John Adams

by David McCullough

Whether I should say, “Mr. Washington,” “Mr. President,” “Sir,” “may it please your Excellency,” or what else? I observed that it had been common while he commanded the army to call him “His Excellency,” but I was free to own it would appear to me better to give him no title but “Sir” or “Mr. President,” than to put him on a level with a governor of Bermuda.

These were not hereditary titles he was proposing, but titles conferred by society for merit and that went only with positions of high federal responsibility. He was convinced that the modest compensation and heavy burdens of public service—the disruption of family life, the criticism and insults one was subjected to—must be compensated for, if ever people of ability were to take part. He believed that honorable titles of a kind not to be acquired in any other line of work could make a difference. To him personally, he insisted, they mattered not at all. It was his thought that Washington should be called “His Majesty the President,” or something of the sort.

Adams was woefully out of step with the country.

The first American play to be produced on stage, it opened with the lines: Exult each patriot heart! This night is shown A piece which we may fairly call our own: Where the proud titles of “My Lord!” “Your Grace!” To humble “Mr.” and plain “Sir” give place.

The contrast

James Madison, in an address to the House, had expressed the conviction of most Americans when he said, “The more simple, the more republican we are in our manners, the more national dignity we shall acquire.”

He thought Adams “silly,” said he had “the face of folly.” Whenever he looked at the Vice President presiding in his chair, wrote Maclay, “I cannot help thinking of a monkey just put into breeches.”

Brilliant

Persisting in his futile effort, Adams made himself a mockery, even among some who were on his side. When Ralph Izard suggested that Adams himself be bestowed with a title, “His Rotundity,” the joke rapidly spread.

“In gravity clad, He has nought in his head, But visions of Nobels and Kings,” wrote Tucker, as a poetic query, to which Page responded: I’ll tell in a trice— ’Tis old Daddy Vice Who carries of pride an ass-load; Who turns up his nose, Wherever he goes, With vanity swelled like a toad.

As even Madison admitted on the floor of the House, it was not a question of vital importance. Nor had Adams proven himself a monarchist, as some like Maclay kept insisting.

The american urge to exaggerate everything to the point of absurdity

But as any adverse or critical comment on Washington, any ridicule at all, would have been considered unacceptable at this stage, Adams served as a convenient target for mockery and humor, and would again, just as he would be subject to the easiest, most damaging of smear words: monarchist.

Replace monarchist with "fascist" or "communist" depending on party loyalty and we have modern politics

He was the first, but by no means the last, Vice President to take abuse in the President’s place, though much of it, to be sure, he brought on himself.

He felt miserably alone. His accommodations with John Jay were the finest possible, and occasional Sundays with Nabby and her family helped greatly. But his need for Abigail, his ballast, was acute.

In fact, Adams had done serious damage to his reputation and among others besides Rush whose opinions he most valued. It appeared that the man who put such stress on balance in government was himself a little unbalanced.

In the meanwhile, even Rush conceded that he was equally distraught over the moral temper of the times and the long-range prospects for America. “A hundred years hence, absolute monarchy will probably be rendered necessary in our country by the corruption of our people,” wrote the usually optimistic physician.

The exact nature of Charles’s difficulties was never defined in the correspondence, but from fragmentary Harvard records it appears that one student was expelled, others reprimanded, when the one, or all, ran naked through Harvard Yard, and the implications are that there had been drinking involved.

He “has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point that if he was not really one of the best intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one. He is polite with dignity, affable without formality, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good. These are traits in his character which peculiarly fit him for the exalted station he holds, and God grant that he may hold it with the same applause and universal satisfaction for many, many years, as it is my firm opinion that no other man could rule over this great people and consolidate them into one mighty empire but he who is set over us.

Aa on gw

Afterward, James Lovell wrote from Massachusetts to tell Adams people were saying he had cast his vote with the President only because he “looked up to that goal.” Of course he looked up to it, Adams answered. How could it be otherwise? “I am forced to look up to it, and bound by duty to do so, because there is only one breath of one mortal between me and it.”

