John Adams

by David McCullough

Within weeks after the first copies of his Defence were ready at the printer, he had written to John Jay to ask that he be recalled. So while noble in intent, the Defence may also have been partly intended as a way of reintroducing himself to his countrymen and influencing the debate on the Constitution.

From Philadelphia, where the Constitutional Convention had assembled, Benjamin Rush, a member of the Convention, wrote that the Defence had “diffused such excellent principles among us, that there is little doubt of our adopting a vigorous and compound federal legislature.” James Madison, who had taken the lead in drafting the so-called Virginia Plan, providing for three equal branches in the new government, and who had seldom ever had anything complimentary to say about Adams, declared in a letter to Jefferson that while men of learning would find nothing new in the book, it was certain to be “a powerful engine in forming public opinion,” and, in fact, had “merit.” But as both John and Abigail had anticipated, there were others who perceived dark intent in what he had written. Cotton Tufts warned that there were people sowing discord, claiming Adams was all for monarchy and planned to put an English prince on a throne in America. In Virginia, the president of the College of William and Mary, a cousin of Madison’s, the Reverend James Madison, saw a “secret design” in the book—that Adams, under the influence of a foreign Court, was “plotting” to overturn the American government.

John Adams was fifty-two. Except for the few months he had spent in Massachusetts in 1778, he had been away for ten years. In that time he had traveled thousands of miles in France, Spain, the Netherlands, and England; he had repeatedly crossed the English Channel and the North Sea; and his voyage home now marked his fourth crossing of the Atlantic. Altogether by land and sea he journeyed more than 29,000 miles, farther than any leading American of his time in the service of his country, never once refusing to go because of difficulties or unseasonable conditions, or something else that he would have preferred to do.

Henry Knox and Benjamin Lincoln, two stalwarts of 1776 and now of formidable political importance, came to talk. Benjamin Rush wrote from Philadelphia, warmly endorsing the prospect of his old friend as Vice President. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, in a letter informing Adams that he had received an honorary degree from Yale, said he rejoiced at the thought of Adams for Vice President. In keeping with the unwritten rule of the time that any display of ambition would be unseemly, Adams kept silent. But, in fact, he had decided from the time he arrived home that he would accept the vice presidency, and that role only, any other being “beneath him,” as Abigail put it confidentially in a letter to Nabby.

The makeup of political leadership in the country had greatly changed in Adams’s absence. Many with whom he had served in the Continental Congress had passed from the scene—some, like Benjamin Rush, were retired from public life; others deceased. Fourteen of those who had signed the Declaration of Independence were dead, including Stephen Hopkins and Caesar Rodney, and much about politics was now in the hands of “new men,” “smart young men,” known to Adams only by reputation. Madison of Virginia was still in his thirties. Hamilton of New York and Fisher Ames of Massachusetts were younger still.

In the event of a tie, the decision would go to the House of Representatives, a prospect so disturbing to Alexander Hamilton that he “deemed [it] an essential point of caution” to see that John Adams did not wind up with such a strong showing in the electoral count as to embarrass Washington. He was not against Adams, Hamilton explained privately. “Mr. A, to a sound understanding, has always appeared to me to add an ardent love for the public good.” But Hamilton was taking no chances. Working quietly through the winter, he did what he could to convince leading politicians in several states to withhold votes from Adams. The scheme succeeded. When the electors met in February 1789, Washington was chosen President unanimously with 69 votes, while Adams, though well ahead of ten others, had 34 votes, or less than half. Adams was humiliated by the news, his pride deeply hurt, but of Hamilton’s part, he knew nothing.

As a result of the Paris Peace Treaty, the size of the nation was double what it had been, greater in area than the British Isles, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined, and if the American population was small by the standards of Europe, it was expanding rapidly, which to Adams was the most promising sign of all. From 2 million or so in 1776, the population had grown to nearly 4 million by 1789, and this despite seven years of violent war, the departure of perhaps 100,000 Loyalists, and comparatively little immigration during the war years.

There was no standard American coinage or currency. British, Spanish, French, and German coins were all still in use, along with the coins of the different states, their value varying appreciably from one state to another. In New England, for example, six shillings made a dollar, while in New York eight shillings made a dollar. In the entire country there were only three banks.

The nation had no army to speak of—about 700 officers and men. The Continental Navy had disappeared. The sea power that Adams had envisioned and worked so hard to attain was nonexistent.

