NINE

THE PRESIDENT VS. THE VICE PRESIDENT

WHEN WASHINGTON ASSUMED the presidency in 1789 many people, including Thomas Jefferson, thought that he might serve for life. That was why Jefferson claimed that the office of the president resembled a Polish king—an elective monarch, something that was not out of the question in the eighteenth century. As James Wilson, one of the initial justices of the Supreme Court, noted, in the distant past “crowns, in general, were originally elective.”¹ But Washington had no intention of serving for life. He had tried to retire in 1792, but was talked out of it. But by 1796 he was determined to leave the office at the end of his second term. That posed an ominous threat to the Union. As the Spanish minister pointed out, Washington’s special status in the eyes of the people had saved the nation from “internal dissention.” But that could not last, “because it seems impossible that there could be found another man so beloved of all. . . . Disunion will follow.”²

Rumors of Washington’s stepping down left Adams, who was clearly not beloved by all, excited and nervous, and he sent off a series of anxious letters to Abigail that she was to show no one. He told her that they faced a momentous decision—“Either We must enter upon Ardours more trying than any ever yet experienced; or retire to Quincy Farmers for Life.” He assumed he was the “Heir Apparent” to the presidency, but he was not sure what to do politically. By attempting to represent Adams “as a Man of Moderation,” the “Southern Gentry,” he said, were playing “a very artful Game.” Although they conceded that Adams was “inclined to limited Monarchy and somewhat Attached to the English,” they claimed he was much less so than John Jay or Alexander Hamilton. Adams thought that this insidious southern scheme was designed to have him remain as vice president, “provided the Northern Gentlemen would consent that Jefferson should be president.”³

This, however, was the one thing he was sure of: he was “determined,” he said, “not to serve under Jefferson.” He could never be vice president under someone other than Washington, “especially if that other should entertain sentiments so opposite to mine as to endanger the Peace of the Nation.” Given the nature of the electoral process, where the person who received the most votes became president and the runner-up became vice president, having the two chief executive officials possess contrasting political views was quite possible and perilous. “It will be a dangerous Crisis in public affairs,” he warned, “if the President and Vice President should be in opposite Boxes.”⁴

Neither Adams nor Jefferson had anticipated the United States becoming riven by parties. Jefferson thought that allegiance to a party would be “the last degradation of a free and moral agent,” a denial of being an independent and disinterested citizen. “If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” he said, “I would not go there at all.” Adams agreed. Parties were “the greatest political Evil” imaginable. He dreaded nothing as much as “a Division of the Republick into two great Parties, each arranged under its Leader, and concerting Measures in opposition to each other.”⁵

Yet that was precisely what was happening. By February 1796, Adams saw that “the Electioneering Campaign is opened already,” and his worst fears of “the silly and the wicked Game” were being realized. Jefferson as “‘the good Patriot, Statesman, and Philosopher’” was being “held up as the Successor.” “The Accursed Spirit which actuates a vast Body of People,” including the anti-Federalists, desperate debtors, and “frenchified Tools,” would, if victorious, “murder all good Men among Us and destroy all the Wisdom & Virtue of the Country.”⁶ Despite all this—despite his dread of parties and his belief that politics had become just a “Game” that he was weary of and actually not very good at—Adams nevertheless didn’t “know how I could live out of it.”⁷

Jefferson, who by contrast was very good at the game of politics, never admitted even privately that he enjoyed it; in fact, he always denied having any great yearning for political office. In his “younger years” he may have had a “spice of ambition,” he told James Madison in 1795, but that “has long since evaporated.” To Madison’s entreaties that he come out of retirement and lead the Republicans, he said that his two dozen years of service meant that the public no longer had any claim on him.⁸ Yet this repeated insistence that he wanted nothing more than to be home with his family and his books may not have been entirely honest. He later confessed to his daughter Mary that those years of retirement from the public, between 1793 and 1797, were the most depressing of his life. Withdrawing from the world had led to “an anti-social & misanthropic state of mind.” Ultimately, he was every bit as ambitious as Adams.⁹

Although Jefferson never acknowledged that he wanted to become president, neither did he ever pretend, publicly or privately, to be a disinterested spectator standing above all parties. If the two parties were simply divided over their greed for office, as in England, then not taking sides might make sense. “But,” he told William Branch Giles of Virginia, “where the principle of difference is as substantial and as strongly pronounced as between the republicans and the Monocrats of our country, I hold it as honorable to take a firm and decided part, and as immoral to pursue a middle line, as between the parties of Honest men, and Rogues, into which every country is divided.”¹⁰ This, of course, was precisely the opposite of Adams’s position, which always sought to maintain a middle line above parties.

•   •   •

SINCE WASHINGTON HAD BEEN UNANIMOUSLY acclaimed as president in 1788 and 1792, the election of 1796 became the first contest for the presidency in American history. It was conducted by two rival political parties in a culture that disparaged and condemned political parties and partisanship. And these two parties, which had substantial numbers of followers, were led by two famous revolutionaries and two former friends, Adams and Jefferson.

“Led” is a misnomer, for neither man campaigned for the presidency in any modern sense. Neither left his home to meet people and shake hands, and neither made speeches or wrote essays on his own behalf. Both thought in traditional terms that a gentleman should never directly seek an office, only be called to it. Because the Federalists were making “continual insinuations in the public papers” that the former secretary of state had secret desires to become president, Jefferson believed that it would have been indecent even to acknowledge these insinuations. But now that the Republicans themselves had begun urging him to seek the presidency, Jefferson told Madison that he at last felt free to declare that the question of the presidency was “for ever closed with me.” It was important that this be clearly understood so that the Republicans not divide their votes, “which,” he said, “might be fatal to the Southern interest”—a revealing slip, later altered to read “the Republican interest,” that showed that Jefferson and many other Republicans in 1795 were thinking very much in sectional terms. Indeed, Jefferson was increasingly coming to identify the Federalists with northern values—finance, paper money, and religious fanaticism.¹¹

Madison became fearful that pressuring Jefferson too much might make him even more adamant in his refusal to consider the presidency, and thus he cut off all communication with his friend for six months. Adams likewise resisted telling Federalist visitors of any plans he might have for the presidency. When they suggested that Hamilton might make a good vice president and hinted that support for Adams might depend on his attitude toward the funding system, he recorded in his diary that he remained “wholly silent.”¹²

Washington had planned on announcing his retirement in June 1796, but Hamilton urged him to “hold the thing until the last moment” in September, which would hinder the Republicans’ electioneering and give the Federalists time to undermine Jefferson’s candidacy. Ironically, the Federalists’ continual attacks on Jefferson in the press as the silent leader of the opposition elevated his status as a presidential candidate. When Washington’s Farewell Address was published in September 1796, the leading Republican newspaper, the Philadelphia Aurora, declared that the two obvious candidates to succeed Washington were Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The choice was now clear: “Whether we shall have at the head of our executive a steadfast friend of the Rights of the People, or an advocate for hereditary power and distinctions.”¹³

Although the Republicans by 1796 obviously wanted Jefferson for president, many of the Federalists weren’t sure they preferred Adams for president. Hamilton and several other Federalist leaders thought he was too irascible and indiscreet and doubted whether he was a firm supporter of the Bank of the United States and the government’s financial program. Hoping to cut into support for Jefferson, Hamilton favored a southerner as an alternative to Adams, first suggesting Patrick Henry, and after some second thoughts, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, the diplomat who had recently negotiated an important treaty with Spain.

Hamilton and other Federalists were fearful of Jefferson’s being elected to either the presidency or the vice presidency. If Jefferson became president, said Oliver Wolcott Jr., the Connecticut Federalist who had replaced Hamilton as secretary of the treasury in 1795, he would “innovate upon and fritter away the Constitution.” But, continued Wolcott, Jefferson as vice president might be even worse. “He would become the rallying point of faction and French influence,” and “without any responsibility, he would . . . divide, and undermine, and finally subvert the rival administration.”¹⁴ Better to support Pinckney as president, some Federalists declared, than to see Jefferson in any high office, even if it cost Adams the presidency.

