Newspapers rushed to Adams’s defense, with the Guardian of New Brunswick declaring “Sedition by all the laws of God and man, is, and ever has been criminal.” Common law tradition in England long had a history of restricting criticism of the government, but with the French Revolution threatening to spread the Reign of Terror across all of Europe, public criticism took on the aura of fomenting rebellion—or, at least, that was what most of the Federalists thought, provoking their ham-handed response. Adams, above all, should have known better.
Suffering from one of his few moral lapses, Adams later denied responsibility for these arguably unconstitutional laws, yet in 1798 he neither vetoed nor protested them. Republicans countered with threats to disobey federal laws, known as the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Authored in 1798 and 1799 by Madison and Jefferson, respectively, the resolutions revived the Anti-Federalist spirit with a call for state sovereignty, and comprised a philosophical bridge between the Articles of Confederation (and Tenth Amendment) and John C. Calhoun’s 1832 Doctrine of Nullification. Madison and Jefferson argued from a “compact” theory of government. States, they claimed, remained sovereign to the national government by virtue of the fact that it was the states, not the people, who formed the Union. Under this interpretation the states had the duty to “judge the constitutionality of federal acts and protect their citizens from unconstitutional and coercive federal laws.”72 Such a Lockean argument once thrilled true Revolutionaries, but now the Declaration (through inference) and the Constitution (through express statement) repudiated these doctrines. If one follows the Jeffersonians’ logic of deriving all government from “first things,” however, one must go not to the Constitution, per se, but to its roots, the Declaration, wherein it was the people of the colonies who declared independence; and the preamble to the Constitution—which, admittedly is not law itself but the intention for establishing the law—still begins, “We the People of the United States of America…” In either case, the states never were the activating or motivating body, rather simply the administering body. No other state supported Madison or Jefferson’s resolutions, which, if they had stood, would have led to an endless string of secessions—first, states from the Union, then, counties from states, then townsips from cities.
Adams’s Mettle and the Election of 1800
In one of his greatest triumphs, John Adams finally rose above this partisan rancor. Over the violent objections of Hamilton and his supporters, he dispatched William Vans Murray to negotiate with Talleyrand. The ensuing French capitulation brought an agreement to leave American shipping alone. With long-term consequences unsure, the short-term results left the Quasi War in abeyance and peace with France ensued. Adams showed his mettle and resolved the crisis. As his reward, one month later, he was voted out of office.
Much of the anger stemmed from higher tax burdens, some of which the Federalists had enacted for the large frigates. A new tax, though, the Direct Tax of 1798, penalized property ownership, triggering yet another tax revolt, Fries’s Rebellion, wherein soldiers sent into Philadelphia to enforce the tax encountered not bullets but irate housewives who doused the troops with pails of hot water. Fries was arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to be executed, but he found the Federalists to be far more merciful than their portrayal in the Jeffersonian papers. Adams pardoned Fries, and although the tax protest shriveled, so did Federalist support in Pennsylvania.73 It bears noting, however, that in the twenty-nine years since the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, Americans had already risen in revolt three times, and on each occasion over taxation.
By 1800, the president had spent much of his time in the new “city” of Washington. Hardly a city at all, the District of Columbia was but a clump of dirty buildings, arranged around “unpaved, muddy cesspools in winter, waiting for summer to transform them into mosquito-infested swamps.”74 Adams disliked Washington—he had not liked Philadelphia much better—and managed to get back to Quincy, Massachusetts, to his beloved Abigail whenever possible. Never possessed of a sunny disposition, Adams drifted into deep pessimism about the new nation. Although he ran against Jefferson again in 1800, this time the Virginian (a “shadow man,” Adams called him, for his ability to strike without leaving his fingerprints on any weapon) bested him. Anger and bitterness characterized the two men’s relationship by that point. Of Jefferson, Adams wrote, “He has talents I know, and integrity, I believe; but his mind is now poisoned with passion, prejudice, and faction.”75 Political warfare had soured Adams even more since he had become president. Hamilton, whom Adams called the “bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,” vexed him from behind and Jefferson, from in front. Besieged from both ends of the political spectrum—the Jeffersonian Republicans blamed him for the Alien and Sedition Acts, while Hamilton’s arch-Federalists withdrew their support because of his peace with France—Adams was left with few friends. When the electoral college met, Jefferson and his vice presidential candidate Aaron Burr tied with 73 electoral votes each; Adams trailed in third place with 65.