The great majority of Americans lived and worked on farms, and fully two-thirds of the population was concentrated in a narrow band along the eastern seaboard from Maine to Spanish Florida.

That a new America was steadily taking form beyond the Appalachians was one of the clearest signs of the times. Down the same road Adams traveled that spring to New York came small caravans from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut—families with children and household belongings piled onto heavy wagons, bound for Ohio, a journey of more than 700 miles. At the same time, settlers from Virginia and the Carolinas were crossing into Kentucky and Tennessee.

With people spread so far and communication so slow and unreliable, what was to hold the nation together? Such republics of the past as Adams had written about in his Defence of the Constitutions were small in scale—so what hope was there for one so inconceivably large? “What would Aristotle and Plato have said, if anyone had talked to them, of a federative republic of thirteen states, inhabiting a country of five hundred leagues in extent?” Adams pondered.

Possibly, Adams was as ludicrous as Maclay portrayed him. But given Maclay’s contempt for Adams—a contempt so blatant that some in the Senate urged him to exercise some self-restraint—it is hard to imagine that what he wrote was not highly colored by bias.

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.

Then a proposal that the Senate have a say in the removal of cabinet officers—a proposal put forth by Senator Maclay—set off fierce debate. To the Federalists, the bill was a flagrant attempt to diminish the power of the President to the benefit of the Senate, and they adamantly objected, arguing that the removal of ranking officials in the executive branch must be at the sole discretion of the President. Adams met with several senators—he was “busy indeed, running to everyone,” according to Maclay’s journal. Most important, he convinced Tristram Dalton of Massachusetts to withdraw his support for Maclay’s bill. Then, when the vote proved a tie, Adams performed his only legislative function and cast his vote against the measure.

Didn’t the impeachment power exist from the beginning?

It was to be a geographically balanced cabinet, with New England, the Middle States, and the South represented, and all four positions were promptly confirmed by the Senate: Hamilton of New York as Secretary of the Treasury; Jefferson, Secretary of State; Edmund Randolph of Virginia, Attorney General; and Henry Knox of Massachusetts as Secretary of War.

even before the first of the essays appeared, he let it be known that while he understood the reasons for the revolution in France—the oppressive abuses of the government, the overbearing and costly “armies of monks, soldiers, and courtiers”—and though he strongly supported the ideals espoused by French patriots, he viewed the situation with dire misgivings.

From experience he knew the kinds of men such upheavals could give rise to, Adams told another correspondent. 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.” France was “in great danger.” Ahead of anyone in the government, and more clearly than any, Adams foresaw the French Revolution leading to chaos, horror, and ultimate tyranny.

The Gazette of the United States had by now carried the text of a formal reply by Jefferson to the welcome he had received from his Virginia neighbors. It was a declaration of his faith in reason and democracy that he had taken great pains over. 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. 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.

Good example of Jefferson's wrongheadedness on democracy

Adams’s series of articles also commenced in the Gazette of the United States that spring of 1790, on April 27, and would continue for a year, endlessly, it seemed to many. Though they were unsigned, the identity of the author was common knowledge. Titled “Discourses on Davila,” and ultimately published as a book, they were largely a translation of a history of the French civil wars of the sixteenth century, a once-popular work, Historia delle guerre civili di Francia, by the Italian Enrico Caterino Davila, published first in 1630. More than he had in his Defence of the Constitutions, Adams stressed the perils of unbridled, unbalanced democracy, and in what he called “useful reflections” he dealt with human nature, drawing heavily on the works of Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, and on Pope’s Essay on Man.

No one, he wrote, better understood the human heart than the Romans, who “considered that as reason is the guide of life, the senses, the imagination and affections are the springs of activity.” Unlike Jefferson, Adams was not only fascinated by “the passions,” but certain they ruled more often than others were willing to concede. “Reason holds the helm, but passions are the gales.”

To Jefferson, Adams had become an embarrassment, and while always pleasant in social encounters, Jefferson had as little as possible to do with him. On matters of foreign relations, where Adams’s judgment could have been of value, Jefferson would never seek his counsel or include him in deliberations. Washington seldom asked Adams for views, but Jefferson, who in Europe had deferred repeatedly to Adams, asked for them not at all.

Due to Adams' suspected monarchist sympathies/the democracy dogma in the zeitgeist

“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. The “turbulent maneuvers” of factions, he now wrote privately, could “tie the hands and destroy the influence” of every honest man with a desire to serve the public good.

