Laudator Temporis Acti

Page Smith, John Adams, Vol. I: 1735-1784 (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962), p. 273:

Of Adams' views and opinions, it is perhaps worth saying something at this juncture. Throughout his life he expressed a number of points of view, many of them about the same issues and problems, and many of them contradictory. Historians are generally uncomfortable in the face of contradictions and paradoxes. But life is full of both; professors may be rational but life is not. John Adams was often paradoxical, and since it did not worry him unduly, it should not worry historians. On one day John Adams loved the people of New England and saw in them every virtue and, if not every grace, almost every quality deserving of admiration and applause. On other days (sometimes the very next day) they seemed to him a narrow, avaricious, small-spirited lot. Sometimes it was clear to him that the American people had the greatest future of any people in the world or, indeed, in the whole sweep of history; and other times he felt that only a miracle could draw the vast, sprawling continent into a brief, precarious unity. Sometimes he deplored the aristocratic spirit, sometimes the leveling one. Sometimes he ridiculed formality and ceremony; at others he insisted on the necessity of both if the dignity of government was to be upheld. Sometimes he warned against innovation, and then again denounced those who resisted change. Part of this seeming inconsistency was, of course, simply Adams' response to the ordinary alternations of social and political life. We are not always threatened by the same dangers. Today's creative dream is often tomorrow's inflexible dogma; and since Adams had a strong vein of practical realism in his character, he responded quickly to new hazards that imperiled his beloved republic-in-the-making. Certainly an aspect of his inconsistency was the classic conflict in him between realism and idealism. He dared to dream bold and magnificent dreams, yet, unlike many dreamers, he was so solidly planted in the real world that he was always acutely conscious of the gap between the hoped-for and that which might be achieved in an imperfect universe.

Beyond that, as a passionate and committed man inclined to intense introspection he was swept alternately by tides of optimism and despair. Beyond that, many of the inconsistencies we have been speaking about were simply the natural response of any thoughtful and religious man to the ironies and paradoxes of the human condition.