John Adams

by David McCullough

The “Reynolds Affair” was a complicated tangle of financial dealings, adultery, blackmail, and alleged corruption in the Department of the Treasury, all dating back five years.

It was then, while in prison, that Reynolds, in an effort to ease his case, got word to three Republican members of Congress, including Senator James Monroe, that Hamilton was not only an adulterer, but, as Secretary of the Treasury, secretly profiteering with government funds.

But it was not until that summer of 1797 that the story broke in a series of unsigned pamphlets produced by James Callender, the unscrupulous writer for the Aurora, whose source apparently was Beckley.

November 23,

January 1798

What Adams read was extremely unsettling. The government of France had refused to see the envoys.

The mission had failed.

“Gentlemen,” said Hottinguer, “you do not speak to the point. It is money. It is expected that you will offer the money. . . . What is your answer?” to which General Pinckney emphatically replied, “No! No! Not a sixpence.”

great care must be taken that nothing endanger the lives of the envoys who were still in Paris.

The respect she had expressed for Jefferson the year before had vanished.

Adams, who had apparently concluded that the envoys were by now safely out of France, released the documents the next day, and with the galleries cleared of visitors and the doors secured, the House went into executive session.

The revelation that the crisis was not less than the administration implied, but far worse, hit the Republicans like a hammer.

THE COUNTRY BEGAN to prepare for war. On April 8, 1798,

The President, it was said, had awakened the nation from its “fatal stupor.”

When he called for a day of fasting and prayer, he was roundly mocked in the Republican press, but on the day itself the churches were filled.

The new navy, in Jefferson’s view, was a colossal waste of money.

In the image of the American eagle, he still clutched both olive branch and arrows, even if, on occasion in his public poses, his head, unlike the eagle’s, was turned to the arrows.

ON JUNE 12, Adams received news that rocked him more than he dared show.

“I will never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected, and honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation.”

There was rampant fear of the enemy within.

ON JULY 2, to meet the cost of the military buildup, the House voted a first direct tax on the people, a tax on land.

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 YEAR 1798, the most difficult and consequential year of John Adams’s presidency, was to provide him no respite.

Most pressing was an unfortunate dispute that developed between Adams and Washington.

The French wanted peace, Gerry reported.

But the welcome from Adams was warm, and the more Gerry talked, the more Adams must have realized that the current had turned his way at last. Talleyrand, Gerry assured him, was ready to treat seriously with the United States.

It was a critical moment in Adams’s presidency. Among other things, Gerry had more than justified Adams’s confidence in him.

His teeth and gums ached; one side of his face was badly swollen.

It was said a British fleet under Admiral Horatio Nelson had overwhelmed the French off the coast of Egypt.

If true, the chance of a French invasion of America had all but vanished.

to arrive on November 24 in Philadelphia, where it was known for certain that Nelson had destroyed the French fleet at the battle of the Nile, four months earlier on August 1.

Adams had been inordinately slow to suspect the worst of his closest advisers, and to face the obvious truth that keeping Washington’s cabinet had been a mistake.

Thus, in December, a representative from Toussaint, Joseph Bunel, dined with Adams, marking the first time a man of African descent was the dinner guest of an American President.

“A peck of troubles in a large bundle of papers often in a handwriting almost illegible comes every day . . . thousands of sea letters . . .

Jefferson had been absent for six months, during which he had raised no voice as head of the Republican party, but had kept extremely busy, writing letters and secretly drafting a set of resolutions to be introduced in the legislature of Kentucky.

Written in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions declared that each state had a “natural right” to nullify federal actions it deemed unconstitutional.

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.

the true principles of the federal compact,”

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.”

His advice to Madison and other close associates was to stay calm and quiet. “Firmness on our part, but passive firmness, is the true course,” Jefferson cautioned after returning to Philadelphia.

Most striking was their common dislike and fear of Hamilton.

ON MONDAY, February 18, 1799, Adams made his move.

of all the brave acts of his career—his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, his crossing the Atlantic on the Boston in the winter of 1778, the high risks of his mission to Holland—one

one brief message sent to the United States Senate was perhaps the bravest.

he was convinced that peace was attainable only as a consequence of America’s growing naval strength.

Beyond all that, Adams recognized there was only so much he could do, that he could effect the roll of events only to a point.

The prosperity of it to the country will depend upon Heaven, and very little on anything in my power.”

For Adams the ultimate command rested always beyond the reach of mortal men, just as the very natures and actions of men themselves were often determined by their Maker.

“It always gives me pain when I find myself obliged to differ in opinion from any of the heads of departments; but, as our understandings are not always in our own power, every man must judge for himself.”

“Genius in a general is oftener an instrument of divine vengeance than a guardian angel.”