by Ray Raphael
The passions are too high at present, to be cooled in our day. You & I have formerly seen warm debates and high political passions. But gentlemen of different politics would then speak to each other, & separate the business of the Senate from that of society. It is not so now. Men who have been intimate all their lives, cross the streets to avoid meeting, & turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats. This may do for young men with whom passion is enjoyment. But it is afflicting to peaceable minds. Tranquillity is the old man’s milk.16
It would only get worse. The hawkish secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, announced to Congress that France had seized over three hundred American vessels. Adams’s three new envoys to France were met by agents who tried to bribe them. France’s belligerence favored Federalists, who took advantage of the militaristic mood to pass legislation that suppressed dissent (Sedition Act), expelled immigrants considered “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States” or simply hailed from an enemy nation (two Alien Acts), and made it more difficult for foreigners to become American citizens (Naturalization Act). This legislative package further angered Republicans, who resisted in every conceivable manner. Newspapers refused to be silenced, even at the risk of legal prosecution. The Republican legislature in Kentucky, working from a draft penned by Jefferson, declared the Sedition Act “void, and of no force,” while the Virginia legislature, on Madison’s instigation, protested that the acts were “palpable and alarming infractions of the Constitution,” and to keep “the present republican system of the United States” from becoming “an absolute, or, at best, a mixed monarchy,” it affirmed its right to “interpose” between the federal government and the people. As Adams’s administration neared its end, the partisan divide had grown wider than ever, and the Union itself seemed threatened.17
How did Adams figure in all this? Washington had done what he could to avoid war with Britain, and he had succeeded, but in doing so, he had antagonized France. Now his successor faced the challenge of avoiding a new war, and that in the midst of a partisan political environment that poisoned his every act. Any move toward peace would leave him open to Federalists’ charges of being too soft, but if he maneuvered in the other direction, promoting military measures that might deter French advances, Republicans would put up an equally staunch resistance. The middle road was narrower than ever, nearly impossible to locate.
Adams’s personal vendetta with Hamilton further complicated his tasks. In July 1798, amid fears of a French attack on American soil, Congress passed a bill that authorized the president to raise an “Additional Army” headed by none other than George Washington. Washington accepted the appointment under two conditions: he would be able to choose his own officers, and he would “not be called into the field until the Army is in a situation to require my presence.” He then presented to President Adams a list of principal officers he wished Adams to appoint, topped by Alexander Hamilton, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Henry Knox, ranking in that order.18
Knox immediately protested his low ranking. During the Revolution, he had held a higher rank than Hamilton, and now he refused to serve under an inferior officer. President Adams, who would make the final decision, sided with Knox over Hamilton, ostensibly because of military protocol but clearly for fear that Washington would be little more than a figurehead and Hamilton would wind up in charge of an army of some twelve thousand soldiers. This frightened Adams almost as much as it did Republicans. When urged by his secretary of war (James McHenry) and secretary of state (Timothy Pickering), both Hamilton supporters, to go with Washington’s list, Adams held firm: “General Washington has through the whole, conducted with perfect honor and consistency. I said and I say now, if I could resign to him the office of President, I would do it immediately and with the highest pleasure, but I never said I would hold the office & be responsible for its exercise, while he should execute it.” Adams, not Washington, was president, and the “power and authority” rested with him. “Knox, Pinckney, Hamilton” would be the order of command.19
Refusing to admit defeat, McHenry and Pickering engaged others to present their case, and they finally prevailed on Washington himself to write to Adams. When accepting command of the additional army, the first president reminded his successor, he and others had understood he was to determine his chief officers, and accordingly he had prepared a list that stipulated rank, but Adams had reordered them “the last to be first, and the first to be last.” The Senate and most of all “the public” would be disappointed if “deprived of the services of Coll. Hamilton in the military line,” Washington wrote. Was Adams’s “determination to reverse the order” absolutely final?20
Washington’s appeal turned out not to be necessary because Adams had already caved to the pressure, allowing the nominations to proceed as first intended. The political risk of crossing Washington was too great, the cost of holding firm too high. In his response to Washington he tried to save face by reaffirming that “by the present Constitution of the United States, the President has the authority to determine the rank of officers,” but by his own discretion the president would allow “you as Commander in Chief” to resolve any complaints about rank, and if anyone should object to “the judgment of the Commander in Chief,” Adams would “confirm that judgment.” The wording was curious. In Article II, Section 2, the Constitution stated clearly that the president was to be “Commander in Chief” of the army, navy, and all state militias when called into service, but in his message to Congress on July 2, Adams had signed that title away: “I nominate George Washington, of Mount Vernon, to be Lieutenant General and Commander in Chief of all the armies raised, or to be raised, in the United States.” With that move, Adams essentially lowered himself from first to a distant fourth in the military/political chain of command, behind not only Washington but also Hamilton and the president’s own cabinet, all of whom supported Hamilton. “His Elective Highness” had fallen mightily. Having already lost control of his party, which he rebuked in any case, he no longer had the political clout to control his own appointees.21
