John Adams Confronts Turgot

John Adams Confronts Turgot A. OWEN ALDRIDGE A recent scholar has described John Adams's Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America (1787) as perhaps the most important work of American political thought prior to The Federalist.1 It ranks in significance with three other eighteenth-century literary works published originally in Europe by eminent Americans, Benjamin Franklin's Memoirs , Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, and Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia . According to a specialist on French-American relations, Durand Echeveria, John Adams "seems to have been the only diplomat besides Franklin to make a lasting impression on the French public."2 A distinguished librarian, Zoltan Haraszti, has given a systematic description of Adams's Defence? and a Belgian historian, Jean-Paul Goffinon, has given the work a penetrating analysis,4 but American scholarship in general has neglected the work, probably because the Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, despite its title, has more to do with Europe than with America. It is composed essentially of quotations from European authors whose works were not at the time to be found in the United States, even in the best libraries. Adams does not mention Turgot at all in the title of the first edition of his Defence in 1787, but the following year he added to the title page of an expanded edition of three volumes the phrase "against the attack of Mr. 91 92 / ALDRIDGE Turgot." In a letter to John Trumbull four years later, 23 January 1791, he seems to defend himself for drawing attention to Turgot in this way: "If another edition should ever be published, I would insert in the titlepage: Ά defence, &c. against the attack of M. Turgot.' This, I apprehend, would cure all defects in point of title."5 Presumably Adams believed that the addition of the symbol for etcetera to the title would serve to decrease the significance of Turgot and suggest the importance of other matters. The only change he made in a new edition in 1794, however, does not in the least detract attention from his French opponent: "Against the Attack of M. Turgot in his Letter to Dr. Price Dated the Twenty-Second day of March 1784. " In this succession of titles, Adams may have meant to convey the impression that Turgot's attack was delivered against the Constitution of the United States, but the final subtitle suggests that it had been directed against Adams himself. The latter was not in any sense true. Price published Turgot's letter in 1784, shortly after the latter's death, when he included it as an appendix to his own Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World. Readers of Adams's Defence three years later in 1787 would have had no reason to associate the work in any way with Turgot. They may well have considered it a reply to a similar study by the abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. On the other hand, Mably's Observations sur le gouvernement et les lois des Etats-Unis de l'Amérique (1784) boldly states on its first page that it is addressed to Adams: "A Mr. Adams, Ministre Plénipotentiare des Etats-Unis en Holland & pour les Negotiations de la Paix." The title of an English translation in London was even more specific concerning the role of Adams: Remarks concerning the Government and the Laws of the United States of America: in Four Letters Addressed to Mr. Adams (London: Debrett, 1784). Biographers have suggested that Adams wrote his Defence in order to prepare the way for his return to the United States. Because of his absence in Europe, he had dropped out of the public eye in America and needed to fortify his reputation.6 The hypothesis does not explain why he selected the particular subject of the state constitutions, however. It may be that he had subconsciously felt the urge to reply to Mably's Observations, to which his Defence is slightly related, but had refrained from doing so, thinking that such an action could be condemned as ungracious if interpreted as censuring a work...