LIKE THE OTHER FEDERALISTS, John Adams had misjudged the future. He assumed that American society would eventually mature and become less egalitarian, more hierarchical, and more like the societies of Europe. He was so sure of the process of maturation that he wanted to prepare for it by having political officeholders serve for longer terms and perhaps for life. By contrast, Thomas Jefferson did end up on the right side of history, but inadvertently. He saw the future no more clearly than Adams. In 1800, however, he and his fellow Republicans did rightly see their electoral victory as more than one party replacing another.
Jefferson sincerely believed that the Hamilton-led Federalists, fearful of the popular forces unleashed by the Revolution, had sought to turn the United States into a European-type state with an enlarged bureaucracy, a standing army, a national bank, high taxes, and a credit system that tried to tie the financial interests of the country to the government. Jefferson and the Republicans set out to repudiate as much as they could all of those Federalist dreams. Jefferson wanted no part of the hereditary aristocracies, gross social inequalities, bloated executives, oppressive debts, and the huge and expensive military establishments that characterized the traditional European monarchies. Despite the excesses and perversions of the French Revolution, he remained faithful to its goal of destroying the old monarchical world. He believed that his election had saved the United States from monarchy and had brought the entire revolutionary venture of two and a half decades to successful completion. Indeed, he was convinced that his election, “the Revolution of 1800,” as he later called it, “was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.”1
Instead of the fiscal-military state the Federalists had wanted, Jefferson, as he said in his inaugural address, sought only “a wise and frugal government,” one that kept its citizens from injuring one another but otherwise left them “free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement” while at the same time avoiding taking “from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” He contemplated “a rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.” For Jefferson, America had become “the world’s best hope” for the future of agrarian republicanism. It was “a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” For those who thought republican governments were too weak to sustain themselves, Jefferson replied that the United States, based as it was on the sovereignty of the people, was “the strongest Government on earth.”2
Adams never witnessed Jefferson’s inauguration since he left before sunrise, becoming the first and only president not to greet his successor. It was an insult that Adams’s onetime friend Elbridge Gerry thought had “wounded his real [friends] & been severely censured by his pretended friends.” Gerry thought that Adams’s recent conduct toward himself had “by no means been satisfactory.”3
• • •
DESPITE SELF-PROTECTIVELY suggesting that he was indifferent to the results of the election, Adams had taken his defeat hard. It was humiliating. He believed that, like Washington, he should have been able to serve until he voluntarily stepped down. In the eyes of some observers, his “unexpected displacement” was unnatural and had to be an act of God. Sometimes Adams could not hide his bitterness, telling his son Thomas, for example, that “if I were to go over my Life again I would be a Shoemaker rather than an American Statesman.” Although that was never serious, the statement was a measure of his disappointment.4
It had been a brutal campaign, perhaps the most vicious and scurrility-ridden in American history. Some Federalists feared that if the Republicans won, “the air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.” For their part, the Republicans claimed that if the Federalists won, they would sell out the country to Great Britain and establish a monarchy. Adams was accused of being a “poor old man . . . in his dotage,” who “merely pretended to be a true friend of revolutionary republicanism.” He even had the gall, the Republicans charged, to negotiate with Toussaint-Louverture, the black leader of the slave rebellion in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and to dine personally in the White House with one of the island’s black representatives.5
Jefferson had been especially alarmed by Adams’s decision to open up trade with the black rebel state. Allowing “Toussaint’s subjects to a free commerce” with the southern states and “free ingress & intercourse with their black brethren” made him very uneasy. “If this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatsoever,” he told Madison, “we have to fear it.” Since the Federalists were willing to accept this migration of blacks into America, he said sarcastically, then they ought not to worry so much about a possible French invasion of the country. “If they are guarded against the Cannibals of the terrible republic,” he declared, “they ought not to object to being eaten by a more civilized enemy.”6
Although neither Adams nor Jefferson had campaigned personally, Jefferson had kept tabs on what was happening in each state, promoted with advice and funds the writings of Republican scandalmongers, and in numerous letters to key Republicans set forth his principles and ideas. He became as much of a party leader as any presidential candidate in American history.
• • •
JEFFERSON LATER RECALLED THAT HE had met Adams on the day they had learned of the vote of New York that gave the Republicans the victory. Adams was “very sensibly affected” and told Jefferson that although he had been beaten “in this contest,” he would be “as faithful a subject as any you will have.” Jefferson replied that he did not see the election as a “personal contest” between him and Adams, but as a division between two parties, with different principles of government, which had put each of them at their head. According to Jefferson, Adams said, “You are right . . . that we are but passive instruments, and should not suffer this matter to affect our personal dispositions.” Unfortunately, recalled Jefferson, Adams “did not long retain this just view of the subject.”7
Since the inauguration of the new president was not until March 4, 1801, Adams had several months remaining in his term. The lame-duck Federalist Congress passed a Judiciary Act and other legislation that created six new circuit courts with sixteen new judges along with many new marshals and district attorneys and justices of the peace. Before surrendering the presidency to Jefferson, Adams appointed Federalists to these new offices, at the same time selecting his new secretary of state, John Marshall, as chief justice of the United States. Because Adams signed the commissions of many of these appointments shortly before Jefferson’s inauguration, the infuriated Republicans exaggeratedly labeled them “midnight appointments” and vowed to repudiate the Judiciary Act as soon as possible.
Since Jefferson and his presumed vice president, Aaron Burr, had inadvertently ended up with the same number of electoral votes, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Adams played no role in the resolution of the crisis, but both he and Abigail much preferred Jefferson to Burr. Adams saw Burr as an upstart, “rising like a balloon,” whose political manipulations could only encourage “party intrigue and corruption!” Abigail said “his private Character will not bear the scrutiny which Mr. Jefferson’s will.” He had Napoleonic ambitions and was “a much more dangerous Man than Mr. Jefferson.”8
Abigail recorded a conversation she had with Jefferson (recorded perhaps because such conversations had become so rare) at a large presidential dinner held in January 1801, two months before Jefferson took office. Knowing that congressmen would soon decide his fate, Jefferson asked her to identify several members attending the dinner, since he never went into the House of Representatives and thus knew only about one in twenty of them. Pointing at one member, she said, “You surely know him, Smiling. He is a democrat.” “No, I do not,” he answered. His ignorance had proved embarrassing, he told Abigail, because some congressmen had complained that he did not take off his hat to them when passing. Besides, said Jefferson, he wouldn’t go into the House because he knew “there are persons there who would take a pleasure in saying something purposefully to affront me.” Abigail declared she knew nearly all of the congressmen, “a few violent demos excepted,” but she had recently avoided attending the House for the same reason as Jefferson: “party spirit is much alike upon both sides [of] the Question.” When Jefferson replied that there was “more candor and liberality upon one side than there is upon the other,” she said, “I differ with you, Sir.” Jefferson then asked her what she thought the House would do about the tie vote for president. She said she didn’t know, but she quoted a clergyman who declared that when people “do not know what to do, they should take great care that they do not do—they know not what.” At this, said Abigail, Jefferson “laught out, and here ended the conversation.”9
Abigail’s recording of her exchange with Jefferson revealed her ambivalent feelings—her saucy sarcasm directed at the leader of what many Federalists caustically labeled the “dems” mingled with her respect for his civility and politeness.
