The task of the President is very arduous, very perplexing, and very hazardous. I do not wonder Washington wished to retire from it, or rejoiced in seeing an old oak in his place.
—Abigail Adams
THE INAUGURATION of the second President of the United States commenced in the first-floor House Chamber of Congress Hall in Philadelphia just before noon, Saturday, March 4, 1797.
The room was filled to overflowing, every seat taken by members of the House and Senate, justices of the Supreme Court, heads of departments, the diplomatic corps, and many ladies said to have added a welcome note of “brilliancy” to the otherwise solemn occasion.
There was a burst of applause when George Washington entered and walked to the dais. More applause followed on the appearance of Thomas Jefferson, who had been inaugurated Vice President upstairs in the Senate earlier that morning, and “like marks of approbation” greeted John Adams, who on his entrance in the wake of the two tall Virginians seemed shorter and more bulky even than usual.
It was a scene few who were present would ever forget. Here were the three who, more than any others, had made the Revolution, and as many in the audience supposed, it was to be the last time they would ever appear on the same platform. Adams felt as he had when he first appeared before George III—as if he were on stage playing a part. It was, he later told Abigail, “the most affecting and overpowering scene I ever acted in.”
Jefferson's height was accentuated by a long blue frock coat. Washington was in a dress suit of black velvet. Adams, the plainest of the three, wore a suit of grey broadcloth intentionally devoid of fancy buttons and knee buckles.
Resolved to keep things as understated as possible, he had ridden to Congress Hall from his lodgings at the Francis Hotel in a “simple but elegant enough” carriage drawn by just two horses. The grand carriage and six white horses of Washington's first inauguration had been dispensed with. Nor would Adams allow an official retinue to march in procession with him. As he confided to Abigail, he wanted few if any of the “court” trappings of his predecessor. On learning that she had had the Quincy coat-of-arms painted on her carriage at home, he told her to have it painted out. “They shall have a republican President in earnest,” he wrote.
Overcast skies had cleared by noon. The day turned bright and cloudless. But for Adams there was little cheer. With none of his family present, he felt miserably alone. He had been unable to sleep the night before, sick with worry that he might not make it through the ceremony without fainting. But he succeeded with flying colors, delivering an address that left little doubt as to where he stood on the Constitution, partisan politics, domestic concerns, France, and the pressing issue of peace or war.
Though in print the speech would seem a bit stilted, it was delivered with great force and effect. Stirred by emotion, and in a strong voice, Adams recalled the old ardor of the American Revolution and spoke of the “present happy Constitution” as the creation of “good heads prompted by good hearts.” In answer to concerns about his political creed, he expressed total attachment to and veneration for the present system of a free republican government. “What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?” He spoke of his respect for the rights of all states, and of his belief in expanded education for all the people, both to enlarge the happiness of life and as essential to the preservation of freedom. The great threats to the nation, Adams warned, were sophistry, the spirit of party, and “the pestilence of foreign influence.”
He paid gracious tribute to Washington's leadership. He lauded American agriculture and manufacturing, pledged himself to a spirit of “equity and humanity” toward the American Indian, “to meliorate their condition by inclining them to be more friendly to us, and our citizens to be more friendly to them.”
To Abigail he would later write, “I have been so strangely used in this country, so belied and so undefended that I was determined to say some things as an appeal to posterity.” But the strongest lines, those underscoring his determination to maintain American neutrality, were delivered directly for the benefit of Congress and the foreign diplomats present, not to say the opposition press. It was his “inflexible determination” to maintain peace with all nations, Adams declared, then expressed a personal esteem for France, stemming from a residence of nearly seven years there. Finally he affirmed an “unshaken confidence” in the spirit of the American people, “on which I have often hazarded my all.”
Then, having issued a solemn invocation of the Supreme Being, he stepped down from the platform to a table at the front of the chamber, where Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth administered the oath of office, Adams energetically repeating the words.
And so Adams became President of the nation that now—with the additions of Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee—numbered sixteen states. Having never in his public life held an administrative position, having never played any but a marginal role in the previous administration, having never served in the military, or campaigned for a single vote, or claimed anything like a political bent, he was now chief executive and commander-in-chief.
Many in the chamber were weeping, moved by his words, but still more, it seems, by the prospect of Washington's exit from the national stage. “A solemn scene it was indeed,” Adams wrote, noting that Washington's face remained as serene and unclouded as the day. “Me thought I heard him think, ‘Ay! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!’ ”
Approval came from all sides. Federalist Senator Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts called it “the most august and sublime” occasion he ever attended. Praise in the Federalist press, too, was not so much for Adams as for the occasion—“Thus ended a scene the parallel of which was never before witnessed in any country.” But Republicans openly extolled what the new President had said. In the pages of the Aurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache proclaimed John Adams a hero in a way inconceivable before, lauding the “Republican plainness” of Adams's appearance, his “true dignity,” his “incorruptible integrity.” In all, it was one of the handsomest tributes ever paid to Adams.
It is universally admitted that Mr. Adams is a man of incorruptible integrity, and that the resources of his own mind are equal to the duties of his station; we may flatter ourselves that his measures will be taken with prudence, that he will not become the head of a party, and that he will not be the tool of any man or set of men. His speech on the inauguration augers well to our country.... He declares himself the friend of France and of peace, the admirer of republicanism, the enemy of party, and he vows his determination to let no political creed interfere in his appointments. How honorable are these sentiments; how characteristic of a patriot!
It was praise Adams took with a large grain of salt, suspecting Bache of wanting only to create a “coolness between me and Mr. Washington.” More to his liking was an item in a Baltimore paper describing him as “an old fielder,” which as he explained to Abigail, “is a tough, hardy, laborious little horse that works very hard and lives upon very little, very useful to his master at small expense.”
• • •
BOTH BEFORE AND AFTER his inauguration dozens of old friends, including some like Benjamin Rush who had supported Jefferson in the election, made a point of expressing confidence in Adams. Elbridge Gerry likened him to a ship ballasted with iron, capable of riding out any storm. Cotton Tufts, in a letter lamenting the “vexation” Adams was bound to encounter, wrote, “I will not, however, admit this to be of weight sufficient to deter or prevent a great and good man.” A letter from Samuel Adams, then in his seventy-fifth year, may have meant the most of all. “I congratulate you as the first citizen of the United States—I may add the world. I am, my dear sir, notwithstanding I have been otherwise represented in party papers, your old and unvaried friend.”
Except for his siege of anxiety the night before the inauguration, Adams's state of mind had remained quite steady. He had never felt “easier,” he assured Abigail, and a diary entry of the wife of the British ambassador seems to bear him out. At a dinner given by Washington in mid-January, Henrietta Liston found herself seated between the President and the Vice President—“between the rising and setting suns”—and though she found Washington as noble as expected, Adams proved surprisingly entertaining. “There is a good deal of amusement in the conversation of Adams, a considerable degree of wit and humor,” she recorded happily.
While he knew much patience would be called for in time to come, Adams reminded Abigail that he had had a “good education” in patience in his years in public life, and could “look at a storm with some composure.” Constituted as he was, he may even have welcomed a storm. When in the predawn hours of January 27, a terrible fire ripped through the home and shop of the Philadelphia printer and publisher of the Federal Gazette, Andrew Brown, taking the lives of his wife and children, Adams was conspicuous among the men handing up buckets to fight the blaze. Brown, as all knew, had for some time been excoriating the Vice President at every chance.
In February, when the outcome of the election became official, it had been Adams's role, as president of the Senate, to open and read the final votes in the electoral college. He had won by only a narrow margin, with 71 votes to Jefferson's 68. (Pinckney had 59, Burr, 30, Samuel Adams, 11.) As Adams himself observed, he was President by three votes. Yet he appears to have taken it in stride. “I am not alarmed,” he told Nabby, who had written to express her concern. “If the way to do good to my country were to render myself popular, I could easily do it. But extravagant popularity is not the road to public advantage.” To Abigail he wrote simply, “The die is cast.”
With the inauguration still to come, he had taken one of the most fateful steps of his presidency. Rather than choosing a new cabinet of his own, Adams asked Washington's four department heads to stay on, convinced this was the surest way to preserve Federalist harmony. “Washington had appointed them and I knew it would turn the world upside down if I removed any one of them,” he later wrote. “I had then no particular objection to any of them.” Also, there was no tradition of cabinet members resigning their positions at the end of a President's term. Washington himself had encouraged them to remain; nor did any express a wish to leave.
They were Secretary of State Timothy Pickering of Salem, Massachusetts; Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Jr., of Connecticut; Secretary of War James McHenry of Maryland; and Charles Lee of Virginia, the Attorney General. All were younger men than Adams. Wolcott, the youngest at thirty-seven, was the son of the Oliver Wolcott with whom Adams had served in the Continental Congress. A plump, rather pleasant-looking lawyer who had been educated at Yale, he was thought trustworthy and affable. McHenry, an even friendlier and more likable man, had been born and raised in County Antrim, Ireland, and spoke with a trace of an Irish accent. Charles Lee, like Wolcott, was still in his thirties, a graduate of the College of New Jersey at Princeton and, while perfectly competent, was distinguished primarily for being a Lee of Virginia.
None were of oustanding ability, but all were Federalists, and Wolcott and McHenry, like Secretary of State Pickering, were extreme Federalists, or High Federalists. They belonged to the ardently anti-French, pro-British wing of the party who considered Alexander Hamilton their leader, and because of this, and the fact that they had served in the Washington cabinet, they were inclined to look down on John Adams.
But of the four it was Timothy Pickering who held the strongest views and, as Secretary of State, was the most important, given the precarious nature of a world at war, as well as his own obdurate personality. Pickering was not an easy man to like or get along with even under normal circumstances, as Adams knew. In many ways Pickering might have served as the model New Englander for those who disliked the type. Tall, lean, and severe-looking, with a lantern jaw and hard blue eyes, he was Salem-born-and-bred, a Harvard graduate, proud, opinionated, self-righteous, and utterly humorless. After brief service on Washington's staff during the war, he had been promoted to adjutant general. Later he became the first Postmaster General, and from there moved over to replace Henry Knox as Secretary of War. When Secretary of State Edmund Randolph was forced to resign under a cloud of suspicion—a cloud largely of Pickering's making—Pickering was named to succeed him, but only after Washington had been turned down by five others to whom he offered the position.
To his credit, Pickering was energetic and conscientious. He was fond of music and enjoyed a happy marriage that had produced ten children. Adams, who had known him for years, though not well, was willing to give him—indeed all of his cabinet—the benefit of the doubt. “Pickering and all his colleagues are as much attached to me as I desire,” he told Elbridge Gerry.