His first maxim then should be to place his honor out of reach of all men. In order to do this he must make it a rule never to become dependent on public employments for subsistence. Let him have a trade, a profession, a farm, a shop, something where he can honestly live, and then he may engage in public affairs, if invited, upon independent principles. My advice to my children is to maintain an independent character.

Ja to ta

Washington, by common agreement, was the greatest man in the world, and in Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Jay, the American people could fairly claim to have the best minds in the country. And however striking their differences in temperament or political philosophy, they were, without exception, men dedicated primarily to seeing the American experiment succeed.

Nor did he doubt its immense historic importance: “It appears to me that most of the events in the annals of the world are but childish tales compared to it,” Adams declared.

French rev

He could not accept the idea of enshrining reason as a religion, as desired by the philosophes. “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.”

In revolutions, he warned, “the most fiery spirits and flighty geniuses frequently obtained more influence than men of sense and judgment; and the weakest man may carry foolish measures in opposition to wise ones proposed by the ablest.”

Adams, too, took up the architectural theme, in a letter to his old fellow revolutionary Samuel Adams. “Everything will be pulled down. So much seems certain,” he wrote. “But what will be built up? Are there any principles of political architecture? . . . Will the struggle in Europe be anything other than a change in impostors?”

Adams’s only known response to the news of Franklin’s demise was in a letter to Rush in which he lamented the lies history would tell of “our revolution.” “The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislation, and war.”

Witty

It rests now with ourselves to enjoy in peace and concord the blessings of self-government so long denied to mankind: to show by example the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs and that the will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err, but its errors are honest, solitary and short-lived. Let us then, my dear friends, forever bow down to the general reason of society.

TJ

But to Adams the “sufficiency” of reason alone for the care of human affairs was by no means clear, and it was exactly the will of the majority, particularly as being exercised in France, that so gravely concerned him.

“My fundamental maxim of government is never to trust the lamb to the wolf,” and in France, he feared, the wolf was now the majority.

Adams

The world was growing more enlightened, Adams conceded. “Knowledge is more diffused. . . . Man, as man, becomes an object of respect.” But, he insisted, there was “great reason to pause and preserve our sobriety. Amidst all their exultations, Americans and Frenchmen should remember that the perfectibility of man is only human and terrestrial perfectibility. Cold will still freeze, and fire will never cease to burn; disease and vice will continue to disorder, and death to terrify mankind.

“There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other,” Adams had observed to a correspondent while at Amsterdam, before the Revolution ended. Yet this was exactly what had happened.

That one had to keep “a good heart,” come what may, was Abigail’s lifelong creed. “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine,” she loved to say, quoting Proverbs. “I hate to complain,” she now wrote. “No one is without difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.”

French diplomat, Louis-Guillaume Otto, summing up the situation in New York for his government, reported that the influence and importance of the Vice President were “nil.” If Washington had an heir apparent, by all rights it was Jefferson. It appears certain at present that he [Adams] will never be President and that he will have a very formidable competitor in Mr. Jefferson, who, with more talents and knowledge than he, has infinitely more the principles and manners of a republican.

In the Senate, charges and countercharges were voiced with increasing vehemence. Adams struggled to keep order and apparently with little effect. “John Adams has neither judgment, firmness of mind, nor respectability of deportment to fill the chair of such an assembly,” scoffed the ever-splenetic William Maclay.

Indeed, Adams not only put his trust in land as the safest of investments, but agreed in theory with Jefferson and Madison that an agricultural society was inherently more stable than any other—not to say more virtuous. Like most farmers, he had strong misgivings about banks, and candidly admitted his ignorance of “coin and commerce.” Yet he was as pleased by the rise of enterprise and prosperity as anyone, and in moments of discouragement over public life, even contemplated going into the China trade!

In sum, Jefferson refused to take any responsibility for what had happened. To Washington he cited the “indiscretion of a printer”; to Adams he said John Quincy was the cause of the trouble, and that he himself was innocent of ever even thinking of Adams in the first place. But it was not Jefferson who had suffered abuse and ridicule in the press. It was Adams, and the damage done was extreme, given the overwhelming popularity of both Thomas Paine and the French Revolution.

absolute snake. a politicians politician

The public stage that Jefferson said he wished to avoid, the growing enmity between public men that Adams abhorred, had made them in the public mind symbols of the emerging divisions in national politics.

