John Adams

by David McCullough

He was confident, Jefferson said, that the American people with their “good sense” would “rally with us round the true principles of the federal compact,” but, he wrote in chilling conclusion, he was “determined, were we to be disappointed in this, to sever ourselves from the union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self-government.”

He was distressed also about the bill before Congress to lift the embargo on San Domingo and commence trade with the “rebellious Negroes under Toussaint.” When “Toussaint’s clause” was passed, Jefferson noted bleakly, “We may expect therefore black crews and . . . missionaries” pouring “into the Southern states. . . . If this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatever, we have to fear it.”

Most striking was their common dislike and fear of Hamilton. The worries Jefferson had about Hamilton’s threat to the nation were more than matched by Adams’s, as Adams revealed in private conversation with Elbridge Gerry at the President’s House. “[Adams] thought Hamilton and a party were endeavoring to get an army on foot to give Hamilton the command of it, and thus to proclaim a regal government and place Hamilton as the head of it, and prepare the way for a province of Great Britain,” wrote Gerry.

While his entire political standing, his reputation as President, were riding on his willingness to make peace, Adams was no less ardent for defense. In fact, he was convinced that peace was attainable only as a consequence of America’s growing naval strength. To Secretary Stoddert he even proposed that some of the fast new ships might be used to cruise the coast of France. Nor do I think we ought to wait a moment to know whether the French mean to give us any proofs of their desire to conciliate with us. I am for pursuing all the measure of defense which the laws authorize us to adopt, especially at sea.

Writing to Washington earlier, he had expressed much of his philosophy as President in two sentences: “My administration will not certainly be easy to myself. It will be happy, however, if it is honorable. The prosperity of it to the country will depend upon Heaven, and very little on anything in my power.”

The meeting lasted several hours, through which, by his account, Adams sat patiently listening as Hamilton with his famous powers of persuasion talked steadily on. “I heard him with perfect good humor, though never in my life did I hear a man talk more like a fool.”

If Hamilton and his admirers in the cabinet had outmaneuvered Adams in the contest over command of the army, Adams had now cut the ground out from under Hamilton. Whatever dreams Hamilton entertained of military glory and empire, America was to have no need of either a standing army or a Bonaparte, which, it is fair to say, was as clear an objective in Adams’s mind as was peace with France.

There would be grumbling over the speech, Abigail wrote. There would always be grumbling, she had come to understand.

When a minister at Newburyport, in a rapturous eulogy spoke of Washington as the “savior” of the country, she turned indignant. At no time, she wrote, had the fate of the country rested on the breath of one man, not even Washington. “Wise and judicious observations about his character are those only which will outlive the badges of mourning,” she told Mary. “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy.”

If Adams had any thoughts or feelings about the passing of the epochal eighteenth century—any observations on the Age of Enlightenment, the century of Johnson, Voltaire, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the age of Pitt and Washington, the advent of the United States of America—or if he had any premonitions or words to the wise about the future of his country or of humankind, he committed none to paper.

Washington’s death had seemed to mark the close of one era; the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte ushered in another. Adams, who like Edmund Burke had predicted dictatorship as the inevitable outcome for the revolution, wisely kept silent.

Callender, who had quit Philadelphia, was now working as a Republican propagandist in Richmond, Virginia, with the encouragement and financial support of Jefferson, who, at the same time, was actively distributing a variety of campaign propaganda throughout the country, always careful to conceal his involvement. “Do not let my name be connected with the business,” he advised James Monroe. That Adams was never known to be involved in such activity struck some as a sign of how naïve and behind the times he was.

Not satisfied that the old charges of monarchist and warmonger were sufficient, Callender called Adams a “repulsive pedant,” a “gross hypocrite,” and “in his private life, one of the most egregious fools upon the continent.” Adams was “that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness,” a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

To all this Jefferson gave his approval. Having seen the proof sheets of the new volume, he assured Callender, “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effects.”

While Adams’s outbursts of temper could be explosive, they never happened in public, always in private confrontations. It was then that “he would give to his language the full impress of his vehement will.” But never until now was he known to have berated a subordinate, and his regret over the outburst was considerable.

Hearing of the dismissals, Alexander Hamilton quickly asked Pickering to search the files at the Department of State for “copies of extracts of all such documents as will enable you to explain both Jefferson and Adams.” The time had come, Hamilton said, when “men of real integrity” must unite against all charlatans.

Rejecting the verdict of the jury and the unanimous opinion of his cabinet, Adams pardoned Fries and the two others, never doubting he had done the right thing. And though the decision aggravated still further the already infuriated Hamiltonians, who saw it as still one more example of Adams’s weakness and capriciousness, much of the electorate approved, and especially in Pennsylvania.