To many the great question was the part Jefferson might play concerning relations with France—the Republicans hoping it would be considerable, the Federalists determined he should have no say whatever. Privately, Adams was ambivalent on the subject. While he had forgiven Jefferson most of his past trespasses, he had by no means forgotten them. “I may say to you that his patronage of Paine and Freneau and his entanglements with characters and politics which have been pernicious are and have been a source of inquietude and anxiety to me,” Adams confided to Tristram Dalton. “He will have too many French about him to flatter him, but I hope we can keep him steady.”
To Elbridge Gerry, however, Adams expressed greater confidence. In view of Jefferson's good sense and long friendship, Adams thought he could expect from his Vice President support of the kind he himself had given Washington, “which is and shall be the pride and boast of my life.” Benjamin Rush, meantime, had written to Jefferson to say what a lift it gave him to hear Adams “speak with pleasure of the prospect of administering the government in a connection with you. He does justice to you upon all occasions...”
Arriving in Philadelphia just days before the inauguration, Jefferson had called on Adams at the Francis Hotel, where Jefferson, too, was to stay. They had not seen one another for three years, and apparently the reunion went well. As a matter of courtesy, one such visit between the President and Vice President would have sufficed, but the fact that Adams promptly returned the call the next morning was taken as a clear signal that Adams meant truly to pursue a policy above party divisions.
According to Jefferson's account of the meeting, written years later, Adams “entered immediately” into discussion of the crisis at hand and his wish for Jefferson to play a lead part in resolving it. Faced with the prospect of war with France, Adams was determined to make a fresh effort at negotiations in Paris, to bring about a reconciliation, which he believed possible and desirable. “Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war,” he had written to Abigail.
The government of France, led since 1795 by a five-headed executive commission known as the Directory, had chosen to interpret the Jay Treaty as an Anglo-American alliance. In an effort to improve relations with France, Washington had recalled the American minister, James Monroe, and sent in his place a staunch Federalist, General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina. But as yet there was no word from Pinckney.
It was the “first wish of his heart,” Adams told Jefferson, to send him to Paris, though he supposed this would be out of the question. “It did not seem justifiable for him to send away the person destined to take his place in case of an accident to himself,” Jefferson would recall; “nor decent to remove from consideration one who was a rival for public favor.”
Jefferson agreed with Adams's reasoning. Irrespective of whether the Constitution would allow it, he was sick of residing in Europe, Jefferson said, and hoped never to cross the Atlantic again as long as he lived.
That being so, Adams continued, it was his plan to send two emissaries to join Pinckney, making it a bipartisan three-man commission, which by its “dignity” ought to satisfy France, and by its geographical and political balance satisfy both parties and all parts of the country. He had in mind Elbridge Gerry and James Madison, who had recently retired from Congress. Jefferson said he was certain Madison would not accept, but at Adams's request agreed to inquire.
This was on March 3, the day before the inauguration. The next morning, in his own brief inaugural remarks before the Senate, Jefferson made a point of commending Adams as that “eminent character,” and spoke of their “uninterrupted friendship.” For a fleeting interlude the prospect of truly nonpartisan cooperation between them appeared attainable. “I am much pleased,” one Supreme Court justice wrote, “that Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson lodge together. The thing looks well; it carries conciliation and healing with it, and may have a happy effect on parties.”
The day following the inauguration, however, when President Adams asked others, including Washington, for their opinion on sending Madison to Paris, he heard only stiff objections. To such High Federalists as Timothy Pickering and Secretary of the Treasury Wolcott, Madison was as unacceptable as Jefferson would have been. Wolcott told the President that sending Madison would “make dire work among the passions of our parties in Congress.” When Adams said he refused to be intimidated by party passions, Wolcott threatened to resign.
As Jefferson would recall, it was that evening while walking down Market Street with Adams, after a farewell dinner given by Washington, that he informed Adams of Madison's refusal to go to France. Adams indicated that in any event the issue was now academic. There had been a change of mind due to objections raised. To Jefferson it was clear that Adams, who imagined he might “steer impartially between the parties,” had been brought abruptly back into the Federalist fold. But it was also clear to Adams that neither Jefferson nor Madison had the least desire to work with the administration, and thus he could expect no help from any of the Republicans.
It was there on Market Street, according to Jefferson, that he and Adams reached the breaking point. Adams never again mentioned a word to him on the subject of France, “or ever consulted me as to any measures of the government.”
Whether the parting was quite so clear-cut as Jefferson remembered is uncertain. But as Adams, too, later acknowledged, they “consulted very little together afterward.” Adams was to call on his Vice President for advice no more than Washington had called on him. The great difference, however, was that Jefferson was of the opposing party, with differing objectives and principles, and Adams consequently could never count on such loyalty from Jefferson as he had given Washington. Adams never knew when Jefferson might be working secretly to undercut or thwart him, for Jefferson's abiding flaw, Adams had concluded, was “want of sincerity.”
In his Farewell Address, Washington had warned against “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” Particularly in governments of “popular form,” he had said, “it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.” Yet party spirit and animosities were as alive as ever, as Adams had been shown in the bluntest of terms in little more than twenty-four hours since taking office.
On March 8, Washington called at the Francis Hotel to say goodbye to Adams and wish him well. They were parting on good terms. For all his long coolness toward Adams, Washington before leaving office had written an unsolicited letter expressing the “strong hope” that as President, Adams would not withhold “merited promotion” from John Quincy. “I give it as my decided opinion,” Washington wrote, “that Mr. [John Quincy] Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad, and there remains no doubt in my mind that he will prove himself to be the ablest of all our diplomatic corps if he is now to be brought into that line, or into any other public work.” Little that Washington might have said or done could have meant more to Adams.
“The President is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag,” Jefferson wrote to Madison. “Yet, as his departure will mark the moment when the difficulties begin to work, you will see, that they will be ascribed to the new administration.”
Jefferson, too, would depart shortly, after a quick farewell to Adams. “He is as he was,” Adams noted cryptically.
• • •
SO MUCH HAD HAPPENED in John Adams's life—he had done so much, taken such risks, given so much of himself heart and soul in the cause of his country—that he seems not to have viewed the presidency as an ultimate career objective or crowning life achievement. He was not one given to seeing life as a climb to the top of a ladder or mountain, but more as a journey or adventure, even a “kind of romance, which a little embellished with fiction or exaggeration or only poetical ornament, would equal anything in the days of chivalry or knight errantry,” as once he confided to Abigail. If anything, he was inclined to look back upon the long struggle for independence as the proud defining chapter.
In this sense the presidency was but another episode in the long journey, and, as fate would have it, he was left little time to dwell overly on anything but the rush of events and the increasingly dangerous road ahead.
“My entrance into office is marked by a misunderstanding with France, which I shall endeavor to reconcile,” he wrote to John Quincy, “provided that no violation of faith, no stain upon honor is exacted.... America is not scared.”
On the evening of March 13, or possibly the next morning, Adams was hit with stunning news. The French Directory had refused to receive General Pinckney. Forced to leave Paris as though he were an undesirable alien, Pinckney had withdrawn to Amsterdam and was awaiting instructions.
To make matters worse, Adams learned of further French seizures of American ships in the Caribbean and that by decrees issued in Paris, the Directory had, in effect, launched an undeclared war on American shipping everywhere. The crisis had come to a head. Adams faced the threat of all-out war.
Days were consumed by tedious meetings. The weather was miserable, he reported to Abigail. “I have a great cold. The news is not pleasant.” Such confidence in his cabinet as he had expressed to Elbridge Gerry was badly shaken. From what he wrote privately to Abigail, it appears he already sensed what trouble was in store from that quarter. “From the situation where I now am, I see a scene of ambition beyond all my former suspicions or imagination.... Jealousies and rivalries... never stared me in the face in such horrid forms as in the present.”
On March 21 he moved into the President's House vacated by Washington, but what should rightfully have been a fulfilling moment proved only more demoralizing.
The furniture belonging to the public is in the most deplorable condition [he reported to Abigail]. There is not a chair to sit in. The beds and bedding are in a woeful pickle. This house has been a scene of the most scandalous drinking and disorder among the servants that I ever heard of. I would not have one of them for any consideration. There is not a carpet nor a curtain, nor a glass [mirror], nor linen, nor china, nor anything.
Rent for the house was an exorbitant $2,700 a year, plus another $2,500 for carriages and horses. Though Congress would allot $14,000 to purchase furniture, Adams worried that on his salary of $25,000, it would be impossible to make ends meet. They would be more “pinched” than ever in their lives, he warned Abigail. “All the glasses, ornaments, kitchen furniture ... all to purchase. All the china... glass and crockery.
“... All the linen besides.... Secretaries, servants, wood, charities... the million dittoes.” Yet not a word could they say. “We must stand our ground as long as we can.” To no one but her could he ever complain.
The work was more taxing than he had been prepared for, “very dry, dull,” “perplexing,” and “incessant.” But again nothing could be said. “Don't expose this croaking and groaning... I should lose all my character [reputation]for firmness.... Indeed, I sometimes suspect that I deserve a character of peevishness and fretfulness, rather than firmness.”
But more was happening than he let on. On Saturday, March 25, he called for Congress to reconvene in special session on May 15, “to consult and determine on such measures as their wisdom shall be deemed meet for the safety and welfare of the United States.” War clouds gathered over the capital—to the angry indignation of the Republicans. The Federalist press declared the United States had been grievously insulted by France; the Republican press affirmed American friendship with the French and, while expressing the hope that the President would remain true to his inaugural pledge to seek peace, reported that a “certain ex-Secretary” (Hamilton) was secretly preaching war to further his political ambitions.
A lively new newspaper had begun publication in Philadelphia, in answer to Bache's Aurora. Porcupine's Gazette was the work of an English printer and bookseller, William Cobbett, who wrote under the pen name “Peter Porcupine” and immediately demonstrated that he could be as biased, sarcastic, and full of invective as Bache, and attract no less attention. Headlines in Porcupine's Gazette announced that war with France was all but certain:
MR. PINCKNEY, THE AMERICAN MINISTER AT PARIS, HAVING RECEIVED ORDERS TO QUIT THE TERRITORIES OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, HAS ACTUALLY TAKEN HIS DEPARTURE ACCORDINGLY. WAR BETWEEN THESE TWO POWERS MAY THEREFORE BE CONSIDERED INEVITABLE.
Cobbett not only expected and wanted war with France, but favored the alliance with Britain that was bound to result—an increasingly popular view in many quarters.