Despite his preference for Jefferson over Burr, Adams was not happy with Jefferson’s election, for it meant that the country would be tossed “in the tempestuous sea of liberty for years to come and where the bark can land but in a political convulsion I cannot see.” Americans, he said, “have sett up pretensions to superior information, intelligence and public virtue in comparison with the rest of mankind.” Those pretensions “will very soon be found wanting, if they have not already failed in the trial.” He doubted whether America’s experiment in republicanism could last.10
• • •
BY CONTRAST, Jefferson was filled with optimism. He told John Dickinson in 1801 that America’s ship of state had passed through a storm promoted by individuals seeking to sink it, but his administration would right the ship and put it on its proper republican tack. The spirit of 1776, he said, had finally been fulfilled, and the United States could at last become a beacon of liberty for the world. “A just and solid republican government” of the kind he sought to build “will be a standing monument & example for the aim & imitation of the people of other countries.” Expanding on the theme of his inaugural address, he told Dickinson that the American Revolution had excited the minds of “the mass of mankind.” Its “consequences,” he said, “will ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe.”11 With Napoleon’s assuming the office of consul for life and the apparent stifling of the French Revolution, America’s role as the sole emblematic republic became all the more important. It was Jefferson, more than any other single figure, who created the idea of America’s exceptionalism and its special role in the world.
With the end of a decade of Federalist delusion, the new Democratic-Republican president had recovered his confidence in the future. America had thrown off its momentary fantasies, he told Joseph Priestley, a fellow supporter of the French Revolution noted for his radical religious views. The forces of “bigotry in Politics & Religion,” said Jefferson, had been routed. “We can no longer say that there is nothing new under the sun, for this whole chapter in the history of man is new.” He told Priestley that his predecessor, President Adams, had never understood the progressive wave of popular opinion sweeping the country and had never appreciated innovation. Adams was one of those who pretended to encourage education, but it was “the education of our ancestors” that he meant.
Jefferson invoked once again Adams’s 1798 response to the young men of Philadelphia whose reactionary character had so shocked him. Adams, he told Priestley, had claimed in his answer that there could be no real progress in science and religion and that “we were to look backwards not forwards for improvement.” Jefferson believed that Adams and the Federalists—“the barbarians”—had sought “to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put every thing into the hands of power & priestcraft.” This was the sort of ignorance that had forced Priestley to flee Britain in 1791 and more recently had embroiled him in controversy in America. All those “who live by mystery and charlatanerie,” said Jefferson, “fear being rendered useless” by those like Priestley who sought to simplify “the Christian philosophy.” No doubt, he said, Christianity was “the most sublime & benevolent” religion, but it was also the “most perverted system that ever shone on man.”12
Despite his disparaging remark about Adams in his letter to Priestley, he had wanted, as he told Madison in December 1800, to reach “a candid understanding with mr A.” He didn’t think Adams’s feelings or his interest would object to some sort of rapprochement. Confident of his ability to soothe Adams’s quirky sensibilities, Jefferson hoped “to induce in him dispositions liberal and accommodating.”13 Anticipating his major means of politicking as president, Jefferson on January 17, 1801, invited Adams to dinner.14
Jefferson’s friends were bewildered and mortified by his persistent praise of Adams, praise that they felt was undeserved. “Your minds are not congenial,” one friend told him, “his being too contracted to contain a generous or disinterested sentiment and his conduct towards you has evinced it—he has done all he cou’d to injure you and he hates you on that account.” But Jefferson tended to ignore such advice, and he remained confident of his ability to conciliate not just Adams but most of the Federalists as well. Consequently, he inserted in his inaugural address an appeal for unity. Although Americans were called by different names, he declared that “we are all republicans: we are all federalists.”15
Adams likewise had hesitated to criticize Jefferson publicly during the campaign, which puzzled some of his fellow Federalists. Instead of condemning Jefferson, complained Fisher Ames, the arch-Federalist from Adams’s own state of Massachusetts, Adams tended to praise Jefferson as “a good patriot, citizen and father.” He “acts as if he did not hate or dread Jefferson.”16
Still, Adams was pained by his defeat. During the crisis over the electoral tie between Jefferson and Burr, Jefferson met Adams and told him that a Federalist plan to override the election by congressional action “would probably produce resistance by force and [have] incalculable consequences.” Adams showed no sympathy for Jefferson’s plight and, “with a vehemence” he had not shown before, said that the problem could be quickly solved if Jefferson would simply give assurances that he would honor the public debt, maintain the navy, and not remove the federal officers. Jefferson replied that he would not enter the office “but in perfect freedom to follow the dictates of my own judgment.” Then, said Adams, “things must take their course.” With that abrupt remark, the conversation ended. It was “the first time in our lives,” Jefferson recalled, that he and Adams “had ever parted with any thing like dissatisfaction.”17
The two former friends exchanged several businesslike letters that showed little or no warmth. Several weeks before the inauguration, Adams informed Jefferson that he was leaving seven horses and two carriages in the stables for the new president’s use. Unfortunately, Congress discovered that Adams had purchased the horses and carriages out of the wrong federal fund, and the issue became embarrassing to Adams. (The British chargé in the new capital city of Washington, D.C., thought this was one of the reasons Adams skipped the inauguration.) Jefferson didn’t want the horses and carriages anyhow and purchased his own.18
On March 8, 1801, Jefferson forwarded to Adams a private letter that had mistakenly been delivered to him. The letter had contained information about the funeral of Adams’s son Charles, who had died recently of alcoholism at age thirty. Adams told Jefferson that if he had read the letter, it “might have given you a moment of Melancholly or at least of Sympathy with a mourning Father.” Adams went on to say that he hoped that Jefferson would never experience anything similar. The tone suggested that Adams had been hurt that Jefferson never acknowledged Charles’s death. Adams concluded by rather belatedly wishing Jefferson “a quiet and prosperous Administration.”19 They would not correspond again with each other for eleven years.
• • •
BELIEVING THAT MOST OF THE EVILS afflicting human beings in the past had flowed from the abuses of inflated political establishments, Jefferson set out to regain what he believed was the original aim of the Revolution: to reduce the overweening and dangerous power of government. He sought to create a general government that could rule without the traditional attributes of power—with as few offices, as little debt, as low taxes, and as small a military establishment as possible.
Jefferson advocated his kind of minimal government because, like such other eighteenth-century radicals as Thomas Paine and William Godwin, he believed that society was naturally harmonious and benevolent and did not need much government. This eighteenth-century radicalism was determined by how much faith theorists had in the inherent sociability of people. Carry this belief in the natural sociability of people far enough and a thinker ended up, as William Godwin did, with a kind of anarchism. Jefferson and Paine never wanted to go that far, but they both sought to disparage government and shrink its power as much as possible. Get rid of the intrusive elements of monarchy—its titles, privileges, excessive taxes, perquisites of offices, monopolies, and corporate grants—and society could sustain itself.
In the opening of Common Sense, Thomas Paine had drawn a sharp distinction between society and government. “Society,” he wrote, “is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.” Society “promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections”; government “negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions.” Later in his Rights of Man, which Jefferson completely agreed with, Paine went even further in denigrating the importance of government. Since “society performs for itself almost every thing which is ascribed to government,” Paine thought that government contributed little or nothing to civilized life. Instead of ordering society, as Adams and other Federalists believed, government, said Paine, “divided it; it deprived it of its natural cohesion, and engendered discontents and disorder, which otherwise would not have existed.”20 If only the natural tendencies of people to love and care for one another were allowed to flow freely, unclogged by the artificial interference of government, particularly monarchical government, Paine and Jefferson both believed, society would prosper and hold itself together.