She brooded over the brevity of life. “How soon may our fairest prospects be leveled with the dust and show us that man in his best estate is but vanity and dust?” she wrote on March 21, 1792, after a particularly bad night of “nerves.”

“I firmly believe,” she darkly forecast to Mary, “if I live ten years longer, I shall see a division of the Southern and Northern states, unless more candor and less intrigue, of which I have no hopes, should prevail.”

Though loyal to Washington and the administration, Adams was but nominally a Federalist, refusing steadfastly to be, or to be perceived as, a party man. That he had allowed “no party virulence or personal reflections” to escape him was also a matter of pride and consolation.

AMONG CLOSE ASSOCIATES the President had been expressing a strong desire to return to private life. He was weary of the demands of office, weary and disheartened, Washington said, by party rancor and a severely partisan press that had taken to calling him the American Caesar.

To Jefferson, Hamilton was “not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” To Hamilton, Jefferson belonged among those “pretenders to profound knowledge” who were “ignorant of the most useful of all sciences—the science of human nature.”

On one issue only were Hamilton and Jefferson in agreement—that for the sake of the country, Washington must serve a second term, as he alone could hold the union together.

Yet the truth of the September Massacres was hardly less appalling. Some 1,400 political prisoners—including more than 200 priests—were butchered in the name of the revolution. “Let the blood of traitors flow. That is the only way to save the country,” cried Marat, who had once been a physician pledged to save lives.

As it happened, William Short was writing to Jefferson from The Hague at the same time, and his descriptions of events greatly distressed Jefferson. In a stinging confidential reply of January 1793, Jefferson called them “blasphemies.” “The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain,” he informed Short, “on account of the extreme warmth with which they censured the proceedings of the Jacobins of France.” Jefferson would hear no more of it. “I consider that sect as the same with the Republican patriots (of America). . . .”

Then Jefferson, whose personal philosophy was to get through life with the least pain possible, who shunned even verbal conflict, made as extreme a claim as any of the time. The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest . . . rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every continent, and left free, it would be better than it now is.

Snowbound in a tavern at Hartford, Adams fell into conversation with another traveler who happened not to recognize him. Knowing how greatly it would amuse Abigail, he described how the man had launched into a harangue on the state of national politics, declaring that the trouble with John Adams was that “he had been long in Europe and got tainted.” I told him that it was hard if a man could not go to Europe without being tainted, that if Mr. Adams had been sent to Europe upon their business by the people, and had done it, and in doing it had necessarily got tainted, I thought the people ought to pay him for the damage the taint had done him.

Years subdue the ardor of passion but in lieu thereof friendship and affection deep-rooted subsists which defies the ravages of time, and whilst the vital flame exists.

Aa to ja

“I want to sit down and converse with you, every evening,” she would write. “I sit here alone and brood over possibilities and conjectures.” “You apologize for the length of your letters,” he told her in a long letter of his own. “[They] give me more entertainment than all the speeches I hear. There are more good thoughts, fine strokes, and mother wit in them than I hear in the whole week.”

Almost from the moment the election was decided—and the Republican campaign to unseat Adams had failed—the Republican press shifted its attacks almost entirely to the President, striking the sharpest blows Washington had yet known. Now it was he who had the deplorable inclination to monarchy. The “hell hounds” were in full cry, wrote Adams, who wondered how well Washington might bear up under the abuse. “His skin is thinner than mine.”

If unwilling to attack Hamilton directly himself, or to write under an assumed name, he was not above urging others to do so. “For God’s sake, my dear sir,” Jefferson would admonish Madison, “take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.”

In theory, Jefferson deplored parties or faction no less than did Adams or anyone. In practice, however, he was proving remarkably adept at party politics. As always, he avoided open dispute, debate, controversy, or any kind of confrontation, but behind the scenes he was unrelenting and extremely effective.