their proper sphere in making the enquiry.”11 Theodore Sedgwick and the president ended up shouting at each other, with Sedgwick attributing Adams’s decision to “the wild and irregular starts of a vain, jealous, and half frantic mind.”12 After these wounding confrontations, Adams beat a hasty retreat to Quincy and stayed there for seven months, sometimes buried in the collected works of Frederick the Great. Federalist Robert G. Harper of South Carolina said that he hoped that, en route to Quincy, the president’s horses might run wild and break their master’s neck.
