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1780s Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin
Sep. 23rd, 2014 08:48 amWe have some colorful background on the relationships among John Adams, Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, having met and shared time together doing diplomatic work in Europe.
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His Paris stay brought him into close contact with both Franklin and Jefferson. Adams could not match their social graces and was “quite out of his element,” fretted his friend Jonathan Sewall: “He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen, and talk small talk or flirt with the ladies.” In addition, Franklin’s blithe hedonism offended the austere New England soul of John Adams. “His whole life has been one continued insult to good manners and to good decency,” Adams complained. Franklin’s fame in France was a blow to Adams’s amour propre, his sense that he was the superior man.
Franklin himself captured Adams with a penetrating epigram: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”
-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”
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His Paris stay brought him into close contact with both Franklin and Jefferson. Adams could not match their social graces and was “quite out of his element,” fretted his friend Jonathan Sewall: “He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen, and talk small talk or flirt with the ladies.” In addition, Franklin’s blithe hedonism offended the austere New England soul of John Adams. “His whole life has been one continued insult to good manners and to good decency,” Adams complained. Franklin’s fame in France was a blow to Adams’s amour propre, his sense that he was the superior man.
Franklin himself captured Adams with a penetrating epigram: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”
-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”
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