This belief in the natural benevolence and sociability of people made modern republican government possible. People’s social disposition and fellow feeling became the sources of eighteenth-century virtue—modern substitutes for the ascetic and Spartan virtue of the ancient republics. This new modern virtue, as Hume pointed out, was much more in accord with the growing commercialization and polite refinement of the enlightened and civilized eighteenth century than the austere and militaristic virtue of the ancients. Virtue in antiquity had flowed from the citizen’s participation in politics; government had been the source of the citizen’s civic consciousness and public spiritedness. But the modern virtue of Jefferson, Paine, and other eighteenth-century liberals flowed from the citizen’s participation in society, not in government.
It was Jefferson’s assumption that society was naturally benevolent and self-ordering that lay behind his belief in minimal government. He was not a nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberal trying to promote capitalism by reducing the power of government, but an eighteenth-century radical who hated monarchical power and all that it entailed. In fact, calling him a believer in minimal government doesn’t do justice to his deep disdain for hereditary monarchical government. Monarchy for Jefferson was silly and contemptible, and his scorn for the European monarchs was boundless. All the kings, he said, were fools or idiots. “They passed their lives in hunting, and dispatched two courtiers a week, one thousand miles, to let each other know what game they had killed the preceding days.”25
Adams, like anyone who believed at all in republicanism, had to acknowledge that humans had some sort of moral sense, but he never shared the confidence of Jefferson and Paine in the natural harmony and benevolence of society.26 Because in his mind aggrandizing governments were not the real source of evils in the society, as Jefferson and Paine and other utopians believed, minimizing government and allowing individuals freely to engage in their separate pursuits of happiness were recipes for disaster. For without government constraining, controlling, and balancing the human passions of ambition, envy, and jealousy, society would fall apart.
Consequently, Adams thought Paine’s distinction between an evil government and a benign society “a Species of airy Anticks,” empty and vaporous. It was not possible to separate the two: “Society,” he said, “cannot exist without Government, in any reasonable sense of the Word.” There could be “Single Acts of Sociability,” but, he asked his son Thomas in 1803, “can you conceive of any thing which can be properly called Society, which signifies a Series of Acts of Sociability, without Government? Nay can you conceive of a Single Act of Sociability without Government?” No matter how minutely these things were traced out, he said, “you will find Government, by Hope, or fear, Force, Influence or Consent in every conceivable Social Act.” He saw “no Symptom of any Society or any Social Act, or exertion of Sociability without Government.”27
Adams may not have been as cynical about human nature as Hamilton, but he was certainly closer to the Federalists’ end of the political spectrum than he was to Jefferson’s. All society, he said, including marriage and the family, was impossible without authority, and “Government is nothing more than Authority reduced to practice.” As he had repeated over and over, that authority had to be bolstered by ceremonies, rituals, and titles—in other words, by all the paraphernalia of monarchy.28
• • •
FROM THE VERY OUTSET JEFFERSON was determined to get rid of all that monarchical paraphernalia. He wanted to establish a new tone of republican simplicity in place of the stiff formality and regal ceremony with which Washington and Adams had surrounded the presidency. No elaborately ornamented coach drawn by four or six horses for Jefferson: the president-elect walked from his boardinghouse on New Jersey Avenue to his inauguration, dressed, as a reporter noted, as “a plain citizen, without any distinctive badge of office.” The day he became president, wrote Jefferson anonymously in the Philadelphia Aurora, “buried levees, birthdays, royal parades, and the arrogation of precedence in society by certain self-stiled friends of order, but truly stiled friends of privileged orders.”29 Since the Federalist presidents Washington and Adams, like the English monarchs, had delivered their addresses to the Congress “from the throne,” Jefferson chose to deliver his message in writing to which no formal answer from the Congress would be expected; this set a precedent that was not broken until the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Much to the chagrin of foreign dignitaries, he brought a new republican informality to the president’s residence. Unlike Washington and Adams, Jefferson (“his Democratic majesty,” as one person called him) made himself easily accessible to visitors, all of whom, no matter how distinguished, he received, as the British chargé reported, “with a most perfect disregard to ceremony both in his dress and manner.” He was unwilling “to admit the smallest distinction that may separate him from the mass of his fellow citizens.”30
Jefferson, unlike Adams, was a superb administrator who intended to centralize information and affairs in his own hands. He told his cabinet at the outset that Adams as president had made a mess of things. Because of “his long & habitual absences from the seat of government,” he was removed “from any share in the transactions of affairs.” Instead, the government under Adams had been parceled out “among four independent heads, drawing sometimes in opposite directions.” As president, Jefferson would have none of that.31
