In a recent post, I recounted the marvelous story of the restoration of the friendship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, a friendship that had been disrupted by political differences. The fact that they moved past their differences was the vindication of the spirit of friendship over the spirit of party, in the words of Merrill Peterson.
In response, I received a note from Diana Schuab, Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland. She wrote this:
in transcending the grudges and ill feelings of the past, the two friends did not follow the path so often taken today of removing politics from the discussion. They did not set aside or silence “the spirit of party.” Real conversation requires a measure of disagreement and the two of them continued to disagree. Adams described the purpose of their correspondence this way: “You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other” (15 July 1813).
Professor Schuab added this:
Posterity is all the better for having those wonderful letters where they each set forth their respective views on how a system based on “the many” can accommodate or control “the few.” They didn’t shy from discussing religion either. I suspect that at least a little of the civility of their exchange came from the knowledge that these letters would belong to Posterity. As in Aristotle’s description of the friendship of noble men, Adams and Jefferson were competing to demonstrate their learning (all those quotes in Latin and Greek) and their wisdom. They rose to the high standard that their friendly competition helped establish.
This is a marvelous add-on to what I wrote, in part because it makes clear that friendship does not require us to agree with one another. To be sure, Jefferson and Adams agreed on many things. But there were serious differences, too. Adams was a man of the few. Jefferson, a man of the many. Adams was the “partisan of aristocracy” while Jefferson was the “partisan of democracy.” Adams liked to look back, Jefferson ahead. And again and again, Adams taunted Jefferson about the failed hopes of the French Revolution. “Let me ask you, very seriously my friend, where are now… the perfection and perfectibility of human nature? Where is now, the progress of the human mind? Where is the amelioration of society?” Jefferson conceded that Adams was the better prophet, and Adams wanted to disentangle the American Revolution from the French Revolution in ways Jefferson did not.
What mattered, then, wasn’t that they disagreed, but how they disagreed. In reading their correspondence, one is reminded of the words from the book of Proverbs: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
Their letters traversed an immense intellectual terrain, according to Peterson – “the philosophy of Plato, the pronunciation of ancient Greece, Indian origins and antiquities, neology, spiritualism and materialism, the uses and abuses of grief, the nature of aristocracy, the French Revolution, the character of Bonaparte, and so on.”
Theirs was a friendship of the good, one that made both men better, that made them think more deeply and more carefully about great and enduring issues. It was their gift to each other, and their gift to us.