SOURCE: “‘Posterity Must Judge’: Private and Public Discourse in the Adams-Jefferson Letters,” in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4, Winter, 1994, pp. 1-30.

[In the following essay, Blake discusses the correspondence between John Adams and Jefferson and situates their letters within the larger public political discourse of the time.]

I first saw the Constitution of the United States in a foreign country. Irritated by no literary altercation, animated by no public debate, heated by no party animosity, I read it with great satisfaction. … In its general principles and great outlines, it was conformable to such a system of government as I had ever most esteemed.

John Adams, Inaugural Speech, March 1797

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The philosophical correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson descends to us as a public text, one which readers have widely admired for its intellectual depth, epistolary style, and remarkable perspective on friendship. Indeed few readers would object to Ezra Pound's declaration that the letters stand as “a Shrine and a Monument” to the cosmopolitan intellect of the revolutionary age (148). Frequently lost, however, in the compelling image of the two presidents conversing on the summit of a republican Mt. Parnassus is the fact that the letters emerged in a culture which routinely used the correspondents as symbols of partisan conflict and rancor. When Adams wrote Jefferson on January 1, 1812, breaking their eleven-year silence, neither of them could be certain that the friendship would this time survive their political disagreements. The statesmen's public identity and their lingering personal resentments combined to make their reconciliation fragile and tenuous, and their letters repeatedly guard against the polarizing effects of American political culture. The distinctly civic status that Pound grants to the renewed correspondence arises from its aggressively private character, from its authors' adjusting their political voices to Monticello and the Quincy farm Adams jokingly termed “Montezillo.”

By making the domestic setting of the correspondence a necessary condition for their friendship, Adams and Jefferson come to value the familiar letter for its ability to seal their discourse off from the public world. As a specifically private genre, however, the familiar letter is particularly sensitive to historical change, and it both registers and negotiates cultural anxiety in its construction of personal verbal space.¹ In the case of Adams and Jefferson, whose political lives and friendship had sprung from their public writings, the letters' elevation of the intimate was strikingly invested with political concerns. The statesmen's insistence on privacy responds to what Gordon Wood has described as the “democratization of mind” in American society, the expansion of the reading public into a more broadly-based political community than the founders initially expected (126).² Formed around the distinctions between public and private expression, the correspondence explicitly critiques the role of public texts in shaping American politics. While the statesmen shelter the letters as if their trans-partisan climate rested on privacy, they designate newspapers, histories, and polemics as the verbal components of an intensely factional age. To situate the correspondence in late republican culture is to restore its conversation with other forms of discourse, to recognize the textual and cultural import of its resistance to public texts.

Adams and Jefferson root this resistance in a mutual respect for audience, in a heightened awareness of the reader that Bakhtin has described in Speech Genres as a work's addressivity. The term derives from the notion that the way a discourse projects its audience ultimately defines its generic form (95). Addressivity, Bakhtin explains, is a “constitutive feature of the utterance” because the writer's anticipation of the reader's response comes to influence and determine the utterance itself (99). To put the matter somewhat differently, what gives an individual work its coherent, expressive form is its “evaluative attitude” towards other acts of speech (94). Bakhtin's observations are particularly pertinent to a correspondence in which evaluation is both a philosophical imperative and a governing rhetorical activity. A self-defined refuge from partisan politics, the correspondence is shaped as much by the threat of external intrusions as it is by internal dialogue, and what we recognize as its coherence or unity is a product of the opposing pressures exerted by these literary and cultural forces. If revolutionary America, as Jay Fliegelman has argued, was widely occupied with the precarious distinctions between a statesman's private character and his public actions, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, nearly every aspect of Adams' and Jefferson's lives had become the subject of partisan scrutiny (124-25). As late as the presidential campaign of 1823, supporters of Andrew Jackson sought to discredit John Quincy Adams by publishing an 1804 letter in which the elder Adams privately criticized Jeffersonian democracy. Although Jefferson dismissed this incident as an outrageous attempt to “plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth and wisdom,” it pointedly displayed the usefulness of the controversy to a new generation of party journalists (Adams-Jefferson 601). Adams and Jefferson do not simply follow epistolary convention, but use the definition of audience to distinguish their mutual correspondence from the many divisive texts published about them.

In the process of interrogating other forms of discourse, the statesmen subsume their political tensions to a more general and unifying disdain for political language; they use the issue of audience to manage and contain the ideological conflicts which arose in the 1790s. With the intensely personal tone of partisan division still resounding after eleven years, the correspondence evolved rather self-consciously as a dialogue which would not negate divergent opinions, but make creative use of the tension between them. While not denying the bitterness of the past, the letters transform partisan rivalry into an issue of philosophical temperament. “The terms of whigg and tory,” Jefferson wrote, “belong to natural, as well as to civil history” (335). Adams not only agreed, but even promised to elaborate upon the “Correspondencies” he had observed through years of study: “Whigg and Tory; Federal and democratic; Virginian and Novanglian, English and French, Jacobinic and despotic, etc.” (348). The letters articulate ideological difference, whether as Calvinism and deism, skepticism and optimism, or classical and democratic republicanism. Massachusetts, as Jefferson put it, was Virginia's “Refractory Sister,” and we see that civil polarity clarified and expressed in the voices of Adams and Jefferson (432).

Scholars have understandably focused on the drama of this exchange, often turning its exploration of ideological difference into a type of national symbol or metaphor.³ However, the letters' engagement with the public sphere leads us to question how contrary the statesmen really were. As Joyce Appleby has noted, by the time that Adams and Jefferson revived their friendship, the similarities between them were more striking than the differences (208-209). The correspondence displays this affinity in its reappraisal of American print culture and the role of public texts in preserving the republic. Folded into the statesmen's elevation of fraternity over faction is an elaborate defense of the letter against the newspaper, the hand against the machine, and the writer's text against the larger structural system of publication and interpretation. Rather than stress the democratic, disruptive possibilities of the familiar letter, Adams and Jefferson embrace their correspondence as a retreat into a world of common reference, unifying principles, and enlightened stewardship.⁴ The correspondence, in this regard, negotiates a path between the genteel notion of a “republic of letters” as defined by Lewis Simpson, and the ideological import of print technology, the actual “letters of the republic” recently examined by Michael Warner (Simpson 3-23; Warner). The civic aspects of print come to shape the statesmen's explicitly private text, suggesting that the borders they placed between private and public expression were both malleable and elastic.⁵ As a product of the statesmen's divisions and their friendship, the letters aspire to the authority, while repelling the conditions of civic discourse.

