Foreword

MERRILL PETERSON’S LECTURES ON ADAMS AND JEFFERSON IN the fall of 1975 continued Mercer University’s commemoration of the nation’s Bicentennial which began the previous year with Clarence Ver Steeg’s lectures in the nineteen-year-old Eugenia Dorothy Blount Lamar Memorial series. This volume contains Professor Peterson’s four lectures on “Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue.” Other lectures in the Bicentennial celebration are to be delivered by Professors Jack Greene of Johns Hopkins University (1976) and Richard Beale Davis of the University of Tennessee (1977). A happy relationship exists between Mercer, the sponsoring university, and the University of Georgia Press, the publisher.

Professor Merrill D. Peterson, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia, is eminently qualified to interpret the mind and spirit of Jefferson and Adams, two giants of the American Revolution. A native of Kansas and graduate of the University of Kansas, Professor Peterson earned his doctorate at Harvard University. Before his appointment at Virginia he taught at Brandeis and at Princeton. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has been awarded the Bancroft Prize in American history and the Gold Medal of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. He has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, a Scholar in Residence, Rockefeller Foundation Study Center, Bellagio, Italy, on the faculty at Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, and a Poynter Fellow at Indiana University. He is a member of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Professor Malcolm Lester of Davidson College, former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts of Mercer University who earned his doctorate at “Mr. Jefferson’s University,” was invited to participate in the program. In his introduction of the speaker he emphasized the importance of Professor Peterson’s books. The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1960) he described as “a superb study of what history has made of Thomas Jefferson. It is indeed a notable contribution to the understanding of the Jefferson symbol in American history.” Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (1970), according to Professor Lester, “by every standard is the best one-volume biography of Jefferson that we have or are likely to have in this generation.” These are only two of the major works by the distinguished scholar. Numerous works also have appeared under his editorship, the latest being The Portable Thomas Jefferson (1975).

Professor Lester, who was Dean at Mercer at the inception of the Lamar Memorial Lecture series and who helped influence Mrs. Walter D. (Eugenia Dorothy Blount) Lamar to make the substantial bequest which makes possible these lectures, took the opportunity to review the early history of the program. It was appropriate, then, for Professor Lester to look back at the origin of the series which not only brings leading southern scholars to the Mercer campus each year but also memorializes the lady who left a handsome legacy to provide “lectures of the very highest type of scholarship, which will aid in the permanent preservation of the values of Southern culture, history, and literature.” Professor Lester was a willing confederate of Dr. Spright Dowell, then President of Mercer, and the Honorable William C. Turpin, Mrs. Lamar’s attorney, as the three convinced Mercer’s dear friend and neighbor that the University would be a faithful steward of her bequest.

Mrs. Lamar was born in Jones County but grew up in the Tatnall Square area near Mercer. She attended Wesleyan and Wellesley Colleges and later was honored with the Doctor of Laws degree from Mercer. During her lifetime Mrs. Lamar was a devoted civic and cultural leader in Macon and throughout the South. She gave generously of her time and resources to her church, to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, to local dramatic groups, and to projects that furthered the welfare and well-being of her region and people. The Lamar Lectures are a living tribute to her benevolence and to her dedicated spirit.

In 1957 President George B. Connell, Dr. Dowell’s successor, instructed Dean Lester to set up the lectureship. His committee consisted of himself as chairman, Professors Paul Cousins, Benjamin Griffith, Spencer King, Helen Plymale, and Henry Warnock. An advisory committee consisted of Dean John Eidson of the University of Georgia, Mr. Ralph Stephens of the University of Georgia Press, Mr. Turpin, and Dr. John Donald Wade of Marshallville, former Professor of Literature at Vanderbilt and later at the University of Georgia, and Founding Editor of the Georgia Review.

In seeking the advice of Dr. Wade, Professor Lester was told by that wise and cultured gentleman that institutions like Mercer “are not only instruments of social change, but are also the guardians and propagators of the best that has been known and thought in the world.” He urged that “lectures of the calibre envisioned by Mrs. Lamar should not only be delivered to appreciative audiences, but should also reach a wider audience of laymen and scholars through publication.” To carry out this purpose, Ralph Stephens of the University of Georgia Press was consulted. The present Committee echoes the thought expressed by Professor Lester: “Over the years Mr. Stephens has rendered an invaluable service in ably directing the publication of the eighteen volumes of lectures which have been given.”

Large and enthusiastic audiences attended the four lectures delivered by Professor Peterson under the general theme “A Revolutionary Dialogue.” These lectures treated the dialogue of ideas between Adams and Jefferson, preeminent philosopher-statesmen of “the age of democratic revolution.” These giants, so unlike in personality, yet moving together toward a common goal, were friends in 1776, enemies in 1800, and friends again in 1812. Professor Peterson deals with their friendship and their conflicts as he follows their paths, sometimes running concurrently sometimes diverging, and examines their correspondence over the fifty founding years of the young nation. But, as he says, he is concerned also with ideas and events that lay behind and beyond that. Throughout that period they were “at the front of the stage and were constantly seeking out the meaning of the American Revolution.”

For those who did not hear the lectures this volume will answer such questions as how and why Adams and Jefferson were friends, and enemies, and friends again; and they will be able to travel those paths with Professor Peterson to the very day when those Revolutionary giants left this world together—on July 4, 1826.

Quoting Professor Lester again: “This subject is in complete accord with the purpose and spirit of the Lamar Lectures, for Adams and Jefferson exemplified that aristocracy of virtue and talent which Eugenia Dorothy Blount Lamar had in mind when she made these lectures possible. To inspire others to enter the aristocracy of virtue and talent was Mrs. Lamar’s confident expectation of such scholars as Merrill Peterson.”

Spencer B. King, Jr., Chairman Lamar Memorial Lectures Committee

January 29, 1976