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Indeed, he was tired of reading all newspapers, he told Abigail on the eve of Washington’s second inauguration. “The whole drama of the world is such tragedy that I am weary of the spectacle.”
Agreed
Like Washington, Adams could not bring himself to say anything publicly. But to a correspondent in England, he warned, “Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots,” and he lamented that so much more blood would have to flow before the lesson was learned.
Extraordinarily Insightful. Said in regards to the execution of louis.
Jefferson, who had once called Louis XVI “a good man,” “an honest man,” observed privately that monarchs were “amenable to punishment like other criminals.” It was the view expressed in a letter in the New York Journal signed “A Republican”: Mankind is now enlightened. They can discover that kings are like other men, especially with respect to the commission of crimes and an inordinate thirst for power. Reason and liberty are over-spreading the world, nor will progress be impeded until the towering crown shall fall, and the spectre of royalty be broken in pieces, in every part of the globe.
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Adams harbored no illusions about his importance, any more than during his first term. “My country in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” he told Abigail.
It was not just that the vice presidency offered so little chance to say or do anything of consequence, but that at a time when party politics were becoming increasingly potent and pervasive, he would not, could not, be a party man. And so, for both reasons, he was becoming more and more a man apart.
For instead of being “the ardent pursuer of science” that some imagined, Jefferson was the captive of ambition, and ambition, Adams told John Quincy, was “the subtlest beast of the intellectual and moral field . . . [and] wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner. Jefferson thinks he shall by this step get a reputation of a humble modest, meek man, wholly without ambition or vanity. He may even have deceived himself into this belief. But if the prospect opens, the world will see . . . he is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell. . . . Though his desertion may be a loss to us of some
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The common accusations notwithstanding, Adams was no Anglophile. As greatly as he admired the British constitution and the British structure of government, he considered the British as insolent as ever, and the unfortunate “mad” George III (by now the victim of porphyria), a hopeless blunderer. The day might come when America would have to “beat down” the “insolence of John Bull,” Adams told Abigail, but he prayed it would not be soon.
Early in February 1796, on the same day Benjamin Franklin Bache declared in the Aurora that “good patriot” Jefferson was the inevitable and ideal choice to replace Washington, Adams professed to be tired of politics. “I am weary of the game,” he told Abigail, then added with characteristic honesty what she had long understood, “Yet I don’t know how I would live out of it.”
I hate speeches [he continued], messages, addresses, proclamations and such affected, constrained things. I hate levees and drawing rooms. I hate to speak to 1,000 people to whom I have nothing to say. Yet all this I can do.
To Adams, time was moving all too fast. (“Long! Nothing is long! The time will soon be gone and we shall be surprised to know what has become of it.”)
Adams was pilloried in the Republican press as a gross and shameless monarchist—“His Rotundity,” whose majestic appearance was so much “sesquipedality of belly,” as said Bache’s Aurora.
Were Adams to be elected, warned the Boston Chronicle, the principle of hereditary succession would be imposed on America, to make way for John Quincy. With Jefferson, said the paper, no one need worry since Jefferson had only daughters.
For their part, the Federalists were hardly less abusive. Jefferson was decried as a Jacobin, an atheist, and charged with cowardice for having fled Monticello from the British cavalry in 1781. “Poor Jefferson is tortured as much as your better acquaintance,” Adams wrote to John Quincy.
Not long after, however, Adams did receive a letter from Abigail, written at Quincy on January 15, 1797: The cold has been more severe than I can ever before recollect. It has frozen the ink in my pen, and chilled the blood in my veins, but not the warmth of my affection for him for whom my heart beats with unabated ardor through all the changes and vicissitudes of life, in the still calm of Peacefield, and the turbulent scenes in which he is about to engage.
On learning that she had had the Quincy coat-of-arms painted on her carriage at home, he told her to have it painted out. “They shall have a republican President in earnest,” he wrote.
And so Adams became President of the nation that now—with the additions of Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee—numbered sixteen states. Having never in his public life held an administrative position, having never played any but a marginal role in the previous administration, having never served in the military, or campaigned for a single vote, or claimed anything like a political bent, he was now chief executive and commander-in-chief.
