David mccullough library.., p.212
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set, page 212
“It is far below the dignity of the President of the United States to take any notice of Talleyrand’s impertinent regrets, and insinuations of superfluities,” Adams lectured. “You or Mr. Murray may answer them as you please.”
That said, Adams got to the essential point, lest Pickering have any misconceptions:
I will say to you, however, that I consider this letter as the most authentic intelligence yet received in America of the successes of the coalition. That the design is insidious and hostile at heart, I will not say. Time will tell the truth. Meantime, I dread no longer their diplomatic skill. I have seen it, and felt it, and been the victim of it these twenty-one years. But the charm is dissolved. Their magic is at an end in America. Still, they shall find, as long as I am in office, candor, integrity, and, as far as there can be any confidence and safety, a pacific and friendly disposition. If the spirit of exterminating vengeance ever arises, it shall be conjured up by them, not me. In this spirit I shall pursue the negotiation, and I expect the cooperation of the heads of departments.
American defenses by sea and land were not to be relaxed. As to the mission, he wished “to delay nothing.”
My opinions and determinations in these subjects are so well made up, at least to my satisfaction, that not many hours will be necessary for me to give you my ultimate sentiments concerning the matter or form of the instructions to be given to the envoys.
But just as it seemed Adams had set his course, news came from Paris of a breakup of the Directory — “chaos,” according to reports. To his cabinet it brought a surge of hope that peace could be postponed, a view strongly reinforced by Inspector General Hamilton.
Secretary of the Navy Stoddert, Adams’s consistently loyal supporter, urged him to come at once to Trenton, New Jersey, where the government had set up emergency quarters until the yellow fever epidemic passed in Philadelphia. Although not inclined to go just yet, Adams told Stoddert that should “considerable difference” arise between the heads of departments, he would come at all events.
On September 13, Stoddert wrote again, filled with apprehension “that artful designing men might make such use of your absence” as to disrupt the peace initiative and “make your next election less honorable than it would otherwise be.” This and a letter from Pickering proposing suspension of the peace mission were all Adams needed to hear. Abigail would follow once she had things in order at home.
He would be in Trenton by October 15 at the latest, Adams wrote Stoddert. “I have only one favor to beg, and that is that a certain election may be wholly laid out of this question and all others.”
Adams left Peacefield on the last day of September, ready for what he had to face. But stopping at East Chester to see Nabby, he was struck a blow for which he was wholly unprepared. While the details are sparse, it could only have been one of the most dreadful moments of his life. To make matters worse, he had begun to feel ill en route and so arrived at East Chester already in a low state.
From his distraught daughter-in-law, Charles’s wife, Sally, who with her two small daughters was staying with Nabby, Adams learned for the first time that Charles, who had disappeared, was bankrupt, faithless, and an alcoholic.
“I pitied her, I grieved, I mourned,” Adams wrote to Abigail in anguish, “but could do no more.” David’s son Absalom at least had enterprise, he said. “Mine is a mere rake, buck, blood, and beast.” If he felt pity for Charles, he did not express it.
“I love him too much,” Adams had once written of his small second son when they were in Paris. “Charles wins the heart as usual, and is the most gentleman of them all,” he had said upon seeing him again, after the return from England. Now Charles had become “a madman possessed of the devil.” And, declared Adams, “I renounce him.”
As time passed, the Adamses would say comparatively little about Charles. It was as though the downfall of Abigail’s brother William were repeating itself, and the family returned to the old ways of keeping “calamity” private. Only now and then would Abigail make mention of it, usually in letters to Mary Cranch, and almost never referring to Charles by name. “Any calamity inflicted by the hand of Providence, it would become me in silence to submit to,” she wrote some weeks later, “but when I behold misery and distress, disgrace and poverty brought upon a family by intemperance, my heart bleeds at every pore.” A “graceless child,” he was, but she did not renounce him.
To push on to Trenton, “loaded with sorrow,” was almost more than Adams was up to. He felt wretchedly ill with a cold so severe that he thought he might have yellow fever, which he did not.
Trenton, a village no larger than Quincy under normal conditions, was overflowing with refugees from Philadelphia, in addition to several hundred government officials and military officers. The best that could be arranged for the President were a small bedroom and sitting room in a boardinghouse kept by two maiden sisters named Barnes, one of whom provided the ailing Adams with a down comforter, while the other dosed him with a purgative of rhubarb and calomel.
Adams arrived expecting to meet directly with his cabinet to straighten out the impasse on the mission to France, and as miserable as he felt, he was ready to summon them without delay. What he had not expected was the presence in Trenton of General Hamilton, who had come to make a personal appeal to Adams to suspend the mission.
Hamilton had ridden over from Newark, where his troops were encamped and where by protocol he ought to have remained until called for, should the President wish to see him. That he had chosen to come to Trenton uninvited was taken by some as the kind of bold move Hamilton was known and admired for, but it also strongly suggested an element of desperation.
Hamilton called on Adams at the Barnes boardinghouse, where presumably they drew up chairs in Adams’s tiny sitting room — two proud, pertinacious men who by now hated each other, one ambitious for war, the other peace, and each determined to have his way.
