Founding Brothers (25 page)

R
EACTIONS TO
the Farewell Address fell
into the familiar grooves. The overwhelming public response was tearfully
exuberant, regretting the departure of America’s political centerpiece
for the last quarter century, but embracing his message, as one member of the
cabinet put it, “as a transcript of the general expression of the people
of the United States.” Meanwhile, the Republican press denounced his
warnings against political divisions at home and diplomatic involvement abroad
as “the loathings of a sick mind.” In the
Aurora,
Benjamin
Franklin Bache reprinted the old charge that Washington had been a traitor who
conspired with the English government during the war. “This man has a
celebrity in a certain way,” Washington remarked concerning Bache,
“for his calumnies are to be exceeded only by his impudence, and both
stand unrivaled.” One of his last acts as president was to place on file
in the State Department his rejoinder to Bache’s accusations, which
historians have long since discovered were based on forged English documents.
He left office in March of 1797 with the resounding cheers of his huge army of
supporters and the howls of that much smaller pack of critics echoing in his
ears.
⁶⁹

Passing through Alexandria on his way to Mount Vernon, he stopped to
deliver a speech in which he reiterated his allegiance to the principles
articulated in the Farewell Address. “Clouds may and doubtless often will
in the vicissitudes of events, hover over our political concerns,” he
announced, “but a steady adherence to these principles will not only
dispel but render our prospects the brighter by such temporary
obscurities.” He remained supremely confident that he was right to the
very end, though the “temporary obscurities” being spewed out by
the Republican press—France was America’s international ally and
the national government its domestic enemy—produced fits of private
despair and periodic flare-ups of the famous Washington temper. (Even ensconced
under his “vine and fig tree” in retirement, he continued to
subscribe to ten newspapers.) More than any great leader in American history
before or since, he was accustomed to getting his way, and equally accustomed
to having history prove him right. But his final two and a half years at Mount
Vernon were beclouded by the incessant apprehension that his final advice to
the country would be ignored, and his legacy, and with it his own place in
history, abandoned.
⁷⁰

Part of his
problem was a function of location. Mount Vernon, of course, lay within the
borders of Virginia, and Virginia had become the homeland of the Republican
opposition, which was dedicated to overturning the foreign policy and the
entire edifice of national sovereignty that Washington stood for. In effect,
Mount Vernon became an enclave within enemy territory, surrounded by neighbors
committed to a Virginia-writ-large version of the American republic.
Washington, once the supreme Virginian, had in their eyes gone over to the
other side. Once the all-purpose solution, Washington was now the still-potent
problem, a kind of Trojan horse planted squarely in the Virginia fortress. The
fact that he devoted so much of his remaining time and energy to overseeing the
construction of the new capital city on the Potomac—it was a foregone
conclusion that it would be named after him—only confirmed their worst
fears. For that city, and the name it was destined to carry, symbolized the
conspiracy that threatened, so Jefferson and his followers thought, all that
Virginia stood for. Washington, for his part, obliged his Virginia critics by
urging his stepgrandson to attend Harvard in order to escape the provincial
versions of learning currently ascendant in the Old Dominion. Increasingly, he
seemed to think of his home state in the same vein as the Indian tribes in his
letter to the Cherokees. The destiny of the American nation was pointing one
way, and if the tribal chieftains of Virginia chose to oppose that direction,
so be it; but they were aligning themselves on the wrong side of
history.
⁷¹

The end came on December 14, 1799. The previous day, when it became clear
that the combination of pneumonia and the bleeding and blistering remedies of
his physicians could produce but one conclusion, Washington ordered the doctors
to cease their barbarisms and permit him to die in peace: “I am just
going,” he apprised those around his bed. “Have me decently buried,
and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am
dead.… Do you understand me?” Though he had no illusions of his
own immortality, he apparently feared being buried alive, perhaps believing
that was really what had happened with Jesus. His last words were
“ ’Tis well.” Self-sufficient as always, his last act
was to feel his own pulse at the moment he expired.
⁷²

CHAPTER FIVE

The Collaborators

A
S A RESULT
of
Washington’s Olympian status, the infant American republic had managed to
avoid a contested presidential election prior to 1796. Exactly how such an
event should proceed without tearing the country apart was still very much a
matter of speculation and improvisation. Although some semblance of the
routinized mechanisms for political parties had begun to congeal during the
debate over Jay’s Treaty, nothing remotely resembling the organized
campaign structure of modern political parties yet existed. The method of
choosing electors to that odd inspiration called the electoral college varied
from state to state. And the very notion that a candidate should openly solicit
votes violated the principled presumption that such behavior itself represented
a confession of unworthiness for national office.

While a clear
political distinction between Federalists and Republicans had emerged during
Washington’s second term, and fervent editorialists were blazing away as
partisans from both sides in the popular press, party labels and issue-oriented
platforms were less important than a prospective candidate’s
revolutionary credentials. Memories of the spirit of ’76 were still warm
twenty years later, and the chief qualification for the presidency remained a
matter of one’s historic role in the creation of American independence
between 1776 and 1789. Only those leaders who had stepped forward at the
national level to promote the great cause when its success was still perilous
and problematic were eligible.

