The Jefferson Adams Letters

In this letter of August 9, 1816, John Adams replies to Thomas Jefferson’s letter of August 1, addressing two subjects. First, he provides a vivid biographical sketch of Francis Adrian Van der Kemp (1752–1829), a Dutch scholar, Mennonite minister, and military commander of the Patriot movement whom Adams had known since 1780 in Leiden. Van der Kemp defended a critical Dutch fortress against Prussian forces in 1787–1788, accepted an honorable capitulation, and emigrated to New York on the strength of Adams’s letters of introduction. Adams describes him as “a Mountain of Salt of the Earth.” Second, Adams responds to Jefferson’s meditation on aging and mortality by constructing a series of thought experiments that weigh pleasure against pain in algebraic terms. He concludes that without the supposition of a future state, all of human existence is merely a “Sublime and beautifull Bubble and Bauble,” and resolves to “wish for Immortality at all hazards and trust the Ruler with his Skies.” The letter also touches on Grimm’s literary correspondence, the restoration of the Jesuits, and Jefferson’s vision of America as a “Colossus”—which Adams tempers with a biblical allusion to the statue of brass, iron, and clay in the Book of Daniel.

In this letter of September 3, 1816, John Adams pivots from the philosophical question he and Jefferson have been debating — “What are the uses of grief?” — to a far more provocative one: “What have been the abuses of grief?” After briefly introducing Dr. James Freeman to Jefferson and recounting Freeman’s response to the grief question, Adams launches into a sweeping historical survey of grief exploited for political ends. He moves from the death of Socrates, whose disciples inflated his reputation in the public’s emotional afterglow, to the death of Caesar, whose murder Mark Antony leveraged to destroy the Roman Republic. Adams then turns to American history with undisguised bitterness, arguing that the deaths of Washington, Hamilton, and Fisher Ames were each seized upon by the Federalist establishment to consolidate support for the financial system and to marginalize the old revolutionary Whigs. He closes with the most audacious example he can summon: the Cross itself, which he calls “the most fatal Example of the Abuses of Grief, which the History of Mankind has preserved.” The letter is vintage Adams — learned, combative, theologically daring, and unflinching in its indictment of political opportunism disguised as mourning.