Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  Abigail was certainly pleased by Jefferson’s election as vice president. Despite his support for Tom Paine and his being “frequently mistaken in Men & Measures,” he was, she said, not “an insincere or a corruptable Man.” She had “not a Doubt but all the Discords may be tuned to harmony by the Hand of a skillful Artist.”24 Although John Adams was certainly no skillful artist in politics, probably no president could have created political harmony in 1797. Jefferson realized that Washington was getting out at the right moment. “The President,” he told Madison, “is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag.”25 Certainly this premonition made Jefferson’s willingness to serve under Adams more comprehensible. But neither he nor Adams foresaw just how bad things would get.

  Some Republicans doubted whether Jefferson would accept the vice presidency. He had been willing to become president, but only, he told Madison, in order “to put our vessel on her republican tack before she should be thrown too much in leeward of her true principles.” He had been less sure about the vice presidency, but with Adams elected as president, he no longer had any misgivings about playing a secondary role. “I am his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in our civil government.” In addition, Jefferson believed that if Adams could be “induced to administer the government on it’s true principles, and to relinquish his bias to an English constitution,” he could become “the only sure barrier against Hamilton’s getting in.” He had written a letter to Adams to encourage these friendly feelings but had not yet sent it. He wanted Madison to look it over first.26

  In this draft of a letter to Adams, dated December 28, 1796, Jefferson told Adams that although he had not followed the campaign closely, he knew that the press had placed him and Adams in opposition to each other. He was sure, however, that very little of this opposition “has been felt by ourselves personally.” He had no doubts at all that Adams would be elected president and that he had never wished otherwise. The only way Adams could be “cheated of your succession” was through the trickery of “your arch-friend of New York.” Fortunately, he himself was beyond Hamilton’s reach. Secure at home in his warm berth among his friends and neighbors, he left “to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm.” He declared, in one of his many self-denying comments, that “I have no ambition to govern men.” All he knew was that no one would congratulate Adams for becoming president “with purer disinterestedness than myself.” Jefferson left it up to Madison to decide whether or not to post this letter to Adams.27

  Madison decided it should not be sent and outlined his reasons. Adams, he told Jefferson, already knew of Jefferson’s conciliatory feelings toward his old friend and any attempt to better those feelings might make them worse. He next suggested that there was in Jefferson’s draft “a general air on the letter which betrays the difficulty of your situation in writing it,” and Adams might be put off by that tone. Moreover, he said, might not Jefferson’s disavowing “the sublime delights of riding in the storm, etc.” be misconstrued as an insult to Adams, who seemed to enjoy riding the whirlwind of politics? Madison admitted that Jefferson knew Adams’s temper better than he did, but he always thought it to be “rather a ticklish one.” Any attempt to play down or depreciate the partisan differences between Jefferson’s backers and Adams was bound to create resentment among the Republicans. And finally, given the uncertainty of the future and the possibility that the actions of the Adams administration might generate “opposition to it from the Republican quarter,” the possession of this letter by Adams, filled as it was with Jefferson’s polite expressions of confidence in Adams due to “your personal delicacy and friendship,” was apt to cause “real embarrassments” in the months to come.28

  Jefferson thanked Madison for his discretion and agreed not to send the letter. Isolated as he was at Monticello from the hurly-burly of Philadelphia politics, he had not appreciated how “an honest expression” of his feelings toward Adams might be misused. He reiterated his affection for Adams, which went back to the beginning of the Revolution. Since their return from Europe, there had been some little incidents, he said, “which were capable of affecting a jealous mind like his.” Despite their political differences, however, Jefferson had not become “less sensible of the rectitude of [Adams’s] heart: and I wished him to know this.” He also wanted Adams to understand how pleased he was that he had become president. He informed Madison that he had written John Langdon of New Hampshire and told him the same thing: how he was willing to serve as vice president under Adams and how being secondary to Adams was natural, since he had been “secondary to him in every situation in which we ever acted together in public life for twenty years past.” The reverse would have been “the novelty,” and Adams would rightly have been offended by it. He was sure that his letter to Langdon would be conveyed to Adams.29

  Actually, Madison, without telling Jefferson, had leaked another letter to Benjamin Rush, an amiable one Jefferson had written on December 17, 1796, in which he had expressed his willingness to serve under Adams, even if they should end in a tie with the same number of electoral votes, since Adams had always been his senior in every respect. Rush in turn had conveyed the contents of this letter to Adams, who was delighted. Adams excitedly told Abigail that Jefferson had written that “Mr. Adams’s services have been longer more constant and more important” than his. Jefferson’s letter to Madison, he told Abigail, had circulated everywhere and was “considered as Evidence of his Determination to accept [the vice presidency]—of his Friendship for me—and of his Modesty and Moderation.” Adams concluded that he and Jefferson “should go on affectionately together and all would be well.”30

  • • •

  AT THIS POINT BOTH MEN SEEMED emotionally ready to bury their political differences and resume the friendship that had meant so much to them in earlier years. Jefferson, however, was politically more sensitive than Adams, more willing to accept the necessity of party. Although he once had said that he disliked parties, he had become the reluctant leader of a transatlantic republican cause, a cause that was threatened by the English monarchy abroad and the Federalist monocrats at home. He and his fellow Republicans sincerely feared for the fate of their sister republic France, and thought that the destiny of the American republic was tied up with that of revolutionary France. For Jefferson the Republicans’ organization as a party was essential but temporary. As soon as republicanism was firmly established in Europe and the United States, the Republican Party could wither away.

