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Tag Archives: Abigail Adams

The Sovereign Subject: Adams, Jefferson, and Krauthammer on Why They Studied Politics

03 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Abigail Adams, and Politics, Charles Krauthammer, Collected Wisdom, Government, history, John Adams, Jon Meacham, letter, Pastimes, politics, Public Service, Things that Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

John Adams

“The science of government it is my duty to study… I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

John Adams, writing to his wife, Abigail Adams, in a letter sent from Paris on May 12th, 1780.

Thomas Jefferson

“Jefferson hungered for greatness, and the drama of his age provided him a stage which he never really left. Writing his William and Mary schoolmate and Revolutionary colleague John Page in 1803 — Page was governor of Virginia, Jefferson president of the United States — Jefferson said: ‘We have both been drawn from our natural passion for study and tranquility, by times which took from us the freedom of choice: times however which, planting a new world with the seeds of just government, will produce a remarkable era in the history of mankind. It was incumbent on those therefore who fell into them, to give up every favorite pursuit, and lay their shoulder to the work of the day.’

In his retirement at Monticello, he looked back over the years, through the haze of war and struggle and peril, and knew that he had done his duty…”

Jon Meacham, describing Thomas Jefferson in the introduction of his new biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

Charles Krauthammer

“[P]erhaps most eccentric of all, I left a life in medicine for a life in journalism devoted mostly to politics, while firmly believing that what really matters, what moves the spirit, what elevates the mind, what fires the imagination, what makes us fully human are all of these endeavors, disciplines, confusions and amusements that lie outside politics…

While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.

Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.”

Charles Krauthammer, reflecting on the relevance of his career choice in the introduction of his new collection, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics.

__________

I’ve thrown together similar collections of words from a variety of luminaries on a single topic. (As always, if you’ve got any additional references that would fit into these posts, don’t hesitate to send them in.)

Steinbeck

Marching (with Steinbeck, Orwell, and Einstein)

Albert Camus

2+2 (with Camus, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Rand, and Göring)

Albert Einstein

Science as Child’s Play (with Einstein, Newton, and Sagan)

John Updike, Massachusetts, 1984; photographs by Dominique Nabokov

The Existence of God (with Updike, Flew, Lewis, and Wittgenstein)

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Meet John Adams

16 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

60 Minutes, Abigail Adams, America, American History, Biography, David Mccullough, founding fathers, friendship, George Washington, Government, history, John Adams, John Hancock, Josiah Quincey, Morley Safer, personality, politics

John Adams

“He was John Adams of Braintree and he loved to talk. He was a known talker. There were some, even among his admirers, who wished he talked less. He himself wished he talked less, and he had particular regard for those, like General Washington, who somehow managed great reserve under almost any circumstance…

As befitting a studious lawyer from Braintree, Adams was a ‘plain dressing’ man. His oft-stated pleasures were his famliy, his farm, his books and writing table, a convivial pipe and cup of coffee (now that tea was no longer acceptable), or preferably a glass of good Madeira…

He was a man who cared deeply for his friends, who, with few exceptions, were to be his friends for life, and in some instances despite severe strains. And to no one was he more devoted than to his wife, Abigail. She was his ‘Dearest Friend,’ as he addressed her in letters — his ‘best, dearest, worthiest, wisest friend in the world’ — while to her he was ‘the tenderest of husbands,’ her ‘good man.’

John Adams was also, as many could attest, a great-hearted, persevering man of uncommon ability and force. He had a brilliant mind. He was honest and everyone knew it. Emphatically independent by nature, hardworking, frugal — all traits in the New England tradition — he was anything but cold or laconic as supposedly New Englanders were. He could be high-spirited and affectionate, vain, cranky, impetuous, self-absorbed, and fiercely stubborn; passionate, quick to anger and all-forgiving; generous and entertaining. He was blessed with great courage and good humor, yet subject to spells of despair, and especially when separated from his family or during periods of prolonged inactivity.

Ambitious to excel — to make himself known — he had nonetheless recognized at an early stage that happiness came not from fame and fortune, ‘and all such things,’ but from ‘an habitual contempt of them,’ as he wrote. He prized the Roman ideal of honor, and in this, as in much else, he and Abigail were in perfect accord. Fame without honor, in her view, would be ‘like a faint meteor gliding through the sky, shedding only transient light.’…

John Adams was not a man of the world. He enjoyed no social standing. He was an awkward dancer and poor at cards. He never learned to flatter. He owned no ships or glass factory as did Colonel Josiah Quincy, Braintree’s leading citizen. There was no money in his background, no Adams fortune or elegant Adams homestead like the Boston mansion of John Hancock.

It was in the courtrooms of Massachusetts and on the printed page, principally in the newspapers of Boston, that Adams had distinguished himself. Years of riding the court circuit and his brilliance before the bar had brought him wide recognition and respect. And of greater consequence in recent years had been his spirited determination and eloquence in the cause of American rights and liberties.”