Then, as in 1796, wily politicians tried to alter the choice of the people and the rule of law. Jefferson and Burr had tied in the electoral college because the Constitution did not anticipate parties or tickets and gave each elector two votes, one each for president and vice president. A tie threw the election to the lame-duck Federalist House of Representatives, which now had the Constitutional prerogative to choose between the two Republicans. To make matters worse, the Federalists expected from Burr, but never received, a polite statement declining the presidency if it were to be offered to him. Burr had other ideas, hoping some deadlock would result in his election, in spite of failing to win the electoral college and all of his prior agreements with the Republican leadership.
House Federalists, with Hamilton as their de facto leader, licked their chops at the prospect of denying Jefferson the presidency. Yet the unscrupulous and unpredictable Burr was just not tolerable. Hamilton was forced to see the truth: his archenemy Jefferson was the lesser of two evils. By siding with the Virginian, Hamilton furthered American democracy while simultaneously (and literally) signing his own death warrant: Colonel Burr would soon take vengeance against Hamilton over letters the secretary had written supposedly impugning Burr’s honor.
Meanwhile, the lame-duck president frantically spent his last hours ensuring that the Jeffersonians did not destroy what he and Washington had spent twelve years constructing. The Republicans had decisively won both the legislative and executive branches of government in November, leaving Adams only one hope for slowing down their agenda: judicial appointments. His unreasonable fear and hatred of the Jeffersonians led him to take a step that, although constitutional, nevertheless directly defied the will of the voters. In February 1801, Adams sent a new Judiciary Act to the lame-duck Congress, and it passed, creating approximately five dozen new federal judgeships at all levels, from federal circuit and district courts to justices of the peace. Adams then proceeded to commission ardent Federalists to each of these lifetime posts—a process so time consuming that the president was busy signing commissions into the midnight hours of his last day in office. These “midnight judges,” as the Republicans soon dubbed them, were not Adams’s only judiciary legacy to Jefferson. In the final weeks of his tenure, Adams also nominated, and the lame-duck Senate approved, John Marshall as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.76
Marshall’s appointment was, Adams later wrote, “a gift to the people of the United States” that was “the proudest of my life.”77 Throughout a brilliant career that spanned the entirety of the American Revolutionary era, Adams left America many great gifts. In Marshall, Adams bequeathed to the United States a chief justice fully committed to capitalism, and willing to amend pristine property rights to the cause of rapid development. Unlike Jefferson and fellow Virginian John Taylor, who weighed in as one of the leading economic thinkers of the day, Marshall perceived that true wealth came from ideas put into action, not vaults of gold or acres of land.78
Whereas the Jeffersonians, Taylor, and other later thinkers such as William Gouge would pin the economic hopes of the country on agriculture and metallic money, Marshall understood that the world had moved past that. Without realizing it, Adams’s last-minute appointment of Marshall ensured the defeat of the Jeffersonian ideal over the long run, but on the morning of Jefferson’s inauguration, America’s first involuntary one-term president (his son John Quincy would be the second) scarcely felt victorious. Adams departed Washington, D.C., at sunrise, several hours before his rival’s inauguration. Adams was criticized for lack of generosity toward Jefferson, but his abrupt departure, faithful to the Constitution, echoed like a thunderclap throughout the world. Here was the clear heir to Washington, narrowly beaten in a legitimate election, not only turning the levers of power over to a hated foe, but entrusting the entire machinery of government to an enemy faction—all without so much as a single bayonet raised or a lawsuit threatened. That event could be described as the most important election in the history of the world. With one colossal exception in 1860, the fact is that with this selfless act of obedience to the law, John Adams ensured that the principle of a peaceful and legal transfer of power in the United States would never even be questioned, let alone seriously challenged.
