AS A RESULT of Washington’s Olympian status, the infant American republic had managed to avoid a contested presidential election prior to 1796. Exactly how such an event should proceed without tearing the country apart was still very much a matter of speculation and improvisation. Although some semblance of the routinized mechanisms for political parties had begun to congeal during the debate over Jay’s Treaty, nothing remotely resembling the organized campaign structure of modern political parties yet existed. The method of choosing electors to that odd inspiration called the electoral college varied from state to state. And the very notion that a candidate should openly solicit votes violated the principled presumption that such behavior itself represented a confession of unworthiness for national office.
While a clear political distinction between Federalists and Republicans had emerged during Washington’s second term, and fervent editorialists were blazing away as partisans from both sides in the popular press, party labels and issue-oriented platforms were less important than a prospective candidate’s revolutionary credentials. Memories of the spirit of ’76 were still warm twenty years later, and the chief qualification for the presidency remained a matter of one’s historic role in the creation of American independence between 1776 and 1789. Only those leaders who had stepped forward at the national level to promote the great cause when its success was still perilous and problematic were eligible.
An exhaustive list of prospects would have included between twenty and thirty names, with Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, and James Madison enjoying spirited support. But the four names topping everyone’s list would have been almost unanimous: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. By 1796, of course, Washington had done his duty. Franklin was dead and gone. That left Adams and Jefferson as the obvious options. And by the spring of 1796 it had become a foregone conclusion that the choice was between them.
They were an incongruous pair, but everyone seemed to argue that history had made them into a pair. The incongruities leapt out for all to see: Adams, the short, stout, candid-to-a-fault New Englander; Jefferson, the tall, slender, elegantly elusive Virginian; Adams, the highly combustible, ever combative, mile-a-minute talker, whose favorite form of conversation was an argument; Jefferson, the always cool and self-contained enigma, who regarded debate and argument as violations of the natural harmonies he heard inside his own head. The list could go on—the Yankee and the Cavalier, the orator and the writer, the bulldog and the greyhound. They were the odd couple of the American Revolution.1
And it was the Revolution that had brought them together. They had worked side by side in the Continental Congress, first as staunch opponents of reconciliation with England, then as members of the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. In 1784 they were reunited in Paris, where Jefferson became an unofficial member of the Adams family and, as Abigail Adams put it, “the only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom and reserve.” The following year Jefferson visited Adams for several weeks in London, where, as America’s two chief ministers in Europe, they endured the humiliation together when George III ostentatiously turned his back on them during a formal ceremony at court. Adams never forgot this scene; nor did he forget the friend who was standing beside him when it happened.2
There were, to be sure, important political and ideological differences between the two men, differences that became the basis for the opposing sides they took in the party wars of the 1790s. But as soulmates who had lived together through some of the most formative events of the revolutionary era and of their own lives, Adams and Jefferson bonded at a personal and emotional level that defied their merely philosophical differences. They were charter members of the “band of brothers” who had shared the agonies and ecstasies of 1776 as colleagues. No subsequent disagreement could shake this elemental affinity. They knew, trusted, even loved each other for reasons that required no explanation.
The two major contestants for the presidency in 1796, then, not only possessed impeccable revolutionary credentials; they had also earned their fame as a team. Within the revolutionary generation, several competing examples of fortuitous cooperation and collaboration had helped to make history happen: Washington and Hamilton during the war, and then again during Washington’s second term; Hamilton and Madison on The Federalist Papers; Madison and Jefferson in orchestrating the Republican opposition to Hamilton’s financial program and then Jay’s Treaty. But in part because it seemed so seminal and symbolic of sectional cooperation, the Adams-Jefferson tandem stood out as the greatest collaboration of them all. Choosing between them seemed like choosing between the head and the heart of the American Revolution.
IF REVOLUTIONARY credentials were the major criteria, Adams was virtually unbeatable. His career, indeed his entire life, was made by the American Revolution; and he, in turn, had made American independence his life’s project. Perhaps Franklin and Hamilton could claim to have come from further back in the pack, but Adams was another one of those American characters who would have languished in obscurity if born in England or Europe.
Instead, he was born in Braintree, twelve miles south of Boston, in 1735, the son of a farmer and shoemaker, who sent Adams to Harvard in the hope he might become a minister. For a decade after graduating from college he probed his soul for signs of a divine calling while earning his keep as a country schoolteacher and then apprentice lawyer. In the mid-1760s two crucial events determined his fate: First, in 1764 he married Abigail Smith and created with her a partnership of remarkable equity and intimacy; second, in 1765, he stepped forward to help lead the opposition against the Stamp Act and eventually against every aspect of British policy toward the American colonies. American independence became his ministerial calling, a mission he pursued with all the compressed energy of a latter-day Puritan pastor whose congregation was the American people.
Bedeviled by doubts about himself but never about his cause, Adams and his cousin Samuel had become the most conspicuous opponents of British authority in New England by the time the Continental Congress convened in 1774. In the debates within the Continental Congress, John Adams gained fame as “the Atlas of independence” for renouncing any reconciliation with England, and for his pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, which became the guidebook for several state constitutions. While other delegates in the Congress kept searching for ways to avoid a break with England, Adams insisted the Revolution had already begun. He successfully lobbied for Washington to head the Continental Army and personally selected Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence, two strategic decisions designed to assure Virginia’s support for the cause. For over a year he served as chair of the Board of War and Ordinance, playing the role of secretary of war during the most tense and uncertain phase of the fighting.
In 1777 the Congress chose him to join Franklin in Paris to negotiate the alliance with France. He returned home for a few months in 1779, just long enough to draft almost single-handedly the Massachusetts Constitution. Then it was back to Paris to work on the peace treaty ending the war, an experience that generated his lifelong enmity toward Franklin, who found him insufferably austere and obsessively diligent. (Adams thought Franklin naïve about French motives, which were anti-English but not pro-American, and besotted with his own inflated reputation as the ultimate American in Paris.) Until 1788, he remained in Europe, first working with Jefferson for legal recognition of the new American nation as well as for loans from Dutch bankers in Amsterdam, then as America’s first minister to the Court of St. James in London, where he confirmed his everlasting conviction that England “cares no more for us than for the Seminole Indians.” His absence from the Constitutional Convention was regretted by all—along with Madison he was regarded as America’s most sophisticated student of government. He used his spare time in London to toss off three volumes of political philosophy, entitled Defence of the Constitution of the United States, which emphasized the advantages of a strong executive, a bicameral legislature, and the principle of checks and balances. He returned to America in time to be elected the first vice president of the United States, which most observers, including Adams himself, interpreted as a popular mandate on his historical contribution to independence. In the American pantheon, with Franklin on his deathbed, he ranked second only to Washington himself.3
His reputation then fell victim to two nearly calamitous setbacks, one beyond his control and the other the product of his personal flair for perversity. On the former score, Adams had the misfortune to become the first occupant of what he described as “the most insignificant office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived.” Subsequent occupants of the vice presidential office have lengthened the list of semihumorous complaints about inhabiting a prestigious political prison (for example, “not worth a bucketful of spit”), but Adams originated the jokes because he was the first prominent American statesman to experience the paradox of being a proverbial heartbeat away from maximum power while languishing in the political version of a cul-de-sac.4
According to the Constitution the vice president had two duties: to remain available if the president died, fell ill, or was removed from office; and to serve as president pro tem of the Senate, casting a vote only to break a tie. During his eight years in office Adams cast more tie-breaking votes—at least thirty-one and perhaps as many as thirty-eight—than any subsequent vice president in American history, in part because the small size of the Senate made ties more frequent. But after Adams’s initial fling at participating in the debates, the members of the Senate decided that the vice president was not permitted to speak. “It is to be sure a punishment to hear other men talk five hours every day,” Adams wrote to Abigail, “and not be at liberty to talk at all myself, especially as more than half I hear appears to me very young, inconsiderate, and inexperienced.” It was a monumental irony: The man famous as the indefatigable orator of independence in the Continental Congress was obliged to remain silent in the legislative councils of the new government. “My office,” Adams complained, “is too great a restraint upon such a Son of Liberty.” The great volcano of American political debate was required to confine himself to purely private eruptions.5
These occurred sporadically in his personal correspondence with Abigail, who remained ensconced at home in Quincy, Massachusetts, and with old revolutionary comrades like Benjamin Rush. Adams deeply resented being marooned and muted in the Senate, like an old warhorse with several charges left in him, now put out to pasture while crucial battles about the direction of the republic raged around him. And, Adams being Adams, his bitterness found colorful and painfully self-defeating expression in his tirades about the injustice of it all: “The History of our Revolution will be one continued lye from one end to the other,” he wrote Rush in 1790. “The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electric rod smote the Earth and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thence forward these two conducted all the Policy, Negotiations, Legislatures and War.” As Adams saw it, he had been prepared, by both experience and training, to perform a central role in the unfolding drama of winning and securing the American Revolution. Instead, he was relegated to the sidelines as a marginal player while Johnny-come-latelies like Hamilton and Madison occupied center stage.6
To make matters worse, his duties in the Senate removed him from the deliberations of the cabinet. Washington seldom consulted him on policy questions, apparently believing that the vice presidency was a legislative office based in the Senate; therefore, to include Adams in executive decisions violated the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. When asked by friends about his isolation from the presidential councils, Adams halfheartedly endorsed the same constitutional explanation. “The executive authority is so wholly out of my sphere,” he observed, “and it is so delicate a thing for me to meddle in that, I avoid it as much as possible.” He desperately wanted to be consulted, but he was too proud to push himself forward. He steadfastly supported all the major initiatives of the Washington administration, including Hamilton’s financial plan, the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Proclamation of Neutrality, and Jay’s Treaty, though he had almost no influence on their formulation and some private reservations about Hamilton’s ties with bankers and speculators. It was difficult to think of the ever-combative, highly combustible champion of the American Revolution as extraneous and invisible, but that is what the vice presidency had made him.7
Adams deserved an assist for making himself into a marginal figure because of remarks he made during the first session of the Senate, before it was decided that the vice president could not participate in debates. The issue concerned a minor matter of etiquette: How should the president be addressed by members of Congress? While hardly an earthshaking question, it had symbolic significance because of the obsessive American suspicion of monarchy, which haunted all conversations about the powers of the presidency under the recently ratified Constitution. Anyone who favored a strong executive was vulnerable to the charge of being a quasi-monarchist, and therefore a traitor to the republican principles of the American Revolution.