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The very first exchange of the renewed correspondence announces its resistance to public texts in what amounts to a dialogic imitation of public-oriented speech. At the urging of their mutual friend Dr. Benjamin Rush, Adams wrote Jefferson on New Year's Day 1812, presenting him with a copy of his son's Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory. Keenly aware of the threat that politics posed to reconciliation, Adams not only avoided public subjects, but he turned public language into something of a trope. Addressing Jefferson as “a Friend to American Manufacturers under proper restrictions, especially Manufacturers of the domestic kind,” Adams offered “two Pieces of Homespun lately produced in this quarter by One who was honoured in his youth with some of your Attention and much of your kindness” (290). The paragraph's extravagantly formal diction boldly conflates a statement of personal intimacy with a parody of civic affairs. The “domestic manufacturers,” John and Abigail Adams, affirm their affection for an old friend by sending him “two Pieces of Homespun,” their son's lectures.

The metaphor, however, does not negate public matters as much as it contains them in expressions of loyalty, a bond which Adams then emphasized in describing the lives of his children, whom the Virginian had known when they were young. When Adams' letter arrived before the package, Jefferson interpreted “homespun” literally and responded, in turn, with an extensive report on the use of spinning jennies and flying shuttles in Virginia. Debates about the changing role of textile manufacturers had occupied the government throughout the Federalist period and by 1812 promised to engage the nation in a war with England. Jefferson had only recently softened his resistance to the American textile industry, and any political message that Adams intended was shrewdly confined to the vehicle of his metaphor. Jefferson's misreading arose from the apolitical nature of Adams' public diction and its dialogic application to their personal bonds.

Despite the confusion, Jefferson sensed Adams' sentiment, writing that his letter called up memories of another age:

It carried 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.

(291)

While Adams' textile metaphor playfully checked immediate political concerns, Jefferson's response appealed to unity by recounting the political struggles the friends had shared in the 1770s. Political conflicts become external, European threats to the young nation, a series of “rubs and difficulties” that the two oarsmen had encountered, both alone and together, in leading the state to a “happy port,” what Jefferson envisioned as “an association, powerful, wise and happy, beyond what has yet been seen by men” (291). Like Adams, the Republican made no direct reference to internal factions and represented subversion as a foreign wave menacing their common, domestic vessel. In taking his “final leave” from politics, the former president had retired from public efforts to maintain American unity against outside foes (291). In contrast to Adams' metaphor, which tried to enact a kind of rapprochement, Jefferson's projections into the past asserted that his affections had remained “unchanged,” that “no circumstances” had altered the respect and esteem he felt for a fellow laborer in the struggle for independence (292). After over a decade of silence, Adams' letter reminded Jefferson of the union they had formed in claiming the right to political self-determination. As both a public and private entity, he suggested, their union was untouched by conflicts from within.

The appeal to memory became a device to which the statesmen frequently returned, often invoking events such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence to offset their quarrels with one another's views. Jefferson's effort to make public experience signify private bonds speaks to what we might understand as the civic nature of the friendship itself. As the Virginian wrote after the campaign disclosures of 1823, the statesmen had formed a “friendship co-eval with … [the] government,” and while it threatened “to draw a curtain of separation” between them, the political world had been the original site of their personal contact and intimacy (600). If republicanism encouraged individuals to view themselves in relation to the state, Adams and Jefferson proved to be exemplary citizens, a point confirmed for many by the remarkable coincidence of both men dying on the Fourth of July, 1826. The statesmen's reliance on civic metaphors offers a very different perspective from Abigail Adams' comment, in 1813, that her association with Jefferson had been “purified from the dross” of “political ‘Back wounding calumny’” (378). While one image suggests an almost spiritual friendship refined of political attachments, the other asserts a public compact by which subsequent feelings and events are measured. Republican camaraderie, which presumes the convergence of personal and civic relations, was both a safe and natural concept for the two men to employ in navigating a course through their inevitable disagreements.

Images such as Jefferson's personal ship of state also function to reclaim the statesmen's political experience from the public sphere and use it for the private, epistolary act of self-representation. In subordinating individual relations to party relations, in turning private language into polemic, political culture had transformed the former presidents into “passive subjects of public discussion,” symbolic figures in an arbitrary, democratic debate (336). The struggle for independence that Jefferson viewed as the initial bond between “fellow laborers” surfaces in the correspondence as a sustained and mutual desire for literary self-determination. The dialogic work of the statesmen's public language coincides with their larger efforts to define themselves apart from the images that circulated about them. Adams and Jefferson represent themselves and their friendship by appropriating the idioms and institutions central to civic life. Thus while Adams' first letter applied the image of manufacturing to an essentially domestic communication, his second seized upon the postal service as an emblem of the forces uniting the two friends. Remarking on the speed with which Jefferson's letter traveled from Monticello, Adams observed that “the Communication between Us is much easier, surer and may be more frequent than I had ever believed or suspected to be possible” (293). After depicting the letter as a private document within a federal system of distribution, Adams used that context to convey his pleasure at the prospects for a renewed correspondence.

While Adams and Jefferson welcomed the chance to express themselves in letters, they importantly linked that rhetorical activity to a reader who would not misconstrue their words. The two friends address each other as private individuals, citizens committed to an honest, candid interpretation of the other's ideas. The epistolary act of self-definition comes to require not only the freedom to write one's opinions, but a reader whose politics would not severely interfere with the writer's intended meaning. Adams was particularly aware of the public's tendency to accept distorted versions of the truth, and it is not surprising that some of his most engaging political thought surfaced in the private exchanges he pursued throughout his retirement. Indeed, much of the rhetorical drive behind the correspondence with Jefferson comes from Adams' sense that understanding is contingent on the writer and the reader, that meaning requires a receptive, rather than partisan audience. “You and I ought not to die,” he wrote Jefferson, “until we have explained ourselves to each other” (358). Embedded in the letters' emphasis on addressivity is the expectation that the writers would perform as exemplary, impartial readers.

In this regard, the private letter was an ideal genre for Adams, who had come to distrust the relationship between public texts and public opinion. The letter allowed Adams not only to direct his thoughts to a specific, responsible audience, but to address the many errors he had learned to expect from his readers. Adams was especially sensitive to misinterpretation because, unlike Paine in Rights of Man, he refused to believe that a text's acceptance suggested the virtue of its arguments. Frequently mistaken for a monarchist, he routinely traced his unpopularity to the public's misreading of his sometimes convoluted works:

In Truth my “defence of the Constitutions” and “Discourses on Davila,” laid the foundation of that immense Unpopula[ri]ty, which fell like the Tower of Siloam upon me. Your steady defence of democratical Principles, and your invariable favourable Opinion of the french Revolution laid the foundation of your Unbounded Popularity.

Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Now, I will forfeit my Life, if you can find one Sentence in my Defence of the Constitutions, or the Discourses on Davila, which by a fair construction, can favour the introduction of hereditary Monarchy or Aristocracy into America.

They were all written to support and strengthen the Constitutions of the United States.

(356)

Feeling that his books had been “overborne by Misrepresentations” in Europe and America (357), Adams embraced his correspondence with Jefferson as an opportunity to communicate directly to a resistant but reliable audience. Implicit in Adams' letters is the inspired belief that a “fair construction” of his ideas would ultimately reveal the importance of his contribution to American politics. In contrast to the “floods and Whirlwinds of tempestuous Abuse” which greeted Discourses on Davila (249), a letter to Jefferson would make its appeal to an honest, non-partisan mind. Adams wrote with the confidence that his political rival was also a trustworthy reader, confessing to Jefferson in 1813, “I never know when to cease, when I begin to write to you” (356).

Coupled with his tendency to fight misprision with an even stronger torrent of words, Adams' enthusiasm for his audience led him to become the principal architect of the correspondence, posing topics, raising questions, and writing a total of 109 letters, sometimes two or three in a week, compared to the 49 he received from Monticello and Poplar Forest (Cappon xxix). Jefferson's sizable correspondence and general self-reticence diverted his attention away from the letters as a unique and evolving event. But writing from his Quincy fireside surrounded by grandchildren and friends, Adams grew increasingly interested in the significance of the epistolary friendship, in what it meant to explain himself to Jefferson. As one historian has speculated, the correspondence occupied almost the same position in Adams' retirement as the University of Virginia did in Jefferson's (Ellis 125). Writing to the political beneficiary of his own embattled character, Adams was extremely conscious of the letters being qualified by their strict addressivity, but also of their source in a matrix of public identities, institutions, and texts. Included in the insistence on privacy was Adams' sense that the correspondence acquired its energy and shape from the public personas of its private participants.

The paradox here is important, for Adams' letters are never so private and self-revealing as when he considers his place in history. His nervous concern for reputation, for how he and his writings would ultimately be read, drove him to a comprehensive vision of the letters as a distinctly coherent public event. Knowing the civic import of his dialogue with Jefferson, Adams both acknowledged and courted the text's unfolding along the seam of private and public discourse. His eager perception of a wider, but silent audience occasionally modified his usual disdain for the press. He closed one letter, for instance, with the enigmatic note that although he hoped the correspondence would be concealed for years after the statesmen's deaths, he had “no personal Objection to the Publication of it in the national Intelligencer” (350). The comment turns the Washington newspaper into a vehicle through which the nation might witness an overtly private reconciliation, and as both a hint and an admission, it typifies how Adams' respect for audience eventually led to his espousal of the civic dimensions of the text. As the old Federalist seemed to recognize, any communication he had with Jefferson would involve the public sphere because of the very nature of the two correspondents, and of the rhetorical challenges they faced. Along with the practice of using civic idioms to re-establish private bonds, the correspondence proposes the literary communion between distant friends as a symbol of the political unity neither they, nor their nation could maintain. As Adams wrote to one friend in 1823, the letters guaranteed that “Posterity … would know on what kind terms they lived” (as quoted in Cappon xxiv).

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Jefferson was less inclined to acknowledge that the letters might eventually reach a public audience, and he rarely discussed them from anything but a personal viewpoint. His only response to Adams' various allusions to seeing the letters in print focused on a plan in 1822 to relieve the burden of his unwieldy correspondence by publishing two letters in which the friends complained how painful it had become for them to write (577-81). Although never put into effect, the scheme is quite revealing in that it suggests a somewhat different perspective on public and private utterances than Adams had in mind. The Virginian's popularity and extensive interests brought him an enormous number of unsolicited communications, and his plan imagines the newspaper as an efficient and graceful means for resigning his obligations as a favored citizen of the international republic of letters. However, despite Jefferson's wish to be released from “drudging at the writing table,” he had even less interest in appearing in print (505). Indeed, although he wrote as many as 1,267 letters a year, Jefferson exercised extreme caution, throughout his career, when it came to publishing his political and philosophical works (581). He preferred to circulate his privately-printed manuscripts among a circle of friends rather than release them to the general reading public. The famous Notes on the State of Virginia, for instance, appeared in publication only after rumors of a pirated edition reached the author in Paris.⁶ Jefferson's love of retirement surfaces in his desire never to have his letters “exhibited in scene on the public stage” (580). In contrast to Adams' impulse to publicize the dialogue and friendship, Jefferson thought about using publication to further secure the private space he had guarded for years.

Considering his reserve, it is somewhat ironic that so many of Jefferson's letters were published without his consent, putting him in the awkward position of explaining remarks he had specifically addressed to intimate friends and supporters. While Adams experienced similar embarrassments, Jefferson's prodigious correspondence made him the more frequent victim of an editorial practice that both men condemned and feared. The publication of their private letters to various other correspondents—usually made public after the recipient's death—initiated some of the most significant episodes in the Adams-Jefferson correspondence, forcing the statesmen to reflect on the partisan intervals of their friendship. Even at the height of their controversies, the statesmen had confined their most hostile criticisms of each other to private missives and notes, and the later discovery of these letters keenly revived the bitterness of the 1790s. In reviewing their former conflicts, Adams and Jefferson focused on the political and textual relations between the public and those who had come to represent it. To publish a private letter, they agreed, was to violate and polemicize the private space where friendships like theirs were maintained.

The first and most serious of these incidents followed the appearance of the Memoirs of the Late Reverend Theophilus Lindsey in Boston in 1813. The book's editor, Thomas Belsham, had discovered in Lindsey's papers two of Jefferson's letters to Joseph Priestley and printed them in the Memoirs without the Virginian's consent. One letter pointedly criticized Adams' administration, and its publication aggravated Adams' already-combative stance towards his many critics. Writing to Priestley in March 1801, the newly inaugurated Jefferson had described the years of Federalist government as an “Effort of Bigotry in politics and religion.” He cited, as his chief example, Adams' preference for “the education of our ancestors” over “real science,” a preference the Virginian found worthy of “barbarians” (Writings 1085). Referring to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Jefferson disclaimed the “legitimacy of that Libel on legislation” and offered the immigrant Priestley protection under “laws which were made for the wise and good, like him” (1085). Writing from Quincy on June 10, 1813, Adams demanded—“in the French sense of the word”—that his former political rival explain the comments as they appeared in the Memoirs of Lindsey (327). Angry and defensive, he questioned Jefferson's evidence and justified his government's right to protect itself from foreign spies and enemies. The publication of Jefferson's private letter introduced the spirit of division into a correspondence specifically defined against public discourse and disagreement.

