2. JQA wrote: “You asked me some days since, for advice, with an intimation, that if
I would give it, there should be some attention paid to it. I promised that I would
faithfully advise you and with a view exclusively to your own welfare. I ask you therefore
to write me every week, and as far as I am able will answer your Letters” (JQA to
CFA, 10 Oct. 1827,
Adams Papers). Taking advantage of the invitation, CFA promptly replied (16 Oct. 1827) and thus
began a correspondence which totaled forty letters from each writer before it was
suspended on 27 July 1828. Unless otherwise noted, all these letters are in the
Adams Papers. Since they are presently available in full in the microfilm edition of the
Adams Papers and will be published in large measure in the
Adams Family Correspondence, it is not necessary to summarize or quote the individual letters in these pages,
except where such reference is needed to make the meaning of CFA’s diary clear.
Taken as a whole, this remarkable correspondence reveals much about both the President
and his son. These were not, by and large, informal, personal letters, though inevitably
they contain many references to health, to family matters, and to finances. Nor were
they generally discussions of political affairs. Instead, JQA intended his letters
to guide his son to success—and he assumed that CFA would, like his father and his
grandfather, aspire to a public career. Charles should, therefore, assiduously improve
himself. Carefully he should budget his time. One way of gaining extra hours, undisturbed
by business or social demands, was to rise early. “If you can establish the practice
of rising at six, or still better, at five o’clock, the year round,” JQA urged, “you
will not want time for study” (10 Oct. 1827). “I will not say it is impossible that
an early riser should be a vicious man,” he further argued. “But I do say that early
rising is indissolubly connected with many of the most active virtues” (9 Dec. 1827).
The time thus gained CFA should spend in hard work, always remembering that “Genius
is the child of Toil” (16 Dec. 1827). He should read the great letter writers, such
as Pliny, Voltaire, and Pascal; he should study Bacon; he should read widely in American
history, though the books on this subject were “little more than details of facts;
told with little art, and without much philosophy” (4 Feb. 1828). Especially he must
study the works of Cicero, beginning with
De Officiis, examining it “1. As a System of Ethics. 2. As a literary composition. 3. Biographically”
(10 Feb.
{ 172 } 1828). To assist his son, JQA filled several letters with short historical and critical
essays on Cicero’s more important orations.
Charles was an attentive but by no means uncritical listener to his father’s advice.
The value of early rising, he soon decided, was much overrated, and he told JQA: “I
cannot help thinking that there is an excess in this as in many other things and that
the habit of witnessing the evident exhaustion under which you labour every evening
has gone far to impress it upon my mind” (8 Jan. 1828). His father’s recommended books
on American history he read eagerly, but they convinced him that Thomas Hutchinson’s
Tory version of the pre-Revolutionary struggle was sounder than that of the American
Whigs, including that upheld by his own grandfather. Repeatedly CFA maintained, in
the face of JQA’s arguments, that the English Parliament did have the right to tax
the colonies, adding, however, that a separation was probably inevitable since “the
distance between the two nations . . . rendered a union absurd” (6 May 1828).
Even more disturbing to JQA was Charles’ contention that Cicero, “the individual whom
you have pronounced your favourite,” was wanting in “firmness of character” (29 Jan.
1828) and was, therefore, inferior to Cato (8 April 1828). The President was so upset
by Charles’ dissent that LCA had to warn her son: “even if his deductions are not
entirely like yours on points of moral character, respect prejudices acquired by favorite
studies and ... do not harshly and positively condemn them” (LCA to CFA, 17 April
1828,
Adams Papers).
Behind these disagreements lay a more basic one: Charles was resisting his father’s
plan to have him enter public life. “I do not expect to make a very great figure in
the world,” CFA told his father. “I cannot get over my dislike to the idea of a political
existence. It shackles the independence of mind and feeling which I have always perhaps
extravagantly admired, and in this Country it destroys all social ties, all the finer
but less intense enjoyments of existence” (22 Jan. 1828). Taking this as a slur upon
his own career, JQA retorted sharply: “If you prefer to remain in private life, stand aloof—you may be sure not to be disturbed in your
privacy” (26 March 1828).
Nevertheless, both men enjoyed their epistolary exchanges. To Charles the letters
brought a closeness to his father which the Adams coldness forbade in direct personal
intercourse. “I am sorry that you should think me likely to consider your letters
tedious,” he assured JQA. “For I assure you, Sir, nothing can exceed the gratification
with which I receive communications, (and of such a kind especially) from you” (13
Nov. 1827). The President, for his part, was pleased by Charles’ punctuality in writing
every week, a practice so markedly in contrast with GWA’s carelessness as to correspondence
and business (LCA to CFA, 20 Feb. 1828,
Adams Papers). At the same time JQA found his son’s letters and questions a welcome opportunity
to turn from the gloomy political scene to the literary pursuits which he so loved.
“Your letters are becoming a necessary of life to me,” he assured Charles. “I have
not in seven years read so much of classical literature, as since I began these Letters
to you. And I might add I have not in seven years enjoyed so much luxurious entertainment”
(25 Nov. 1827).