Adams was so confident in his own revolutionary credentials that he regarded himself as immune to such charges. But when he lectured the Senate on the need for elaborate trappings of authority and proposed that President Washington be addressed as “His Majesty” or “His Highness,” his remarks became the butt of several barbed jokes, including the suggestion that he had been seized by “nobilimania” during his long sojourn in England and might prefer to be addressed as “His Rotundity” or the “Duke of Braintree.” Jefferson threw up his hands at the sheer stupidity of Adams’s proposals, calling them “the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of.”8
Adams tried to laugh himself out of the monarchical morass, claiming that he simply wanted to assure that the executive branch of the government enjoyed a fighting chance against the awesome powers of the legislature. “The little fishes will eat up the great one,” he joked, “unless the great one should devour all the little ones.” If all formal titles were to be stigmatized, he wrote to Benjamin Rush, then perhaps Rush’s children should start addressing their father as “Ben.”9
Mostly, however, Adams stewed and simmered and tried to defend himself. Ever the political pugilist who felt obliged to answer every bell, Adams refused to back away from his belief that the new American government needed a strong executive presence. In a series of thirty-one essays printed in the Gazette of the United States and subsequently published as Discourses on Davila, he argued that all stable governments required what he called a “monarchical principle,” meaning a singular figure empowered to embody the will of the nation and to protect the ordinary citizenry from the inevitable accumulation of power by the more wealthy and wellborn. In most European states, he went on to argue, it was probably necessary for the monarchy to remain hereditary for the foreseeable future, in order to permit a more gradual transition to full-blown republican principles.
Such statements seemed almost designed to invite misunderstanding, which is precisely what they did. For the rest of his life, Adams lived under a cloud of suspicion that he wished to restore hereditary monarchy in America and that, once installed in the presidency, he fully intended to declare himself king for life and his son John Quincy his successor. He could argue till doomsday that such claims were preposterous, which they were and which he did, but Adams had tied a tin can labeled “monarchist” to his own tail, which then rattled through ages and pages of the history books. Since Washington had no children of his own—the Father of His Country was almost certainly sterile—he was less vulnerable to charges of hereditary aspirations. (Intriguingly, of the first six presidents, only Adams had a male heir.) If Washington became the quasi-monarchical president who could be trusted, Adams became the closet monarchist who could not.10
The Davila essays, in fact, became the basis for the first serious rift in his friendship with Jefferson. The publisher of the American edition of Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man printed what we would now call a blurb for the book, a quote from Jefferson, who had presumed that his remarks would be anonymous. Jefferson mentioned in passing “the political heresies” of Davila, which everyone knew to be written by Adams. Adams was outraged, claiming that Jefferson, of all people, should know that he had not converted to monarchy while in Europe. Jefferson expressed his regrets, explaining to Washington: “I am afraid the indiscretion of a printer has compromised me with a friend, Mr. Adams, for whom, as one of the most honest and disinterested men alive, I have a cordial esteem.” A somewhat touchy correspondence then ensued, in which Jefferson attempted to remind Adams that their much-valued friendship did not depend on complete agreement about forms of government. Adams, clearly hurt, responded in his typically aggressive style: “I know not what your idea is of the best form of government. You and I never had a serious conversation together that I can recollect concerning the nature of government. The very transient hints that have passed between us have been jocular and superficial, without ever coming to any explanation.” Having scored his points, Adams then retreated to safer ground: “The friendship that has subsisted for fifteen years between us without the slightest interruption, and until this occasion without the slightest suspicion, ever has been and still is very dear to my heart.”11
It was still dear to Jefferson as well, so much so that he preferred to misrepresent his emerging conviction that Adams had allowed himself to be “taken up by the monarchical federalists” and was, albeit inadvertently, lending his enormous prestige to the growing conspiracy against the revolutionary principles that the Adams-Jefferson team had done so much to create. That, at least, was what he was saying and writing to others. To Adams, on the other hand, he claimed that his remarks on the Davila essays had been misconstrued, that he was actually “not referring to any writing that I might suppose to be yours.” This was patently untrue, but a justifiable distortion in the Jeffersonian scheme of things because motivated by an authentic urge to sustain the friendship. The Adams style was to confront, shout, rant, and then to embrace. The Jefferson style was to evade, maintain pretenses, then convince himself that all was well.12
For a time, the meshing of these two diametrically different styles worked. Adams and Jefferson maintained cordial relations throughout most of Washington’s first term, even though it was clear for all to see that they stood on opposite sides of the chasm that was opening up between Federalists and Republicans. It helped that Adams was muzzled and largely ignored in the vice presidency, and that Jefferson, though covertly advising Madison on how best to counter Hamilton’s financial program, was simultaneously and officially a member of the Washington administration. In 1793 Jefferson accompanied Adams for his induction into the American Philosophical Society. Adams commented to Abigail, “we are still upon terms,” meaning that the friendship endured, but just barely.13
Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution, despite its wild and bloody excesses, pushed Adams over the edge. The notion that the cascading events in France bore any relation to the American Revolution struck Adams as outright lunacy. (“Danton, Robespierre, Marat, etc. are furies,” he wrote to John Quincy in 1793. “Dragons’ teeth have been sown in France and will come up as monsters.”) He began to describe Jefferson as a dangerous dreamer who, like many of his fellow Virginians, was so deeply in debt to British creditors that his judgment of European affairs was tinged with a virulent form of Anglophobia that rendered him incapable of a detached assessment of America’s interests abroad. He needed to “get out from under his debts … and proportion his style and life to his Revenue.” As it was, Jefferson had become a man “poisoned by ambition and his Temper embittered against the Constitution and the Administration.”14
By the time Jefferson stepped down as secretary of state late in 1793, only faint traces of the famous friendship lingered like nostalgic reminiscences in the Adams memory: “I have so long been in the habit of thinking well of his abilities and general good dispositions,” Adams confided to Abigail, “that I cannot but feel some regret at this event [Jefferson’s retirement]…. But his want of candor, his obstinate prejudices against all forms of government power, his real partiality in spite of all his pretensions … have so nearly reconciled me to it that I will not weep.… His mind is now poisoned with passion, prejudice, and faction.”15
As a veteran Jefferson watcher, Adams offered a skeptical assessment of his former friend’s decision to leave public life: “Jefferson thinks by this step to get a reputation of an humble, modest, meek man, wholly without ambition or vanity,” he explained to John Quincy. “He may even have deceived himself into this belief. But if a prospect opens, the world will see and he will feel that he is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell, though no soldier.” In a sense, Adams was saying that he understood the psychological forces driving Jefferson’s escape to Monticello better than Jefferson himself. He already sensed, in a way that Jefferson’s elaborate denial mechanisms did not permit into his own interior conversations, that Jefferson’s retirement was temporary, and the two old colleagues would soon be vying for the presidency. The great collaboration was destined to become the great competition.16
THE MOST savvy Jefferson watcher of all time, at least over the full stretch of their respective careers, was James Madison. While in the Adams partnership Jefferson was the younger man, he was senior to Madison. While he tended to defer to Adams on the basis of age and political experience, Jefferson dominated his relationship with Madison for the same reasons. The collaboration had begun in Virginia during the Revolution and had then congealed during the 1780s, when Jefferson was in Paris and Madison became his most trusted source of information about political events back home, most especially the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, which turned out to be Madison’s most singularly creative moment and the only occasion when he acted independently of Jefferson’s influence.
Although the trust between them had grown close to unconditional by the 1790s, when they assumed joint leadership of the Republican opposition to Federalist domestic and foreign policies, their partnership lacked the dramatic character of the Adams-Jefferson collaboration, which seemed to symbolize the creative tension between New England and Virginia and the fusion of ideological and temperamental opposites in a common cause. Madison was temperamentally the opposite of Jefferson—less sweeping in his intellectual style, more careful and precise, the prose to Jefferson’s poetry—but because he instinctively subordinated his agenda to Jefferson’s will, there were never the revealing clashes that gave the Adams-Jefferson dialogue its dynamic dimension. If the seams in the Adams-Jefferson collaboration were the source of its magic, the Jefferson-Madison alliance was seamless, and therefore less magical than smoothly and silently effective.
Whereas Adams and Jefferson had come together as Americans, first in 1776 as early advocates of independence from Great Britain, then in the 1780s as America’s two chief ministers in Europe, Jefferson and Madison had bonded as Virginians, dedicated to assuring the triumph of Virginia’s interests within the national government. While perhaps a more provincial cause, it had all the advantages of a more concerted and tightly focused political agenda in which each man played a clearly defined role.
Jefferson was the grand strategist, Madison the agile tactician. “I shall always receive your commands with pleasure,” Madison wrote to Jefferson in 1794, “and shall continue to drop you a line as occasions turn up.” Jefferson had recently ensconced himself at Monticello, relishing his retirement, and Madison was returning to the political wars in Philadelphia. Madison’s message signaled the resumption of what can be considered the most successful political partnership in American history. And though Jefferson did not know it, indeed made a point of denying it to himself, it also signaled the start of his campaign for the presidency.17
Jefferson’s letters during this reclusive phase avoided politics altogether, emphasizing instead his designs for a refurbished Monticello, his crop-rotation system, a somewhat bizarre proposal to transport the University of Geneva to Virginia, and the ideal process for making manure. His letters to Madison also featured the Monticellan Jefferson, the statesman-turned-farmer sequestered in “my remote canton.” Politics on occasion crept into the dialogue, much like an exotic plant growing amid descriptions of vetch as the ideal rotation crop. Madison’s letters, on the other hand, were full of political news from the capital—Hamilton’s treacheries and alleged cooking of the books in the Treasury Department, Washington’s ominous overreaction to the Whiskey Rebellion, the groundswell of opposition to Jay’s Treaty—with many of the letters written in code to foil snoopers at the post office.18
Madison was quietly orchestrating the Republican campaign on behalf of Jefferson to succeed Washington. In October of 1795 Aaron Burr visited Monticello, presumably to discuss the delivery of New York’s electoral votes, probably as a condition for his own place on the ticket as vice president. Other Republican operatives like John Beckley, the Speaker of the House, were focusing on the political factions in Pennsylvania, another key state. On the other side, Federalist editors and polemicists, encountering this mounting campaign on Jefferson’s behalf, began to generate anti-Jefferson propaganda: He had suffered humiliation as governor of Virginia when he fled before British troops; he was an inveterate Francophile; he was an intellectual dreamer, “more fit to be a professor in a College, President of a Philosophical Society … but certainly not the first magistrate of a great nation.” While all this was going on around him, Jefferson professed complete ignorance of his candidacy. He would have been perfectly capable of swearing on the Bible that none of these initiatives came from him.19
Madison managed the particulars silently and surreptitiously. He understood—indeed, it was a crucial aspect of the collaboration—that Jefferson’s eventual reentry into the political arena depended upon sustaining the fiction in his mentor’s own mind that it would never happen. Jefferson required what we would call “deniability,” not just for public purposes but also for his own private serenity. In the Jefferson-Madison collaboration, Madison was not just responsible for handling the messy particulars; he was also accountable for shielding his chief from the political ambitions throbbing away in his own soul.
