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Chapter 6: Beyond Example?
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Chapter 6 Beyond Example? On New Year’s Day, 1812, John Adams wrote to Jefferson and ended a silence that had subsisted between them since the beginning of the century. Their ensuing retirement correspondence offered the two former presidents the possibility not only to discuss a wide range of political, historical, and philosophical problems but also to convey some of the most congenial impressions of their characters. Occasional disclaimers notwithstanding, both elder statesmen also had posterity on their minds when celebrating the renewal of their friendship above party politics. Their correspondence may thus be viewed as their most successful autobiographical construction, one that turned out to be more complimentary to their posthumous reputations than their actual autobiographies. As if to gain clarity about their historical legacies at the onset of this unique exchange, Jefferson in his first reply to Adams summed up their place in his vision of American history. After a short essay on household manufactures occasioned by a typical misunderstanding of Adams’s wordplays, Jefferson reflected on “recollections very dear to my mind” of the revolutionary past, when the two men had been “fellow laborers in the same cause.”1 As in the very last letter of their correspondence, he dressed his reminiscences of their “Heroic age”2 in the nautical metaphors familiar from his first inaugural address: “Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark, we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.” Although the young United States was at the brink of a new war when he wrote this sentence in 1812, Jefferson History 186 chose to emphasize that the American ship of state had managed to escape the dangerous European tempests and Caribbean hurricanes of the recent past: aided by Providence, he and Adams had collaborated successfully to ensure the ship’s safe progress through the “conflicting elements of a troubled world.”3 In an Atlantic crossing from the east to the west, as it were, they had left the turmoil of European history behind and “made a happy port” in America. Proceeding from the past to the future, Jefferson now showed himself entirely convinced of American progress: So we have gone on, and so we shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man. And I do believe we shall continue to growl [grow], to multiply and prosper until we exhibit an association, powerful, wise and happy, beyond what has yet been seen by men. As for France and England, with all their pre-eminence in science, the one is a den of robbers, and the other of pirates. And if science produces no better fruits than tyranny , murder, rapine and destitution of national morality, I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest and estimable as our neighboring savages are.4 Jefferson thus reemphasized his conviction of a fundamental divide between American and European history. In the United States, the future was predictable through the knowledge of a similar past (“So we have gone on, and so we shall go on”), allowing Americans to continue in their steady progress toward the future of a republican millennium (“an association, powerful, wise and happy, beyond what has yet been seen by men”). The first of all nations to have this peaceful republic within reach, Americans were “puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man”— “puzzled” by a providential plan that was only partly accessible to a limited human knowledge of history. Although they “knew not how,” Americans were moving “beyond example in the history of man” because, Jefferson hoped, their progress avoided the mistakes of a contingent European history . Americans were themselves becoming the only positive historical “example,” the republican model to be emulated by all other nations in the time to come. Thus, while American history was indeed moving “beyond” the examples of European history, Jefferson’s theory of history did not move “beyond example,” as he reaffirmed the didactic function of history: in the case of the American past, he tried his best again to understand history as “philosophy teaching by examples.” [3.144.27.148] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:34 GMT) Beyond Example? 187 Claiming to prefer the original innocence of the Indians to the moral destitution of French “robbers” and English “pirates,” Jefferson even alluded to the restorative dimension of his early philosophical history. To be sure, this...