Foreword to the Reissue
Merrill D. Peterson (1921–2009) enjoyed a wide reputation for his well-developed historical sensibility and original scholarship. His breakout book of 1960, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, earned him the Bancroft Prize in 1961; it was reissued in 1998 and, like the volume under discussion here, retains its academic sheen today. After his official retirement from the University of Virginia, where he taught for a quarter century, Peterson went on to execute a similar treatment of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln in American Memory (1994).
If he made a specialty of the legacies of eminent men, Peterson’s own legacy is more diversified than that of most professional historians. He grew up in Kansas, a child of divorce whose mother ran a modest boardinghouse. A young supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, he studied at the Harvard Business School as World War II unfolded, where his training led to two years in the U.S. Navy Supply Corps. He returned to Harvard after the war and worked with the renowned intellectual historian Perry Miller.
After refashioning his dissertation into The Jefferson Image, Peterson succeeded Dumas Malone at the University of Virginia in 1962, as Malone went on to complete his life’s work, a six-volume Jefferson biography. In 1970, before Malone had gotten to the third president’s second term, Peterson published his thousand-page, single-volume life, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation. The Jefferson industry, as some have termed it, was cresting, and the domed Tidal Basin memorial, erected by FDR to celebrate the liberal credentials of the author of the Declaration of Independence, stood as a shrine to democracy. Meanwhile, the prodigious Adams family—and the Revolutionary John Adams—received little love.
Jefferson may have a very mixed reputation with regard to his personal involvement with slavery, but Peterson did not make any excuses for it, though his scholarship otherwise echoed Malone’s embrace of the inspired political actor who professed undying devotion to the “rights of man.” In the spring of 1965, as the civil rights era took center stage in American life, Professor Peterson resisted the conservative impulse of the administration at “Mr. Jefferson’s University,” giving passionate voice to the noblest of Jeffersonian ideals by honoring the cause of those who were marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in pursuit of racial justice. “Selma,” Peterson pronounced, as he faced the statue of Jefferson at the university’s Rotunda, “is a vital link in the heritage of American liberty.” He likened it to the Battles of Lexington and Concord that inaugurated the War for Independence.
Precisely one decade later, while continuing to occupy the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation chair at UVA, Merrill Peterson delivered the lectures that compose this volume. He begins by calling attention to the differences in temperament between the Virginian and the New Englander, their friendship “a triumph of will over seeming incompatibilities.” By the end of the volume, the reader comes to understand the force of partisan politics in a clearer context, with a retrospective appreciation for the ways in which leaders do and do not exert influence on the “course of human events.” Adams and Jefferson differed markedly in their confidence in the reliability of the popular will; as national executives, however, they both exercised caution in tying their philosophies, gleaned from reading history, to their performance. By a nearly impossible coincidence, the second and third presidents both ended their lives on the fiftieth Fourth of July, in 1826, symbolically harmonizing in a way that lessens their differences without muting them.
Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue implicitly challenges the long-held assumption of Jefferson’s preeminence by recalibrating a fifty-year relationship. Peterson returns the Revolutionary pair to essentially equal footing, deftly describing the challenge before them to act out the imperatives of self-government in a political forum while retaining what was worth preserving of the British model. What limits were to be placed on popular government? On this question, Adams was a “moderate,” writes Peterson; Jefferson, the same––up to a point. The effusive Adams did not shy from declaring the historic British constitution a “masterpiece,” leading his critics (Jefferson included) later to misjudge the degree of his admiration for the British.
One must not paint either founder with too broad a brush. As Peterson explains, Adams “felt that ‘self-love’ was the dominant passion in men and that government must deal with it.” A “government of laws, not of men,” was an Adamsian construct, predicated on the separation of powers. Jefferson “believed that the moral sense, in which all men were equal, naturally led them to seek the good of others and to live justly in society.” His vaunted idealism led Jefferson to a natural rights theory drawn from that presumption: an inborn benevolence. In the 1780s, he weighed in less avowedly than Adams on the interlocking parts of federal administration, while exercising his pen as to the ways of promoting social harmony.
Both men were instrumental in the reframing of their state’s legal systems during the Revolution, though Adams had greater success in seeing his balanced views enacted. Virginia, while responsive to Adams’s shaping of the 1780 Massachusetts State Constitution, ironically preserved colonial-era hierarchies of power, by which, as Peterson notes, at least one-third of adult white males were disenfranchised. Jefferson wanted a more democratic instrument.
In 1784, independence having been won, Jefferson went to France and was welcomed into the new republic’s diplomatic circle. There he found his friend Adams, a knowing negotiator since 1778, and the two collaborated in pursuing commercial ties with the nations of Europe. In this effort, Adams was, Peterson avers, “the senior partner.” If they disagreed on anything, it was the relevance of their aging colleague, Benjamin Franklin. The mild-mannered Jefferson felt that Franklin’s “amiable and liberal disposition” aided him in courting America’s French ally; indeed, says Peterson, he “idolized” Franklin. The crustier Adams, meanwhile, being “candid, direct, and unyielding,” had no doubt at all that “the old conjuror,” as he dismissively referred to Franklin, had lost a step and was unwittingly acting under the direction of a devious French foreign minister.
In the 1790s, when Adams served two terms as George Washington’s vice president and Jefferson headed the Department of State for four years, the two fell into direct opposition. Yet their personal friendship did not entirely dissolve. The violence attending the French Revolution left Adams on the side of order, while Jefferson remained remarkably patient with a series of imperfect revolutionary governing groups in the hope that a peaceable, pro-American republic was still likely to result.
Adams and Jefferson became standard-bearers of the first two organized political parties, the Federalists and Republicans. Yet by the middle of that irritable decade, the two found a common enemy in Alexander Hamilton, whose ambition left no room for either. The New Yorker ingratiated himself with the unimpeachable Washington, who, in retirement, arm-twisted his immediate successor into appointing Hamilton to head the U.S. military in anticipation of a French invasion that never occurred. Acting independently, President Adams secured peace with revolutionary France.
National politics remained at fever pitch, however, and the falling out between Adams and Jefferson was complete when Jefferson unseated Adams in the hate-spewing election of 1800. For an entire decade, direct communication between them ceased. Then, in 1811, the retired ex-presidents revived an epistolary conversation that endured until the end of their days.
Here is where Peterson’s narrative reaches its crescendo. They danced around political questions, Adams always the more provocative, Jefferson professing a distaste for all partisan wrangling. “You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other,” writes Adams preciously in 1813. They tended to draw analogies to ancient Greece and Rome as a common vocabulary partially suppressing the trials and tribulations of their own political times. Jefferson acknowledged the inaccuracy of the charge that Adams was an apologist for monarchy, and they proceeded to debate whether such a thing as “natural aristocracy” existed and whether “equality” was realizable in any meaningful way, even in a republic. Adams remained wary of the “tyranny of numbers,” Jefferson ever the champion of democracy.
The Age of Revolutions was past, as the two ruminated on how America’s momentous founding would be conveyed to future generations. What had they, collectively, taught the world? As for religion, writes Peterson, they had reached a convergence of belief. “Jefferson became a kind of Christian humanist, a disciple for the morals of Jesus, while Adams ‘read himself out of bigotry,’ as he said, and embraced the Enlightenment’s faith in reason.” In the end, the pair renounced all who would attempt to separate them into factions. In Peterson’s inspiring treatment of the Adams-Jefferson dialogue, what matters most is the substance, not the symbolism; the grace, not the grousing. Such an outlook is not a bad template for our century either.