First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  One final ingredient in the political chemistry, perhaps the most elemental of all, was John’s distinctive personality. Despite his distinguished résumé, he had no executive experience, had never commanded troops like Washington or served as governor like Jefferson. He was not equipped, by either temperament or experience, to delegate authority to subordinates or to manage them through a difficult decision-making process. All his major public achievements—defending the British troops after the Boston Massacre, leading the Continental Congress toward independence, drafting the Massachusetts Constitution, insisting on a separate American peace treaty with Great Britain—were singular acts of leadership, usually performed in defiance of either conventional wisdom or popular opinion. He harbored a strong contrarian streak that, for example, made him uncomfortable with popularity, because it seemed to him a symptom of someone who would trim his sails rather than pursue the correct if unpopular course. He was an elitist who, unlike Jefferson, believed that majorities were wrong more often than right, and he periodically carried this conviction to the level of perversity, claiming that he was confident that a policy was correct because of its current unpopularity.

  All these personal tendencies had hardened into permanent habits of mind and heart by the time John reached the presidency. (Abigail referred to him as an “old oak” who might be torn up by the roots but would never bend, whereas Jefferson was “the willow” who would shift with the wind.) At the policy level, he was completely clear about the direction in which American history needed to flow: neutrality abroad, unity at home, and peace at all costs. By sending an American delegation to Paris, he had planted his standard, which he was prepared to defend to the death, no matter how few American citizens rallied round it.14

  The only advisors who had his ear were John Quincy, his designated one-man listening post in Europe, and Abigail, his one-woman cabinet. He urged John Quincy “to continue your Practice of writing freely to me, and cautiously to the Office of State,” thereby suggesting that he intended to keep foreign policy under his own control. As for Abigail, when the Aurora fired a salvo that described the president as “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams,” she joked that only she possessed the intimate information to verify the description, and that its very virulence indicated that he must be on the correct political course. Living with John all those years had turned her into a contrarian, too.15

  ABIGAIL’S EVOLUTION

  Abigail settled into her new duties—the term First Lady had not yet been coined—with all the ease one would expect of the veteran diplomat she had become. On a typical day she rose at five o’clock, tended to her correspondence until joining John for breakfast at eight, then received guests for two or three hours. She met John again for dinner at three, usually with a gathering of eight to ten guests, once a week hosting a much larger state banquet and twice a week hosting the more public levees. They spent two or three hours alone together most evenings, reading, talking, or writing letters at the same table.

  They almost certainly discussed John’s decision to nominate John Quincy as American minister to the Prussian Court in Berlin. Though both parents were aware that the nomination would smack of nepotism, they also had Washington’s judgment to bolster their confidence. Washington had been extremely impressed with John Quincy’s performance at The Hague and had urged John not to have any reservations about appointing his son to another post. “For without intending to compliment the father or mother,” Washington wrote, “I give it as my decided opinion that Mr. Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad, and there remains no doubt that he will prove himself to be the ablest of all our diplomatic corps.” When John Quincy learned of the nomination, however, he recoiled at the thought of being appointed by his father and declined the offer.16

  John was insistent: “Your Delicacy about holding a Commission from your Father, Seems to me, too refined … It is the worst founded opinion I ever knew you to conceive.” John Quincy eventually relented, but he asked his mother to apprise the president “that no nomination of me to any public office whatsoever, may ever again proceed from the present first magistrate.” His reasons were honor-driven, to be sure, but his reasoning was more sound than his father’s. Granted, merit alone should always be the criterion, John Quincy observed, “but the President is the constitutional judge of merit … and as it respects me, I know that he is a favorably partial judge.” What John Quincy did not know was that John had seriously considered appointing him to the highly controversial delegation to France, a decision that would have provoked a political firestorm.17

  Predictably, Bache, at the Aurora, trained his guns on the appointment, charging that “our monarchical president” was positioning his son for “a succession to the throne” and claiming, in defiance of the evidence, that John Quincy’s salary was much higher than the norm. This was all mixed with sarcastic references to “our three vote president,” referring to John’s narrow margin in the election, and dusted-off references to “His Rotundity.”18

  It was all too much for Abigail, who found it excruciating to sit still while her husband and son were being vilified. She began to refer to the Republican press, and eventually all critics of John’s policies, as “Jacobins,” a smear term that conjured up radical devotees of the guillotine during the French Revolution, declaring herself fed up with “the Billingsgate of all the Jacobin papers, the Lies, falsehoods, calamities and bitterness.” Her growing sense of revulsion spread to all of Philadelphia, which she described as “a City that seems devoted to calamity,” suggesting that the political atmosphere mirrored the contaminated air that produced yellow fever every summer.19