While Adams eventually used the incident to clarify his political philosophy, Jefferson responded by focusing on the role of political parties in determining republican culture. Written after the rancor of the 1800 elections, the Priestley letters reflect a period when, in Jefferson's words, “all the resources of reason, and of wrath, were exhausted by each party in support of it's [sic] own, and to prostrate the adversary opinions” (336). In answering Adams' “demand,” Jefferson made both the Address and its critique indicative of the general historical climate. He shrewdly distinguished between Adams as an individual and Adams as a representative of his party, a figure polemically constructed by the advocates and enemies of Federalist policy. More visible and articulate than his supporters, Adams had simply attracted attacks directed at his political friends rather than at his person. Similarly, Jefferson argued, as factions increased in influence, the statesmen began to speak more as politicians and less as individuals. Thus, he heard in Adams' Answer to the “Address of the Young Men of Philadelphia” not the convictions of an Enlightenment mind, but the pervasive voice of Federalist rhetoric, an insistence that science and reform would never surpass the wisdom of the ancients. “I do not consider this,” Jefferson explained, “as your deliberate opinion. You possess, yourself, too much science, not to see how much is still ahead of you, unexplained and unexplored. … I consider it as a [sic] expression lent to the prejudices of your friends” (332).

Jefferson, in effect, softened the tone of his censure by focusing on the power of partisan culture to claim the individual citizen and thus transform the statesman into a mouthpiece of his party. The President, according to Jefferson, was not “the author of all the measures” to which the Republicans objected (332). The “real authors” were the Federalist advisers Adams had inherited from Washington: “the Pickerings, the Wolcotts, the Tracys, the Sedgewicks, et id genus omne [and all of their kind] with whom we supposed you in a state of Duresse” (332). By distancing Adams from his administration, Jefferson exonerated the friends from the intensity of their political conflicts. His approach derives from the old convention that it is not the King but his evil ministers who are responsible for the government's treachery.⁷ Jefferson elaborated on the concept a decade later when one of Adams' caustic letters appeared in a Jacksonian paper. Both men, he explained, had fallen victim to advisers intent on transforming a political contest into a belligerent, personal battle. They made us “forget what we had known of each other for so many years,” Jefferson confessed, “by filling our ears with malignant falsehoods, by dreaming 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” (600). Adams had ultimately struggled with his party as much as Jefferson had with the philosophy it advanced in the name of the President.

Although Adams himself readily attributed the failures of his administration to an “impious Idolatry to Washington,” Jefferson's response relies upon the link between faction and misrepresentation (346, 349). The influence he assigns to partisan interests questions the individual's capacity to know and communicate his own opinions in private and public discourse. If Washington's “Farewell Address” had located the spirit of party in “the strongest passions of the human mind,” Jefferson portrayed it as an external power contending for the self (Commager 172). His argument, in this sense, integrates his belief that it was foolish for a republic to encourage its citizens to relinquish themselves to the state.⁸ To Adams' insistence that his comments on science were distorted by the reader (327-29), Jefferson emphasized the writer's difficulty in creating an autonomous text, in successfully resisting the political passions and allegiances of the age. His explanation of the Priestley letter deploys the language of sensibility in describing “the sensations excited in free yet firm minds, by the terrorism of the day” (331). Political culture emerges as an affective, almost physical power fogging and disturbing the rational mind. The offending letter attested not to Jefferson's personal feelings for Adams, but to the “sensations” of Federalist America, to “the gloomy transactions of the times, the doctrines they witnessed, and the sensibilities they excited” (331). The culture displaced each statesman as the author of his writings.

Jefferson subordinates the ideological tensions between the two documents to his more general condemnation of partisan America. Just as Adams' speech reflected the prejudice of his party, the Priestley letter was stimulated by political forces outside the statesmen's control. Newspapers, addresses, pamphlets, and legislative debates all exhibited the acrimony and resentment of the period, and in this sense, Jefferson argued, private letters were no different from more public forms of discourse as they expressed, without restraint, the reigning partisan controversies (336). The fact that such polemic had surfaced in his correspondence with Priestley indicated, to Jefferson, not a personal betrayal of Adams, but the frightening ability of politics and the press to infiltrate the private world. Attributing the factionalism displayed in the Priestley letter to Belsham's publication of it, Adams sympathized with Jefferson, suggesting that his friendship with both Priestley and Adams had been violated by partisan ambitions: “There are critical moments when Faction, whether in Church or State, will stick at nothing. Confidence of Friendship the most sacred is but a cobweb tie. How few! Oh how few are the exceptions!” (333). By exposing the private confidences passed between friends, the English editor Belsham had become, in Adams' estimate, as divisive a force as Hamilton and Pickering had been.

The idea of faction assumes its most menacing form when Adams and Jefferson link it with texts such as Belsham's. If one strategy in defusing the Priestley affair had been to distance the friends from their words, a more self-reflexive and unifying approach was to uphold the sanctity of personal correspondence as a decidedly private genre. Because the Priestley letters were “not meant for the public eye,” Jefferson explained, “they were not restrained by the respect due to that; but poured forth from the overflowings of the heart into the bosom of a friend, as a momentary easement of our feelings” (336). Despite the culture's impact on their creation, the letters were, nonetheless, private offerings directed to an intimate audience that factions overtly disregarded. The Memoirs of Lindsey had turned Jefferson's personal unburdening into a public polemic, and the Virginian charged Belsham with “an act of the grossest abuse of confidence” (331), an offense which displayed the editor's “Satanic Spirit” (336). Full of “malice and treachery” (336), Belsham's text ushered private words into the public world of politics and party loyalties. Nine years later, Jefferson returned to his charge of treason, calling the editor of the Baltimore Federal Republican “treacherous” for printing another of his private letters (578). Such editors betrayed the internal union established between correspondents by openly violating their sense of audience. Authors had a right to define their readership, and the eighty-year-old Jefferson declared that the act of publishing a private letter should be a “penitentiary felony” (578).

Having seen his own personal correspondence spark controversy early in his career, Adams joined Jefferson in condemning the unauthorized publications of private materials: “They are the worst Species of Tyrany over private Judgement and free Enquiry. They suppress the free communication of Soul to Soul” (333). The threat of public exposure becomes, in Adams' metaphor, a despot that inhibits the free exchange of opinions between liberated selves. While Jefferson argued that letters, like nations, were vulnerable to treachery and had to be protected by the law, Adams bleakly suggested that the popular power that resided in editors and publishers could, if abused, significantly alter the relations between individual citizens. By violating the confidence of friends, factions had turned the books and newspapers essential to the republic into a force that actually undermined its most basic liberties. Self-expression was no longer limited by the state, but by the fear that printers would not respect writers' instructions regarding their readers. To borrow de Tocqueville's familiar phrase, the “tyranny of the majority” exercised itself not by demanding conformity, but by assuming that all texts were public texts, and consequently, open to political scrutiny.

