The Vice President as Party Boss
ON MARCH 2, 1797, when Thomas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia to take the oath of office as vice president, he was greeted by a large crowd plus a company of artillery hauling two twelve-pound cannon. The guns boomed sixteen rounds, one for each state in the Union, and the cheering crowd waved a flag that read: JEFFERSON, THE FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE. Thomas Mifflin, still the governor of Pennsylvania, was once more trying to discomfit George Washington. Mifflin’s right-hand man, Alexander James Dallas, who was often the acting governor, since Mifflin was drunk a great deal of the time, was no doubt on hand, directing the celebration. The message was unmistakable. Jefferson’s followers considered the vice presidency a mere pause on his way to the nation’s highest office.1
Although Jefferson had made a pro forma statement to James Madison that he wanted to avoid all such displays, he was not entirely averse to accepting this greeting from one of the President’s oldest enemies. George Washington’s impending departure had stirred not a little bitterness in his soul. As General and President, Washington had survived so many challenges and difficulties, while Jefferson’s career was stained by his failures and flights as wartime governor of Virginia and his inglorious retreat from the President’s cabinet.
In a letter to Madison, the Vice President-elect virtually snarled that Washington was “fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag.” The coming difficulties “would be ascribed to the new administration and…he will have his usual good fortune of reaping credit for the good acts of others and leaving to them that of his errors.”2
Jefferson still found it impossible to credit Washington for the political skills that had piloted the ship of state between the reefs of a war with England and the shoals of a takeover by France. Worse, the men in charge of his beloved French Revolution—the Directory—were very close to declaring war on the United States.
Further irritating Jefferson was the contentment that pervaded most of the nation. Thanks to Hamilton’s financial system and a huge increase in commerce with the West Indies and Europe, America was incredibly prosperous. Salaries of skilled workers and laborers in Philadelphia and other cities had doubled in the previous four years. Farmers were getting ever higher prices for their corn and wheat and cotton. On February 22, twelve hundred well-dressed admirers celebrated Washington’s birthday at Philadelphia’s sprawling Ricketts Amphitheater, normally the site of visiting circuses. “For splendor, taste and elegance,” wrote David Claypoole, the publisher of the Farewell Address, the affair “was perhaps never excelled by any entertainment in the United States.” Martha Washington reportedly shed tears of happiness to see and hear so much affection heaped on her smiling husband.3
On inauguration day (March 4, 1797), the departing President walked alone to Congress Hall. He wore a simple black suit and a military hat with a black cockade. Jefferson, too, walked, wearing a long, blue frock coat. President-elect John Adams arrived in a gleaming new two-horse carriage with a coachman and footman. The incoming chief executive wore a pearl colored broadcloth suit with wrist ruffles and a powdered wig. Some Democratic-Republicans sneered that he was trying to look like a man of the people by using only two horses, whereas “monarchical” President Washington had preferred four steeds and sometimes six.
When the crowd around Congress Hall saw Washington approach, there was a tremendous explosion of cheers. In the House of Representatives, the applause was thunderous. President-elect Adams and Vice President-elect Jefferson also got hearty bursts of clapping. It was a day of more than justified rejoicing. The United States was witnessing a peaceful transfer of political power, something so rare it won exclamations of amazement around the nation and the world. Congressman William Loughton Smith of South Carolina described it as happening with “a facility and calm which has astonished even those of us who always augured well of the government and the good sense of our citizens. The machine has worked without a creak.”4
Almost everyone gave Washington most of the credit for this semi-miracle. Some people disagreed, of course. Benjamin Franklin Bache’s editorial in the Aurora declared the departing president had done everything in his power to “canker the principles of republicanism in an enlightened people.” Not content with this canard, Bache went back to the first military action of Washington’s career. In 1754, he had been leading a reconnaissance party on the Virginia frontier and collided with a French patrol. In Bache’s version, Washington ordered his men to open fire, even though the French were displaying a flag of truce. The French commander was killed in the first volley. Bache called it “an act of assassination.” For Democratic-Republican readers in 1797, this fictionalized history proved that Washington had always hated the French and it was no surprise to see him so violently opposed to an alliance with Paris.5
In the chamber of the House of Representatives, President Adams gave an inaugural address that was brief but very much to the point. He paid tribute to ex-President Washington and declared his deep admiration for the Constitution. He alluded almost offhandedly to his narrow victory and affirmed his desire for peace with France. But he also warned in sharp language against the danger of “foreign intrigue” in America’s politics. This was an undoubted reference—and rebuke—to Minister Plenipotentiary Adet’s barefaced campaigning for the Democratic-Republican ticket. In a more subtle rebuke to the opposition’s obsession with monarchical tendencies, Adams denied he had ever entertained the slightest fondness for royal government and affirmed his faith in the republican brand.