That June of 1790, with the President recovered, the 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.

Then, on a morning in June, the historic “compromise of 1790” began to take form, when Hamilton and Jefferson met outside the President’s house and Hamilton, taking Jefferson by the arm, walked him up and down for half an hour, urging him, for the sake of the union, to join in “common cause” and resolve acceptance of the assumption bill. Professing that reasonable men ought to be able to reach a compromise, Jefferson invited Hamilton and Madison to dine at his house the next day. And there, over a bottle of Jefferson’s best wine, the bargain was struck. In return for southern support for the assumption bill, Hamilton agreed to do all he could to persuade the Pennsylvanians to vote for a permanent capital by the Potomac, if it were agreed to move the capital temporarily to Philadelphia. Madison said he would not vote for assumption, but then neither would he be “strenuous” in opposition.

Secretary Hamilton’s proposed national bank, the centerpiece of his plan and now before Congress, had the support of nearly everyone, Abigail reported to Cotton Tufts. There was not a doubt that the bill would pass and by a considerable majority, she assured the trusted family adviser. As she predicted, the bill for the Bank of the United States passed by a sizable majority, despite opposition from Madison and Jefferson, who urged the President to exercise a veto on constitutional grounds. But Hamilton’s views carried greater weight with Washington, who signed the bill on February 25.

In furious response to Edmund Burke’s book Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine, who was then in England, had produced a pamphlet, The Rights of Man, that attacked Burke and set forth an impassioned defense of human rights, liberties, and equality. Jefferson, on receiving an early copy, promptly passed it on to a Philadelphia printer with a note warmly endorsing it as the answer to “the political heresies that have sprung up among us.” When the printer published a first American edition, Jefferson’s endorsement appeared prominently on the title page and was attributed to the Secretary of State. The endorsement caused a sensation. Jefferson claimed to be astonished but privately confirmed that by “political heresies” he meant the writings of John Adams. In a letter of explanation to Washington, he said he was “mortified” to be “thus brought forward on the public stage . . . against my love of silence and quiet, and my abhorrence of dispute.” He greatly regretted that “the indiscretion of a printer” had doubtless offended his “friend Mr. Adams, for whom, as one of the most honest and disinterested men alive, I have cordial esteem,” despite “his apostasy to hereditary monarchy.” But to Adams, Jefferson said nothing.

Jefferson, like many readers, assumed “Publicola” was Adams. In fact, it was John Quincy, who, rising to the defense of his father, took Jefferson to task for claiming that a difference in political opinion might be declared “heresy,” and those who differed in view from the Secretary of State were therefore heretics. I am somewhat at a loss to determine [he wrote] what this very respectable gentleman means by political heresies. Does he consider this pamphlet of Mr. Paine’s as a canonical book of political scripture? As containing the true doctrine of popular infallibility, from which it would be heretical to depart in one single point? . . . I have always understood, sir, that the citizens of these States were possessed of a full and entire freedom of opinion upon all subjects civil as well as religious; they have not yet established any infallible criterion of orthodoxy, either in church or state . . . and the only political tenet which they could stigmatize with the name of heresy would be that which should attempt to impose an opinion upon their understandings, upon the single principle of authority. Jefferson let three months pass before sending Adams a rather stiff letter of apology and explanation, which, though well intentioned, hardly sufficed.

in what he had said in his note to the printer, Jefferson had tagged Adams with being both mentally unsound and a monarchist, the two charges most commonly and unjustly made against him for the rest of his life. Adams let the matter drop. He made no reply to Jefferson’s last letter, and there would be no further correspondence between them for several years. The “explanation with each other” that Adams hoped for would have to wait for more than two decades.

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.

Seeing themselves as representing the true spirit of republican ideals, Jefferson, Madison, Freneau, and others allied with them had begun calling themselves Republicans, thus implying that the Federalists were not, but rather monarchists, or monocrats, as Jefferson preferred to say. And while there was as yet some question whether it was Jefferson or Madison who led the Republicans, there was no doubt about who led the Federalists. It was Hamilton, who was more than a match for anyone.

That the French King and Queen would soon “fall sacrifice to the fury of the mobites,” Nabby had no doubt. “I wonder what Mr. Jefferson says to all these things?” 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). . . .” He deplored the loss of life, Jefferson said, but only as he would deplore the loss of life in battle.