Adams heard these rumors and was appalled at the idea that Hamilton was intriguing “to give Pinckney a Sly slide over my head.” The idea that Jefferson might come in ahead of him was disturbing enough, he said, but that “such an unknown being as Pinckney” might become president, “trampling on the bellies of hundreds of other men infinitely his superiors in talents, services, and reputation,” made him afraid for the safety of the nation. The possibility of a nobody like Pinckney becoming president made him change his earlier opinion about Jefferson as chief executive. “I had rather hazard my little Venture in the ship to the pilotage of Jefferson,” he told Abigail in mid-December 1796, “than that of Pinckney.” Adams was coming to realize that he disliked some Federalists more than he did his former friend, despite the fact that Jefferson was being hailed as the leader of the opposition Republican Party.¹⁵

The campaign was rancorous, with the followers of Jefferson and Adams using the writings of each against him. In an attempt to weaken Jefferson’s support among southern slaveholders, Federalists drew on his antislavery remarks in his Notes on the State of Virginia and on his 1791 correspondence with the black mathematician Benjamin Banneker, in which he referred to “our black brethren” and his desire to be shown that they had “talents equal to those of other colours of men.” The Federalists also used Jefferson’s comments on religion in the Notes—“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”—to accuse him of being hostile to Christianity. Other Federalists criticized his soft, sentimental, and “womanish” affection for France, his cowardice as governor during the Revolution, and—in contrast to Adams, whose public service was untiring—his neglect of his public duties by his retirement to Monticello. Jefferson, declared the Federalists, was merely a soft and weak intellectual—someone perhaps suited to be a college professor or the head of a philosophical society, “but certainly not the first magistrate of a great nation.”¹⁶

In the case of Adams, the Republicans had more writings to work with, since Adams had published so much. His Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America had been reissued in London in 1794, an edition that reached the United States just in time to be used against Adams in the campaign. The Republicans claimed that his volumes were a “Eulogium of Monarchy and the British,” written, they noted, “whilst Minister at the Court of London.” In the Defence, the Republicans asserted, Adams had questioned the whole idea of popular government. He had admitted that elections were fine, if “soberly made.” But since electing high officers was such a “hazardous experiment,” so liable to be disturbed by parties, factions, drunkenness, and bribes, the people sooner or later would discover that the electoral process was not working well. They would find that the only recourse they had was to reduce the frequency of elections by lengthening the terms of the chief magistrate and senators gradually “till they become for life; and if this is not found to be an adequate remedy, there will remain no other but to make them hereditary.”¹⁷ Adams had expressed such antipopular sentiments so frequently that denial was impossible. Not that he ever tried. But people had heard his eccentric views so often that perhaps they had begun discounting them.

Adams was in fact pleased that so many people were paying attention to his Defence, even if it was for the purpose of criticizing him. In a hundred years, he said, “it would not have been so much read” as it was during the election campaign. A new third edition was on the way, and he told Abigail, with his usual self-protective sarcasm, that he expected “it will be got by Heart by All Americans who can read.”¹⁸

The electors met in their respective state capitals in December 1796 and, although the ballots would not be certified until they were opened in February 1797, the results began leaking out. In mid-December Madison was preparing his friend Jefferson for the probability that he would become vice president. “It seems essential,” he told his fellow Virginian, “that you should not refuse the station which is likely to be your lot.” Besides, Madison said, serving with your former friend Adams as his vice president “may have a valuable effect on his councils,” especially in foreign policy and America’s relations with France, which were verging on war. Adams would not necessarily follow the domestic policies of the Washington administration either. His censures of the paper systems and his anger at the efforts of New York to put Pinckney above him had separated him from “the British faction.” In addition, Madison told Jefferson, Adams was now speaking of you “in friendly terms” and would “no doubt be soothed by your acceptance of a place subordinate to him.” But, he said, all these calculations might be worth nothing in the face of Adams’s “political principles and prejudices.”¹⁹

In the final tally Adams received seventy-one electoral votes, mostly from New England and New York and New Jersey. Jefferson was next with sixty-eight, all from Pennsylvania and the states in the South. Pinckney received fifty-nine votes and Aaron Burr, the presumed Republican vice presidential candidate, received thirty, but only one vote from Virginia. Because personal ambitions, local interests, friendships, and sectional ties tended to override national party loyalties, the election was confused and chaotic. The Constitution provided for the electors to select any two candidates that suited them, even if they were from opposing parties, as long as they were from two different states. So in Pennsylvania one elector voted for both Jefferson and Pinckney. In Maryland an elector voted for Adams and Jefferson. And all the electors of South Carolina voted for both Jefferson and Pinckney. Despite these examples of crossing party lines, however, eight of sixteen states did vote a straight Adams-Pinckney or Jefferson-Burr ticket. Yet, as the vote of the South Carolina electors suggests, the election in fact reflected more of a sectional than a party split.

Adams believed that the “narrow Squeak” of three votes by which he had beaten Jefferson was humiliating, and he never got over it.²⁰ He was especially upset by the prospect of men he considered his friends voting against him. When he learned that Thomas McKean, the chief justice of Pennsylvania, had voted for Jefferson, he was hurt. “All Confidence between Men and Men,” he told Abigail, “is suspended for a time.” In fact, he hated the whole process of elections, believing it a disgrace to republicanism. Hearing in the Senate chamber that some electors had actually voted for George Clinton, Adams gritted his teeth and exclaimed, “Damn ‘em’ Damn ‘em’ Damn ‘em’ you see that an elective government will not do.”²¹

•   •   •

THE COUNTRY WAS INITIALLY excited by the election of the Federalist John Adams as president and the Republican Thomas Jefferson as vice president. It seemed to promise an end to factionalism and a new era of good feelings. Since both men were thought to have a mutual respect for each other, it seemed possible that they might renew their friendship and restore the revolutionaries’ dream of nonpartisan government.²² During the campaign Adams had scarcely thought of Jefferson as his opponent. He had directed his anger more at Hamilton, who, he said, was “a proud Spirited, conceited, aspiring Mortal always pretending to Morality, with as debauched Morals as old Franklin who is more his Model than any one I know.” Comparing him with Franklin was about as damning a comment about Hamilton as Adams could have made.²³ Having a common enemy in Hamilton made a reconciliation of Adams and Jefferson appear all the more promising.

Abigail was certainly pleased by Jefferson’s election as vice president. Despite his support for Tom Paine and his being “frequently mistaken in Men & Measures,” he was, she said, not “an insincere or a corruptable Man.” She had “not a Doubt but all the Discords may be tuned to harmony by the Hand of a skillful Artist.”²⁴ Although John Adams was certainly no skillful artist in politics, probably no president could have created political harmony in 1797. Jefferson realized that Washington was getting out at the right moment. “The President,” he told Madison, “is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag.”²⁵ Certainly this premonition made Jefferson’s willingness to serve under Adams more comprehensible. But neither he nor Adams foresaw just how bad things would get.

Some Republicans doubted whether Jefferson would accept the vice presidency. He had been willing to become president, but only, he told Madison, in order “to put our vessel on her republican tack before she should be thrown too much in leeward of her true principles.” He had been less sure about the vice presidency, but with Adams elected as president, he no longer had any misgivings about playing a secondary role. “I am his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in our civil government.” In addition, Jefferson believed that if Adams could be “induced to administer the government on it’s true principles, and to relinquish his bias to an English constitution,” he could become “the only sure barrier against Hamilton’s getting in.” He had written a letter to Adams to encourage these friendly feelings but had not yet sent it. He wanted Madison to look it over first.²⁶

In this draft of a letter to Adams, dated December 28, 1796, Jefferson told Adams that although he had not followed the campaign closely, he knew that the press had placed him and Adams in opposition to each other. He was sure, however, that very little of this opposition “has been felt by ourselves personally.” He had no doubts at all that Adams would be elected president and that he had never wished otherwise. The only way Adams could be “cheated of your succession” was through the trickery of “your arch-friend of New York.” Fortunately, he himself was beyond Hamilton’s reach. Secure at home in his warm berth among his friends and neighbors, he left “to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm.” He declared, in one of his many self-denying comments, that “I have no ambition to govern men.” All he knew was that no one would congratulate Adams for becoming president “with purer disinterestedness than myself.” Jefferson left it up to Madison to decide whether or not to post this letter to Adams.²⁷

Madison decided it should not be sent and outlined his reasons. Adams, he told Jefferson, already knew of Jefferson’s conciliatory feelings toward his old friend and any attempt to better those feelings might make them worse. He next suggested that there was in Jefferson’s draft “a general air on the letter which betrays the difficulty of your situation in writing it,” and Adams might be put off by that tone. Moreover, he said, might not Jefferson’s disavowing “the sublime delights of riding in the storm, etc.” be misconstrued as an insult to Adams, who seemed to enjoy riding the whirlwind of politics? Madison admitted that Jefferson knew Adams’s temper better than he did, but he always thought it to be “rather a ticklish one.” Any attempt to play down or depreciate the partisan differences between Jefferson’s backers and Adams was bound to create resentment among the Republicans. And finally, given the uncertainty of the future and the possibility that the actions of the Adams administration might generate “opposition to it from the Republican quarter,” the possession of this letter by Adams, filled as it was with Jefferson’s polite expressions of confidence in Adams due to “your personal delicacy and friendship,” was apt to cause “real embarrassments” in the months to come.²⁸