__________

From the opening chapter of David McCullough’s seminal biography John Adams.

David McCullough

“I feel so sorry for anyone who misses the experience of history, the horizons of history. We think little of those who, given the chance to travel, go nowhere. We deprecate provincialism. But it is possible to be as provincial in time as it is in space. Because you were born into this particular era doesn’t mean it has to be the limit of your experience. Move about in time, go places.

Why restrict your circle of acquaintances to only those who occupy the same stage we call the present? It doesn’t have to be that way… Take the novels of Willa Cather when you go to Nebraska. Bring Faulkner when you’ re going south.

Read. Read all you can. Read history, biography. Read Dumas Malone’s masterful biography of Jefferson and Paul Horgan’s epic history of the Rio Grande, Great River. Read Luigi Barzini’s books on Italy and America. Read the published journals of those who traveled the Oregon Trail. Read the novels of Maya Angelou and Robertson Davies, read Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, and the poems of Robert Penn Warren. However little television you watch, watch less.”

David McCullough, speaking recently to a class of college graduates.

Watch McCullough and Morley Safer of 60 Minutes discuss the founders, our current political climate, and McCullough’s writing routine below:

Read some of John Adams’s personal correspondence with his wife, Abigail, below:

John Adams

Whether I Stand High or Low in the Estimation of the World

John Adams

The Great Anniversary Festival

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The School of Affliction

12 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Afterlife, American History, Bixby Letter, founding fathers, friendship, John Adams, Kazuo Ishiguro, loss, Mortality, mourning, Noam Chomsky, personal letter, Ravelstein, Saul Bellow, Thomas Jefferson

Thomas JeffersonMonticello, November 13, 1818.

The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding.

Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medi­cine. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.

Th. Jefferson

__________

Thomas Jefferson’s letter to his friend and political rival John Adams, upon hearing that Adams’s wife Abigail had died. You can find it along with more the best letters in American history in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence.

I finished graduate school at Georgetown a week and a half ago, and have now found myself, for the second time in a year, living in my childhood home, as a graduate, idling away a brief but ambiguous stretch of days before moving on to the “next stage” of life. Twelve months ago, I had just finished four undergraduate years at the University of Virginia, and had lugged home a bag of dirty clothes to wash and suitcase of books to read.

One of those books is Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, which I inhaled last July and have since picked up off the shelf and re-read in the past week. The novel (Bellow’s final book, published when he was eighty-five) is a roman à clef and thinly disguised paean to his friend and colleague Allan Bloom. Bellow speaks through the narrator, Chick, as he recounts his long friendship and final months with the renowned academic Abe Ravelstein (re: Bloom) as well as the erotic and intellectual conversations they rehearse as the undercurrent of impending mortality slowly submerges their long-developing friendship. Bellow gives voice to these anxieties with a quivering, careful solemnity that I haven’t encountered elsewhere. His text simultaneously affirms Martin Amis’s claim that Ravelstein is a masterpiece without analogue, while flouting Kazuo Ishiguro’s suggestion that no great novels are written by writers who have matured beyond the class of quinquagenarian.

Bellow’s voice is inflected with the ambiguities and uncertainties of one who is aware of his limited earthly future yet wary of traditional immortality narratives. Chick defers to Ravelstein’s afterlife-agnosticism for much of the book, until its final scenes, wherein the two old pals are overwhelmed by a sensation that Ravelstein’s deathbed is not — and perhaps cannot — be their final meeting place. This impulse is rendered and pondered beautifully by Bellow:

“I wonder if anyone believes the grave is all there is… This is the involuntary and normal, the secret, esoteric, confidence of the man of flesh and blood. The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.”

By the tone of his letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, who was an absolutely determined skeptic for his entire adult life, seems to have embraced some loose version of Bellowian death-survival. The body decays, Jefferson certainly knew that, but as it is eventually cast off, does the spark of consciousness continue to flicker elsewhere? Jefferson may not have really thought that — he may have merely been bowing to the grief of his good friend — or perhaps, like Bellow, he didn’t just want to believe it, he had to.

John Adams

As a side note: Last summer, in the throes of obsession with Ravelstein, I sent the above quotation to Noam Chomsky, to which I attached the question, “So Bellow intuited that life may go on after death — can you sympathize with, or make sense of, such a view?”

Chomsky’s response was typical in its sobering candor: “Bellow is clearly wrong in saying we all believe it.  I can sympathize with a young mother who hopes fervently to see her dying child in heaven, but not with someone like Bellow who chooses the same illusions.”

I didn’t push Chomsky to amend his answer in light of Bellow’s crucial use of the word “involuntary,” though I perhaps should have (or may even in the future). The whole point of the quote — and the related speculation about Jefferson’s view of the afterlife — is to suggest that there is something reflexive, something automatic about the human belief in immortality.

