by Ian W. Toll
The result was a great vindication for John Adams. His controversial decision to send a second delegation to Paris had preserved American neutrality and restored peace. He had pulled the country back from the brink of dissolution and civil war. He had, as he said, “steered the vessel…into a peaceable and safe port.” In so doing, he sacrificed his hopes of reelection, as the Hamiltonian faction flared up in open opposition and the Federalist Party splintered.
Two decades earlier, Adams had been closely associated with the disappointments of the Continental Navy. As president, he engineered a “second commencement” of the navy that managed to avoid the worst mistakes and misadventures of the earlier experience. In the Quasi War, the nation had demonstrated to itself and to Europe that it was capable of projecting military force far from North American shores. The United States had built a small but respectable fleet of warships and a shore-based infrastructure to keep them at sea. The 44-gun frigates United States, Constitution, and President were the most powerful ships of their class in any navy in the world. Good officers had planted their feet firmly on the lowest rungs of the promotion ladder, and in time they would inherit command of a thoroughly professional service.
In retirement, ex-President Adams would continue to press his campaign for naval power. “The counsel which Themistocles gave to Athens, Pompey to Rome, Cromwell to England, DeWitt to Holland, and Colbert to France, I have always given and shall continue to give to my countrymen,” he wrote Truxtun in 1802—“That the great questions of commerce and power between nations and empires must be determined by sea…[and therefore] all reasonable encouragement should be given to a navy.” Letters from Quincy repeated the same catchphrase, again and again, like a mantra: “The trident of Neptune is the scepter of the world.”
PART TWO
To the Shores of Tripoli
CHAPTER FIVE
The presidential campaign of 1800 pitted Adams against the man who was both the sitting vice president and leader of the opposition, Thomas Jefferson. It was almost certainly the most bitterly fought election in American history. The political culture of the young democracy was still evolving, and there was not yet an established boundary between acceptable rhetoric and outright slander. The result was a campaign of personal vilification, rumormongering, and mudslinging not quite like anything the American people had ever seen before, or have since.
Arch Federalist and Yale College president Timothy Dwight warned his congregation that if Jefferson won the election, “The Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin frenzy, our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat.” A Federalist newspaper in New York predicted that a Republican victory would bring a flood of French and Irish revolutionaries, “the refuse of Europe,” who would launch a Jacobin-style reign of terror against “all who love order, peace, virtue, and religion.” For the first time, rumors surfaced that a slavewoman who lived at Monticello, Sally Hemings, had borne Jefferson’s children.*
The Republicans, on their part, struck back, reiterating all their favorite charges against the president. Adams, a campaign handbill proclaimed, was an “avowed friend of monarchy” who was plotting to “saddle you with Political Slavery.” He was a warmonger, a plutocrat, and a secret agent of the English crown. Some of the more scurrilous Republican broadsheets called attention to the indisputable (if not particularly relevant) fact that Adams was a fat, toothless old man. But what was especially galling for Adams was that he was taking fire from two sides. His decision to send a second peace delegation to France had turned the High Federalists intractably against him. The intraparty attack on Adams climaxed with a hostile pamphlet entitled Letter from Alexander Hamilton Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States. Hamilton concluded this strange and incoherent essay with a reluctant endorsement of Adams’s reelection, on the basis that a Jefferson presidency was unacceptable. But the damage was done: Adams himself recognized that the rupture with Hamilton would cost him the election.
In the sixteen-state electoral college, Jefferson polled 73 votes to Adams’s 65. The pivotal state had been New York, where the Federalist influence was strong—the efforts of the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Aaron Burr, ensured a narrow victory in the popular vote. But a flaw in the original version of the U.S. Constitution (corrected in 1804 by the Twelfth Amendment) brought about a perverse result. There was no separate line on the presidential ballot for a vice-presidential candidate: the Constitution merely ruled that the candidate receiving the second largest number of electoral votes would become vice president. Burr had won 73 electoral votes, the same number as Jefferson. The Republican running mates were tied in the electoral college. Although it was understood by all that Jefferson had run for president and Burr for vice president, the question of which man would occupy the highest office was thrown into the House of Representatives, which was still controlled by the Federalists.
Instead of casting his support to Jefferson, the unscrupulous Burr maneuvered for a deal that would secure the top office for himself. House Federalists, hating both men equally, plotted to void the election results and elevate the president pro tempore of the Senate to the presidency. Separately, Hamilton and Adams each sought to obtain Jefferson’s assurances on several issues (including a pledge to “maintain the navy”) as the price of Federalist support, but Jefferson refused to bargain for the office he had rightfully won. Ballot after ballot ended in deadlock. A constitutional crisis loomed. The Republican governor of Pennsylvania threatened to send his state’s militia to march on Washington.