Jefferson thanked Madison for his discretion and agreed not to send the letter. Isolated as he was at Monticello from the hurly-burly of Philadelphia politics, he had not appreciated how “an honest expression” of his feelings toward Adams might be misused. He reiterated his affection for Adams, which went back to the beginning of the Revolution. Since their return from Europe, there had been some little incidents, he said, “which were capable of affecting a jealous mind like his.” Despite their political differences, however, Jefferson had not become “less sensible of the rectitude of [Adams’s] heart: and I wished him to know this.” He also wanted Adams to understand how pleased he was that he had become president. He informed Madison that he had written John Langdon of New Hampshire and told him the same thing: how he was willing to serve as vice president under Adams and how being secondary to Adams was natural, since he had been “secondary to him in every situation in which we ever acted together in public life for twenty years past.” The reverse would have been “the novelty,” and Adams would rightly have been offended by it. He was sure that his letter to Langdon would be conveyed to Adams.²⁹

Actually, Madison, without telling Jefferson, had leaked another letter to Benjamin Rush, an amiable one Jefferson had written on December 17, 1796, in which he had expressed his willingness to serve under Adams, even if they should end in a tie with the same number of electoral votes, since Adams had always been his senior in every respect. Rush in turn had conveyed the contents of this letter to Adams, who was delighted. Adams excitedly told Abigail that Jefferson had written that “Mr. Adams’s services have been longer more constant and more important” than his. Jefferson’s letter to Madison, he told Abigail, had circulated everywhere and was “considered as Evidence of his Determination to accept [the vice presidency]—of his Friendship for me—and of his Modesty and Moderation.” Adams concluded that he and Jefferson “should go on affectionately together and all would be well.”³⁰

•   •   •

AT THIS POINT BOTH MEN SEEMED emotionally ready to bury their political differences and resume the friendship that had meant so much to them in earlier years. Jefferson, however, was politically more sensitive than Adams, more willing to accept the necessity of party. Although he once had said that he disliked parties, he had become the reluctant leader of a transatlantic republican cause, a cause that was threatened by the English monarchy abroad and the Federalist monocrats at home. He and his fellow Republicans sincerely feared for the fate of their sister republic France, and thought that the destiny of the American republic was tied up with that of revolutionary France. For Jefferson the Republicans’ organization as a party was essential but temporary. As soon as republicanism was firmly established in Europe and the United States, the Republican Party could wither away.

Hence, with Madison’s advice very much in mind, Jefferson concluded that as the leader of an opposition party he ought not to get involved in the administration’s affairs in any way. His excuse was that his participation would be constitutionally impossible. As president of the Senate, he was a “member of a legislative house” and forbidden by the Constitution to meddle in executive business.³¹

Adams was less politically astute, and for a moment he actually seemed to think that he and Jefferson might be able to collaborate in running the government. As president, he did not see himself as the leader of something called the Federalist Party. He admitted that he was a Federalist, by which he meant that he was a friend of government, of hierarchy, and of law and order. Although he was as suspicious of banks and Hamilton’s financial program as Jefferson, he hated the French Revolution with a passion and thus he tilted toward England in its titanic struggle with France. That alone identified him as a Federalist and set him at odds with Jefferson and the Republicans.

All Adams had to guide him as president was his image of an independent executive set forth in his writings. Despite all his theoretical emphasis on the executive, he had actually never served in any executive capacity. He had never been a governor or a cabinet officer. Even as vice president he had not been involved in the discussions and decisions of the Washington administration.

He immediately revealed his political naïveté by retaining the members of Washington’s cabinet, whose loyalties were not with him but with Hamilton. He was determined, he later claimed, “to make as few removals as possible,” and certainly none “from personal malice” or “from mere Party Considerations.” Besides, he recalled, Washington had asked him to keep his cabinet, and he feared that if he removed any one of them “it would turn the world upside down.” According to Madison, Adams at the beginning was uncertain over whether or not he could remove his predecessor’s ministers without the Senate’s advice and consent. Madison suggested that either “the maxims of the British Govt. are still uppermost in his mind” or Adams believed his election was “a continuation of the same reign.”³²

Although Adams later realized that keeping Washington’s cabinet members was the greatest political error of his presidency, at the time he had “no particular objections to any of them.” But Jefferson understood his mistake at once. By May 1797 he knew that Adams’s cabinet had been working from the outset to alienate the president from his vice president. These “Hamiltonians by whom he is surrounded,” he told Elbridge Gerry, “are only a little less hostile to him than to me.” He realized that these “machinations” by the followers of Hamilton were bound to affect the cordiality of his relationship with Adams, but he didn’t know how to convince Adams that he wasn’t trying to undermine his government. Although he realized that not knowing each other’s motives “may be a source of private uneasiness with us,” he was confident that neither he nor Adams would allow it to harm “our public duties.”³³

Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia on March 2, 1797, and he promptly called on Adams, who the following morning returned the call. According to Adams’s recollections published in the Boston Patriot in 1809, he had sought out Jefferson on March 3 because he trusted him. He had been his friend for twenty-five years, sometimes in very perilous situations, and he had “always found him assiduous, laborious, and as far as I could judge, upright and faithful.” They had differed over the French Revolution, but Adams said that he had no reason to think that they differed over the U.S. Constitution. He thought that the slurs and slanders of partisan politics should not prevent him from consulting someone like Jefferson, with all his experience and talent.³⁴

In Jefferson’s account based on notes he had taken at the time, Adams said he was glad to find Jefferson alone, for he wanted to have “a free conversation” with him. He explained that because of French seizures of American merchant ships, the situation with France had become dire and threatened to end in war. Adams wanted to send a mission at once to France and wished that Jefferson could be a member of it, but he realized that it might be improper to send the vice president abroad.³⁵ If so, he hoped to send Madison instead, along with two others, in a high-level commission that would represent all sections of the country.

Jefferson told Adams that his participation was out of the question. He also doubted Madison would join a mission either, given that he had turned down an earlier invitation to go abroad. Adams was disappointed, but said that he would appoint Madison anyway “and leave the responsibility on him.”³⁶ According to Adams, he and Jefferson “parted as good friends as we had always lived.”³⁷

The next day, March 4, was Adams’s inauguration as president, the most trying day in his life, he told Abigail. Washington attended and seemed serene and peaceful, as if he were enjoying “a Tryumph” over Adams. “Methought I heard him think Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! see which of Us will be happiest.” But Adams knew very well the historic importance of the occasion. “The Sight of the Sun Setting full orbit and other rising tho less Splendid was a novelty.” He and many others were deeply moved, with much weeping. “Exchanging Presidents without Tumult,” said Adams, was no small thing.³⁸

In his inaugural address Adams tried to counter some of the impressions his publications had made. It was as if he suddenly realized that as president he couldn’t talk to the country in the blunt way he had in his writings. He praised the Constitution and said that there had never been “any objection to it in my mind that the Executive and Senate were not more permanent.” Nor had he ever thought of “promoting any alteration” of it except as the people themselves might desire in the future and in accord with the amendment process set forth in the document. He urged that Americans encourage education and religion as “the only means of preserving our Constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments.” At the end, he felt it necessary to express his “veneration for the religion of a people who profess and call themselves Christians,” remarks that Jefferson would never have made. Adams apparently thought that affirming “a decent respect for Christianity” was much needed as an important qualification for public service in light of Thomas Paine’s recent publication of The Age of Reason, which had dismissed Christianity as an absurdity.³⁹

The next day Adams excitedly told Abigail that all agreed that his inauguration “taken all together . . . was the sublimest Thing ever exhibited in America.” But when some high-toned Federalists criticized his address as too soft on France and the Republicans, he became indignant. “If the Federalists go to playing Pranks,” he told Abigail, “I will resign the office and let Jefferson lead them to Peace, Wealth and Power if he will.” He then launched into one of his characteristic outbursts against ambition and emulation, which he feared “will turn our Government topsy turvy.” Although he had written endlessly about “Jealousies & Rivalries,” with “Checks and Ballances as their Antidotes,” never had they “stared me in the face in such horrid forms as at present.”⁴⁰

Jefferson said nothing about Adams’s inaugural address. In fact, he seems to have had no misgivings whatsoever over Paine’s harsh criticism of Christianity or over anything else Paine wrote. Several weeks later he received a long letter from Paine predicting the bankruptcy and likely downfall of England. Paine warned Jefferson that as vice president he had to keep an eye on Adams, for Adams had “a Natural disposition to blunder and to offend.” With his bad temper, said Paine, he could “do nothing but harm.”⁴¹

On the day following his inauguration, March 5, Adams met with his secretary of the treasury, Oliver Wolcott, and told him about his plans for sending a mission to France with Madison as a member. He was surprised to find Wolcott cool to the whole idea of a mission and especially concerned about Madison being a member. That, Wolcott said, would stir “the passions of our parties” in Congress and throughout the country, and he offered to resign.