This would occur because people were innately sociable; they possessed a social sense that naturally bound people together. Such an inherent social predisposition was needed to counter the problems raised by Lockean sensationalism. Although Jefferson generally accepted the premises of Lockean sensationalism—that the character and personality of individuals were formed by the environment operating through the senses—he and other liberals were not such out-and-out sensationalists that they counted on men and women being able by reason alone to control the environment’s chaotic bombardment of their senses. Something else was required in individuals to help structure their sensuous experiences. Otherwise human personalities, as James Wilson pointed out in 1790, citing David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, would become “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, . . . in a perpetual flux and movement.”21
A society composed of such variable and unstable personalities would be impossible. Something had to bind people together intuitively and naturally and bring order out of all the various sensations flying about. As Jefferson said, “The Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social dispositions.” Jefferson and others modified their stark Lockean environmentalism—their belief that circumstances by themselves shaped people’s character—by positing a natural sense of sociability and sympathy in every human being. “Nature,” said Jefferson, “hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses.” Jefferson admitted that this moral sense did not exist in everyone and was imperfect in others. But that there were exceptions did not contradict the rule that such a social disposition was “a general characteristic of the species.” When this moral sense was lacking, he said, “we endeavor to supply the defect by education, by appeals to reason and calculation.”22
Although the idea of such a moral gyroscope in the English-speaking world went back at least to Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, and Bishop Joseph Butler, by the late eighteenth century it was generally identified with the Scottish moral or commonsense philosophy associated with Francis Hutcheson, Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, and other Scots; but it was much too prevalent among enlightened liberals like Jefferson to be linked to any single writer or group of writers. It resembled the categories of Immanuel Kant, which were likewise designed to counteract the worst and most frightening implications of pure Lockean sensationalism. If man’s character were simply the consequence of the “impressions” made upon him “from an infinite variety of objects external and internal,” Nathaniel Chipman, the federal district judge in Vermont, wrote in 1793, “he would be the sport of blind impulses.” In order “to prevent the utmost capriciousness of conduct” by individuals beset by multitudes of fluctuating impressions, “some constant regulator is necessary.” In wild and changing environments, people needed “a balancer, as well as some arbiter of moral action.”23
And this regulator, balancer, or arbiter was not reason, which was too unequally distributed in people, but a common moral disposition hardwired in nearly every person’s heart or conscience, however humble and however lacking in education that person may have been. “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor,” said Jefferson; “the former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.” Despite his jaundiced view of the inferiority of blacks in reason and imagination, Jefferson did concede that the African slaves possessed the same moral sense and sympathy for others as whites. They had the same endowments of “the heart” and the same feelings of “benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity” as whites.24
This belief in the natural benevolence and sociability of people made modern republican government possible. People’s social disposition and fellow feeling became the sources of eighteenth-century virtue—modern substitutes for the ascetic and Spartan virtue of the ancient republics. This new modern virtue, as Hume pointed out, was much more in accord with the growing commercialization and polite refinement of the enlightened and civilized eighteenth century than the austere and militaristic virtue of the ancients. Virtue in antiquity had flowed from the citizen’s participation in politics; government had been the source of the citizen’s civic consciousness and public spiritedness. But the modern virtue of Jefferson, Paine, and other eighteenth-century liberals flowed from the citizen’s participation in society, not in government.
It was Jefferson’s assumption that society was naturally benevolent and self-ordering that lay behind his belief in minimal government. He was not a nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberal trying to promote capitalism by reducing the power of government, but an eighteenth-century radical who hated monarchical power and all that it entailed. In fact, calling him a believer in minimal government doesn’t do justice to his deep disdain for hereditary monarchical government. Monarchy for Jefferson was silly and contemptible, and his scorn for the European monarchs was boundless. All the kings, he said, were fools or idiots. “They passed their lives in hunting, and dispatched two courtiers a week, one thousand miles, to let each other know what game they had killed the preceding days.”25
Adams, like anyone who believed at all in republicanism, had to acknowledge that humans had some sort of moral sense, but he never shared the confidence of Jefferson and Paine in the natural harmony and benevolence of society.26 Because in his mind aggrandizing governments were not the real source of evils in the society, as Jefferson and Paine and other utopians believed, minimizing government and allowing individuals freely to engage in their separate pursuits of happiness were recipes for disaster. For without government constraining, controlling, and balancing the human passions of ambition, envy, and jealousy, society would fall apart.
Consequently, Adams thought Paine’s distinction between an evil government and a benign society “a Species of airy Anticks,” empty and vaporous. It was not possible to separate the two: “Society,” he said, “cannot exist without Government, in any reasonable sense of the Word.” There could be “Single Acts of Sociability,” but, he asked his son Thomas in 1803, “can you conceive of any thing which can be properly called Society, which signifies a Series of Acts of Sociability, without Government? Nay can you conceive of a Single Act of Sociability without Government?” No matter how minutely these things were traced out, he said, “you will find Government, by Hope, or fear, Force, Influence or Consent in every conceivable Social Act.” He saw “no Symptom of any Society or any Social Act, or exertion of Sociability without Government.”27
Adams may not have been as cynical about human nature as Hamilton, but he was certainly closer to the Federalists’ end of the political spectrum than he was to Jefferson’s. All society, he said, including marriage and the family, was impossible without authority, and “Government is nothing more than Authority reduced to practice.” As he had repeated over and over, that authority had to be bolstered by ceremonies, rituals, and titles—in other words, by all the paraphernalia of monarchy.28
• • •
FROM THE VERY OUTSET JEFFERSON was determined to get rid of all that monarchical paraphernalia. He wanted to establish a new tone of republican simplicity in place of the stiff formality and regal ceremony with which Washington and Adams had surrounded the presidency. No elaborately ornamented coach drawn by four or six horses for Jefferson: the president-elect walked from his boardinghouse on New Jersey Avenue to his inauguration, dressed, as a reporter noted, as “a plain citizen, without any distinctive badge of office.” The day he became president, wrote Jefferson anonymously in the Philadelphia Aurora, “buried levees, birthdays, royal parades, and the arrogation of precedence in society by certain self-stiled friends of order, but truly stiled friends of privileged orders.”29 Since the Federalist presidents Washington and Adams, like the English monarchs, had delivered their addresses to the Congress “from the throne,” Jefferson chose to deliver his message in writing to which no formal answer from the Congress would be expected; this set a precedent that was not broken until the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Much to the chagrin of foreign dignitaries, he brought a new republican informality to the president’s residence. Unlike Washington and Adams, Jefferson (“his Democratic majesty,” as one person called him) made himself easily accessible to visitors, all of whom, no matter how distinguished, he received, as the British chargé reported, “with a most perfect disregard to ceremony both in his dress and manner.” He was unwilling “to admit the smallest distinction that may separate him from the mass of his fellow citizens.”30
Jefferson, unlike Adams, was a superb administrator who intended to centralize information and affairs in his own hands. He told his cabinet at the outset that Adams as president had made a mess of things. Because of “his long & habitual absences from the seat of government,” he was removed “from any share in the transactions of affairs.” Instead, the government under Adams had been parceled out “among four independent heads, drawing sometimes in opposite directions.” As president, Jefferson would have none of that.31
The new president aimed to create a much smaller central government, one that resembled the old Articles of Confederation rather than the European-type state that the Federalists had sought to build. The federal government, Jefferson declared in his first message to Congress in 1801, was “charged with the external and mutual relations only of these states.” All the rest—the “principal care of our persons, our property, and our reputation, constituting the great field of human concerns”—was to be left to the states, which Jefferson thought were the best governments in the world.32 The Sedition Act lapsed, and a new liberal naturalization law was adopted. Because of what Jefferson called the Federalist “scenes of favoritism” and “dissipation of treasure,” strict economy was ordered to root out corruption.33
Jefferson inherited from Adams a governmental establishment that was minuscule by modern standards and small even by eighteenth-century European standards. In March 1801, the headquarters of the War Department, for example, consisted of only the secretary, an accountant, fourteen clerks, and two messengers. The secretary of state had a staff consisting of a chief clerk, six other clerks (one of whom ran the patent office), and a messenger. The attorney general did not yet even have a clerk. Nonetheless, Jefferson believed that this tiny federal bureaucracy had become “too complicated, too expensive,” and offices under the Federalists had “multiplied unnecessarily.”34 He especially resented all the appointments that Adams had made after the election results were known. He considered these so-called midnight appointments as “mere nullities,” with the candidates having no claim whatsoever to the offices. Adams, he said, especially in contrast to Washington, had “degraded himself infinitely by his conduct on this subject.”35
Jefferson was appalled by the abuses and “disregard of legal appropriations” practiced by the previous two administrations. There were “expenses . . . for jobs not seen; agencies upon agencies in every part of the earth, and for the most useless or mischievous purposes, & all of these opening doors for fraud & embezzlement far beyond the ostensible profits of the agency.” Hence his administration, he told colleagues, had become busy “hunting out & abolishing multitudes of useless offices, striking off jobs &c.” 36
His government eliminated all tax inspectors and collectors, which shrunk the number of treasury employees by 40 percent. The diplomatic establishment was reduced to three missions—in Britain, France, and Spain. If Jefferson could have had his way completely, he said he would have gotten rid of all the missions and maintained only consuls. Like other enlightened believers in the possibility of universal peace, Jefferson longed to have only commercial connections with other nations.