As late as the summer of 1796, when Washington’s retirement was a foregone conclusion and Jefferson’s candidacy for the presidency was common knowledge throughout the country, Jefferson claimed to be completely oblivious to the campaign on his behalf. Madison spent four months at Montpelier, only a few miles from Monticello, but never visited Jefferson, for fear of being forced into a conversation that might upset Jefferson’s denial mechanisms. “I have not seen Jefferson,” he wrote Monroe in code, “and have thought it best to present him no opportunity of protesting to his friend against being embarked on this contest.” Jefferson thus became perhaps the last person in America to recognize that he was running for the presidency against his old friend from Massachusetts.20
Meanwhile up in Quincy, that very friend was also dancing a minuet with his own political ambitions. Adams’s partner in the dance was Abigail, whose political instincts rivaled Madison’s legendary skills and whose knowledge of her husband’s emotional makeup surpassed all competitors. She had always been his ultimate confidante, the person he could trust with his self-doubts, vanities, and overflowing opinions. Now, however, with Jefferson gone over to the other side and their former friendship reduced to polite and nervously evasive exchanges, Abigail became his chief and, in most respects, his sole collaborator. One reason Adams fled from Philadelphia for nine months each year, apart from the oppressive summer heat, the annual yellow fever epidemics, and the fact he despised his job, was that he needed to be with her.
Ironically, we can only know what they were saying to each other while together from the letters they wrote when apart. During the months Congress was in session they wrote each other two or three times every week. Much of the correspondence was playfully personal: “No man even if he is sixty years of age ought to have more than three months at a time from his family,” Abigail complained soon after he departed for Philadelphia. “Oh that I had a bosom to lean my head upon,” Adams replied. “But how dare you hint or lisp a word about ‘sixty years of age.’ If I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above forty.”21
Just as often, however, Adams also used the correspondence to unburden himself of opinions that his muzzled status in the Senate prevented him from sharing publicly. The quality of oratory in the Senate, he complained, was far below the standards at the Continental Congress, though he was intrigued by the fluid, nonchalant style of Aaron Burr, whom he described “as fat as a duck and as ruddy as a roost cock.” He was lonely for his wife’s company and political advice: “I want to sit and converse with you about our debates every evening. I sit here alone and brood over political probabilities and conjectures.” Abigail heard him out about the doomed course of the French Revolution but was somewhat more sanguine: “I ruminate upon France as I lie awake many hours before light,” she wrote. “My present thought is that their virtuous army will give them a government in time in spite of all their conventions but of what nature it will be, it is hard to say.”22
Abigail responded harshly to Republican critics of Jay’s Treaty, calling them “mindless Jacobins and party creatures.” Adams concurred, though he also thought the affection for England that the “ultras,” or High Federalists, seemed to harbor was just as misguided as the Republican love affair with France: “I wish that misfortune and adversity could soften the temper and humiliate the insolence of John Bull, but he is not yet sufficiently humble. If I mistake not, it is the destiny of America one day to beat down his pride. But the irksome task will not soon, I hope, be forced upon us.” Like Washington, he saw Jay’s Treaty as a shrewd if bittersweet bargain designed to postpone war with England for perhaps a generation. In the meantime, he hoped that England and France would bleed each other to death. As for George III, “the mad idiot will never recover,” but as in the old revolutionary days, “his idiocy is our salvation.”23
When Adams offered a harsh appraisal of Washington’s lack of formal education and knowledge of the classics, Abigail chided him: Washington was the only man apart from her husband capable of detachment and ought not be carped at behind his back. If anyone else had corrected him so directly, Adams would have gone into his Vesuvial mode. Coming from Abigail, however, the political advice was welcomed. “Send more,” Adams pleaded. “There is more good thoughts, fine strokes, and mother wit in them than I hear [in the Senate] in the whole week.” Abigail dismissed such praise as pure flattery. “What a jumble are my letters—politics, domestic occurrences, farming anecdotes—pray light your segars [sic] with them.” Instead, he savored and saved them all.24
Then there was the touchy question of the presidency. At some unspoken level, Adams knew, which meant that Abigail also knew, that he considered the office his revolutionary right. No one else, save perhaps Jefferson, could match his record of service to the cause of independence. Why else had he been willing to languish in the shadow of the vice presidency for those godforsaken years if not to use it as a stepping-stone to the prize itself? Like Jefferson—indeed, like any self-respecting statesman of the era, save perhaps Burr—Adams had no intention of campaigning for the office. (Burr did, and acted on it.) “I am determined to be a silent spectator of the silly and wicked game,” Adams explained to Abigail, “and to enjoy it as a comedy, a farce, or as a gymnastic exhibition at Sadler’s Wells.” Then he added a candid afterthought: “Yet I don’t know how I should live without it.”25
That was the Adams pattern: first to deny his political ambitions, much like Jefferson; then to confront them, feel guilty about them, fidget over them; then grudgingly admit they were part of who he was. Washington’s successor would inherit “a devilish load … and be very apt to stagger and stumble.” Who in his right mind would want the job? Moreover, he was not cut out for all the ceremonial obligations: “I hate speeches, messages, addresses and answers, proclamations, and such affected, studied, contraband things,” he wrote sulkily to Abigail. “I hate levees and drawing rooms. I hate to speak to a thousand people to whom I have nothing to say.” Then again the revealing afterthought: “Yet all this I can do.”26
Abigail aligned her responses to fit alongside her husband’s own internal odyssey toward the inevitable. Yes, the presidency was a thankless job, “a most unpleasant seat, full of thorns, briars, thistles, murmuring, fault-finding, calumny, obloquy.” But—her version of the Adams internal ricochet—“the Hand of Providence ought to be attended to, and what is designed, cheerfully submitted to.” Did this mean she could live with his candidacy and would consent to live with him if he won the election? Abigail refused to answer that question until the late winter of 1796. “My Ambition leads me not to be first in Rome,” she observed somewhat coyly. Her only political ambition was to “reign in the heart of my husband. That is my throne and there I aspire to be absolute.” On the other hand, if he was elected to the presidency, it would be “a flattering and Glorious Reward” for his lifetime of public service, and he would obviously need “a wife to hover about you, to bind up your temples, to mix your bark and pour out your coffee.” Adams was ecstatic: “Hi! Ho! Oh Dear. I am most tenderly your forever friend.” With her at his side, he had no real need for a cabinet.27
Now that his personal demons were out in the open and Abigail was on board, the collaboration moved into high gear. In March and April of 1796, the Adams team began to assess electoral projections on a state-by-state basis. He worried that New England might not rally to his candidacy. She was confident it would go solidly for him. (She was right.) Reports from New York and Pennsylvania suggested a strong surge for Jefferson, who was clearly the main threat. Adams foresaw a very close electoral vote, perhaps even a tie with Jefferson, which would then throw the election into the House of Representatives. Or suppose Jefferson finished a close second and therefore became vice president? (Until passage of the Twelfth Amendment, electors voted for two candidates, not one ticket of two.) Might this not create “a dangerous crisis in public affairs” by placing the president and vice president “in opposite boxes”? Abigail thought such speculations were too hypothetical to worry about. (Here events proved her wrong.) Moreover, she still had a soft spot in her heart for Jefferson and believed him fully capable of joining the Adams team: “Though wrong in politics, though formerly an advocate of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, and though frequently mistaken in men and measures, I do not think him an insincere or corruptible man.” And all this fretful conjuring about prospective mishaps and crises, she scolded, was unbecoming a man who would be first magistrate of the nation. In a recent dream, Abigail reported, she was riding in a coach when, suddenly, several large cannonballs were flying toward her. All burst in the air before reaching her coach, the pieces of metal falling harmlessly in the middle distance. This was a clear sign: Stop worrying. The voters and the gods were on their side.28
EVENTS PROVED Abigail half-right. The electoral vote split along sectional lines, Adams carrying New England and Jefferson the South. As the results trickled in from different states in December, Adams threw several tantrums that required Abigail to nurse him back to composure. The Federalist ticket featured Adams and Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina as a tandem. Behind-the-scenes maneuverings by Hamilton threatened to propel Pinckney past Adams, though Hamilton claimed that his chief goal was to knock Jefferson out altogether. For a while, when it appeared that Pinckney might actually win and Adams come in second, the Sage of Quincy exploded: Pinckney was a “nobody”; the humiliation of serving under him was more than he could bear; he would resign the vice presidency if he finished in second place. On December 30, however, when results from Virginia and South Carolina revealed that Adams had captured one electoral vote in each of these southern states, Adams ceased erupting and started celebrating. “John Adams never felt more serene in his life,” he wrote Abigail. It was a razor-thin victory, but he had prevailed over Jefferson 71 to 68, with Pinckney a close third and Burr, Jefferson’s running mate, far back in the pack.29
Jefferson’s posture throughout the drawn-out counting of the electoral votes remained a combination of studied indifference and calculated obliviousness. Quite obviously, he realized he was a candidate. Madison was relaying state-by-state assessments to Monticello, which were also being reported in the local press. Although Jefferson claimed to be too busy with his renovations at Monticello and his crop-rotation scheme to notice such things, some hidden portion of his mind was surely paying close attention, since he predicted that Adams would win by three electoral votes—the precise result—two months before it became official.