Adams was taken aback. He consulted two other department heads, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and Secretary of War James McHenry, and he came to realize that “the violent party spirit of Hamilton’s friends” made Madison’s appointment impossible. “I could not do it,” he recalled, “without quarreling outright with my ministers, whom Washington’s appointment had made my masters.”⁴²

According to Jefferson, the next day, March 6, he and Adams came away together from a dinner at Washington’s house. As Jefferson tried to explain his attempts to persuade Madison to join the commission, Adams immediately became embarrassed and said that “some objections to that nomination had been raised.” He was going on with excuses when the two men had to part to go to their respective residences. Adams, noted Jefferson, “never after that said one word to me on the subject, or ever consulted me as to any measures of the government.” Jefferson correctly concluded that Adams in his innocence and in the enthusiasm of his inauguration had forgotten about his Federalist connections and, as he was wont to do, had allowed himself to be governed by “the feeling of the moment.” But as soon as Adams had met his cabinet the next day, he had realized his mistake “and returned to his former party ways.”⁴³

•   •   •

ADAMS FELT ISOLATED IN PHILADELPHIA, with “no Society but Statesmen” and with no one he could fully trust. His vice president was no confidant, and besides, he told Abigail, who was back in Quincy, Jefferson had left for Virginia. “He is as he was,” he said. What he needed was her presence. “I must go to you or you must come to me. I cannot live without you.”⁴⁴

The most pressing challenge facing the president was dealing with the deteriorating relations with France. Angered by Jay’s Treaty with Great Britain, the French had begun seizing American ships and confiscating their cargoes. John Quincy Adams, the president’s son, who was now minister to the Netherlands, alerted his father to France’s goals in a remarkable series of letters. In 1795 France had turned the Netherlands into a satellite and renamed it the Batavian Republic and, relying on French republican sympathizers in various countries, was now seeking to expand its republican revolution elsewhere in Europe. More alarming, France had its eye on the United States as well. It was, said John Quincy, bent on undermining the Federalists and bringing about the “triumph of French party, French principles, French influence in the United States.” The French government had been led to believe that “the People of the United States have but a feeble attachment to their Government, and will not support them in a contest with that of France.” Young Adams even suggested that France planned to invade the South and, with the support of Jefferson and the Republican Party there and in the West, break up the Union and turn the United States into another puppet republic.⁴⁵

By the time Adams took office, the French had decided to confront the United States directly. The French government refused to receive as minister Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Thomas Pinckney’s elder brother, and intensified its seizure of American ships carrying British goods.

In response, the president called for a special session of Congress for May 16, 1797, the first president to do so. Adams requested a buildup of American military forces, especially the navy, and condemned the French for trying to separate the American people from their government. Americans, he declared, must convince the French that “we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence.”⁴⁶

Jefferson was incensed by Adams’s actions. He thought that Adams’s calling Congress “out of season” was totally unnecessary. Convening Congress in a special session was simply an attempt by the administration “to see how far and in what line they could count on it’s support.” The president’s speech, he told a Maryland follower, was “too bold” and actually endangered “the peace of our country.”⁴⁷

A relative of this Maryland recipient read this letter and, despite being told that he should make no improper use of it, communicated the substance of it to Adams. The president found Jefferson’s comments “serious,” and reason enough among “many others . . . to be upon my guard.” Gone was his earlier confidence in his vice president. He now had “evidence of a mind, soured, yet seeking for popularity, and eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed and ignorant.”⁴⁸

Adding to Adams’s awareness of the vice president’s hostility was the publication in the press of a letter Jefferson had written the previous year to his Italian friend Philip Mazzei. In its translation from English to Italian to French back to English, Jefferson was quoted as describing a separation between the “Anglo-Monarchical-Aristocratic party” that dominated the government and the mass of the American citizens who were still “faithful to republican principles.” The government, he said, was under the control of “apostates” who once were “Solomons in council and Sampsons in combat, but whose hair has been cut off by the whore England.” Although Jefferson was embarrassed and never publicly acknowledged the letter, the Federalists were delighted with it and never ceased using it against the leader of the Republicans. The comment seemed to indict Washington most directly, but it could also be construed as a criticism of Adams. Indeed, the French émigré the Comte de Volney observed that although most Federalists were not devoted to England, many did have “a taste for its constitution and M. Adams is at the head.”⁴⁹

Hoping against hope that Jefferson in 1797 had moderated his views from what they had been a year earlier, Abigail described the Mazzei letter as something written when Jefferson “was anxious to convert all political Heriticks to French Faith.” Still, she told her son John Quincy, she was sure it would “never be forgotten by the Characters traduced.”⁵⁰ In his reply, John Quincy told his mother that the Mazzei letter was “more than imprudent: it shows a mind full of error, or an heart full of falsehood.” But he could not believe the latter. “My old sentiments of respect veneration and attachment still hang about me with regard to that man”—evidence of how strong and warm the friendship between the Adams family and Jefferson had been in Europe. Nevertheless, said young Adams, the letter did reveal “a very weak man” and a hypocritical one. Indeed, “there could not be a stronger proof of the misrepresentations and calumnies” that lay behind recent French policy toward the United States. It showed just “how much the French depended upon an internal party in America to support and justify their treatment of us.”⁵¹

Adams himself was anxious about the strength of Jefferson’s attachment to France. He was convinced that from the beginning France had “invariably preserved a Course of Intrigue to gain an undue Influence in these states, to make Us dependent upon her, and to keep up a quarrel with England.”⁵² By the middle of 1797, he felt that the United States and France were on the verge of war.

Jefferson and the other Republican leaders dismissed the Federalists as warmongers, threatening a war that France did not want, and they urged delay. To Jefferson and the other Republicans, war with America’s sister republic was inconceivable. It would play into the hands of the English party in the United States and destroy the republican experiment everywhere. Besides, Jefferson believed that a French invasion of Britain was imminent and that its success would solve all of America’s problems with France.

Adams’s earlier plans to send a commission to France now became even more urgent, and he decided on John Marshall of Virginia, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who was already in France, to make up the diplomatic commission.

By November 1797, Abigail had lost all hope for Jefferson. “He is a child,” she said, “the dupe of party, . . . a Man whose Mind is so warped by prejudice, and so Blinded by Ignorance as to be unfit for the office he holds.”⁵³ Adams himself was deeply discouraged. Congress was giving him little or no support in his dealings with France. And for over a year since his inauguration he had had no contact whatsoever with his predecessor, Washington.⁵⁴

•   •   •

FOR SOMEONE LIKE JEFFERSON, who placed such a high value on politeness and social harmony, the political passions dividing the society were truly alarming. “Men who have been intimate all their lives,” he lamented, “cross the street to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.” He could have been speaking about his personal relations with Adams when he said that “party animosities” had “raised a wall of separation between those who differ in political sentiments.”⁵⁵

That November, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives rejected Adams’s appeal to build up a naval force. Jefferson dismissed Adams’s efforts to call attention to French depredations as “inflammatory,” designed only to promote his desire to arm America’s merchant ships. Jefferson was delighted that the merchants themselves were becoming less and less interested in arming their ships. As far as the French government itself was concerned, the Americans seemed hopelessly divided and thus no threat whatsoever.⁵⁶

Bad as things were, Adams and Jefferson were still speaking to each other, though not intimately. Jefferson recorded a conversation he had with the president when they sat next to each other at the end of a large dinner party in mid-February 1798. After discussing the high price of labor and rents and concurring in holding the banks and their issues of paper money responsible, the two turned to the Constitution. In the course of the conversation, which Jefferson recorded in notes shortly thereafter, Adams contended that no republic could long exist without a strong senate, “strong enough to bear up against all popular storms & passions.” He thought the U.S. Senate was probably “as well constituted as it could have been,” but still it was “not durable enough”; and eventually that would be its undoing. Certainly, trusting “a popular assembly for the preservation of our liberties . . . was the merest chimaera imaginable.” Although Adams was aware that Jefferson supported the French Revolution, he nevertheless told him to his face that “in France anarchy had done more mischief in one night than all the despotism of their kings had ever done in 20 or 30 years.”⁵⁷

Polite as usual, Jefferson never fully revealed to Adams just how much of a true believer he was—someone thoroughly convinced that the success of the French Revolution would determine the fate of America’s experiment in republicanism. Just as Adams and the Federalists were frightened by the fifth-column-like activities of the Republicans, so too did Jefferson see the Federalists using their mercantile and financial connections to draw America “into war on the side of England” in order ultimately “to break up our union.”⁵⁸ Jefferson believed that war with France would be a calamity and would play into the hands of monarchies everywhere.