The one nation he wanted nothing to do with was the new Republic of Haiti. In 1802–1803 he supported France’s attempt to recover the island and restore slavery on it, but when that failed he refused to extend diplomatic recognition to the independent black republic—the only sister republic in the New World. The United States did not recognize the Haitian government until the administration of Abraham Lincoln.
Jefferson wanted no part of the Federalist dream of creating a modern army and navy like those of European nations. When he learned early in 1800 of Napoleon’s coup d’état of November 1799, which had overthrown the French Republic, he did not draw the lesson that Adams did: that too much democracy led to dictatorship. Instead, he said, “I read it as a lesson against standing armies.”37 Upon taking office, he immediately cut the military budget in half. Since the armed forces had been the largest cause of non-debt-related spending in the 1790s, amounting to nearly 40 percent of the total federal budget, this reduction severely decreased the overall expenditures of the national government. Jefferson left the army with three thousand regulars and only 172 officers. The state militias were enough for America’s defense, he said.
Although the navy had only a half-dozen frigates, Jefferson sought to replace this figment of a standing navy with several hundred small, shallow-draft gunboats, which were intended simply for inland waters and harbor defense. They would be the navy’s version of the militia, unquestionably designed for defense of the coastline and not for risky military ventures on the high seas. Such small, defensive ships, said Jefferson, could never “become an excitement to engage in offensive maritime war” and were unlikely to provoke naval attacks from hostile foreign powers. Not only were the standing armies and navies that the Federalists had desired expensive and a threat to liberty, but they were the cause of all the monarchical-bred wars that had gone on for the past three centuries.38
Since Hamilton’s financial program had formed the basis of the political power of the federal government, it above all had to be dismantled—at least to the extent possible. It mortified Jefferson that his government inherited “the contracted, English, half-lettered ideas of Hamilton. . . . We can pay off his debt in 15 years, but we can never get rid of his financial system.” He had to keep the Bank of the United States with its twenty-year charter, but other aspects of Hamilton’s program could be abolished. All the internal excise taxes the Federalists had designed to make the people feel the energy of the national government were eliminated. For most citizens the federal presence was now reduced to the delivery of the mail. Such an inconsequential and distant government, noted one observer in 1811, was “too little felt in the ordinary concerns of life to vie in any considerable degree with the nearer and more powerful influence produced by the operations of the local governments.”39
Jefferson believed that his election had occurred in just the nick of time. If the Federalists had continued in office much longer, he said, “it would have been long & difficult to unhorse them.” But they had brought about their own downfall. “Their madness” over the preceding three years had accomplished “what reason acting alone” might not have been able to do in decades. With the Republicans having taken over the presidency and the House of Representatives, with a fairly even balance in the Senate, he now intended “to establish good principles” and “to fortify republicanism behind as many barriers as possible.”
The Federalists, however, had not been completely routed. “They have retired into the Judiciary as a strong hold.” There, Jefferson lamented, they hoped to preserve the “remains” of their party. “From that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down & erased by a fraudulent use of the constitution.” Since judges were not constitutionally removable, the Federalists with their lame-duck legislation had “multiplied useless judges merely to strengthen their phalanx.”40 Jefferson and the new Republican Congress moved swiftly to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801, thus eliminating the offices of sixteen federal judges, and then set about using impeachment to remove otherwise immovable Federalist judges and justices of the Supreme Court. Jefferson realized that impeachment, which was designed for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” was “a bungling way” of removing judges with life tenure, but unfortunately there seemed no alternative.41
• • •
IN RETIREMENT ADAMS had trouble getting over his hurt and anger. He began a lengthy answer to Hamilton’s malicious Letter, which helped to calm some of his emotional turmoil, but he never published it. He wondered what he would do in retirement. Having been so active for so many years, could he suddenly come to a stop? He dismissed out of hand the notion that he could resume his law practice or become a minister at a foreign court. No, he concluded, he “must be Farmer John of Stoneyfield and nothing more, (I hope nothing less) for the rest of my Life” (Stoneyfield being one of the several names he gave to his home in Quincy).42
Fuming over the way he had been treated, in October 1802 he began writing an autobiography, designed, as he said, to show his posterity by his own hand “proof of the falsehood of that Mass of odious Abuse of my Character, with which News Papers, private Letters and public Pamphlets and Histories have been disgraced for thirty Years.”43 But after only a few pages and getting up to only 1751, the year he entered college, he abandoned the memoir.
Two years later, in November 1804, John Quincy, unaware of his father’s earlier effort, urged his father to write “an account of the principal incidents of your own life.”44 Adams’s reply was swimming in self-pity: “Alass! Alass! What can I say? I can recollect no part of my Political Life, without pain.” All he saw was “so much jealousy, Envy, Treachery, Perfidy, Malice without cause or provocation and revenge: without Injury or Offence” that he couldn’t imagine recovering a credible account of his life. “You may depend on this, I am a Man more Sinned against than sinning.” He feared that if he wrote “the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth,” not only would very few believe him, but he would also have to “reveal to posterity the Weaknesses of many great Men,” which would result in his work being dismissed as “an Hymn to Vanity.” Far from soothing his passions, as his son hoped, the effort to write his memoir would only inflame them, reminding him of all “my Mortifications, Disappointments or Resentments” in a life forsaken even by God. Like the memoirs of the Duc de Sully, the early-seventeenth-century minister to Henri IV of France, his would be “a melancholly Book.”45
Melancholy or not, Adams nevertheless resumed his autobiography, and wrote doggedly for the next seven months, carrying the jumbled story of his life up to 1776.