When in the predawn hours of January 27, a terrible fire ripped through the home and shop of the Philadelphia printer and publisher of the Federal Gazette, Andrew Brown, taking the lives of his wife and children, Adams was conspicuous among the men handing up buckets to fight the blaze. Brown, as all knew, had for some time been excoriating the Vice President at every chance.
“If the way to do good to my country were to render myself popular, I could easily do it. But extravagant popularity is not the road to public advantage.”
To Jefferson it was clear that Adams, who imagined he might “steer impartially between the parties,” had been brought abruptly back into the Federalist fold. But it was also clear to Adams that neither Jefferson nor Madison had the least desire to work with the administration, and thus he could expect no help from any of the Republicans.
Adams never knew when Jefferson might be working secretly to undercut or thwart him, for Jefferson’s abiding flaw, Adams had concluded, was “want of sincerity.”
The furniture belonging to the public is in the most deplorable condition [he reported to Abigail]. There is not a chair to sit in. The beds and bedding are in a woeful pickle. This house has been a scene of the most scandalous drinking and disorder among the servants that I ever heard of. I would not have one of them for any consideration. There is not a carpet nor a curtain, nor a glass [mirror], nor linen, nor china, nor anything.
The presidential house
“We must stand our ground as long as we can.” To no one but her could he ever complain.
To Abigail he confessed to being totally exhausted and begged her to come to his rescue. The more at odds he felt with his cabinet, the less he trusted their judgment, the greater his need for her insight and common sense, her presence in his life. His pleas for her to come grew more urgent even than those he had sent during his difficult debut as Vice President.
“I must go to you or you must come to me. I cannot live without you,” he wrote. And again: “I must entreat you to lose not a moment’s time in preparing to come on, that you may take off from me every care of life but that of my public duty, assist me with your councils, and console me with your conversation.” “The times are critical and dangerous, and I must have you here to assist me,” he told her. “I must now repeat this with zeal and earnestness. I can do nothing without you.”
Then, in the line that caused the stir, Jefferson wrote: It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to those heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.
Mazzei letter
It was not only that Republicans were divided from Federalists, but Federalists were sharply at odds with themselves, and the roll of the strident, often vicious press was changing the whole political atmosphere.
Benjamin Bache turned with a fury on the President he had so recently lauded as a prudent, high-minded man of integrity. In almost daily attacks in the Aurora, Adams was belittled as “The President by Three Votes,” mocked again as “His Rotundity,” excoriated as a base hypocrite, a tool of the British, “a man divested of his senses.” He was charged again and again as a creature of Hamilton and the Federalist war hawks.
“The task of the President is very arduous, very perplexing, and very hazardous. I do not wonder Washington wished to retire from it, or rejoiced in seeing an old oak in his place,” observed Abigail, who in her letters to her sister Mary was to provide an inside look at the Adams presidency like no other, much as she had in portraying their life in France and London years before, writing always to the moment and with untrammeled candor.
The President’s worries and burdens were never out of mind. “Mrs. Tufts once styled my situation ‘splendid misery,’ ” Abigail reminded Mary. Interestingly, it was a phrase Vice President Jefferson also used to describe the presidency.
“We may truly say we know not what a day will bring forth,” Abigail observed in her running account. “From every side we are in danger. We are in perils by land, and we are in perils by sea, and in perils by false brethren.”
After years of seclusion at Monticello, Jefferson had, with amazing agility, stepped back into the kind of party politics he professed to abhor, and in no time emerged as leader of the opposition.
Convinced that the best hope for the world was the defeat of Britain by France, and that such an outcome was imminent, Jefferson privately advised the French chargé d’affaires in Philadelphia, Philippe-Henry-Joseph de Letombe, that the Directory should show the three American envoys all proper courtesy but “then drag out the negotiations at length.”
Actual treason
America, Jefferson had impressed upon Letombe, was “penetrated with gratitude to France” and would “never forget that it owes its liberation to France.” The new President of the United States was another matter, however. Jefferson was unsparing: “Mr. Adams is vain, irritable, stubborn, endowed with excessive self-love, and still suffering pique at the preference accorded Franklin over him in Paris.”
