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Coxcombs & Atheists. Though Adams himself felt that Christianity was saddled with "whole cartloads of trumpery"—and abandoned his Calvinist upbringing to become a Unitarian—he frothed with epithets when he picked up the spoor of an atheist, as he thought he did in a letter from Jean Le Rond d'Alembert to Frederick the Great.
D'Alembert: I am sometimes tempted to believe that God was at least as much in need of advice when he created the moral world as when he created the physical.
Adams: Thou Louse, Flea, Tick, Ant, Wasp, or whatever Vermin thou art, was this Stupendous Universe made and adjusted to give you Money, Sleep, or Digestion?
To Condorcet's comfortable belief "that the perfectibility of man is truly limitless," Adams retorted skeptically: "Will man ever be free from disease, vice, and death?" With Rousseau, whom he dubbed an "eloquent coxcomb," he disputed that the ignorance of primitive man is bliss; that men are equal by nature ("To be sure, if there was but one man in the world, there would be no inequality among mankind"); and that "the voice of the people is the voice of God." "If the majority is 51 and the minority 49," Adam wanted to know, "is it certainly the voice of God? If tomorrow one should change to 50 vs. 50, where is the voice of God? If two and the minority should become the majority, is the voice of God changed?"
John Adams knew he was oldfashioned. He expected to rub posterity the wrong way. But he suspected that he had raised the fundamental questions, and given them, whether posterity cared or not, the fundamental answers.
* As did his son John Quincy, who went horseback riding during Jackson's inaugural, and Andrew Johnson, who sat cleaning up his White House desk during Grant's.
† On July 4, 1826, 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, within a few hours of the death of Jefferson at Monticello.