The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1785

The retirement correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is lauded as two giants of the Revolution reflecting on what they had wrought and their roles in it.  That’s what I assumed this volume to contain.  And it does, but it also contains the complete extant correspondence between the two men as well as letters between Abigail Adams and Jefferson.  In fact, 38% of this collection is letters from years preceding Adams being inaugurated as Vice President and before the French Revolution.

Our thumbnail sketches of historical figures don’t capture the whole person, of course: cranky, monarchical John Adams and abstract, democratic Thomas Jefferson are labels of convenience but as these work-a-day letters show, the thumbnails are far from their lived reality.

This is an example of something I have felt intuitively for years but which I have lately learned is an aspect of Bonini’s Paradox.  Paul Valery’s summation of it: "Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable."  This idea affects business and computer models and maps and history.  I was recently explaining to one of my kids an odd cycle of reporting by corporate IT to management to which I have been subjected over the years: management wants a “dashboard,” a quick way to see the health and progress of a project.  Once the dashboard is before them, the managers begin to ask for details to support the readings.  This is reasonable; they need to validate what we are reporting and take action where results are lagging.  But the dashboard becomes, as a result, more complicated, more elaborate as it attempts to capture more and more detail.  Until finally, frustrated management declares it needs a summary dashboard that tells the story simply.  Bonini’s Paradox!

This whole digression was prompted by the Adams/Jefferson letters from 1785.  In reading these, one has to set aside the thumbnail descriptions of the people and observe what they were laboring over day after day. 

1785 was two years after the end of the War for Independence.  The Philadelphia constitution lay in the future. Congress, governing under the Articles of Confederation, had sent Adams and then Jefferson to join Benjamin Franklin representing the new country in France.  With peace and Franklin’s return to America, what was needed were commercial treaties to foster trade with Europe.  And that’s what Adams and Jefferson labored over in 1785. 

When John Adams was appointed ambassador to England and Thomas Jefferson remained as ambassador to France, the two wrote frequent letters back and forth.  Supposedly abstract Jefferson was as much in the details as Adams, pitching the value of shipping flour to Portugal rather than wheat (but facing Portuguese resistance to protect its own millers) and countless other details.

The details are fascinating because they are so… everyday.  Adams had ordered crates and crates of French wine to follow him to London.  When he discovers that his ambassadorial status will not exempt him from import duties, he hurriedly writes to Jefferson to intercept the shipments, take some for himself, return what he can.  Portions of many letters include the efforts to deal with this and to settle accounts between them.  Jefferson wants the London newspapers but it was no easy thing to get them cheaply in Paris and they write that maybe this Duke or that Count could help.  Odd characters keep accosting the ambassadors with tales of how they helped the Revolution this way or that way and now they need their expenses reimbursed – each writes to the other: have you heard of this fellow? Sometimes they write in code, but at one point their cipher sheets get out of sync and they have to write in the clear to correct each other’s encryption. 

The letters between Jefferson and Abigail were more playful, often satirizing their respective host governments or one asking the other to buy shirts from London or figurines from Paris.

Weightier matters occupied them too, of course.  Buying off the Barbary Pirates, for example.  But even here, it was a matter of countless details.  This man could go to Morocco but not Algiers.  This one for Algiers then.  But we must send with him a secretary to keep us independently informed of his actions.  Yes, but who can we trust?  Has Congress authorized these delegations yet?  Do we have authority to make these arrangements?

There was at this time no love lost between England and America and John and Abigail Adams bore the brunt of this in London.  They, for their part, were fiercely impatient with the British Press and the British government and frustrated at the dismissive attitude toward trade with the former colonies.  This attitude also took the form of individual, everyday events: a snub here, a cancelled meeting there, a scurrilous newspaper story to rebut.

And in what would today be a scandalous conspiracy of political incorrectness, both men wrote the other to work out the best way to market American whale oil in Europe!

So the Adams and Jefferson of our thumbnail sketches had not yet appeared on the stage – as if they ever would.  I’ll check back in on this a few years down the road in their correspondence…

ADDENDUM: I have long observed at work that activities improve as management pays special attention to them.  I came across this way of phrasing the same idea in a letter of Jefferson’s: “The king sets out on the 21^st inst. for Cherburg in order to animate by his notice the operations there.”  I love that “to animate by his notice.”