Possibly these were not Jefferson’s exact words; possibly his assessment of Adams was not as harsh and patently disloyal as Letombe’s account would make it appear. But if what Letombe recorded was all that Jefferson had to say for Adams, this would seem to have proved the end of a long friendship. And whatever Jefferson’s exact words may have been, clearly the chargé d’affaires was led to conclude that the difficulties of the moment were not a question of American regard for France, but of the difficult, unpopular, aberrant old man who temporarily held office as President.
The truth, it happens, was that Adams and Jefferson both wanted peace with France and each was working to attain that objective, though in their decidedly different ways.
Feelings ran deep, dividing the parties, dividing old friends. “Men who have been intimate all their lives,” wrote Jefferson, “cross the streets to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.”
In the midst of debate, when Federalist Roger Griswold of Connecticut insulted Republican Matthew Lyon of Vermont, Lyon crossed the chamber and spat in Griswold’s face. Soon after, Griswold retaliated with a cane. Lyon grabbed fire tongs from the fireplace, and the two went at each other until, kicking and rolling on the floor, they were pulled apart. To some the scene provided comic relief. To others it was sad testimony to how very far the republican ideal had descended. It was also apt prelude to much that would follow.
In the meanwhile, as the President was unaware, his cabinet—Wolcott and McHenry in particular—were receiving continued advice and directions from Alexander Hamilton, who had supposedly retired from public life.
Convinced that Adams was deliberately withholding information favorable to the French, Republicans in and out of Congress began insisting that the documents be made available at once. Any delay would be a sign of further duplicity. The Aurora taunted Adams for being “afraid to tell.”
“Beds of roses have never been his destiny,” Abigail wrote of her husband.
As Abigail reported to Mary Cranch and John Quincy, public opinion in the capital changed overnight. The tricolor cockade of France that Republicans had been wearing in their hats all but disappeared from sight. No one was heard singing French patriotic songs in public as before, or espousing the cause of France.
When the xyz affair became public
The Aurora, in turn, lashed out at the President as a man “unhinged” by the “delirium of vanity.” Had Adams refrained from insulting the French, had he chosen more suitable envoys, the country would never have been brought to such a pass. But in a matter of days subscriptions and advertising fell off so drastically that it appeared the paper might fail.
Delusional people exist in every time
When a fight broke out between two street gangs wearing the black and tricolor cockades, the cavalry was called in. It had become dangerous to set foot outside the door at night, Jefferson wrote.
CONTRARY TO THE expectations of nearly everyone, Adams did not ask for a declaration of war against France. Had he done so, the Congress would assuredly have obliged. Instead, they turned their attention to the enemies at home.
Adams later spoke of the Alien and Sedition Acts as war measures. It was how he saw them then, and how he chose to remember them. “I knew there was need enough of both, and therefore I consented to them,” he would write in explanation long afterward, and at the time, the majority of Congress and most of the country were in agreement.
Though it was clearly a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech, its Federalist proponents in Congress insisted, like Adams, that it was a war measure, and an improvement on the existing common law in that proof of the truth of the libel could be used as a legitimate defense. Still, the real and obvious intent was to stifle the Republican press, and of those arrested and convicted under the law, nearly all were Republican editors.
Sedition act
That Adams valued and trusted her judgment ahead of that of any of his department heads there is no question, and she could well have been decisive in persuading Adams to support the Sedition Act.
Thus, both the Secretary of War and the Secretary of State were secretly campaigning for Hamilton, supplying him with inside information, and undermining the intentions of their President, whom they saw riding for a fall. Sending Hamilton copies of secret government documents that summer, McHenry attached a note saying, “Do not, I pray you, in writing or otherwise betray the confidence which has induced me to deal thus with you or make extracts or copies. . . . Return the papers immediately.”
He wanted all “to be still and calm,” and told his department heads no more than they needed to know. For he understood now that their first loyalty was not to him.
Desperate for food for his starving troops, Toussaint wanted the American embargo lifted from the former French colony. In effect, he wanted recognition of the black republic, and Adams was interested. Thus, in December, a representative from Toussaint, Joseph Bunel, dined with Adams, marking the first time a man of African descent was the dinner guest of an American President.