• • •
LEARNING OF THE ATTEMPT by Jefferson and the Republicans to use the process of impeachment to remove hostile Federalist judges, Adams was reminded of his 1773 defense in the Massachusetts press of an independent judiciary, and he included the events in his memoir. He said he had embodied these principles of an independent judiciary in the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, and they had prevailed in America until the administration of Jefferson, “during which they have been infringed and are now in danger of being lost.” This was alarming, he wrote in his autobiography, because “we shall have no balance at all of Interests or Passions, and our Lives, Liberties, Reputations and Estates will lie at the mercy of a Majority, and of a tryumphant Party.”46
In June 1805, Adams paused in the writing of his memoir, perhaps because he began writing many more letters to friends, family members, and acquaintances. At this time he resumed his friendship with Benjamin Rush, with whom he had not corresponded since he had become president in 1797. In December 1806, however, he once again returned to his memoir and worked on it for another seven months or so, bringing his life up to 1780, when he was in France. He abruptly stopped there, and never completed it.
Perhaps he ceased writing his memoir in 1807 because he couldn’t stomach reliving the duplicity of Franklin in the 1780s and the arrogance of Hamilton in the 1790s; or because he had critics like Mercy Otis Warren whom he had to answer; or because he began contributing to the Boston Patriot numerous pieces defending his role in the Revolution; or because his interest in the actions of the Jefferson administration was absorbing more and more of his time.
• • •
AT FIRST ADAMS had no confidence whatsoever in Jefferson’s administration. He thought the new president was unreliable. His “sayings are never well digested, often extravagant, and never consistently pursued,” he told his son Thomas in July 1801. Jefferson did not have “a clear head”; he “never pursues any question through. His Ambition and his cunning are the only steady qualities in him. His Imagination and Ambition are too strong for his Reason.”47
Adams objected to Jefferson’s assertion that his election had saved republicanism from monarchism. That was false, Adams said. The reason he had failed to get reelected as president, he claimed, was that the Federalists had become divided, not because of “any change in favor of Republicanism in the People, . . . nor by any opinion that the new president was more of a Republican than the old former one.” He was also offended by the Republicans’ charge of his “aggrandizing Executive Power.” In fact, he said in June 1801, there had been “more acts of the Executive of more Power in 4 months past, than were in 12 years preceeding.” He especially resented Jefferson’s being hailed as a great enlightened philosopher. “The harmonious voice of Europe and America,” he said, “pronounce Jefferson the greatest Man who ever was in America.” This was the man who “had the affectation to go to Italy for an outlandish name for his Hill.”48
It was all too much to bear. “That part of the World of Science called Academicians, if not the Universal,” he told his brother-in-law, “are at this day, prone to Epicureanism to such a degree, that they instantly become the puffers and Trumpeters of every man of genius and Learning who despises the Church.”49
Yet gradually Adams’s resentments softened. Not wanting his administration to be dismissed as some sort of monarchical ancien régime that had to be overthrown, he continued to play down Jefferson’s claim that his election represented a radical revolution. He admitted to his son John Quincy in 1804 that he had some regrets about what was happening under the Republicans, especially the assaults on the judiciary and the cashiering of so many public offices. But generally, he said, things at present were not “so very terrible.”50
Adams appreciated that Jefferson was trying to avoid taking sides in the great struggle for supremacy taking place between Britain and France. The ferocity of that war, which had gone on more or less continually since 1793, had convinced Adams of “the absolute necessity of keeping aloof from all European Powers and Influences; and that a Navy was the only Arm by which it can be accomplished.” He was especially pleased to learn that Jefferson seemed to endorse this need for a strong navy in order to keep foreign powers off America’s shores. He was mistaken in this hope, as Jefferson had no such plans.51
Adams concluded that Jefferson had borrowed, indeed, stolen, the basic principle that Adams himself had advocated and upheld ever since the model treaty of 1776—“to do Justice of all Nations, to have alliances with none without necessity.” Emotionally, Adams needed to see continuity, not change, in Jefferson’s administration. Forgetting how bellicose he had been at times during 1798–1799, Adams claimed that as president he had “established Peace with both France and England in such a manner that it was almost impossible for my Successor to break it.”52
He still worried about Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution—an enthusiasm that Bonaparte’s 1799 coup had not diminished. Initially, Jefferson had not seen Napoleon, as Adams had, as the inevitable outcome of a revolution that had gone terribly awry. Instead, Jefferson simply dismissed Bonaparte as a bigoted Italian usurper who offered “nothing which bespeaks a luminous view of the organisation of rational government.” Napoleon’s assumption of power was “not serious enough to disturb the course of [French] military operations.” Besides, Bonaparte had “but a few days to live,” for he was likely to be assassinated soon by fervent French revolutionaries. Jefferson had so much vested in the French Revolution that he just knew that if Bonaparte tried to stop it and declare for royalty either for himself or for Louis XVIII, “the enthusiasm of that nation would furnish a million of Brutus’s who would devote themselves to death to destroy him.”53
But if Bonaparte was not killed, there was some consolation, said Jefferson. He might settle the question that had been undecided between the two transatlantic sister republics for nearly a decade—whether the single executive in the United States was better than the plural executive of the Directory in France.54 Jefferson hoped that Napoleon would use his head and realize “how much superior is the glory of establishing a republic to that of wearing a crown.” If he chose the crown, he feared “the influence of the example on our countrymen”—suggesting just how fragile America’s experiment in republicanism still seemed to Jefferson. All Americans could do, he said, was “wait with patience” until the French got it right. If it went wrong and the French republic blew up, the United States was at least far enough away to be safe.55
By contrast, Adams had no illusions about Napoleon. To him the man was an extraordinary force of nature. Neither Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, nor even Alexander the Great, he said, could “bear a Parallel with Bonaparte.” He was “Sui generis.” Of course, he admitted, no one could predict what would happen in France. The Revolution there resembled nothing before in history, “and Bonaparte differs from all the Conquerors we know of.” But at least Napoleon was bringing order and tranquillity to a society that was “weary of blood, disgusted with murder, and indignant at rapine.” He told Lafayette that he wished Napoleon “a greater Glory than ever yet fell to the Lott of any Conqueror before him, that of giving Peace to Europe and Liberty and Good Government to France.”56
Perhaps because of his appreciation of what military force could achieve, Adams had come around to Jefferson’s handling of the continuing problems with North African pirates. Ever since independence, the Barbary states had been capturing and imprisoning American merchant sailors in the Mediterranean Sea and then asking for ransom to free them. Back in the 1780s, Adams had differed with Jefferson over how these Muslim states ought to be treated. Believing that Congress would never pay for the warships necessary to use force, he advocated following the example of Britain and France and simply paying tribute to the pirates. It would, he said, be cheaper than going to war with them.
Jefferson, on the other hand, had taken a hard line. He believed that the North African states were so caught up in Islamic fatalism and Ottoman tyranny that their backward and indolent societies could only be dealt with by force. Although he was opposed to a standing army and preferred using commercial pressure to war in dealing with international problems with the great powers, the Barbary pirates were different. Paying tributes and ransoms, he said, was just “money thrown away.” The North African states kept upping their requests and breaking their promises. “I am an enemy to these douceurs, tributes and humiliations,” he explained to Madison, who was now his secretary of state, and “I know that nothing will stop the eternal increase of demand from these pirates but the presence of an armed force.”57
Now thanks to the half-dozen frigates that his predecessor Adams had built to engage in the Quasi-War with France—a war and a naval buildup Jefferson had opposed—President Jefferson was at last able to use naval power against the Barbary pirates and teach them a lesson.
As far as Jefferson’s domestic policies were concerned, Adams saw little that was really new or radical. Substituting messages for speeches and holding dinners every day for a dozen instead of levees twice a week for a large number were “mere Trifles.” Even Jefferson’s “twenty other little Sacrifices to a very vulgar popularity” didn’t bother him. He claimed disingenuously that he had never really favored the Alien and Sedition Acts, and therefore he did not regret their repeal. He did think the Republicans had made the naturalization process “too easy.” All “the irreligion, the Immorality and Venality which are creeping in and gaining ground” he blamed on “French intrigue,” and Jefferson couldn’t stop it anyhow. Adams predicted, correctly, that the Republicans’ catering to the press would in the future turn newspaper editors into “the principal Instruments” of party ambition and activity.