The new president aimed to create a much smaller central government, one that resembled the old Articles of Confederation rather than the European-type state that the Federalists had sought to build. The federal government, Jefferson declared in his first message to Congress in 1801, was “charged with the external and mutual relations only of these states.” All the rest—the “principal care of our persons, our property, and our reputation, constituting the great field of human concerns”—was to be left to the states, which Jefferson thought were the best governments in the world.32 The Sedition Act lapsed, and a new liberal naturalization law was adopted. Because of what Jefferson called the Federalist “scenes of favoritism” and “dissipation of treasure,” strict economy was ordered to root out corruption.33
Jefferson inherited from Adams a governmental establishment that was minuscule by modern standards and small even by eighteenth-century European standards. In March 1801, the headquarters of the War Department, for example, consisted of only the secretary, an accountant, fourteen clerks, and two messengers. The secretary of state had a staff consisting of a chief clerk, six other clerks (one of whom ran the patent office), and a messenger. The attorney general did not yet even have a clerk. Nonetheless, Jefferson believed that this tiny federal bureaucracy had become “too complicated, too expensive,” and offices under the Federalists had “multiplied unnecessarily.”34 He especially resented all the appointments that Adams had made after the election results were known. He considered these so-called midnight appointments as “mere nullities,” with the candidates having no claim whatsoever to the offices. Adams, he said, especially in contrast to Washington, had “degraded himself infinitely by his conduct on this subject.”35
Jefferson was appalled by the abuses and “disregard of legal appropriations” practiced by the previous two administrations. There were “expenses . . . for jobs not seen; agencies upon agencies in every part of the earth, and for the most useless or mischievous purposes, & all of these opening doors for fraud & embezzlement far beyond the ostensible profits of the agency.” Hence his administration, he told colleagues, had become busy “hunting out & abolishing multitudes of useless offices, striking off jobs &c.” 36
His government eliminated all tax inspectors and collectors, which shrunk the number of treasury employees by 40 percent. The diplomatic establishment was reduced to three missions—in Britain, France, and Spain. If Jefferson could have had his way completely, he said he would have gotten rid of all the missions and maintained only consuls. Like other enlightened believers in the possibility of un
iversal peace, Jefferson longed to have only commercial connections with other nations.
The one nation he wanted nothing to do with was the new Republic of Haiti. In 1802–1803 he supported France’s attempt to recover the island and restore slavery on it, but when that failed he refused to extend diplomatic recognition to the independent black republic—the only sister republic in the New World. The United States did not recognize the Haitian government until the administration of Abraham Lincoln.
Jefferson wanted no part of the Federalist dream of creating a modern army and navy like those of European nations. When he learned early in 1800 of Napoleon’s coup d’état of November 1799, which had overthrown the French Republic, he did not draw the lesson that Adams did: that too much democracy led to dictatorship. Instead, he said, “I read it as a lesson against standing armies.”37 Upon taking office, he immediately cut the military budget in half. Since the armed forces had been the largest cause of non-debt-related spending in the 1790s, amounting to nearly 40 percent of the total federal budget, this reduction severely decreased the overall expenditures of the national government. Jefferson left the army with three thousand regulars and only 172 officers. The state militias were enough for America’s defense, he said.
Although the navy had only a half-dozen frigates, Jefferson sought to replace this figment of a standing navy with several hundred small, shallow-draft gunboats, which were intended simply for inland waters and harbor defense. They would be the navy’s version of the militia, unquestionably designed for defense of the coastline and not for risky military ventures on the high seas. Such small, defensive ships, said Jefferson, could never “become an excitement to engage in offensive maritime war” and were unlikely to provoke naval attacks from hostile foreign powers. Not only were the standing armies and navies that the Federalists had desired expensive and a threat to liberty, but they were the cause of all the monarchical-bred wars that had gone on for the past three centuries.38
Since Hamilton’s financial program had formed the basis of the political power of the federal government, it above all had to be dismantled—at least to the extent possible. It mortified Jefferson that his government inherited “the contracted, English, half-lettered ideas of Hamilton. . . . We can pay off his debt in 15 years, but we can never get rid of his financial system.” He had to keep the Bank of the United States with its twenty-year charter, but other aspects of Hamilton’s program could be abolished. All the internal excise taxes the Federalists had designed to make the people feel the energy of the national government were eliminated. For most citizens the federal presence was now reduced to the delivery of the mail. Such an inconsequential and distant government, noted one observer in 1811, was “too little felt in the ordinary concerns of life to vie in any considerable degree with the nearer and more powerful influence produced by the operations of the local governments.”39
Jefferson believed that his election had occurred in just the nick of time. If the Federalists had continued in office much longer, he said, “it would have been long & difficult to unhorse them.” But they had brought about their own downfall. “Their madness” over the preceding three years had accomplished “what reason acting alone” might not have been able to do in decades. With the Republicans having taken over the presidency and the House of Representatives, with a fairly even balance in the Senate, he now intended “to establish good principles” and “to fortify republicanism behind as many barriers as possible.”