Adams was the very opposite of a true believer. He was pessimistic, cynical about human nature, and sure about only one thing—that the French Revolution was an unmitigated disaster. He lacked Jefferson’s confidence in the future and was uncertain about what to do. In contrast to some High Federalists who favored war with France, he preferred a peaceful resolution of the crisis, “provided that no Violation of Faith, no Stain upon Honour is exacted. But,” he told his son John Quincy, “if Infidelity, Dishonour, or too much humiliation is demanded, France shall do as she pleases and take her own course. America is not Scared.”⁵⁹

Adams realized that England was as much a violator of America’s neutral rights as France. “If we believe Britain’s less hungry for plunder than Frenchmen,” he told his secretary of state, “we shall be deceived.” Still, unlike Jefferson, he was proud of his English heritage. Impressed by England’s skill and perseverance in the war at sea, he told Abigail “we are a Chip of that Block.”⁶⁰ Since he believed in order, hierarchy, and the inevitability of social inequality, and was an admirer of the English constitution and suspicious of democracy, he was necessarily a Federalist, but he was not really a party man. And many of his fellow Federalists sensed that, which made him suspect in their eyes.

•   •   •

IN THE END FRANCE ITSELF RESCUED Adams from his despairing uncertain situation. The French government refused to recognize the credentials of the commissioners Adams had sent to France. French agents, later referred to as “X, Y, and Z” in dispatches published in America, demanded of the American envoys that the U.S. government apologize for President Adams’s allegedly unfriendly May 1797 speech to Congress and assume responsibility for any outstanding French debts owed to Americans. To top this off, the French agents insisted that the United States in effect give a bribe to the French government of fifty thousand pounds. Only then might the French government receive the commissioners.

In April 1798, after months of haggling, a disgusted Marshall and Pinckney returned to the United States. Gerry, fearful that a war with France would “disgrace republicanism & make it the scoff of despots,” decided to remain behind.⁶¹ Before returning, Marshall had sent to the president records of the XYZ Affair and the collapse of the negotiations with France. Without revealing the contents of the commission’s dispatches, Adams on March 19, 1798, informed the Congress of the failure of the diplomatic mission and called for arming America’s merchant vessels and other defensive measures. On March 23, he also called for “a day of solemn humiliation, fasting and prayer” to be held on May 9, 1798.

Jefferson was horrified by what he took to be Adams’s warlike message. He called it “insane.” Madison agreed, and said the message was evidence that “the violent passions, and heretical politics” that had long governed Adams privately had at last been publicly exposed. Desperate to avoid conflict with America’s sister republic, the Republican leaders sought to find some way of delaying action by Congress. “To do nothing, and to gain time is everything with us,” Jefferson told Madison. If war could be put off for six months or so, he said, events in Europe would save us. England was on its last legs, and a French invasion of the British Isles was bound to happen soon.⁶²

The Republicans thought that Adams’s initial refusal to make the envoys’ dispatches public was a cover-up, and, unaware of how damaging they were to their cause, they called for their release. On April 4, 1798, Abigail told her son John Quincy that the Republicans wanted the dispatches, and she said, with smiling anger, “today they will receive them.” The dispatches exhibited “a picture of National Degradation and unparalleled corruption” and were so insulting, she said, that America ought to cut off all connection with that regicide republic.

When Americans finally learned how the French government had humiliated their commissioners in the XYZ Affair, most of them exploded in anger against France and the Republican Party. “The Jacobins in senate and House were struck dumb,” said Abigail, and not having received instructions from their French emissaries spread all over America, they didn’t know what to do.⁶³

Jefferson himself was stunned. The publication of the dispatches, he told Madison, “produced such a shock on the republican mind as has never been seen since our independence.” Especially embarrassing were the French agents’ references to the “friends of France” in the United States, suggesting that there existed quislings in the country willing to aid the French. Many of the “vibrators” and “wavering characters” in the Republican Party, Jefferson groaned, were so anxious “to wipe out the imputation of being French partisans” that they were going over in droves to “the war party.” He himself felt especially persecuted. “At this moment,” he told James Monroe, “my name is running through all the city as detected in a criminal correspondence with the French directory.”⁶⁴

Over the remainder of 1798 and into 1799, the Federalists won election after election, even in the South, and gained control of the Congress.

Following his initial shock, Jefferson soon recovered his natural optimistic faith in the French Revolution, and he began assuring his correspondents that only “the merchants & satellites of the administration” favored war. The farmers of America did not. He began making excuses for the French, arguing that the Directory in charge of the government knew nothing of the corrupt behavior of its foreign minister and his agents. The only real obstacle to negotiations, he claimed, was President Adams’s speech of May 16, 1797. It will be “the real cause of war, if war takes place.” If that “insult from our Executive should be first wiped away,” the French seemed willing to settle all other differences. It was certain, he said, that the revelations of these dispatches “do not offer one motive the more for our going to war.” The Republicans, or what he often called “the whig-party” in contrast to the monarch-minded Tories, were “willing to indulge the war-gentry with every reasonable measure of internal defense & preparations, but will oppose everything external.” He expected time would heal passions, “unless the Executive should be able to plunge us into war irrecoverably.”⁶⁵

•   •   •

THE REVELATION OF THE XYZ AFFAIR suddenly made President Adams and the Federalists popular in a way they had not been before. “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute!”—the reply the American envoys supposedly had given to the French demand for a bribe—became the Federalists’ rallying cry. Songs and plays celebrated the president, and theater audiences that earlier had rioted on behalf of the French now sang praises of President Adams.

Acclamations and addresses cascaded upon the president—hundreds of them, from state legislatures, town meetings, college students, grand juries, Masonic lodges, and military companies. They congratulated him for his leadership, for his patience, for his impartiality, and for his wisdom in upholding the honor and independence of the United States. The addresses condemned those “characters in the United States who call themselves Americans and who . . . are endeavoring to poison the minds of the well-meaning citizens and to withdraw from the government the support of the people.”⁶⁶

Beside himself with excitement, Adams answered all the addresses, sometimes with bellicose statements against the “inordinate Ambition and Avarice” of France and at other times with indictments of “designing men” who have appealed to “the Passions and Prejudices of the People” in an attempt “to separate the People from the Government.” In his answer “To the Young Men of the City of Philadelphia,” an answer that greatly upset Jefferson, Adams declared that, “without wishing to damp the ardor of curiosity, or influence the freedom of inquiry,” he guessed that after much impartial research the longest liver among the young men would “find no principles, institutions, or systems of education more fit, in general, to be transmitted to your posterity, than that you have received from your ancestors.” In other words, the wisdom of the past trumped the promises of the future. Nothing could be more contrary to Jefferson’s outlook on the world.⁶⁷

Jefferson was fascinated by Adams’s answers, and he systematically compiled a list of all that were published, categorizing them under various headings: “favor to England,” “abuse of the French,” “libels against his fellow-citizens,” “anti-republican heresies,” and “egoisms.” He complained that these presidential responses were “full of extraordinary things” and were more boastful and more damaging to the possibility for peace than the addresses themselves. Foreign nations might be able to pardon indiscreet and passionate statements made by local governments and private organizations, but, he said, they could scarcely ignore statements made by the president of the United States.⁶⁸

All of Adams’s responses troubled Jefferson, but the one that most outraged him and the one he never forgot was Adams’s astonishing advice given to the young men of Philadelphia. It was, Jefferson exclaimed, “precisely the doctrine which the present despots of the earth are inculcating, & their friends here re-echoing; & applying especially to religion and politics.” He could hardly believe what Adams had said: “we are to look backwards then, & not forwards for the improvement of science, & to find it amidst feudal barbarisms and the fires of Spital-fields”—that is, amid the cremations from the Roman era discovered in London in the sixteenth century. “But thank heaven,” he said, “the American mind is already too much opened, to listen to these impostures.”⁶⁹

Because Adams was finally receiving the popular praise and respect that he had long yearned for, all his doubts about his actions suddenly disappeared. He could only conclude that “the French and many Americans have miscalculated. They have betrayed to the World their Ignorance of the American Character.”⁷⁰ Adams took the responsibility for answering all these addresses so seriously that Abigail feared for his life.⁷¹ But he himself was never happier than he was during the summer of 1798, lecturing his countrymen on the ignorance and dishonesty of both France and the Republican Party.