On December 28 he wrote a congratulatory letter to Adams, regretting “the various little incidents [that] have happened or been contrived to separate us” and disavowing any desire to have been thrust into the presidential election in the first place: “I have no ambition to govern men,” he explained. “It is a painful and thankless task.” He also went out of his way to squelch rumors that he might resent serving under his old friend and more recent opponent: “I can particularly have no feelings which would revolt at a secondary position to Mr. Adams. I am his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in our civil government.” Up in Quincy, Abigail reiterated her abiding sense that Jefferson could be trusted to recover his earlier intimacy with her husband. “You know,” she confided to Adams, “my friendship for that gentleman has lived through his faults and errors—to which I have not been blind. I believe he remains our friend.”30
Over the course of the next few weeks Adams and Jefferson developed two equally cogent but wholly incompatible political strategies in response to their somewhat awkward reunion as a political pair. Both strategies began with the realistic recognition that whoever succeeded Washington as president was likely to face massive problems, in part because of the deep political divisions over foreign policy that had haunted his second term, mostly because Washington was destiny’s choice as the greatest American of the age and therefore inherently irreplaceable. From that common starting point, they then devised diametrically different courses of action.
The core feature of the Adams strategy was to bring Jefferson into his confidence and his councils—in effect, to create a bipartisan administration in which Jefferson enjoyed the kind of access and influence that Adams himself had been denied as vice president in the Washington administration. Adams began to leak his thoughts along these lines in private conversations that he knew would find their way back to Jefferson. And they did: “My friends inform me that Mr. A. speaks of me with great friendship,” Jefferson observed, “and with satisfaction in the prospect of administering the government in concurrence with me.” Adams was suggesting that the old collaboration of 1776 be recovered and revived. If no single leader could hope to fill the huge vacuum created by Washington’s departure, perhaps the reconstituted team of Adams and Jefferson, which had performed so brilliantly in previous political assignments, might enjoy at least a fighting chance of sustaining the legacy of national leadership that Washington had established. Abigail supported the initiative; indeed, it might very well have been her idea in the first place, convinced as she was that the political split between Jefferson and her husband had not destroyed the mutual affection and trust that had built up over the previous twenty years of friendship.31
Trust was crucial. On almost all the disputes over domestic and foreign policy in the 1790s Adams and Jefferson had found themselves on different sides. And each man had made brutally harsh assessments of the other, rooted in their quite different convictions about the proper course the American Revolution should take. Adams was distinctive, however, for his tendency to regard even serious political and ideological differences as eminently negotiable once elemental bonds of personal trust and affection were established. In the Adams scheme, intimacy trumped ideology.
Several of Adams’s closest friends—Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Benjamin Rush, Mercy Otis Warren—were ardent Republicans but still retained his confidence. He was especially predisposed to forgive or ignore political differences when the other person had been one of the “band of brothers” in 1776. He harbored, as Fisher Ames described it, “a strong revolutionary taint in his mind, [and] admires the character, principles and means which that revolutionary system … seems to legitimate, and … holds cheap any reputation that was not then founded and top’d off.” By this standard, Jefferson was a more reliable colleague than staunch Federalists who had been reluctant or merely peripheral participants in the climactic phase of the revolutionary drama. “His [Jefferson’s] talents I know very well,” Adams wrote to Gerry in a letter he knew would find its way to Monticello, “and have ever believed in his honour, Integrity, his Love of Country, and his friends.”32
Because nothing like the full-blooded machinery of a modern political party system existed, Adams conveyed his tentative scheme for a bipartisan initiative informally through letters and conversations sure to be picked up by the press. That was how Jefferson learned that Adams was contemplating a truly bold response to the most glaring problem facing his presidency—namely, to send a delegation to France analogous to Jay’s mission to England, this time to negotiate a treaty designed to avert war with the other great European power. What’s more, Adams let it be known that he was considering either Jefferson or Madison to head the delegation—in effect, including the leadership of the Republican party in the shaping of foreign policy. When Madison got wind of this rumor, he could not believe it: “It has got into the Newspapers that an Envoy Extraordinary was to go to France,” he wrote Jefferson, “and that I was to be that person. I have no reason to suppose a shadow of truth in the former part of the story; and the latter is pure fiction.”33
But the rumor was true. Abigail endorsed the initiative. Again, the idea might have originated with her, though the communication within the Adams marriage was so seamless and overlapping that primacy is impossible to fix. When the trial balloon floated past several dedicated Federalists, they could not believe it either, since it seemed to them like willfully dragging the Trojan horse into the Federalist fortress. Adams heard about the Federalist reaction and told Abigail that if it persisted, he would threaten to “resign the office and let Jefferson lead them to peace, wealth, and power if he will.” He was sure, in any event, that a bipartisan effort maximized the prospects for a truly neutral American foreign policy, which was what Washington had attempted and the vast majority of Americans wanted: “We will have neither John Bull nor Louis Baboon,” he joked to Abigail. His response to those partisans of both parties who disagreed was one defiant word: “Silence.”34
Jefferson was the master of silence, especially when he disagreed. But the early letters and leaks out of Monticello indicated that he was in fact disposed to agree and consider a bipartisan political alliance grounded in the personal trust of the once-great collaboration. He reiterated his claim, simultaneously sincere and misleading, that he had been embarrassed to learn that he had become a candidate for the presidency. “I never in my life exchanged a word with any person on the subject,” he noted, “till I found my name brought forward generally, in competition with that of Mr. Adams.” In fact, he claimed to feel quite awkward being pitted against a man whom he regarded much like an older brother and one with a superior claim to the office based on seniority and experience: “Few will believe the true dispositions of my mind,” he told his son-in-law. “It is not the less true, however, that I do sincerely wish to be second on the vote rather than first.” When a dispute over the electoral vote in Vermont threatened to produce a tie in the final tally and throw the election into the House of Representatives, Jefferson let out the word that he would defer to Adams so as “to prevent the phaenomenon of a Pseudo-president at so early a day.” His posture seemed the model of graciousness and elegant accommodation.35
This was not a mere facade, but it was only the top layer of Jefferson’s thinking. A level below the surface, he, much like Adams, was preoccupied with the long shadow of George Washington. Mixing his metaphors in uncharacteristic fashion, he confided to Madison his deeper reasons for embracing the Adams victory: “The President [Washington] is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag. Yet, as his departure will mark the moment when the difficulties begin to work, you will see, that they will be ascribed to the new administration, and that he will have his usual good fortune of repaying credit from the good acts of others, and leaving to them that of others.” He was certain that “no man will bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.” While strolling around the grounds of Monticello with a French visitor, he expanded on his strategic sense of the intractable political realities: “In the present situation of the United States, divided as they are between two parties, which mutually accuse each other of perfidy and treason … this exalted station [the presidency] is surrounded with dangerous rocks, and the most eminent abilities will not be sufficient to steer clear of them all.” Whereas Washington had been able to levitate above the partisan factions, “the next president of the United States will only be the president of a party.” There was no safe middle ground, only a no-man’s-land destined to be raked by the cross fire from both sides.36
From Jefferson’s perspective, then, Adams was essentially proposing that the two men join forces and stand back-to-back in the killing zone. To his credit, Jefferson’s first instinct was to accept the invitation. After congratulating Adams on his electoral triumph, assuring him that “I never one single moment expected a different issue,” Jefferson warned him of the partisan bickering that his administration would have to negotiate. “Since the days on which you signed the treaty of Paris,” Jefferson noted ominously, “our horizon was never so overcast.” He would be pleased and honored, however, to play a constructive role in moving the nation past this difficult moment and to recover the old patriot spirit of ’76, “when we were working for our independence.” He closed with a vague promise to renew the old partnership.37
Adams would have been overjoyed to receive such a message—given the stilted language of their most recent and rather contrived correspondence, it seemed to meet him more than halfway—but the letter was never sent. Instead, Jefferson decided to pass it to Madison in order to assure its propriety. Madison produced six reasons why Jefferson’s gesture of support might create unacceptable political risks. The last and most significant was the clincher: “Considering the probability that Mr. A’s course of administration may force an opposition to it from the Republican quarter, and the general uncertainty of the posture our affairs may take, there may be real embarrassments from giving written possession to him, of the degree of compliment and confidence which your personal delicacy and friendship have suggested.” In short, Jefferson must choose between his affection for Adams, which was palpable and widely known, and his leadership of the Republican party. If registering a nostalgic sentiment of affinity was Jefferson’s main intention, Madison suggested that could be done by leaking part of the message to mutual friends. (In fact, Madison had already handled that piece of diplomacy by sending such words to Benjamin Rush, who would presumably pass them along to Adams, and did.) But Jefferson must not permit himself to be drawn into the policy-making process of the Adams administration, lest it compromise his role as leader of the Republican opposition.38
When Madison offered tactical advice of this sort, Jefferson almost always listened. Nevertheless, he wanted Madison to know that it came at a price: “Mr. A. and myself were cordial friends from the beginning of the revolution,” he explained. “The deviation from that line of politics on which we had been united has not made me less sensible of the rectitude of his heart: and I wished him to know this.” That said and duly recorded on one portion of his soul, Jefferson concurred that a diplomatic leak of that message satisfied his conscience. “As to my participating in the administration,” Jefferson then observed, “if by that he meant the executive cabinet, both duty and inclination will shut that door to me.” By “duty,” Jefferson meant his obligation to orchestrate the opposition to Adams’s presidency. By “inclination,” he meant his personal aversion to the kind of controversy and policy debate inside the cabinet that Adams seemed to be proposing. “I cannot have a wish,” Jefferson concluded, “to descend daily into the arena like a gladiator to suffer martyrdom in every conflict.” Instead of acknowledging that he was choosing loyalty to party over loyalty to Adams—for Jefferson, ideology was trumping intimacy—he preferred to cast his decision in personal terms. He simply did not have the stomach or the stamina to argue the Republican agenda from inside the tent. Though psychologically incapable of seeing himself as a party leader, in truth that was what he had become.39
It was a personally poignant and politically fateful decision. Adams did not know about it for several weeks. The reports he was receiving from mutual friends emphasized Jefferson’s generosity of spirit in defeat. This sounded hopeful. Abigail remained confident that Jefferson could be trusted, that the bipartisan direction was the proper course, and the inclusion of a prominent Republican on the peace delegation to France, probably Madison, was a shrewd move. On the other hand, the Federalists whom Adams chose for his cabinet—he retained Washington’s advisers, his biggest blunder—had threatened to resign en masse if Adams tried to implement his bipartisan strategy. (In retrospect, this would have been the best thing that could have happened to Adams.) How the incoming president would have resolved this impasse if Jefferson had agreed to resume the collaboration is impossible to know.
