Alexander Hamilton (101 page)

When Phocion turned to John Adams, the Massachusetts patriot appeared to great advantage compared to Jefferson. Hamilton paid Adams a mighty compliment, describing him as “a citizen pre-eminent for his early, intrepid, faithful, persevering, and comprehensively useful services, a man pure and unspotted in private life, a patriot having a high and solid title to the esteem, the gratitude, and the confidence of his fellow citizens.”
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(In September 1792, Hamilton had written as Catullus that Adams was “preeminent for his early, intrepid, faithful, persevering, and comprehensively useful services to his country, a man pure and unspotted in private life, a citizen having a high and solid title to the esteem, the gratitude and the confidence of his fellow citizens.)
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He cited thirty years of unblemished public conduct and said the Jeffersonian press had distorted Adams’s political writings, trying to convert him into a monarchist. “For my own part,” Hamilton concluded, “were I a Southern planter, owning negroes, I should be ten thousand times more alarmed at Mr. Jefferson’s ardent wish for
emancipation
than at Mr. Adams’s system of checks and balances.”
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At first glance, Hamilton’s paean to Adams suggests an unqualified endorsement and seems fully consistent with Hamilton’s stated position that Federalists should vote equally for Adams and Pinckney. Nonetheless, one wonders whether there was not a subtle strategy here to sabotage Adams. Hamilton knew that if he could prompt southern slaveholders to desert Jefferson over emancipation, they would opt not for Adams, an abolitionist, but for Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina. There was no way that invoking the slavery issue could assist Adams in the south, where he needed the votes.

When the ballots were counted in February 1797, the outcome was a split ticket. Adams became president with seventy-one electoral votes and Jefferson vice president with sixty-eight. Pinckney received fifty-nine votes and Burr, making a miserable showing in the south, only thirty. Renegade electors in New England had reversed Hamilton’s strategy and denied Pinckney eighteen votes. The New England states had voted solidly for Adams, while the south went for Jefferson. Adams had been prepared to resign if he was only reelected as vice president or subjected to the indignity of a tie vote that threw the election into the House of Representatives. He regarded his thin victory as also a blow to his pride, however, and blamed it on followers of Hamilton and Jefferson. “As both parties despaired of obtaining their favorite,” he later wrote with self-pity, “Adams was brought in by a miserable majority of one or two votes, with the deliberate intention to sacrifice him at the next election. His administration was therefore never supported by either party, but vilified and libelled by both.”
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He blamed Hamilton more than Jefferson for this slim margin and spent the next four years trying to punish him.

Jefferson did not especially mind winning second place. Since resigning as secretary of state, he had been in isolation at his mountain fastness at Monticello. “From 1793 to 1797, I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had on my own mind.... [I]t led to an anti-social and misanthropic state of mind,” he told his daughter.
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With his unerring sense of timing, Jefferson did not think the moment auspicious for a Republican president. Troubles were still brewing with France, and he was happy to let Adams bear the brunt. Sure that the wheel of history would soon turn in his favor, the prescient Jefferson counseled patience to Madison.

Many Republicans preferred President Adams to Washington, if only because of his distance from Hamilton. The Jeffersonian
Aurora
celebrated Adams’s anticipated victory with an implicit swipe at Washington and Hamilton: “There can be no doubt that Adams would not be a
puppet
—that having an opinion and judgment of his own, he would act from his own impulses rather than the impulses of others.”
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Similarly, Jefferson welcomed an Adams presidency as “perhaps the only sure barrier against Hamilton’s getting in.”
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Though currently estranged from Adams, Jefferson had been dear friends with him and Abigail in Paris, and once the election was over he sought to ingratiate himself with the president-elect and turn him against Hamilton by dwelling on the latter’s election machinations. “There is reason to believe that [Adams] is detached from Hamilton and there is a possibility he may swerve from his politics,” he told one confidant.
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Hamilton studiously monitored the attempted rapprochement between Adams and Jefferson. “Mr. Adams is President, Mr. Jefferson Vice President,” he reported to Rufus King, now the American minister in London. “Our Jacobins say they are well pleased and that the
lion
and the
lamb
are to lie down together.”
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Hamilton was skeptical about this truce, seeing Jefferson as too wedded to ideology to make compromises.