•   •   •

DESPITE ADAMS’S NEWFOUND CONFIDENCE, the situation in 1798 was exceedingly perilous. Groups of Republicans and Federalists adopted different cockades—the Federalists assumed a black ornament to contrast sharply with what they took to be the French tricolor cockade worn by the Republicans. Mobs wearing these contrasting cockades became involved in skirmishes, fistfights, and other violence, even at church doors. Abigail was beside herself with anger and anguish. She hoped that people were at last uniting against “foreign influence” in the capital and would crush “the Hydra Monster of Jacobinism” and prevent it from ever rising again. To some frightened observers, society seemed to be coming apart. “Friendships were dissolved, tradesmen dismissed, and custom withdrawn from the Republican party,” bemoaned the wife of a prominent Republican in Philadelphia. “Many gentlemen went armed.”⁷²

Rumors spread everywhere that a conspiracy was afoot to burn Philadelphia on May 9, 1798, the day Adams had designated for fasting and prayer. On the eve of that day, riots and brawling erupted in the capital between supporters of Britain and backers of France, and mobs attacked Republican newspaper editors. Many years later the events of that night were still vivid in Adams’s memory. “What think you of Terrorism, Mr. Jefferson?” asked Adams, in one of his many letters to Jefferson written in retirement. “I have no doubt You was fast asleep in philosophical Tranquility,” he sarcastically reminded Jefferson, “when ten thousand People, and perhaps many more, were parading the Streets of Philadelphia.”⁷³

Adams had been scared. The governor of Pennsylvania had to order patrols of horse and foot to preserve the peace. Crowds—numbering ten thousand persons, said Abigail—were everywhere. “Market Street was as full as Men could stand by one another.” A mob of over a thousand even came to the president’s door, so close that some of his servants, who were in a “Phrenzy,” said Adams, offered “to sacrifice their Lives in my defence.” His “Domesticks” were about to make “a desperate Sally among the multitude,” when others, “with difficulty and danger,” dragged them back. Adams himself had ordered “Chests and Arms” to be brought surreptitiously to his house, which he was determined to defend “at the expense of my Life, and the lives of the few, very few Domesticks and Friends within it.”⁷⁴

John and Abigail both blamed the terrorism on the Republican newspaper editors, such as Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin; William Duane, who succeeded Bache as editor of the Philadelphia Aurora; and the notorious James Thomson Callender, who had vilified the president and other Federalist officials in the years leading up to 1798. “The vile incendiaries” in the Republican newspapers, exclaimed Abigail in April 1798, were filled with “the most wicked and base, violent & caluminiating abuse” of Federalist officeholders. “But,” she said, “nothing will have an effect until congress pass a Sedition bill.” Indeed, there was no stronger advocate for limiting the scurrility of the press than Mrs. Adams. She and many other Federalists thought that all authority was under attack, with French sympathizers everywhere and a French army on the verge of invading the country.⁷⁵

John Randolph, Jefferson’s brilliant but eccentric second cousin, later claimed in the Congress that “the grand Army of Richmond was intended to put down the Yankee Administration.” Adams later said that he had no doubt that this was true, and “Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison were privy to the design.”⁷⁶

•   •   •

THESE WERE INDEED FRIGHTENING TIMES, perhaps the most frightening moment in all of American history—something most historians have not appreciated. The only comparable period of terror might be the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when the country, worried over possible Japanese espionage and an invasion of the West Coast, interned well over a hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry, 60 percent of whom were American citizens. Bad as the situation was in 1941–1942, 1798–1799 seems scarier because the nation then was so new and so militarily weak and the enemy that threatened to invade was the strongest land power in the world.

A French invasion of America was not far-fetched. French armies were dominating Europe. Not only had France annexed Belgium and parts of Germany outright, but, more alarming, it had also used native collaborators to create puppet republics in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and much of Italy. It might do the same in America. France after all had sent a huge army across the Atlantic two decades earlier. And there were large numbers of Americans and recent immigrants, both French and Irish, who were sympathetic to the French Revolution and who might welcome a French invasion. So strong was the French influence in the capital that one historian has called Philadelphia in the 1790s “an American Paris.”⁷⁷

Jefferson, of course, was right when he said that the Federalists were mistaken in presuming that the Republicans’ attachment to France and their hatred of the Federalist monarchists trumped their love of their own country.⁷⁸ At the time, however, that was not at all clear to the Federalists. All they could see were the Republican expressions of sympathy for France and the threat of a French invasion; and, of course, they, like everyone else, did not know the future. Even Jefferson realized that he had expressed enough affection for France and support of the French Revolution that his loyalty might be suspect. In fact, the Federalist press was calling him “that traitor to his country.”⁷⁹ When the French philosophe the Comte de Volney left America to return to France, Jefferson asked him not to write to him, fearing that letters from any Frenchmen at this critical time were bound to arouse suspicion.⁸⁰

Because none of the Federalists’ fears actually materialized and no invasion occurred, historians have never been able to fully appreciate the Federalists’ apprehensions. Yet if the Federalists’ actions during the crisis of 1798–1799 are to be understood, their fears, which were genuine and deeply felt, must be taken seriously, however wrongheaded they turned out to be.

The most devout Federalists in Congress began enacting measures to prepare the county for war with France. In the absence of a formal declaration of war, they sanctioned a Quasi-War, or what Adams called “the half-war with France.”⁸¹ Congress formally abrogated all treaties with France and laid an embargo on all French trade. It authorized American naval vessels to attack armed French ships that were seizing American merchant vessels. In addition to levying new taxes, providing for loans, and making plans for beefing up the army, Congress approved the building of fifteen warships. To supervise the new fleet Congress created an independent Navy Department—one of Adams’s proudest accomplishments. The “one thing wanting,” said Abigail, was a formal declaration of war. It “ought undoubtedly to have been made,” except for Elbridge Gerry’s “unaccountable Stay” in France. The people wanted war, but their representatives in Congress, she said, were too timid, too full of “party spirit, and Jacobinism.” Apparently, Adams himself, at least at this moment, was equally bent on a declaration of war.⁸²

At the same time the Federalists in Congress thought they had to do something about what they believed were the sources of Jacobin influence in America—the increasing number of foreign immigrants and the scurrilous behavior of the Republican press. In response, in the summer of 1798 they passed and President Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, measures that turned out to be a horrendous mistake. In fact, more than anything else, these acts have so tarnished the historical reputation of Adams and the Federalists that it can probably never be recovered. Yet it is important to put these acts in context and explain why they made sense to the Adamses and to the Federalists.

•   •   •

AT THE OUTSET OF THE NEW GOVERNMENT in 1789, the Federalists, especially the big land speculators, had been very eager to receive foreign immigrants, and in 1790 they had passed a fairly liberal naturalization measure that required only two years of residency for free white persons to become citizens. By contrast, Jefferson and the Republicans were not initially as welcoming to immigrants. Believing in a more active hands-on role for the people in politics, they had worried that European immigrants might lack a proper appreciation of liberty and self-government to become good citizens. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had thought that too many European immigrants might come to America with monarchical principles “imbibed in their early youth” and would pass these principles on to their children and infuse into American culture “their spirit, warp and bias its direction,” ultimately turning America into “a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”⁸³

In the subsequent years, however, the Federalists and the Republicans changed their minds. In the 1790s alone, nearly one hundred thousand immigrants came to the United States. Many of these were political or religious refugees, driven from Britain and Ireland because of their dissenting beliefs, and they tended to support the Republican Party. A disproportionate number of them became newspaper editors, usually writing on behalf of the Republican cause.

At the same time, thousands of Frenchmen in the 1790s, escaping the convulsions in their homeland and in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), entered the United States, and these French immigrants naturally made many Federalists uneasy. It has been estimated that as much as 10 percent of the population of Philadelphia in the mid-1790s was French, with French shops, French craftsmen, and French newspapers everywhere in the city. Jefferson’s French friend the Comte de Volney, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1795, thought the city had “a penchant for our arts, our manners, our language.”⁸⁴ By 1798 the Federalists were frightened enough by the presence of all these foreigners that they were prepared to limit their ability to influence American politics.

The Naturalization Act of June 18, 1798, extended the period of residence required before an alien could become a citizen to fourteen years, and prevented aliens who were citizens or subjects of a nation with which the United States was at war from becoming citizens. This legislation was followed a week later by the Alien Friends Act, which allowed the government to restrain aliens even in peacetime.