While he spoke, Adams noticed tears streaming down the faces of numerous listeners, both in the galleries and on the floor of the House. It dawned on him that they were weeping over Washington’s departure. In a letter to Abigail, he wryly pretended he was unsure whether they were grieving for “the loss of their beloved President [or the arrival] of an unbeloved one.” Or maybe it was “the joy of exchanging presidents without tumult.” Or maybe it was the sheer “sublimity” of his speech.6
On March 3, the day before the inauguration, Adams had called on Jefferson at the Madisons’ home, where the incoming Vice President was staying. The President-elect was upset about the looming crisis with France. The French had recalled Minister Plenipotentiary Adet and refused to accept Charles Cotesworth Pinckney as James Monroe’s replacement. Such gestures often preceded a declaration of war. Adams told Jefferson he wished he could send him to Paris as a special ambassador.
That was impossible, of course. But perhaps Jefferson could persuade James Madison to go. Adams had a bipartisan commission in mind, men from both parties. Jefferson said he would consult Madison, but he warned it was a hopeless task. The Congressman was unalterably opposed to risking his fragile health in a six- or eight-week voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.
Three days later, after a pleasant farewell dinner with George Washington, at which politics was somehow avoided, Jefferson and Adams again discussed Madison as an envoy. As Jefferson had predicted, the Congressman had turned down the proposal. Adams confessed that after conferring for the first time with his cabinet, he now had second thoughts about the idea.
To reassure the public that he was following in Washington’s footsteps, Adams had retained all of the first president’s cabinet officers. They had told him that Madison would just be Monroe with a different name. When Adams lamented this adherence to “party passions,” Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott threatened to resign. It was grim evidence of the gulf between the two parties—and an ominous hint of a possible gulf between the new president and the Federalist Party that had elected him.7
Relations with France continued to deteriorate. Before 1797 ended, French warships would seize over three hundred American merchantmen. A troubled President Adams called Congress into special session in May. He reiterated his desire to achieve a peaceful understanding with Paris. But he thought it equally important to prepare for war. He called on Congress to put cannon on American cargo ships, fortify American ports, and create an adequate U.S. Navy.
In 1794, during the crisis over the Jay Treaty, President Washington had made a similar request, and Congress had commissioned six warships. But the trickle of money they voted for their construction had turned the process into a slow-motion charade. Only three frigates were anywhere near the point of being launched. Congress insisted these would be enough to masquerade as a navy.
Vice President Jefferson was dismayed by the President’s belligerent stance. He told acquaintances and newspapermen such as Benjamin Franklin Bache that Adams was a warmonger. This rhetoric had not a little to do with Congress’s resistance to the President’s proposals. It is easy to see why wiser men soon realized that it was necessary to amend the Constitution and ensure that the vice president and the president belonged to the same party. The memory of Vice President Jefferson sabotaging President Adams’s policies was a convincing argument, in itself.8
To prove his peaceful intentions, the President launched a three-man commission to negotiate an agreement with Paris. Repudiated minister Charles Cotesworth Pinckney would be joined by Federalist Congressman John Marshall of Virginia and Democratic-Republican Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. The cabinet begged Adams not to send the erratic, argumentative Gerry, but he was an old friend and the President insisted on having his way.