In the end, the worst the Republicans had done was to shift the basis of American politics. “Public Virtue is no longer to rule: but Ambition is to govern the Country. . . . Call it Vanity or what you will,” but Adams believed that his and Washington’s administrations were the last expressions of selfless disinterested government. In the future, all the American people could hope for was that they might “be governed by honorable, not criminal ambition.” Since America’s Constitution seemed to lack “any Mediating Power capable of uniting or controlling Rival Factions, and maintaining a ballance between them, our Government must forever be a kind of War of about one half the People against the other.” This to Adams was what political parties portended.58
The only solution he could imagine was to make the president more independent and more respectable, presumably by making him president for life. “Till this is done, the Government will be a ride and a tye, a game at leap frog, one Party once in eight or twelve years leaping over the head and shoulders of the other, kicking and spurring when it rides”—a rather perceptive prediction of what eventually did become normal American politics. He wanted the president to resemble a monarch and be the head of the nation, not the head of a party. He saw himself standing above all the factional fighting.59
Adams kept up a relentless patter of cynicism in his correspondence, describing, for example, “the Philosophers of the eighteenth Century and almost all the Men of Science and Letters” as cracked and fit only for Bedlam. Indeed, judging “by the Conduct and Writings of the Men of Science,” it seemed to him that the earth had become the place where “the Sun, Moon, and Stars send all their Lunaticks . . . for confinement.” He often made sly references in one way or another to the dreaminess of Jefferson. He mocked philosophers who believed in “a universal and perpetual Peace among all Nations and all Men.” He made fun of those who feared having “any thing more powerful at sea than Gun Boats.” He loved emphasizing the Virginians’ belief that in their state “Geese are all Swans.” He enjoyed pointing out that all men have the “universal Passion” of self-love in an equal degree, but, unlike knaves, “honest Men do not disguise it.” Someone like Jefferson who prided himself on his modesty, he said, was bound to be “as vain a fellow as lives.”60
When told that he knew Jefferson better than anyone, he denied it outright. “In truth,” he said, “I know but little concerning him.” Even when they had been abroad together, “there was no very close intimacy between us.”61 Adams was still angry and hurt. His sarcasm was unmistakable when he called Jefferson’s government “our Monarchical, Antirepublican Administration” and compared it with his own, led by a real and “zealous Republican.” He was more serious and direct in his criticism of Jefferson’s handling of the 1807 trial of Aaron Burr for treason. (In 1806 the former vice president had organized a mysterious expedition to the West that seemed to threaten a breakup of the Union.) “Mr. Jefferson,” Adams told Benjamin Rush, “has been too hasty in his Message in which he has denounced him by Name and pronounced him guilty.” Even if Burr’s guilt was “as clear as the Noon day Sun,” he said, “the first Magistrate ought not have pronounced it so before a Jury had tryed him.” It is a point many historians and jurists have subsequently made as well.62
• • •
GRADUALLY, HOWEVER, Adams found himself agreeing more and more with Jefferson’s administration than with the views of his fellow Federalists. In fact, he became increasingly hostile to the so-called Essex Junto in Massachusetts, who he believed had turned against him in the election of 1800. While some northern Federalists plotted secession from the Union over the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Adams and his son John Quincy, newly elected by the Massachusetts legislature to the U.S. Senate, celebrated it. With Jefferson, he strongly opposed the British practice of impressing sailors on American ships. He and John Quincy even approved of Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807—a policy that devastated trading communities in New England and became anathema to the Federalists. Indeed, John Quincy’s support for the embargo cost him his seat in the Senate.
When in 1807 a British warship fired on the U.S.S. Chesapeake, killing several seamen, and went on to impress four others, the United States was brought to the brink of war. But Jefferson hated war so much—it bred monarchism—that he hoped he might coerce Britain by withholding American trade as the colonists had done in the 1760s and ’70s. “War is not the best engine for us to resort to,” he said; “nature has given us one in our commerce, which, if properly managed, will be a far better instrument for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice.”63 He and his Republican Congress thus instituted the embargo, which barred American ships and goods from all overseas trade.
Although Adams termed the embargo “a cowardly measure,” he supported it as “a wise and prudent” but temporary action designed only to protect America’s seamen and property.64 Not liking armies, Adams understood the attractiveness of Jefferson’s grand experiment in peaceful coercion—what we today call economic sanctions. In the end, however, he realized that not only was the embargo “extremely difficult if not absolutely impossible to carry into Execution,” but he had “never believed that we could coerce or intimidate or bring to serious consideration the Government of Great Britain by embargo’s or non-importations or non-intercourses.”65 Such economic sanctions never worked for long; he realized that ultimately Americans might have to fight, but only if “we are compelled to it, and then only by Sea unless we are invaded.”66 When the war with Britain finally came, in 1812, Adams favored the military conflict, believing that war was needed to bring Americans together and preserve the Union.
• • •
BY THIS TIME ADAMS had become more of an outsider among the Federalist elite of Massachusetts than he had ever been. He had been in “Enemies Country” before—France, England—but now, he said, that country was “Boston, Massachusetts.” Some of these Massachusetts Federalists flirted with the British and even threatened secession. At a convention in Hartford in the winter of 1814–1815, several dozen of these angry and frightened Federalists from all the New England states brought to a head all their accumulated grievances against Virginia’s Republican dominance over the Union. Adams scoffed at the disloyal behavior of these Federalists, expressing astonishment that “so many of his Country-Men, still cherish a fond attachment to the people of England.” It seemed that some aspects of the Revolution had not been completed. In 1776 it had been “necessary to destroy the ignorant bigoted Attachment of the People to Great Britain. And this never has yet been half done.”67
Although Adams’s position as an ex-president earned him the presidency of several boards in the state, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture, and the Visitors of the Professorship of Natural History at Harvard, he found himself at the meetings of these boards the odd man out. He told his friend Rush that there were twelve men on these boards, and they met once a month. “Every one, but myself, is a Staunch Anti-Jeffersonian and Anti-Madisonian. . . . They were all real Gentlemen; all but me, very rich, have their City Palaces and Country Seats, their fine Gardens and greenhouses and hot Houses &c &c &c.”68
This was the aristocracy Adams had long worried about. In the opinion of these well-to-do Federalists, Adams’s separation from them was puzzling and his support for “Mr. Madison’s War” against Great Britain incomprehensible. He advised his controversial Republican friend Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of the dangers of writing in the press against the Essex Junto. “They will not,” he warned Waterhouse, “hesitate to destroy, if they can, both you & your family.”69 The fact that John Quincy had joined the Republican Party only further convinced them that Adams had become a Jeffersonian. [JQA began as a Federalist but after the Embargo of 1807–8 he joined the Republican Party.] Before long, the High Federalists in Massachusetts were relishing the fact that Adams had “few friends” left, which Adams had to admit was all “too true.”70
By the time the nation was at war with Great Britain, the New England states, much to Adams’s horror, were threatening secession. This moment in 1813, he told Jefferson, was the most serious that he had ever experienced. But the northern states were only copying what they had learned from the examples of Virginia and Kentucky in 1799. He didn’t know which party, the Federalists or the Republicans, had “the most unblushing Front, the most lying Tongue, or the most impudent and insolent not to say the most seditious and rebellious Pen.”71 All he knew was that the Union was in danger.