“Oh! That I could have a home!” He felt he had been forever on the move, on the road. “Rolling, rolling, rolling, till I am very nearly rolling into the bosom of Mother Earth.”

Most vicious were the charges that Adams was insane. Thus, if Jefferson was a Jacobin, a shameless southern libertine, and a “howling” atheist, Adams was a Tory, a vain Yankee scold, and, if truth be known, “quite mad.”

But the great difference in the attacks on Adams in this election was that they came from Republicans and High Federalists alike. While the Republicans assaulted him as a warmonger, he was berated by the High Federalists as fainthearted in the face of the French. While one side belittled him as a creature of the Hamiltonians, the other scorned him as a friend of Elbridge Gerry.

There were, as well, striking ironies. Jefferson, the Virginia aristocrat and slave master who lived in a style fit for a prince, as removed from his fellow citizens and their lives as it was possible to be, was hailed as the apostle of liberty, the “Man of the People.” Adams, the farmer’s son who despised slavery and practiced the kind of personal economy and plain living commonly upheld as the American way, was scorned as an aristocrat who, if he could, would enslave the common people. “My countrymen!” exclaimed William Duane in the Aurora in his crusade for Jefferson, “If you have not virtue enough to stem the current, determine to be slaves at once.”

As early as May, Hamilton had launched a letter campaign to his High Federalist coterie declaring Adams unfit and incapable as President, a man whose defects of character were guaranteed to bring certain ruin to the party. “If we must have an enemy at the head of the government, let it be one whom we can oppose . . . who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.”

Not long past, Abigail had warned Adams to “beware of that spare Cassius.” Now, in the eleventh hour of the election, Hamilton lashed out in a desperate effort to destroy Adams, the leading candidate of his own party.

Nothing that Hamilton ever wrote about Jefferson was half so contemptuous. He berated Adams in nearly every way possible—for his “great intrinsic defects of character,” his “disgusting egotism,” weaknesses, vacillation, his “eccentric tendencies,” his “bitter animosity” toward his own cabinet. He deplored Adams’s handling of relations with France, the “precipitate nomination” of William Vans Murray, the firing of Timothy Pickering, the pardoning of John Fries.

And finally, most strangely, having spent fifty pages tearing Adams to pieces, Hamilton concluded by saying Adams must be supported equally with General Pinckney in the election.

In a high-spirited letter to Jefferson, James Madison said Hamilton’s “thunderbolt” meant certain victory for Jefferson. “I rejoice with you that Republicanism is likely to be so completely triumphant.”

In fact, Hamilton had amply demonstrated that it was he who had become a burden to the party, he, if anyone, who seemed to have departed from his senses.

No wonder the federalist party disappeared

Speculation as to why he had done it, what possible purpose he might have had, would go on for years. Possibly, as John Quincy surmised, it was because Adams had denied him his chance for military glory, humiliated him at Trenton, and made his army superfluous. Perhaps he believed he was improving Pinckney’s chances. Or he wanted to bring down the Federalist party, so that in the aftermath of a Jefferson victory he could raise it up again as his own creation. Probably not even Hamilton knew the answer. But by his own hand he had ruined whatever chance he ever had for the power and glory he so desperately desired.

at one o’clock, the President was seen rolling up to the south entrance in his coach-and-four. He was accompanied still by Billy Shaw and Briesler following on horseback. There was no one else, no honor guard, no band playing, no entourage of any kind. The two commissioners and a few workers at hand comprised the welcoming committee for the arrival of John Adams, the first President to occupy what only much later would become known as the White House.

At his desk the next morning, on a plain sheet of paper, which he headed, “President’s House, Washington City, Nov. 2, 1800,” he wrote to Abigail a letter in which he offered a simple benediction: I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.

She thought the President’s House beautifully situated by the Potomac, the country around “romantic but wild.” Nearby Georgetown, however, was “the very dirtiest hole I ever saw.”

She had not liked what little she had seen of the South thus far. The presence of slaves working about the house left her feeling depressed. The whole system struck her as woefully slow and wasteful, not to say morally wrong. She watched twelve slaves clothed in rags at work outside her window, hauling away dirt and rubble with horses and wagons, while their owners stood by doing nothing. “Two of our hardy New England men would do as much work in a day as the whole 12,” she told Cotton Tufts. “But it is true Republicanism that drive the slaves half fed, and destitute of clothing . . . whilst an owner walks about idle, though one slave is all the property he can boast.”

She despaired that anything could ever be accomplished in such a society. “The lower class of whites,” she wrote, “are a grade below the Negroes in point of intelligence, and ten below them in point of civility.” But she wrote, “I shall bear and forebear.”