As it was, events played out in a rather dramatic face-to-face encounter. On March 6, 1797, Adams and Jefferson dined with Washington at the presidential mansion in Philadelphia. Adams learned that Jefferson was unwilling to join the cabinet and that neither Jefferson nor Madison was willing to be part of the peace delegation to France. Jefferson learned that Adams had been battling his Federalist advisers, who opposed a vigorous Jeffersonian presence in the administration. They left the dinner together and walked down Market Street to Fifth, two blocks from the very spot where Jefferson had drafted the words of the Declaration of Independence that Adams had so forcefully defended before the Continental Congress almost twenty-one years earlier. As Jefferson remembered it later, “we took leave, and he never after that said one word to me on the subject or ever consulted me as to any measure of the government.” But of course Jefferson himself had already decided that he preferred the anomalous role of opposing the administration in which he officially served.40
A few days later at his swearing-in ceremony as vice president, Jefferson joked about his rusty recall of parliamentary procedure, a clear sign that he intended to spend his time in the harmless business of monitoring debates in the Senate. After Adams was sworn in as president on March 13, he reported to Abigail that Washington had murmured under his breath: “Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest.” Predictably, the sight of Washington leaving office attracted the bulk of the commentary in the press. Adams informed Abigail that it was like “the sun setting full-orbit, and another rising (though less splendidly).” Observers with a keener historic sense noticed that the first transfer of power at the executive level had gone smoothly, almost routinely. Jefferson was on the road back to Monticello immediately after the inaugural ceremony, setting up the Republican government in exile, waiting for the inevitable catastrophes to befall the presidency of his old friend. As for Adams himself, without Jefferson as a colleague, with a Federalist cabinet filled with men loyal to Hamilton, he was left alone with Abigail, the only collaborator he could truly trust. His call to her mixed abiding love with a sense of desperation: “I never wanted your advice and assistance more in my life,” he pleaded. “The times are critical and dangerous and I must have you here to assist me.… You must leave the farm to the mercy of the winds. I can do nothing without you.”41
LOOKING BACK over the full sweep of American history, one would be hard-pressed to discover a presidency more dominated by a single foreign policy problem and simultaneously more divided domestically over how to solve it. The Adams presidency, in fact, might be the classic example of the historical truism that inherited circumstances define the parameters within which presidential leadership takes shape, that history shapes presidents, rather than vice versa. With all the advantages of hindsight, Jefferson’s strategic assessment of 1796 appears more and more prescient: Whoever followed Washington was probably doomed to failure.
Beyond the daunting task of following the greatest hero in American history, Adams faced a double dilemma. On the one hand, the country was already waging an undeclared war against French privateers in the Atlantic and Caribbean. The salient policy question was clear: Should the United States declare war on France or seek a diplomatic solution? Adams chose the latter course; like Washington, he was committed to American neutrality at almost any cost. He coupled this commitment with a buildup of the navy, which would enable the United States to fight a defensive war if negotiations with France broke down.
In retrospect, this was the proper and indeed the only realistic policy. But successful negotiations required a French government sufficiently stable and adequately impressed with American power to bargain seriously. Neither of these conditions was present during Adams’s term as president. Until the emergence of Napoleon as dictator, the French government, eventually called the Directory, was a misnamed coalition of ever-shifting political factions inherently incapable of either coherence or direction. What’s more, from the French perspective—and the same could be said about the English perspective, as well—the infant American republic was at most a minor distraction, more often an utter irrelevancy, within the larger Anglo-French competition for primacy on the Continent. In short, at the international level, the fundamental conditions essential for resolving the central problem of the Adams presidency did not exist. The problem was inherently insoluble.42
On the other hand, and to make a bad situation even worse, the ongoing debate between Federalists and Republicans had degenerated into ideological warfare. Each side sincerely saw the other as traitors to the core principles of the American Revolution. The political consensus that had held together during Washington’s first term, and had then begun to fragment into Federalist and Republican camps over the Whiskey Rebellion and Jay’s Treaty, broke down completely in 1797. Jefferson spoke for many of the participants caught up in this intensely partisan and nearly scatological political culture when he described it as a fundamental loss of trust between former friends. “Men who have been intimate all their lives,” he observed, “cross the street to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch hats.” He first used the phrase “a wall of separation,” which would later become famous as his description of the proper relation between church and state; here, however, describing the political and ideological division between Federalists and Republicans: “Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here,” he reported to his daughter. “They seem, like salamanders, to consider fire as their element.”43
Jefferson’s interpretation of the escalating party warfare was richly ironic, since he had contributed to the breakdown of personal trust and the complete disavowal of bipartisan cooperation by rejecting Adams’s offer to renew the old partnership. But Jefferson was fairly typical in this regard, lamenting the chasm between long-standing colleagues while building up the barricades from his side of the divide. Federalists and Republicans alike accused their opponents of narrow-minded partisanship, never conceding or apparently even realizing that their own behavior also fit the party label they affixed to their enemies.
The very idea of a legitimate opposition did not yet exist in the political culture of the 1790s, and the evolution of political parties was proceeding in an environment that continued to regard the word party as an epithet. In effect, the leadership of the revolutionary generation lacked a vocabulary adequate to describe the politics they were inventing. And the language they inherited framed the genuine political differences and divisions in terms that only exacerbated their nonnegotiable character. Much like Jefferson, Adams regarded the impasse as a breakdown of mutual trust: “You can witness for me,” he wrote to John Quincy concerning Jefferson’s opposition, “how loath I have been to give him up. It is with much reluctance that I am obliged to look upon him as a man whose mind is warped by prejudice.… However wise and scientific as a philosopher, as a politician he is a child and the dupe of the party.”44
At the domestic level, then, Adams inherited a supercharged political atmosphere every bit as ominous and intractable as the tangle on the international scene. It was a truly unprecedented situation in several senses: His vice president was in fact the leader of the opposition party; his cabinet was loyal to the memory of Washington, which several members regarded as embodied now in the person of Alexander Hamilton, who was officially retired from the government altogether; political parties were congealing into doctrinaire ideological camps, but neither side possessed the verbal or mental capacity to regard the other as anything but treasonable; and finally, the core conviction of the entire experiment in republican government—namely, that all domestic and foreign policies derived their authority from public opinion—conferred a novel level of influence to the press, which had yet to develop any established rules of conduct or standards for distinguishing rumors from reliable reporting. It was a recipe for political chaos that even the indomitable Washington would have been hard-pressed to control. No one else, including Adams, stood much of a chance at all.
If hindsight permits this realistic rendering of the historical conditions, which in turn defined the limited parameters within which the policies of the Adams presidency took shape, it also requires us to notice that none of the major players possessed the kind of clairvoyance required to comprehend what history had in store for them. (They believed they were making history, not the other way around.) In effect, the political institutions and the very authority of the federal government were too new and ill-formed to cope effectively with the foreign and domestic challenges facing the new nation.
What happened as a result was highly improvisational and deeply personal. Adams virtually ignored his cabinet, most of whom were more loyal to Hamilton anyway, and fell back to his family for advice, which in practice made Abigail his unofficial one-woman staff. Jefferson resumed his partnership with Madison, the roles now reversed, with Jefferson assuming active command of the Republican opposition from the seat of government in Philadelphia and Madison dispensing his political wisdom from retirement at Montpelier. While the official center of the government remained in the executive and congressional offices at Philadelphia, the truly effective centers of power were located in two political partnerships based on personal trust. Having failed to revive the great collaboration of the revolutionary era, Adams and Jefferson went their separate ways with different intimates.
THERE WAS an almost tribal character to the Adams collaboration. Adams himself, while vastly experienced as a statesman and diplomat, had no experience whatsoever as an executive. He had never served as a governor, as Jefferson had, or as a military commander, as Washington had. And he regarded the role of party leader of the Federalists as not just unbecoming but utterly incompatible with his responsibilities as president, which were to transcend party squabbles in the Washington mode and reach decisions like a “patriot king” whose sole concern was the long-term public interest. As a result, the notion that he was supposed to manage the political factions in the Congress or in his cabinet never even occurred to him. Instead, he would rely on his own judgment and on the advice of his family and trusted friends.