It is manifestly the design of the French party to lull the people into a fatal security, to deaden their national energy and to defeat in this way those measures of defense which would secure to us our independence. With this view they will fabricate reports of accommodation with France—for this end they are constantly preaching up the improbability of a war with that nation, and some of the base traitors have even declared that in the event of war they will join France.
Adams remained silent, but in letters to Henry Knox and John Quincy said he would do everything possible to settle all disputes with France. To Abigail he confessed to being totally exhausted and begged her to come to his rescue. The more at odds he felt with his cabinet, the less he trusted their judgment, the greater his need for her insight and common sense, her presence in his life. His pleas for her to come grew more urgent even than those he had sent during his difficult debut as Vice President.
“I must go to you or you must come to me. I cannot live without you,” he wrote. And again: “I must entreat you to lose not a moment's time in preparing to come on, that you may take off from me every care of life but that of my public duty, assist me with your councils, and console me with your conversation.”
“The times are critical and dangerous, and I must have you here to assist me,” he told her. “I must now repeat this with zeal and earnestness. I can do nothing without you.”
• • •
ABIGAIL HAD BEEN corresponding faithfully the whole time, offering advice, opinions on people, often saying more than she knew she should as the wife of a president. “My pen runs riot,” she allowed. “I forget that it must grow cautious and prudent.” She had encouraged his confidence in Jefferson. Like others, she had thought the odd circumstance of having a President and Vice President of “differing sentiments” could prove a blessing were both to “aim at the same end, the good of their country.” Conceivably the combination of two well-meaning men could serve to continue the Union as Washington had managed all alone.
When Adams confided that he hoped to keep Hamilton at a safe distance, she provided a withering farsighted assessment. “Beware that spare Cassius has always occurred to me when I have seen that cock sparrow,” she wrote. “Oh, I have read his heart in his wicked eyes. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.”
She prayed that “ ‘things which made for peace’ may not be hid from your eyes.” Her feelings were not those of pride or ostentation, but “solemnized” by the knowledge of the obligations and duties he had assumed. “That you may be enabled to discharge them with honor to yourself, with justice and impartiality to your country, and with the satisfaction to this great people, shall be the daily prayer of your A.A.”
Her own days were taken up with all that would have preoccupied him had he been home, and more. She kept house, ran the farm, settled issues among the hired men, managed the family finances, and tried not to complain about her health or loneliness.
In a particularly memorable letter, she recounted a crisis that arose when the youngest of her hired hands, James Prince, a free black boy she had taken under her wing in Philadelphia, came to ask if he might attend evening classes in town at a new school for apprentices. Abigail, who had taught him herself to read and write, warmly approved, but was soon asked by a neighbor to withdraw James. If she did not, she was told, the other boys would refuse to attend and the school would close. Had James misbehaved, Abigail asked. No, she was informed, it was because he was black. Did these other boys object when he attended church? No, they did not.
“The boy is a freeman as much as any of the young men, and merely because his face is black is he to be denied instruction?” she asked. “How is he to be qualified to procure a livelihood? Is this the Christian principle of doing unto others as we would have others to do to us?”
She requested that the boys be sent to her. “Tell them... that I hope we shall all go to Heaven together.” And this, she was pleased to report to Adams, ended the crisis. She heard no more on the subject; James continued in the school.
As ever, a very considerable part of her time was devoted to correspondence with the rest of the family, about whom she reported to John, seldom withholding her own opinions.
John Quincy was in love again, this time with Louisa Catherine Johnson, the daughter of the American consul in London whom the Adamses knew. Though John Quincy assured his mother that his “matrimonial prospects” were still uncertain, she could not help worrying, as she told him, whether the young woman was right for him, whether she might be too young, too accustomed to the splendors and attractions of Europe—meaning her expensive tastes might be more than he could afford.
“All your observations on the subject are received by me with gratitude, as I knew them to proceed from serious concern and purest parental affection,” answered the young diplomat. The lady in question had “goodness of heart and gentleness of disposition, as well as spirit and discretion,” and would “prove such a daughter as you would wish for your son.”
“My fear arose from the youth and inexperience of the lady,” Abigail wrote in reply, and asked John Quincy to please tell Louisa that “I consider her already my daughter.”
Her greater concern was still over Nabby, whose husband, Colonel Smith, Abigail had sadly concluded, was “a man wholly devoid of judgment.” He had deceived himself with his visionary schemes and “led his family into a state of living which I fear his means will not bear him out.”
In April, as Abigail was preparing to leave for Philadelphia, the weather turned unseasonably hot. Then as suddenly the temperature plunged and John's aged mother went into a sharp decline. “The good old lady is sure she shall die now [that] her physician and nurse are about to leave her, but she judges with me that all ought to be forsaken for the husband,” Abigail informed John.
Refusing to leave, she was with his mother until the end came on April 21, and it was she who made arrangements for the funeral in her front parlor.
“I prepare to set out on the morrow,” she wrote to John on April 26. “Our aged parent has gone to rest.... She fell asleep, and is happy... I am ready and willing to follow my husband wherever he chooses.”
The obituary that appeared in the Boston papers noted that Susanna Boylston Adams Hall, mother of the President of the United States, who died in the eighty-ninth year of her life, had “afforded the present generation a living example of that simplicity of manners and godly sincerity for which the venerable settlers of this country were so justly esteemed.”
From Philadelphia, Adams wrote to Abigail to express his grief and the wish that he had been at Quincy to give her help and comfort.
Our ancestors are now all gone, and we are to follow them very soon to a country where there will be no war or rumor of war, no envy, no jealousy, rivalry or party.
You and I are entering on a new scene, which will be the most difficult and least agreeable of any in our lives. I hope the burden will be lighter to both of us when we come together.
Her journey south was extremely difficult, because of heavy rains and washed-out roads. She felt like Noah's dove, Abigail wrote, her thoughts always returning to the ark she had left. The part she must play now, as wife of the President, though “enviable no doubt in the eyes of some,” was one she had never envied or wanted. “That I may discharge my part with honor and give satisfaction is my most earnest wish.”
Stopping to see Nabby at East Chester, she was stunned to find that Colonel Smith was off again on another of his uncertain ventures, and Nabby too upset even to talk about it, except to say she had no idea where he was. “My reflections upon prospects there took from me all appetite for food,” Abigail confided to her sister Mary, “and depressed my spirits, before too low.”
Expecting her to arrive at Philadelphia on May 10, Adams set off that morning by carriage and met her about twenty-five miles outside the city.
I quitted my own carriage, and took my seat by his side [she wrote]. We rode on to Bristol, where I had previously engaged a dinner, and there upon the banks of the Delaware, we spent the day, getting into the city at sunset.
It took several days for her to recover from the trip. But in little time she, too, was caught up in the tumult of events.
• • •
ONE DAY LATER, on May 11, Thomas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia from Monticello to find the city astir over a private letter he had written more than a year before that had just appeared in print in the New York Minerva, a strongly Federalist paper, edited by Noah Webster. Writing to an Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, during the debate over the Jay Treaty, Jefferson had described America as a country taken over by “timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty,” and by leaders who were assimilating “the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model.” Then, in the line that caused the stir, Jefferson wrote:
It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to those heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.
Successive translations of the letter from English to Italian to French, then back to English again had changed and intensified some of the wording by the time it appeared in the Minerva—“harlot” had become “whore,” for example—but the meaning was essentially unchanged and the letter was taken by many as an unconscionable attack on Washington.
Jefferson said nothing in his defense, and Washington, too, remained silent. But great damage had been done to Jefferson by the “Mazzei Letter,” notwithstanding the many prominent Republicans who claimed he had only been telling the unvarnished truth.
• • •
THE PRESIDENT entered Congress Hall at midday, May 16, 1797, absolutely clear in his mind about his intentions and walked to the dais knowing he had the support of his cabinet in what he was about to say. Indeed, some of the language in the speech he carried was their own, arrived at after he had asked for their answers to a list of specific questions, a technique employed by his predecessor. Long a man of decided temperament, Adams was as determined as he had ever been to maintain the policy of neutrality established by Washington, while refusing to submit to any indignities or to sacrifice American honor—he was determined, in essence, to fulfill his own inaugural promises.
But as an old realist, and one who had read more of history and experienced more of it than any of those in his audience, he also knew how extremely difficult, if not impossible, neutrality would be to achieve and maintain in a world at war. He knew how much could happen in France or Britain or on the high seas, or within his own country, over which he had no control. Regional and party differences had made a tinderbox of American politics. It was not only that Republicans were divided from Federalists, but Federalists were sharply at odds with themselves, and the roll of the strident, often vicious press was changing the whole political atmosphere.
Nor was Adams like George Washington immensely popular, elected unanimously, and all but impervious to criticism. He had no loyal following as Washington had, no coterie of friends in Congress. Further, there was the looming reality that America at the moment had no military strength on land or sea. With authorization from the Republic of France, French privateers continued to prey on the American merchant fleet at will and there was no way to stop them.
In a calm, steady voice, Adams said the French had “inflicted a wound in the American breast,” but that it was his sincere desire to see it healed, and to preserve peace and friendship with all nations. He was therefore calling for both “a fresh attempt” at negotiation with France, and a buildup of American military strength.
While we are endeavoring to adjust all our differences with France by amicable negotiation, with the progress of the war in Europe, the depredations on our commerce, the personal injuries to our citizens, and the general complexion of our affairs, render it my duty to recommend your consideration of effectual measures of defense.
This was not an act of belligerence, but a measure to give added weight and respect to the mission he planned to send to Paris.
As was remarked at the time, the speech bore a strong resemblance to the American eagle, an olive branch in one talon, and in the other the “emblems of defense.” Federalist papers hailed Adams's patriotic fire. He had “shone forth” as in times of old, exciting “the liveliest approbation of all real Americans.”
It may be justly called a true American speech [said the Gazette of the United States]. It breathes in every line true American patriotism. It came from the heart of a tried patriot, and was addressed to the hearts of patriots alone. There was nothing wavering in it; no little trick to catch a transitory approbation from the discontented, or to soothe the fractious. It was the explicit language of the first magistrate of the nation, disclosing to his fellow citizens the honest sentiments of his heart, expressing with proper feeling and sensibility the wrongs done to his injured country, and his determination to attempt to obtain redress; while at the same time it manifested humane anxiety to avert the calamities of war by temperance and negotiations.
Federalist approval was emphatic and widespread. From Mount Vernon, Washington wrote that the President had “placed matters upon their true ground.”
Republicans were enraged. Adams had not only failed to express sufficient sympathy for the French but had sounded a “war-whoop.” How, if he wanted to avoid war, could he press Congress to build up the navy?