• • •
THE ISSUE THAT THREATENED the Union most was slavery. Adams had never commented on Jefferson’s involvement with slavery, but when the press brought it up, he could hardly avoid the subject. In the late summer and fall of 1802, James Callender, the former Republican scandalmonger who had recently turned against Jefferson, published in the Richmond Recorder several accounts of the relationship between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Callender claimed that he had earlier heard hints of Jefferson’s relationship with a slave but had dismissed them as Federalist calumny. But he now believed that “by this wench Sally our president has had several children.” There was no one in the neighborhood of Charlottesville, he wrote, who did not believe the story.
Callender claimed he was no prudish Scottish Presbyterian pastor. He understood boys and bachelors having relations with slaves, but Jefferson was the president, “the favorite! the first born of republicanism! the pinnacle of all that is good and great!” It was amazing that Jefferson should have a black concubine, given what he had previously written “so smartly concerning negroes.” When he had “endeavoured so much to belittle the African race” in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Callender had not expected that he would become “the ringleader” in showing this opinion to be erroneous or that he would choose “an African stock” on which he would “engraft his own descendants.” Because of this interracial relationship, the Republicans no longer had any right to criticize President Adams’s treaty with Haiti. Indeed, Jefferson was fortunate that the revelation came after he became president. If Americans had known about Sally in 1800, that “SINGLE FACT would have rendered his election impossible.”72
These charges were picked up and spread everywhere in the press, becoming in the course of a year increasingly crude and more malicious in tone. The Republicans tried to deny them, while the delighted Federalists wrote endless poems and satires about “Dusky Sally.” Even John Quincy Adams, who generally tried to moderate some of the harshest Federalist criticism of Jefferson, joined in the fun with a loose imitation of Horace’s “Ode to Xanthia Phoceus.” He attributed the piece to Thomas Paine, “THE SOPHIST OF THETFORD,” and in a note he cited Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia on “the amatory propensities of the blacks.” The poem opened:
Dear Thomas, deem it no disgrace
With slaves to mend thy breed.
Nor let the wench’s smutty face
Deter thee from the deed.73
Jefferson made no response whatsoever to all these charges and satires, but he knew about them. His friends usually dismissed them as slander. Adams did not. “Callender and Sally will be remembered as long as Jefferson has Blotts in his Character.” The story, he told a Massachusetts correspondent in 1810, was “a natural and almost Unavoidable Consequence of the foul contagion in the human Character [of] Negro Slavery.” He had heard said by a great lady that there was not “a Planter in Virginia who could not reckon among his Slaves a Number of his Children.” Still, he added, none of Jefferson’s scandals, including that involving his youthful attempts to seduce Mrs. Walker, were as bad as the “much more atrocious” tales involving Hamilton.74
Although Adams liked to brag that “never in my Life did I own a slave,” he was no abolitionist and was much more a man of his own time than ours. In 1790 he had been disgusted when the Abolition Society of Pennsylvania had introduced into Congress a petition, signed by Benjamin Franklin, calling for the abolition of slavery in the United States. “What motives the eastern members can have to support the silly petition of Franklin and his Quakers, I never could conceive.”75 For most leaders in 1790, that was certainly the realistic position. Although Franklin’s petition sparked outrage from southern congressmen, one of them saying the Pennsylvanian proposal if accepted would result in a civil war, most elites, including President Washington, agreed with Adams that the petition was ill timed, for it threatened to break up the Union just as it was getting on its feet.
In 1795 Jeremy Belknap, a Boston clergyman and a major founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, asked Adams how slavery had been abolished in Massachusetts. Adams replied that although he had been involved in several cases before the Revolution in which slaves had sued for their freedom, the rise and progress of slavery was “a subject to which I have never given any very particular attention.” The fact that in at least four recorded cases Adams was the counsel for the master and lost three of them may have helped account for his lack of interest in the subject.76
In his answer to Belknap, Adams assumed that slavery would decline elsewhere just as it had in Massachusetts. One thing was clear: it had not been abolished by intellectual arguments or court decisions. “The real Cause was the multiplication of labouring White people, who would no longer Suffer the Rich to employ these Sable Rivals, So much to their Injury.” These common white people turned black slaves into unprofitable servants. “Their Scoffs & Insults . . . filled the Negroes with Discontents, made them lazy idle, proud, vicious and at length wholly useless to their Masters: to such a Degree that the Abolition of slavery became a measure of Oeconomy.” This same principle had “kept Negro slavery out of France England and other Parts of Europe.”77
At any rate, Adams did not think it wise to suddenly turn the slaves “loose upon a World in which they have no Capacity to procure even a Subsistence.” He asked Belknap, “What would become of the old? The young? The infirm?” The only just way to abolish slavery, said Adams, was “to prohibit the Importation of new Negroes,” and “soften the Severity of the Condition of old ones, as much as possible.” This would buy time “until the increasing Population of the Country shall have multiplied the Whites to such a superiority of Numbers, that the Blacks may be liberated by Degrees, with the Consent of Master and Servant.”78
In 1801 he repeated his admonition to two antislavery Quakers that “the Abolition of slavery must be gradual and accomplished with much caution and Circumspection.” To do it forcefully and abruptly, he said, “would produce greater violations of Justice and Humanity than the continuance of the practice.” He presumed that neither of his Quaker correspondents “would be willing to venture on Exertions which would probably excite Insurrections among the Blacks to rise against their Masters and imbue their hands in innocent blood.” Besides, he said, there were “many other Evils in our Country” that were a more immediate threat to the United States “than the oppression of the blacks . . . hatefull as that is.” These evils, he said, at the very moment the Jeffersonian Republicans were about to take office, were “a general Debauchery as well as dissipation, produced by pestilential phylosophical Principles of Epicurus” that were undermining both government and education. These were more pressing social evils than slavery. Like many other leaders in the early nineteenth century, Adams thought that “the practice of slavery was fast diminishing.”79
Actually, at this point Adams’s position on biding time and softening the condition of the slaves was not all that different from Jefferson’s. By the time Jefferson had returned from France in 1789, he had essentially abandoned his earlier goal of abolishing slavery outright. Instead, he had come to terms with the institution and had begun concentrating on what he called “ameliorating” the condition of the slaves. It was part of his new appreciation of the superiority of America over Europe. Despite its fine arts and culture, the Old World was no longer the measure of civilization. America may have had slaves, but he thought most of them were better off than the great mass of oppressed peasants in Europe.80
When he had left the Washington administration at the end of 1793, he had told people he was returning to Monticello “to watch out for the happiness of those who labor for mine.” Masters and slaves were no longer in the state of war he had described in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson had come to believe that a paternalistic slaveholder could have the best interests of the slaves at heart. He had witnessed the way prisoners were treated at the Walnut Street Prison in Philadelphia, where the aim was to eliminate corporal punishment and create rational and useful members of society; and he now sought to apply those principles to the running of Monticello.
He introduced incentives of rewards and distinctions and began doling out random acts of leniency and paying money for some jobs. He established a nail factory, in which young enslaved boys aged ten to sixteen would learn self-discipline and efficiency. He wanted to use “the stimulus of character” rather than “the degrading motive of fear” to get the boys to work productively. Using the whip on the boys (except “in extremities”) would “degrade them in their own eyes” and thus destroy the value of Jefferson’s experiment.81
This was only a respite, however; the burden of slavery on Jefferson would only get heavier as time went on.