Hamilton received fair warning that Adams intended to retaliate for his disloyalty during the election. That January, Hamilton was laid up with an injured leg that resulted from serving on nocturnal patrols that sought to stop a rash of mysterious fires in New York—fires that may have been related to slave revolts. Stephen Higginson of Boston told Hamilton that the “blind or devoted partisans of Mr. Adams” were accusing him of leading a cabal that had tried to swing the election for Thomas Pinckney. “At the head of this junto, as they call it, they place you and Mr. Jay and they attribute the design to him and you of excluding” Adams from the presidency.
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Hamilton thus went from unmatched access to President Washington to total exclusion from President Adams. Given his belief in Hamilton’s treachery, Adams made the seemingly contradictory decision to retain Washington’s cabinet, which was filled with Hamilton’s friends, admirers, and former colleagues. Adams was to come to regret that decision as much as any other he made in office.
TWENTY-NINE

t was ironic that John Adams, like Hamilton, was denigrated as a monarchist, because he grew up without the patrician comforts enjoyed by Jefferson and Madison, who were the quickest to apply the epithet against him. He was born

in Braintree, Massachusetts, to a father who toiled as a farmer in summer and as a shoemaker in winter. Though his family lacked wealth, it boasted a proud ancestry, tracing its roots back to Puritans who had emigrated from England in the 1630s: “My father, grandfather, great grandfather, and great, great grandfather were all inhabitants of Braintree and all independent country gentlemen.”
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Adams was schooled in the ascetic virtues of Puritan New England: thrift, hard work, self-criticism, public service, plain talk, and a morbid dread of ostentation. As a young man, he wrote, “A puffy, vain, conceited conversation never fails to bring a man into contempt, although his natural endowments be ever so great and his application and industry ever so intense.”
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Much of his life’s drama arose from the intense, often fitful, sometimes tormenting struggle to measure up to his own impossibly high standards, and he never entirely made peace with his own craving for fame and recognition.

After a formal education that began at age six, Adams entered Harvard at fifteen, the first in his family to attend college. He briefly taught school in Worcester, then turned to law as the most promising career route. In 1764, he married Abigail Smith, a smart, sharp-tongued minister’s daughter with a passion for politics and books. Abigail Adams tended the farm and raised the children while John roamed the world on diplomatic missions. Before Hamilton had arrived in North America, Adams had fought against the Stamp Act and defended British soldiers accused of killing five colonists in the so-called Boston Massacre of 1770. This legal work displayed a perverse streak of independence in Adams that ranked among his most attractive qualities. He was a born gadfly, always skeptical of reigning orthodoxy. Like Hamilton, he was an ambivalent revolutionary, appalled by the repressive measures of the British Crown but unsettled by the disorder of the rebel colonists. He always had a vivid sense of how easily righteous causes could degenerate into mob excess. Before independence, he asked himself what “the multitude, the vulgar, the herd, the rabble, the mob” would do if the colonists flouted royal authority. “I feel unutterable anxiety,” he confessed to his diary.
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At the Continental Congress, John Adams emerged as the most impassioned voice for independence, leaping to his feet in rich bursts of oratory. All the while, this feisty, rough-hewn lawyer brooded about potential anarchy. “There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we are all undone,” he told a friend in 1776. “There must be decency and respect and veneration introduced for persons of authority of every rank.”
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His dedication in Congress was prodigious: he sat on ninety congressional committees, chairing twenty-five of them. He also laid claim to having been the main talent scout of the Revolution, touting Washington as commander of the Continental Army and recruiting Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. Somehow, Adams also found time to draft a constitution for Massachusetts and publish a pamphlet,
Thoughts on Government,
which influenced other state constitutions.

