Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  To the end of his life Adams always felt a deep need to emphasize the natural inequality of people. Somehow or other it became an explanation and a vindication of his own extraordinary rise from mediocrity. Jefferson, of course, never felt such a need.

  NINE

  THE PRESIDENT VS. THE VICE PRESIDENT

  WHEN WASHINGTON ASSUMED the presidency in 1789 many people, including Thomas Jefferson, thought that he might serve for life. That was why Jefferson claimed that the office of the president resembled a Polish king—an elective monarch, something that was not out of the question in the eighteenth century. As James Wilson, one of the initial justices of the Supreme Court, noted, in the distant past “crowns, in general, were originally elective.”1 But Washington had no intention of serving for life. He had tried to retire in 1792, but was talked out of it. But by 1796 he was determined to leave the office at the end of his second term. That posed an ominous threat to the Union. As the Spanish minister pointed out, Washington’s special status in the eyes of the people had saved the nation from “internal dissention.” But that could not last, “because it seems impossible that there could be found another man so beloved of all. . . . Disunion will follow.”2

  Rumors of Washington’s stepping down left Adams, who was clearly not beloved by all, excited and nervous, and he sent off a series of anxious letters to Abigail that she was to show no one. He told her that they faced a momentous decision—“Either We must enter upon Ardours more trying than any ever yet experienced; or retire to Quincy Farmers for Life.” He assumed he was the “Heir Apparent” to the presidency, but he was not sure what to do politically. By attempting to represent Adams “as a Man of Moderation,” the “Southern Gentry,” he said, were playing “a very artful Game.” Although they conceded that Adams was “inclined to limited Monarchy and somewhat Attached to the English,” they claimed he was much less so than John Jay or Alexander Hamilton. Adams thought that this insidious southern scheme was designed to have him remain as vice president, “provided the Northern Gentlemen would consent that Jefferson should be president.”3

  This, however, was the one thing he was sure of: he was “determined,” he said, “not to serve under Jefferson.” He could never be vice president under someone other than Washington, “especially if that other should entertain sentiments so opposite to mine as to endanger the Peace of the Nation.” Given the nature of the electoral process, where the person who received the most votes became president and the runner-up became vice president, having the two chief executive officials possess contrasting political views was quite possible and perilous. “It will be a dangerous Crisis in public affairs,” he warned, “if the President and Vice President should be in opposite Boxes.”4

  Neither Adams nor Jefferson had anticipated the United States becoming riven by parties. Jefferson thought that allegiance to a party would be “the last degradation of a free and moral agent,” a denial of being an independent and disinterested citizen. “If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” he said, “I would not go there at all.” Adams agreed. Parties were “the greatest political Evil” imaginable. He dreaded nothing as much as “a Division of the Republick into two great Parties, each arranged under its Leader, and concerting Measures in opposition to each other.”5

  Yet that was precisely what was happening. By February 1796, Adams saw that “the Electioneering Campaign is opened already,” and his worst fears of “the silly and the wicked Game” were being realized. Jefferson as “‘the good Patriot, Statesman, and Philosopher’” was being “held up as the Successor.” “The Accursed Spirit which actuates a vast Body of People,” including the anti-Federalists, desperate debtors, and “frenchified Tools,” would, if victorious, “murder all good Men among Us and destroy all the Wisdom & Virtue of the Country.”6 Despite all this—despite his dread of parties and his belief that politics had become just a “Game” that he was weary of and actually not very good at—Adams nevertheless didn’t “know how I could live out of it.”7

  Jefferson, who by contrast was very good at the game of politics, never admitted even privately that he enjoyed it; in fact, he always denied having any great yearning for political office. In his “younger years” he may have had a “spice of ambition,” he told James Madison in 1795, but that “has long since evaporated.” To Madison’s entreaties that he come out of retirement and lead the Republicans, he said that his two dozen years of service meant that the public no longer had any claim on him.8 Yet this repeated insistence that he wanted nothing more than to be home with his family and his books may not have been entirely honest. He later confessed to his daughter Mary that those years of retirement from the public, between 1793 and 1797, were the most depressing of his life. Withdrawing from the world had led to “an anti-social & misanthropic state of mind.” Ultimately, he was every bit as ambitious as Adams.9

  Although Jefferson never acknowledged that he wanted to become president, neither did he ever pretend, publicly or privately, to be a disinterested spectator standing above all parties. If the two parties were simply divided over their greed for office, as in England, then not taking sides might make sense. “But,” he told William Branch Giles of Virginia, “where the principle of difference is as substantial and as strongly pronounced as between the republicans and the Monocrats of our country, I hold it as honorable to take a firm and decided part, and as immoral to pursue a middle line, as between the parties of Honest men, and Rogues, into which every country is divided.”10 This, of course, was precisely the opposite of Adams’s position, which always sought to maintain a middle line above parties.