Very interesting

It would be unbecoming the representatives of this nation to assemble for the first time in this solemn temple without looking up to the Supreme Ruler of the universe, and imploring his blessing. May this territory be the residence of virtue and happiness! In this city may that piety and virtue, that wisdom and magnanimity, that constancy and self-government, which adorned the great character whose name it bears, be forever held in veneration! Here, and throughout our country, may simple manners, pure morals, and true religion flourish forever!

Adams speech in the capitol

Shortly after, in reply to the then customary answer to his speech from the Senate, Adams said of the new Capitol, “Here may the youth of this extensive country forever look up without disappointment, not only to the monuments and memorials of the dead, but to the examples of the living.”

In another few days the outcome of the election was known. Adams had lost. “My little bark has been overset in a squall of thunder and lightning and hail attended by a strong smell of sulfur,” he wrote to Thomas. However crushed, disappointed, saddened, however difficult it was for him to bear up, he expressed no bitterness or envy, and no anger. Nor was anyone to feel sorry for him. “Be not concerned about me,” he told Thomas. “I feel my shoulders relieved from the burden.”

What was surprising—and would largely be forgotten as time went on—was how well Adams had done. Despite the malicious attacks on him, the furor over the Alien and Sedition Acts, unpopular taxes, betrayals by his own cabinet, the disarray of the Federalists, and the final treachery of Hamilton, he had, in fact, come very close to winning in the electoral count. With a difference of only 250 votes in New York City, Adams would have won with an electoral count of 71 to 61.

So another of the ironies of 1800 was that Jefferson, the apostle of agrarian America who loathed cities, owed his ultimate political triumph to New York.

Also, were it not for the fact that in the South three-fifths of the slaves were counted in apportioning the electoral votes, Adams would have been reelected.

To Adams the outcome was proof of how potent party spirit and party organization had become, and the most prominent was Burr’s campaign in New York. Washington, in his Farewell Address, had warned against disunion, permanent alliances with other nations, and “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” Adams could rightly claim to have held to the ideals of union and neutrality, but his unrelenting independence—his desire to be a President above party—had cost him dearly.

All the old patriots, all the splendid talents, the long experience, both Federalists and Anti-Federalists must be subjected to the humiliation of seeing this dextrous gentleman [Burr] rise like a balloon, filled with uninflammable air over the heads. . . . What an encouragement to party intrigue and corruption!

If only people still wrote like this

And none of this would have happened but for Adams’s decision to send the second peace mission to France. It was his determination to find peace and check Hamilton that cost him the full support of the party and thus the election.

Nation before party

If there was a gleam of justice to the crisis, it was the dreadful pass Hamilton had come to. “Mr. Hamilton has carried his eggs to a fine market,” Adams told William Tudor, using the old farmer’s expression. “The very man—the very two men of all [in] the world that he was most jealous of are now placed above him.”

I replied . . . I have heard of a clergyman who upon some difficulty amongst his people, took a text from these words: “And they knew not what to do,” from whence he drew this inference, that when a people were in such a situation, they do not know what to do, they should take great care that they do not do they know not what. At this he laughed out, and here ended the conversation.

Aa and tj

To a suggestion from William Tudor that he and Tudor reunite as law partners, Adams replied in a letter of January 20, “I must be farmer John of Stoneyfield and nothing more (I hope nothing less) for the rest of my life.”

A newspaper described the event the next day: “The fire for some time threatened the most destructive effects—but through the exertions of the citizens, animated by the example of the President of the United States (who on this occasion fell into the ranks and aided in passing the buckets) was at length subdued.”

In its far-reaching importance to the country, Adams’s appointment of Marshall was second only to his nomination of George Washington to command the Continental Army twenty-five years before. Possibly the greatest Chief Justice in history, Marshall would serve on the Court for another thirty-four years.

“The Revolution of 1776 is now, and for the first time, arrived at its completion,” proclaimed the Aurora. Till now the Republicans have indeed beaten the slaves of monarchy in the field of battle, and driven the troops of the King of Great Britain from the shores of our country; but the secret enemies of the American Revolution—her internal, insidious, and indefatigable foes, have never till now been completely discomfitted. This is the true period of the triumph of Republican principle.

Republican newspaper on election of 1800

There was no frenzied rush to name “midnight judges,” as portrayed by Jefferson and the Republican press. Most of the nominations for judges were made on February 20, the rest completed by February 24, more than a week in advance of the inauguration. That nearly all those selected were Federalists was no more surprising than the indignation of the President-elect. In fact, most all of the nominees were perfectly good choices and the Republicans opposed hardly any of them.

Among the last letters he wrote as time ran out was a considerate reminder to Jefferson that he need not purchase horses or carriages, since those in the stable at the President’s House were the property of the United States and would therefore remain behind.