a political flatterer, “Awkward, tortuous, politically paltry, shabby, timid, disingenuous—but I shall go more into detail on another occasion.”²³

The sense of conversation and immediate presence is equally evident in Adams' letter to Abigail of July 6, 1774:

Our Justice Hutchinson is eternally giving his Political Hints. In a Cause, this Morning, Somebody named Captn. Mackay as a Refferee [sic]. I said “an honest Man!”—“Yes” says Hutchinson, “he's an honest Man, only misled.—He he he,” blinking and grinning.—At dinner, to day, Somebody mentioned Determinations in the Lords House (the Court sitts in the Meeting House).—“I've known many very bad Determinations in the Lords House of late” says he, meaning a Fling upon the Clergy.—He is perpetually flinging about the Fasts, and ironically talking about getting Home to the Fast. A Gentleman told me, that he had heard him say frequently, that the Fast was perfect Blasphemy.—“Why dont they pay for the Tea? Refuse to pay for the Tea! and go to fasting and praying for Direction! perfect Blasphemy!” This is the Moderation, Candor, Impartiality, Prudence, Patience, Forbearance, and Condescention of our Justice.²⁴

Note here Adams' effort to reproduce the style of conversation. His construction of dialogue, his use of ellipsis, his grammatical license, and his sense of irony, all contribute to the familiarity of the composition.

The rich description, the conversational style, and the sense of immediate presence we experience in Adams' letters is very much like the style of Cicero's epistles, as we can see in the following excerpt from a communication to Atticus:

Pray, what's all this? What is going on? I am in the dark. “We hold Cingulum, we've lost Ancona, Labienus has deserted Caesar.” Is it a Roman general or Hannibal we are talking of? Deluded wretch, with never in his life a glimpse of even the shadow of Good! And he says he is doing all this for his honour's sake! Where is honour without moral good? And is it good to have an army without public authority, to seize Roman towns by way of opening the road to the mother city, to plan debt cancellations, recall of exiles, and a hundred other villainies “all for that first of deities, Sole Power”? He is welcome to his greatness.²⁵

This letter closes the distance between Cicero and his correspondent and communicates the spontaneous boiling of a mind in action. More than a report of ideas or events, it brings the writer to the reader with all the confusion, frustration, emotion, pace, and language of a personal interaction. Cicero uses questions, answers, exclamations, incomplete periods, and apparently random disposition to create his conversational tone. He seems unconcerned about the elegance or art of his epistles to Atticus. His goal, rather, is to communicate his message and personality in clear and colorful terms, relying on the resources of both his invention and style.

While the stylistic affinity between the letters of Cicero and Adams is somewhat difficult to demonstrate with only a few excerpts, there can be no doubt that Adams had Cicero in mind as he composed his letters home. Amidst the activity of the Continental Congress and in the martial atmosphere of wartime Philadelphia, Adams told Abigail he wished he could write letters to her which would lay open “the whole system of Politicks and War, and delineate all the Characters in Either Drama, as minutely, altho I could not do it, so elegantly, as Tully [Marcus Tullius Cicero] did in his Letters to Atticus.”²⁶

ADAMS' LETTERS AND POLITICAL JUDGMENT

While Adams' imitation of Cicero's epistolary style is itself significant as further evidence of classical influence on the thought and language of eighteenth-century Americans, to Adams it was the political advantages of Cicero's mode of letter writing that led him to imitate the Roman.

There is no doubt that questions of political judgment weighed heavily on Adams as he confronted the momentous issues facing the Continental Congress. “We have a delicate Course to steer,” he wrote, “between too much Activity and too much Insensibility, in our critical situation.” Charting that course was exceedingly difficult as he had to weigh the “Characters and Tempers, the Principles and Views of fifty Gentlemen total Strangers.” Along with the opinion of the “Multitude of Pamphlets, News Papers, and private Letters,” he lamented, “I have numberless Plans of policy and many Arguments to consider.” He believed the Congress had “as great Questions to discuss as ever engaged the Attention of Men, and an infinite Multitude of them.” The times demanded that “every Man, upon every Question must shew his oratory, his Criticism and his Political Abilities.” He regularly lamented that “Such a vast Multitude of Objects, civil, political, commercial and military, press and crowd upon Us so fast,” that he and his Congressional colleagues “know not what to do first.”²⁷