The new President’s stubbornness was a fact of life to which the cabinet was becoming unhappily accustomed. Oliver Wolcott compared it to the way the god Jupiter supposedly governed from Olympus: “Without regarding the opinions of friends or enemies, all are summoned to hear, reverence and obey.”9
In the Senate, Vice President Jefferson swiftly took command of the Democratic-Republican Party. It was another ironic comment on his supposed distaste for politics. He was soon reporting to retired James Madison how the party voted in the House as well as in the upper chamber where he presided. When the Federalists fired his friend and backstage operator John Beckley as clerk of the House, Jefferson saw it as a blow to “the Republican interest.” When three Virginians started voting with the Federalists in the House, the Vice President called them “renegadoes.”10
Jefferson lived at the St. Francis Hotel, where, one Federalist sourly remarked, he was surrounded by a “knot of Jacobins”—also known as Democratic-Republican senators and congressmen. He eagerly thrust his oar into the nomination of Elbridge Gerry as a peace commissioner. In a letter to Gerry, Jefferson said he was “a spring of hope” in the darkness of Federalist hostility to France.11
When dismissed envoy James Monroe returned to Philadelphia during the special session of Congress, Jefferson and fifty Democratic-Republican congressmen gave him a sumptuous dinner at Oeller’s Hotel. Federalists were outraged. They regarded Monroe as a virtual traitor to his country for his sycophantic worship of the French Revolution during his days in Paris.
There was more than an undercurrent of defiance in Jefferson’s public embrace of Monroe. As the special session of Congress began, Federalist newspapers had gotten their hands on a copy of a letter he had written to his Italian friend Philip Mazzei at the height of the controversy over the Jay Treaty. Reporting on the state of American politics, Jefferson described the Federalists as “an Anglican, monarchical and aristocratic party.” Shifting to individuals, he told Mazzei it “would give you a fever were I to pass on to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field & Solomons in the council, who have had their heads shorn by the harlot, England.”
Mazzei had sent this explosive message to friends in Paris, who were delighted to publish it. Soon it was translated back into English for London readers and inevitably made its way to America. Federalists declared the letter was an insult to George Washington. Who else had been a “Samson” on the field of battle as well as a “Solomon” in the nation’s councils?
Monroe urged Jefferson to publish a defense. Madison advised him to remain silent. Such a statement might lead to “disagreeable explanations or…tacit confessions.” Jefferson took this advice but it was not a pleasant solution. More than one Philadelphia gentleman and/or his wife crossed the street when they saw the Vice President approaching. Federalist newspapermen began calling him “Monsieur Jefferson.” One editor called his opinion treasonous.12
During this same summer of 1797, Jefferson’s ousted follower, John Beckley, counterattacked with a revelation he had been hoarding for six years. He gave Scottish-born James Thomson Callender, a Democratic-Republican journalist who had once offered a toast to “the speedy death” of President Washington, the papers he had acquired from James Monroe about Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds. Callender published these documents in a murky “History of the United States for 1796.” Jefferson liked it so much, he visited Callender’s rooming house to congratulate him and bought several copies of his book.
The Vice President was soon calling the author a “man of genius” and “a man of science, fled from persecution.” Callender had been run out of Britain for calling the English constitution a “conspiracy of the rich against the poor.” Exactly why Jefferson considered him a scientist remains a mystery—unless it was his talent for twisting the truth into venomous accusations. Callender defended his exposure of the long-dead affair as justified by the “unfounded reproaches heaped on Mr. Monroe” for which he claimed Hamilton was responsible.13
Instead of adopting the policy of dignified silence that Madison had urged on Jefferson, Hamilton reached for his pen. The result was an erotically detailed thirty-seven-page confession bolstered by fifty-seven pages of documents. Hamilton claimed he was forced to undergo this public humiliation because Callender had asserted the affair with Maria Reynolds was a device to conceal his corrupt dealings with her husband. Hamilton fiercely refuted this accusation, and added denunciations of the politicians behind this plot to destroy him—notably Thomas Jefferson.