This explains two of his earliest and most controversial decisions. First, he insisted on including Elbridge Gerry in the peace delegations to France. Gerry was a kind of New England version of Benjamin Rush, a lovable gadfly with close personal ties to the Adams family but with ideological convictions that floated in unpredictable patterns over the entire political landscape. The most recent breezes had carried him into the Republican camp as a staunch defender of the French Revolution, which was the chief reason Abigail thought that Gerry “had a kink in his head.” Adams himself warned Gerry not to confuse what was happening in France with the American Revolution. “The French are no more capable of a republican government,” he insisted, “than a snowball can exist a whole week in the streets of Philadelphia under a burning sun.” Despite Abigail’s reservations, Adams wanted Gerry on the peace delegation to demonstrate his bipartisan principles and also to assure that he would receive candid reports from a trusted friend.45
Second, he appointed John Quincy as American minister to Prussia. His son objected, protesting that the appointment would surely be criticized as an act of nepotism and would fuel charges that Adams was grooming an heir for the presidency: “Your reasons will not bear examination,” Adams retorted. “It is the worst founded opinion I ever knew you to conceive.” This was vintage Adams bravado, shouting his denial at political advice he knew to be sound, refusing to listen because it was patently political and merely self-protective. Mostly, he wanted John Quincy located in one of the diplomatic capitals of Europe as his own personal listening post. “I wish you to continue your practice of writing freely to me,” he wrote, then added, “and more cautiously to the office of state.” He would be his own secretary of state and trust his son’s quite impressive knowledge of European affairs more than official reports.46
Both of these decisions paid dividends the following year, when the prospects for an outright declaration of war against France looked virtually certain. The ever agile and forever unscrupulous Talleyrand, foreign minister of France, had refused to receive the American peace delegation and had then sent three of his operatives to demand a bribe of fifty thousand pounds sterling as the prerequisite for any further negotiations. When Adams received word of this outrageous ultimatum, he ordered the delegation to return home, but he also withheld the official dispatches describing the bribery scheme from the Congress and the public. Abigail described this decision as “a very painful thing” because “the President could not play his strongest card.” But Adams knew that popular reaction to what became known as the XYZ Affair (after the three French operatives) would be virulently patriotic and intensely belligerent. By delaying publication of the dispatches, he bought time. And during that time, Gerry, always the maverick, had opted to remain in Paris to confer unofficially with French diplomats about averting the looming war. His reports home counseled patience, based on the growing recognition within the Directory that the bribery demand had been a terrible miscalculation. John Quincy’s network of European sources also urged enlightened procrastination. Despite considerable pressure from the Federalists in Congress and mounting war fever in the wake of the XYZ revelations, Adams held out hope for reconciliation based primarily on these reports.47
Abigail was his chief domestic minister without portfolio. In a very real sense Adams did not have a domestic policy, indeed believed that paying any attention to the shifting currents of popular opinion and the raging party battles in the press violated his proper posture as president, which was to remain oblivious to such swings in the national mood. Abigail tended to reinforce this belief in executive independence. Jefferson, she explained, was like a willow who bent with every political breeze. Her husband, on the other hand, was like an oak: “He may be torn up by the roots. He may break. But he will never bend.”48
Nevertheless, she followed the highly partisan exchanges in the Republican newspapers and provided her husband with regular reports on the machinations and accusations of the opposition. When an editorial in the Aurora described Adams as “old, guerelous [sic], bald, blind, and crippled,” she joked that she alone possessed the intimate knowledge to testify about his physical condition. Popular reaction to the XYZ Affair generated a surge of hostility toward French supporters in America, and Abigail noted with pleasure the appearance of William Cobbett’s anti-Jefferson editorials in Porcupine’s Gazette, where Jefferson was described as head of “the frenchified faction in this country” and a leading member of “the American Directory.” She relished reporting the Fourth of July Toast: “John Adams. May he, like Samson, slay thousands of Frenchmen with the jawbone of Jefferson.” She passed along gossip circulating in the streets of Philadelphia about plans to mount pro-French demonstrations, allegedly orchestrated by “the grandest of all grand Villains, that traitor to his country—the infernal Scoundrel Jefferson.” She predicted that the Republican leaders “will … take ultimately a station in the public’s estimation like that of the Tories in our Revolution.”49
Although we can never know for sure, there is considerable evidence that Abigail played a decisive role in persuading Adams to support passage of those four pieces of legislation known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These infamous statutes, unquestionably the biggest blunder of his presidency, were designed to deport or disenfranchise foreign-born residents, mostly Frenchmen, who were disposed to support the Republican party, and to make it a crime to publish “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States.” Adams went to his grave claiming that these laws never enjoyed his support, that their chief sponsors were Federalist extremists in the Congress, and that he had signed them grudgingly and reluctantly.50
All this was true enough, but sign them he did, despite his own reservations and against the advice of moderate Federalists like John Marshall. (Even Hamilton, who eventually went along, too, was at best lukewarm and fearful of the precedent set by the Sedition Act.) Abigail, on the other hand, felt no compunctions: “Nothing will have an effect until Congress passes a sedition bill,” she wrote her sister in the spring of 1798, which would then permit “the wrath of the public to fall upon their [the Republican editors’] devoted heads.… In any other country Bache and all his papers would have been seized long ago.” Her love for her husband, and her protective sense as chief guardian of his presidency, pushed her beyond any doubts. She even urged that the Alien Act be used to remove Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-born leader of the Republican party in the House of Representatives. Gallatin, she observed, “that specious, subtle, spare Cassius, that imported foreigner,” was guilty of treasonable behavior by delivering speeches or introducing amendments “that obstruct their cause and prevent their reaching their goals.” Gallatin, along with all the henchmen in the Jefferson camp, should be regarded “as traitors to their country.”51
Ultimately, of course, Adams himself must bear the responsibility for signing into law the blatantly partisan legislation that has subsequently haunted his historic reputation. But if, as he forever insisted, the Alien and Sedition Acts never enjoyed his enthusiastic support, Abigail’s unequivocal endorsement of the legislation almost surely tilted the decision toward the affirmative. To put it somewhat differently, if she had been opposed, it is difficult to imagine Adams taking the action he did. It is the one instance when the commingling of their convictions and the very intimacy of their partnership led him astray.
Ironically, the most significant—and in the long run most successful—decision of the Adams presidency occurred when Abigail was recovering from a bout with rheumatic fever back in Quincy, and the Federalists who opposed the policy attributed it to her absence. This was Adams’s apparently impulsive decision, announced on February 18, 1799, to send another peace delegation to France. Theodore Sedgwick, a Federalist leader in the Congress, claimed to be “thunderstruck” and summed up the reaction of his Federalist colleagues: “Had the foulest heart and the ablest head in the world, been permitted to select the most ruinous measure, perhaps it would have been precisely the one which had been adopted.” Timothy Pickering, the disloyal secretary of state, whom Adams had come to despise, also described himself as “thunderstruck” and offered a perceptive reading of Adams’s motives: “it was done without any consultation with any member of the government and for a reason truly remarkable—because he knew we should all be opposed to the measure.” Abigail herself reported that all the bedrock Federalist enclaves of New England were taken by surprise: “the whole community were like a flock of frightened pigions; nobody had their story ready.”52
The stories circulating in the Philadelphia press suggested that Adams had acted impulsively because his politically savvy wife had not been available to talk him out of it. For the preceding two months he had in fact complained in public and private that he was no good as a “solitudionarian” and he “wanted my talkative wife.” Abigail had noted an editorial in Porcupine’s Gazette regretting her absence: “I suppose,” she wrote her husband, “they will want somebody to keep you warm.” The announcement of the new peace initiative then gave added credibility to the charge that, without Abigail, Adams had lost either his balance or his mind. Adams joked about these stories: “They ought to gratify your vanity,” he wrote Abigail, “enough to cure you and bring you here.” For her part, Abigail returned the joke, but with a clear signal of support: “This was pretty saucy, but the old woman can tell them they are mistaken, for she considers the measure a master stroke of policy.”53
This has pretty much been the verdict of history, for the delegation Adams appointed eventually negotiated a diplomatic end to the “quasiwar” with France; Adams’s decision became the first substantive implementation of Washington’s message in the Farewell Address, as well as a precedent for American isolation from European wars—one that would influence American foreign policy for over a century. In the immediate context of the party wars then raging, however, Adams’s unilateral action was politically suicidal: “He has sustained the whole force of an unpopular measure,” Abigail observed, “which he knew would … shower down upon his head a torrent of invective. As he expected, he has been abused and calumniated by his enemies, that was to be looked for—but in the house of his friends, they have joined loudest in the clamor.” What Abigail meant was that Adams had chosen to alienate himself from the mainstream of the Federalist party, which regarded his policy as pro-French, indeed just the kind of decision one might have expected from Jefferson and the Republicans. The editorials in Porcupine’s Gazette turned against him. Federalist gossip suggested that their erstwhile leader was mentally unbalanced. (Adams, feeling his oats, wrote Abigail that he might now use the Sedition Act to shut down the Federalist press.) He was the archetypal illustration of the president without a party.54
Why did he do it? Three overlapping reasons appear to have converged in Adams’s mind and provided decisive direction to a foreign policy that, until then, had been vacillating between the incompatible agendas of the Federalists and the Republicans.
First, his lingering suspicions of Hamilton developed into unbridled distrust and then outright personal hatred. For two years, Hamilton had been issuing directives to Adams’s cabinet behind the scenes. Though Adams was vaguely aware of these machinations, he gave them little attention; after all, he never paid much heed to his cabinet anyway. In the summer of 1798, however, Hamilton persuaded his Federalist colleagues in the Congress to authorize the creation of a vastly expanded Provisional Army (subsequently called the New Army) of between ten thousand and thirty thousand soldiers in preparation for the looming outbreak of war with France. Adams had always supported military preparations more as a diplomatic maneuver to impress the French government of American resolve. And he had strongly preferred a naval force, what he called “Floating batteries and wooden walls.” Standing armies struck him as inherently dangerous and expensive items. “Regiments are costly articles everywhere,” he explained to his secretary of war, “and more so in this country than any other under the sun.” What possible rationale could exist for a large American land force, since the conflict with France was occurring on the high seas? “At present,” he observed, “there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here than there is in Heaven.”55
Then the whole horrid picture came into focus for Adams. Hamilton intended to make the New Army his personal instrument of power. It was a foregone conclusion that Washington would be called out of retirement to head the force, but equally predictable that the aging general would delegate actual command to his former aide-de-camp. Adams suspected that Hamilton, whom he had formerly distrusted and now utterly loathed, saw himself as an American Napoleon, poised to declare martial law and present himself as the available savior. Abigail seconded the assessment, calling Hamilton “a second Buonaparty” whose imperialistic designs could only be guessed at. (If they had been able to read Hamilton’s private correspondence, they would have discovered that his plans were quite grandiose: He hoped to march his conquering army through Virginia, where recalcitrant Republicans would be treated like the Whiskey Rebels, then down through the Louisiana Territory and into Mexico and Peru, liberating all the inhabitants from French and Spanish domination and offering membership in the expanded American republic.) Although Adams had gone along with the Alien and Sedition Acts, the prospect of a Hamilton-led army marching heaven knows where conjured up the demise of republican government altogether in the classical last act—a military dictatorship. No one recognized this historical pattern more clearly than Adams. No one, not even Jefferson, hated Hamilton more than Adams. Abigail described the decision to resume negotiations with France as “a master stroke of policy” because it averted a French war and removed the rationale for Hamilton’s army at one fell swoop.56
Second, the reports Adams was receiving from John Quincy in Prussia, based on his network of contacts in Paris and Amsterdam, provided fresh evidence that Talleyrand was now eager for peace with the United States. In January of 1799 Adams’s second son, Thomas Boylston, returned from Europe with additional dispatches from John Quincy, indicating that Talleyrand would not only receive an American peace delegation but would also be open to a consideration of compensation for American shipping losses over the past three years. However impulsive Adams’s February decision might have appeared to outsiders, it was really the culmination of considerable deliberation, based on diplomatic advice from his most trusted and strategically located confidant, who also happened to be his son.
