First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Much of Davila, in fact, was a repetition or extension of arguments already made in Defence. To wit, any balanced constitution required a singular figure empowered to embody the will of the nation, much in the way that every human body required a head. This “monarchical principle” was a universal tenet, true for all societies throughout history, though the understandable loathing toward the British monarch during the American war for independence had rendered otherwise intelligent American thinkers blind to this fact. (Abigail made the same point in the more specific context of Washington’s presidency: “It is my firm opinion that no man could rule over this great people & consolidate them into one mighty Empire but He who Set over us.”) In most European states—John was thinking primarily of France—it was probably necessary for the monarchy to remain hereditary for the foreseeable future in order to permit a more gradual transition to fullblown republican principles.15

  By conflating the American presidency with “the monarchical principle,” however, John almost invited misunderstanding, because the very term “monarchy” had become an epithet that provoked near-universal condemnation within the American political context. It was one thing to acknowledge that Washington was indispensable, quite another to talk so openly and approvingly of “the monarchical principle.” In that sense, Davila only confirmed the murmurings that John had lost the true republican faith during his long residence in Europe. (The truth was that he had harbored the conviction that a strong executive presence was essential for many years, and had embedded the principle in his draft of the Massachusetts Constitution.) But Davila only fed the rumors that he was a closet monarchist who favored making the presidency a hereditary office that, if he ever was elected to it, he intended to pass along to John Quincy.16

  There was one section of Davila, however, that had nothing directly to do with the main theme about monarchy, and indeed seems an impulsive aside that popped into John’s head as he was writing. It began with the story of a pauper who was starving but chose to starve rather than eat his dog’s food. When asked why he opted for his dog instead of himself, he responded: “Who will love me then? With these words,” John observed, “there is a key to the human heart—and to the rise and fall of empires.”17

  He then proceeded to make the argument that passions or emotions, not ideas, were the driving force in history, and the most potent passion of all was, as he put it, “the need to be considered, esteemed, praised, beloved and admired by his fellows.” The pursuit of wealth was a secondary drive, not an end in itself but only a means to a greater end, “because riches attract the attention, consideration, and congratulations of mankind.” (A hundred years later, Thorstein Veblen would give the economic version of this notion a name: conspicuous consumption.) The primal political urge, often unconscious and beyond rational control, he called “emulation,” which was the compulsion to rise above your rivals and become the focus of public veneration. And the ultimate version of emulation was lasting fame beyond one’s own lifetime by winning the affection and admiration of posterity: “For what folly it is,” he observed. “What is it to us what shall be said of us after we are dead? Or in Asia, Africa, or Europe while we live? There is no greater or imaginable illusion. Yet the impulse is irresistible.”18

  There can be little doubt that John’s diagnosis of the role that human ambitions played in the political arena was primarily rooted in his intimate familiarity with his own internal urges. Although the references in Davila were all drawn from European history—whole sections were lifted from English, French, and Italian texts without attribution—the seminal text was his own soul. There John acknowledged his endless quest for recognition in the public arena, which in its ultimate manifestation became an unquenchable desire to live forever in the memory of future generations.

  PERIPHERAL VISIONS

  At the ceremonial level, when he was with Abigail at the presidential levees or at a dinner party at Richmond Hill, John was regarded as a central player in the new government. When he was presiding over the Senate, however, he was a mere cipher. Significant legislation came before him during Washington’s first term, to include the chief provisions of a national fiscal policy, the location of the new capital city, and a treaty designed as a model for policy toward the Native Americans. But he had nothing to do with the crafting of this legislation, and no influence over its ultimate fate. He frequently complained to Abigail about his abiding irrelevance, and she did her best to reassure him that his ceremonial role as president of the Senate made a difference: “Altho it is so limited as to prevent you from being so useful as you have been accustomed to, yet these former exertions and services give a weight of Character, which like the Heavenly orbs silently diffuse a benign influence.”19

  The truth was that John’s status as an established icon of the American Revolution was beginning to seem like an increasingly distant piece of nostalgia, glorious in its day, to be sure, but part of an earlier chapter in the story that had now moved beyond the struggle for American independence to the quest for American nationhood. A new generation of political leaders was emerging, men like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, who were almost young enough to be John’s sons. (In 1790 John was fifty-five, Hamilton was thirty-five, and Madison was thirty-nine.) He could not help but think of them as latecomers to the cause that he had championed in its most fragile and formative phase. As he confided to Abigail, it was sheer torture to sit in the Senate and listen to speakers who struck him as “young, inconsiderate, and inexperienced,” mere babes in the woods, while he sat sullenly and silently. It was difficult to think of the indefatigable “Atlas of independence” in the Continental Congress as extraneous and irrelevant, but that is what the vice presidency had made him.20