  • • •

  SINCE WASHINGTON HAD BEEN UNANIMOUSLY acclaimed as president in 1788 and 1792, the election of 1796 became the first contest for the presidency in American history. It was conducted by two rival political parties in a culture that disparaged and condemned political parties and partisanship. And these two parties, which had substantial numbers of followers, were led by two famous revolutionaries and two former friends, Adams and Jefferson.

  “Led” is a misnomer, for neither man campaigned for the presidency in any modern sense. Neither left his home to meet people and shake hands, and neither made speeches or wrote essays on his own behalf. Both thought in traditional terms that a gentleman should never directly seek an office, only be called to it. Because the Federalists were making “continual insinuations in the public papers” that the former secretary of state had secret desires to become president, Jefferson believed that it would have been indecent even to acknowledge these insinuations. But now that the Republicans themselves had begun urging him to seek the presidency, Jefferson told Madison that he at last felt free to declare that the question of the presidency was “for ever closed with me.” It was important that this be clearly understood so that the Republicans not divide their votes, “which,” he said, “might be fatal to the Southern interest”—a revealing slip, later altered to read “the Republican interest,” that showed that Jefferson and many other Republicans in 1795 were thinking very much in sectional terms. Indeed, Jefferson was increasingly coming to identify the Federalists with northern values—finance, paper money, and religious fanaticism.11

  Madison became fearful that pressuring Jefferson too much might make him even more adamant in his refusal to consider the presidency, and thus he cut off all communication with his friend for six months. Adams likewise resisted telling Federalist visitors of any plans he might have for the presidency. When they suggested that Hamilton might make a good vice president and hinted that support for Adams might depend on his attitude toward the funding system, he recorded in his diary that he remained “wholly silent.”12

  Washington had planned on announcing his retirement in June 1796, but Hamilton urged him to “hold the thing until the last moment” in September, which would hinder the Republicans’ electioneering and give the Federalists time to undermine Jefferson’s candidacy. Ironically, the Federalists’ c
ontinual attacks on Jefferson in the press as the silent leader of the opposition elevated his status as a presidential candidate. When Washington’s Farewell Address was published in September 1796, the leading Republican newspaper, the Philadelphia Aurora, declared that the two obvious candidates to succeed Washington were Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The choice was now clear: “Whether we shall have at the head of our executive a steadfast friend of the Rights of the People, or an advocate for hereditary power and distinctions.”13

  Although the Republicans by 1796 obviously wanted Jefferson for president, many of the Federalists weren’t sure they preferred Adams for president. Hamilton and several other Federalist leaders thought he was too irascible and indiscreet and doubted whether he was a firm supporter of the Bank of the United States and the government’s financial program. Hoping to cut into support for Jefferson, Hamilton favored a southerner as an alternative to Adams, first suggesting Patrick Henry, and after some second thoughts, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, the diplomat who had recently negotiated an important treaty with Spain.

  Hamilton and other Federalists were fearful of Jefferson’s being elected to either the presidency or the vice presidency. If Jefferson became president, said Oliver Wolcott Jr., the Connecticut Federalist who had replaced Hamilton as secretary of the treasury in 1795, he would “innovate upon and fritter away the Constitution.” But, continued Wolcott, Jefferson as vice president might be even worse. “He would become the rallying point of faction and French influence,” and “without any responsibility, he would . . . divide, and undermine, and finally subvert the rival administration.”14 Better to support Pinckney as president, some Federalists declared, than to see Jefferson in any high office, even if it cost Adams the presidency.

  Adams heard these rumors and was appalled at the idea that Hamilton was intriguing “to give Pinckney a Sly slide over my head.” The idea that Jefferson might come in ahead of him was disturbing enough, he said, but that “such an unknown being as Pinckney” might become president, “trampling on the bellies of hundreds of other men infinitely his superiors in talents, services, and reputation,” made him afraid for the safety of the nation. The possibility of a nobody like Pinckney becoming president made him change his earlier opinion about Jefferson as chief executive. “I had rather hazard my little Venture in the ship to the pilotage of Jefferson,” he told Abigail in mid-December 1796, “than that of Pinckney.” Adams was coming to realize that he disliked some Federalists more than he did his former friend, despite the fact that Jefferson was being hailed as the leader of the opposition Republican Party.15

  The campaign was rancorous, with the followers of Jefferson and Adams using the writings of each against him. In an attempt to weaken Jefferson’s support among southern slaveholders, Federalists drew on his antislavery remarks in his Notes on the State of Virginia and on his 1791 correspondence with the black mathematician Benjamin Banneker, in which he referred to “our black brethren” and his desire to be shown that they had “talents equal to those of other colours of men.” The Federalists also used Jefferson’s comments on religion in the Notes—“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”—to accuse him of being hostile to Christianity. Other Federalists criticized his soft, sentimental, and “womanish” affection for France, his cowardice as governor during the Revolution, and—in contrast to Adams, whose public service was untiring—his neglect of his public duties by his retirement to Monticello. Jefferson, declared the Federalists, was merely a soft and weak intellectual—someone perhaps suited to be a college professor or the head of a philosophical society, “but certainly not the first magistrate of a great nation.”16