At last, Hamilton intervened to resolve the impasse. With confessed reluctance, he urged his followers in the House to choose Jefferson over Burr, because (he said) Burr was a truly dangerous man, while “a true estimate of Mr. J’s character warrants the expectation of a temporizing rather than a violent system.” On February 17, 1801, with the thirty-sixth ballot, the House voted to elect Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United States.
Two weeks later, shortly before noon on March 4, Jefferson left his boardinghouse at New Jersey Avenue and C Street and trudged up the muddy, rutted road to the unfinished Capitol, which was surrounded by brick kilns, construction sheds, and workmen’s shanties, and littered with “mud, shavings, boards, planks, & all the rubbish of building.” Pools of dirty water had collected in holes where clay had been dug out of the ground to be used in manufacturing bricks. Horses and carriages were parked wherever their drivers could locate a patch of vacant grass. Except for the main dirt road, which skirted north of the Capitol, the entire hill was overgrown with brush and briars and could be traversed only on footpaths. The north and south wings of the Capitol were coupled by a boardwalk, covered by a makeshift wooden roof, that allowed members to pass from one to the other without sinking into the mud. The unfinished south wing, where the House of Representatives met, was a poorly ventilated, oval-shaped brick structure that members had nicknamed “the oven.” The Senate Chamber in the north wing was more or less completed, so this was where the inaugural ceremony would be held. The senators had crowded into one side of the chamber to make room for their House colleagues, many of whom remained standing in order to allow the ladies to sit. There was thought to be as many as a thousand people in the chamber. A witness recalled that the room “was so crowded that I believe not another creature could enter.”
The outgoing president had caught the 4:00 a.m. stage to Philadelphia, where he would be reunited with Abigail for the long journey back to Quincy and retirement. Adams’s absence was condemned by Republicans as a crowning act of petulance, and a missed opportunity to signal that the Federalists would remain loyal to the Constitution while in opposition. Adams and Jefferson would not return to speaking terms for a dozen years.
Jefferson had always been a reluctant orator. He disliked being thrust in front of a large crowd, and he spoke in a low, te
ntative voice. Only a handful of people seated directly in front of the rostrum could hear him—the others would have no idea what was said until a printed version was passed out at the end of the ceremony. But whatever the quality of the original performance, Jefferson’s first inaugural address was one of the most important public statements of his career, ranking alongside the Declaration of Independence as a justification of the American democratic experiment, and cast in phrases that managed simultaneously to seduce and command. The United States, Jefferson said, was “a rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.” Self-government, as practiced in America, was “the world’s best hope”—and self-government had been given a fighting chance by the fortunate presence of a great ocean separating America “from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe.” He introduced the axiom that has been so often quoted by advocates of an isolationist foreign policy, and so often misattributed to George Washington: “Possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation,” the people of the United States would seek “honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”
The partisan bitterness and repression of the 1790s, said Jefferson, had been an aberration, a distant echo of “the throes and convulsions of the ancient world.” Now, all would be forgiven. In the line that was best remembered and most often quoted, the new president offered a truce to his political enemies: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans, we are all federalists.”
Jefferson exited the Capitol without fanfare and returned to his lodgings at Conrad & McMunn’s boardinghouse. As he and his thirty or so fellow boarders sat down in the dining hall, Jefferson took his habitual chair, furthest away from the fire, declining to be seated at the head of the table in recognition of his new rank. He would continue to live at the boardinghouse for the first two weeks of his administration, conducting the business of the federal government from a private parlor adjoining his bedchamber, from which he enjoyed sweeping southern views of the “thick & noble wood” along the banks of the Potomac.
THE NEW PRESIDENT WAS FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, but he was as healthy and vigorous as a man half his age. He was six feet two inches tall and “straight as a gun-barrel,” recalled Edmund Bacon, who worked at Monticello for many years: “He was like a fine horse—he had no surplus flesh. He had an iron constitution, and was very strong.” With advancing years, his shoulder-length hair had gone completely gray, and his face showed the ruddy color and peeling skin of a man accustomed to long hours of outdoor exercise. He had keen, friendly eyes that were either gray, blue, or hazel, according to the contradictory opinions of his friends and relatives. His most striking feature, evident to posterity only in images that depict him in profile (such as busts, reliefs, or silhouettes), was his cartoonishly strong chin.
Jefferson had a pleasant, easygoing manner that seemed to refute the barrage of Federalist propaganda that had been launched at him from the hustings. Margaret Bayard Smith, wife of the editor of the Washington National Intelligencer and a shrewd chronicler of early Washington society, had been raised by Federalist parents who taught her to believe that Jefferson was “an ambitious and violent demagogue, coarse and vulgar in his manners, awkward and rude in his appearance.” She described how a visit from an anonymous guest, shortly after the election, had changed her mind:
I was one morning sitting alone in the parlour, when the servant opened the door and showed in a gentleman who wished to see my husband. The usual frankness and care with which I met strangers were somewhat checked by the dignified and reserved air of the present visitor; but the chilled feeling was only momentary, for after taking the chair I offered him in a free and easy manner, and carelessly throwing his arm on the table near which he sat, he turned towards me a countenance beaming with an expression of benevolence and with a manner and voice almost femininely soft and gentle, entered into conversation on the commonplace topics of the day….