Adams' letter writing assisted his political judgment. The style he borrowed from Cicero is ideal for deliberating on political issues within the epistolary form. Its informal, conversational quality, provides an excellent medium for playing with political ideas and arriving at political judgments. Adams' letters, written in a Ciceronian style, become his means of discovering a course of action in the chaos of the Revolution. The letters are exceedingly practical texts, the very manifestation of Adams' politics. Without the burdens imposed by formal public speaking or didactic discourse, the epistolary style adopted by Adams permits the writer to explore issues in a preliminary fashion. The style encourages Adams to propose tentative principles, advance incomplete arguments, seek advice, ask questions, reveal doubts, measure his stance, test his wit, and explore his options. As an informal style it does not demand consistency, determination, or certainty. Adams is not burdened by the demands of proper grammar, structure, logic, or polite address. Such constraints would undoubtedly narrow the deliberative space within the discourse and consequently weaken its capacity to function as a medium of political judgment. The private epistle, unlike a public letter (such as Dickinson's) imposes no burden of ethos.²⁸ Like Cicero who often complained that he was “eaten up with anxiety,” Adams, in the confidence of his private correspondence, is free to present a character with all its human frailties and inconsistencies.²⁹ Nor do such letters constrain the future discourse of the writer in the way a public statement might. In addition, regular correspondence with friends in Massachusetts enables Adams to secure part of that detached view so important for competent political judgment, but a view he cannot achieve “amidst the suffocating Heats of the City, and the wasting, exhausting Debates of the Congress.”³⁰ Epistolary communication, as a medium of judgment, extends the political vista and permits him, through correspondents, to include the distant view in his deliberation. The letters become, then, a text of engagement between what Ronald Beiner called the judging actor who “deliberates within his actual situation,” and the judging spectator who “reflects on the actual situation.”³¹

Adams clamors for that distant view in his constant call for intelligence from home. His letters portray him at the center of political business, yet he was sometimes overwhelmed by the immediacy of this political burden. “I am engaged from 7 in the Morning till 11. at Night,” he told Abigail. “How I find Time to write half the Letters I do,” he wondered, “I know not, for my whole Time seems engrossed with Business.”³² Adams is trapped in the bustle of the moment. Suffering with his political obligations, he was like Cicero who told Atticus “I am afraid it's not in the best of taste to tell you how busy I am, but in fact I am so harassed that I have hardly found time even for these few lines, and stolen it at that from most pressing business.”³³

The escape from the pressure of political business comes from writing and receiving letters. In correspondence Adams is able to achieve the proper deliberative attitude. “Pray write to me,” he told his wife, “and get all my Friends to write and let me be informed of every Thing that occurs.” “I write at this time,” he scolded James Warren, “only to remind you that I have received no Letters.” Adams felt isolated when not engaged in political correspondence. “I have lost all my friends in the Massachusetts Bay,” he complained to Abigail, “excepting my Wife, Coll. Warren and Coll. Palmer. From each of these I have received only two or three Letters and no more. Not a scratch of a Pen have I been able to obtain from any Body else.”³⁴ In his isolation, Adams could find consolation in the letters of Cicero, which were filled with calls to Atticus for more information. “It is thirty whole days from the time of writing since I heard anything from you. … I beg you to write to me in the plainest possible terms of anything that comes within your purview, whatever way it tends.”³⁵

Adams' feelings of isolation were compounded by his inability to consult his closest advisors. Cicero had often expressed the desire to be with Atticus in person to deliberate on political matters. “Caesar wants to have me on his staff,” he wrote on one occasion. “That would be a more respectable evasion of the danger, which however I do not decline. It comes to this, I would rather fight. But my mind is not made up. Again I say, ‘If only you were here!’”³⁶ In a similar fashion, Adams told Warren, “I want to be with you, Tete a Tete, to canvass, and discuss the complicated subject of Trade.”³⁷

Unable or unwilling to face the political arena alone, Adams constantly sought the advice of his friends. “Shall We then give Permission for our Vessells to go to foreign Nations, if they can escape the Men of War?” Adams asked Warren. “This vast object is never out of my mind. Help me to grapple it.”³⁸ Like Cicero, who consistently told Atticus “I am eagerly waiting your advice,” Adams, before speaking or acting on important political questions, regularly asked his closest personal advisors “What shall We do?”³⁹

In one letter to Warren, Adams launches a barrage of questions and answers. The style of the letter (which Adams himself describes as “unconnected Scraps and broken Hints”) and the act of judging seem inseparable.

