Adams argued that Washington be called “His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of the Rights of the Same.” When Jefferson got word in Paris, where he was serving as U.S. minister to France, of the spectacle, he wrote in code that it was “the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of.” Ben Franklin had described Adams, Jefferson added, as “Always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.”1 And Jefferson was a friend of Adams.