He warned Short to take care in the future how he reported events in France. “You have been wounded by the sufferings of your friends, and have by this circumstance been hurried into a temper of mind which would be extremely disrelished if known to your countrymen.”

Though the electoral vote would not be known until February, it was clear by Christmas that Washington was again the unanimous choice for President, and that Adams, for all that had been said against him, had won a clear second place, far ahead of George Clinton. In the final count Adams received 77 votes; Clinton, 50; Jefferson, 4; Aaron Burr, 1.

Then, with summer, came the two calamities for which the year 1793 would be forever remembered. In France the Reign of Terror commenced, a siege of vicious retribution that would send nearly 3,000 men and women to the guillotine in Paris alone, while in the provinces the slaughter was even more savage. At Lyon, where the guillotine was thought too slow a means of dispensing with antirevolutionaries, hundreds were mown down by cannon fire. At Nantes, 2,000 people were herded onto barges, tied together, taken to the middle of the Loire and drowned.

Once, briefly, a difference in philosophy was touched upon, when Jefferson observed that the “paper transactions” of one generation should “scarcely be considered by succeeding generations,” a principle he had earlier stated to Madison as “self-evident,” that “ ‘the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither the power or rights over it.” Adams, however, refused to accept the idea that each new generation could simply put aside the past, sweep clean the slate, to suit its own desires. Life was not like that, and if Jefferson thought so, it represented a fundamental difference in outlook.

THE ATTENTION OF THE COUNTRY, meanwhile, had shifted to western Pennsylvania where an insurrection had broken out over a federal excise tax on distilleries, the only internal tax thus far imposed by the federal government. At home at Quincy through the summer, Adams had kept abreast of the crisis in the newspapers. An army of fully 12,000 volunteers marched over the Alleghenies in an unprecedented show of force, Washington himself riding at the head part of the way, with Hamilton second in command. By the time Adams returned to Philadelphia in December and established himself in different lodgings, at the Francis Hotel, the so-called Whiskey Rebellion had ended.

Alexander Hamilton announced he would retire. Convinced he had accomplished all he could, the brilliant, head-strong Secretary of the Treasury returned to his lucrative New York law practice. No one, however, expected him to abandon politics. With the retirement also of Secretary of War Henry Knox in December, the sense of an administration in ebb was strongly felt. Only Edmund Randolph, now Secretary of State, remained of Washington’s original cabinet.

1794

That the terms of Jay’s treaty would ignite a storm of protest was plain at once. Jay had given up virtually every point to the British, in return for very little. Conspicuously absent was any guaranteed protection of American seamen from British seizure. Further, the British had refused to open their ports to American trade, except in the West Indies, but there only to ships of less than seventy tons. The one important British concession was to remove the last of their troops from forts in the northwest by the end of the year.

1795 Jay Treaty; Washington supported and drew heat for it in the press

He had cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate of historic importance—in protecting the President’s sole authority over the removal of appointees, for example, and in the several stages leading to the location of the national capital. In all, Adams cast thirty-one deciding votes, always in support of the administration and more than by any vice president in history.

Adams and Jefferson were the leading candidates in what was the first presidential election with two parties in opposition, an entirely new experience for the country. Jefferson remained at Monticello, Adams at Peacefield, neither taking any part in what quickly became a vicious, all-out battle. 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. Adams, declared the widely read paper, was unfit to lead the country, and beneath a headline declaring AN ALARM, Bache warned that unless by their votes the people were to call forth Thomas Jefferson, “the friend of the people,” Adams, the “champion of kings, ranks, and titles,” would be their President. 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. To add further fuel to the fire, Thomas Paine, in a fury over the Jay Treaty, unleashed an unprecedented attack on George Washington in the pages of the Aurora. Writing from Paris, Paine called Washington a creature of “grossest adulation,” a man incapable of friendship, “a hypocrite in public life,” apostate and impostor. For their part, the Federalists were hardly less abusive. Jefferson was decried as a Jacobin, an atheist, and charged with cowardice for having f...

To add to Adams’s troubles, Alexander Hamilton was up to his old tricks behind the scenes, urging the strongest possible support for Thomas Pinckney, ostensibly as a way to keep Jefferson from becoming Vice President, but also, it was suspected, to defeat Adams as well and make Pinckney president—Pinckney being someone Hamilton could more readily control. The rumors of this that reached Adams at Quincy would be confirmed before the year was out by his old friend Elbridge Gerry, who was a presidential elector for Massachusetts and, like Adams, an ardent antiparty man. For both John and Abigail, Gerry’s report marked the end of whatever remaining trust or respect they had for Hamilton. Abigail henceforth referred to him privately as Cassius. John called him “as great a hypocrite as any in the U.S. His intrigues in the election I despise.”