Adams served his country with sustained diplomatic assignments in London, Paris, and Amsterdam. In 1782, he coaxed the Dutch into recognizing the United States and cajoled a two-million-dollar loan from Amsterdam bankers. His Paris stay brought him into close contact with both Franklin and Jefferson. Adams could not match their social graces and was “quite out of his element,” fretted his friend Jonathan Sewall: “He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen, and talk small talk or flirt with the ladies.”
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In addition, Franklin’s blithe hedonism offended the austere New England soul of John Adams. “His whole life has been one continued insult to good manners and to decency,” Adams complained.
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Franklin’s fame in France was a blow to Adams’s amour propre, his sense that he was the superior man.

Franklin himself captured Adams with a penetrating epigram: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”
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Franklin was one of the first to spot the paranoid streak that came to mar Adams’s career. In 1783, he grumbled about the “ravings” of Adams, who suspected him and the comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister, “of plots against him which have no existence but in his own troubled imaginations.”
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In a similar vein, Bernard Bailyn later observed of Adams: “Sensitive to insults, imaginary and real, he felt the world was generally hostile, to himself and to the American cause, which was the greatest passion of his life. There were enemies on all sides.”
⁹

The prickly Adams developed a tender affection for Jefferson, albeit one mingled with an uneasy sense of his unfathomable mystery. No less than Hamilton, Adams perceived that Jefferson, behind the facade of philosophic tranquillity, was “eaten to a honeycomb” with ambition.
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Jefferson, in turn, detected traces of the curmudgeon in Adams. “He hates Franklin, he hates Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English,” he told Madison from Paris. “To whom will he adhere? His vanity is a lineament in his character which had entirely escaped me.”
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Four years later, Jefferson sent Madison a more potent version of this same critique, calling Adams “
vain, irritable, and a bad calculator
of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men.”
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For all that, Jefferson appreciated Adams as a warmhearted, convivial spirit, a fascinating conversationalist, and a man of bedrock integrity. Their relationship had foundered in 1791 when Jefferson lauded
The Rights of Man
by Thomas Paine by drawing an invidious contrast to the “political heresies which have sprung up among us”—a cutting reference to Adams’s
Discourses on Davila,
which Jeffersonians read as a plea for a hereditary presidency.
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After Jefferson stepped down as secretary of state, he and Adams seldom corresponded during the next three years.

John Adams was an unprepossessing man. Short and paunchy with a round, jowly face and a pale complexion, he had piercing eyes that protruded from behind thick lids. He had an exceedingly active mind, always bubbling with words. Images welled up spontaneously from his imagination, as in his extraordinary description of Thomas Paine as “the satyr of the age ...a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a butch wolf.”
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Because he bared his psyche in diaries and letters, we know him more intimately than any other founder. One can summon up an army of adjectives for John Adams—crotchety, opinionated, endearing, temperamental, frank, erudite, outspoken, generous, eccentric, restless, petty, choleric, philosophical, plucky, quirky, pugnacious, fanciful, stubborn, and whimsical—and scarcely exhaust the possibilities. His life was a kaleidoscope of constantly shifting moods. Charles Francis Adams summed up his mercurial grandfather well when he wrote that he could be very warm and engaging in ordinary conversation but “extremely violent” when provoked.
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Adams was a mass of psychosomatic symptoms, his nervous tics and tremors often betraying extreme inner tension. “My constitution is a glass bubble,” he once said, and he had a medical history of headaches, fatigue, chest pains, failing eyesight, and insomnia to prove it.
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In 1776, he etched this self-portrait: “My face is grown pale, my eyes weak and inflamed, my nerves tremulous.”
¹⁷
He seems to have undergone some form of nervous breakdown during his time in Amsterdam, suffering from periods of withdrawal from society and flashes of temper. Later on, he complained of “quivering fingers” and lost several teeth from pyorrhea, forcing him to speak with a lisp. By the time he became president, the sixty-one-year-old John Adams looked like a pudgy, toothless old man.