According to Adams, who provided several accounts of the confrontation, then and later, he received the general with appropriate civility, saying nothing of politics. But at first chance Hamilton commenced to “remonstrate” against the mission to France. “His eloquence and vehemence wrought the little man up to a degree of heat and effervescence. . . . He repeated over and over again . . . [his] unbounded confidence in the British empire . . . with such agitation and violent action that I really pitied him, instead of being displeased.” The British had the upper hand in the war, Hamilton insisted, and would soon help restore the Bourbons to power in France. America must join with the British and have no dealings whatever with the present French government.
Adams was astonished by Hamilton’s “total ignorance” of the situation in Europe. He would as soon expect the sun, moon, and stars to fall from their orbits as to see the Bourbons restored, he told Hamilton. But even were that to happen, what injury could it mean for the United States to have envoys there?
The meeting lasted several hours, through which, by his account, Adams sat patiently listening as Hamilton with his famous powers of persuasion talked steadily on. “I heard him with perfect good humor, though never in my life did I hear a man talk more like a fool.”
On October 15, Adams summoned the cabinet to a session that lasted until eleven o’clock that night. Pickering, Wolcott, and McHenry, like Hamilton, adamantly opposed the mission. Secretary of the Navy Stoddert supported it, as did Attorney General Lee, the only member of the cabinet not present at Trenton, but who had expressed his views in a letter.
Adams’s decision was given the next morning, Wednesday, October 16, 1799. “The President has resolved to send the commissioners to France,” wrote a thoroughly dispirited Hamilton to George Washington. “All my calculations lead me to regret the measure.” The commission sailed for France on November 15.
If Hamilton and his admirers in the cabinet had outmaneuvered Adams in the contest over command of the army, Adams had now cut the ground out from under Hamilton. Whatever dreams Hamilton entertained of military glory and empire, America was to have no need of either a standing army or a Bonaparte, which, it is fair to say, was as clear an objective in Adams’s mind as was peace with France.
III
“I ENCLOSE THE SPEECH,” Abigail wrote to Mary Cranch. “It has been received here with more applause and approbation than any speech which the President has ever delivered.”
She was reinstated in the President’s House and in the President’s life, resuming her role where she had left off, despite all she had been through, and all, Mary knew, she suffered because of Charles. There would be grumbling over the speech, Abigail wrote. There would always be grumbling, she had come to understand.
Addressing a joint session of the new Congress, at the usual noon hour, December 3, 1799, Adams had delivered the most moderate, peaceable speech since his inaugural message, stressing a “pacific and humane” American stance before the world. Gone were calls for a new navy or a new army. Though the “measures adopted to secure our country against foreign attacks,” must not be renounced, the national defense must be “commensurate with our resources and the situation of our country.” War drums were out of season. Adams evoked instead “prospects of abundance,” “the return of health, industry, and trade, to those cities which have lately been afflicted with disease.”
Let the grumblers wake up to the “brightest, best and most peaceful days they now see,” declared Abigail. Her old delight in being at the center of things had returned in full flower. In unseasonably mild weather, she was out and about taking walks, making calls, receiving visitors, and enjoying the current spectacle of Philadelphia society. For in its last winter as the nation’s capital, the city “intended to shine.” “I have heard of ‘Once a man and twice a child’ and the ladies’ caps are an exact copy of baby’s caps,” Abigail began her report to Mary on “gay attire,” showing no less delight in details — sleeves, buttons, petticoats, hairstyles — than once she had when writing from Paris.
Then, in an instant, the entire mood of the city changed. On December 14, 1799, as if to give period to the passing of the century and the Federal era, George Washington died at Mount Vernon. The cause of death was a heavy cold — a streptococcus infection. He had been sixty-seven, and until a few days before, in good health. The news reached Philadelphia the night of the seventeenth. In the morning the muffled bells of Christ Church commenced to toll and Congress adjourned.
The Adamses were stunned. The nation, said the President in a formal message to the Senate, had lost “her most esteemed, beloved, and admired citizen. . . . I feel myself alone, bereaved of my last brother.” No man was more deservedly beloved and respected, wrote Abigail. A “universal melancholy has pervaded all classes of people.”
The door of the presidential mansion, Congress Hall, Washington’s pew at Christ Church, were draped in black. In Boston Harbor every ship displayed “the melancholy signal of mortality.” “Our pulpit is hung with black,” Mary Cranch reported from Quincy.
The day after Christmas, the official day of mourning in the capital, troops of light infantry and cavalry passed through the city to the slow military beat of muffled drums, in a grand solemn procession that began at Congress Hall and included a host of federal and state leaders, city magistrates, Masons, and a riderless white horse with reversed boots in the stirrups. Washington had been interred in the family vault at Mount Vernon, but this was the nation’s funeral for its first President and greatest hero. The line of march was south on Fifth Street, east on Walnut, then north on Fourth, crossing Chestnut, Market, and Arch Streets to the German Lutheran Church at Fourth and Cherry, which had the largest seating capacity of any church in the city.