Although the United States had not actually declared war on France, nevertheless, “in times like the present,” Abigail told her sister, “a more careful and attentive watch ought to be kept over foreigners.”⁸⁵ John Adams much later justified his signing the Alien Friends bill as president on the grounds that “we were then at War with France: French Spies then swarmed in our Cities and in the Country. . . . To check them was the design of this law. Was there ever a Government,” he asked Jefferson, “which had not Authority to defend itself against Spies in its own Bosom?” Jefferson vehemently opposed the act and scorned it as “a most detestable thing,” something “worthy of the 8th or 9th century.”⁸⁶

Following the passage of the Alien Friends Act, more than a dozen shiploads of frightened Frenchmen sailed for France or Santo Domingo, the former Spanish colony adjoining Saint-Domingue that France had acquired in 1795. Adams wanted no more Frenchmen, no matter how enlightened, to enter the United States. “We have had too many French Philosophers already,” he told Secretary of State Pickering in September 1798; “and I really begin to think or to suspect, that learned academics not under the immediate Inspection and Control of Government have disorganised the World and are incompatible with social order.” When Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de St. Méry, a refugee from the Reign of Terror who in 1794 had established a bookstore in Philadelphia, asked why he was on the president’s list for deportation, he was told of President Adams’s blunt reply: “Nothing in particular, but he’s too French.”⁸⁷

In the end, however, because so many foreigners left before the act was enforced and because of Adams’s strict interpretation of the statute, the Federalist government never actually deported a single alien under the Alien Friends Act.

But it was the Sedition Act of July 14, 1798, that aroused the most Republican anger. It made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish . . . false, scandalous, and malicious” writings that brought the president or members of either house of Congress “into contempt or disrepute.” (Significantly, the vice president was not protected by the act.) It was designed, said Jefferson, for “the suppression of the whig presses,” especially the Philadelphia Aurora. If the Republican papers were silenced, he said, “republicanism will be entirely brow-beaten.”⁸⁸

The partisan newspapers were truly scandalous. Indeed, never in American history has the press been more vitriolic and more scurrilous than it was in the 1790s. Although the Federalist press had its own share of malicious charges against the Republicans, it was the growing number of Republican newspapers that filled the air with vicious attacks on the president and Federalist officeholders. Federalist officials were denounced for being “Tory monarchists” and “British-loving aristocrats.” Adams was singled out for being “a mock Monarch” who was “blind, bald, toothless, and querulous” and “a ruffian deserving of the curses of mankind.”⁸⁹

By the early nineteenth century, all Adams could recall of the press during his presidency was that it was full of “the most envious malignity, the most base, vulgar, sordid, fishwoman scurrility, and the most palpable lies.” Indeed, based on what the pamphlets and newspapers of both parties had said about him, he had to be judged nothing less than “the meanest villain in the world.”⁹⁰

The traditional common law of seditious libel that ran in most state courts was designed to protect authority and promote order in this still premodern world. In a society that lacked police forces and modern mechanisms for maintaining order, magistrates and rulers, it was thought, had to rely on their inherent social authority—their wealth, their learning, and their social respectability—to command the obedience of those below them. If that social respectability was brought into question by scurrilous charges in the press, then the capacity of these magistrates and rulers to maintain order would be endangered. As Adams’s Harvard classmate Jonathan Sewall had put it in 1766, “the person and the office are so connected in the minds of the greatest part of mankind, that a contempt of the former and a veneration for the latter are totally incompatible.”⁹¹ This was the rationale behind the common law of seditious libel.

Americans believed in freedom of the press and had written that freedom into their Bill of Rights. But they believed in it as Englishmen did.⁹² Indeed, the English had celebrated freedom of the press since the seventeenth century, but they meant by it, in contrast with the French, no prior restraint or censorship of what was published. Under English law, people were nevertheless held responsible for what they published. If a person’s publications were calumnious enough to bring public officials into disrespect, then under the common law the publisher could be prosecuted for seditious libel. The truth of what was published was no defense; indeed, it even aggravated the offense. Furthermore, under the common law, judges, not juries, had the responsibility to decide whether or not a publication was seditious. Although this common-law view of seditious libel had been challenged and seriously weakened by John Peter Zenger’s trial in New York in 1735, it had never been fully eradicated from American thinking or practice in the state courts.

In this regard the Sedition Act passed by Congress in 1798 was a liberalization of the common law. It said the statements had to be true in order to be libelous, and it allowed for juries to decide whether a piece was seditious. Unlike Madison and many other of his fellow Republicans, who were more libertarian than he, Jefferson objected to the Sedition Act solely on federalist grounds—that is, that the national Congress had no constitutional right to enact such a law. But he fully accepted the right of the state courts to use the traditional common law of seditious libel in order to punish scurrilous writers who attacked government officials.

Not only did he dislike the press nearly as much as Adams—“nothing in a newspaper,” he said, “is to be believed”—but when he became president he wrote to Republican governors and attorneys general in the states and urged them to prosecute some scandalmongering Federalist editors for seditious libel under the common law. In 1803 he told Thomas McKean, by then governor of Pennsylvania (“what I say must be entirely confidential”), that “a few prosecutions of the most eminent offenders would have a wholesome effect in restoring the integrity of the presses—not a general prosecution, for that would look like persecution: but a selected one.” Although Jefferson did allow for truth to be a defense in these trials of seditious libel, his efforts to go after Federalist editors surreptitiously have not endeared him to some later historians.⁹³

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EXPELLING ALIENS and stifling the scurrility of the Republican press were only parts of the Federalist program designed to save the nation from the evils of Jacobinism. Many Federalists remained convinced that a French army would sooner or later invade the United States and the country had to be prepared. Consequently, in the summer of 1798, Congress immediately enlarged the army to twelve thousand men and authorized ten thousand more in case of an actual invasion. Adams, who doubted the possibility of a French invasion, had never called for these increases in the army. They were pushed by Hamilton and other Federalists, and the president felt himself carried along. In fact, sometimes Adams acted as if he were not the chief executive at all and someone else was making the decisions.

In the summer of 1798, Adams confessed to his predecessor his sense of helplessness in the face of the crisis. If the country was to be saved, he told Washington, it had to “depend upon Heaven, and very little on any thing in my Power.” Since he had no martial experience, he wished the Constitution would allow him to change places with Washington or permit him to become vice president once again under his leadership. Without getting Washington’s final permission, Adams went ahead and commissioned the former president as the commander in chief of all the armies. Washington, however, declared that he would serve only if Hamilton was second in command and the de facto commander. Adams wanted Henry Knox as second in command, because he had outranked Hamilton in the Revolutionary War. Under pressure from Washington and his cabinet, Adams finally gave way. He was furious that he had to promote Hamilton, who became for Adams “the most restless, impatient, indefatigable and unprincipled Intriguer in the United States, if not in the world.”⁹⁴

Hamilton did have grandiose plans. He was a Napoleonic figure who wanted glory both for himself and for the nation. He wanted to strengthen the Union, extend the judiciary, and amend the Constitution to break up the large states, especially Virginia. He thought a war with France would allow the United States, in cooperation with Britain, to seize both Florida and Louisiana. He even raised the possibility of aiding the Venezuelan patriot Francisco de Miranda in liberating South America from Spanish control.

At first Jefferson remained sanguine in the face of all the Federalist talk of crisis and a French invasion. In June 1798, he sought to soothe the fears of John Taylor of Virginia, who had criticized the Federalists’ plans and raised the possibility of the southern states seceding from the Union. “A little patience,” he told Taylor, “and we shall see the reign of the witches pass over.” The Federalists in Massachusetts and Connecticut, “marked like the Jews with a peculiarity of character,” were now in control, but that was unnatural and only temporary. “The body of our countrymen is substantially republican through every part of the union.”⁹⁵

With the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the summer of 1798, however, Jefferson became more apprehensive, fearing that the Federalists might build on the success of their oppressive legislation. He saw that legislation as “an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the constitution.” If the people accept these acts, Congress might next attempt to grant the president life tenure, which would lead to making the office hereditary, followed by establishing the Senate for life. Since these attempts “to worm out the elective principle” were what Adams had long predicted, Jefferson had little doubt the Federalists were contemplating making them, and given the degree to which the American people had been duped so far, he was no longer confident of being able to resist them.⁹⁶ Even more alarming was the possibility of Hamilton, “our Buonaparte, surrounded by his comrades in arms,” invading Virginia in order to put down the Republican opposition.⁹⁷

In the end Jefferson, actually now more fearful of what was happening than Adams, became convinced that he had to do something to combat the Federalist plans. With the Federalists in control of Congress and the presidency, he had come to think of the federal government as “a foreign jurisdiction.” Over the previous decade, he said, the general government had “become more arbitrary, and has swallowed up more of the public liberty than even that of England.” By contrast, “our state governments are the very best in the world.” Consequently, he and Madison plotted to use the state legislatures as the most effective instrument for contesting the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts.⁹⁸

Jefferson’s draft of the state resolutions was intended for the Virginia legislature, but when Madison’s draft went to Virginia, his ended up in the Kentucky legislature. In it Jefferson described the Constitution as “a compact” among the several states, with each state retaining final authority to declare acts of the federal government that exceeded its delegated powers, in this case, the Alien and Sedition Acts, “void & of no force” within that state’s jurisdiction. Jefferson labeled this remedy for abusive federal actions “nullification,” but, fortunately for his subsequent reputation, the Kentucky legislature edited out this inflammatory term when it adopted Jefferson’s draft in a set of resolves issued in November 1798.⁹⁹

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ADAMS’S EARLIER APPREHENSIONS about what the French and their Republican sympathizers might be up to were now overwhelmed by his hatred of Hamilton and the High Federalists. He had come to detest the entire Hamiltonian financial program, declaring that “there is not a democrat in the world who affects more horror than I really feel, at the prospect of that frightful system of debts and taxes, into which imperious necessity seems to be precipitating us.” Having been humiliated by Washington and the Hamiltonians over the appointment of the army’s generals, Adams was very bitter. His loathing of Hamilton was so intense that he came to regard him as something other than an American, calling him nothing but “a foreigner,” and “not a native of the United States.”¹⁰⁰

Sharing none of his fellow Federalists’ fears of a French invasion—he told Secretary of War James McHenry in October 1798 that “at present there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here, than there is in Heaven”—Adams was finally prepared to defy Hamilton and the High Federalists and defuse the warlike atmosphere they had created.¹⁰¹ In a December 8, 1798, speech to Congress, the president opened the door to further negotiations with France.

