First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Although the ultimate decision had probably been made by March, John’s wrestling match with his own ambitions continued throughout the spring. Once again, as in the two previous presidential elections, the absence of a formal nomination process meant that he did not need to declare his candidacy. But in newspaper editorials, even toasts at dinner parties, his name topped most lists throughout New England as the obvious choice. He had, after all, received more votes in the two previous elections than anyone except Washington. And if the chief criterion was revolutionary credentials, one would be hard-pressed to find anybody else who could match his. Abigail assured him on this point: “There remains not a Man in America whose Publick Service [more] entitled him to the office.”72

  Prospective voters south of the Potomac did not quite see it that way, insisting that there was a certain Virginian currently in retirement at Monticello who possessed impeccable revolutionary credentials of his own, and whose views on the proper limitations that should be placed on federal power were more akin to their own. By the summer of 1796 it was clear to all concerned, except apparently to Jefferson himself, that the contest for the presidency would match the two former friends. Jefferson later claimed that he was wholly oblivious that he was a candidate, and that he was too busy harvesting his vetch crop to notice that the Republican opposition had rallied around his candidacy. Madison endorsed this rather incredible version of Jefferson’s indifference, claiming that he made a point of not visiting his friend at Monticello that summer for fear that any mention of the presidential election might cause Jefferson to withdraw his name.

  John could not claim that he was unaware of his own candidacy, in part because he lacked Jefferson’s powers of self-deception, in part because he was receiving letters from Abigail and John Quincy about his prospects. Abigail made a survey of newspaper editorials on the eve of the election and reported that his endorsement of American neutrality and support for the Jay Treaty would cost him most of the electoral votes in the South. She predicted a clear sectional split in the final tally and a very close contest. If he did not win but came in second, she requested and received a solemn promise that he would refuse the vice presidency and join her in retirement in Quincy.73

  For his part, John took refuge behind the classic code of silence. Anyone who uttered any statements on his own behalf, or even commented on the ongoing campaign being conducted by surrogates, thereby exposed his own vanity and was deemed unqualified to serve. On good days he boasted to Abigail that he would be fine regardless of the outcome: “I feel myself in a very happy temper of mind. Perfectly willing to be released from the Port of Danger, but determined, if call’d to it, to brave it.” On bad days he confided his emotional confusion: “I laugh at myself twenty times a Day, for my feelings and meditations … It really seems to be as if I wished to be left out. Let me see. Do I know my own heart? I am not sure.” Could he, with proper decorum, announce Jefferson’s victory in the Senate, where the electoral votes were counted? Or would he be too mortified to do his duty? He did not know.74

  After the election, but before the results were known, Abigail reported to John that she had had an interesting dream. She was riding in a coach when a barrage of twenty-four cannonballs came flying at her. She was terrified and fully expected to be blown to bits. But the cannonballs all exploded in midair before they reached her. She interpreted the dream as a kind of supernatural signal not to worry. Either way, they would be fine. And the dream probably meant that, despite all the anguish, John was going to win.75

  He did. As Abigail had predicted, the vote was extremely close (71–68). As she also predicted, the split was mostly sectional, with John’s margin of victory dependent on two electoral votes in western Virginia and North Carolina. The results were reasonably clear over a month before the votes were officially counted in the Senate in February 1797. “According to present Appearances,” John apprised Abigail in late December, “Jefferson will be Daddy Vice,” a fate that would require him to adjust his indulgent living habits to the meager salary of the office.76

  Abigail wrote back to report that congratulatory compliments were pouring in from all their friends and relatives. The only sour note concerned the revelation, based on several reliable sources, that Alexander Hamilton, in a brazen act of skullduggery, had attempted to manipulate the electoral votes on behalf of Thomas Pinckney, a South Carolina Federalist, in the apparent hope of sneaking Pinckney in ahead of John. The plot failed, but it probably cut into John’s margin of victory.

  This was clinching evidence that Hamilton could not be trusted. “He is a Man ambitious as Julius Caesar,” Abigail warned. “His thirst for Fame is insatiable. I have ever kept my eye on him.” The clear implication was that John had rather nonchalantly taken Hamilton’s support for granted and vastly underestimated his ambition to control the Federalist agenda after Washington’s departure. Hamilton must now be regarded as a rival.77

  Although she had made her own preferences for retirement clear, now that the voters had spoken, Abigail was prepared to embrace the verdict and join John again as a partner in this final triumph of his public career. It was so cold in Quincy that it was freezing her ink and chilling the blood in her veins, she observed, but his election had quickened her heartbeat in defiance of the cold. They were in all eyes, including hers, a team, so in some sense she, too, had been called to serve. She promised to be at his side, “in the turbulent scenes in which he is about to engage.”78

  CHAPTER SIX

  1796–1801

  “I can do nothing without you.”