Shall We hush the Trade of the whole Continent and not permit a Vessell to go out of our Harbours except from one Colony to another? How long will or can our People bear this? I Say they can bear it forever—if Parliament Should build a Wall of Brass, at low Water Mark, We might live and be happy. We must change our Habits, our Prejudices our palates, our Taste in Dress, Furniture, Equipage, Architecture &c. But We can live and be happy. But the Question is whether our People have Virtue enough to be mere Husbandmen, Mechaniks and Soldiers? That they have not Virtue enough to bear it always, I take for granted. How long then will their Virtue last? Till next Spring?⁴⁰

On another occasion, Adams set out a long series of questions about trade during non-exportation:

But a Question arises, whether, our Association against Exportations, can be observed, so as to have its full Effect, upon Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies, unless We extend it further? We have agreed not to export to B., I., and the W. Indies. Parliament has made an Act that We Shall not export to any other Place. So that Trade is entirely stopped. But will not a Smuggling Trade be opened? … In short may not our associations be wholly evaded and eluded, if we dont draw it closer? My own opinion upon these great Questions I may possibly give you sometime or other. But I must have yours.⁴¹

Adams used interrogatories as a deliberative tool. Asking such questions enabled him to discover the central issues connected with complex political problems, and bring into focus various policy options.

This manner of deliberating in letters by composing a series of questions and answers is something Cicero also often did. In the following letter to Atticus, Cicero explores the alternatives and consequences for dealing with his enemy Clodius and securing his own restoration to Roman politics:

For what in your view can be done and how? Through the Senate? But you yourself told me that Clodius posted in the doorway of the Senate House a clause in his law banning “any motion or mention.” How then could Domitius say that he would make a motion? And how was it that Clodius sat mum while the persons you mention spoke on the subject and demanded that a motion be put to the House? And if it is to go through the Assembly, will that be possible without the unanimous approval of the Tribunes? What about my property, and my house? Can it be restored, and, if not, how can I be? Unless you see solutions to these problems, what sort of hope are you asking me to entertain?⁴²

As these letters show, both Adams and Cicero used their letter writing as the medium for their political judgment. And, the style of the letter—the interrogatives, the condensed argumentative tone, the rapid introduction of new topics, the incomplete development of ideas, the flavor of natural conversation—affords each writer the widest latitude for deliberation.

Even after seeking advice, however, Adams could not rest without rehearsing his deliberations for his correspondents. In this practice, too, he emulated Cicero, who often reasoned out loud in his letters to Atticus. “It may help you to advise me if I set out briefly the points which occur to my mind in favour of either course,” Cicero would write. Or, he would tell Atticus “Practising myself upon these questions and setting out the arguments on either side, now in Greek now in Latin, I take my mind for a while off my troubles and at the same time ponder matters of relevance.” Cicero's deliberations would be composed in the style of political debate, confirming the importance of private letters as a vital medium of political judgment:

No doubt you will say that he [Caesar] be persuaded to hand over his army and so become Consul. True, this would be a course against which, if he were to bring himself to it, nothing could be said, and I am surprised that he does not do so if his claim to stand while training his army is not allowed. From our standpoint, however, as certain persons think, no prospect is more formidable than Caesar as Consul. “Better thus” you will say, “than with an army at his back.” Assuredly, but this very “thus” is, I know, considered a disaster by somebody; and yet there is no help for it. If that is what he wants we must let him have it. “You have put up with him as Consul before, put up with him again.” “Ah but he was weak then” comes the answer, “and yet stronger than the entire state. What do you think he will be like now?” And if he is Consul, Pompey is resolved to stay in Spain. A wretched situation indeed if the worst of all contingencies is something which cannot be refused and which, should be accept it, would make all the honest men immediately and heartily grateful to him!⁴³

As Adams wrote his own letters in this Ciceronian style, they became like drafts of his Congressional orations, as he discovered and laid out the reasons for his proposed course of action. In a letter to James Warren on October 19, 1775, for example, Adams considered the merits of funding a Navy:

The Expence would be very great—true. But the Expence might be born and perhaps the Profits and Benefits to be obtained by it, would be a Compensation. A naval Force might be created, which would do something. It would destroy Single Cutters and Cruizers—it might destroy small Concerts or Fleets of those like Wallaces at R. Island and Lord Dunmores at Virginia. … But, there is a great objection to this. All the Trade of Pensylvania, the Lower Counties, a great Part of Maryland and N. Jersey Sails in between the Capes of Delaware Bay—and if a strong Fleet should be posted in that Bay, Superiour to our Fleet it might obstruct all the Trade of this River.⁴⁴

Although Adams admitted to Warren that he was “speculating now about Things at a Distance,” he nevertheless was using his letter writing as an important deliberative tool. He may not have expected Warren to offer specific answers to his questions (as he did when he solicited advice directly), but by writing letters he could become more confident himself in the views he held.