We can appreciate Jefferson's fear that in publically addressing the Priestley letters, Adams would rekindle the newspapers wars of the previous decades. With no desire to relive the bitterness of their presidential campaigns, Jefferson speculated that further public discussion would add little to their old debates and serve only to excite partisan rivalries. Although he respectfully maintained Adams' right to defend his administration, he hoped that the former president would not subject their retirement to a series of newspaper polemics:

And shall you and I, my dear Sir, like Priam of old, gird on the ‘arma, diu desueta, trementibus aevo humeris’ [arms, long unused, upon the trembling shoulders of an old man]? Shall we, at our age, become the Athletae of party, and exhibit ourselves, as gladiators, in the Arena of the newspapers? Nothing in the universe could induce me to it. My mind has been long fixed to bow to the judgement of the world, who will judge me by my acts, and will never take counsel from me as to what that judgement shall be.

(337)

Writing from Quincy two days earlier, however, Adams assured Jefferson that he intended to answer his censure privately, and indeed over the next three weeks, he sent nine letters to Monticello, five of which directly challenged Jefferson's 1801 comments to Priestley.

While the intensity of Adams' response reveals his characteristic defensiveness, it also suggests his firm belief that intellectual dissent could promote, not threaten, the correspondence. The statesmen did not avoid politics in their letters as much as they renounced political readers, and in this regard, they grounded their friendship on a generic contract, rather than an ideological agreement. The privacy of the letters created a climate in which divergent opinions would not “affect personal esteem, or social intercourse,” as Jefferson had feared (377). Despite an eager and ubiquitous press, Adams declared that he “care[d] not a farthing” for his public reputation. “I have no thought, in this correspondence,” he explained, “but to satisfy you and myself” (333). Any suspicions we might entertain about the ultimate truthfulness of this assertion should only confirm our sense of its rhetorical usefulness.

In the context of such self-defining commentary on the nature of their letters, Adams and Jefferson contain the idea of faction by situating it in public-oriented language. The statesmen's concern for textual autonomy and their profound respect for genre are fundamental to their letters' evaluation of other types of discourse. This critical perspective functions as the generic equivalent of Jefferson's image of foreign waves threatening the ship of state, except in this case, the friendship importantly diverges from the nation. The spirit of party that terrorized the government and severed the relations between friends appears textually in the books, pamphlets, and above all, newspapers that comprised popular politics. If the personal letter as a genre fostered “the free communication of soul to soul,” the newspaper emerges as its factional counterpart, an “arena” in which ancient “gladiators” become the “Athletae of party” contending for public opinion (337). Jefferson frequently portrayed the press as a battleground for younger men, regretting in 1822 that having been drawn into “the arena of newspapers” he was forced to “buckle on the armour of youth” to defend himself from an unwarranted attack (578). While private correspondents could simply seek to explain themselves to one another, a debate in the press inevitably combined combat with display since victory required the ability to persuade an audience of reading citizens. In retiring from public service, Jefferson had retired from the instruments of national opinion, and he significantly defined his private life by making generic distinctions: “I have given up newspapers,” he wrote in his first letter of the renewed correspondence, “in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid” (291). To both Adams and Jefferson, newspapers had come to signify a republic of factions and misrepresentations that their private correspondence would have to oppose.

4

The correspondents' aversion to public discourse suggests a political perspective more suited to the eighteenth century than to the increasingly democratic world in which the letters were written. Jefferson's exchange of newspapers for Thucydides conveys a preference for texts governed by the impartial use of reason, rather than the open courting of public opinion. The preference is quite revealing when we consider the importance Jefferson placed, throughout his career, on the press' role in shaping the public into an effective political force. As Warner has observed, the infusion of print with political meaning was central to American republicanism (see 63-64, 71-72), and throughout the revolutionary period, Adams and Jefferson warmly embraced the press' capacity to create and communicate a coherent republican persona. Newspapers and pamphlets turned their public audience into an active civic entity by representing the collective will of their readers as the voice of public opinion. Print culture, in this manner, nurtured and legitimated the idea that the people were a power distinct from British authority. As Adams suggested to Jefferson in 1815, the diffusion of public opinion through the press had been critical to American independence:

What do We Mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington. The Records of thirteen Legislatures, the Pamp[h]lets, Newspapers in all the Colonies ought [to] be consulted, during that Period to ascertain the Steps by which the public Opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the Authority of Parliament over the Colonies.

(455)

While the statesmen had few qualms about attributing the American revolution to the influence of public texts, their faith in the efficacy of public opinion was severely tested in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The trust between nations that Jefferson favorably recalled from his years as ambassador to France had given way to territorial ambition, Napoleon's conquest of Europe, and the arbitrary divisions sanctioned by the Congress of Vienna. Fueled by his confidence in the American Revolution, Jefferson maintained his belief that reason could withstand the challenges it faced from military and political strength. Thus, writing to Adams in 1816 about the collapse of the French revolt, he argued that the notion of representative government would ultimately triumph over violent and autocratic regimes: “Opinion is power, and that opinion will come” (460). “The oppressors may cut off heads after heads,” he continued, “but like those of the Hydra they multiply at every stake” (460). Although “rivers of blood” would continue to separate the French from their liberty, the idea of democracy had spread throughout France, and Jefferson was confident that it would again exercise its authority. Despite the failure of revolutions in Naples, Piedmont, and Spain, Jefferson could write in 1821 that “the art of printing alone and the vast dissemination of books will maintain the mind where it is, and raise the conquering ruffians to the level of the conquered” (575). “The flames kindled on the 4th. of July 1776,” he assured Adams, “have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism” (575). As the author of the Declaration of Independence Jefferson identified himself as an integral part of “the art of printing” and the global expansion of republican ideas.

Jefferson's faith in political enlightenment, however, is modified in the correspondence by his elegiac posture towards the eighteenth century, a century that Adams eulogized as “the most honourable to human nature” (456). Despite the statesmen's advocacy of a free and widely-circulated press, their correspondence increasingly focused on the divisive and anti-republican effects of American political writing. Embedded in the letters' emphasis on addressivity is the statesmen's patrician preference for a stable and controlled discourse in which political differences could be contained within a mutual regard for Theognis and Cicero. In this sense, the dialogic mode of the correspondence reveals the text to be less a debate between competing ideologies than a coherent rhetorical response to the growth of partisan culture. The letters remind us that the enlightenment values which bound the revolutionary generation also declined with it (Appleby 208-209). Adams' and Jefferson's concern for audience arises out of this sense of cultural estrangement and helps to account for their letters' curious combination of antipathy to the press and philosophical faith in it.