It was a scene few who were present would ever forget. Here were the three who, more than any others, had made the Revolution, and as many in the audience supposed, it was to be the last time they would ever appear on the same platform.

Adams inauguration March 1797

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.

None were of oustanding ability, but all were Federalists, and Wolcott and McHenry, like Secretary of State Pickering, were extreme Federalists, or High Federalists. They belonged to the ardently anti-French, pro-British wing of the party who considered Alexander Hamilton their leader, and because of this, and the fact that they had served in the Washington cabinet, they were inclined to look down on John Adams.

Adams asked Washington's core cabinet to stay on.

As a matter of courtesy, one such visit between the President and Vice President would have sufficed, but the fact that Adams promptly returned the call the next morning was taken as a clear signal that Adams meant truly to pursue a policy above party divisions. According to Jefferson’s account of the meeting, written years later, Adams “entered immediately” into discussion of the crisis at hand and his wish for Jefferson to play a lead part in resolving it. Faced with the prospect of war with France, Adams was determined to make a fresh effort at negotiations in Paris, to bring about a reconciliation, which he believed possible and desirable. “Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war,” he had written to Abigail. The government of France, led since 1795 by a five-headed executive commission known as the Directory, had chosen to interpret the Jay Treaty as an Anglo-American alliance. In an effort to improve relations with France, Washington had recalled the American minister, James Monroe, and sent in his place a staunch Federalist, General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina. But as yet there was no word from Pinckney.

As Jefferson would recall, it was that evening while walking down Market Street with Adams, after a farewell dinner given by Washington, that he informed Adams of Madison’s refusal to go to France. Adams indicated that in any event the issue was now academic. There had been a change of mind due to objections raised. 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. It was there on Market Street, according to Jefferson, that he and Adams reached the breaking point. Adams never again mentioned a word to him on the subject of France, “or ever consulted me as to any measures of the government.” Whether the parting was quite so clear-cut as Jefferson remembered is uncertain. But as Adams, too, later acknowledged, they “consulted very little together afterward.” Adams was to call on his Vice President for advice no more than Washington had called on him. The great difference, however, was that Jefferson was of the opposing party, with differing objectives and principles, and Adams consequently could never count on such loyalty from Jefferson as he had given Washington.

SO MUCH HAD HAPPENED in John Adams’s life—he had done so much, taken such risks, given so much of himself heart and soul in the cause of his country—that he seems not to have viewed the presidency as an ultimate career objective or crowning life achievement. He was not one given to seeing life as a climb to the top of a ladder or mountain, but more as a journey or adventure, even a “kind of romance, which a little embellished with fiction or exaggeration or only poetical ornament, would equal anything in the days of chivalry or knight errantry,” as once he confided to Abigail. If anything, he was inclined to look back upon the long struggle for independence as the proud defining chapter.

Adams was hit with stunning news. The French Directory had refused to receive General Pinckney. Forced to leave Paris as though he were an undesirable alien, Pinckney had withdrawn to Amsterdam and was awaiting instructions. To make matters worse, Adams learned of further French seizures of American ships in the Caribbean and that by decrees issued in Paris, the Directory had, in effect, launched an undeclared war on American shipping everywhere. The crisis had come to a head. Adams faced the threat of all-out war.

March 1797 upon first assuming the Presidency

on May 11, Thomas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia from Monticello to find the city astir over a private letter he had written more than a year before that had just appeared in print in the New York Minerva, a strongly Federalist paper, edited by Noah Webster. Writing to an Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, during the debate over the Jay Treaty, Jefferson had described America as a country taken over by “timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty,” and by leaders who were assimilating “the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model.” 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. Successive translations of the letter from English to Italian to French, then back to English again had changed and intensified some of the wording by the time it appeared in the Minerva—“harlot” had become “whore,” for example—but the meaning was essentially unchanged and the letter was taken by many as an unconscionable attack on Washington. Jefferson said nothing in his defense, and Washington, too, remained silent. But great damage had been done to Jefferson by the “Mazzei Letter,” notwithstanding the many prominent Republicans who claimed he had only been telling the unvarnished truth.

1797