  ALTHOUGH BOTH John and Abigail were well aware of the supercharged political atmosphere they were entering, the shrewdest assessment of the scatological climate came from no less than Thomas Jefferson: “The President [Washington] is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag … No man will bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.” Editorials in the Aurora, the chief Republican newspaper, seemed designed to illustrate Jefferson’s point, firing several salvos at the departing hero that verged on criminal slander. The Farewell Address was described as “the loathings of a sick mind,” and Washington was urged to ask himself “whether you are an apostate or an imposter, whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.” Given Washington’s singular status, one could only imagine the gauntlet being prepared for his successor. Abigail conjured up the picture of “being fastned up Hand and foot and Tongue to be shot at as our Quincy lads do at the poor Geese and Turkies.”1

  She soon suggested a political path designed to flank this fate, which John immediately adopted as his own preferred course. It entailed opening up a discreet line of communication with Jefferson; offering him cabinet status and a major say in foreign policy; designating him or Madison as the new American envoy to France, where the most ominous threats were brewing; and in effect creating a bipartisan presidency. Despite the recent breach in their relationship, Abigail observed, “I do not think him [Jefferson] an insincere or corruptible man,” adding that her own “Friendship for him has ever been unshaken,” and that “all the discords may be atuned to harmony by the Hand of a skillfull Artist.” Besides, a political alliance with Jefferson was vastly preferable to depending on the loyalty of the ultra-Federalists, who were infatuated with Hamilton, whose misguided attempt to manipulate the recent election had exposed his anti-Adams agenda. “Beware of that spare Cassius,” Abigail warned. “I have read his Heart and his wicked Eyes many a time. The very devil is in them.”2

  John leaked word of his bipartisan intentions to Jefferson through Elbridge Gerry, a mutual friend. The initial response from Monticello, a letter to Madison, dutifully confided to mutual friends in Philadelphia, seemed encouraging: “I can particularly have no feelings which would revolt at a secondary position to Mr. Adams,” Jefferson observed, also noting that “I am his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in govern
ment.”3

  A second letter was equally gracious, recalling his long friendship with the entire Adams family and saluting John’s generosity “at the prospect of administering the government in concurrence with me.” Jefferson eventually wrote directly to John, agreeing that the partisan political atmosphere had become truly poisonous and hoping to recover the old spirit of ’76, “when we were working together for our independence.” Rumors were rampant on the streets of Philadelphia that the venerable Adams-Jefferson partnership was back. Abigail reported attending a dinner at Harvard, where the students proposed a toast: “Adams and Jefferson, or Checks and balances.”4

  The course of the Adams presidency, perhaps even the early path of American history, would have gone in a different direction if John’s bipartisan proposal had worked. But it quickly became the victim of the party spirit it was intended to replace. When John floated the idea past several dedicated Federalists, they expressed disbelief, claiming that it amounted to dragging the Trojan horse into the Federalist fortress. Meanwhile, down at Monticello, Jefferson was having second thoughts, prompted by Madison’s insistence that the Republican cause must take precedence over nostalgic bonds of brotherhood, no matter how heartfelt; a political alliance with Adams was rooted in a merely sentimental attachment, Madison observed, and not in the abiding interests of the Republican opposition that Jefferson must now prepare himself to lead.5

  The prospects for an Adams-Jefferson partnership died in a poignant fact-to-face encounter that both men saw fit to record in their memoirs, a clear sign they recognized its political and personal significance. After dining with Washington on March 6, 1797, they walked together down Market Street to Fifth, two blocks from the very spot where Jefferson had drafted the Declaration of Independence that John had so forcefully defended in the Continental Congress almost twenty-one years earlier. John reiterated his offer to bring Jefferson into cabinet deliberations—he had apprised members of his cabinet that anyone who felt strongly opposed to Jefferson’s presence should feel free to resign—and repeated his willingness to dispatch either Jefferson or Madison to Paris as American envoy. But Jefferson dismissed both proposals as impossible. They parted at Market and Fifth as former friends who were now poised to become bitter political enemies.6

  Abigail received a somewhat cryptic letter from John a week later, saying that “Mr. Jefferson has been here … He is as he was.” She immediately recognized the significance of the message: “There is one observation in your Letter which struck me as meaning more than is exprest. Jefferson is as he was! Can he still be a devotee to a cause and a people run mad? Can it be.” John delivered his own answer to the question in a letter to John Quincy: “You can witness for me how loath I have been to give him [Jefferson] up. It is with much reluctance that I am obliged to look upon him as a man whose mind is warped by prejudice … as to be unfit for the office he holds.” He did not know that, at that very moment, Jefferson was engaged in clandestine conversations with the French consul in Philadelphia, urging him to ignore any peace initiative from Adams, who did not speak for the true interests of the American people, despite his recent election. By most measures, such behavior verged on treason.7

  Jefferson’s rejection increased John’s awareness of the bitterly partisan political world emerging in the wake of Washington’s departure: “From the Situation, where I am now,” he lamented to Abigail, “I see a Scene of Ambition beyond all my former suspicions or Imaginations … Jealousies and Rivalries have been my Theme … but they never Stared me in the face in such horrid forms as at present.”8