Jefferson had addressed the dangers of a partisan press as early as his second inauguration when he responded to the many scurrilous attacks that Federalist newspapers had mounted against him. Reminding the country of his administration's power to prosecute “false and defamatory publications,” the Republican distinguished between the “artillery of the press” and the voice of public opinion as it emerged in the national suffrage (Writings 521-22). Without resorting to legal restraints, the president had been cleared of the newspapers' allegations, and he astutely promoted the campaign as an “experiment” proving that “freedom of discussion, unaided by power,” was “sufficient for the propagation and protection of truth.” By making public opinion the censor of the press, Jefferson acknowledged the dangers of partisan discourse and the importance of countering them (Writings 522). At the same time, however, he affirmed his confidence in public opinion, giving it a supervisory role wholly distinct from the popular texts it was to check in the name of the republic.

What amounted to a cultural and political annoyance to Jefferson, however, seemed to Adams a serious and constant threat to stable government. Although it never explicitly refers to the Sedition Act, Jefferson's Inaugural surely invited the nation to admire the differences between his and Adams' solutions to various abuses of the press. Despite its political unpopularity, Adams' critique of Jeffersonian progress is quite pertinent to the correspondence, as his skepticism frequently pertains to the relations between factions and misrepresentation. If public opinion had a commanding influence over the republic, if it wielded, as Jefferson suggested, a rationally articulated power, Adams pointedly warned against its subversion by political institutions and parties. Emperors, counsels, and the majorities in popular assemblies each posed a danger to liberty, as all three had the capacity to form and shape the public towards their arbitrary will (351).

The divisions and resentments of Adams' career only reinforced the caution with which he endorsed the American experiment. While not denying the importance of elections in voicing the public will, Adams warned against the power of factions to corrupt the political process, to sacrifice “every national Interest and honor to private and party Objects” (401).⁹ Considering himself the victim of both Federalist and Republican conspiracies, Adams argued that the desire to win elections and gain “the Loaves and Fishes” profoundly disturbed the model of perfection that philosophers such as Jefferson admired (347). Although the constitution had strictly defined the jurisdiction of the state, the entire culture seemed to him to suffer under a peculiar version of political tyranny:

Our Money, our Commerce, our Religion, our National and State Constitutions, even our Arts and Sciences are so many seed Plotts of Division, Faction, Sedition, and Rebellion. Everything is transmuted into an Instrument of Electioneering. Election is the grand Brama, the immortal Lama, I had almost said, the Jaggernaught, for Wives are almost ready to burn upon the Pile and Children to be thrown under the Wheel.

(427)

To the hope that governments would accede to the spread of knowledge and truth, Adams countered that the drive for power, not reason, was the nation's dominant motive. American democracy had simply institutionalized the quarrels and usurpations that had handicapped governments for “3 or 4 thousand Years” (351).

What especially disturbed Adams was that the politics of public opinion depended less on a representative's integrity than on his pose of public acceptance. As Ellis has cogently illustrated, Adams' distrust of popularity deeply informed his character and, to a certain extent, can account for his notorious contrariety. On both a personal and political level, virtue, for Adams, “seemed to require isolation and unpopularity as evidence of its authenticity” (45). The model republican would sacrifice public acceptance in devoting himself to the public good, but to make these sacrifices in America was to relinquish political power. As Adams wrote to Jefferson in 1813, he had hesitated before publishing his controversial books, as he expected them to offend many of his compatriots “in a Country where Popularity had more Omnipotence than the British Parliament assumed” (356). In this regard, Adams refused to ignore the ways in which public opinion served as an instrument of power, rather than a real and effective check against it. While he believed that civil power derived from the people, he could not accept, in Ellis' words, that “there was an undifferentiated body of popular opinion ‘out there’ with an abiding will of its own” (129-30). Writers and politicians cited the community to legitimate partisan ends, and Adams railed against such misrepresentations of the common weal. If one were to call the writings of Thomas Paine and John Randolph “Public Discussions,” he argued, one ought to give the “Rantings and Ravings of Bedlam” that appellation as well. “There is not, there cannot be, a greater Abuse of Words” (358).

The possibility that language itself could be exploited by faction is central to Adams' skepticism about the sovereignty of reason in the republic. Contrary to the linguistic concerns currently attributed to his contemporaries, Adams tended to situate misrepresentation not in the ambiguity of language, but in the insidious desire for power.¹⁰ Public opinion could function as a natural censor of governments only if the public could withstand the stylized bias of partisan discourse (461). Political texts did not educate their readers as much as they disabled their critical faculties. Too easily swayed by passions and inclinations, man was prone to manipulation, and his government, according to Adams, had to be based on the same checks and balances that his psychology demanded:

Our Passions, Ambition, Avarice, Love, Resentment, etc possess so much Metaphysical Subtilty and so much overpowering Eloquence, that they insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and convert both to their Party. And I may be deceived as much as any of them, when I say, that Power must never be trusted without a Check.

(463)

Eloquence excited the passions and invited a lack of control, and thus a political system based simply on the public's knowledge of its government risked confusing political rhetoric for political truths. Partisan discourse strategically obscured the meaning of words, and in this regard, Jefferson's faith in the public's capacity to censor abuses of the press seemed utopian and ill-founded to Adams. By using language that appealed to the senses and clouded public reason, factions subverted the union in the same manner that poets had threatened Plato's Republic and Satan corrupted Milton's Eden.

Nowhere is Adams' alarm more apparent than in his practical approach to the party newspapers that circulated throughout the country during his presidency. Identifying the success of his administration with the security of the state, Adams presented the numerous attacks in the opposition press as a rebellion against the government itself rather than as part of the democratic process. Republican newspapers and pamphlets became the voices of revolt promising to defeat not just Federalist rule, but federal authority. Claiming that radical factions plotted a Jacobin uprising, Adams signed the infamous Sedition Act of 1798, making editors of anti-government publications open to charges of libel and sedition; persons convicted under the law could be fined $2000 and imprisoned for up to two years. The diction of the act associates the republican press with efforts to subvert the nation, with the attempt to divide the public against itself by publically denouncing the government. The act labels as seditious the very activities that defined the republic of letters, penalizing writers, editors, and all those who would aid them in “writing, printing, uttering, or publishing any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States” (Commager 177). Nearly fifteen years later, in 1813, Adams answered Jefferson's reference to the “Terrorism of the day” by reminding him of the terrors struck by Phillip Freneau, Ned Church, Andrew Brown, and Thomas Paine, all republican writers and editors who violently condemned Adams' presidency (346). In one of the great ironies of his career, the Quincy statesman decided that dissenting texts were party texts which exploited the diffusion of letters by converting, not illuminating, the reader.

