When is a conversation a failure?

A couple of weeks ago I was in Nottingham at a conference on “The History of Failure and the Failure of History”. I was shamefully late, so I didn’t hear all the papers, but one that struck me was by Anthony Barker of George Washington Law School. The main thrust of his argument wasn’t that surprising. The American Revolution and the settlement that followed failed to achieve the large goals it set for itself in terms of freedom and equality; and specifically, it failed to achieve much of anything for women.

Perhaps there can be no failure where the terms of success are unreasonable, or anachronistic. But that wasn’t the case in revolutionary America. There, a far more radical change had been realised intellectually, only to be smothered politically. If only John Adams had listened properly to his wife Abigail, when she issued her famous call to “Remember the Ladies”:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independancy—and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” (Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March 1776)

 More than the failure of the revolution as a whole, it was John Adams’ personal failure to comprehend this letter that was the crux of Baker’s talk. John had responded to his wife, of course. But he had treated the whole exchange as a joke: “I can not but laugh,” he wrote to her. As Woody Holton has written, “He viewed the whole exchange as a continuation of the banter that, from the early days of his and Abigail’s courtship...” (Abigail Adams, p. 103). For Baker, that was Adams’ failure. He’d missed the real importance of his wife’s words, which deeply challenged the political theory of the revolution.

My question is, what constitutes a failure in conversation? Or, what constitutes success? I wonder how John felt when he sealed and sent his reply. All we have is interpretation, and – for some historians – conviction.

“Abigail Adams herself, I am now convinced, would have been mortified to learn the meaning that has been read into some of her private – and not entirely serious – correspondence with her husband,” wrote Linda dePauw in 1978. Charles Akers in 1980 reckoned that “by treating her “Code of Laws” as a joke, [John] saved [Abigail] the embarrassment of seriously prosecuting a case against one of the least guilty of men.” By the standards of both these historians, then, the exchange was... successful?

Historians are conducting a peculiarly one-sided conversation of our own, with the past. Can that conversation fail? What kind of understanding needs to be built up? Biographers often tout their unique appreciation for their subjects. Edith Gelles claimed to capture “the Abigail who emerges from her own words”. That claim reminds me of Ranke’s, that history arises mystically from the archive, as if it involves the same kind of je ne sais quoi as a good conversation. But what does it mean to fail?