Vice President Jefferson and retired Congressman Madison read this unwise exercise with undisguised pleasure—at least in their private correspondence. Jefferson told a Virginia friend that Hamilton’s “willingness to plead guilty seems rather to have strengthened than to have weakened; that he was, in truth, guilty of the speculations.” Madison was somewhat kinder. He called the pamphlet “a curious example of the ingenious folly of its author.” Was he remembering those days of friendship, when he and Hamilton wrote the Federalist? If so, Madison swiftly returned to politics and dismissed the ex-treasury secretary’s “malignant insinuation” against Jefferson as “a masterpiece of folly, because its impotence is in exact proportion to its venom.”14
But Hamilton was not quite as impotent—or as foolish—as this tormented confession made him look in Jefferson/Madison/Monroe’s eyes. While the nation’s political class reeled with the double shocks of the Mazzei letter and Hamilton’s admissions, a package from Virginia arrived on the doorstep of the troubled ex-secretary’s household on Cedar Street in New York. In the package was a four-bottle silver wine cooler—and a message from George Washington.
The ostensible reason was the recent birth of another Hamilton son. But the message went far beyond this pretext. The ex-president said he was sending it, “not for any intrinsic value the thing possesses, but as a token of my sincere regard and friendship for you.” Washington was saying he still had confidence in Hamilton’s integrity—and his patriotism.15
In Virginia, Jefferson was troubled by something he regarded as far more serious than the destruction of political reputations. Congressman James J. Cabell, from the district that included Monticello, was accused of writing a letter to his constituents that endangered the peace and prosperity of the nation. The message was severely critical of the Adams administration’s foreign policy toward France. Supreme Court Justice James Iredell, sitting as a federal judge on circuit, told a Richmond grand jury that “some foreign nation” might use such statements “to take advantage of our internal discords, first making us the dupe and then the prey” of their ambition to control our government. The grand jury indicted Cabell for threatening “the happy government of the United States.”
Jefferson called the indictment an invitation to federal judges to become “inquisitors on the freedom of…their fellow citizens.” The Vice President drafted a “Protest against the interference of the [Federal] judiciary between Representative and Constituent” for forwarding to the Virginia Assembly. The document claimed that the federal grand jury had committed a crime “of the highest and most alarming nature.” The members should be promptly impeached and punished.
The Vice President first sent copies of the protest to Madison and Monroe. Both dutifully praised it, but Madison wondered about the wisdom of “embarking the legislature in the business.” This was his polite way of saying he did not think it was a good idea to promote a clash between states’ rights and federal rights—one of the chief problems he and George Washington had tried to solve in the Constitution. Monroe confessed a similar worry.
Jefferson ignored his two lieutenants. He sent the protest to the Virginia House of Delegates, where the members angrily denounced Congressman Cabell’s indictment. But they ignored Jefferson’s call to punish the grand jurors. In fact, they did not even send their wrathful resolutions to the state senate. Nor did they forward them to Congress. The inaction suggests others were uneasy about promoting a clash with the federal government.16
Back in the Senate, early in 1798, Jefferson told one friend that “party animosities” had “raised a wall of separation between those who differ in political sentiments.” After examining the various names being called, he told one correspondent that Whig (liberal) and Tory (conservative) were the only meaningful terms for the “two sects.” He never admitted to himself or to anyone else that he was among the most reckless users of slanderous terms, such as the ones he had produced for the Mazzei letter.17
Determined to defend Jefferson as their once and future candidate, the Democratic-Republicans in the House, led by Albert Gallatin, objected to Federalist criticism of the Mazzei letter—especially when a Connecticut representative read it into the congressional record. The Federalists were trying to link Jefferson to Democratic-Republican policies in the current Congress, where the party resisted President Adams’s call to raise money for an army and a navy to deal with the threat of French aggression. Federalists declared the Mazzei episode proved Jefferson was “the life and soul of the opposition” to protecting America’s independence.18
