Gordon Wood, the dean of historians of the American Revolution, has been chasing John Adams his entire career. From his Bancroft Prize-winning The Creation of the American Republic (1969) to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution(1992) and beyond, Adams has been a favorite source. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is Wood's first book-length study of Adams, along with his friend and rival Jefferson.
The new book is a study in contrasts. Many accounts of Adams and Jefferson begin with Benjamin Rush's comment that they were “the North and South Poles of the American Revolution.” Wood does not see it that way. Rather, Jefferson is American and Adams is, well, un-American. The two patriots, “remained divided in almost every fundamental way: in temperament, in their ideas of government, in their assumptions about human nature, in their notions of society, in their attitude toward religion, in their conception of America, indeed in every single thing that mattered.” Wood presents the two men as ideological types, though he does not completely ignore their personal stories. My favorite part of Friends Divided might be its close reading of Rush's efforts to reconcile his two old friends, after Jefferson retired from the presidency in 1809. Rush's epistolary diplomacy consisted of saying A to Jefferson and B to Adams, or quoting X but not Y from Adams when writing Jefferson. Wood's inner humanist shines through in these meticulous, inspired interpretations of people, events, and writings, interpretive passages that are unsurpassed in his formidable body of work. Yet Wood's bias as a historian is cultural or ideological. Hence his focus is not on the Adams-Jefferson friendship or even on their famous correspondence, but, rather, on what they represent for America.
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