  He felt more comfortable with veteran revolutionaries of his own age, men who had run the gauntlet with him when the odds seemed stacked against success. When Washington arrived in Boston to start his tour of the New England states in November 1789, for example, John and Samuel Adams met with him, and reporters, to John’s immense satisfaction, described the trio as “the three genuine Pivots of the Revolution.” John concurred with the historical significance of the meeting, writing Abigail that an artist should have been commissioned to capture the scene for posterity, painted “with the greatest care, and preserved in the best Place.” If an artist had been commissioned to paint a group portrait of the major players in the Washington administration, however, John would not have been included in the picture.21

  His absence from such a putative picture was also reflected in the written record. Whatever the reasons—his wounded pride, his reluctance to write anything about his own personal opinions that might damage the legislative agenda of the administration—John had precious little to say about the political issues passing before him. He had been assigned a minor role that, in truth, he did not know how to play, despite Abigail’s somewhat forced reassurances of his significance. Quite uncharacteristically, apart from complaining about his abiding irrelevance, he said virtually nothing in his personal correspondence about his thoughts on the highly controversial legislation passing before him, except that he felt duty-bound to support whatever the executive branch proposed.

  The same was not true of Abigail. Her letters to family and friends back in Massachusetts provide a running commentary on the increasingly shrill political arguments. It is safe to assume that she and John talked on a daily basis about the current issues at stake. And, at this stage of their partnership, it is also safe to assume a seamless symmetry between them that made conflicting convictions virtually impossible. If the Adams family had an opinion about the legislative agenda of the infant republic, the best source turned out to be Abigail.

  She recognized from the start that the most controversial and critical provision in Hamilton’s financial plan, presented to Congress in January 1790 as A Report on Public Credit, was the federal assumption of state debts—taking $25 million in state debt, most of it a function of wartime expenditures by
the thirteen states, and putting it into one pile. This made excellent economic sense, since by consolidating the state debts, the United States was sending a signal to the international markets that the new nation fully intended to pay its bills.

  But politically, assumption was extremely controversial, for it meant that the federal government had also assumed control over the national economy, thereby asserting federal supremacy over the states, even though many of the states, Virginia most strenuously, believed they had fought the American Revolution to protest just such domination by distant authorities in London and Whitehall. “The members of the different states think so widely from each other,” Abigail observed, “that it is difficult to accommodate their interests … What one member esteems the pillar, the Bulwork of the Constitution, an other considers as the Ruin of his State.” She was calling attention to the fact that the Assumption Bill presumed the existence of an established national ethos that, in fact, did not exist because allegiances remained confined within state or, at best, regional borders. She supported assumption, as did John, but she recognized that the debate over its implications was so fierce because it provided a clear resolution of the question of federal versus state sovereignty that the Constitution itself had deliberately left ambiguous.22

  As it turned out, Abigail’s enthusiastic support for assumption was not wholly disinterested. She had invested in war bonds issued by Massachusetts during the war, probably for patriotic reasons. The value of these bonds, and the interest they paid, increased considerably once the federal government assumed the Massachusetts state debt, because interest payments were thereby assured. Her profits were hardly huge, but the passage of the Assumption Bill in the summer of 1790 earned her a tidy sum. It is not clear whether John ever knew about this unspoken conflict of interest. It is clear that Abigail’s sense of her own independence included control over financial investments that she regarded as hers and hers alone.23

  The debate over the Residence Act did not raise the constitutional questions posed by assumption, but the studied ambiguity of the Constitution virtually assured partisan bickering that came to resemble a political circus. Congress was required to identify a permanent “seat of government” without any guidance on the specific location. All the regional voting blocs—New England, the Middle Atlantic, the South—could imagine schemes placing the national capital within their borders, and none seemed capable of imagining it anywhere else. Abigail found the debates, some of which she witnessed from the Senate gallery, extremely offensive because of the blatantly partisan atmosphere and the wholly argumentative context of the legislative process. “The more I see of Mankind,” she lamented, “the more sick I am of publick Life, and the less worthy do they appear to me.” She thought it was a mistake to open the Senate gallery to the public, since ordinary citizens would now see that making laws was like making sausage: not a pretty sight, and not a scene likely to inspire confidence in the new government. So much for John’s idealistic vision of the Senate as the arena for America’s virtuous elite.24

  Nor did Abigail like the eventual selection of Philadelphia as the temporary capital while the designated permanent site on the Potomac, negotiated in a behind-the-scenes bargain, was being built. “You will see by the publick papers that we are destined for Philadelphia,” she wrote to John Quincy, “a Grievious affair to me I assure you, but so it is ordained.” She loved the lavish estate and grounds at Richmond Hill, with its majestic view of the Hudson, and saw no reason why the government should not remain in New York until the Potomac location was ready. She would have to leave Nabby and the grandchildren for a hot and humid place that was infamous as a breeding ground for mosquitoes and infectious diseases. And why would a government seeking to create an impression of permanence decide to move around so often, what she described as “continual roling”? Finally, it was a question of aesthetics and “the Schuylkill is not more like the Hudson, than I to Hercules.”25