“The President of the United States and his Lady . . . and a vast concourse of other citizens,” were present for services led by Bishop William White of Christ Church, with an oration by Representative Henry Lee of Virginia — General “Light-Horse Harry” Lee — who extolled Washington as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
When the service ended after four and a half hours, several hundred people crowded into the President’s House. “The gentlemen all in black,” Abigail noted, while the ladies had not let their grief “deprive them in their taste for ornamenting.” They wore black military sashes, “epaulets of black silk . . . black plumes . . . black gloves and fans.”
But as the encomiums to Washington continued, in speeches, sermons, and editorials — tributes that seemed often as contrived for show as the black plumes and fans — Abigail grew extremely impatient. When a minister at Newburyport, in a rapturous eulogy spoke of Washington as the “savior” of the country, she turned indignant. At no time, she wrote, had the fate of the country rested on the breath of one man, not even Washington. “Wise and judicious observations about his character are those only which will outlive the badges of mourning,” she told Mary. “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy.”
For the time being, the President said no more than he already had. But the Vice President was not known to have said anything about Washington. In some quarters it was being observed that because of his shame over the “Mazzei Letter,” Jefferson had deliberately delayed his departure from Monticello to avoid the ceremonies in Washington’s memory. Jefferson, who could have been in Philadelphia in time, did not arrive until two days later, on December 28, after an absence of ten months.
“I CONGRATULATE YOU on the New Year and the New Century,” Adams wrote to his old friend Cotton Tufts on January 1, 1800, adding a line from Virgil, “Aspice venturo laetentur ut omnia! [Look how they are full of joy at the age to come!].”
If Adams had any thoughts or feelings about the passing of the epochal eighteenth century — any observations on the Age of Enlightenment, the century of Johnson, Voltaire, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the age of Pitt and Washington, the advent of the United States of America — or if he had any premonitions or words to the wise about the future of his country or of humankind, he committed none to paper. His thoughts, to judge by what he said to Cotton Tufts, were on home and some marshland he wished to buy, overpriced though it might be.
Across the water, events had moved on dramatically. In February came the news from France of a coup on November 9 — 18 Brumaire, by the French revolutionary calendar. General Bonaparte had taken power as First Consul, which made him, at age thirty-three, sovereign ruler of France and much of Europe. The French Revolution was over, as declared Bonaparte himself.
Jefferson, who had pinned his highest hopes on the revolution, commented only that the situation was “painfully interesting.” Clearly, American enchantment with France and the revolution were also at an end. Washington’s death had seemed to mark the close of one era; the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte ushered in another. Adams, who like Edmund Burke had predicted dictatorship as the inevitable outcome for the revolution, wisely kept silent.
“ELECTIONEERING” had already begun. A “stormy session” was forecast, and from the tone of their letters home — to Mary Cranch, Cotton Tufts, and others — both the Adamses seem to have concluded that there was to be no second term for them. That Jefferson would be the Republican choice to oppose him in the election was a foregone conclusion.
Congress was doing little. From the Vice President’s chair upstairs at Congress Hall, Jefferson lamented the overbearing “dreariness” of the scene. As much as possible, he was associating with the “class of science,” as he said, his friends and fellow members of the Philosophical Society, of which he had become president. He took time to have his portrait painted by young Rembrandt Peale, the gifted son of Charles Willson Peale, and of all the portraits done of him, it was perhaps the strongest — Jefferson in his prime at age fifty-seven, grey-haired, handsome, and confident.
Acutely conscious of the mistakes Adams had made as Vice President, Jefferson, when presiding in the Senate, never talked out of turn, or tried to impose his own opinion from the chair, conduct all in keeping with his nature. Moreover, he saw no necessity to be constantly present, as Adams had. There were better ways to spend his time, Jefferson felt. Seeing the need for a manual of parliamentary rules for the Senate, he wrote one, distinguished by its clarity, emphasis on decorum, and the degree to which he had drawn on the British model. Had it been Adams paying such tribute to English foundations and traditions, the uproar would have been immediate; he would have been denounced still again as “tainted” by his years in London and love for all things British. But among Jefferson’s many contributions to the new republic, his Senate Manual would stand as one of the most useful and enduring.
In writing one rule, No. 17.9, under “Order in Debate,” it was almost as though he had his predecessor as Vice President specifically in mind.
No one is to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluously or tediously.
If Adams found any relief or pleasure in his duties, it was approving, on April 24, legislation that appropriated $5,900 to “purchase such books as may be necessary” for a new Library of Congress. It was one of the few measures upon which he and the Vice President could have heartily agreed.
IV
THAT THE CONTEST for the presidency in 1800 was to be unlike any of the three preceding presidential elections was clear at once. For the first (and last) time in history, the President was running against the Vice President. The two political parties had also come into their own with a vitality and vengeance exceeding anything in the country’s experience.
Further, under the Sedition Act anyone openly criticizing the President ran the risk of being fined or sent to prison. Since the first sensational case against Congressman Matthew (“Spitting”) Lyon of Vermont, eleven others had been charged and convicted under the law. In one instance, a New Jersey tavern loafer who had done no more than cast aspersions on the President’s posterior was arrested, prosecuted, and fined $150.
