Founding Brothers (26 page)

Adams
deserved an assist for making himself into a marginal figure because of remarks
he made during the first session of the Senate, before it was decided that the
vice president could not participate in debates. The issue concerned a minor
matter of etiquette: How should the president be addressed by members of
Congress? While hardly an earthshaking question, it had symbolic significance
because of the obsessive American suspicion of monarchy, which haunted all
conversations about the powers of the presidency under the recently ratified
Constitution. Anyone who favored a strong executive was vulnerable to the
charge of being a quasi-monarchist, and therefore a traitor to the republican
principles of the American Revolution.

Adams was so confident in his
own revolutionary credentials that he regarded himself as immune to such
charges. But when he lectured the Senate on the need for elaborate trappings of
authority and proposed that President Washington be addressed as “His
Majesty” or “His Highness,” his remarks became the butt of
several barbed jokes, including the suggestion that he had been seized by
“nobilimania” during his long sojourn in England and might prefer
to be addressed as “His Rotundity” or the “Duke of
Braintree.” Jefferson threw up his hands at the sheer stupidity of
Adams’s proposals, calling them “the most superlatively ridiculous
thing I ever heard of.”
⁸

Adams tried
to laugh himself out of the monarchical morass, claiming that he simply wanted
to assure that the executive branch of the government enjoyed a fighting chance
against the awesome powers of the legislature. “The little fishes will
eat up the great one,” he joked, “unless the great one should
devour all the little ones.” If all formal titles were to be stigmatized,
he wrote to Benjamin Rush, then perhaps Rush’s children should start
addressing their father as “Ben.”
⁹

Mostly,
however, Adams stewed and simmered and tried to defend himself. Ever the
political pugilist who felt obliged to answer every bell, Adams refused to back
away from his belief that the new American government needed a strong executive
presence. In a series of thirty-one essays printed in the
Gazette of the
United States
and subsequently published as
Discourses on Davila,
he argued that all stable governments required what he called a
“monarchical principle,” meaning a singular figure empowered to
embody the will of the nation and to protect the ordinary citizenry from the
inevitable accumulation of power by the more wealthy and wellborn. In most
European states, he went on to argue, it was probably necessary for the
monarchy to remain hereditary for the foreseeable future, in order to permit a
more gradual transition to full-blown republican principles.

Such
statements seemed almost designed to invite misunderstanding, which is
precisely what they did. For the rest of his life, Adams lived under a cloud of
suspicion that he wished to restore hereditary monarchy in America and that,
once installed in the presidency, he fully intended to declare himself king for
life and his son John Quincy his successor. He could argue till doomsday that
such claims were preposterous, which they were and which he did, but Adams had
tied a tin can labeled “monarchist” to his own tail, which then
rattled through ages and pages of the history books. Since Washington had no
children of his own—the Father of His Country was almost certainly
sterile—he was less vulnerable to charges of hereditary aspirations.
(Intriguingly, of the first six presidents, only Adams had a male heir.) If
Washington became the quasi-monarchical president who could be trusted, Adams
became the closet monarchist who could not.
¹⁰

The
Davila
essays, in fact, became the basis for the first serious rift in
his friendship with Jefferson. The publisher of the American edition of Tom
Paine’s
The Rights of Man
printed what we would now call a blurb
for the book, a quote from Jefferson, who had presumed that his remarks would
be anonymous. Jefferson mentioned in passing “the political
heresies” of
Davila,
which everyone knew to be written by Adams.
Adams was outraged, claiming that Jefferson, of all people, should know that he
had not converted to monarchy while in Europe. Jefferson expressed his regrets,
explaining to Washington: “I am afraid the indiscretion of a printer has
compromised me with a friend, Mr. Adams, for whom, as one of the most honest
and disinterested men alive, I have a cordial esteem.” A somewhat touchy
correspondence then ensued, in which Jefferson attempted to remind Adams that
their much-valued friendship did not depend on complete agreement about forms
of government. Adams, clearly hurt, responded in his typically aggressive
style: “I know not what your idea is of the best form of government. You
and I never had a serious conversation together that I can recollect concerning
the nature of government. The very transient hints that have passed between us
have been jocular and superficial, without ever coming to any
explanation.” Having scored his points, Adams then retreated to safer
ground: “The friendship that has subsisted for fifteen years between us
without the slightest interruption, and until this occasion without the
slightest suspicion, ever has been and still is very dear to my
heart.”
¹¹