Indeed, the continuous demand upon Adams' political judgment led him to dash off letters to Warren and others which seem to commence in mid-argument. It is as if Adams had been privately deliberating for some time. Then, seeking clarification or solidification of his ideas, he creates a deliberative space in a letter, ostensibly addressed to his correspondent, in which he can set out his ideas and test his judgment. On one occasion he begins a letter to Warren:

Dear Sir

Can The Inhabitants of North America live without foreign Trade? There is Beef and Pork, and Poultry, and Mutton and Venison and Veal, milk, Butter, Cheese, Corn, Barley, Rye, Wheat, in short every Species of Eatables animal and Vegetable in a vast abundance, an immense Profusion. We raise about Eleven hundred Thousand Bushells of Corn, yearly more than We can possibly consume.

The letter goes on in this fashion for seven paragraphs and then ends as abruptly as it begins: “On the other Hand if We give Liberty Trade, will not most of our Vessells be Seized? Perhaps all but those of the Tories who may be privileged.”⁴⁵ The letter, without any personal remarks at all, is a pure deliberative text. By presenting all the relevant arguments and questions in a letter to Warren, Adams focused his thinking, tuned his reasoning, and polished the presentation he might one day make in Congress. In this way his correspondence allowed him to gain a firm grasp on the issues he faced and to test his reasoning in a deliberative discourse free from the risks of public speaking. While the letter informs Warren, it nevertheless functions almost exclusively as a text of political judgment in which the writer deals with the contingencies and immediacy of revolutionary politics. As with his other political letters, the character of this epistle as a deliberative discourse is formed as much from its style as from its substance. Indeed, Adams seems acutely aware that it is his free style of writing that permits his epistolary deliberation. At one point he tells Warren, “You dont Expect Correctness nor Ceremony from me. When I have any Thing to write and one Moment to write it in I scratch it off to you, who dont expect that I should dissect these Things, or reduce them to correct Writing.”⁴⁶

PRIVATE LETTERS AS PUBLIC RECORD

Reflecting on his correspondence as a record of political judgment, Adams advised his wife to save all his letters to her and “put them up safe, and preserve them.” The letters, he thought, “may exhibit to our Posterity a kind of Picture of the Manners, Opinions, and Principles of these Times of Perplexity, Danger and Distress.”⁴⁷ As the record of his own political judgment, Adams' letters would enable him to appear to future generations with distinction, just as Cicero's had done.

Adams always considered the letters of Cicero to constitute a remarkable historical record. “The period in the history of the world the best understood is that of Rome from the time of Marius to the death of Cicero,” he told Benjamin Rush, “and this distinction is entirely owing to Cicero's letters and orations.” In Cicero's letters, said Adams, “we see the true character of the times and the passions of all the actors on the stage.”⁴⁸ Here Adams echoed Middleton, who wrote in his Life of Cicero that Cicero's letters were “the most authentic materials for the history of that age,” because they laid open “the grounds and motives of all the great events that happened in it.” Middleton told his readers to attend especially to Cicero's political letters, in which “all his maxims are drawn from an intimate knowledge of men and things” and in which “he always touches the point on which the whole affair turns.”⁴⁹

Conscious that his own time was also an age of extraordinary historical significance, and aiming to emulate the accomplishments of Cicero, Adams hoped his letters would become “the most authentic materials for the history of that age.” For his letters, too, would lay open “the grounds and motives of all the great events that happened” and show Adams deliberating on “the point on which the whole affair turns.” Adams hoped this informal conversational record of his political judgment would be as inspiring to posterity as Cicero's epistles had been to him.