Benjamin Bache turned with a fury on the President he had so recently lauded as a prudent, high-minded man of integrity. In almost daily attacks in the Aurora, Adams was belittled as “The President by Three Votes,” mocked again as “His Rotundity,” excoriated as a base hypocrite, a tool of the British, “a man divested of his senses.” He was charged again and again as a creature of Hamilton and the Federalist war hawks.
In fact, most Federalists at this point, including Hamilton, recognized the need for a renewed effort to treat with France, and as Adams did not know, it was largely because of Hamilton's influence that the cabinet had given their full support to the peace mission.
Within days Adams appointed two special envoys who, with General Pinckney, would comprise a new commission to proceed to Paris. He chose John Marshall of Virginia, whom he did not know, and his own former aide in Paris, Francis Dana. But when Dana declined because of poor health, Adams named Elbridge Gerry.
Marshall, a forty-two-year-old lawyer, was an ardent champion of George Washington under whom he had served gallantly in the war. A cousin of Jefferson's, but not an admirer of the Vice President, he was known to be able, skilled in the law, and, as mattered greatly, he was one of Virginia's few Federalists. Secretary of State Pickering and others in the cabinet strongly approved the choice.
Elbridge Gerry, however, was unacceptable to Pickering and the cabinet, who thought him too independent and unreliable. “It is ten to one against his agreeing with his colleagues,” Secretary of War McHenry warned the President. Even Abigail questioned the choice. But Adams insisted. He needed someone on the commission whose friendship and loyalty were beyond doubt. He knew Gerry—“I knew Gerry infinitely better than any of them,” he later said. The old bond of 1776 was still a tie that held Adams to Rush and even to Jefferson, for all the strains of politics. From the time of their ride to Philadelphia by horseback in the crisis winter of 1776, Adams had felt Gerry was someone to count on, and he was prepared to do just that in the present crisis. With the exception of his own son, John Quincy, there was perhaps no man in whom Adams placed more trust. Also, importantly, of the three envoys Gerry was the most sympathetic to France and, with his open admiration of Jefferson, came the closest to making it a bipartisan commission.
Later, when Marshall arrived in Philadelphia, Adams felt still better about the makeup of the commission. He and Marshall liked each other at once, even used virtually the same words to describe one another. Marshall judged Adams a “sensible, plain, candid, good tempered man,” while Adams wrote of Marshall, “he is a plain man, very sensible, cautious, and learned in the law of nations.”
In Paris the three American envoys would be dealing with the extremely wily and charming new French Foreign Minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord. A former bishop in the Catholic Church, Talleyrand had only recently returned to France after more than two years in exile in Philadelphia, where he had been well treated. Adams had known him but only slightly, not enough to have a sense of what to expect.
• • •
THE UNDECLARED WAR at sea continued. That spring Adams was informed that already the French had taken more than 300 trading vessels. American seamen had been wounded. In March the French captors of a ship out of Baltimore, the Cincinnatus, had tortured the American captain with thumbscrews in an unsuccessful attempt to make him say he was carrying British cargo.
“The task of the President is very arduous, very perplexing, and very hazardous. I do not wonder Washington wished to retire from it, or rejoiced in seeing an old oak in his place,” observed Abigail, who in her letters to her sister Mary was to provide an inside look at the Adams presidency like no other, much as she had in portraying their life in France and London years before, writing always to the moment and with untrammeled candor.
Adams was in his office in the President's House most of every day and from “such close application” looked exhausted. She took charge of the large house, supervised the staff, and sent off orders to Mary for shipments of the President's favorite New England cheese, bacon, white potatoes, and cider. In keeping with “old habit,” she told Mary, their day began at five in the morning. Breakfast was at eight, and they saw each other again at dinner, customarily served at three. “I begin to feel a little more at home, and less anxiety about the ceremonious part of my duty,” Abigail allowed. “I am obliged every day to devote two hours for the purpose of seeing company.”
The day is past, and a fatiguing one it has been [she closed another letter at eight o'clock in the evening]. The ladies of Foreign Ministers and the Ministers, with our own secretaries and ladies have visited me today, and add to them, the whole levee today of Senate and House. Strangers, etc. making near one hundred asked permission to visit me, so that from past 12 till near 4:00, I was rising up and sitting down.
She was both involved and vitally interested in her husband's world. She read all the newspapers, and in time came to know the names and faces of everyone in Congress, their background and political views. Little transpired in the capital that she did not know about. Yet her interest in matters at home never flagged. She kept contact with nieces and nephews, inquired regularly about the welfare of her pensioners: Parson Wibird, who had grown old and infirm, and her aged former servant Phoebe, to whom she sent money and made sure she had sufficient firewood and whatever other necessities were wanting.
The President's worries and burdens were never out of mind. “Mrs. Tufts once styled my situation ‘splendid misery,’ ” Abigail reminded Mary. Interestingly, it was a phrase Vice President Jefferson also used to describe the presidency.
When Adams named John Quincy to be minister to Prussia, more Republican protest erupted. Washington had never appointed relatives to office, it was said, not even distant relatives. The President must resign, charged the Aurora, “before it is too late to retrieve our deranged affairs.” When Congress chose to leave some matters to the “discretion” of the President, the Aurora attacked Adams for his excessive vanity.
“We may truly say we know not what a day will bring forth,” Abigail observed in her running account. “From every side we are in danger. We are in perils by land, and we are in perils by sea, and in perils by false brethren.” Whom she meant by false brethren, she did not say. But the Vice President all the while did nothing whatever to help his former friend the President. Further, he made no secret of his belief that Adams was leading the nation straight to war.
After years of seclusion at Monticello, Jefferson had, with amazing agility, stepped back into the kind of party politics he professed to abhor, and in no time emerged as leader of the opposition. With Madison in retirement, and the vice presidency providing ample free time, Jefferson kept extremely busy as a “closet politician,” in one man's expression, writing letters and lending support—ideas, information, and money—to the Republican press, including such “gladiators of the quill” as a dissolute Scottish pamphleteer and scandalmonger named James T. Callender, who wrote for the Aurora and specialized in attacks on John Adams.
The Francis Hotel, where Jefferson continued to lodge, became headquarters for the Republican inner circle. Any pretense of harmony between the President and Vice President was dispensed with. Like other Republicans, Jefferson failed to understand how Adams could reconcile negotiation for peace with measures of defense, and in private correspondence accused Adams of willfully endangering the peace. When some of this got back to Adams, he angrily declared it bespoke a mind “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.”
Yet given all that Jefferson was doing, and the combustible atmosphere of the moment, Adams's rancorous comments were remarkably few and mild. Many in the Federalist party suspected Jefferson of outright treachery against his own country.
Convinced that the best hope for the world was the defeat of Britain by France, and that such an outcome was imminent, Jefferson privately advised the French charge d'affaires in Philadelphia, Philippe-Henry-Joseph de Letombe, that the Directory should show the three American envoys all proper courtesy but “then drag out the negotiations at length.”
Letombe wrote of the meeting with “the wise Jefferson,” in a report to his Foreign Minister, dated June 7, 1797. America, Jefferson had impressed upon Letombe, was “penetrated with gratitude to France” and would “never forget that it owes its liberation to France.” The new President of the United States was another matter, however. Jefferson was unsparing: “Mr. Adams is vain, irritable, stubborn, endowed with excessive self-love, and still suffering pique at the preference accorded Franklin over him in Paris.” But Adams's term of office was only four years, Jefferson reminded Letombe. Besides, Adams did not have popular support. “He only became President by three votes, and the system of the United States will change along with him.”
Possibly these were not Jefferson's exact words; possibly his assessment of Adams was not as harsh and patently disloyal as Letombe's account would make it appear. But if what Letombe recorded was all that Jefferson had to say for Adams, this would seem to have proved the end of a long friendship. And whatever Jefferson's exact words may have been, clearly the charge d'affaires was led to conclude that the difficulties of the moment were not a question of American regard for France, but of the difficult, unpopular, aberrant old man who temporarily held office as President.
The truth, it happens, was that Adams and Jefferson both wanted peace with France and each was working to attain that objective, though in their decidedly different ways.
SUMMER MARKED the departure of the envoys, Gerry sailing from Boston, Marshall from Philadelphia, where Congress sweltered and fumed trying to wind up business, before “the sick season” came on.
She could not wait to start for home, Abigail wrote. She longed for a sea breeze and her rose bush. “The President really suffers for want of a journey, or rather for want of some relaxation,” she told Mary Cranch.
Today will be the fifth great dinner I have had, about 36 gentlemen today, as many more next week, and I shall have to get through the whole of Congress, with their appendages. Then comes the 4th of July, which is a still more tedious day, as we must then have not only all Congress, but all the gentlemen of the city, the Governor and officers and companies... I hope the day will not be hot.
The Fourth turned out to be a “fine, cool day,” and her reception a great success.
... my fatigue arose chiefly from being dressed at an early hour, and receiving the very numerous sets of company who were so polite as to pay their compliments to me in succession in my drawing room after visiting the President below, and partaking of cake, wine, and punch with him. To my company were added the ladies of foreign ministers and Home Secretaries with a few others. The parade lasted from 12 until four o'clock.
To at least one of those present, she and the President seemed the picture of calm good cheer. Henrietta Liston, the British ambassador's wife, described Adams as “steady and resolute,” while “Mrs. Adams... has spirit enough to laugh at Bache's abuse of her husband, which poor Mrs. Washington could not do.”
In days the city had become a bake house again, as Abigail wrote. “The hot weather of July has weakened us all. Complaints of the bowels are very frequent and troublesome.” Strangely, cats were dying all over the city. The streets were filled with dead cats. No one had an explanation, and no one in Congress wished to delay departure an hour longer than necessary.
On July 10, exhausted, irritable members of both houses started for home convinced the special session had only aggravated party divisions.
Adams had hoped it would help unite the country, and in this plainly he had failed.
There was some consolation, however. After a good deal of fuss and bickering, Congress had at last approved an Act Providing a Naval Armament. It was hardly what Adams had called for, but it was a start, providing funds to equip and man three frigates, the Constitution, the United States, and the Constellation, which had been built during the Washington administration but remained unequipped for service.
With a cooling rain falling, the Adamses started for home on July 19. Why, asked the Aurora, had the President of the United States “absconded” from the seat of government at a time when the public mind was “exceedingly agitated”?
• • •
IT WAS A SUMMER without incident. There was no news from France, no worsening or lessening of the crisis. For Adams the pleasures of August and September at Peacefield had all the desired effect. By the time they were heading back to Philadelphia, he and Abigail were both rested and revived. Abigail wrote of feeling better than she had in years.