Jefferson was impressed with its “moderation,” but doubted that it revealed Adams’s genuine feelings.¹⁰² But Adams had changed. Learning from various sources that France was finally ready to reach an agreement with the United States, Adams, without consulting anyone, including his own cabinet, decided in February 1799 to send another mission to France.

This extraordinary action stunned the Federalists and divided the party. It was as if Adams’s long pent-up hostility to being attached to a party with which he had little in common could at last be released. “If anyone entertains the Idea that, because I am President of three votes only, I am in the Power of a party,” he told Charles Lee, his attorney general, they had another think coming. The president was ready to take on the “Combinations of Senators Generals and Heads of Departments” that had formed against him. So little had he come to think of himself as a Federalist that he even suggested that he would form a new party made up of independent-minded men from both existing parties.¹⁰³

He even saw himself as a kind of republican king ruling above all parties. He asked his ministers’ advice as to whether or not the president could establish “a Gazette in the Service of the Government.” After all, the king of England had a gazette, and “without running a Parallel between the President of the United States and the King of England, it is certain that the honor Dignity and Consistency of Government is of as much importance to the People, in one case as the other.” This remarkable proposal suggests just how much Adams modeled the American executive on that of England and just how out of touch he was with the realities of American politics.¹⁰⁴

Adams was no politician and certainly no party leader; and he had very little political sense. In 1799 he seemed oblivious to the political implications of counseling a federal judge to surrender to British authorities a sailor named Jonathan Robbins, alias Thomas Nash, who was accused of a bloody mutiny on H.M.S. Hermione in 1797. Only after Robbins was given up to the British did the sailor claim to be a U.S. citizen impressed into the British navy—a false claim, as it turned out. British subject or not, mutineer or not, Robbins and his extradition and subsequent quick execution by the British became a political disaster for Adams. The Republicans relentlessly criticized him in the press for being complicit in the murder of a “martyr to liberty,” and under the leadership of Edward Livingston in the House of Representatives, they threatened to censure and even impeach him.

Jefferson followed these proceedings very closely and was well aware of the implications of the Robbins affair for the upcoming presidential election. As early as October 1799, he thought that “no one circumstance since the establishment of our government has affected the popular mind more” than the Robbins case. As an American presumably seized by the British navy, Robbins embodied the evil of British impressment. Indeed, many, including Jefferson, thought that Robbins’s martyrdom was a major reason for Adams’s defeat in 1800.¹⁰⁵

As his behavior over the Robbins affair indicated, Jefferson was a superb politician and party leader. While Adams did little or nothing to plan for his reelection, Jefferson was exchanging letters with his Republican colleagues, tallying votes state by state and plotting strategy. It was as if Adams didn’t care about the election. He told members of his cabinet that at their upcoming meeting there should be no discussion of the election. He knew where he stood in the eyes of the people and he was going to be “a President of three votes or no president at all”—the difference in his opinion being “not worth three farthings.”¹⁰⁶

Since for Adams party had lost all meaning, he now felt free enough to criticize Hamilton openly and to do what he should have done long before—dismiss the Hamiltonians in his cabinet, Pickering and McHenry. In an explosive expression of rage, which had become increasingly common, Adams accused McHenry of being “subservient to Hamilton,” who was “a man devoid of every moral principle, a Bastard,” and the cause of all the Federalists’ problems. Jefferson, said Adams, was an “infinitely better” and “wiser” man than Hamilton, and if he should become president he “will act wisely.” Adams went on to say that he would rather be vice president under Jefferson, or even minister at The Hague, than be “indebted to such a being as Hamilton for the Presidency.”¹⁰⁷ So strange and eccentric did Adams’s actions seem that some Federalists thought that he and Jefferson must have come to some secret agreement.¹⁰⁸

Learning of Adams’s tirade, and especially the reference to his illegitimacy, an irate Hamilton could only conclude that the president was “more mad than I ever thought him” and perhaps because of his praise of Jefferson “as wicked as he is mad.”¹⁰⁹ Others too thought that Adams had become emotionally unhinged. Even the British minister described him as “the most passionate, intemperate man he ever had anything to do with.”¹¹⁰ Some Federalists questioned Adams’s mental stability and sought to find some alternative as president. In 1799 a few had even tried to talk Washington into standing once again for the presidency—an effort the ex-president in anger and despair dismissed out of hand, saying that in this new era of political parties even “a broomstick” properly supported by its party could win an election.¹¹¹

Hamilton was especially desperate. In the summer and fall of 1800, he composed a fifty-four-page privately published Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States. In this pamphlet Hamilton criticized Adams for his “eccentric tendencies,” his “distempered jealousy,” his “extreme egoism,” his “ungovernable temper,” and his “vanity without bounds.” He declared that Adams and his many “paroxysms of anger” had undone everything that the Washington administration had established. If Adams were to continue as president, he might bring the government to ruin. Despite stating that Adams was unfit to be president, Hamilton ended his invective polemic by supporting the president’s reelection. Apparently, he was hoping for some combination of electoral votes that would result in the election of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney as president.

Although Hamilton’s Letter may not by itself have prevented Adams’s reelection, its publication revealed the deep division among the Federalists that made Jefferson’s election as president more or less inevitable. That division was caused by Adams’s courageous decision to send a new mission to France, the issue that Hamilton most emphasized in his pamphlet and the one that stunned and destroyed Adams’s reputation among many Federalists.

Writing from Federalist-dominated Massachusetts, Abigail told her husband that his decision “universally electrified the public. . . . It came so sudden, was a measure so unexpected, that the whole community were like a flock of frightened pigeons: nobody had their story ready; Some call’d it a hasty measure; other condemned it as an inconsistent one; some swore, some cursed.”¹¹²

Adams actually enjoyed angering the Hamiltonian Federalists, showing them that he was his own man. He considered this decision to try once more to negotiate with France, as he never tired of telling everyone, “the most disinterested, prudent, and successful conduct in my whole life.” He desired no other inscription on his gravestone than: “Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800.”¹¹³

Although presidents probably should not make controversial decisions without consulting someone, Adams was right to be proud of his determination to send a new mission to France. Not only did his decision vindicate his theory of an independent executive—someone who stood above all parties—but it put an end to the war crisis, a crisis that in the minds of some Federalists and Republicans had threatened a civil war. News of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in October 1799 undercut the threat of a French invasion and made Adams’s mission possible. The plans of the extreme Federalists to strengthen the central government and the military establishment of the United States crumbled, and consequently they have never been taken seriously by historians.

After months of negotiations, France, now headed by First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, who would soon make himself emperor, agreed to terms and in 1800 signed the Treaty of Mortefontaine with the United States; it brought the Quasi-War to a close and suspended the Franco-American treaty of 1778 (and its related convention of 1789), thus freeing America from its first of what Jefferson would refer to as “entangling alliances.”¹¹⁴

Adams realized that the “imprudent and disorganizing opposition and Clamor” of the High Federalists to his decision to send another peace mission had severely delayed the departure of the envoys, and that delay might very well endanger his reelection as president. So be it, he said. He was prepared to lose, he told John Trumbull in September 1800. “Age, Infirmities, family Misfortunes have conspired, with the Unreasonable Conduct of Jacobins and insolent Federalists, to make me too indifferent to whatever can happen.”¹¹⁵ He actually didn’t mean that.

He was right to worry about the delay. News that the conflict was ended did not reach America until the Republicans had won the presidency. Jefferson received seventy-three electoral votes to Adams’s sixty-five. The twelve electoral votes of New York for Jefferson and for Aaron Burr, who had guaranteed those votes, made all the difference.