  In the case of Adams, the Republicans had more writings to work with, since Adams had published so much. His Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America had been reissued in London in 1794, an edition that reached the United States just in time to be used against Adams in the campaign. The Republicans claimed that his volumes were a “Eulogium of Monarchy and the British,” written, they noted, “whilst Minister at the Court of London.” In the Defence, the Republicans asserted, Adams had questioned the whole idea of popular government. He had admitted that elections were fine, if “soberly made.” But since electing high officers was such a “hazardous experiment,” so liable to be disturbed by parties, factions, drunkenness, and bribes, the people sooner or later would discover that the electoral process was not working well. They would find that the only recourse they had was to reduce the frequency of elections by lengthening the terms of the chief magistrate and senators gradually “till they become for life; and if this is not found to be an adequate remedy, there will remain no other but to make them hereditary.”17 Adams had expressed such antipopular sentiments so frequently that denial was impossible. Not that he ever tried. But people had heard his eccentric views so often that perhaps they had begun discounting them.

  Adams was in fact pleased that so many people were paying attention to his Defence, even if it was for the purpose of criticizing him. In a hundred years, he said, “it would not have been so much read” as it was during the election campaign. A new third edition was on the way, and he told Abigail, with his usual self-protective sarcasm, that he expected “it will be got by Heart by All Americans who can read.”18

  The electors met in their respective state capitals in December 1796 and, although the ballots would not be certified until they were opened in February 1797, the results began leaking out. In mid-December Madison was preparing his friend Jefferson for the probability that he would become vice president. “It seems essential,” he told his fellow Virginian, “that you should not refuse the station which is likely to be your lot.” Besides, Madison said, serving with your former friend Adams as his vice president “may have a valuable effect on his councils,” especially in foreign policy and America’s relations with France, which were verging on war. Adams would not necessarily follow the domestic policies of the Washington administration either. His censures of the paper systems and his anger at the efforts of New York to put Pinckney above him had separated him from “the British faction.” In addition, Madison told Jefferson, Adams was now speaking of you “in friendly terms” and would “no doubt be soothed by your acceptance of a place subordinate to him.” But, he said, all these calculations might be worth nothing in the face of Adams’s “political principles and prejudices.”19

  In the final tally Adams received seventy-one electoral votes, mostly from New England and New York and New Jersey. Jefferson was next with sixty-eight, all from Pennsylvania and the states in the South. Pinckney received fifty-nine votes and Aaron Burr, the presumed Republican vice presidential candidate, received thirty, but only one vote from Virginia. Because personal ambitions, local interests, friendships, and sectional ties tended to override national party loyalties, the election was confused and chaotic. The Constitution provided for the electors to select any two candidates that suited them, even if they were from opposing parties, as long as they were from two different states. So in Pennsylvania one elector voted for both Jefferson and Pinckney. In Maryland an elector voted for Adams and Jefferson. And all the electors of South Carolina voted for both Jefferson and Pinckney. Despite these examples of crossing party lines, however, eight of sixteen states did vote a straight Adams-Pinckney or Jefferson-Burr ticket. Yet, as the vote of the South Carolina electors suggests, the election in fact reflected more of a sectional than a party split.

  Adams believed that the “narrow Squeak” of three votes by which he had beaten Jefferson was humiliating, and he never got over it.20 He was especially upset by the prospect of men he considered his friends voting against him. When he learned that Thomas McKean, the chief justice of Pennsylvania, had voted for Jefferson, he was hurt. “All Confidence between Men and Men,” he told Abigail, “is suspended for a time.” In fact, he hated the whole process of elec
tions, believing it a disgrace to republicanism. Hearing in the Senate chamber that some electors had actually voted for George Clinton, Adams gritted his teeth and exclaimed, “Damn ‘em’ Damn ‘em’ Damn ‘em’ you see that an elective government will not do.”21

  • • •

  THE COUNTRY WAS INITIALLY excited by the election of the Federalist John Adams as president and the Republican Thomas Jefferson as vice president. It seemed to promise an end to factionalism and a new era of good feelings. Since both men were thought to have a mutual respect for each other, it seemed possible that they might renew their friendship and restore the revolutionaries’ dream of nonpartisan government.22 During the campaign Adams had scarcely thought of Jefferson as his opponent. He had directed his anger more at Hamilton, who, he said, was “a proud Spirited, conceited, aspiring Mortal always pretending to Morality, with as debauched Morals as old Franklin who is more his Model than any one I know.” Comparing him with Franklin was about as damning a comment about Hamilton as Adams could have made.23 Having a common enemy in Hamilton made a reconciliation of Adams and Jefferson appear all the more promising.