It was still
dear to Jefferson as well, so much so that he preferred to misrepresent his
emerging conviction that Adams had allowed himself to be “taken up by the
monarchical federalists” and was, albeit inadvertently, lending his
enormous prestige to the growing conspiracy against the revolutionary
principles that the Adams-Jefferson team had done so much to create. That, at
least, was what he was saying and writing to others. To Adams, on the other
hand, he claimed that his remarks on the
Davila
essays had been
misconstrued, that he was actually “not referring to any writing that I
might suppose to be yours.” This was patently untrue, but a justifiable
distortion in the Jeffersonian scheme of things because motivated by an
authentic urge to sustain the friendship. The Adams style was to confront,
shout, rant, and then to embrace. The Jefferson style was to evade, maintain
pretenses, then convince himself that all was well.
¹²

For a time,
the meshing of these two diametrically different styles worked. Adams and
Jefferson maintained cordial relations throughout most of Washington’s
first term, even though it was clear for all to see that they stood on opposite
sides of the chasm that was opening up between Federalists and Republicans. It
helped that Adams was muzzled and largely ignored in the vice presidency, and
that Jefferson, though covertly advising Madison on how best to counter
Hamilton’s financial program, was simultaneously and officially a member
of the Washington administration. In 1793 Jefferson accompanied Adams for his
induction into the American Philosophical Society. Adams commented to Abigail,
“we are still upon terms,” meaning that the friendship endured, but
just barely.
¹³

Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution, despite its wild
and bloody excesses, pushed Adams over the edge. The notion that the cascading
events in France bore any relation to the American Revolution struck Adams as
outright lunacy. (“Danton, Robespierre, Marat, etc. are furies,” he
wrote to John Quincy in 1793. “Dragons’ teeth have been sown in
France and will come up as monsters.”) He began to describe Jefferson as
a dangerous dreamer who, like many of his fellow Virginians, was so deeply in
debt to British creditors that his judgment of European affairs was tinged with
a virulent form of Anglophobia that rendered him incapable of a detached
assessment of America’s interests abroad. He needed to “get out
from under his debts … and proportion his style and life to his
Revenue.” As it was, Jefferson had become a man “poisoned by
ambition and his Temper embittered against the Constitution and the
Administration.”
¹⁴

By the time
Jefferson stepped down as secretary of state late in 1793, only faint traces of
the famous friendship lingered like nostalgic reminiscences in the Adams
memory: “I have so long been in the habit of thinking well of his
abilities and general good dispositions,” Adams confided to Abigail,
“that I cannot but feel some regret at this event [Jefferson’s
retirement].… But his want of candor, his obstinate prejudices against
all forms of government power, his real partiality in spite of all his
pretensions … have so nearly reconciled me to it that I will not
weep.… His mind is now poisoned with passion, prejudice, and
faction.”
¹⁵

As a veteran
Jefferson watcher, Adams offered a skeptical assessment of his former
friend’s decision to leave public life: “Jefferson thinks by this
step to get a reputation of an humble, modest, meek man, wholly without
ambition or vanity,” he explained to John Quincy. “He may even have
deceived himself into this belief. But if a prospect opens, the world will see
and he will feel that he is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell, though no
soldier.” In a sense, Adams was saying that he understood the
psychological forces driving Jefferson’s escape to Monticello better than
Jefferson himself. He already sensed, in a way that Jefferson’s elaborate
denial mechanisms did not permit into his own interior conversations, that
Jefferson’s retirement was temporary, and the two old colleagues would
soon be vying for the presidency. The great collaboration was destined to
become the great competition.
¹⁶

T
HE MOST
savvy Jefferson watcher of all
time, at least over the full stretch of their respective careers, was James
Madison. While in the Adams partnership Jefferson was the younger man, he was
senior to Madison. While he tended to defer to Adams on the basis of age and
political experience, Jefferson dominated his relationship with Madison for the
same reasons. The collaboration had begun in Virginia during the Revolution and
had then congealed during the 1780s, when Jefferson was in Paris and Madison
became his most trusted source of information about political events back home,
most especially the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, which turned
out to be Madison’s most singularly creative moment and the only occasion
when he acted independently of Jefferson’s influence.