The Federalists, however, had not been completely routed. “They have retired into the Judiciary as a strong hold.” There, Jefferson lamented, they hoped to preserve the “remains” of their party. “From that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down & erased by a fraudulent use of the constitution.” Since judges were not constitutionally removable, the Federalists with their lame-duck legislation had “multiplied useless judges merely to strengthen their phalanx.”40 Jefferson and the new Republican Congress moved swiftly to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801, thus eliminating the offices of sixteen federal judges, and then set about using impeachment to remove otherwise immovable Federalist judges and justices of the Supreme Court. Jefferson realized that impeachment, which was designed for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” was “a bungling way” of removing judges with life tenure, but unfortunately there seemed no alternative.41
• • •
IN RETIREMENT ADAMS had trouble getting over his hurt and anger. He began a lengthy answer to Hamilton’s malicious Letter, which helped to calm some of his emotional turmoil, but he never published it. He wondered what he would do in retirement. Having been so active for so many years, could he suddenly come to a stop? He dismissed out of hand the notion that he could resume his law practice or become a minister at a foreign court. No, he concluded, he “must be Farmer John of Stoneyfield and nothing more, (I hope nothing less) for the rest of my Life” (Stoneyfield being one of the several names he gave to his home in Quincy).42
Fuming over the way he had been treated, in October 1802 he began writing an autobiography, designed, as he said, to show his posterity by his own hand “proof of the falsehood of that Mass of odious Abuse of my Character, with which News Papers, private Letters and public Pamphlets and Histories have been disgraced for thirty Years.”43 But after only a few pages and getting up to only 1751, the year he entered college, he abandoned the memoir.
Two years later, in November 1804, John Quincy, unaware of his father’s earlier effort, urged his father to write “an account of the principal incidents of your own life.”44 Adams’s reply was swimming in self-pity: “Alass! Alass! What can I say? I can recollect no part of my Political Life, without pain.” All he saw was “so much jealousy, Envy, Treachery, Perfidy, Malice without cause or provocation and revenge: without Injury or Offence” that he couldn’t imagine recovering a credible account of his life. “You may depend on this, I am a Man more Sinned against than sinning.” He feared that if he wrote “the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth,” not only would very few believe him, but he would also have to “reveal to posterity the Weaknesses of many great Men,” which would result in his work being dismissed as “an Hymn to Vanity.” Far from soothing his passions, as his son hoped, the effort to write his memoir would only inflame them, reminding him of all “my Mortifications, Disappointments or Resentments” in a life forsaken even by God. Like the memoirs of the Duc de Sully, the early-seventeenth-century minister to Henri IV of France, his would be “a melancholly Book.”45
Melancholy or not, Adams nevertheless resumed his autobiography, and wrote doggedly for the next seven months, carrying the jumbled story of his life up to 1776.
• • •
LEARNING OF THE ATTEMPT by Jefferson and the Republicans to use the process of impeachment to remove hostile Federalist judges, Adams was reminded of his 1773 defense in the Massachusetts press of an independent judiciary, and he included the events in his memoir. He said he had embodied these principles of an independent judiciary in the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, and they had prevailed in America until the administration of Jefferson, “during which they have been infringed and are now in danger of being lost.” This was alarming, he wrote in his autobiography, because “we shall have no balance at all of Interests or Passions, and our Lives, Liberties, Reputations and Estates will lie at the mercy of a Majority, and of a tryumphant Party.”46
In June 1805, Adams paused in the writing of his memoir, perhaps because he began writing many more letters to friends, family members, and acquaintances. At this time he resumed his friendship with Benjamin Rush, with whom he had not corresponded since he had become president in 1797. In December 1806, however, he once again returned to his memoir and worked on it for another seven months or so, bringing his life up to 1780, when he was in France. He abruptly stopped there, and never completed it.
Perhaps he ceased writing his memoir in 1807 because he couldn’t stomach reliving the duplicity
of Franklin in the 1780s and the arrogance of Hamilton in the 1790s; or because he had critics like Mercy Otis Warren whom he had to answer; or because he began contributing to the Boston Patriot numerous pieces defending his role in the Revolution; or because his interest in the actions of the Jefferson administration was absorbing more and more of his time.
• • •
AT FIRST ADAMS had no confidence whatsoever in Jefferson’s administration. He thought the new president was unreliable. His “sayings are never well digested, often extravagant, and never consistently pursued,” he told his son Thomas in July 1801. Jefferson did not have “a clear head”; he “never pursues any question through. His Ambition and his cunning are the only steady qualities in him. His Imagination and Ambition are too strong for his Reason.”47
Adams objected to Jefferson’s assertion that his election had saved republicanism from monarchism. That was false, Adams said. The reason he had failed to get reelected as president, he claimed, was that the Federalists had become divided, not because of “any change in favor of Republicanism in the People, . . . nor by any opinion that the new president was more of a Republican than the old former one.” He was also offended by the Republicans’ charge of his “aggrandizing Executive Power.” In fact, he said in June 1801, there had been “more acts of the Executive of more Power in 4 months past, than were in 12 years preceeding.” He especially resented Jefferson’s being hailed as a great enlightened philosopher. “The harmonious voice of Europe and America,” he said, “pronounce Jefferson the greatest Man who ever was in America.” This was the man who “had the affectation to go to Italy for an outlandish name for his Hill.”48
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