John Adams

by David McCullough

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.

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. “Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here,” he told his daughter Martha. “They seem, like salamanders, to consider fire as their element.” One French emigré would remember people acting as though a French army might land at any moment. “Everybody was suspicious of everybody else; everywhere one saw murderous glances.”

In a matter of days, Congress abrogated the French-American treaties of 1778, created a permanent Marine Corps, passed the Sedition Act, and approved the nomination of Washington as supreme commander. War fever was at a pitch.

The idea was to “liberate” Spanish Florida and Louisiana, possibly all of Spanish America, in a bold campaign combining a British fleet and American troops. First proposed by an impassioned apostle of Spanish-American freedom, Francesco de Miranda of Venezuela, the scheme had been around for years. Adams had learned of it and dismissed it out of hand. “We are friends with Spain,” he had told Pickering. But the British had shown interest, and in secret Hamilton had lately become involved, seeing possibilities for national empire and personal glory beyond the vision of lesser men. In a letter to one of his generals in Georgia, Hamilton stressed the need for a buildup of military supplies. “This you perceive, looks to offensive operations,” he wrote. “If we are to engage in war, our game will be to attack where we can. France is not to be considered as separate from her ally [Spain]. Tempting objects will be within our grasp.”

The Kentucky Resolutions, which had passed in November, were an open challenge to the authority of the central government and a measure both of Jefferson’s revulsion over the Alien and Sedition Acts and the seriousness with which he regarded states’ rights.

According to Adams, who provided several accounts of the confrontation, then and later, he received the general with appropriate civility, saying nothing of politics. But at first chance Hamilton commenced to “remonstrate” against the mission to France. “His eloquence and vehemence wrought the little man up to a degree of heat and effervescence. . . . He repeated over and over again . . . [his] unbounded confidence in the British empire . . . with such agitation and violent action that I really pitied him, instead of being displeased.” The British had the upper hand in the war, Hamilton insisted, and would soon help restore the Bourbons to power in France. America must join with the British and have no dealings whatever with the present French government. Adams was astonished by Hamilton’s “total ignorance” of the situation in Europe. He would as soon expect the sun, moon, and stars to fall from their orbits as to see the Bourbons restored, he told Hamilton. But even were that to happen, what injury could it mean for the United States to have envoys there? 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.” On October 15, Adams summoned the cabinet to a session that lasted until eleven o’clock that night. Pickering, Wolcott, and McHenry, like Hamilton, adamantly...

But as the encomiums to Washington continued, in speeches, sermons, and editorials—tributes that seemed often as contrived for show as the black plumes and fans—Abigail grew extremely impatient. 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.

On the evening of May 5, Adams summoned McHenry to the presidential mansion to discuss the appointment of a minor federal official. The discussion was quickly concluded and McHenry was about to leave when something he said, or the way he said it, started Adams on the subject of Hamilton and the loss of the New York election. Adams charged McHenry with working secretly with Hamilton to undercut the administration. When McHenry protested, Adams cut him off, saying, “I know it, sir, to be so.” Hamilton, said Adams, seething with anger, was an “intrigant . . . a man devoid of every moral principle, a bastard . . . a foreigner.” Then Adams let fly with what to any faithful Hamiltonian was the ultimate insult. Jefferson, Adams declared, was a better man, “a wiser one,” than Hamilton, and, furthermore, Jefferson would make a better president.

It was what Adams himself might have written earlier. But with his review completed, Adams saw that he had been mistaken. Fries, it was his judgment, had led a riot, not an insurrection, and was therefore not guilty of treason. 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.

If Jefferson carried on with slave women, Adams, according to one story in circulation, had ordered Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to London to procure four pretty mistresses to divide between them. When the story reached Adams, he was highly amused. “I do declare upon my honor,” he wrote William Tudor, “if this is true General Pinckney has kept them all for himself and cheated me out of my two.”

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.

The two candidates conveyed the customary air of indifference, neither saying anything publicly or appearing to lift a finger in his own behalf.

A Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States, a fifty-four-page pamphlet, was published in New York at the end of October. 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. Though Hamilton did not go so far as to call Adams insane, he cited his “ungovernable temper” as evidence of a man out of control. “It is a fact that he is often liable to paroxisms of anger which deprive him of self-command and produce very outrageous behavior.”

“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.”

The new navy was an outstanding achievement. In less than two years, it had grown from almost nothing to 50 ships, including the frigates United States, Constitution, and Constellation, and over 5,000 officers and seamen, and this bore heavily on the outcome of the negotiations with France. Indeed, Adams’s insistence on American naval strength proved decisive in achieving peace with France in 1800. Further, by undercutting Hamilton and making his army useless, he may have saved the country from militarism.

Furious at Jefferson’s parsimony, Callender switched sides to become the editor of a new Federalist paper, in Richmond, the Recorder. In the summer that followed, writing in the Recorder, Callender revealed that Jefferson, while Vice President, had secretly subsidized and encouraged him as he broke the Hamilton-Reynolds scandal and did all he could to defame John Adams. For proof Callender quoted several of Jefferson’s letters to him.

According to surviving records, she had seven children, all born at Monticello, two of whom came later, Madison in 1805 and Easton in 1808. From Jefferson’s own records, it is clear that he was at home at Monticello at least nine months before the birth of each of her children, and that she never conceived when he was not there. Her children were all light-skinned and several, as gossiped then, looked astonishingly like Jefferson.

Then Adams put the issue squarely where it belonged, saying, in essence, that all such stories of slave masters and their slave women were metaphors for the overriding sin of slavery itself. Callender and Sally will be remembered as long as Jefferson as blots on his character. The story of the latter is a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery.

The ideal of the perfectibility of man as expounded by eighteenth-century philosophers—perfectibility “abstracted from all divine authority”—was unacceptable, he declared. It is an idea of the Christian religion, and ever has been of all believers of the immortality of the soul, that the intellectual part of man is capable of progressive improvement for ever. Where then is the sense of calling the perfectibility of man an original idea or modern discovery. . . . I consider the perfectibility of man as used by modern philosophers to be mere words without a meaning, that is mere nonsense.

Dabbling in medical theory, Adams suggested that all Hamilton’s overheated ambitions and impulses might be attributed to “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off!” and that “the same vapors produced his lies and slanders by which he totally destroyed his party forever and finally lost his life in the field of honor.”

“I know it is high treason to express a doubt of the perpetual duration of our vast American empire,” but a struggle between the states over slavery “might rend this mighty fabric in twain.”

By his will Jefferson had freed just five of his slaves, all of whom were members of the Hemings family, but Sally Hemings was not one of them. She was given “her time,” unofficial freedom, by his daughter Martha Randolph after his death. In January 1827 on the front lawn of Monticello, 130 of Jefferson’s slaves were sold at auction, along with furniture and farm equipment. Finally, in 1831, after years of standing idle, Monticello, too, was sold for a fraction of what it had cost.