Although
the trust between them had grown close to unconditional by the 1790s, when they
assumed joint leadership of the Republican opposition to Federalist domestic
and foreign policies, their partnership lacked the dramatic character of the
Adams-Jefferson collaboration, which seemed to symbolize the creative tension
between New England and Virginia and the fusion of ideological and
temperamental opposites in a common cause. Madison was temperamentally the
opposite of Jefferson—less sweeping in his intellectual style, more
careful and precise, the prose to Jefferson’s poetry—but because he
instinctively subordinated his agenda to Jefferson’s will, there were
never the revealing clashes that gave the Adams-Jefferson dialogue its dynamic
dimension. If the seams in the Adams-Jefferson collaboration were the source of
its magic, the Jefferson-Madison alliance was seamless, and therefore less
magical than smoothly and silently effective.

Whereas Adams and
Jefferson had come together as Americans, first in 1776 as early advocates of
independence from Great Britain, then in the 1780s as America’s two chief
ministers in Europe, Jefferson and Madison had bonded as Virginians, dedicated
to assuring the triumph of Virginia’s interests within the national
government. While perhaps a more provincial cause, it had all the advantages of
a more concerted and tightly focused political agenda in which each man played
a clearly defined role.

Jefferson was the grand strategist, Madison the
agile tactician. “I shall always receive your commands with
pleasure,” Madison wrote to Jefferson in 1794, “and shall continue
to drop you a line as occasions turn up.” Jefferson had recently
ensconced himself at Monticello, relishing his retirement, and Madison was
returning to the political wars in Philadelphia. Madison’s message
signaled the resumption of what can be considered the most successful political
partnership in American history. And though Jefferson did not know it, indeed
made a point of denying it to himself, it also signaled the start of his
campaign for the presidency.
¹⁷

Jefferson’s letters during this reclusive phase avoided politics
altogether, emphasizing instead his designs for a refurbished Monticello, his
crop-rotation system, a somewhat bizarre proposal to transport the University
of Geneva to Virginia, and the ideal process for making manure. His letters to
Madison also featured the Monticellan Jefferson, the statesman-turned-farmer
sequestered in “my remote canton.” Politics on occasion crept into
the dialogue, much like an exotic plant growing amid descriptions of vetch as
the ideal rotation crop. Madison’s letters, on the other hand, were full
of political news from the capital—Hamilton’s treacheries and
alleged cooking of the books in the Treasury Department, Washington’s
ominous overreaction to the Whiskey Rebellion, the groundswell of opposition to
Jay’s Treaty—with many of the letters written in code to foil
snoopers at the post office.
¹⁸

Madison was
quietly orchestrating the Republican campaign on behalf of Jefferson to succeed
Washington. In October of 1795 Aaron Burr visited Monticello, presumably to
discuss the delivery of New York’s electoral votes, probably as a
condition for his own place on the ticket as vice president. Other Republican
operatives like John Beckley, the Speaker of the House, were focusing on the
political factions in Pennsylvania, another key state. On the other side,
Federalist editors and polemicists, encountering this mounting campaign on
Jefferson’s behalf, began to generate anti-Jefferson propaganda: He had
suffered humiliation as governor of Virginia when he fled before British
troops; he was an inveterate Francophile; he was an intellectual dreamer,
“more fit to be a professor in a College, President of a Philosophical
Society … but certainly not the first magistrate of a great
nation.” While all this was going on around him, Jefferson professed
complete ignorance of his candidacy. He would have been perfectly capable of
swearing on the Bible that none of these initiatives came from him.
¹⁹