Also, one news item appears to have added considerably to their outlook. John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Johnson had been married, as the Adamses learned just before leaving home. The small announcement in a Boston paper, like the first word from John Quincy himself, appeared two months after the fact. The young couple were married on July 26 in the ancient Anglican church known as All Hallows Barking by the Tower of London.
“I have now the happiness of presenting to you another daughter,” read John Quincy's letter to his “Dear and Honored Parents,” each of whom responded with an appropriately warm letter of congratulations. “And may the blessing of God Almighty be bestowed on this marriage and all its connections and effects,” wrote Adams in benediction.
The departure from Quincy took place in the first week of October, but the Adamses were not to reach the capital for more than a month. Yellow fever again raged in Philadelphia, as they learned en route, and so it was necessary to stop and wait at East Chester with Nabby. Adams was kept apprised by daily reports. Two-thirds of the population of Philadelphia had fled the city. The government had scattered to various outlying towns. He imagined members of Congress stranded along the way all up and down the country, all waiting as he was, “in a very disagreeable, awkward, and uncertain situation.” Told there had been an attempt to break into the President's House and asked if a guard should be posted, Adams said no, lest a sentinel at the door lead people to think the situation worse than they knew.
The wait “at East Chester was not easy, as much as he and Abigail adored Nabby and the four grandchildren. The house was small, and the continued absence of Colonel Smith cast a shadow. Abigail found East Chester itself unbearably dull. She worried about Nabby living there, and urged her to come with the children to Philadelphia. “I cannot leave her here this winter with not a single creature within 20 miles of her to speak a word to, or shorten the long solitary winter evening,” she told Mary. But Nabby refused. “I cannot say as much as is in my mind,” wrote Abigail, “the subject being a very delicate one.”
Adams went to New York for a dinner in his honor. Otherwise, to fill the time there was little but the newspapers and talk of a sensational scandal involving Alexander Hamilton. Possibly for Abigail, who claimed to have seen “the very devil” in Hamilton's eyes, the story came as no surprise.
The “Reynolds Affair” was a complicated tangle of financial dealings, adultery, blackmail, and alleged corruption in the Department of the. Treasury, all dating back five years. In 1792, while his wife and children were away, Hamilton had become involved in an “improper connection” with a young woman named Maria Reynolds. Her husband, James Reynolds, a speculator with an unsavory reputation, commenced to blackmail Hamilton, until the point when he, Reynolds, went to prison for an earlier swindle. It was then, while in prison, that Reynolds, in an effort to ease his case, got word to three Republican members of Congress, including Senator James Monroe, that Hamilton was not only an adulterer, but, as Secretary of the Treasury, secretly profiteering with government funds. When the three confronted Hamilton with the charges, he denied any corrupt act as a public official, but acknowledged the affair with Mrs. Reynolds and the blackmail plot, with the understanding that they, as gentlemen, would keep silent, which they did to a degree. A few more were let in on the secret, including the Republican clerk of the House, John Beckley, and Thomas Jefferson.
But it was not until that summer of 1797 that the story broke in a series of unsigned pamphlets produced by James Callender, the unscrupulous writer for the Aurora, whose source apparently was Beckley.
Callender dismissed the adulterous affair as a cover story and accused Hamilton of being a partner with Reynolds in corrupt financial dealings. In response, Hamilton published his own pamphlet, Observations on Certain Documents... in which... the Charge of Speculation against Alexander Hamilton... is Fully Refuted. He denied any improper speculation with James Reynolds, but confessed to the adulterous affair. “My real crime,” Hamilton wrote, “is an amorous connection with his wife.”
Hamilton's disgrace was a windfall for the Republicans and all who had long thought him corrupt. Presumably the scandal would put a finish to his public career.
Jefferson appears to have made no comment on the Reynolds Affair. Nor did Adams, though it is certain he and Abigail heard plenty, such was the mood in Philadelphia when in November they arrived back at the President's House, after an absence of fully four months. “Alas, alas, how weak is human nature,” wrote Abigail to her son Thomas.
There was still no report from the three envoys to France. Speaking before Congress on November 23, Adams could acknowledge only that the “unpleasant state of things” continued. The wait would go on, and the lack of information, plus the suspicion that some people knew more than they were saying, only put nerves further on edge.
Feelings ran deep, dividing the parties, dividing old friends. “Men who have been intimate all their lives,” wrote Jefferson, “cross the streets to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.”
• • •
IN EUROPE, French armies had been sweeping across Italy and Austria, in a campaign of French aggrandizement led by young General Napoleon Bonaparte, who appeared invincible. Now, with the start of a new year, 1798, Bonaparte had been given command of all forces on land and sea to carry the war across the Channel to Britain, and as John Quincy reported to his father, the expedition was “in great forwardness.” Bonaparte shortly was to change his mind and lead his forces to Egypt instead, as John Quincy would also report. The French had become formidable as never before.
January 1798 in Congress Hall in Philadelphia, by contrast, was marked by a battle royal on the floor of the House. Vicious animosity of a kind previously confined to newspaper attacks broke out in the first physical assault to occur in Congress. In the midst of debate, when Federalist Roger Griswold of Connecticut insulted Republican Matthew Lyon of Vermont, Lyon crossed the chamber and spat in Griswold's face. Soon after, Griswold retaliated with a cane. Lyon grabbed fire tongs from the fireplace, and the two went at each other until, kicking and rolling on the floor, they were pulled apart.
To some the scene provided comic relief. To others it was sad testimony to how very far the republican ideal had descended. It was also apt prelude to much that would follow.
Step by step, events were moving toward the precipice, as Adams said. The first hint of trouble with the mission to France had been in a letter to Adams from General Pinckney in November, but it was a hint only, nothing to go on. In January, again in a private letter, came word from John Marshall by way of The Hague warning that the mission might not be received by the French Directory. In February, to make the tension still worse, Adams had to inform Congress that a French privateer had actually attacked a British merchant ship inside Charleston Harbor.
“We are yet all in the dark respecting our envoys,” Abigail wrote on February 16; and again in another week: “Our envoys have been near six months in Paris but to this hour not a line has been received.”
In the meanwhile, as the President was unaware, his cabinet—Wolcott and McHenry in particular—were receiving continued advice and directions from Alexander Hamilton, who had supposedly retired from public life.
Hamilton was still opposed to war with France. “It is an undoubted fact that there is a very general and strong aversion to war in the minds of the people of the country,” he wrote to McHenry. “It is an undoubted fact that there is a very general indisposition toward the war in the minds of the people of the United States,” McHenry dutifully advised the President four days later. But should the present attempt to negotiate fail, then the President must address the Congress in a style “cautious, solemn, grave, and void of asperity,” declared McHenry—Hamilton also having told him this was what he was to say.
At last, late the evening of March 4, a year to the day since Adams became President, official dispatches arrived in Philadelphia and were delivered immediately to Timothy Pickering's desk at the Department of State at Fifth and Chestnut Streets. Four of the dispatches were in cipher and it would be several days before they were decoded. But the message of the fifth dispatch was clear. Seething with indignation, Pickering pulled on a coat and hurried three blocks to the President's House.
What Adams read was extremely unsettling. The government of France had refused to see the envoys. The mission had failed. Furthermore, the Directory had decreed all French ports closed to neutral shipping and declared that any ship carrying anything produced in England was subject to French capture.
Promptly the next morning, Monday, March 5, Adams sent the uncoded dispatch to Congress. But there was more to the story, as he soon learned with the decoding of the other dispatches.
After arriving in Paris in the first week of October, the three American envoys were kept waiting for several days and then were granted a meeting with Foreign Minister Talleyrand for all of fifteen minutes. More days of silence followed. Then began a series of visits from three secret agents representing Talleyrand—Jean Conrad Hottinguer, Pierre Bellamy, and Lucien Hauteval—who were referred to by the Americans in their dispatches as X, Y, and Z. The Foreign Minister was favorably disposed toward the United States, the American envoys were informed, but in order for negotiations to proceed, a douceur (a sweetener) would be necessary, a bribe of some $250,000 for Talleyrand personally. In addition, a loan of $10,000,000 for the Republic of France was required as compensation for President Adams's “insults” in his speech before Congress the previous May.
Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry refused to negotiate on such terms. M. Hottinguer, the X of X, Y, and Z, reminded them of the “power and violence of France,” as Marshall recorded, but the Americans held their ground. “Gentlemen,” said Hottinguer, “you do not speak to the point.
“It is money. It is expected that you will offer the money.... What is your answer?” to which General Pinckney emphatically replied, “No! No! Not a sixpence.”
The last of the dispatches was not entirely decoded until March 12, and for several days Adams struggled over what to do, listening to advice and scribbling his thoughts on paper as his mood swung one way then another. He wrote of the “continued violences” of the French at sea, of their “unexampled arrogance” in refusing to receive the envoys, and declared such “injury, outrage, and insult” more than a self-respecting nation should ever have to submit to. But he also noted that peace might still be attainable, and, in fact, peace with honor was still his determined objective.
Wild rumors swept the city. It was said France had already declared war on the United States, that the French were moving to take possession of Florida and Louisiana.
Adams's message to Congress on March 19 revealed only that the diplomatic mission had failed, and thus he must call again for the measures necessary to defend the nation in the event of attack. It was as mild a statement as he could have made under the circumstances. There was not a word about war, nor anything said of the contents of the dispatches, except that they had been examined and “maturely considered.”
The Republicans immediately decried the message as a declaration of war. In a letter to Madison, Jefferson called it “insane” and commenced lobbying for ways to delay action and allow time for Bonaparte to invade Britain. Jefferson proposed that members of Congress adjourn at once and go home to consult their constituents on the great crisis. “The present period ... of two or three weeks,” he told Madison in a burst of hyperbole, “is the most eventful ever known since that of 1775, and will decide whether the principles established by that contest are to prevail, or give way to those they subverted.”
Convinced that Adams was deliberately withholding information favorable to the French, Republicans in and out of Congress began insisting that the documents be made available at once. Any delay would be a sign of further duplicity. The Aurora taunted Adams for being “afraid to tell.”
“Beds of roses have never been his destiny,” Abigail wrote of her husband. Whether he would reveal more of the dispatches was something only he could determine, she told Mary; but “clamor who will,” great care must be taken that nothing endanger the lives of the envoys who were still in Paris. The Republicans, French agents, and the “lying wretch” Bache intended to abuse and misrepresent the President until they forced him to resign, “and then they will reign triumphant, headed by the man of the people, “Jefferson.
