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October 04, 2006

Passionate Sage

It will come as no surprise to readers familiar with both my own personality and the founders of the United States that I have always had a warm spot in my heart for John Adams. Doubtless that is in no small part due to the wonderful job William Daniels did portraying Adams in one of my favorite movies, 1776, and there is probably some love of the underdog in it as well, as Adams’s reputation is markedly lower than it ought to be given his central role in the events that shaped this country’s birth.

Joseph Ellis’s biography of Adams’s declining years, Passionate Sage, does nothing to dim my impressions of this remarkable man. Passionate Sage is a book in much the same vein as Ellis’s American Sphinx, in that he attempts to examine Adams to determine not what happened to him, but who he was. Passionate Sage does an excellent job of this, examining Adams’s life after he was defeated by Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800 to his death on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, some five hours after his friend and rival had died.

Ellis is an excellent historian and perhaps an even better writer. As with all of his works that I have read, Passionate Sage draws the reader in and illuminates the subject as to make him utterly fascinating to the reader. This may, admittedly, be easier to do with men like Adams and Jefferson, but I have read quite enough bad history to know that a poor writer can make the most interesting of events deadly dull. Ellis’s writing, however, is a pleasure, and I suspect that the work will stand as one of the best analyses of John Adams’s character ever written. The reader finishes the work at once convinced he knows Adams as never before and saddened by the knowledge he cannot actually meet the fascinating man described in Ellis’s prose.

Adams himself disparaged the idea that the generation of men who fought the Revolution and brought the United States into being were any more capable or knowledgeable than the generations that followed. Yet the more we come to understand men like Adams and Jefferson, the more difficult it is to compare them to anyone who purports to lead the country today. In that sense, Ellis’s impressive work is almost as depressing as it is uplifting, for surely America could use a few more men like John Adams in times like these.