A Constitution to Control Government, Drafted by People Who Controlled Their Emotions – Part 2

The wonderful example of the reconciliation between Adams and Jefferson.

This essay continues a series on Jeffrey Rosen’s book The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, in which he presents the fascinating story of how the founders of our country liberated a nation by keeping their own spirits in check and crafting a system of checks and balances designed to do the same for America.

As Rosen writes, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were for many years bitter political rivals, with Adams an adherent to the Federalist political party and Jefferson an adherent of the earlier Republican political party:

On March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson’s Inauguration Day, John Adams left the White House at four in the morning rather than wait for his successor to take the oath of office— perhaps because he wasn’t invited or because he was still seething. A few hours later, Jefferson walked from his boardinghouse to the US Capitol, was sworn in at noon by Chief Justice John Marshall, and, in a barely audible voice in the Senate Chamber, proceeded to give one of the greatest inauguration speeches in American history. Applying the psychology of happiness to the new Constitution, Jefferson began by acknowledging the same connection between personal and political self-government that Washington, Madison, and Hamilton had all emphasized. “Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others?” Jefferson was confident that history would answer in the affirmative because Americans had “a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow citizens.” If private happiness for Jefferson required the freedom to cultivate mental tranquility, public happiness required that citizens be “free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” And he expressed optimism that the American public could continue to govern itself by reason rather than passion. “[E]very difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” he said. “We are all republicans; we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.” … It took the intervention of their mutual friend Benjamin Rush to reunite the estranged patriots [John Adams and Thomas Jefferson] … In December Rush urged Adams “to receive the Olive branch which has thus been offered to you by the hand of a Man who still loves you. Fellow labourers in creating the great fabric of American Independence… embrace—embrace each Other!” What followed was a remarkable correspondence that lasted until their deaths on the same day, July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In their letters, they returned repeatedly to a spiritual theme: namely, the common teachings of the ancient Eastern and Western wisdom traditions about the pursuit of happiness.

The reconciliation between Adams and Jefferson began with a discussion of personal philosophies, not politics:

Jefferson agreed with Adams that the goal of the pursuit of happiness was tranquility of mind, although at the end of his life, he declared himself to be not a Stoic but an Epicurean. He shared his mature reflections on happiness in an exchange with Adams in the spring of 1816 about whether both men considered themselves happy. Adams declared he would live his eighty years again. “[T]his is upon the whole a good World. There is ten times as much pleasure as pain in it,” Adams wrote—and asked Jefferson if he would do the same. “You ask if I would agree to live my 70. Or rather 73. Years over again?” Jefferson replied. “[T]o which I say Yea. I think with you that it is a good world on the whole, that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us.”

Adams and Jefferson ultimately both settled on a forgiving variant of stoicism called Epicureanism:

In a revealing passage, Jefferson said that a lifetime of reflection had convinced him that “the perfection of the moral character is, not in a Stoical apathy, so hypocritically vaunted, and so untruly too, because impossible, but in a just equilibrium of all the passions.” As a result, Jefferson had concluded that he was an Epicurean. “[T]he summum bonum with me is now truly Epicurean, ease of body and tranquility of mind; and to these I wish to consign my remaining days,” he declared. Now that he was retired, Jefferson found the best way to cultivate tranquility of mind was through Epicurus’s council of moderating desire and taking pleasure in all things, rather than the unrealistic Stoic advice to overcome our desires entirely. “As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean,” he wrote to his friend William Short in 1819. “I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece & Rome have left us.”40 Jefferson sent Short a syllabus he had prepared twenty years ago on the moral doctrines of Epicurus: Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness. Utility the test of virtue. For Epicureans, Jefferson stressed, the highest good “is to be not pained in body, nor troubled in mind.” And “to procure tranquility of mind we must avoid desire & fear the two principal diseases of the mind.” … Although the Stoics, including Cicero, had caricatured the Epicureans as impulsive pleasure seekers, this was one of their “calumnies,” Jefferson objected. In fact, Epicurus advocated the rational pursuit of pleasure through mindful self-mastery and the contraction of our desires. For this reason, Jefferson advised Short to avoid indolence and to practice the virtue of industry. “[Y]ou are not a true disciple of our master Epicurus, in indulging the indolence to which you say you are yielding,” Jefferson wrote. “[O]ne of his canons, you know, was that ‘that indulgence which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain, is to be avoided.’” Jefferson warned Short that “your love of repose will lead, in it’s progress, to a suspension of healthy exercise, a relaxation of mind, an indifference to every thing around you, and finally to a debility of body and hebetude of mind, the farthest of all things from the happiness which the well regulated indulgences of Epicurus ensure.” Until the end of his days, Jefferson wrote letters to his daughters and his friends about the importance of improving their faculties through industrious exercise of body and mind, never ceasing in the daily pursuit of self-improvement … After a lifetime of reflection, in other words, Adams and Jefferson agreed that the pursuit of happiness was the goal of life, tranquility of mind the key to the pursuit of happiness, and moderation of the passions the key to tranquility of mind … Jefferson also sustained his disciplined daily schedule of reading, writing, and exercise until the end. After breaking his arm at the age of seventy-eight, he recovered quickly, and his handwriting remained firm. In 1822 he calculated the number of letters he had received two years earlier and found the total to be 1,267, “many of them requiring answers of elaborate research.” The industrious daily schedule that he began as a young student remained unchanged … In 1820 Jefferson, who always guarded his emotions, wrote movingly to Adams about his true feelings for his friend. “I am sure that I really know many, many, things, and none more surely than that I love you with all my heart, and pray for the continuance of your life until you shall be tired of it yourself.” And in their final year on earth, both men reaffirmed that their friendship transcended politics, as Jefferson warmly congratulated Adams on the election of his son John Quincy to the presidency. “I sincerely congratulate you on the high gratific[atio]n which the issue of the late election must have afforded you,” Jefferson wrote in February 1825. “[I]t must excite ineffable feelings in the breast of a father to have lived to see a son to whose educ[atio]n and happiness his life has been devoted so eminently distinguished by the voice of his country.” … Jefferson ended his affectionate letter by wishing Adams “nights of rest to you and days of tranquility,” which was his definition of the pursuit of happiness. “I am certainly very near the end of my life,” Adams responded in his penultimate letter to Jefferson, in January 1826. He then repeated Socrates’s advice about keeping calm in the face of death, which Cicero embraced in Tusculan Disputations. Adams contemplated death “without terror or dismay,” he said, because either it was followed by a transmigration to the afterlife or it was the end (“aut transit, aut finit”). If it was the end, “which I cannot believe, and do not believe,” then he would “never know it, and why should I dread it,” and if it was a transmigration to the afterlife, “I shall ever be under the same constitution and administration of Government in the Universe and I am not afraid to trust and confide in it.” Months later, on July 4, 1826, the old friends died within hours of each other, each believing the other still lived.

Rosen then describes the shared concern the Founders had that individual Americans have enough self-restraint in their private lives to restrain government in its public policies:

Like Hamilton and Madison, [Adams and Jefferson] disagreed about whether Americans as a whole could achieve the personal self-government necessary for political self-government on a large scale. In other words, they were unsure whether Americans could find the self-mastery necessary to sustain the republican experiment. The fundamental premise of Adams’s political creed, he told Jefferson, was that most powerful forces in society would always seek absolute power, and absolute power was “[e]qually arbitrary, cruel bloody and in every respect, diabolical,” whether wielded by “a Majority of a popular Assembly, and Aristocratical Counsel, an Oligarchical Junto and a single Emperor.” In Adams’s view, human reason and conscience were no match for human passions and “Power must never be trusted Without a Check.” The only way to prevent the clashing interests in society from trying to dominate one another through force was to separate powers entirely. Jefferson, by contrast, agreed with Condorcet that the eighteenth century had seen the steady diffusion of the cool light of reason and morality, as public opinion was slowly enlightened, monarchies were toppled, and representative government spread across Europe. Jefferson was confident that the public mind could be perfected by education. “[N]o government can continue good but under the controul of the people,” and the American people had to be educated for self-government, as citizens were in ancient Rome. “[T]heir minds were to be informed, by education, what is right & what wrong, to be encouraged in habits of virtue,” Jefferson wrote. Only education could “render the people a sure basis for the structure of order & good government.” The disagreement between Adams and Jefferson on the perfectibility of the human mind mirrored that between Hamilton and Madison, and between the Federalists and the Republicans more generally. Taking the Federalist position, Adams doubted that virtue could be taught on a wide scale. “[H]ave you ever found in history one single example of a Nation thoroughly Corrupted—that was afterwards restored to Virtue,” Adams asked. “To return to the Romans—I never could discover that they possessed much Virtue, or real Liberty.” … As the political scientist Dennis Rasmussen argues, many of the Founders by their end of their lives had become disillusioned for different reasons about the future of the American experiment. “Washington became disillusioned above all because of the rise of parties and partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was not sufficiently vigorous or energetic, Adams because he believed that the American people lacked the requisite civic virtue for republican government, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions that were laid bare by conflict over the spread of slavery,” Rasmussen writes.