  The inaugural ceremony was awkward for John, in part because Abigail, who was tending to his dying mother at Quincy, was not present to calm his nerves, in part because everyone in the audience was sobbing at the sight of Washington’s final appearance on the public stage. At the end of the ceremony, so he reported to Abigail, Washington whispered to him, “Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest.” In the ensuing weeks, with Washington gone back to Mount Vernon and Jefferson gone over to the opposition, he suddenly felt lonely and isolated, and sent a cri de coeur to Quincy: “I never wanted you more in my life. The times are critical and dangerous and I must have you here to assist me … You must leave our farm to the mercy of the winds … I can do nothing without you.”9

  ELEMENTAL INGREDIENTS

  John’s sudden sense of desperation was based not on an overripe imagination, but on an accurate assessment of the foreign and domestic dilemmas facing him at the start of his presidency. The most pressing problem was France, which had reacted to the Jay Treaty by deploying its privateers in the Atlantic and Caribbean to prey on all American vessels carrying contraband cargo bound for British ports. By May 1797 they had seized more than three hundred American ships, thereby placing the Franco-American relationship on the cusp of war.

  Nor was that all. The ever-shifting French government, misleadingly called the Directory, had moved into an anti-American phase, expelling the new American minister, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, effectively breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States. Rather incredibly, this was pretty much what the previous American minister, James Monroe, who was a devoted Jefferson protégé, had recommended. (Monroe had described the Federalist administration as a hopeless gaggle of pro-British sympathizers wholly out of touch with the pro-French sympathies of the American people, which was the same line that Jefferson was taking with the French consul in Philadelphia.) As a result, the Directory had developed grandiose plans for declaring war against the American government, based on the belief that the vast majority of American citizens would rally to the French cause. The French foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, envisioned a resurgent French empire in North America based in the Republican stronghold in the southern states.10

  All this was a preposterous illusion, of course, but as the armies of the French Republic swept victoriously across Europe, even the most extreme forms of Gallic infatuation seemed credible. Writing to his father from The Hague, John Quincy caught the French mood of nearly delirious invincibility: the fate of the world was now, he wrote, “in the hands of a Corsican stripling [Napoleon], whose name two years ago might have been hidden under a dog’s ear on the rolls of fame, but which at the moment disdains comparison with less than Caesar or Alexander.”11

  John’s instinctive response to the French threat, rooted in the same realistic convictions about America’s abiding interests that Washington had proposed in the Farewell Address, was that war must be avoided at almost any cost. And so in May 1797, soon after Abigail came down from Quincy—“I come to place my head upon your Bosom”—he decided to send a three-man delegation to Paris to negotiate a French version of the Jay Treaty. He coupled this diplomatic commitment with a buildup of the American navy, which would enable the United States to fight a defensive war on the high seas if negotiations broke down.12

  It was extremely likely that they would. Within the larger context of the Anglo-French competition for primacy in Europe, the United States remained a piddling power of relative insignificance. And given the information they were receiving from the French consul in Philadelphia, fully briefed by Jefferson to dismiss any Federalist initiative as irrelevant, the Directory was poised to treat the American envoys with consummate indifference. At least at this early stage, the central problem facing the Adams presidency was inherently unsolvable.

  John’s predicament was rendered even more difficult by two political anomalies no president before or since has had to face. The first was the result of a flaw in the Constitution that made the runner-up in the presidential election the vice president. (This was corrected by the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, which eliminated the awkward burden of a vice president who happened to be head of the opposition party.) As we have seen, as soon as Jefferson rejected the bipartisan overture from John, he quickly moved behind the scenes to undermine the administration he was purportedly serving. In a sense it
was a repeat of the equally duplicitous role Jefferson had played as secretary of state under Washington. It must have taxed even Jefferson’s psychological agility to appear at weekly levees alongside Abigail and John, then write coded letters to Madison orchestrating Republican strategy and pass juicy bits of anti-Adams information to Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Aurora, but he somehow managed it with apparent serenity.

  The second anomaly was the cabinet. One of John’s biggest blunders was to retain Washington’s chief advisors, a decision that he made without much thought and later attempted to explain as forced upon him by Federalists eager to convey the seamless transition from Washington to Adams. In effect, he somewhat lamely claimed that he lacked the authority to pick his own team.

  What he did not realize, and it took him an inordinately long time to figure it out, was that three members of his cabinet—Timothy Pickering at State, Oliver Wolcott at Treasury, and James McHenry at War—were loyal disciples of Hamilton and regarded “the little lion of Federalism,” and not John Adams, as their political chief. Hamilton described the arrangement in terms that left no doubt: there was “the President’s administration,” with John an elected figurehead, and then there was “the actual administration,” with Hamilton exercising power as the acknowledged leader of the Federalist Party. Virtually every cabinet vote was run past Hamilton for his approval, and all major cabinet proposals originated with Hamilton. It is difficult to decide what was more bizarre, Hamilton’s stunning arrogance at presuming his supremacy over a duly elected president, or John’s blind indifference to what was going on around him.13