This invective would have been dismissed as far too mild if the Federalists knew what Jefferson told the latest French envoy, Philippe Henri Letombe. He was only a Charge’ d’Affaires instead of a Minister Plenipotentiary—a diminishment that underscored French hostility. On June 7, 1797, Letombe reported to Paris that he had enjoyed a “long and tranquil” conversation with “the wise Jefferson.” The Vice President had assured him that America had “broken…forever the chains which attached it to England” and the nation “was penetrated with gratitude to France.”19
Jefferson swiftly segued to the underlying reason for these declarations. President John Adams was a disaster—“vain, irritable, stubborn, endowed with excessive amour-propre and still suffering pique at the preference accorded Franklin over him in Paris.” But his presidency would last “only five (sic) years.” He had only became president by three electoral votes, and “the system of the United States will change” with his departure.20
The Vice President launched into a rhapsody of praise for the recent French military triumphs in Europe. France was “at the summit of her glory.” She could afford to wait, “to precipitate nothing,” and soon “everything would return to order.” President Adams’s envoys should be received peacefully. But there was no need to accede to their demands. Instead, the Directory should “allow the negotiations to drag on,” softening matters whenever possible with the requisite “urbanity.” Letombe added that Jefferson “repeats to me incessantly…Machievelli’s maxim. Nil repente [never repent] is the soul of great affairs.”21
It was a truly astonishing performance. The Vice President, not content with undercutting the President in Congress, was now telling the French how to talk his foreign policy to a humiliating political death. If this was not treason to the nation, it was certainly a betrayal of his supposedly revered friendship with John Adams. Jefferson rationalized this policy by convincing himself he was preventing a war. He closed by telling Letombe it was time to arrange reciprocal citizenship between the two republics. He hoped France would soon invade England and dictate a peace that would guarantee “a purer government” for export to “other portions of mankind.”22
There is a touching nobility—and a dismaying naivete—about these ideas. In a country already boiling with antipathy to France, as their men of war seized American merchantmen by the dozen, why would Americans embrace reciprocal citizenship, which would entitle future Citizen Genets to operate with virtual impunity in the United States? Did the Vice President really think that a French army in the ruins of London would inspire the dictatorial Directory to create a purer government?
In Congress, the political atmosphere became so rancid, Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon, a volatile Democratic-Republican, spit in Connecticut Federalist Roger Griswold’s face when the latter suggested he had been a less than heroic soldier in the American Revolution. Griswold responded the next day by assaulting Lyon with his cane. The Vermont firebrand defended himself with a poker.
Jefferson found this violence distasteful. But he told Madison it might have one beneficial outcome. “These proceedings must degrade the federal government, and lead the people to lean more on their state governments, which have been sunk under the early popularity of the former.” This was a shift in loyalty that Jefferson approved and even welcomed. It was one more piece of evidence of his underlying hostility to the Constitution. The so-called “father” of that document made no attempt to disagree.
A few weeks later, the Vice President was gleefully telling Madison a more entertaining story. “The late birthnight,” he wrote, “has sown tares among the exclusive Federals.” He was talking about a ball that Washington devotees had proposed to celebrate the ex-president’s birthday, even though the man being honored had retired to Mount Vernon. The organizers had invited President Adams and his wife, assuming they would endorse the festivities.
Revealing in stark detail his political limitations, Adams exploded and declared himself insulted. Abigail, badly damaging her reputation as the person who prevented her dearest friend from going to extremes, agreed with him. The contretemps split the Federalist Party and the Adams administration. The President’s four cabinet members attended the ball. Those who stayed home drew glares of disapproval from the Washington devotees.
Jefferson described all this in delighted terms. He added a touch for which he may have been responsible. The Democratic-Republicans went “in number,” he told Madison. This encouraged the idea that all the previous celebrations had been “for the General and not the President.” It was a neat way of dismissing Washington’s presidency as worthy of no more than a glimmer of respect.23
Across the wintry Atlantic came only silence from the three envoys to France. Jefferson convinced himself that this non-communication was an omen of peace. He did not respond to a Madison letter, which compared Adams to Washington. After complimenting the first president in a half-dozen ways and criticizing Adams, the retired Congressman feared serious trouble lay over the horizon.