The respect she had expressed for Jefferson the year before had vanished. How different was the President's situation from that of Washington, whose Vice President had “never combined with a party against him... never intrigued with foreign ministers or foreign courts against his own government... never made Bache his companion and counsellor.” John Adams was no warmonger. In self-defense the country might become involved in a war, and for that the country should be prepared, which was the President's intent. Of what possible benefit could a war be to him? she asked. “He has no ambition for military glory. He cannot add by war to his peace, comfort, or happiness. It must accumulate upon him an additional load of care, toil, trouble, malice, hatred, and I dare say, revenge.”
On Monday, April 2, on the floor of the House, Representative Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania, who had replaced Madison in the leadership of the Republicans, stood to propose that the President be requested to turn over the text of the dispatches. Republicans who had been clamoring for disclosure were now joined by a number of High Federalists who had gotten wind of the damaging content of the dispatches and were happy to help the Republicans step into a trap of their own making. By a vote of 65 to 27 the House demanded that the full text be delivered at once.
Adams, who had apparently concluded that the envoys were by now safely out of France, released the documents the next day, and with the galleries cleared of visitors and the doors secured, the House went into executive session.
The revelation that the crisis was not less than the administration implied, but far worse, hit the Republicans like a hammer. They were “struck dumb, and opened not their mouths,” wrote Abigail. Many representatives privately voiced outrage over the effrontery of Talleyrand and his agents. Some offered lame new arguments. It was said that the whole XYZ story was a contrivance of the Federalist warmongers, that the breakdown of negotiations was the fault of the American envoys. Jefferson, while refusing to comment publicly, privately blamed Adams for past insults to the French, and insisted that Talleyrand and his agents were not, after all, the French government, which was “above suspicion.”
Once the Senate voted to have copies of the documents printed for use within Congress only, it was only a matter of days before they were public knowledge.
In the House, Gallatin had urged that the dispatches not be published, certain that they would dash any surviving hope of a settlement with France—which, it appears, was exactly the fear that troubled the President. And, indeed, High Federalists were claiming it was too late for preaching peace any longer. The Federalist press protested the “damnable outrages” of the French, and a wave of patriotic anti-French anger swept the city and the country with unexpected passion. As Abigail reported to Mary Cranch and John Quincy, public opinion in the capital changed overnight. The tricolor cockade of France that Republicans had been wearing in their hats all but disappeared from sight. No one was heard singing French patriotic songs in public as before, or espousing the cause of France.
The Aurora, in turn, lashed out at the President as a man “unhinged” by the “delirium of vanity.” Had Adams refrained from insulting the French, had he chosen more suitable envoys, the country would never have been brought to such a pass. But in a matter of days subscriptions and advertising fell off so drastically that it appeared the paper might fail. Anger at Bache and Callender was as intense nearly as at the French. John Fenno, editor of the rival Gazette of the United States, asked, “In the name of justice and honor, how long are we to tolerate this scum of party filth and beggerly corruption ... to go thus with impunity?” In the heat of the moment, it was a question many were asking, including the wife of the President. Bache and his kind had the “malice and falsehood of Satan,” wrote Abigail, whose dislike of the press, dating from the attacks on Adams by London newspapers a decade before, had nearly reached the breaking point.
For the first time, she began to fear for her husband. “Such lies and falsehoods were continually circulated,” she wrote to Mary, “and base and incendiary letters sent to the house addressed to him, that I really have been alarmed for his personal safety.... With this temper in a city like this, materials for a mob might be brought together in ten minutes.”
• • •
THE COUNTRY BEGAN to prepare for war. On April 8, 1798, Representative Samuel Sewall, a Federalist from Marblehead, Massachusetts, called on Congress to give the President all he had asked for and slowly, somewhat reluctantly, Congress swung into action. Measures were passed for arming merchant ships. Substantial funds—nearly $1 million—were voted for harbor fortifications and cannon foundries. In May a bill passed empowering United States warships to capture any French privateer or cruiser found in American waters.
“The merchant vessels along the wharf in this city begin to wear a warlike appearance,” reported Porcupine's Gazette. “I dare say the French spies have been writing many, many a melancholy letter on the subject to their partisans who are laying off the coast.”
Led by Gallatin, the Republicans mounted vigorous resistance, and nothing passed by large majorities. The “Executive Party,” Gallatin argued, was creating the crisis only to “increase their power and to bind us by the treble chain of fiscal, legal and military despotism.”
A bill for a “provisional army” was passed, but not before it was cut from 25,000 men to 10,000, which was still more than Adams had asked for or wanted. For though he was the greatest advocate of the navy of any American statesman of his generation, Adams deplored the idea of a standing army.
The rebirth of the navy—the “wooden walls” he wanted above all for defense of the country—and a new Department of the Navy, separate from the War Department, were his pride and joy. Little that he achieved as President would give him greater satisfaction, and with his choice of the first Secretary of the Navy, the able, energetic Benjamin Stoddert of Maryland, he brought into his administration the one truly loyal ally he had close at hand.
From every part of the country came hundreds of patriotic “addresses” to the President—expressions of loyalty and “readiness” from state legislatures, merchant groups, fraternal orders, college students, small towns and cities. Suddenly, Adams was awash in a great upswelling of patriotism. His popularity soared. Never had he known such attention and acclaim, which some thought surpassed even what Washington had known while in office.
Abigail, making her social calls about the city, found people stopping on the street to bow to her or lift their hats, something she had not experienced before. “People begin to see who have been their firm unshaken friends, steady to their interests and defenders of their rights and liberties,” she wrote. “In short, we are now wonderfully popular except with Bache & Co., who in his paper calls the President, old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams.”
At the New Theater on Chestnut Street a young performer named Gilbert Fox was stopping the show each night singing “Hail Columbia,” which was “The President's March” with new lyrics composed by Joseph Hopkinson of Philadelphia, son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Francis Hopkinson. Abigail was part of the full house the night of its premiere, April 25, when Fox was called back to sing it three more times and cheers from the audience, according to Abigail, might have been heard a mile away. “The theater, you know,” she reminded Thomas, “has been called the pulse of the people.”
A few nights later, with the President in the audience as Fox sang “Hail Columbia,” the response was still more stupendous. The song was called for “over and over.” The audience joined in the singing, danced in the aisles.
Firm, united let us be. Rallying 'round our liberty. As a band of brothers joined, Peace and safety we shall find.
When a lone man tried to sing “Ciera,” the marching song of the French Revolution, there were shouts to throw him out.
Even the High Federalists heartily approved of John Adams as they never had. The President, it was said, had awakened the nation from its “fatal stupor.”
Adams himself, exhilarated by such unprecedented popularity, appeared to be as caught up in the spirit of the moment as anyone. Deeply touched by the patriotic addresses that kept pouring in, he spent hours laboring to answer them, as if obliged to respond to each and every one, and in some of what he wrote, he appeared ready to declare war anytime. “To arms then, my young friends,” he said in reply to the youth of Boston, “to arms, especially by sea.”
One May afternoon crowds lined Market Street as a thousand young men of Philadelphia marched two-by-two to the President's House, wearing in their hats, as a sign of their support, black cockades like those worn by Washington's troops in the Revolution, Adams received a delegation of them in the Levee Room wearing a dress uniform and sword.
Yet here and there in his replies to the patriotic addresses were to be found clear signs that peace, not war, remained his objective. “I should be happy in the friendship of France upon honorable conditions, under any government she may choose to assume,” he said in a letter to the citizens of Hartford, Connecticut.
When he called for a day of fasting and prayer, he was roundly mocked in the Republican press, but on the day itself the churches were filled. To Vice President Jefferson, it was as though an evil spell had been cast over the capital. He called it a “reign of witches,” and saw no difference between Adams and the “war party.” The new navy, in Jefferson's view, was a colossal waste of money.
When a fight broke out between two street gangs wearing the black and tricolor cockades, the cavalry was called in. It had become dangerous to set foot outside the door at night, Jefferson wrote. “Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here,” he told his daughter Martha. “They seem, like salamanders, to consider fire as their element.” One French emigre would remember people acting as though a French army might land at any moment. “Everybody was suspicious of everybody else; everywhere one saw murderous glances.”
Benjamin Bache's house was assaulted, his windows smashed. It was rumored that French agents were plotting to burn the city. At the presidential mansion, Adams finally consented to have a sentry posted at the door.
What Adams's thoughts were through all this he did not record. His personal correspondence had dried up. He wrote almost no letters at all of the kind in which he customarily unburdened himself—in large part because Abigail was with him, but also because he had almost no time to himself.
By all signs, however, he was still of two minds in addressing the crisis. In the image of the American eagle, he still clutched both olive branch and arrows, even if, on occasion in his public poses, his head, unlike the eagle's, was turned to the arrows.
In his physical appearance, Adams was noticeably changed. He was uncharacteristically pale and had lost weight—“he falls away,” Abigail noted. If not exactly toothless, as Bache said, he had suffered the loss of several more teeth, about which he was quite self-conscious. Abigail worried that he was smoking too many cigars and working to the point of collapse.
Some afternoons he is called from his room twenty times in the course of it, to different persons, besides the hours devoted to the ministers of the different departments, the investigation necessary to be made of those persons who apply for offices or are recommended, the weighing the merits, and pretentions of different candidates for the same office, etc., etc., etc.
“I dare not say how really unwell he looks,” she told Cotton Tufts. To Mary Cranch she confided, “I think sometimes that if the [Congress] does not rise and give the President respite, they will have Jefferson sooner than they wish.”
Yet his spirits were fine, his resolve unwavering in the face of Talleyrand and the Directory. “Poor wretches,” she wrote, “I suppose they want him to cringe, but he is made of oak instead of willow. He may be torn up by the roots, or break, but he will never bend.”
• • •
ON JUNE 12, Adams received news that rocked him more than he dared show. A letter arrived from William Vans Murray, who had replaced John Quincy as minister at The Hague. Dated April 12, two months past, it revealed that while envoys Pinckney and Marshall had left Paris, Elbridge Gerry had remained behind. It seemed France wished to treat with Gerry alone.
For Adams, who had banked so much on Gerry against the advice of nearly everyone, it was a painful, infuriating turn of events, as once again Abigail reported to Mary.
Can it be possible, can it be believed that Talleyrand has thus declared and fascinated Mr. Gerry, that he should dare to take upon him such a responsibility? I cannot credit it, yet I know the sin which most easily besets him is obstinacy, and a mistaken policy. You may easily suppose how distressed the President is at this conduct, and the more so because he thought Gerry would certainly not go wrong, and he acted [on] his own judgment, against his counsellors, “who have been truer prophets than they wish themselves.” Gerry means the good of his country, he means the peace of it, but he should consider it must not be purchased by national disgrace and dishonor. If he stays behind he is a ruined man in the estimation of his countrymen. This is all between ourselves.
