John Adams & Thomas Jefferson

Some were surprised or even disappointed at how graciously Mitt Romney exited the 2008 race and then endorsed John McCain. The acrimony between them, while Romney was still in the race, was widely noted. To some observers, it was largely attributable to McCain’s bad temper and dirty tricks. But this may be a matter of perception.

Whatever it’s genesis, the conflict and its apparent denouement brought to my mind, on this President’s Day, one of the more remarkable relationships in the political history of the United States — that between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. I share here a few insights on their relationship, courtesy of David McCullough’s John Adams.

Adams and Jefferson held fundamentally differing views on the proper balance between unfettered democracy, on the one hand, and a strong executive on the other. Their decades-long debate on this topic is thoroughly documented in the many letters they wrote to each other.

Shortly after the new U.S. Constitution was published from Philadelphia, John Adams wrote from London that he would have preferred the President to have more power. Jefferson, by contrast, wrote from Paris that the Constitution as written would create in the U.S. executive a “bad edition of a Polish king.” Adams responded “You [Jefferson] are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.”

On one level, the Adams-Jefferson disagreement is analogous to that between McCain, who favors gut-level decision-making by a strong executive, and Romney, who sees greater virtue in data-driven, decentralized — perhaps Jeffersonian — consultation and consensus. While Romney — like Jefferson and Adams before him — speaks French, I don’t see in either McCain or Romney the intellectual profundity or visceral commitment to governing principles evident in Adams and Jefferson. Still, the historical comparison helps bring into focus the continuing tension between democracy and monarchy and the capacity — in the American political framework — of antagonists to reconcile with each other for the greater good.

Despite their differences, Adams and Jefferson held each other in high regard and got along famously — much of the time. While they worked together in France, Abigail Adams wrote to Jefferson that her husband felt he could work with Jefferson in “perfect freedom and unreserve” and that Jefferson was “one of the choicest ones of the earth.” However, the good will between them was frayed almost beyond repair by the French Revolution.

Jefferson took the side of the French rebels and defended even their worst excesses as necessary to the birth of a French republic. By contrast, Adams loudly condemned the excesses in a year-long series of articles, titled “Discourses on Davila,” on the French Revolution. At about the same time, in his endorsement of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, Jefferson characterized Adams’ writings as “political heresies”:

This comment, published in 1792, polarized the discourse and plunged Adams and Jefferson into a rhetorical cold war deepened and exacerbated by a series of articles written by John Quincy Adams in defense of his father. Two decades would pass before Adams and Jefferson would communicate with each other again.

When they did, it was thanks to the good offices of another great American statesman, Benjamin Rush. With prodding from Rush, Adams wrote a brief note to Jefferson, on New Years Day 1812. Jefferson quickly responded, on January 21, with a letter in which he wrote:

A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind. It carries 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.

While the two would never again see each other in person, their correspondence would continue for another 14 years until, on July 4, 1826 — 50 years to the day from the signing of the Declaration of Independence — both men slipped beyond the veil into the great beyond. In the late afternoon of that day, shortly before he crossed the threshold, John Adams whispered to those at his side, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

Their lives, relationship and legacy of self-government eloquently support the words of yet another great American, Joseph Smith, who wrote, “By proving contraries truth is made manifest.” May this land ever be one in which great minds are free to prove great truths through an open contest of ideas.