In an attempt to come alongside my daughter’s schoolwork, I have been reading Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause, a survey of the American Revolution published in the Oxford History of the United States. I thought I knew a thing or two about American history, but perhaps growing up in New England and attending a school named after a Revolutionary war hero puffed my confidence without cause. As I have been reading, I have recognized that, to me, Faneuil Hall had not been a place where British soldiers were barracked when colonists refused to house them but the place where you buy clam chowder and see the statue of former Celtics coach Red Auerbach (smoking a cigar, of course).

But as pitiful as my internal encyclopedia may be, I do know a thing or two about John Adams, having read David McCullough’s biography of him, and, I admit, forming an attachment to him based on the resemblance of his personality to my own: he was energetic and excitable, earnest and vulnerable. I am not foolish enough to see Adams-like greatness in myself, but how could I not see the similarities between us when McCullough introduces him like this: “He was John Adams of Braintree and he loved to talk”? Any of my students could justly insert my name into that sentence.

So, I read Middlekauff’s portrayal of Adams, which keys in on Adams’s vanity, defensively. Regarding Adams’s serving as defense attorney for the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre, he notes Adams was full of “self-righteous satisfaction at taking on an unpopular case.” In reference to the commotion in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress, he observes that Adams “pretended to complain of ‘the unnecessary Parade that was made about us,’ but he loved every minute of it.” And in sketching a short profile of Adams, Middlekauff asserts that he was “eager for [the world’s] praise and recognition but throughout his life often stung by its barbs of disapproval…. Jefferson possessed a serene surface that the perpetually uneasy Adams never developed, even for a moment. Jefferson was elegant; Adams was rough though never coarse…. He craved fame and reputation.”

Now, this is not all Middlekauff has to say about Adams, and he cites amply Adams’s contribution to the glorious cause. But, clearly, he casts Adams’s vanity as a key character trait, and this irked me from the start.

Part of what irks me is revealed by that very contrast between Adams and Jefferson—one Middlekauff admits historians can’t resist, for Jefferson and Adams were life-long correspondents, and their differences were remarkable. Even their physical stature foiled: Jefferson stood a regal six foot two, Adams’s head, level with Jefferson’s chin, seven inches below.

Another aspect of this contrast is disposition. Jefferson was famously reserved in his journal, sharing few personal details and filling it with data, like temperatures and expenses. Adams filled his journal with the fears and feelings swirling inside him. One of my favorite examples of this contrast comes at Stratford-on-Avon, where, McCullough explains, Adams

was distressed by how little evidence remained of Shakespeare, either of the man or the miracle of his mind. “There is nothing preserved of this great genius . . . which might inform us what education, what company, what accident turned his mind to letters and drama,” Adams lamented. Jefferson noted only that he paid a shilling to see the house and Shakespeare’s grave.

Did Jefferson think nothing upon visiting Shakespeare’s house? Did he care only about money? Surely not. But he chose not to record his thoughts, whereas Adams, as usual, spilled his feelings into his journal and letters to his wife, Abigail. If Abigail had not remained in Braintree for so much of John’s career, perhaps traveling with John on each trip to Europe, Washington DC, or Philadelphia, we might not know half his thoughts and fears, for he might have shared them with her in person and not committed them to paper.

But perhaps not, for John Adams loved to share his thoughts, to remain in constant conversation, even when the conversation was more apostrophe than exchange. McCullough notes that when Adams read, he did so with a pen in hand, filling the margins with comments. “It was part of the joy of reading for him,” he says, “to have something to say himself, to talk back to, agree or take issue with, Rousseau, Condorcet, Turgot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, or Joseph Priestley.

Particularly amusing to me is Adam’s response to Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution, which McCullough says

Adams read at least twice and with delight, since he disagreed with nearly everything she said. To her claim that government must be simple, for example, he answered, “The clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels . . . but it would not tell the time of day.” . . . In all, in this one book, Adams’s marginal notes and comments ran to some 12,000 words.

Twelve-thousand words in the margins of one book hints at how much material historians have to work with when studying John Adams and making judgments on his character. So, yes, he might have been vain or focused on what others thought of him, but how do we know he dwelt on these things more than other people? Jefferson, for example, left little of this interpretive data. McCullough reports that Jefferson “seldom even marked a book, and then only faintly in pencil.” If Jefferson lacked or possessed vanity, we would never know—how can we guess at vanity from a few light pencil marks?

I suppose Adams’s very desire to record his thoughts might be a sign of vanity, but loving to talk is not the same as simple vanity. Refusing to listen is closer, as it involves a self-centeredness that won’t consider another’s interests, but loving to converse, to speak, to think through ideas in writing—these can coexist with valuing another’s interests and considering them above one’s own.

Granted, I wouldn’t claim that verbosity and vanity are completely exclusive; I am plagued by self-regard, after all. But I don’t see my vanity as fused to abundant speech. My vanity is an absorption with myself and an overestimation of myself, an embarrassing desire to see myself as amazing. I therefore recognize a mirror in Aaron Belz’s poem, “My Chosen Vocation,” where the speaker has failed at his goals in life and is left “rather sexy-looking,” with messy hair “volumized / with Matrix Essentials / Foam Volumizer.” He sees a picture of a contemporary Walt Whitman rather than a washed up, purposeless bum. My vanity, then, is a delusion, a conceit. But that self-absorption is not a product of my speaking; instead, the speaking reveals the self-absorption.

To look at the connection another way, I don’t see how reserve and quiet are inherently removed from vanity and self-righteousness. I can stay quiet and remain aloof out of vanity as much as I can speak from it. Thomas Jefferson may not have been vain, but his reticence to say anything in his letters does not prove that.

Yet I suppose I should admit Robert Middlekauff was not wrong in his estimation of Adams. He recognizes that Adams was “open to the world,” and it is this openness that enables our judgment. It does not determine our judgment, but it allows it. Thus, John Adams probably was vain, or at least consumed with himself and his own reputation.

But I am eager to declare so gently. I have a sense that he was not unique so much as exposed. He opened himself up and revealed what was truly swirling in his soul. If what was swirling is unique, then I worry for myself more than him; when I read his letters, I recognize my own fears and vulnerabilities, my own, similar, vanity. And I am hoping those who judge me will be gentle and merciful as well.