How could Gerry possibly stay “among the wolves?” Mary would ask in response. She felt great distress for the President, she said, but then “he ought not have infallibility demanded of him.”
On June 17, John Marshall arrived by ship in New York, and in another two days received a hero's welcome in Philadelphia. Marshall said nothing about going to war with France, however. Indeed, for all he had been through, Marshall was confident, he told Adams, that the French did not want a war with the United States.
Marshall was an impressive man, tall, solidly handsome, unmistakably intelligent, and without airs. Further, unlike all the others advising Adams, he had met with the French and strongly advocated caution and moderation. In effect, Marshall told Adams that there need not be a war, which had been Adams's instinctive sense all along. Marshall also informed him that Elbridge Gerry had remained behind in Paris because he had been told by Talleyrand that if he left, war would follow. Gerry had made his decision for the good of the country, aware of the scorn he would be subjected to at home.
If Adams had had any thought of asking for a declaration of war before Congress adjourned, he changed his mind. Instead, he sent a message of all of four sentences, the fourth and most important of which was: “I will never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected, and honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation.”
But with the war clamor at a pitch, all talk of an alternative solution was limited to private discussion. More common was the opinion that a formal declaration of war could not come too soon, a view most strongly held by those nearest Adams, including his wife. In a letter to John Quincy, Abigail described how the town of Newburyport had taken upon itself to build a 20-gun warship to loan to the government, and that all down the coast other cities were following the example. A few weeks later she would write to him again of further progress with the “subscription” ships, her enthusiasm for the burgeoning navy clearly as great as that of her husband. Philadelphia had raised $80,000 to build a 36-gun frigate. New York had subscribed a nearly equal sum for a comparable ship. Baltimore had done the same. “Boston outstrips them all,” she wrote.
Just months earlier Abigail had questioned the very idea of war. Now, one senses, had she been called upon to serve, she would have signed up and marched off without hesitation. “This city, which was formally torpid with indolence and fettered with Quakerism,” she reported proudly, “has become one military school, and every morning the sound of the drum and fife lead forth, ‘A Band of Brothers Joined.’ ” Writing to Mary Cranch, Abigail berated Congress for being so slow to vote a declaration of war. “Why, when we have the thing, should we boggle at the name?”
• • •
CONTRARY TO THE expectations of nearly everyone, Adams did not ask for a declaration of war against France. Had he done so, the Congress would assuredly have obliged. Instead, they turned their attention to the enemies at home.
Another Philadelphia summer had arrived. The temperature in the last week of June was in the 90s, “the weather so hot and close, the flies so tormenting,” Abigail wrote, she hardly had energy to move. “Not a leaf stirs till nine or ten o'clock ... It grows sickly, the city noisome.” In two sweltering weeks, their popularity and confidence never higher, the Federalist majority in Congress passed into law extreme measures that Adams had not asked for or encouraged. But then neither did he oppose them, and their passage and his signature on them were to be rightly judged by history as the most reprehensible acts of his presidency. Still, the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 must be seen in the context of the time, and the context was tumult and fear.
Adams later spoke of the Alien and Sedition Acts as war measures. It was how he saw them then, and how he chose to remember them. “I knew there was need enough of both, and therefore I consented to them,” he would write in explanation long afterward, and at the time, the majority of Congress and most of the country were in agreement.
There was rampant fear of the enemy within. French emigres in America, according to the French consul in Philadelphia, by now numbered 25,000 or more. Many were aristocrats who had fled the Terror; but the majority were refugees from the slave uprisings on the Caribbean island of San Domingo. In Philadelphia a number of French newspapers had been established. There were French booksellers, French schools, French boardinghouses, and French restaurants. The French, it seemed, were everywhere, and who was to measure the threat they posed in the event of war with France?
In addition to the French there were the “wild Irish,” refugees from the Irish Rebellion of 1798 who were thought to include dangerous radicals and in any case, because of their anti-British sentiment, gladly joined ranks with the Republicans. James Callender was sometimes cited as a prime example of this type, apart from the fact that Callender was a Scot.
Beyond that, the United States was at war—declared or not—and there were in fact numbers of enemy agents operating in the country.
The Alien Acts included a Naturalization Act, which increased the required period of residence to qualify for citizenship from five to fourteen years, and the Alien Act, which granted the President the legal right to expel any foreigner he considered “dangerous.” In the view of the Vice President, the Alien Act was something worthy of the ninth century. Jefferson and others imagined a tempestuous John Adams expelling foreigners by the shipload. As it was, they need not have worried. Adams never invoked the law and this despite the urging of Secretary of State Pickering, who did indeed favor massive deportations.
Of greater consequence was the Sedition Act, which made any “False, scandalous, and malicious” writing against the government, Congress, or the President, or any attempt “to excite against them... the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition,” crimes punishable by fine and imprisonment. Though it was clearly a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech, its Federalist proponents in Congress insisted, like Adams, that it was a war measure, and an improvement on the existing common law in that proof of the truth of the libel could be used as a legitimate defense. Still, the real and obvious intent was to stifle the Republican press, and of those arrested and convicted under the law, nearly all were Republican editors.
Such stalwart, respected Federalists as Senators Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts and James Lloyd of Maryland were strongly in support of the Sedition Act. Noah Webster, editor, author, lexicographer, and staunch Federalist, declared it time to stop newspaper editors from libeling those with whom they disagreed, and to his friend Timothy Pickering wrote to urge that the new law be strictly enforced.
Even George Washington privately expressed the view that some publications were long overdue punishment for their lies and unprovoked attacks on the leaders of the union.
Vice President Jefferson, having no wish to be present for the inevitable passage of the Sedition Act, or anything more that might take place in such an atmosphere, quietly packed and went home to Monticello.
There were some Federalists who had mixed feelings about the Sedition Act, and John Marshall was openly opposed. Were he in Congress, Marshall said, he would have voted against it.
Though Adams appears to have said nothing on the subject at the time, it is hard to imagine him not taking a measure of satisfaction from the prospect of the tables turned on those who had tormented him for so long. And if Adams was reluctant to express his views, Abigail was not. Bache and his kind would inevitably provoke measures to silence them, she had predicted to Mary Cranch. They were “so criminal” that they ought to be brought to court. “Yet daringly do the vile incendiaries keep up in Bache's paper the most wicked and base, violent and culminating abuse,” she wrote another day, sure that “nothing will have effect until Congress passes a Sedition Bill.”
It was not uncommon in Philadelphia—or in Massachusetts—to hear talk of the unrivaled influence Abigail Adams had on her husband and of her political sense overall. Fisher Ames once observed that she was “as complete a politician as any lady in the old French Court.” That Adams valued and trusted her judgment ahead of that of any of his department heads there is no question, and she could well have been decisive in persuading Adams to support the Sedition Act. “Bearing neither malice or ill will towards anyone, not even the most deluded ... I wish the laws of our country were competent to punish the stirrer up of sedition, the writer and printer of base and unfounded calumny,” she wrote, and the key word to her was “unfounded.” She wanted proven lies to be judged unacceptable. This, she was sure, would “contribute as much to the peace and harmony of our country as any measure, and in times like the present, a more careful and attentive watch ought to be kept over foreigners.”
But it was also possible that Adams needed no persuading, and that in what she wrote to Mary Cranch, Abigail was speaking for both of them. Nor, importantly, was her influence always decisive, as shown by his choice of Elbridge Gerry as an envoy to France and, most importantly, his continued reluctance to declare war.
• • •
ON JULY 2, to meet the cost of the military buildup, the House voted a first direct tax on the people, a tax on land. Also, on July 2, to the surprise of many, Adams nominated George Washington as commander-in-chief of the new provisional army. “It was one of those strokes which the prospect and exigency of the times required,” wrote Abigail, “and which the President determined upon without consultation.” In addition, Adams submitted a list of proposed general officers that included Alexander Hamilton, but also several Republicans, most notably Aaron Burr, as well as his own son-in-law, Colonel Smith.
In a matter of days, Congress abrogated the French-American treaties of 1778, created a permanent Marine Corps, passed the Sedition Act, and approved the nomination of Washington as supreme commander. War fever was at a pitch.
On July 9, Secretary McHenry left for Mount Vernon by the express mail stage carrying Washington's commission and a letter from Adams saying that were it in his power to appoint Washington President, he would gladly do so.
On July 16, Congress adjourned and departed the city with a rush. By July 25, when the Adamses set off, people were already dying in what would become the worst yellow fever epidemic since 1793.
• • •
THE YEAR 1798, the most difficult and consequential year of John Adams's presidency, was to provide him no respite. His stay at Quincy would be longer even than the year before, but the stress of the undeclared war—the Quasi-War, as it came to be known, or Half-War, as he called it—combined with the threatening ambitions of Alexander Hamilton and growing dissension within Adams's own cabinet, filled his days with frustration and worry. There was precious little peace to be found at Peacefield in the summer of 1798, and especially as Abigail fell so ill that she very nearly died.
The first days at home were supposed to have been an even greater delight than usual, for unbeknown to Adams, a huge improvement to the house had taken place in their absence. An entire wing with a spacious parlor and a library above, had been added to the east end, and the whole house “new painted” inside and out. Abigail had secretly arranged it all that spring through Cotton Tufts, as a surprise for Adams. It was a “wren's house” no more. She had doubled its size, much as Jefferson had done at Monticello, except on a considerably smaller scale and with the difference that she did it entirely to her own wishes, paying for it out of money she saved from household expenses at Philadelphia, and never asking for Adams's permission or opinion. “I meant to have it all done snug... before I come,” she had told Mary Cranch in April. “I know the President will be glad when it is done, but he can never bear to trouble himself about any thing of the kind, and he has not the taste for it.”
The parlor was for Abigail, the second-floor library, or “Book room,” for Adams, and like the parlor, it was to have a handsome fireplace and windows on three sides. It must accommodate all his books “in regular order and be a pleasant room for the President to do business in,” Abigail had directed.
But in late June, just as the project was nearly finished, a Quincy neighbor on his way through Philadelphia stopped to pay his respects and revealed the whole secret to Adams, who, Abigail was happy to report, responded with a hearty laugh.
Whatever pleasure they might have found in their expanded quarters was foreclosed before they ever reached home. Abigail was taken ill on the journey and confined to her bed from the day they arrived, August 8.