The confirmation of this pessimism came in March. In phrases charged with tension, Adams reported the peace mission was a failure and there was immediate need to take seriously his call to prepare the nation to defend itself. Vice President Jefferson called the announcement “an insane message.” His first instinct was to rally his party to dismiss the President’s summons to war. He could think of no reason for such a move that would be plausible even to “the weakest mind.”
The Federalists lacked a majority in the House of Representatives, which would vote the money for this preparedness. Jefferson thought the Democratic-Republicans should call for an adjournment, so everyone could go home and consult their constituents. He was sure a vast majority of the people were opposed to both war and the new taxes it would require.
The Vice President swiftly learned no one in the party had the nerve to propose such a move. The best he could get was a lame statement that it was “inexpedient” to go to war with “the French Republic.” This weak reed was soon in grave danger of crumpling under pressure from the President, two-thirds of the Senate, and the Federalist share of the House. Madison suggested another tactic. Demand from the President “the intelligence” which led him to his brusque demands.
In the executive mansion, President Adams and Secretary of State Pickering were reading dispatches from envoy John Marshall that revealed the latest truth about the rulers of France. The Directory were revolutionists in name only. Their power depended almost totally on the tolerance of the generals who had won the victories that Vice President Jefferson applauded. With their reign precarious, these pseudo-rulers were eager to line their own pockets should a hasty departure be just around the corner.
When the three envoys arrived at the offices of Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, they were greeted with cool politeness. A former priest, Talleyrand had the most flexible conscience in Europe. Through three spokesmen, he delivered a message to the shocked Americans: it would take money, a lot of money, to reach an understanding.
The spokesmen had no compunction about suggesting a down payment of $50,000. That might enable the envoys to begin conversing with Foreign Minister Talleyrand. Up the road, if some understanding was reached, the French Republic expected a very large loan from her sister republic across the Atlantic. Also needed were profuse apologies for President Adams’s speech to the special session of Congress, which had left the Directory “extremely exasperated.” This ominous word was succeeded by boastful descriptions of the “power and violence” of the French Republic, demonstrated within a week of the envoys’ arrival by Austria’s surrender of Italy to General Napoleon Bonaparte.24
Here, surely, was the reductio ad absurdum of the French Revolution as Thomas Jefferson’s “polar star.” Adding to the intended humiliation of the envoys was a warning from one of Talleyand’s messengers that if they went home and accused the French of unreasonable demands, the “French party” in America would unite with skillful French diplomats and “throw the blame for the rupture of negotiations on the Federalists”—the British Party, “as France terms you.”25
When the House Democratic-Republicans took Madison’s advice (via Jefferson) and demanded to see the “intelligence” which made the supposedly vain, irritable, stubborn, pique-ish President Adams so anxious to prepare the United States for war, Secretary of State Pickering described the confrontation with Talleyrand’s spokesmen in acid detail. As a gesture of decorum, the foreign minister’s agents were not named. They were called X, Y and Z. But the size and arrogance of their demands was not withheld. Nor was Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s response: “No! Not a sixpence!” This was soon improved by a Federalist congressman to “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute!”26
A bewildered Vice President Jefferson described the impact to James Madison: “Such a shock on the Republican Mind…has never been seen since our independence.” A gleeful Abigail Adams revealed what she thought of Jefferson and his followers: “The Jacobins in the Senate and the House were struck dumb and opend (sic) not their mouths.” On March 23, 1798, the President proved he was not quite as politically inept as Jefferson portrayed him; he called for a national day of fasting and prayer to seek God’s protection from an amoral, voracious enemy.27
Vice President Jefferson knew defeat when it stared him in the face. He told Madison the Democratic-Republicans in the House had abandoned their resolution calling war inexpedient. It made it look like they were in agreement with the XYZ swindlers. The best they could do now was resist “war measures externally” while voting approval of “every rational measure of internal defence.”