  Throughout the fall and early winter of 1797, while the nation awaited word from the American envoys to France, Abigail became increasingly partisan in her characterizations of the Republican opposition. It was not just a collection of insufferable critics; it was a “frenchified faction that is spreading sedition.” Their purported principles, she charged, were merely a convenient cover “to calumniate the President, his family, his admistration until they oblige him to resign, and then they will Reign Triumphant, headed by the Man of the People,” presumably Jefferson. Though her information was not far off the mark, she was crossing a line by suggesting that critics of her husband’s policies were guilty of treason and should be treated accordingly. “In times like the present,” she warned, “all Neutral Ground should be abandoned, and those who are not for us, be considered against us.”20

  It did not help that diplomatic prospects looked bleak. John Quincy wrote her to counsel low expectations from the current French government: “We shall find her to be at last, what she has been to us from the first moments of her existence, a domineering, captious, faithless and tyrannical sister.” John was equally pessimistic: “What are We to expect from the Negotiations? Europe seems to be one burning mountain, whose Bowells are full of Materials for Combustion.” Abigail was reaching the conclusion that war with France was unavoidable; indeed, France was already waging an undeclared war against American commerce. In such a situation, then, it was sheer folly to regard critics of government policy as anything but the modern-day equivalent of Tories. On this score, she had become more of an ultra-Federalist than John.21

  XYZ

  John did not think of himself as a Federalist at all. His model as chief executive was the same as Washington’s, the “patriot king” celebrated in Henry St. John Bolingbroke’s writings on English history, the statesman who levitated above all partisan interests and attempted to act in the long-term public interest of the nation regardless of the popular enthusiasms of the moment. This was an elevated conception of the presidency that was becoming increasingly anachronistic in the ferocious and highly orchestrated party battles of the 1790s, in which anyone attempting to carve out a centrist position soon found himself in a political version of no-man’s-land, raked by the crossfire from both sides.

  That was precisely the position that John found
himself in after deciding to make a last-ditch effort to avoid war with France. His policy was both realistic and prudent—give diplomacy a chance to avoid a crippling and costly war that the infant American republic could ill afford to wage, and at the same time create a more formidable American navy in case war became unavoidable. But at the time, the policy alienated the ultra-Federalists, who regarded the diplomatic initiative as blatant appeasement, as well as the Republican opposition, who saw the naval buildup as provocative and the peace initiative itself as a transparent sham designed to clear the ground for war with France. (In fact, this was Hamilton’s position.) In such a situation, the center could not hold because it did not exist.

  The bad news arrived on March 4, 1798, the first anniversary of John’s inauguration. Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, had refused to receive the American delegation, and, even more devastating, his three anonymous operatives, designated X, Y, and Z, had demanded a bribe of $250,000 as the prerequisite for any further negotiations. President Adams was also required to make a public apology for critical remarks about the French government delivered to Congress the previous summer. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering insisted that the only possible response to such gratuitous insults was a declaration of war.

  Though equally indignant about French demands, John rejected Pickering’s advice. He ordered the American envoys to return home, but refused to share the correspondence that exposed the indignities suffered by them with Congress, because he realized that those revelations would provoke popular outrage that would virtually force him into a declaration of war. Interestingly, Abigail described this decision as “a very painful thing [because] the President could not play his strongest card.” She misconstrued his decision because she herself, like Pickering, believed war with France was now unavoidable. John, however, was playing a different game, still clinging tenaciously to his core conviction that a premature war threatened to kill the infant American republic in the cradle. For one of the few times in their long partnership, Abigail and John were not on the same political page.22

  What happened next was richly ironic. Thanks to their two-to-one majority in the House, the Republicans were able to pass a resolution demanding that the president share with Congress all the dispatches from the American envoys, convinced as they were that the correspondence would reveal that the negotiations had broken down because of skullduggery on the American side. (This conviction followed naturally from their operating assumption that the president’s peace initiative had, from the start, been designed to fail.) And, double irony, Jefferson himself, as president of the Senate, was required to read the dispatches that described in excruciating detail the insulting behavior of the French government, bribes and all. Abigail, who was present in the gallery for this melodramatic scene, noted with enormous satisfaction that “the Jacobins in the Senate and House were struck dumb and opened not their mouths.”23

  Popular opinion shifted almost overnight. Abigail reported with great glee the newspaper accounts of a riot in Philadelphia’s major theater when the orchestra attempted to play “French Songs and Airs.” The audience shouted down the musicians, demanded that they play “the President’s March,” and when they refused, drove them off the stage.24

  Rumors began to circulate that French émigrés, who constituted a substantial minority population in Philadelphia, were plotting to set fire to the city and massacre the inhabitants. While Abigail found such wild rumors credible, John dismissed them as incendiary threats based on forged documents designed to stir up anti-French hysteria. He was almost surely correct, though even he lent his tacit support to the fearmongering when an anti-French mob estimated at ten thousand gathered outside the presidential residence, purportedly to protect it from firebombers. Rather ridiculously, John appeared before the crowd in military uniform, complete with sword, and obviously relished one of the few opportunities in his life to embrace the status of popular hero. The crowd chanted the new battle cry, “Millions for defense, not a cent for tribute.”25

  If vanity made him vulnerable, and it clearly did, his deep distrust of mobs and wild swings in popular opinion virtually ensured that his dalliance with the cheers of the crowd would prove transitory. Moreover, he remained convinced that the shouts of the multitude were just as misguided now, when they were demanding war with France, as they had been not so long ago, when they were hypnotized by the ideological illusions of the French Revolution. He remained wedded to a centrist course of American neutrality, which was attuned, or so he believed, to the deeper rhythms of American history and ought not be influenced by the turbulent cacophonies of the moment.