  Hence, with Madison’s advice very much in mind, Jefferson concluded that as the leader of an opposition party he ought not to get involved in the administration’s affairs in any way. His excuse was that his participation would be constitutionally impossible. As president of the Senate, he was a “member of a legislative house” and forbidden by the Constitution to meddle in executive business.31

  Adams was less politically astute, and for a moment he actually seemed to think that he and Jefferson might be able to collaborate in running the government. As president, he did not see himself as the leader of something called the Federalist Party. He admitted that he was a Federalist, by which he meant that he was a friend of government, of hierarchy, and of law and order. Although he was as suspicious of banks and Hamilton’s financial program as Jefferson, he hated the French Revolution with a passion and thus he tilted toward England in its titanic struggle with France. That alone identified him as a Federalist and set him at odds with Jefferson and the Republicans.

  All Adams had to guide him as president was his image of an independent executive set forth in his writings. Despite all his theoretical emphasis on the executive, he had actually never served in any executive capacity. He had never been a governor or a cabinet officer. Even as vice president he had not been involved in the discussions and decisions of the Washington administration.

  He immediately revealed his
political naïveté by retaining the members of Washington’s cabinet, whose loyalties were not with him but with Hamilton. He was determined, he later claimed, “to make as few removals as possible,” and certainly none “from personal malice” or “from mere Party Considerations.” Besides, he recalled, Washington had asked him to keep his cabinet, and he feared that if he removed any one of them “it would turn the world upside down.” According to Madison, Adams at the beginning was uncertain over whether or not he could remove his predecessor’s ministers without the Senate’s advice and consent. Madison suggested that either “the maxims of the British Govt. are still uppermost in his mind” or Adams believed his election was “a continuation of the same reign.”32

  Although Adams later realized that keeping Washington’s cabinet members was the greatest political error of his presidency, at the time he had “no particular objections to any of them.” But Jefferson understood his mistake at once. By May 1797 he knew that Adams’s cabinet had been working from the outset to alienate the president from his vice president. These “Hamiltonians by whom he is surrounded,” he told Elbridge Gerry, “are only a little less hostile to him than to me.” He realized that these “machinations” by the followers of Hamilton were bound to affect the cordiality of his relationship with Adams, but he didn’t know how to convince Adams that he wasn’t trying to undermine his government. Although he realized that not knowing each other’s motives “may be a source of private uneasiness with us,” he was confident that neither he nor Adams would allow it to harm “our public duties.”33

  Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia on March 2, 1797, and he promptly called on Adams, who the following morning returned the call. According to Adams’s recollections published in the Boston Patriot in 1809, he had sought out Jefferson on March 3 because he trusted him. He had been his friend for twenty-five years, sometimes in very perilous situations, and he had “always found him assiduous, laborious, and as far as I could judge, upright and faithful.” They had differed over the French Revolution, but Adams said that he had no reason to think that they differed over the U.S. Constitution. He thought that the slurs and slanders of partisan politics should not prevent him from consulting someone like Jefferson, with all his experience and talent.34

  In Jefferson’s account based on notes he had taken at the time, Adams said he was glad to find Jefferson alone, for he wanted to have “a free conversation” with him. He explained that because of French seizures of American merchant ships, the situation with France had become dire and threatened to end in war. Adams wanted to send a mission at once to France and wished that Jefferson could be a member of it, but he realized that it might be improper to send the vice president abroad.35 If so, he hoped to send Madison instead, along with two others, in a high-level commission that would represent all sections of the country.