Adams' enforcement of the Sedition Act dramatically illustrates the aspects of his philosophy most alien to Jefferson. The consequences of misrepresentation seemed so severe and so ominous to the Federalist that only a flagrant exertion of authority could arrest its influence on the public. Keeping this distinction in mind, however, we must not discount Jefferson's own frustration with the corrosive effects of civic discourse. From the Horatian repose of their correspondence, the statesmen traded analyses of the ways in which political and religious parties throughout history had produced prejudiced texts. Jefferson's attempt to extract the philosophy of Jesus from the “Nonsense” of his early commentators reveals his sustained belief that factions, motivated by power and riches, freely obscured the truth. In reducing the New Testament to its “pure and unsophisticated doctrines,” he had tried to cast from the gospels the “artificial vestments” of Christ's duplicitous interpreters (384). From the earliest centuries, factions had sought to empower themselves by using versions of the past to control and exploit the public, and in this, Adams made no distinction between Jacobins, Despots, and Priests (351). “Arbitrary power,” he wrote, “wherever it has resided, has never failed to destroy all the records Memorials and Histories of former times which it did not like and to corrupt and interpolate such as it was cunning enough to preserve or tolerate” (456).

The statesmen were equally disturbed by the proliferation of texts which distorted the American Revolution. As the proceedings of the Second Continental Congress had been conducted in secret, without official notes, the Revolution seemingly invited historians to fashion the actual events to suit their particular purpose. For example, while both men admired the classical style of Carlo Botta's Storia della Guerra Americana, they questioned his practice of composing speeches for real, historical individuals. “Botta,” Jefferson observed, “had put his own speculations and reasonings into the mouths of persons whom he names, but who, you and I know, never made such speeches” (452). Nonetheless, when confronted with the “party diatribe of Marshall,” Jefferson preferred the Italian's “more judicious, more chaste, more classical, and more true” account to Marshall's Life of Washington (452-53). Both works falsified the events leading to independence and were indicative of trends that worried the ever-critical Adams. “I have been so little satisfied with Histories of the American Revolution,” he wrote in 1817, “that I have long since ceased to read them. The Truth is lost in adulatory Panegyricks and in vituperating Insolence” (516). The Revolution whose origin they ascribed to the colonists' access to newspapers, pamphlets, and books was now being recounted in partisan histories suffused with political ambition rather than philosophical or even historical truth. Only remotely associated with the task of public enlightenment, print discourse had evolved into an organ for factions, a praetorian tyrant that used the history of the republic to advance a political argument.

Adams' and Jefferson's dissatisfaction with various types of public discourse amounts to a rather comprehensive critique of the role that publications played in the republic. The correspondence's emphasis on addressivity arises out of the different expectations the two friends shared for public and private readers, We see in the letters' conflation of structural and political concerns a republican response to democratic print culture and the expansion of the American political community beyond the unifying abstractions of the 1770s.¹¹ From the statesmen's perspective, public texts were both a cause and a register of the republic's transformation into a collection of malleable and warring citizens. Partisan newspapers and pamphlets embroiled the country in a mire of misreadings and misrepresentations which threatened to turn the reading public into an instrument of ambition, rather than a guardian of liberty. And while newspapers shaped the public's attitude about immediate political issues, partisan histories threatened the freedom of later generations to consider the past fully and impartially. As versions of the Revolution descended from one age to the next, the reader became increasingly dependent on competing orthodoxies. Factions threatened to transform historical inquiry into an ideological exercise in party legitimation. As the Revolution slipped more and more into memory, Adams and Jefferson worried about the implications of a historical discourse determined by partisan politics.

5

In linking faction with public-oriented language, Adams and Jefferson effectively remove their correspondence from American political culture, at the same time that they attempt to secure its civic and historical value. This doubleness brings us to the heart of the statesmen's dialogic work, the anticipation of how future readers would receive their overtly private text. Adams was particularly candid in presuming the historical significance that readers would attribute to the correspondence, and at times he used it to prevent future generations from misinterpreting his presidency. The letters following the Priestley affair, for example, argue that in order to understand the Federalist's controversial speech to the young men of Philadelphia, the reader must place it in both a diplomatic and rhetorical context. Although directed to Jefferson, Adams' comment turns what appears to be a private defense into an occasion for historiographic advice: “If one Hundred Years hence, Your letters and mine should see the light, I hope the Reader will hunt up this Address and read it all; and remember that We were then engaged or on the point of engaging in a War with France” (339). Jefferson's critical account of the 1790s leads to Adams' efforts to guide the reader towards a more favorable rendering of the period. The external reader appears again when Adams dismisses Jefferson's belief that Federalist advisers had influenced the content of his speeches: “I beg leave to correct an Idea that some readers may infer from an expression in one of your letters. No sentiment or expression in any of my Answers were obtruded or insinuated by any Person about me” (346). Jefferson, of course, had meant to relieve the tension of the Priestley letter by focusing on the power that politics could exercise over individuals. Adams complicates the strategy by shifting his attention to the unnamed citizen who, reading the correspondence years later, might mistake Jefferson's rhetorical apology for historical fact.

Adams' inclusion of the general reader openly recognizes the private correspondence as a peculiarly public event, and as early as 1815, the dialogue between the two former Presidents had in fact become a matter of public interest. Confronted by a printer hoping to publish the exchange, Jefferson concluded that his and Adams' letters had been noticed in post offices from which news of the correspondence had spread (453). Although Adams was able to report that all of Jefferson's letters had arrived without tampering, he was not surprised that others were interested in their epistolary friendship:

That our correspondence has been observed is no Wonder, for your hand is more universally known than your face. No Printer has asked me for copies: but it is no Surprize that you have been requested. These Gentry will print whatever will sell: and our Correspondence is thought such an Oddity by both Parties, that the Printers imagine an Edition would soon go off and yield them a Profit.

(455)

The statesmen's disdain for the effrontery of the printer's request derives, of course, from their general hostility towards the public exploitation of partisan conflict. The printer reveals his social class in expressing his desire to publicize the private correspondence. As Adams' son-in-law Thomas Boylston would later make clear, a letter from Jefferson to Adams would be worth as much as $500 to any newspaper editor in Boston because it would draw new readers to the paper (575). Adams may have seen such offers as evidence of his own personal relevance. It was precisely, however, the denial of this contemporary audience which ensured the letters' eventual status as an ultimately civic text, one which actively addresses its readers across generic and temporal boundaries.

