John Adams

by David McCullough

From his distraught daughter-in-law, Charles’s wife, Sally, who with her two small daughters was staying with Nabby, Adams learned for the first time that Charles, who had disappeared, was bankrupt, faithless, and an alcoholic.

It was as though the downfall of Abigail’s brother William were repeating itself, and the family returned to the old ways of keeping “calamity” private.

“Any calamity inflicted by the hand of Providence, it would become me in silence to submit to,” she wrote some weeks later, “but when I behold misery and distress, disgrace and poverty brought upon a family by intemperance, my heart bleeds at every pore.”

That he had chosen to come to Trenton uninvited was taken by some as the kind of bold move Hamilton was known and admired for, but it also strongly suggested an element of desperation.

“I heard him with perfect good humor, though never in my life did I hear a man talk more like a fool.”

If Hamilton and his admirers in the cabinet had outmaneuvered Adams in the contest over command of the army, Adams had now cut the ground out from under Hamilton.

Whatever dreams Hamilton entertained of military glory and empire, America was to have no need of either a standing army or a Bonaparte, which, it is fair to say, was as clear an objective in Adams’s mind as was peace with France.

On December 14, 1799, as if to give period to the passing of the century and the Federal era, George Washington died at Mount Vernon.

At no time, she wrote, had the fate of the country rested on the breath of one man, not even Washington.

Jefferson, who could have been in Philadelphia in time, did not arrive until two days later, on December 28, after an absence of ten months.

His thoughts, to judge by what he said to Cotton Tufts, were on home and some marshland he wished to buy, overpriced though it might be.

Jefferson, who had pinned his highest hopes on the revolution, commented only that the situation was “painfully interesting.”

Clearly, American enchantment with France and the revolution were also at an end. Washington’s death had seemed to mark the close of one era; the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte ushered in another. Adams, who like Edmund Burke had predicted dictatorship as the inevitable outcome for the revolution, wisely kept silent.

both the Adamses seem to have concluded that there was to be no second term for them.

But among Jefferson’s many contributions to the new republic, his Senate Manual would stand as one of the most useful and enduring.

a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Hamilton, said Adams, seething with anger, was an “intrigant . . . a man devoid of every moral principle, a bastard . . . a foreigner.”

McHenry portrayed Adams as “actually insane.”

While Adams’s outbursts of temper could be explosive, they never happened in public, always in private confrontations. It was then that “he would give to his language the full impress of his vehement will.” But never until now was he known to have berated a subordinate, and his regret over the outburst was considerable.

Hearing of the dismissals, Alexander Hamilton quickly asked Pickering to search the files at the Department of State for “copies of extracts of all such documents as will enable you to explain both Jefferson and Adams.” The time had come, Hamilton said, when “men of real integrity” must unite against all charlatans.

THE REMOVAL of the government from Philadelphia to the new Federal City by the Potomac was scheduled to take place in June.

Capital punishment was part of life. Nor was Adams opposed to it. As President, he had signed death warrants for military deserters.

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.

Being that it was his first foray into the South, Adams might have been disturbed by the sight of slaves at work.

Adams, with his memories of Paris and London, with his fondness for Philadelphia and his belief that the capital of a great nation ought to be a great city, could have been appalled by the whole place and seen it as a colossal blunder.

He could have dismissed it as Jefferson’s city, Jefferson having devoted more time and thought to the project than anyone in government. Everything considered, there was almost no reason for Adams to have liked anything about it.

But most amplified were charges of atheism.

Stories were spread of personal immorality.

Most vicious were the charges that Adams was insane. Thus, if Jefferson was a Jacobin, a shameless southern libertine, and a “howling” atheist, Adams was a Tory, a vain Yankee scold, and, if truth be known, “quite mad.”

Far more hurtful were the personal attacks from the Hamilton Federalists.

The great imponderable was Napoleon Bonaparte.

Then, without warning, while Adams was on the road to Washington, a “thunderbolt” struck.

Now, in the eleventh hour of the election, Hamilton lashed out in a desperate effort to destroy Adams, the leading candidate of his own party.

Republicans were euphoric. Whatever crazed notions had taken hold of Hamilton, he had surely dealt Adams a blow and “rent the Federal party in twain.”

Possibly, as John Quincy surmised, it was because Adams had denied him his chance for military glory, humiliated him at Trenton, and made his army superfluous.

But by his own hand he had ruined whatever chance he ever had for the power and glory he so desperately desired.

But for Adams the house was to be the setting of great disappointment and much sorrow.

At a grand fete celebrating the event, Bonaparte declared that the differences between France and the United States had been no more than a family quarrel.

for Adams it was an immense victory.

“The lower class of whites,” she wrote, “are a grade below the Negroes in point of intelligence, and ten below them in point of civility.”

So another of the ironies of 1800 was that Jefferson, the apostle of agrarian America who loathed cities, owed his ultimate political triumph to New York.

It was his determination to find peace and check Hamilton that cost him the full support of the party and thus the election.

Adams, who could have applied influence behind the scenes, refused to say or do anything.

On January 1, 1801, the Adamses held the first New Year’s Day reception at the President’s House.

February 16, 1801, his last official dinner—and

ON INAUGURATION DAY, Wednesday, March 4, John Adams made his exit from the President’s House and the capital at four in the morning, traveling by public stage under clear skies lit by a quarter moon.

If ever a system was proven to work under extremely adverse circumstances, it was at this inauguration of 1801, and it is regrettable that Adams was not present.

It would also have been more politic to have expressed confidence in his successor, but, such expressions were not Adams’s way if he did not mean them.

A passing tribute to Washington was made before he finished, but of Adams he said nothing.