  Jefferson told Adams that his participation was out of the question. He also doubted Madison would join a mission either, given that he had turned down an earlier invitation to go abroad. Adams was disappointed, but said that he would appoint Madison anyway “and leave the responsibility on him.”36 According to Adams, he and Jefferson “parted as good friends as we had always lived.”37

  The next day, March 4, was Adams’s inauguration as president, the most trying day in his life, he told Abigail. Washington attended and seemed serene and peaceful, as if he were enjoying “a Tryumph” over Adams. “Methought I heard him think Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! see which of Us will be happiest.” But Adams knew very well the historic importance of the occasion. “The Sight of the Sun Setting full orbit and other rising tho less Splendid was a novelty.” He and many others were deeply moved, with much weeping. “Exchanging Presidents without Tumult,” said Adams, was no small thing.38

  In his inaugural address Adams tried to counter some of the impressions his publications had made. It was as if he suddenly realized that as president he couldn’t talk to the country in the blunt way he had in his writings. He praised the Constitution and said that there had never been “any objection to it in my mind that the Executive and Senate were not more permanent.” Nor had he ever thought of “promoting any alteration” of it except as the people themselves might desire in the future and in accord with the amendment process set forth in the document. He urged that Americans encourage education and religion as “the only means of preserving our Constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments.” At the end, he felt it necessary to express his “veneration for the religion of a people who profess and call themselves Christians,” remarks that Jefferson would never have made. Adams apparently thought that affirming “a decent respect for Christianity” was much needed as an important qualification for public service in light of Thomas Paine’s recent publication of The Age of Reason, which had dismissed Christianity as an absurdity.39

  The next day Adams excitedly told Abigail that all agreed that his inauguration “taken all together . . . was the sublimest Thing ever exhibited in America.” But when some high-toned Federalists criticized his address as too soft on France and the Republicans, he became indignant. “If the Federalists go to playing Pranks,” he told Abigail, “I will resign the office and let Jefferson lead them to Peace, Wealth and Power if he will.” He then launched into one of his characteristic outbursts against ambition and emulation, which he feared “will turn our Government topsy turvy.” Although he had written endlessly about “Jealousies & Rivalries,” with “Checks and Ballances as their Antidotes,” never had they “stared me in the face in such horrid forms as at present.”40

  Jefferson said nothing about Adams’s inaugural address. In fact, he seems to have had no misgivings whatsoever over Paine’s harsh criticism of Christianity or over anything else Paine wrote. Several weeks later he received a long letter from Paine predicting the bankruptcy and likely downfall of England. Paine warned Jefferson that as vice president he had to keep an eye on Adams, for Adams had “a Natural disposition to blunder and to offend.” With his bad temper, said Paine, he could “do nothing but harm.”41

  On the day following his inauguration, March 5, Adams met with his secretary of the treasury, Oliver Wolcott, and told him about his plans for sending a mission to France with Madison as a member. He was surprised to find Wolcott cool to the whole idea of a mission and especially concerned about Madison being a member. That, Wolcott said, would stir “the passions of our parties” in Congress and throughout the country, and he offered to resign.

  Adams was taken aback. He consulted two other department heads, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and Secretary of War James McHenry, and he came to realize that “the violent party spirit of Hamilton’s friends” made Madison’s appointment impossible. “I could not do it,” he recalled, “without quarreling outright with my ministers, whom Washington’s appointment had made my masters.”42

  According to Jefferson, the next day, March 6, he and Adams came away together from a dinner at Washington’s house. As Jefferson tried to explain his attempts to persuade Madison to join the commission, Adams immediately became embarrassed and said that “some objections to that nomination had been raised.” He was going on with excuses when the two men had to part to go to their respective residences. Adams, noted Jefferson, “never after that said one word to me on the subject, or ever consulted me as to any measures of the government.” Jefferson correctly concluded that Adams in his innocence and in the enthusiasm of his inauguration had forgotten about his Federalist connections and, as he was wont to do, had allowed himself to be governed by “the feeling of the moment.” But as soon as Adams had met his cabinet the next day, he had realized his mistake “and returned to his former party ways.”43

  • • •

  ADAMS FELT ISOLATED IN PHILADELPHIA, with “no Society but Statesmen” and
with no one he could fully trust. His vice president was no confidant, and besides, he told Abigail, who was back in Quincy, Jefferson had left for Virginia. “He is as he was,” he said. What he needed was her presence. “I must go to you or you must come to me. I cannot live without you.”44

  The most pressing challenge facing the president was dealing with the deteriorating relations with France. Angered by Jay’s Treaty with Great Britain, the French had begun seizing American ships and confiscating their cargoes. John Quincy Adams, the president’s son, who was now minister to the Netherlands, alerted his father to France’s goals in a remarkable series of letters. In 1795 France had turned the Netherlands into a satellite and renamed it the Batavian Republic and, relying on French republican sympathizers in various countries, was now seeking to expand its republican revolution elsewhere in Europe. More alarming, France had its eye on the United States as well. It was, said John Quincy, bent on undermining the Federalists and bringing about the “triumph of French party, French principles, French influence in the United States.” The French government had been led to believe that “the People of the United States have but a feeble attachment to their Government, and will not support them in a contest with that of France.” Young Adams even suggested that France planned to invade the South and, with the support of Jefferson and the Republican Party there and in the West, break up the Union and turn the United States into another puppet republic.45

  By the time Adams took office, the French had decided to confront the United States directly. The French government refused to receive as minister Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Thomas Pinckney’s elder brother, and intensified its seizure of American ships carrying British goods.