I know not how it was, but there was something in his manner, his countenance and voice that at once unlocked my heart, and in answer to his casual enquiries concerning our situation in our new home, as he called it, I found myself frankly telling him what I liked or disliked in our present circumstances and abode. I knew not who he was, but the interest with which he listened to my artless details…put me perfectly at my ease; in truth so kind and conciliating were his looks and manners that I forgot he was not a friend of my own, until on the opening of the door, Mr. Smith entered and introduced the stranger to me as Mr. Jefferson.
I felt my cheeks burn and my heart throb, and not a word more could I speak while he remained. Nay, such was my embarrassment I could scarcely listen to the conversation carried on between him and my husband.
The last week of March, Jefferson moved into the executive mansion, which stood on a hilltop a mile and a half west of the Capitol. The big white sandstone house, which would not be called the White House until decades later, was rectangular in shape, with a series of four engaged Ionic columns on the north side, facing Pennsylvania Avenue and President’s Square. The south-facing windows commanded a sweeping view of the Potomac and the port of Alexandria in the distance. The mansion, like all of Washington, was a work in progress, and the grounds were crowded with construction sheds, stacks of lumber, and stonecutters’ huts. A visitor complained that “in a dark night, instead of finding your way to the house, you may, perchance, fall in a pit, or stumble over a heap of rubbish.”
The twenty-three rooms were cold, drafty, unfurnished, and smelled of fresh paint and plaster. Jefferson lived in the southwest corner on the main floor, working and living in two rooms where his books and personal papers were piled up on tables, and in which he kept his treasured “scientific instruments, maps, globes, and gardening tools.” Adjoining his study was an antechamber that Jefferson used as a sitting room, and an oval drawing room where he received visitors. The East Room had originally been intended for public receptions. Abigail Adams had used it as a space to hang clothes out to dry. Now it was partitioned into a combined bedchamber and office for the president’s private secretary, Meriwether Lewis.
Jefferson remarked that he and Lewis lived in the great house like a pair of mice in a church. In fact, they were well looked after by a staff that included a steward, a coachman, a French chef, a footman, a valet, and a varying number of scullions and maids. “We find this a very agreeable country residence,” Jefferson wrote his son-in-law shortly after moving in; “Good society, and enough of it, and free from the noise, the heat, the stench and the bustle of a close-built town.”
Jefferson was never out of bed later than dawn. In the cold months, a servant kept a box in his room well supplied with dry firewood, and the president began his day by building and stoking a fire with his own hand. From five until nine, he worked without interruption at the green baize–covered portable writing desk that he had had built to his own design in 1776, the same desk on which he had written the Declaration of Independence. He sat in an ingeniously contrived ergonomic revolving chair, also built to his own design. He wrote quickly and with little or no editing, and it was in these letters that most of the substantive work of his presidency was done. After nine, he was willing to receive cabinet officers, members of Congress, and others; but if no one appeared, he continued to write. He wrote 116 letters during his first month in office and 677 letters in his first year, taking care to keep a copy of each. In November, he could report that his daily routine had “got to a steady and uniform course. It keeps me from 10 to 12 and 13 hours a day at my writing table, giving me an interval of 4 hours for riding, dining and a little unbending.”
Jefferson’s daily ramble on horseback was his main for
m of exercise, and his cherished escape from the duties of his office. Every afternoon at exactly one o’clock, he quit his desk and went down to the stables, where his Irish coachman and riding agent, James Dougherty, would already have saddled and bridled one of the president’s horses. Jefferson’s tastes ran to imported plated stirrups and leopard-skin saddles. He was an expert rider. “You saw at a glance,” said his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, “from his easy and confident seat, that he was master of his horse, which was usually the fine blood horse of Virginia. The only impatience of temper he ever exhibited was with his horse, which he subdued to his will by a fearless application of the whip, on the slightest manifestation of restiveness.”
Long hours on the rutted carriage roads and bridle paths of the District of Columbia allowed him to survey the capital city at firsthand. Its French designer, Pierre L’Enfant, had envisioned a “system of larger and lesser centers widely dispersed over the terrain,” interconnected by expansive avenues that reached out diagonally, like the spokes of a wheel, from the major public edifices. It was a grand vision, and Jefferson was smitten with it. But it was only that, a vision—the reality, in 1801, fell far short. It was not just that L’Enfant’s city was not yet finished. Skeptics doubted that it could ever be finished. The ambitious street plan had contemplated a great city, a major population center, and a nexus of commerce and the arts. What was actually there was a mostly uncultivated lowland wilderness in which one might find, here or there, an isolated public building or a half-deserted, tumbledown hamlet.
