At Random for April 18, 2008
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Watching “John Adams,” the HBO miniseries based on the popular biography by David McCullough, viewers have been reminded that, in many ways large and small, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the odd couple of the American Revolution.
“The differences in physique, background, manner and temperament could hardly have been more contrasting,” McCullough writes of Adams and Jefferson. “Where Adams was stout, Jefferson was lean and long-limbed, almost bony. Where Adams stood foursquare to the world, shoulders back, Jefferson customarily stood with his arms folded tightly across his chest . . . where Adams was nearly bald, Jefferson had a full head of thick, coppery hair. His freckled face was lean like his body, the eyes hazel, the mouth a thin line, the chin sharp.”
While Jefferson had a gift for grace and subtlety, Adams embraced a New Englander’s typical preference for bluntness. The two men quarreled politically and grew distant from each other for years before reconciling in old age.
But for all their differences, Adams and Jefferson had at least one big thing in common:
They were both unrepentant bookworms. “A list of the favorite authors of either could have served for the other,” McCullough observes.
When diplomatic service took Adams to Europe, what he missed most after his wife and children was his bookshelf. Although pretty conservative with money, Adams acquired more and more books throughout his life, a passion he could never quite curb.
Jefferson seemed even more of a spendthrift at the bookshop. Although there weren’t many bookstores in the colonies, when Jefferson served as a diplomat in Paris, he confessed to devoting “every afternoon I was disengaged, for a summer or two, in examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hands.”
After the British burned the Library of Congress during the War of 1812, Jefferson offered to sell all his books to Congress as the basis for a new congressional library. The gesture was partly patriotic, but also inspired by Jefferson’s need to pay his mounting debts.
Jefferson personally supervised the packing of the books, and 10 wagons were required to transport them to Washington. But as Jefferson biographer Noble E. Cunningham has pointed out, the last wagon of Jefferson’s books was “hardly down the hill at Monticello before he was starting to build another collection.”
While no one is ever going to confuse my modest suburban home with Monticello, I thought about Jefferson the other day as I glanced at stacks of books that seem to grow like moss around my nightstand. We cleared dozens of books from the shelf during a New Year’s burst of house cleaning, but the shelves have a way of filling back. Somewhere, I thought to myself, the Sage of Monticello is smiling.