  Given the accusations of emotional instability that would be hurled at him in the ensuing months, it is instructive to recover his stubborn refusal to surrender his strategic vision to the impulsive cries for war in the spring and summer of 1798. His behavior is a textbook example of diplomatic patience, delaying a decision while waiting for the political templates to move. A letter from John Quincy buoyed his hopes on this score, for it provided intelligence about shifting factions within the Directory, an emerging recognition that French military resources were already spread too thin in Europe to contemplate another front in North America, and a new willingness to open negotiations with one of the American envoys, Elbridge Gerry, who had decided to remain in Paris in order to make himself available if and when French policy changed. Gerry was being pilloried in the Federalist press for this apparent act of insubordination, but he was one of John’s closest friends, which was the only reason he was appointed to the American delegation in the first place, and now John Quincy was reporting that Gerry’s insubordination had proved prescient. The French were having second thoughts.26

  Meanwhile, Abigail’s thoughts were moving in a different direction. Her comments on the French government became more strident and absolute (e.g., “the most dissolute and corrupt Nation now existing”). Unlike John, she held open no realistic hopes for a diplomatic resolution; indeed, she believed the nation was already engaged in an undeclared war with France, and therefore urged that Bache and his pro-French minions be identified as enemy agents: “As the French have boasted of having more influence on the United States than their own Government,” she wrote her sister, “the Men who now espouse their cause against their own Country … ought to be carefully marked.”27

  More specifically, she favored federal legislation designed “to punish the stirrer up of sedition, the writer and printer of base and unfounded calumny.” Foreigners were also a problem, especially French émigrés and recent Irish immigrants, who harbored French or anti-British sympathies and appeared to constitute foot soldiers for Republican candidates in several states. She predicted that the Republican leaders “will take ultimately a station in the public’s estimation like that of the Tories in our Revolution.”28

  In short, Abigail was an enthusiastic advocate for the four pieces of legislation pushed through Congress by the ultra-Federalists in late June and early July 1798 and known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These infamous statutes were designed to deport or disenfranchise foreign-born residents who were disposed to support the Republican, pro-French agenda, and make it a crime to publish “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States.” John played a passive role as the legislation made its way through Congress, and lived long enough to acknowledge that the Alien and Sedition Acts constituted a permanent stain on his presidency.29

  While he never blamed Abigail for his blunder, it is difficult to imagine that her strong support did not influence his decision. (Or perhaps a better way to put it is that it’s difficult to imagine him signing the controversial legislation if she had opposed it.) Through their long partnership, her political judgment usually provided reinforcement for his excellent instincts, which were often unpopular at the time but proved correct as history unfolded. When she had offered a critical suggestion, it was almost always cautionary, designed to calm him down
and rein in his more impulsive urges. In this instance, however, their customary roles were reversed. She had allowed herself to get caught up in the ultra-Federalist frenzy, to develop a highly melodramatic understanding of the political forces at play and lose any perspective on the hyperbolic assessments she was making. Instead of providing her usual gift of ballast, she helped to pull John over the edge and into a free fall from which his legacy never, in truth, completely recovered.

  How could this happen? It helps to remember that the entire Adams presidency seems to have been enveloped within an electromagnetic cloud that caused otherwise sensible statesmen to temporarily lose their bearings. George Washington, for example, by almost all accounts the most sober and realistic political leader of the era, wholly endorsed the Alien and Sedition Acts. And on the other side of the ideological divide, Jefferson and Madison managed to convince themselves that the entire XYZ Affair had been orchestrated by President Adams or his behind-the-scenes henchman, Hamilton. Speaking of Hamilton, his arrogant assumption that he was the de facto president had a delusional dimension, and his imperial ambitions as head of a putative standing army made Napoleon seem cautious by comparison. Abigail’s mental aberration, then, was part of a larger pattern of widespread political paranoia.

  Moreover, some of Abigail’s fears were not wholly unfounded. Jefferson was providing confidential intelligence to French partisans and to Bache at the Aurora. The Directory had entertained a scheme—it was Talleyrand’s brainchild—to incite a civil war designed to make the southern states part of a new French empire in America. Indeed, in some respects more conspiracies were afoot than she realized, since she was as ignorant as her husband of Hamilton’s duplicities with the cabinet.