John Adams

by David McCullough

To Jefferson, Adams had become an embarrassment, and while always pleasant in social encounters, Jefferson had as little as possible to do with him.

“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,”

When the President’s presiding physician allowed that death was all but certain, alarm swept through the city. Calamity faced the country.

“At this early day when neither our finances are arranged, nor our government sufficiently cemented to promise duration, his death would, I fear, have had most disastrous consequences.”

THAT SUMMER Congress worked itself to a fever pitch over two issues certain to be of long-lasting consequence.

An immigrant of illegitimate birth, Hamilton had arrived in New York from the West Indies at age fifteen.

Brilliant to the point of genius, he exuded vitality and could turn on great charm when needed.

As one of the principal authors, along with Madison, of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton ranked as a leading proponent of a strong central government, and his name was commonly linked with that of Madison, with whom he remained on friendly terms.

Boldly, Hamilton argued that such an increase in the national debt would be a blessing, for the greater the responsibility of the central government, the greater its authority.

The Virginians wanted no part of either of the northern cities and were strongly committed to bringing the capital south to a site on the Potomac River not far from Washington’s home at Mount Vernon.

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.

AS SOON AS CONGRESS ADJOURNED on August 12, the government began packing for the move.

Happily, America was prospering, commerce and agriculture both flourishing, and there was increasing confidence everywhere.

“Never since I was born was America so happy as at this time.”

Had the Adamses invested in government securities as Abigail wished, they would, almost certainly, have wound up quite wealthy.

spring of 1791,

the root cause was the revolution in France.

Does he consider this pamphlet of Mr. Paine’s as a canonical book of political scripture?

That you and I differ in our idea of the best form of government is well known to us both, but we have differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each other’s motives, and confiding our differences of opinion to private conversation.

“You and I have never had a serious conversation together that I can recollect concerning the nature of government.”

In sum, Jefferson refused to take any responsibility for what had happened.

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.

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.

The “explanation with each other” that Adams hoped for would have to wait for more than two decades.

IN THE AUTUMN of 1791, alarmed to find they were living beyond their means,

Southern members of the House seemed determined not just to oppose the Secretary of the Treasury but to destroy him, while much of the press joined in the assault.

“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.”

He was in the chair every day, all day, without fail, which was a point of pride with him, but also of some worry, since he knew such sedentary confinement to be good neither for the body nor the spirit of “a man habituated for a long course of years to long voyages and immense journeys.”

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.

Even more aggravating for the President was the unrelenting feud between Jefferson and Hamilton, the two highest officers in his cabinet, and the most gifted.

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.

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.

The Marquis de Lafayette had fled France and was being “kept a close prisoner by the Austrians.”

Jefferson was busy behind the scenes in a campaign to drive Hamilton from office.

Jefferson’s debt to his British creditors was a colossal 7,000 pounds, Adams had learned, which led him to ponder whether this might account for Jefferson’s antipathy to the central government.

If only someone could pay off Jefferson’s debt, indeed pay off the personal debt of all Virginians, Adams speculated, then perhaps Jefferson’s reason might return, “and the whole man and his whole state would become good friends of the Union.”

It was known that the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, philosopher and lover of liberty, one of the first in France to translate the Declaration of Independence, and one of the first, with his mother, to befriend Adams in Paris, had been stoned to death by a mob before his mother’s eyes.

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.

Young Genêt had been dispatched to America with instructions to rouse American support for France, spread the principles of the French Revolution, and encourage privateering against British shipping by American seamen.

But on April 22 in Philadelphia, before Genêt arrived, Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality, a decision Adams had no part in but affirmed what he had long said about keeping free from the affairs of Europe.

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.

In France, however, there was no cease to the slaughter.

But the Terror only accelerated, eventually consuming those who set it in motion. Marat was murdered; Danton and Robespierre went to the guillotine. The final toll would eventually reach 14,000 lives.

Among those executed in the last few days of the Terror, as Abigail would later learn, to her horror, were the grandmother, mother, and sister of her friend Madame Adrienne Lafayette.

ARRIVING AT PHILADELPHIA in la...

Jefferson’s conflict with Hamilton, however, had become intolerable.

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.

he is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell. . . .

because his soul is poisoned with ambition.

The British had begun stopping American ships and taking off sailors, claiming they were British citizens.