Third, and finally, Adams derived deep personal satisfaction from singular acts of principle that defied the agendas of both political parties. The fact that the decision to send the delegation rendered him unpopular, that it struck most observers as an act of political suicide, only confirmed for him that it must be right. The office of the presidency, as he saw it, was designed to levitate above the party squabbles and transcend partisan versions of the national interest. Even more palpably, the fullest expression of his best energies always occurred when the long-term public interest, as he understood it, clashed with the political imperatives of the moment.
The trademark Adams style might be described as “enlightened perversity,” which actually sought out occasions to display, often in conspicuous fashion, his capacity for self-sacrifice. He had defended the British troops accused of the Boston Massacre, insisted upon American independence in the Continental Congress a full year before it was fashionable, argued for a more exalted conception of the presidency despite charges of monarchical tendencies. It was all part of the Adams pattern, an iconoclastic and contrarian temperament that relished alienation. (John Quincy and then great-grandson Henry Adams exhibited the same pattern over the next century, suggesting that the predilections resided in the bloodstream.) The political conditions confronting the presidency in 1798 were tailor-made to call forth his excessive version of virtue. Though Abigail was with him all the way, for Adams himself it was the supreme collaboration with his own private demons and doubts, his personal declaration of independence.
ALL THE DOMESTIC and international challenges facing the Adams presidency looked entirely different to Jefferson and Madison. Once they decided to reject Adams’s overture and set themselves up as the leaders of the Republican opposition, they closed ranks around their own heartfelt convictions and interpreted the several crises confronting him as opportunities to undermine the Federalist party, which they sincerely regarded as an organized conspiracy against the true meaning of the American Revolution. “As to do nothing, and to gain time, is everything with us,” Jefferson wrote to Madison, the very intractability of the French question and “the sharp divisions within the Federalist camp” between the Hamiltonians and what Jefferson called “the Adamites” worked to their political advantage. In order for the Republican agenda to win, the Federalist agenda needed to fail. Although Adams never fit comfortably into either party category, and eventually acted decisively to alienate himself from both sides, as the elected leader of the Federalists he became the unavoidable target of the organized Republican opposition.57
Madison had never shared Jefferson’s personal affection for Adams, so it was easier for him to take the lead in stigmatizing Adams’s motives and character:
There never was perhaps a greater contrast between two characters than between those of the present President and of his predecessor.… The one cold considerate and cautious, the other headlong and kindled into flame by every spark that lights on his passions. The one ever scrutinizing into the public opinion, and ready to follow where he could not lead it; the other insulting it by the most adverse sentiments and pursuits. W. a hero in the field, yet over-weighing every danger in the Cabinet. A. without a single pretension to the character of a soldier, a perfect Quixote as a statesman. The former chief magistrate pursuing peace every where with sincerity, tho’ mistaking the means; the latter taking as much pains to get into war, as the former took to keep out of it.
The latter point became an article of faith within the Jefferson-Madison collaboration—namely, that Adams actually wanted war with France. He was, declared Madison, “the only obstacle to accommodation, and the real cause of war, if war takes place.”58
Jefferson and Madison even managed to persuade themselves that Adams had concocted the entire XYZ Affair to mobilize popular support for a declaration of war. Talleyrand, they told each other, was neither so stupid nor so dishonorable to attempt bribery of the American peace delegation. Adams had orchestrated “a libel on the French government” as part of his “swindling experiment.” Instead of regarding Adams’s decision to delay release of the dispatches exposing the bribery demands as a prudent and statesmanlike effort to avoid a public outcry for war, Madison insisted it was timed to produce maximum damage. “The credit given to Mr. Adams for a spirit of conciliation towards France is wonderful,” Madison observed caustically, meaning that it was wholly undeserved. When Jefferson halfheartedly suggested that his old friend had once been a man of revolutionary principles, Madison retorted, “Every answer he gives to his addresses unmasks more and more his true principles.… The abolition of Royalty was it seems not one of his Revolutionary principles. Whether he always made this profession is best known to those, who knew him in the year 1776.” Jefferson, in effect, needed to liberate himself from nostalgic memories. Adams was a traitor.59
Although he certainly knew better, Jefferson went along. He reported gossip in the corridors of Congress to the effect that Adams had been heard to declare “that such was his want of confidence in the faith of France, that were they ever to agree to a treaty ever so favorable, he should think it his duty to reject it.” (Adams was in fact, at that very moment, listening to Gerry’s pleadings for a renewal of the peace effort.) Another rumor circulating in the streets of Philadelphia caught Jefferson’s ear: Washington had leaked the news that he opposed Adams’s foreign policy. (The exact opposite was true. Washington was endorsing the Adams initiative as the effective implementation of his own long-standing commitment to American neutrality.) Yet another rumor had it that Adams was working behind the scenes to scuttle the plans for moving the capital to the Potomac (also untrue). And then, when the president announced his unexpected decision to send a new American peace delegation to France in February of 1799, Jefferson apprised Madison that this “event of events” had been forced upon Adams. Jefferson had reliable evidence that Talleyrand had threatened to leak news of his previous peace initiative, thereby requiring Adams to reciprocate. “Mark that I state this as conjecture,” Jefferson told Madison, “but founded on workings and indications which have been under our eyes” (all contrived).60
If the primary function of the collaboration within the Adams family was to insulate and eventually isolate Adams from the ideological warfare raging between both political parties, the primary function of the collaboration between Jefferson and Madison was to generate mutual reinforcement for their uncompromising assault on the presidency, frequently at the expense of even the most rudimentary version of factual accuracy. In their minds, the political stakes were enormous, the threat posed by the Federalists put the entire republican experiment at risk, the battle was to the death, and taking prisoners was not permitted. They convinced themselves that Adams was the enemy, and then all the evidence fell in place around that rock-ribbed, if highly questionable, conviction.
Jefferson’s nearly Herculean powers of self-denial also helped keep the cause pure, at least in the privacy of his own mind. In 1798, he commissioned James Callender, a notorious scandalmonger who had recently broken the story on Hamilton’s adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds, to write a libelous attack on Adams. In The Prospect Before Us, Callender delivered the goods, describing Adams as “a hoary headed incendiary” who was equally determined on war with France and on declaring himself president for life, with John Quincy lurking in the background as his successor. When confronted with the charge that, despite his position as vice president, he had paid Callender to write diatribes against the president, Jefferson claimed to know nothing about it. Callender subsequently published Jefferson’s incriminating letters, proving his complicity, and Jefferson seemed genuinely surprised at the revelation, suggesting that for him the deepest secrets were not the ones he kept from his enemies but the ones he kept from himself.61
When Congress began the debates over the Sedition Act in the spring of 1798, Jefferson’s first fear was that it was aimed pointedly at him. He complained to James Monroe that “my name is running through all the city as detected in criminal correspondence with the French directory.” Editorials in Federalist newspapers accused him of passing information to the French government through pro-French agents in America and meeting routinely with Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Aurora, the chief vehicle for the opposition. Jefferson privately acknowledged to Madison that these accusations were essentially true. Even though he was the second-ranking member of the Adams administration, he was, as the Federalist leadership in the House described him, “the very life and soul of the opposition.” Jefferson defended himself by claiming that his consultations with Bache were not clandestine meetings; he had met with Bache many times, true enough, but he was not, as the Federalists charged, “closeted” with him. More basically, Jefferson simply did not regard his behavior as seditious or treasonable. Indeed, it was the Federalist government, though duly elected, that was guilty of treason.62
Here was the core of the problem. Jefferson genuinely believed, and Madison reinforced the belief, that the Federalists had captured the government from the American people. Despite its electoral mandate, the programs and policies the Federalists were implementing at the national level—an expansive agenda for the federal government, a version of neutrality that aligned the United States more with England than France—represented a repudiation of the spirit of ’76. The passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, then the creation of the New Army, only confirmed that the Federalist agenda violated the central tenets of the American Revolution, conjuring up memories of Parliament’s restrictions on the colonial press and British troops quartered in the major colonial cities. How could opposition to such measures be treasonable now when they had been legitimate expressions of American dissent back then?
The legal guidelines that might permit a clear answer to that question had not yet congealed. By modern standards Jefferson’s active role in promoting anti-Adams propaganda and his complicity in leaking information to pro-French enthusiasts like Bache were impeachable offenses that verged on treason. But then Hamilton had been guilty of similar indiscretions with pro-English advocates during the Jay’s Treaty negotiations. And his conduct in providing clandestine instructions to Adams’s cabinet undermined the constitutional authority of the executive branch in ways that would have landed him in jail in modern times. Only ten years after the passage and ratification of the Constitution, however, what were treasonable or seditious acts remained blurry and more problematic judgments without the historical sanction that only experience could provide. Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicans alike were afloat in a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold because it did not exist.