Moses Coit Tyler encouraged later students of the Revolution to view the letters as Adams had hoped they would be viewed. Tyler believed the private correspondence of the revolutionary period “would set forth for us, in vivid contemporary colors, every passing phase of that time of mighty commotion.” With their letters, the men and women of the Revolution “found one another out, informed one another, stimulated, guided, aided one another in the common struggle.” As I have argued here, John Adams relied on Cicero's assistance in that struggle. He mastered Cicero's epistolary style; but in imitating Cicero, he not only wrote in a style praised by the literary-minded men of his day, he also discovered a medium of political expression, appropriate for his active life, which empowered him by facilitating his political judgment. Cicero's style was liberating. It allowed Adams to pursue freely the political questions which vexed him and his colleagues in the Continental Congress. Like Cicero before him, Adams relied on letters as a space for deliberation. In his letters, style and politics became inseparable. For this reason they remain for students of the eighteenth century, as they were for Tyler, among the best examples of “a vast, a fascinating, and a significant branch” of the literature of the American Revolution.⁵⁰

Notes

1. Charles Rollin, The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, 6th ed., 4 vols. (London: 1769), 1:107; Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2 vols., ed. Harold F. Harding (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 2:300. On the tradition of letter writing as a rhetorical art, see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from St. Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 194-268; Jean Robertson, The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: University Press of Liverpool, 1943); Katherine Gee Hornbeak, The Complete Letter Writer in English, 1568-1800, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages (Northampton, MA: Smith College Press, 1934); Harry B. Weiss, American Letter Writers 1698-1943 (New York: New York Public Library, 1945). See also Raoul N. Smith, “A Bibliography of Books on Language and Languages Printed in the United States Through the Year 1800,” Historiographia Linguistica, 4 (1977): 207-43.

2. William Guthrie, trans., Cicero's Epistles to Atticus. With Notes Historical, Explanatory, and Critical, new edition corrected and amended, 3 vols. (London: Lackington, Allen, and Co., et al., 1806), 2:74n, 70n; Blair, Lectures 2:300; Conyers Middleton, Life of M. Tullius Cicero, 2 vols. (London: Baynes and Son, 1823), 2:404-5; Rollin, Method 1:106-7; John Ward, A System of Oratory, Delivered in a Course of Lectures Publicly Read at Gresham College London, 2 vols. (London: 1759), 2:217.

3. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 59, 3.

4. Stephen H. Browne, “The Pastoral Voice in John Dickinson's First Letter from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 46, 47, 52, 53, 52, 54, 53, 54.

5. Ibid., 49, 53, 48.

6. Robert Hariman, “Political Style in Cicero's Letters to Atticus,” Rhetorica 7 (1989): 145-58. See also Lenore Kramp Geweke, “Notes on the Political Relationship of Cicero and Atticus from 63-59 B.C.” Classical Journal 29 (1934): 269-83.

7. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 1:73, 96. See also John Adams to Josiah Quincy, October 6, 1775, Papers of John Adams, ed. Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline, and Gregg L. Lint, 8 vols. to date (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977-), 3:186. The virtues of the Vita Activa are most eloquently described by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

8. John Adams to James Warren, June 25, 1774, Papers 2:99.

9. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams 2:97.

10. John Adams to William Tudor, August 4, 1774, Papers 2:126. On eighteenth-century American politics as “theatre” see Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 79-94. Cicero boasted of the justice and temperance of his provincial administration in letters to Atticus. See for example Cicero to Atticus 109.3 and 110.2 in Cicero's Letters to Atticus ed. D. R. Shackelton Bailey, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). All references to Cicero's letters are taken from this edition. Letters will be identified in notes by the number from this collection.

11. John Adams to James Warren, July 17, 1774 and July 24, 1774, Papers 2:109, 117. On Adams at Congress see Richard A. Ryerson, “John Adams' First Diplomatic Mission: Philadelphia, 1774,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 95 (1983): 17-28. On Adams' early emulation of Cicero see James M. Farrell, “Syren Tully and the Young John Adams,” Classical Journal 87 (1992): 373-90.

12. Opera Omnia cum Gruteri et Select variorum notis & inicibus locupletissimus, ed. C. Schrevello (Amsterdam: 1661).

13. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams 3:271.

14. Adams owned the 5th edition (London: W. Innys and J. Richardson, and H. S. Cox, 1755).

15. On the importance and popularity of these translations in eighteenth-century America see Myer Reinhold, The Classick Pages: Classical Reading of Eighteenth-Century Americans (University Park, PA: American Philological Association, 1975), 51. See also James Beister, “Samuel Johnson on Letters,” Rhetorica 5 (1988): 145-66.

16. John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 7, 1776, Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 2:39.

17. John Adams to Benjamin Rush, December 27, 1812, The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805-1813, ed. John A. Shutz and Douglass Adair (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1966), 263.

18. John Adams to Robert Treat Paine, December 6, 1756, Papers 1:31; John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 7, 1776, Family Correspondence 2:39.

19. John Adams to Abigail Adams, June 29, 1774, Family Correspondence 1:111-12. See also John Adams to Abigail Adams July 5, 1774, ibid. 124; John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 6, 1774, ibid. 129-30.