Behind the scenes, however, the Jefferson/Madison love affair with the French Revolution continued. The Vice President called the XYZ demands “very unworthy of a great nation,” and doubted they were the official policy of France’s rulers. Madison agreed. Unless proof was “perfectly conclusive,” the decision should be “agst the evidence rather than on the side of infatuation.”28
Like a good president should, Adams sought advice on his next moves from all quarters. Swallowing his hostility, he even invited Alexander Hamilton to dine with him and Abigail to discuss the administration’s response. Benjamin Franklin Bache was soon telling readers of the Aurora about this dinner party with the “adulterous” Hamilton. He claimed to be aghast at the President’s selection of such company for the entertainment of his wife. “Oh Johnny! Johnny!” he mocked.29
No one paid the slightest attention to this desperation tactic. Letters and addresses of support poured across President Adams’s desk. “The Students of Harvard University” joined “the inhabitants of Providence, R.I. and the ‘Soldier Citizens’ of New Jersey” in affirming their admiration. When Adams attended the theater, the audience went berserk. The orchestra played “The President’s March” a dozen times and people danced to it. Robert Treat Paine wrote a song, “To Adams and Liberty” to the melody of an old tune, “Anacreon in Heaven.” Its final line had words that soon became ominous to Democratic-Republicans: “Her pride is her Adams—his laws are her own.”30
Meanwhile, the “heavy” frigates United States, Constitution, and Constellation slid down the ways and headed for the open seas to take on French raiders. These ships wielded forty-four guns and were more stoutly built than any ship of their class on the high seas. Other American men of war were also on the prowl. On July 7, 1798, the USS Delaware’s twenty guns subdued a French schooner, Le Croyable, that had seized and looted an American merchantman, the Alexander Hamilton. The citizens of Charleston, S.C. launched a warship they had paid for out of their own pockets, the USS John Adams. The President decided it was time to take his warrior sailors seriously and created a Department of the Navy to supervise and supply them.31
In May, Congress voted to raise a regular army of ten thousand men for active duty and a “provisional” or backup force of twelve thousand. President Adams, facing the fact that he had not an iota of military experience, rushed a letter to Mount Vernon, asking George Washington to emerge from retirement. “If the Constitution and your convenience would permit of my changing places,” he wrote, “or of taking my old station as your Lieutenant Civil, I should have no doubts about the ultimate prosperity and glory of the country.” To the President’s dismay, Washington accepted the task on one condition—that Adams would appoint Alexander Hamilton as a major general and his second-in-command.32
By now, Congress had no doubt whatsoever it was preparing for war with France. This stirred a worry about enemies on American soil. There were at least thirty thousand French men and women in the United States. Most were fugitives from their murderous revolution. But there was more than a possibility that many were secret agents, ready, willing, and able to sabotage the American war effort from within. Didn’t they have vivid evidence in the XYZ revelations, with their boast of the readiness of their so-called diplomats to work with the “French Party” to overthrow the U.S. government? Federalist congressmen easily convinced themselves that it was time to pass a law giving the president the power to order any and all of these aliens out of the country.
As for the “French Party,” what better way to keep the Democratic-Republicans and their devious vice presidential leader under control than a law to silence—or at least, subdue—their obnoxious newspapers? Soon Congress was crafting an “Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes.” This “Sedition Act” made it a criminal offense to speak or print “any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States, or either House of the Congress of the United States, with intent to defame…or to bring them…into contempt or disrepute.” The law gave the accused newspaper editor the right to defend himself in court. If he could prove the truth of his statements, he would walk out a free man. If he was found guilty? A federal judge would decide his fate.
President Adams had not requested these proposals. But he was in wholehearted agreement with them. So was his dearest friend and advisor, Abigail. He signed both bills into law. Neither he nor the congressmen and senators who wrote them were aware that they were committing political suicide. They were also triggering a final clash between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson that would profoundly affect the future of the nation.33