Growing America
Adams handed over to Jefferson a thriving, energetic Republic that was changing before his very eyes. A large majority of Americans remained farmers, yet increasingly cities expanded and gained more influence over the national culture at a rate that terrified Jefferson. Baltimore, Savannah, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston all remained central locations for trade, shipping, and intellectual life, but new population centers such as Cincinnati, Mobile, Richmond, Detroit, Fort Wayne, Chicago, Louisville, and Nashville surfaced as regional hubs. New York gradually emerged as a more dominant city than even Boston or Philadelphia. A manumission society there worked to end slavery, and had won passage of the Gradual Manumission Act of 1799. Above all, New York symbolized the transformation in city government that occurred in most urban areas in the early 1800s. Government, instead of an institution that relied on property holdings of a few as its source of power, evolved into a “public body financed largely by taxation and devoting its energies to distinctly public concerns.”79
A city like New York, despite its advances and refinements, still suffered from problems that would jolt modern Americans. An oppressive stench coming from the thousands of horses, cattle, dogs, cats, and other animals that walked the streets pervaded the atmosphere. (By 1850, one estimate put the number of horses alone in New York City at one hundred thousand, defecating at a rate of eighteen pounds a day and urinating some twenty gallons per day, each!) If living creatures did not suffice to stink up the city, the dead ones did: city officials had to cope with hundreds of carcasses per week, hiring out the collection of these dead animals to entrepreneurs.
Combined with the garbage that littered the streets, the animal excrement and road kill made for a powerful odor. And human bodies mysteriously turned up too. By midcentury, the New York City coroner’s office, always underfunded, was paying a bounty to anyone collecting bodies from the Hudson River. Hand-to-hand combat broke out on more than one occasion between the aquatic pseudoambulance drivers who both claimed the same floating cadaver and, of course, its reward.
Most important, though, the urban dwellers already had started to accept that the city owed them certain services, and had gradually developed an unhealthy dependence on city hall for a variety of services and favors. Such dependence spawned a small devil of corruption that the political spoils system would later loose fully grown. City officials, like state officials, also started to wield their authority to grant charters for political and personal ends. Hospitals, schools, road companies, and banks all had to “prove” their value to the community before the local authorities would grant them a charter. No small amount of graft crept into the system, quietly undermining Smithian concepts that the community was served when individuals pursued profit.
One fact is certain: in 1800, Americans were prolific. Population increases continued at a rate of 25 percent per decade and the constitutionally mandated 1800 census counted 5,308,473 Americans, double the 1775 number.80 Foreign immigrants accounted for some of that population increase, but an incredibly high birthrate, a result of economic abundance and a relatively healthier lifestyle, explained most of the growth. Ethnically, Americans were largely of Anglo, Celtic (Scots and Scots-Irish), and African descent, with a healthy smattering of French, Swedes, Dutch, and Germans thrown in. And of these 5.33 million Americans, 24 of 25 lived on farms or in country villages.
At least 50 percent of all Americans were female, and although their legal status was unenviable, it had improved considerably from that of European women. Most accepted the idea that a woman’s sphere of endeavor was dedicated to the house, church, and the rearing of children, a belief prevailing among American men and women alike. Women possessed no constitutional political role. Economically, widows and single women (feme sole) could legally hold property, but they surrendered those rights with marriage (feme covert). Trust funds and prenuptial agreements (an American invention) helped some middle-class families circumvent these restrictions. A few women conducted business via power of attorney and other American contractual innovations, and a handful engaged in cottage industry. None of the professions—law, medicine (midwifery excepted), ministry, or of course the army—were open to females, although, in the case of medicine, this had less to do with sexism than it did the physical necessity of controlling large male patients while operating without anesthetic. Women could not attend public schools (some attended private schools or were tutored at home), and no colleges accepted women students.