If High Federalists (as Hamilton and his allies came to be called) were hard on Adams, tougher yet were his Republican critics, who made no distinction between Adams, who was still trying to avoid war with France, and Hamilton and company, who sought it. A Virginia correspondent warned Hamilton to “take care of yourself” because people in his state wanted “the heads of JOHN ADAMS, and ALEXANDER HAMILTON; & some few others perhaps.” Republican rage was fueled not only by the push for war with France but also by the measures needed to pay for it. States were required to raise funds, and when a small army of tax collectors in Pennsylvania started visiting each home to assess its size, building materials, and the dimensions of its windows, people banded together to hound the tax men and decry everything Federalist, from the house tax to the Alien and Sedition Acts, from Congress and President Adams to “all friends of government, because they were all tories.” Although Adams was able to suppress this incipient rebellion, named after one of its leaders, John Fries, he could not suppress all dissent, much of it directed his way. In the Republican press, the president of the United States was mocked as “His Rotundity”—a far cry from the exalted title Adams would have preferred.22
How could he not take this personally? Like Washington, Adams struck back at his detractors. The Alien and Sedition Acts gave him legal sanction not only to demean critics, as Washington had done, but also to suppress them. Adams did not instigate these repressive measures; in fact, he worried they would be considered war measures (the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed simultaneously with the authorization of the additional army) and consequently “a hurricane of clamor would be raised against them.” Yet believing “there was need enough for both,” he consented to the bills, and once they became law, his administration prosecuted fourteen high-profile cases under the Sedition Act that triggered, in his words, a “fierce and violent” opposition. Despite his best intentions, Ada
ms, like his predecessor, had become a partisan player. With other Federalists, he treated criticisms leveled against himself, his administration, or the Federalist-dominated Congress as assaults on legitimate government under the Constitution. It is not difficult to see how this backfired, broadening the base of the opposition. Republicans gained considerable ground by complaining that the Federalists’ repressive measures were intended to “perpetuate their authority and preserve their present places.”23
Each of the first two presidents had aspired to transcendent governance, yet each failed to produce the intended result: the settlement of differences without flagrant discord. This is not to say the first twelve years under the Constitution ended in failure, as we might infer if we look only at the tone of political discourse. The nation restored its credit and was solvent. The national debt and balance of trade had stabilized. Exports increased from $20 million in 1790 to $70 million in 1800, and population in that decade grew by 35 percent. All this was possible, in part, because there were no costly military conflicts. Jay’s Treaty avoided war with Britain, and while the scuffles with France included several naval confrontations, both France and the United States backed off; the “Quasi-War” ended with the Convention of 1800, which established American neutrality. In the end, the partisan divide paid some dividends: Francophiles and Anglophiles in a sense canceled each other out, each group resisting war with its favored nation. Both Washington and Adams, in their respective negotiations with Britain and France, managed to buy enough time to prevent hawks at home from driving the agenda and declaring war. To accomplish this, they did not have to assume exceptional powers; they only needed to assert their constitutionally guaranteed authority to appoint ambassadors, which they did.24
It comes as no surprise that Washington, who arrived at the office with more political capital than any subsequent president, could accomplish this much, but Adams came with little capital and faced headstrong opposition almost from the outset. Unlike Washington, he was in no position to expand or even define presidential powers. The aggressive acts taken by Federalists during his administration—raising and supporting a large federal army and passing the Alien and Sedition Acts—were pushed through by High Federalists in Congress and within his own cabinet. Presidential leadership was not required. Although Adams possessed the trappings of the presidency, he did not have the support necessary to lead the nation in the manner he had hoped and perhaps expected; he could hardly arbitrate between conflicting parties when neither party paid him much respect. To be a strong president required more than exercising the powers granted by the Constitution and augmented during Washington’s administration. This legal authority was necessary but not sufficient to exert leadership, Adams inadvertently demonstrated. Although it was nowhere written, an effective president would need to build greater support and command higher esteem than his office alone guaranteed.
That said, Federalists and Republicans alike realized they could not possibly achieve their goals without capturing the presidency. Since party-line voting had solidified in Congress, overriding a presidential veto by a two-thirds vote of both houses became nearly impossible, and that, in effect, gave the president an absolute “negative” over any legislation—a warrant that the framers had rejected. The power to appoint ambassadors had given the president the lead role in foreign relations, and this turned out to have commercial as well as military implications. Cabinet officers, whom the president appointed and could dismiss at will, had come to play a major role in shaping policy, functioning in some ways as the executive council the framers never created. These powers, when considered together, were too great to wind up in the hands of the opposition, so electing the president superseded all other goals. In 1800, as Adams entered the fourth and final year of his first term in office, both sides readied for an epic battle. All the political struggles of the 1790s would be rolled into one: Which party could place its own man in the highest office in the land?