• • •
BOTH ADAMSES RETAINED an interest in Jefferson’s life. Abigail learned that in April 1804 Jefferson’s younger daughter, Mary Eppes, known as Polly, died at age twenty-five of a lingering illness following the birth of her second child. Learning of Jefferson’s loss, Abigail wrote Jefferson in May to offer her condolences. Since Abigail had not been in touch with Jefferson for three and a half years, she said she had at first hesitated to write for “reasons of various kinds.” But her feelings for Polly, whom as a nine-year-old arriving in Europe she had cared for, “burst through the restraint.” Having lost her son Charles in 1800, Abigail knew what Jefferson was going through. With what Jefferson called his “evening prospects” now hinging on “the slender thread of a single life”—his elder daughter, Martha Randolph—he had been utterly devastated by Polly’s death. Abigail knew that he needed all the sympathy he could get. She signed her letter as someone “who once took pleasure in subscribing Herself as your Friend.”82
On June 13, 1804, Jefferson responded warmly, recalling the friendship “with which you honoured me,” and expressing “regret that circumstances should have arisen which have seemed to draw a line of separation between us.” He reminded Abigail of his long friendship with Mr. Adams that went back to the very beginning of the Revolution. He said that the political difference that had produced “a rivalship” in the minds of their respective followers was not duplicated in their minds, and thus the “mutual esteem” that each man had for the other was never lessened. This was “sufficient to keep down all jealousy between us, and to guard our friendship” from any sense of rivalry.
Jefferson seems to have assumed that the old friendship was unbroken and that Abigail valued it as much as he did. Perhaps too eager to reconcile, he misinterpreted the tone of Abigail’s letter. He apparently thought their friendship was strong enough that he could invoke it as a reason for excusing Adams for something offensive he had done. He told Abigail “with truth” that there was “only one act of Mr. Adams’s life, and one only,” that ever displeased him. And that was Adams’s many lame-duck appointments to the judiciary. These Jefferson considered “personally unkind.” He believed “it seemed but common justice to leave a successor free to act by instruments of his own choice.” But after brooding for some time, Jefferson said he had “cordially” forgiven Adams’s action because of their friendship and had restored all the esteem and respect for Adams that he had earlier felt. Mentioning this one act that had displeased him was a disastrous mistake.83
Abigail answered Jefferson immediately. She said that if Jefferson had written only the first page of his letter there would have been no further need to write. But his comments about the lame-duck appointments called for a response, and she gave him a long and passionate one. Adams, she said, had assumed that all officeholders with the exception of the cabinet officials would be kept on. Then she launched into a bitter diatribe against the way in which Jefferson’s supporters carried on the campaign for the presidency. She was very angry, and she decided to “freely disclose” to Jefferson just what he had done to sever “the bonds of former Friendship.”
Abigail told Jefferson that one of the first acts of his administration had been to liberate that “wretch” James Callender, who had vilely slandered Adams in the campaign and deserved to remain in jail. Actually, Callender had completed his prison sentence, but Jefferson had pardoned him, thus remitting his fine, which Abigail regarded as “a public approbation of his conduct.” She was furious and cut Jefferson no slack whatsoever. She said “the Chief Magistrate of a Nation, whose elevated station places him in a conspicuous light,” should never forget that his behavior, giving “countenance to a base Calumniater,” for example, could have a very bad effect on the manners and morals of the community. She blamed Jefferson for encouraging Callender and financially supporting him and she couldn’t help reminding the president that this “serpent” whom he had “cherished and warmed” had turned and “bit the hand that nourished him.” She regarded the whole business of Callender “as a personal injury.” She ended by saying that there was one other act of his administration that she considered “personally unkind,” but since “it neither affected character, or reputation,” she decided not to describe it. She told Jefferson that she wrote in confidence and no one had seen her letter. “Faithful are the wounds of a Friend.” Often, she said, she had wished that Jefferson had behaved differently. She bore no malice, she said, but of course she did.84
Jefferson quickly protested. He knew nothing of Callender’s character and his “charities to him were no more meant as encouragements to his scurrilities than those I give to a beggar at my door are meant as rewards for the vices of his life.” Besides, he paid no more attention to what Callender was writing than Mr. Adams paid to the Federalist scandalmongers. He said he pardoned all the victims of “the pretended Sedition law.” His motives ought to be judged, he said, “by the general tenor of my life.”85
Abigail wrote back with “the freedom and unreserve of former Friendship,” to which she would gladly return if all the causes could be removed. These causes went beyond mere differences of opinion, differences, for example, over the Sedition Act. She wouldn’t judge its constitutionality. She presumed that was the job of the Supreme Court. All she knew was that “in no Country has calumny falsehood, and reviling stalked more licentiously than in this.” Not appreciating that the Sedition Act had expired when Jefferson assumed office, she accused Jefferson of taking it upon himself, like a despot, to annul the law. “You exculpate yourself from any intentional act of unkindness towards any one.” She then told him that the other act she faulted him for was his removal of her son John Quincy from a district judgeship.86
By this time, Jefferson must have been wondering what he had gotten himself into. He patiently explained that he knew nothing about John Quincy’s removal as a bankruptcy judge, and if he had known he would have been pleased to have appointed him over anyone else. He then went on to deny Abigail’s suggestion that the Supreme Court alone could decide the validity of the Sedition Act. The executive had an equal right to decide for itself the constitutionality of acts. Indeed, each branch of government had a coordinate power to determine the constitutionality of a law. For Jefferson the Constitution was primarily a political, not a legal, document, and judges had no monopoly on interpreting it. If slander by the press needed to be curbed, then leave it to the states, “and their exclusive right, to do so.” The First Amendment prohibited the Congress, but not the states, from controlling the press.
Jefferson hoped that Abigail would understand his position. He accepted wide differences of opinion. Both political parties wanted to promote the public good but differed over means. “One fears most the ignorance of the people: the other the selfishness of rulers independent of them.” Time will tell which is right; the body of the nation would decide. All he knew was that these differences of opinion and his anxieties over the future had never allowed him to use anything but “fair and honorable means, of truth and reason” in his politics. Nor had these differences and anxieties “ever lessened my esteem for moral worth; nor alienated my affections from a single friend who did not first withdraw himself.” When friends had become estranged from him, he had kept himself “open to a return of their justice.” The ball of friendship was in the Adamses’ court.87
Abigail wrote one final letter explaining to Jefferson at length why she had been hurt by his actions and why she had withdrawn her esteem for him. She grudgingly accepted his explanation for his behavior, but added that she did not believe that the First Amendment prohibited the Congress from protecting the national government from a scurrilous press. She hoped that posterity would judge “with more candour, and impartiality” than the opposing parties just what measures had best promoted the happiness of the people. She also hoped that he as president would contribute to that happiness. But with her underlying anger unabated, she asked “whether in your ardent zeal, and desire to rectify the mistakes and abuses as you may consider them, of the former administration, you are not led into measures still more fatal to the constitution, and more derogatory to your honour, and independence of Character? Pardon me Sir if I say, that you are.” This was candor with a vengeance.
In a postscript added three weeks later to Abigail’s letter-book copy of this extraordinary letter, John Adams noted that at Abigail’s request he had just read “the whole of this Correspondence,” and wanted posterity to know that it “was begun and conducted without my Knowledge or Suspicion.” He had “no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place.”88 The friendship between the Adamses and Jefferson was as dead as ever.
Having won the election in 1800 and riding high in popularity with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Jefferson was certainly more open to a renewal of the friendship in 1804 than Abigail. If he had avoided any criticism whatsoever of Adams in his letter of June 13, and had instead fulsomely praised him, he might have gradually warmed Abigail up. But her anger was so pervasive and powerful that the slightest criticism of her husband was bound to touch it off.