  What we might call Abigail’s perspective from the periphery enjoyed a crescendo moment near the end of the first congressional session in August 1790. A delegation of twenty-seven Native Americans, all chiefs of the Creek Nation, arrived in New York to negotiate and sign a treaty designed to end hostilities on the southern frontier. Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox also intended the treaty to serve as a model for American policy toward all the Native American tribes located east of the Mississippi. For the first time, the tribes would be legally recognized as sovereign nations, with rights to land that could not be violated without their consent. And once boundaries were agreed to by treaty, the federal government was committed to protecting the Native American residents from encroachment by white settlers, using military force if necessary. Washington envisioned a series of Native American enclaves east of the Mississippi that would be bypassed by the surging wave of settlements. It was his attempt at a just resolution of the Native American dilemma.26

  It so happened that the entire Creek delegation was lodged at an inn adjoining Richmond Hill. For nearly a month, Abigail was fascinated with what she described as “my Neighbours the Creeck Savages, who visit us daily.” It was quite a scene: “They are very fond of visiting us as we entertain them kindly and they behave with much civility … Last night they had a great Bond fire, dancing around it like so many spirits, hoping, singing, yelling and expressing their pleasure and Satisfaction in true Savage State. They are the first Savages I ever saw.”

  The soaring optimism of that moment—the possibility of a just accommodation with the indigenous population of the American continent—was destined to be dashed very shortly, when Washington discovered that the federal government lacked the resources to honor its pledge of protection. But Abigail participated in the short-lived celebratory mood, attending the signing ceremony in Federal Hall, where the Creek chiefs formed themselves into a chorus and sang a song that, as an interpreter explained, was about perpetual peace. That evening she invited a Creek chief to dine at Richmond Hill, and he proceeded to make her an honorary member of the Creek Nation: “He took me by the Hand, bowed his Head, and bent his knee, calling me Mammea, Mammea,” presumably her Creek name. All the chiefs, she observed, “are very fine looking Men, placid countenances & fine shape,” almost perfect physical models in the manner of Greek statues. There were very few high points in the tragic story of Indian-white relations in the United States, but Abigail was able to participate in one of them.27

  Although John witnessed the same events as Abigail, he did not leave a written record of his reactions, in part because of his vows to embrace the required role of silence as vice president, in part because he was channeling his intellectual energies into the Davila essays. These provoked the only occasion when he, or at least his name, emerged from the invisible background, and he went from being essentially harmless to politically dangerous. The incident was provoked, albeit inadvertently, by his old friend and former colleague Thomas Jefferson.

  Washington had persuaded a reluctant Jefferson to serve as the first secretary of state. Jefferson was late to arrive in New York, delayed until May 1790 because he needed to oversee the marriage of his eldest daughter at Monticello. He had previously written a glowing tribute to John on his appointment as vice president, and it is virtually certain—though the historical record is blank on this score—that he resumed his social interactions with Abigail and John that summer. The old intimacies of Paris were recovered.28

  A few months later, however, Jefferson was asked to provide an endorsement of Thomas Paine’s new book, The Rights of Man, which was a soaring argument for viewing the recent French Revolution as a European version of the American Revolution. Misguidedly thinking that his endorsement would be anonymous, Jefferson praised Paine’s book, which accurately expressed his own somewhat romantic political conviction about ongoing developments in France. He described it as an antidote “against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.” The reference was widely and correctly seen as a swipe against John’s d
efense of “the monarchical principle” in the Davila essays, and was quickly picked up by all the major newspapers.

  Deeply offended, John confronted his old friend for what he regarded as a gratuitous slap and blatant distortion of his views. Jefferson’s remark, he later observed, “was generally considered as an open personal attack upon me, by insinuating the false interpretation of my Writings as favouring the introduction of hereditary Monarchy and Aristocracy into this Country.” His clear intent, so he explained, was to insist that a strong executive was essential in the new American government, and that in France the retention of some version of constitutional monarchy was probably wise in order to ease the transition to more full-blooded republican principles.29

  Jefferson had already responded apologetically, but also somewhat elusively. Whatever political differences existed between them mattered less to him than their personal friendship: “And I can declare with truth in the presence of the almighty that nothing was further from my intention or expectation than to have had either my name or your name brought before the public on this occasion.” This was surely sincere, for Jefferson had not expected his name to be cited in an endorsement of Paine’s book. Then he added—and this was not sincere—that he was “not referring to any writing that I might suppose to be yours.”30

  Whether John actually believed Jefferson is unclear, but he chose to accept the apology because he wished to avoid a rupture in a friendship that, as he put it, “has subsisted for fifteen years between us without the slightest interruption … and is still dear to my heart.” A series of eleven essays under the pseudonym “Publica” soon appeared in the Boston newspapers, quite deftly criticizing Paine’s linkage of the American and French revolutions, questioning Jefferson’s political judgment in embracing the connections, and defending the opposing views of Davila. Most pundits assumed that Publica was John, arguing on his own behalf. But it was really John Quincy, in his first—albeit anonymous—appearance on the national stage, defending his father.31