20. Cicero to Atticus 16.10. See also Cicero to Atticus 21.5, 30.2, 94.3, 195.9-10, 354, 389.1.

21. John Adams to Abigail Adams, September 14, 1774, Family Correspondence 1:155.

22. The rapid style here suggests how a figurative construction communicates at the formal, as well as the substantive level. See Michael Leff and Andrew Sachs, “Words the Most Like Things: Iconicity and the Rhetorical Text,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 252-73.

23. Cicero to Atticus 13.4. See also 55.2.

24. John Adams to Abigail Adams, September 14, 1774, Family Correspondence 1:128.

25. Cicero to Atticus 134.1

26. John Adams to Abigail Adams, March 31, 1777, Family Correspondence 2:192.

27. John Adams to Abigail Adams, September 16, 1774, ibid. 1:158; John Adams to Abigail Adams October 7, 1774, ibid. 164-65; John Adams to Abigail Adams, October 9, 1774, ibid. 166; John Adams to James Warren, May 21, 1775, Papers 3:11.

28. Insofar as letter writing is free from these various burdens of formality, it is even more of a “natural language” phenomenon than the “oratorical ideal” described by Fliegelman as dominant in the revolutionary period. As he explains, there was a “presumption that intimate conversation and correspondence were more frank than public utterance, that to tell the truth was to speak in private.” He also notes that “Adams was a man who turned correspondents into confessors, audiences, and publicists,” Declaring Independence, 44, 125.

29. Cicero to Atticus 214. See also 18.1, 39.1, 39.5, 44.5, 50, 53.2, 115.14, 133, 134.5.

30. John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 17, 1775, Family Correspondence 1:251.

31. Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 197.

32. John Adams to Abigail Adams, November 4, 1775, Family Correspondence 1:320; John Adams to Abigail Adams December 3, 1775, Family Correspondence 1:331.

33. Cicero to Atticus 14.1. See also 19.1, 43.1, 74.1.

34. John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 2, 1775, Family Correspondence 1:191; John Adams to James Warren, September 28, 1775, Papers 3:171; John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 4, 1775 Family Correspondence 1:238.

35. Cicero to Atticus 66. See also 55.3, 56.2, 61, 105.2, 106.3, 135.1.

36. Cicero to Atticus 39.5

37. John Adams to James Warren, October 19, 1775, Papers 3:215.

38. John Adams to James Warren, October 19, 1775, ibid. 215-16.

39. Cicero to Atticus 424.1; John Adams to James Warren, July 23, 1775, Papers 3:88. Adams must have considered Warren to be his “Atticus,” someone like Cicero's confidant, with whom he “could share all that gives me any anxiety, a wise, affectionate friend to whom I could talk without pretence or evasion or concealment.” Cicero to Atticus, 18.1.

40. John Adams to James Warren, October 19, 1775, Papers 3:215. Cicero once described the style of his letters to Atticus in similar fashion. “If you complain of my chopping and changing, I answer that I talk to you as to myself. In so great a matter must not any man argue with himself this way and that? Besides I want to draw your opinion—if it is still the same I shall be the steadier, if it has changed I shall agree with you.” Cicero to Atticus 164.2-3.

41. John Adams to James Warren, October 28, 1775, Papers 254-55.

42. Cicero to Atticus 60.6; see also Cicero to Atticus 21.8, 25.2, 134.1, 169.1-2, 173.2-3, 199.3-4, 388.

43. Cicero to Atticus 153.1-7, 173.3, 132.3.

44. John Adams to James Warren, October 19, 1775, Papers 3:214-15. See also John Adams to Moses Gill, June 10, 1775, ibid. 20-21.

45. John Adams to James Warren, October 20, 1775, ibid. 216-17.

46. John Adams to James Warren, October 25, 1775, ibid. 244.

47. John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 2, 1774, Family Correspondence 1:121.

48. John Adams to Benjamin Rush, December 4, 1805, Spur of Fame, 44.

49. Middleton, Life of Cicero 2:405. Hugh Blair also read Middleton. Cicero's letters “contain the most authentic materials of the history of that age,” he wrote. They are “the last monuments which remain of Rome in its free state; the greatest part of them being written during that important crisis, when the Republic was on the point of ruin; the most interesting situation, perhaps, which is to be found in the affairs of mankind.” Lectures on Rhetoric 2:301.

50. Moses Coit Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1783 (1897; reprint New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 12-14.