Divorce was extremely difficult to obtain. Courts limited the grounds for separation, and in some states only a decree from the state legislature could effect a marital split. Despite the presentist critique by some modern feminists, the laws in the early Republic were designed as much to protect women from the unreliability and volatility of their husbands as to keep them under male control. Legislatures, for example, tailored divorce laws to ensure that husbands honored their economic duties to wives, even after childbearing age.
In stark contrast to women stood the status of African Americans. Their lot was most unenviable. Nearly one million African Americans lived in the young United States (17 percent), a number proportionately larger than today. Evolving slowly from colonial days, black slavery was by 1800 fully entrenched. Opponents of slavery saw the institution thrive after the 1794 invention of the cotton gin and the solidification of state black codes defining slaves as chattels personal—moveable personal property.
No law, or set of laws, however, embedded slavery in the South as deeply as did a single invention. Eli Whitney, a Yankee teacher who had gone south as a tutor, had conceived his cotton gin while watching a cat swipe at a rooster and gather a paw full of feathers. He cobbled together a machine with two rollers, one of fine teeth that sifted the cotton seeds out, another with brushes, that swept off the residual cotton fibers. Prior to Whitney’s invention, it took a slave an hour to process a single pound of cotton by hand; afterward, a slave could process six to ten times as much.81 In the decade of the 1790s, cotton production increased from 3,000 bales a year to 73,000; 1810 saw the production soar to 178,000 bales, all of which made slaves more indispensable than ever.82
Somehow, most African American men and women survived the ordeal of slavery. The reason for their heroic survival lies in their communities and family lives, and in their religion. The slaves built true sub-rosa societies with marriage, children, surrogate family members, and a viable folk culture—music, art, medicine, and religion. All of this they kept below the radar screen of white masters who, if they had known of these activities, would have suppressed them. A few slaves escaped to freedom, and some engaged in sabotage and even insurrections like Gabriel’s Uprising in 1800 Virginia. But for the most part,
black survival came through small, day-to-day acts of courage and determination, fueled by an enthusiastic black Christian church and Old Testamaent tales of the Hebrews’ escape from Egyptian slavery.
Between the huge social gulf of master and slave stood a vast populace of “crackers,” the plain white folk of the southern and western frontier.83 Usually associated with humble Celtic-American farmers, cracker culture affected (and continues to affect) all aspects of American life. Like many derogatory terms, cracker was ultimately embraced by those at whom it was aimed. Celtic-American frontiersmen crossed the Appalachian Mountains, and their coarse, unique folk culture arose in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. As they carved out farms from the forest, crackers planted a few acres of corn and small vegetable gardens. Cattle, sheep, and the ubiquitous hogs (“wind splitters” the crackers called them) were left to their own devices in a sort of laissez-faire grazing system. Men hunted and fished, and the women worked the farms, kept house, and bore and raised children. They ate mainly meat and corn—pork, beef, hominy, johnnycake, pone, and corn mush. Water was bad and life was hard; the men drank corn whiskey.
Their diet, combined with the hardships of frontier lifestyle, led to much sickness—fevers, chills, malaria, dysentery, rheumatism, and just plain exhaustion. Worms, insects, and parasites of every description wiggled, dug, or burrowed their way into pioneer skin, infecting it with the seven-year itch, a generic term covering scabies and crabs as well as body lice, which almost everyone suffered from. Worse, hookworm, tapeworm, and other creatures fed off the flesh, intestines, and blood of frontier Americans. Crackers seemed particularly susceptible to these maladies. Foreign travelers were shocked at the appearance of the “pale and deathly looking people” of bluish-white complexion.
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