An exhaustive list of prospects would
have included between twenty and thirty names, with Samuel Adams, Alexander
Hamilton, Patrick Henry, and James Madison enjoying spirited support. But the
four names topping everyone’s list would have been almost unanimous:
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. By
1796, of course, Washington had done his duty. Franklin was dead and gone. That
left Adams and Jefferson as the obvious options. And by the spring of 1796 it
had become a foregone conclusion that the choice was between them.

They
were an incongruous pair, but everyone seemed to argue that history had made
them into a pair. The incongruities leapt out for all to see: Adams, the short,
stout, candid-to-a-fault New Englander; Jefferson, the tall, slender, elegantly
elusive Virginian; Adams, the highly combustible, ever combative, mile-a-minute
talker, whose favorite form of conversation was an argument; Jefferson, the
always cool and self-contained enigma, who regarded debate and argument as
violations of the natural harmonies he heard inside his own head. The list
could go on—the Yankee and the Cavalier, the orator and the writer, the
bulldog and the greyhound. They were the odd couple of the American
Revolution.
¹

And it was the
Revolution that had brought them together. They had worked side by side in the
Continental Congress, first as staunch opponents of reconciliation with
England, then as members of the committee to draft the Declaration of
Independence. In 1784 they were reunited in Paris, where Jefferson became an
unofficial member of the Adams family and, as Abigail Adams put it, “the
only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom and
reserve.” The following year Jefferson visited Adams for several weeks in
London, where, as America’s two chief ministers in Europe, they endured
the humiliation together when George III ostentatiously turned his back on them
during a formal ceremony at court. Adams never forgot this scene; nor did he
forget the friend who was standing beside him when it happened.
²

There were, to
be sure, important political and ideological differences between the two men,
differences that became the basis for the opposing sides they took in the party
wars of the 1790s. But as soulmates who had lived together through some of the
most formative events of the revolutionary era and of their own lives, Adams
and Jefferson bonded at a personal and emotional level that defied their merely
philosophical differences. They were charter members of the “band of
brothers” who had shared the agonies and ecstasies of 1776 as colleagues.
No subsequent disagreement could shake this elemental affinity. They knew,
trusted, even loved each other for reasons that required no explanation.

The two major contestants for the presidency in 1796, then, not only
possessed impeccable revolutionary credentials; they had also earned their fame
as a team. Within the revolutionary generation, several competing examples of
fortuitous cooperation and collaboration had helped to make history happen:
Washington and Hamilton during the war, and then again during
Washington’s second term; Hamilton and Madison on
The Federalist
Papers;
Madison and Jefferson in orchestrating the Republican opposition
to Hamilton’s financial program and then Jay’s Treaty. But in part
because it seemed so seminal and symbolic of sectional cooperation, the
Adams-Jefferson tandem stood out as the greatest collaboration of them all.
Choosing between them seemed like choosing between the head and the heart of
the American Revolution.

I
F
REVOLUTIONARY
credentials were the major criteria, Adams was virtually
unbeatable. His career, indeed his entire life, was made by the American
Revolution; and he, in turn, had made American independence his life’s
project. Perhaps Franklin and Hamilton could claim to have come from further
back in the pack, but Adams was another one of those American characters who
would have languished in obscurity if born in England or Europe.

Instead, he was born in Braintree, twelve miles south of Boston, in 1735,
the son of a farmer and shoemaker, who sent Adams to Harvard in the hope he
might become a minister. For a decade after graduating from college he probed
his soul for signs of a divine calling while earning his keep as a country
schoolteacher and then apprentice lawyer. In the mid-1760s two crucial events
determined his fate: First, in 1764 he married Abigail Smith and created with
her a partnership of remarkable equity and intimacy; second, in 1765, he
stepped forward to help lead the opposition against the Stamp Act and
eventually against every aspect of British policy toward the American colonies.
American independence became his ministerial calling, a mission he pursued with
all the compressed energy of a latter-day Puritan pastor whose congregation was
the American people.

Bedeviled by doubts about himself but never about
his cause, Adams and his cousin Samuel had become the most conspicuous
opponents of British authority in New England by the time the Continental
Congress convened in 1774. In the debates within the Continental Congress, John
Adams gained fame as “the Atlas of independence” for renouncing any
reconciliation with England, and for his pamphlet,
Thoughts on
Government,
which became the guidebook for several state constitutions.
While other delegates in the Congress kept searching for ways to avoid a break
with England, Adams insisted the Revolution had already begun. He successfully
lobbied for Washington to head the Continental Army and personally selected
Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence, two strategic decisions
designed to assure Virginia’s support for the cause. For over a year he
served as chair of the Board of War and Ordinance, playing the role of
secretary of war during the most tense and uncertain phase of the
fighting.