Finally, returning to Jefferson’s letter: does anyone know if his apposition of “loved and lost” in this context inspired Abraham Lincoln’s use of those same two words in his famous Bixby Letter?

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The Great Anniversary Festival

03 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Abigail Adams, America, Declaration of Indepence, Freedom, independence, Independence Day, John Adams, the Fourth of July, The United States

John Adams

Philadelphia

July 3rd, 1776.

Evening

Yesterday the greatest question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was or will be decided among Men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, and as such they have, and of right ought to have, full power to make war, conclude peace, establish commerce, and to do all the other acts and things which other states may rightfully do.” You will see in a few days a declaration setting forth the causes which have impelled us to this mighty revolution and the reasons which will justify it in the sight of God and man. A plan of confederation will be taken up in a few days…

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the great Anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp, shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward forever.

You will think me transported with enthusiasm; but I am not. I am well aware of the toil, and blood, and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this declaration, and support and defend these states. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of light and glory; I can see that the end is more than worth all the means, and that posterity will triumph, although you and I may rue, which I hope we shall not.

John Adams

__________

A letter from John Adams to his wife, Abigail Adams. You can put it on your shelf — My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams.

Throughout the next day, I’m enrolling myself (as I think we all should) in a self-taught crash-course in the history of American liberty, beginning with King George III’s Proclamation Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition, then the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, The Declaration, and The Constitution. Part two will orbit other figures: George Washington, Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel Adams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Anna Howard Shaw, Theodore Roosevelt, Jack Kerouac, George Washington Carver, Sam Houston, Ronald Reagan, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others.

I think of these as the champions of our great American tradition of individual liberty, moral courage, opportunity — not the commercialized, commoditized, flag-waving, beer-chugging junk that to so many Americans now represents our Independence Day.

This is the best of our proud tradition, and it’s the material we need to ventilate and reflect upon now, perhaps, more than ever. I’m going to be posting the best of it here throughout the next day, so stay tuned.

Read another letter from Adams:

John Adams

Whether I Stand High or Low in the Estimation of the World

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Whether I Stand High or Low in the Estimation of the World

13 Saturday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Abigail Adams, America, founding, John Adams, letter, Love, marriage

John Adams

York July 1st: 1774

I am so idle, that I have not an easy moment, without my pen in my hand. My time might have been improved to some purpose, in mowing grass, raking hay, or hoeing corn, weeding carrots, picking or shelling peas. Much better should I have been employed in schooling my children, in teaching them to write, cypher, Latin, French, English and Greek.

I sometimes think I must come to this — to be the foreman upon my own farm, and the school master to my own children. I confess myself to be full of fears that the ministry and their friends and instruments, will prevail, and crush the cause and friends of liberty…

I am determined to be cool, if I can; I have suffered such torments in my mind heretofore, as have almost overpowered my constitution, without any advantage: and now I will laugh and be easy if I can… whether I stand high or low in the estimation of the world, so long as I keep a conscience void of offence towards God and man. And thus I am determined by the will of God, to do, let what will become of me or mine, my country, or the world.

I shall arouse myself ere long I believe, and exert an industry, a frugality, a hard labour, that will serve my family, if I cant serve my country. I will not lie down and die in dispair. If I cannot serve my children by the law, I will serve them by agriculture, by trade, by some way, or other. I thank God I have a head, an heart and hands which if once fully exerted alltogether, will succeed in the world as well as those of the mean spirited, low minded, fawning obsequious scoundrells who have long hoped, that my integrity would be an obstacle in my way, and enable them to out strip me in the race.

But what I want in comparison of them, of villany and servility, I will make up in industry and capacity. If I dont they shall laugh and triumph.

I will not willingly see blockheads, whom I have a right to despise, elevated above me, and insolently triumphing over me. Nor shall knavery, through any negligence of mine, get the better of honesty, nor ignorance of knowledge, nor folly of wisdom, nor vice of virtue.

I must intreat you, my dear partner in all the joys and sorrows, prosperity and adversity of my life, to take a part with me in the struggle. I pray God for your health—intreat you to rouse your whole attention to the family, the stock, the farm, the dairy. Let every article of expence which can possibly be spared be retrench’d. Keep the hands attentive to their business, and let the most prudent measures of every kind be adopted and pursued with alacrity and spirit.

I am &c.,
John Adams

__________

From a letter from John Adams to his wife on July 1st, 1774. A portion of this letter forms part of the closing narrations of the John Adams miniserieson HBO.

It’s impossible now to think of a form of communication which will survive so beautifully and immediate as letters like these; our emails will die (if not disappear) when we do. Eliot was more prescient than he could have known when he asked, “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

John Adams and Abigail integrate seamlessly the mundane concerns of everyday life with the elevated demands of an affection that lasted for over a half century.

I will post more of these letters in the coming weeks.

(By the way: does anyone know what “&c.” means at the end of this letter?)

Watch the imponderably affecting and tasteful closing shot of the John Adams series here:

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