She was “very weak,” Adams wrote to Oliver Wolcott. Some days later he reported to Timothy Pickering, “Mrs. Adams is extremely low and in great danger.” In fact, she was as sick as she had ever been and it was with difficulty that Adams was able to concentrate on anything else.
Nabby, who with her daughter Caroline had come for an extended visit, hoping to be of help, wrote to John Quincy that it had become a different house. “The illness of our dear mother has cast a gloom over the face of everything here, and it scarce seems like home without her enlivening cheerfulness.”
To Secretary of War McHenry, Adams would describe it as “the most gloomy summer” he had known, but he could as easily have called it one of the most gloomy passages of his life, second only to his own siege of illness and despair in Amsterdam. Writing to George Washington later, after two months at home, Adams would say that Abigail's fate was still very precarious “and mine in consequence of it,”
Yet to judge from the volume of correspondence, the number and variety of issues he dealt with, he worked no less diligently than usual, spending long hours at his desk in the new library across the hall from Abigail's sickroom. Official reports from Philadelphia, dispatches from department heads, documents requiring his signature, requests for pardons, applications for jobs, reports of all kinds, arrived in assorted bundles, daily by post rider. Decisions were called for on matters large and small. Benjamin Rush asked that his brother be considered for the Supreme Court. There was a request for the President's approval to build a lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, a request from Secretary Wolcott for authority to borrow up to $5,000,000 on behalf of the United States, reports from Wolcott on the yellow fever epidemic. Secretary McHenry sent an extended review, numbing in detail, of expenditures required for the Department of War. (“I have supposed that the items in the table of the Quarter Master's supplies and contingent expenses for the eight additional companies and privates to the old establishment and for the six additional companies of dragoons may be covered by the appropriations for the original army and that the 600 thousand dollars stated by the Quarter Master's department for the 12 regiments will procure all the camp equipage not provided for by the table. “) Nor was there any letup in the stream of patriotic addresses.
Adams struggled to read it all and respond. “Wooden walls have been my favorite system of warfare and defense for three and twenty years,” he wrote in reply to an address from the Boston Marine Society. “Americans in general, cultivators as well as merchants and marines, begin to look to that source of security and protection.” After reading Wolcott's report on the ravages of yellow fever at the capital, Adams sent an anonymous contribution of $500.
Most pressing was an unfortunate dispute that developed between Adams and Washington. At the heart of the issue was whether Alexander Hamilton should be made the second-highest-ranking officer in the new army, as Washington preferred and as Hamilton desperately desired.
When McHenry had gone off by express stage to Mount Vernon in early July, he had carried, in addition to Washington's commission from the President, a letter from Hamilton about which Adams was told nothing. “The arrangement of the army may demand your particular attention,” Hamilton wrote, referring to Washington's choice of a general staff. In this regard Washington was advised that the judgment of the President ought not to be a consideration. “The President,” Hamilton wrote, “has no relative ideas, and his prepossessions on military subjects in reference to such a point are of the wrong sort,” meaning, presumably, that Adams cared more for the navy than the army.
The view that Adams was unsuited to prepare the nation for war and that Hamilton, by contrast, was the ideal choice for second-in-command was shared by McHenry and Secretary Pickering alike. Indeed, Pickering had already said as much in a letter to Washington.
Thus, both the Secretary of War and the Secretary of State were secretly campaigning for Hamilton, supplying him with inside information, and undermining the intentions of their President, whom they saw riding for a fall. Sending Hamilton copies of secret government documents that summer, McHenry attached a note saying, “Do not, I pray you, in writing or otherwise betray the confidence which has induced me to deal thus with you or make extracts or copies.... Return the papers immediately.”
Washington had accepted his commission in an entirely cordial letter to Adams, but with the understanding that as head of the new army he could choose his own principal officers. Then he made known his intention to name Hamilton as second-in-command, with the rank of major general. Since no one expected Washington to take the field at his age, or to command except in name, the proposed arrangement meant, in effect, that Hamilton was to be in command—it was to be Hamilton's army.
In a letter that went off from Quincy to McHenry on August 29, Adams wrote that Washington had conducted himself with “perfect honor and consistency.” But the “power and authority are in the President,” Adams reminded his Secretary of War. “There has been too much intrigue in this business,” he added, suggesting he knew more, or suspected more, than he appeared to. In a letter to Oliver Wolcott that he most likely never sent, Adams said angrily that were he to consent to the appointment of Hamilton to second rank under Washington, he would consider it the most reprehensible action of his life. “His talents I respect. His character—I leave...”
But Washington had left Adams no way out. To raise the new army Washington's prestige was essential, as Hamilton, McHenry, Pickering, and Wolcott all understood. On September 30, Adams relinquished the final say to Washington.
September 30 was a Sunday, which makes it unlikely that the letter went off until the following day, October 1, the same day Elbridge Gerry arrived home from France, bringing news that gave a very different cast to the whole picture. Gerry's ship appeared off Boston that morning. Losing no time, he dispatched a letter to Adams before the ship docked. But whether Gerry's letter reached Adams before Adams's letter went off to McHenry with the morning post is not known.
The French wanted peace, Gerry reported.
Three days later, on Thursday, October 4, Gerry presented himself at Quincy, and he and Adams settled in for a long private talk.
In his few days ashore Gerry had been thoroughly ostracized in Boston. “Not a hat was moved” as he walked up State Street, according to one account from the time. Angry crowds shouted insults outside his Cambridge home. But the welcome from Adams was warm, and the more Gerry talked, the more Adams must have realized that the current had turned his way at last. Talleyrand, Gerry assured him, was ready to treat seriously with the United States.
It was a critical moment in Adams's presidency. Among other things, Gerry had more than justified Adams's confidence in him. What he was telling Adams, to be sure, was what Adams desperately wanted to hear. The last thing in the world Adams wished to do was to lead the country into a needless war. But more to the point, he judged quite correctly that Gerry was telling the truth.
John Marshall had said much the same thing, and so had John Quincy in some of his correspondence with his father, but as Adams was to write, the assurances of Gerry—“my own ambassador”—were “more positive, more explicit, and decisive.”
Gerry's letter of October 1, Adams later said, “confirmed these [earlier] assurances beyond all doubt in my mind, and his conversations with me at my own house in Quincy, if anything further had been wanting, would have corroborated the whole.”
It was the week after Gerry's return when a letter arrived from Washington. Written on September 25, it did not reach Adams until October 8. Were he to be denied the deciding voice in the selection of his general staff, Washington informed the President, he would resign his commission.
Adams sent off an immediate reply, agreeing to Washington's wishes. As he had accepted Washington's cabinet in the interest of unanimity, so he now accepted Washington's choice of Hamilton. But he also had reason to believe now that Hamilton and the army might not be needed at all.
As a matter of form, he reminded Washington a bit lamely that by the Constitution it was the President who had the authority to determine the rank of officers. Washington promoted Hamilton to be inspector general.
In the contest of who was in charge, Adams, it seemed, had been put in his place, outflanked not so much by Washington as by his own cabinet, and ultimately Hamilton, which left Adams feeling bruised and resentful. But at the same time, it gave Hamilton, and those in Adams's cabinet whose first loyalty was to Hamilton, an inflated sense of their own importance and authority.
From continued discussion with Gerry at Quincy and from new dispatches from William Vans Murray at The Hague, Adams became convinced that Gerry's conduct in Paris had not only been proper, but courageous. On October 20, writing to Pickering to ask for suggestions on the content of his forthcoming message to Congress, Adams made it plain that he was thinking of sending a new minister to France “who may be ready to embark ... as soon as ... the President shall receive from the Directory satisfactory assurance that he shall be received and entitled to all the prerogatives and privileges of the general laws of nations.” Further, he offered a list of those he had in mind for the assignment that included Patrick Henry and William Vans Murray.
Then, in a letter to his Secretary of War expressing his full support for Washington's judgment, Adams added two pointed observations. Maintaining armies was costly business and could become quite unpopular in the absence of an enemy to fight, he reminded McHenry. Of what possible use could a large army be, Adams was saying, if a French invasion never took place? In closing, he observed, “At present there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here than there is in heaven.”
• • •
ABIGAIL'S ILLNESS dragged on. She never left her sickbed, her “dying bed,” as she said. Talk of sickness and death—of insomnia, melancholy, her persistent, baffling fevers—dominated the domestic scene, just as sickness and death filled the newspapers, week after week, as yellow fever spread in Boston, New York, Baltimore, and worst of all in Philadelphia.
By September nearly 40,000 people had evacuated Philadelphia. Yet the newspapers continued to report more than a hundred new cases a day. “The best skill of our physicians... have proved unequal to the contest of this devouring poison,” reported the Aurora. By the time the plague ran its course in Philadelphia, more than 3,000 lost their lives, including, as the Adamses were stunned to read, the mayor of the city and both Bache of the Aurora, who had died on September 10 at age twenty-nine, and his arch nemesis, Fenno of the Gazette of the United States, who died just days before. The list of victims also included four of the servants at the President's House, as Abigail was duly informed.
The melancholy that beset her was unrelenting, suggesting the fever she suffered may have been malaria, but she was also distressed over further troubles within the family.
Before leaving on his diplomatic assignment abroad, John Quincy had left his savings, some $2,000, in the trust of his brother Charles. In the time since, however, Charles had managed to lose nearly all of it through bad investments, and then kept silent about what had happened, refusing to answer John Quincy's queries, in the hope that, with a little more time, he might somehow recover at least part of the money. Only that summer had the truth become known within the family, and it was devastating to both parents, but especially to Abigail, who had so long and so diligently managed the family affairs.
“I have not enjoyed one moment's comfort for upwards of two years on this account,” Charles wrote to his mother in midsummer. “My sleep has been disturbed, and my waking hours embittered.”
“He is not at peace with himself,” she would write later to John Quincy, during her convalescence, “and his conduct does not meet my wishes.
He has an amiable wife... two lovely children. I hope my letters will in time have their effect. I have discharged my duty I hope faithfully, but my dying bed was embittered... with distress for the only child whose conduct ever gave me pain.
Abigail was bedridden at Quincy altogether for eleven weeks. It was early November before she was well enough to come downstairs, and it was early November before Philadelphia was declared once more free of yellow fever.
On November 12, leaving Abigail behind, Adams headed off in the presidential coach behind two spirited horses and accompanied by his young nephew William Shaw—Billy Shaw, as he was known—a recent graduate of Harvard who had been lame since birth and had lately become the President's secretary.
“I strive to divert the melancholy thoughts of our separation, and pray you do the same,” Adams wrote to Abigail at the end of his first day on the road.