In 1777 the Congress chose him to join Franklin in Paris to
negotiate the alliance with France. He returned home for a few months in 1779,
just long enough to draft almost single-handedly the Massachusetts
Constitution. Then it was back to Paris to work on the peace treaty ending the
war, an experience that generated his lifelong enmity toward Franklin, who
found him insufferably austere and obsessively diligent. (Adams thought
Franklin naïve about French motives, which were anti-English but not
pro-American, and besotted with his own inflated reputation as the ultimate
American in Paris.) Until 1788, he remained in Europe, first working with
Jefferson for legal recognition of the new American nation as well as for loans
from Dutch bankers in Amsterdam, then as America’s first minister to the
Court of St. James in London, where he confirmed his everlasting conviction
that England “cares no more for us than for the Seminole Indians.”
His absence from the Constitutional Convention was regretted by all—along
with Madison he was regarded as America’s most sophisticated student of
government. He used his spare time in London to toss off three volumes of
political philosophy, entitled
Defence of the Constitution of the United
States,
which emphasized the advantages of a strong executive, a bicameral
legislature, and the principle of checks and balances. He returned to America
in time to be elected the first vice president of the United States, which most
observers, including Adams himself, interpreted as a popular mandate on his
historical contribution to independence. In the American pantheon, with
Franklin on his deathbed, he ranked second only to Washington himself.
³

His reputation
then fell victim to two nearly calamitous setbacks, one beyond his control and
the other the product of his personal flair for perversity. On the former
score, Adams had the misfortune to become the first occupant of what he
described as “the most insignificant office that ever the Invention of
Man contrived or his Imagination conceived.” Subsequent occupants of the
vice presidential office have lengthened the list of semihumorous complaints
about inhabiting a prestigious political prison (for example, “not worth
a bucketful of spit”), but Adams originated the jokes because he was the
first prominent American statesman to experience the paradox of being a
proverbial heartbeat away from maximum power while languishing in the political
version of a
cul-de-sac.
⁴

According to
the Constitution the vice president had two duties: to remain available if the
president died, fell ill, or was removed from office; and to serve as president
pro tem of the Senate, casting a vote only to break a tie. During his eight
years in office Adams cast more tie-breaking votes—at least thirty-one
and perhaps as many as thirty-eight—than any subsequent vice president in
American history, in part because the small size of the Senate made ties more
frequent. But after Adams’s initial fling at participating in the
debates, the members of the Senate decided that the vice president was not
permitted to speak. “It is to be sure a punishment to hear other men talk
five hours every day,” Adams wrote to Abigail, “and not be at
liberty to talk at all myself, especially as more than half I hear appears to
me very young, inconsiderate, and inexperienced.” It was a monumental
irony: The man famous as the indefatigable orator of independence in the
Continental Congress was obliged to remain silent in the legislative councils
of the new government. “My office,” Adams complained, “is too
great a restraint upon such a Son of Liberty.” The great volcano of
American political debate was required to confine himself to purely private
eruptions.
⁵

These occurred sporadically in his personal correspondence with Abigail,
who remained ensconced at home in Quincy, Massachusetts, and with old
revolutionary comrades like Benjamin Rush. Adams deeply resented being marooned
and muted in the Senate, like an old warhorse with several charges left in him,
now put out to pasture while crucial battles about the direction of the
republic raged around him. And, Adams being Adams, his bitterness found
colorful and painfully self-defeating expression in his tirades about the
injustice of it all: “The History of our Revolution will be one continued
lye from one end to the other,” he wrote Rush in 1790. “The essence
of the whole will be that
Dr. Franklin’s electric rod smote the Earth
and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod
and thence forward these two conducted all the Policy, Negotiations,
Legislatures and War.
” As Adams saw it, he had been prepared, by
both experience and training, to perform a central role in the unfolding drama
of winning and securing the American Revolution. Instead, he was relegated to
the sidelines as a marginal player while Johnny-come-latelies like Hamilton and
Madison occupied center stage.
⁶

To make
matters worse, his duties in the Senate removed him from the deliberations of
the cabinet. Washington seldom consulted him on policy questions, apparently
believing that the vice presidency was a legislative office based in the
Senate; therefore, to include Adams in executive decisions violated the
constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. When asked by friends about
his isolation from the presidential councils, Adams halfheartedly endorsed the
same constitutional explanation. “The executive authority is so wholly
out of my sphere,” he observed, “and it is so delicate a thing for
me to meddle in that, I avoid it as much as possible.” He desperately
wanted to be consulted, but he was too proud to push himself forward. He
steadfastly supported all the major initiatives of the Washington
administration, including Hamilton’s financial plan, the suppression of
the Whiskey Rebellion, the Proclamation of Neutrality, and Jay’s Treaty,
though he had almost no influence on their formulation and some private
reservations about Hamilton’s ties with bankers and speculators. It was
difficult to think of the ever-combative, highly combustible champion of the
American Revolution as extraneous and invisible, but that is what the vice
presidency had made him.
⁷