Ironically, anticipation of the election in some ways softened dissent. The Virginia legislature had appealed to other states to follow its lead in declaring the Alien and Sedition Acts “unconstitutional,” but none did. The rebels in Pennsylvania had hoped others would join them in resisting wartime taxes, but none did. Instead, with the election looming, most Republicans chose to alter their tactics, preferring electoral politics over direct or violent confrontation; playing too strong a hand, they reasoned, would only hurt their chances at the ballot box. Here was a payoff for free and reasonably frequent elections, which not only prevented dictatorship but also provided an alternative to revolutionary upheavals. Yet the election would not proceed along the lines the delegates to the Federal Convention had intended, because they had failed to predict the hardening of party lines. Viewing the presidency as a winner-take-all affair, each side, of necessity, tried to muscle its way into power, pushing the limits of the system stipulated in the Constitution.
The jockeying began at the state level. Since electors were to be chosen in a manner determined by state legislatures, Republicans and Federalists alike realized that to elect a president, they would have to organize locally and secure majorities in those bodies. Organizational techniques varied from state to state, but partisans had previously figured out ways to solidify support for candidates to state offices and Congress. Legislative leaders in Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia caucused to nominate candidates and strategize. Party activists in Delaware and New Jersey gathered in state conventions. In Pennsylvania and Maryland, local party committees coordinated efforts to select slates and bring out the vote. By 1800, these fledgling party organizations were poised to tackle the much larger task of electing a president.25
Several states were not competitive, but a few were. In Pennsylvania in 1799, Republicans prevailed in a close gubernatorial election, but the state senate remained in the hands of Federalists, and the two parties couldn’t agree on the manner of selecting electors. Confident they had a majority, Republicans favored statewide elections that would give them all of Pennsylvania’s fifteen electors, but Federalists pushed for district elections, in which they would capture several spots. Fearful that the new governor, Thomas McKean, would try to rig the system in favor of the Republicans, the U.S. senator James Ross, the Federalist whom McKean defeated, introduced a bill in Congress that would allow a committee of thirteen—six senators, six representatives, and one representative selected by the Senate—to judge the eligibility of contested electors from any state.26
Republicans immediately cried foul. Both the Senate and the House were under Federalist control, and if Ross’s bill passed, Federalists could police the election in such a manner as to produce a president of their own persuasion. Republican senators tried amending the bill to make it less conspiratorial; committee members should be chosen by lot, they said, and the proceedings should be open to the public. The Federalist majority rejected both amendments, and the bill proceeded through its first and second readings.27
On the third and final reading, the South Carolina Republican Charles Pinckney (son of Thomas Pinckney’s cousin) took the floor and assailed the bill as “even more alarming than the alien and sedition law.” His central argument was irrefutable: “By the Constitution, electors of a President are to be chosen in the manner directed by the State Legislatures—this is all that is said…. There is not a single word in the Constitution which can, by the most tortured construction, be extended to give Congress, or any part of our Federal Government, a right to make or alter the State Legislature’s directions on this subject.” This was true not only in the letter of the law but in the spirit as well. Pinckney, who had been a delegate to the Federal Convention, reminded the House that he and his colleagues, when writing the Constitution, had intentionally stripped Congress of its authority to choose the president, except when electors could not produce a majority winner. They had done this in the hopes of preventing intrigue and ensuring presidential independence, but if Ross’s bill passed, intrigue would b
e the inevitable result, and the president would become a creature of Congress. In a contested election, he predicted, “party spirit” would “govern every decision.” Losers at the state level would raise objections that their friends in Congress would uphold, thereby invalidating their opponents’ electors. Free elections would thus become farcical. “Give the power of deciding on their votes, and of rejecting or receiving them as they please, to thirteen men, all of the same political description, all wishing the same men, sitting behind closed doors, and whose deliberations are removed from the public eye, and you will find it difficult to avoid suspicion.” Citizens would understandably lose faith in “the integrity of government”—the bedrock of a republican nation.28
It was a carefully prepared and persuasive speech, but fortunately for the bill’s proponents there was no need for a reasoned rebuttal. Immediately after Pinckney relinquished the floor the question was called, and Ross’s bill passed the Senate along strict party lines, 16 to 12.29
The House, though, killed the measure by making alterations the Senate did not accept. Members there had their own reasons for not going along with the Senate’s plan. According to the Constitution, the House would choose the president if electors produced no clear winner, but Ross’s bill would effectively give control of the election to the Senate, which determined the majority of the committee’s thirteen members. Further, moderate Federalists in the House faced elections by the people every two years, and once the Republican newspaper Aurora pirated a copy of the bill and published it, congressmen who supported it would do so at their peril.30