John and Abigail Adams’ son, John Quincy, is an exemplar of “like father, like son.”  As Rosen explains:

From the age of eleven until he died at eighty-one, [John Quincy] Adams kept a diary of his daily attempts to pursue happiness through Stoical self-mastery. And the diary, which many consider the most revealing diary ever kept by an American president, is a model of Benjamin Franklin’s system of daily moral self-accounting. “A Diary is the Time Piece of Life, and will never fail of keeping Time, or of getting out of order with it,” Adams wrote to his son George Washington Adams in 1827. “A Diary if honestly kept is one of the best preservatives of Morals. A man who commits to paper from day to day the employment of his time, the places he frequents, the persons with whom he converses, the actions with which he is occupied, will have a perpetual guard over himself. His Record is a second Conscience.” Adams’s diary reflects the relentless pressure that he exerted on himself in his quest for self-discipline and self-improvement. Like his father, John Quincy had a hot temper and struggled to control it. He achieved self-mastery only with great effort, showing to the world a granite imperturbability that concealed his own roiling emotions. But if Adams was the most self-critical of the Founders’ sons, he was also the one most committed to the quest for lifelong growth. His father never overcame his vanity; Thomas Jefferson his avarice; Alexander Hamilton his ambition. By contrast, Adams’s daily commitment to moral self-accounting led him to transcend his youthful pragmatism and political ambition and to become one of the leading antislavery voices of his time. For both the elder and the younger Adams, keeping a diary was necessary for self-reflection and self-discipline. Adams’s diary for 1785 begins with a maxim from Voltaire (“Indolence is sweet, its consequences bitter”), and the virtue he upbraided himself most frequently for failing to sustain was industry. But no one accused Adams of indolence aside from Adams himself. He started keeping the diary in 1779, at the age of eleven … To his exacting mind, none of [his] achievements seemed adequate. “I am not satisfied with the manner in which I employ my time,” Adams wrote in his diary on May 26, 1792. “It is calculated to keep me forever fixed in that state of useless and disgraceful insignificancy which has been my lot for some years past.” He was “[a]t an age bearing close upon 25,” Adams noted, but still found himself “as obscure, as unknown to the world, as the most indolent, or the most stupid of human beings.” Adams reminded himself that achieving a “respectable reputation” was “within my own powers,” but he would never fulfill his potential “without such a steady, patient and persevering pursuit of the means adapted to the end.” He quoted the poem about the choice of Hercules between Virtue and Vice that was his father’s favorite fable. Only “Labour and Toil” could prevent “my Time” from being “loitered away in stupid laziness,” he wrote. “[M]y character is (under the smiles of heaven) to be the work of my own hands.”

John Quincy was also an exemplar of “like mother, like son,” as Abigail Adams did her part as well to remind John Quincy of the practical need to practice the classical virtues:

Abigail warned [John Quincy] that vice was lurking on every corner. “Passions are the Elements of life,” but “Elements which are subject to the controul of Reason,” she wrote. “The due Government of the passions has been considered in all ages as a most valuable acquisition,” Abigail wrote. She then quoted the [Biblical] proverb that Adams would quote years later in his Harvard lectures: “He that is slow to anger is better than the Mighty, and he that ruleth his Spirit than he that taketh a city.” In particular, Abigail Adams emphasized to her son the destructive power of anger. “This passion unrestrained by reason cooperating with power has produced the Subversion of cities, the desolation of countries, the Massacre of Nations, and filled the world with injustice and oppression,” she warned. When he beheld his own country suffering from the effects of “Malignant passions,” Abigail said that John Quincy should learn “to govern and controul yourself. Having once obtained this self government, you will find a foundation laid for happiness to yourself and usefullness to Mankind.” Abigail wrote sternly to her son. His present and future happiness depended on his “performance of certain duties which all tend to the happiness and welfare of Society and are comprised in one short sentance expressive of universal Benevolence, ‘Thou shalt Love thy Neighbour as thyself.’”

His father John Adams also:

noted that “[t]he Stoicks, who made Morality their principal Study,” emphasized the importance of mastering the virtues that “entirely depend on yourself; Sincerity, Gravity, Humanity, Laboriousness and Industry, Contempt of Voluptuousness.” By avoiding “Luxury, trifling Amusements, and vain Discourses,” and bearing in mind that “all the Happiness of this Life” depends entirely on improving our own character, every individual has the capacity to develop a soul “judicious, free and great.” In the Pythagorean spirit, he urged [his son] to achieve excellence in sports as well as in his studies, noting that even ice skating could be an art form if it was practiced mindfully. His father emphasized a division of time between “a Taste for Literature and a Turn for Business,” both of which, when “united in the same Person, never fails to make a great Man.” Adams urged the advantages of reading poetry as a form of high pleasure, an alternative to wasting his time in idle amusements. “You will never be alone, with a Poet in your Poket,” Adams wrote. “You will never have an idle Hour.”

In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore how former slave Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln carried on the Founders’ shared understanding that self-restraint is essential to personal success.