The capstone of the Jefferson-Madison collaboration occurred at this volatile political moment—namely, their joint authorship of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Jefferson visited Madison at Montpelier on July 2–3 to discuss their response to the Sedition Act, which passed the Senate the following day. (The Federalists, ironically, thought it was the perfect way to celebrate the Fourth of July.) They agreed to launch a pamphlet campaign against what Jefferson called “the reign of witches.” Working alone at Monticello, Jefferson composed what became known as the Kentucky Resolutions in August and September. His core argument was that the Sedition Act was unconstitutional because it violated the natural rights of the citizens of each state to control their own domestic affairs. Moreover, each state “has a natural right in cases not within the compact”—that is, in all cases not specified as under federal jurisdiction in the Constitution—“to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits.” Here was the classic states’ rights position, topped off by the sweeping claim that federal laws could be nullified by the states, which then had a legitimate right to secede, what Jefferson called “scission,” if the federal Congress or courts defied their decision. If the Sedition Act was a serious threat to civil liberties, Jefferson’s response was an equally serious threat to the sovereignty of the national government and the survival of the union.63
Fortunately for Jefferson, the leadership of the Kentucky legislature decided to delete the sections of his draft endorsing nullification, presumably because such open defiance of federal law seemed excessive and unnecessarily risky. Madison’s more judicious arguments, published as the Virginia Resolutions, were circulating in the national press and achieving the same goal—condemning the Sedition Act—but without recourse to nullification. In fact, the Virginia Resolutions described the Alien and Sedition Acts as “alarming infractions” of the Constitution that violated the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment. Instead of challenging the authority of the federal government, Madison invoked the protections afforded by that very government, implicitly suggesting that the federal courts and not the individual states were the ultimate arbiters of the Constitution. Whereas Jefferson’s line of thought led logically to the compact theory of the Constitution eventually embraced by the Confederacy in 1861, Madison’s arguments led toward the modern doctrine of judicial review and constitutional guarantees for free speech and freedom of the press.64
When Madison wrote or spoke on constitutional questions, Jefferson always deferred. To Republican confidants in Virginia, he reiterated his conviction that “the true principles of our federal compact” left the states sovereign over all domestic policy; if Congress failed to rescind the Sedition Act, “we should sever ourselves from that union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self government which we have reserved.” After a personal visit from Madison in September of 1799, however, Jefferson agreed to soften his stance on secession, “not only in deference to his judgment,” as he put it, “but because we should never think of separation but for respected and enormous violations”—or, as he had previously written in the Declaration of Independence, after “a long train of abuses.” Madison’s prudent and silent intervention rescued Jefferson from the secessionist implications of his revolutionary principles and artfully concealed the huge discrepancy between their respective views of the Constitution. The imperatives of their collaboration, plus the need to present a united front against the Federalists, took precedence over their incompatible notions of where sovereignty resided in the American republic.65
THERE ARE only a few universal laws of political life, but one of them guided the Republicans during the last year of the Adams presidency—namely, never interfere when your enemies are busily engaged in flagrant acts of self-destruction. As soon as the Federalists launched their prosecutions of Republican editors and writers under the Sedition Act—a total of eighteen indictments were filed—it became clear that the prosecutions were generally regarded as persecutions. Most of the defendants became local heroes and public martyrs. Madison quickly concluded that “our public malady may work its own cure,” meaning that the spectacle of Federalist lawyers descending upon the Republican opposition with such blatantly partisan accusations only served to create converts to the cause they were attempting to silence. The threatened prosecution of aliens also backfired on the Federalists, when Irish immigrants in New York and Germans in Pennsylvania, formerly staunch supporters of the Adams administration, went over to the Republicans in droves.66
What Jefferson had described as “the reign of witches” even began to assume the shape of a political comedy in which the joke was on the Federalists. In New Jersey, for example, when a drunken Republican editor was charged with making a ribald reference to the president’s posterior, the jury returned a not guilty verdict on the grounds that truth was a legitimate defense. There was even room for irony. It was while James Callender was serving his sentence for libel in a Richmond jail that he first heard rumors of Jefferson’s sexual liaison with a mulatto slave named Sally Hemings. He subsequently published the story after deciding that Jefferson had failed to pay him adequately for his hatchet job on Adams.67
But this delectable morsel of scandal, which was only confirmed as correct beyond any reasonable doubt by DNA studies done in 1998, did not arrive in time to help Adams in the presidential election of 1800. Indeed, Adams’s string of bad luck or poor timing, call it what you will, persisted to the end. The peace delegation he dispatched to France so single-handedly negotiated a treaty ending the “quasi-war,” but the good news arrived too late to influence the election. Moreover, the New Army, which Adams had opposed and then rendered superfluous, had strained the federal budget to a point that demanded new sources of revenue. Even as the army was being disbanded, much to Adams’s credit and relief, the cost of raising it landed on the voting public. Adams had somehow managed to miss the political rewards due him and catch the criticism that properly belonged to others.
Abigail’s earlier characterization of the Adams-Jefferson competition—the oak versus the willow—proved prophetic. Perhaps the supreme example of Jefferson’s greater flexibility occurred on the foreign policy front. Throughout the Adams presidency, Jefferson and his Republican followers had been insisting that the French Revolution was the American Revolution on European soil and that France was therefore America’s major international ally. But when Napoleon overturned the French Republic and declared himself omnipotent military dictator, again just as Adams had predicted would happen, Jefferson quickly shifted his position to accommodate the new reality. “It is very material for the … [American people] to be made sensible that their own character and situation are materially different from the French,” he observed in 1800, “and that whatever may be the fate of republicanism there, we are able to preserve it inviolate here.” This was precisely the neutral foreign policy that both Washington and Adams had been urging for a decade and that Jefferson had condemned as a betrayal of the spirit of ’76. Jefferson’s conversion occurred with such breathtaking speed that hardly anyone noticed how deftly he was discarding the chief weapon the Republicans had wielded against two Federalist administrations. That weapon was unnecessary now, as both Jefferson and Madison understood, because the superior organization of the Republicans at the state level virtually assured their victory in the looming presidential election.68
Given this formidable array of bad luck, poor timing, and the highly focused political strategy of his Republican enemies, Adams actually did surprisingly well when all the votes were counted. He ran ahead of the Federalist candidates for Congress, who were swept from office in a Republican landslide. Outside of New York, he even won more electoral votes than he had in 1796. But thanks in great part to the deft political maneuverings of Aaron Burr, all twelve of New York’s electoral votes went to Jefferson. As early as May of 1800, Abigail, the designated vote counter on the Adams team, had predicted that “New York will be the balance in the scaile, skaill, scaill (is it right now? it does not look so.)” Though she did not know how to spell scale, she knew where the election would be decided. In the final tally, her husband lost to the tandem of Jefferson and Burr, 73 to 65.69
Though it probably occurred too late to have much, if any, bearing on the results, the most dramatic event of the campaign was provided by Hamilton. In October he wrote and privately printed a fifty-four-page pamphlet assailing the character of Adams, describing him as an inherently unstable creature, a man driven by vanity and his own perverse version of independence, a pathetic bundle of twitches and tantrums who was “unfit for the office of chief Magistrate.” Adams responded with uncharacteristic calmness to this personal vendetta. “I am confident,” he observed, “that it will do him more harm than me.” He was right. Coming too late to affect many voters, Hamilton’s diatribe exposed the deep rift within the Federalist camp for all to see and suggested to most readers that Hamilton himself was out of his mind. In political terms, the Hamilton pamphlet was fully as fatal, and perhaps suicidal, as his subsequent decision to face Aaron Burr on the plains of Weehawken. His reputation never recovered.70
The same could be said for the Federalist party. The Jefferson-Madison collaboration was not just committed to capturing the federal government for the Republicans. As Jefferson put it so graphically, their larger goal was “to sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection of it.” When Madison declared that the Republican cause was now “completely triumphant,” he not only meant that they had won control of the presidency and the Congress but also that the Federalist party was in complete disarray. Though pockets of Federalist power remained alive in New England for over a decade, as a national movement with the capacity to dominate the debate about America’s proper course, it was a spent force. Jefferson had not yet invented the expression “the revolution of 1800” to describe the Republican ascendancy. Nor had historians translated that term to mean the emergence of a more authentically democratic brand of politics, a translation that Jefferson would have understood dimly, if at all. (Jefferson actually thought that his victory represented a recovery rather than a discovery, a renewal of the principles of ’76 and a repudiation of the constitutional settlement of 1787 as the Federalists had attempted to define it.) But the more historically correct reality was that no one quite knew what the Republican triumph meant in positive terms for the national government. What was clear, however, was that a particular version of politics and political leadership embodied in the Washington and Adams administrations had been successfully opposed and decisively defeated. The Jefferson-Madison collaboration was the politics of the future. The Adams collaboration was the politics of the past.71
What died was the presumption, so central to Adams’s sense of politics and of himself, that there was a long-term collective interest for the republic that could be divorced from partisanship, indeed rendered immune to politics altogether; and that the duty of an American statesman was to divine that public interest while studiously ignoring, indeed remaining blissfully oblivious to, the partisan pleadings of particular constituencies. After 1800, what Adams had called “the monarchical principle” was dead in American political culture, along with the kind of towering defiance that both Washington and Adams had harbored toward what might be called the “morality of partisanship.” That defiance had always depended upon revolutionary credentials—those present at the creation of the republic could be trusted to act responsibly—and as the memory of the Revolution faded, so did the trust it conferred. Of course Jefferson could, and decidedly did, claim membership in “the band of brothers,” but his election marked the end of an era. The “people” had replaced the “public” as the sovereign source of political wisdom. No leader could credibly claim to be above the fray. As Jefferson had understood from the moment Washington stepped down, the American president must forever after be the head of a political party.
Neither member of the Adams team could ever comprehend this historical transition as anything other than an ominous symptom of moral degeneration. “Jefferson had a party,” Adams observed caustically, “Hamilton had a party, but the commonwealth had none.” If the very idea of virtue was no longer an ideal in American politics, then there was no place for him in public life. If the Adams brand of statesmanship was now an anachronism—and it was—then the Adams presidency would serve as a fitting monument to its passing. In February of 1800, Adams signed the Treaty of Mortefontaine, officially ending hostilities with France. He could leave office in the knowledge that his discredited policies and singular style had worked. As he put it, he had “steered the vessel … into a peaceable and safe port.”72
Rather ironically, the last major duty of the Adams collaboration was to supervise the transition of the federal government to its permanent location on the Potomac. Though the entire archive of the executive branch required only seven packing cases, Abigail resented the physical burdens imposed by this final chore, as well as the cold, cavernous, and still-unfinished rooms of the presidential mansion. For several weeks it was not at all clear whether Jefferson would become the next abiding occupant, because the final tally of the electoral vote had produced a tie between him and Burr. Rumors circulated that Adams intended to step down from office in order to permit Jefferson, still his vice president, to succeed him, in an effort to forestall a constitutional crisis. Adams let out the word that Jefferson was clearly the voters’ choice and the superior man, that Burr was “like a balloon, filled with inflammable air.” In the end, the crisis passed when, on the thirty-sixth ballot, the House voted Jefferson into office.73
Despite all the accumulated bitterness of the past eight years, and despite the political wounds Jefferson had inflicted over the past four years on the Adams presidency, Abigail insisted that her husband invite their “former friend” for cake and tea before she departed for Quincy a few weeks before the inauguration ceremony. No record of the conversation exists, though Jefferson had already apprised Madison that he knew the Adamses well enough to expect “dispositions liberal and accommodating.” On the actual day of the inauguration, however, Jefferson did not have Adams by his side as he rode down a stump-infested Pennsylvania Avenue to the yet-unfinished capitol. Rather than lend his presence to the occasion, Adams had taken the four o’clock stage out of town that morning in order to rejoin Abigail. He did not exchange another word with Jefferson for twelve years.74