Despite the statesmen's insistence on the differences between public and private discourse, their letters self-consciously extend the personal into a national communication. This hybrid structure is critical to the dialogic nature of the text, for what distinguishes the philosophical letters from a pamphlet or a book is that they achieve their public audience through an explicitly private form. The statesmen exclude the general reader until after the text is complete, which is to say that the correspondence delays its address to a civic audience until after its authors' deaths. Written in a culture in which printing and reading were often highly partisan acts, the letters specifically address future individuals removed from the nation's conflicts. Safely situated in posterity, the reader becomes what Bakhtin terms a “superaddressee,” an objective figure outside the primary writer-reader relationship “whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time” (126). The correspondence descends to us, then, not simply as a civic text, but as the collaboration of rival patriarchs vying to impart their differing visions of the American republic. As readers have often agreed, the statesmen explain themselves to future generations as much as they do to each other.

Adams and Jefferson repeatedly invoke this superaddressee in the figure of posterity, which they portray as a community of objective, candid citizens who will look upon the past from a more detached and informed perspective than that of their ancestors. Having witnessed the consequences of political programs and events, the future reader functions, in Adams' mind, as an arbiter of history, one who will evaluate the nation's forebears without partisan bias. “Whether you or I were right,” Adams explained in 1812, “Posterity must judge” (301). Free from contemporary prejudice, posterity becomes an ideal reader capable of interpreting the past. Removed from the “sensations of the times,” Jefferson wrote Adams, posterity will fairly evaluate the nature of their conflicts (331). Rational, independent, dispassionate, and candid, posterity emerges as a decidedly eighteenth-century figure, a republican whose frank and critical evaluation will promote the common good. Comprised of ideal citizen-readers, it promises to restore the relations between individuals and publications that the statesmen typified as the genesis of American independence. Indeed, as a sane and judicious reader, posterity is a version of the “candid world” to which the Declaration of Independence submitted its appeal (Commager 101).

Perhaps the most abiding rhetorical feature of the correspondence is the way in which it transforms the autonomous voice of public opinion into an imaginary audience comprised of the statesmen's civil descendants. Adams' appeals to posterity suggest a vision of the country's future citizens perusing their history with the spirit of enlightened inquiry he and Jefferson identified with the Revolution's public texts. While both men tended to depict themselves as patriarchs of the nation, Adams' vision extends beyond issues of inheritance to suggest the possibilities for a civic discourse without partisan designs. Through their letters, Adams and Jefferson can re-enter the public sphere as participants in the nation's civic life who are also removed from it. The correspondence does not wield public opinion as a rhetorical authority, but rather turns it into a unifying, trans-partisan force outside the immediate political context. The idea of a republic of letters comes to describe not the political power of a free press, but the ways in which the future republic is imagined, created, and addressed in a rational civic discourse. Adams and Jefferson write the republic, envisioning and representing future generations untroubled by the divisions of democratic politics.

In transforming public opinion into the image of an ideal audience, the statesmen do not presume that a “Moral Government of the World” would eventually replace partisan conflict (516). In fact it is Adams' and Jefferson's realistic appraisal of American political culture that accounts for their letters' paradoxical literary form. The union that the correspondence represents is a union made through words, one which offers only a rhetorical resolution to the nation's civil and ideological tensions. Despite their mutual preference for the “dreams of the future” over the “history of the past,” Adams and Jefferson firmly root their hopes for posterity in a republican tradition of letters that they knew could not address the more pressing divisions they saw afflicting American politics (484). As Adams observed in November 1819, “Congress are about to assemble and the Clouds look Black and thick, Assembling from all points, threatening thunder and lightning” (548). While Jefferson could dismiss the debates over bankruptcy and the Spanish treaty as “occurrences which like waves in a storm will pass under the ship,” slavery in Missouri posed a more dangerous threat. “The Missouri question is a breaker on which we lose the Missouri country by revolt, and what more, God only knows. From the battle of Bunker's Hill to the treaty of Paris,” Jefferson wrote, “we never had so ominous a question” (548-49).

Notes

1. Joanne Jacobson usefully elaborates on this point in her discussion of the letters of Henry Adams: see 3-5 in particular.

2. See also The Radicalism of the American Revolution in which Wood places this intellectual transformation in a broader social context, esp. 347-68.

3. Both historians and literary critics have concentrated on the correspondence as a dialogue between opposites. We see this in Merrill D. Peterson's standard history of friendship, Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue. Joseph Ellis provides an excellent summary and analysis of the principal events of the correspondence in his chapter “An American Dialogue” in Passionate Sage 113-42. Daniel B. Shea offered a more literary interpretation of this dialogue in “Reconstituting a Nation: The Correspondence of Adams and Jefferson,” a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, San Francisco, December 1987. A brief summary of his approach can be found in “The Prehistory of American Autobiography” in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, 40-41. Like Shea, Elizabeth Renker and Larzer Ziff both view the letters as versions of autobiography, focusing on the statesmen's efforts to present themselves as signers of the Declaration of Independence. See Renker, “‘Declaration-Men’ and the Rhetoric of Self-Presentation” 120-34 and Ziff, Writing in the New Nation, 107-16, esp. 113-16. On Abigail Adams' role in the correspondence, see Frank Shuffelton, “In Different Voices: Gender in the American Republic of Letters,” 289-306.

4. On the democratic aspects of 19th-century epistolary culture, see Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence 12-33.

5. On the mixture of public and private identities and the emergence in revolutionary America of a performative self, see Fliegelman 120-40.

6. For the publication history of Notes on the State of Virginia, see William Peden's introduction in Notes on the State of Virginia xv-xx.

7. In this rhetorical context, Jefferson importantly diverges from the strategy of the Declaration of Independence, in which he holds the King responsible for every English violation of colonial rights.

8. See, for example, Jefferson's June 9, 1793, letter to James Madison in which he argues that to spend one's entire life serving the public “would be to be born a slave” (Writings 1010).

9. On Adams' hatred of political parties, see Elkins and McKitrick 533-34.

10. For a discussion of early American anxieties about misrepresentation, see Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words 19-36. On Madison's concern for misrepresentation in The Federalist Papers, see Michael P. Kramer, Imagining Language in America 119-36.

11. See Wood, “Democratization” 113-21.

Works Cited

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Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

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Elkins, Stanley and Eric McKitrick. The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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———. “The Prehistory of American Autobiography.” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Ed. Paul John Eakins. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

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