Founding Brothers (27 page)

Madison managed the particulars silently and surreptitiously. He
understood—indeed, it was a crucial aspect of the
collaboration—that Jefferson’s eventual reentry into the political
arena depended upon sustaining the fiction in his mentor’s own mind that
it would never happen. Jefferson required what we would call
“deniability,” not just for public purposes but also for his own
private serenity. In the Jefferson-Madison collaboration, Madison was not just
responsible for handling the messy particulars; he was also accountable for
shielding his chief from the political ambitions throbbing away in his own
soul.

As late as the summer of 1796, when Washington’s retirement
was a foregone conclusion and Jefferson’s candidacy for the presidency
was common knowledge throughout the country, Jefferson claimed to be completely
oblivious to the campaign on his behalf. Madison spent four months at
Montpelier, only a few miles from Monticello, but never visited Jefferson, for
fear of being forced into a conversation that might upset Jefferson’s
denial mechanisms. “I have not seen Jefferson,” he wrote Monroe in
code, “and have
thought it best to present him no opportunity of
protesting
to his
friend against
being
embarked on this
contest.
” Jefferson thus became perhaps the last person in America
to recognize that he was running for the presidency against his old friend from
Massachusetts.
²⁰

Meanwhile up
in Quincy, that very friend was also dancing a minuet with his own political
ambitions. Adams’s partner in the dance was Abigail, whose political
instincts rivaled Madison’s legendary skills and whose knowledge of her
husband’s emotional makeup surpassed all competitors. She had always been
his ultimate confidante, the person he could trust with his self-doubts,
vanities, and overflowing opinions. Now, however, with Jefferson gone over to
the other side and their former friendship reduced to polite and nervously
evasive exchanges, Abigail became his chief and, in most respects, his sole
collaborator. One reason Adams fled from Philadelphia for nine months each
year, apart from the oppressive summer heat, the annual yellow fever epidemics,
and the fact he despised his job, was that he needed to be with her.

Ironically, we can only know what they were saying to each other while
together from the letters they wrote when apart. During the months Congress was
in session they wrote each other two or three times every week. Much of the
correspondence was playfully personal: “No man even if he is sixty years
of age ought to have more than three months at a time from his family,”
Abigail complained soon after he departed for Philadelphia. “Oh that I
had a bosom to lean my head upon,” Adams replied. “But how dare you
hint or lisp a word about ‘sixty years of age.’ If I were near I
would soon convince you that I am not above forty.”
²¹

Just as
often, however, Adams also used the correspondence to unburden himself of
opinions that his muzzled status in the Senate prevented him from sharing
publicly. The quality of oratory in the Senate, he complained, was far below
the standards at the Continental Congress, though he was intrigued by the
fluid, nonchalant style of Aaron Burr, whom he described “as fat as a
duck and as ruddy as a roost cock.” He was lonely for his wife’s
company and political advice: “I want to sit and converse with you about
our debates every evening. I sit here alone and brood over political
probabilities and conjectures.” Abigail heard him out about the doomed
course of the French Revolution but was somewhat more sanguine: “I
ruminate upon France as I lie awake many hours before light,” she wrote.
“My present thought is that their virtuous army will give them a
government in time in spite of all their conventions but of what nature it will
be, it is hard to say.”
²²

Abigail
responded harshly to Republican critics of Jay’s Treaty, calling them
“mindless Jacobins and party creatures.” Adams concurred, though he
also thought the affection for England that the “ultras,” or High
Federalists, seemed to harbor was just as misguided as the Republican love
affair with France: “I wish that misfortune and adversity could soften
the temper and humiliate the insolence of John Bull, but he is not yet
sufficiently humble. If I mistake not, it is the destiny of America one day to
beat down his pride. But the irksome task will not soon, I hope, be forced upon
us.” Like Washington, he saw Jay’s Treaty as a shrewd if
bittersweet bargain designed to postpone war with England for perhaps a
generation. In the meantime, he hoped that England and France would bleed each
other to death. As for George III, “the mad idiot will never
recover,” but as in the old revolutionary days, “his idiocy is our
salvation.”
²³

When Adams
offered a harsh appraisal of Washington’s lack of formal education and
knowledge of the classics, Abigail chided him: Washington was the only man
apart from her husband capable of detachment and ought not be carped at behind
his back. If anyone else had corrected him so directly, Adams would have gone
into his Vesuvial mode. Coming from Abigail, however, the political advice was
welcomed. “Send more,” Adams pleaded. “There is more good
thoughts, fine strokes, and mother wit in them than I hear [in the Senate] in
the whole week.” Abigail dismissed such praise as pure flattery.
“What a jumble are my letters—politics, domestic occurrences,
farming anecdotes—pray light your segars [
sic
] with them.”
Instead, he savored and saved them all.
²⁴

Then there
was the touchy question of the presidency. At some unspoken level, Adams knew,
which meant that Abigail also knew, that he considered the office his
revolutionary right. No one else, save perhaps Jefferson, could match his
record of service to the cause of independence. Why else had he been willing to
languish in the shadow of the vice presidency for those godforsaken years if
not to use it as a stepping-stone to the prize itself? Like
Jefferson—indeed, like any self-respecting statesman of the era, save
perhaps Burr—Adams had no intention of campaigning for the office. (Burr
did, and acted on it.) “I am determined to be a silent spectator of the
silly and wicked game,” Adams explained to Abigail, “and to enjoy
it as a comedy, a farce, or as a gymnastic exhibition at Sadler’s
Wells.” Then he added a candid afterthought: “Yet I don’t
know how I should live without it.”
²⁵

That was the
Adams pattern: first to deny his political ambitions, much like Jefferson; then
to confront them, feel guilty about them, fidget over them; then grudgingly
admit they were part of who he was. Washington’s successor would inherit
“a devilish load … and be very apt to stagger and stumble.”
Who in his right mind would want the job? Moreover, he was not cut out for all
the ceremonial obligations: “I hate speeches, messages, addresses and
answers, proclamations, and such affected, studied, contraband things,”
he wrote sulkily to Abigail. “I hate levees and drawing rooms. I hate to
speak to a thousand people to whom I have nothing to say.” Then again the
revealing afterthought: “Yet all this I can do.”
²⁶

Abigail
aligned her responses to fit alongside her husband’s own internal odyssey
toward the inevitable. Yes, the presidency was a thankless job, “a most
unpleasant seat, full of thorns, briars, thistles, murmuring, fault-finding,
calumny, obloquy.” But—her version of the Adams internal
ricochet—“the Hand of Providence ought to be attended to, and what
is designed, cheerfully submitted to.” Did this mean she could live with
his candidacy and would consent to live with him if he won the election?
Abigail refused to answer that question until the late winter of 1796.
“My Ambition leads me not to be first in Rome,” she observed
somewhat coyly. Her only political ambition was to “reign in the heart of
my husband. That is my throne and there I aspire to be absolute.” On the
other hand, if he was elected to the presidency, it would be “a
flattering and Glorious Reward” for his lifetime of public service, and
he would obviously need “a wife to hover about you, to bind up your
temples, to mix your bark and pour out your coffee.” Adams was ecstatic:
“Hi! Ho! Oh Dear. I am most tenderly your forever friend.” With her
at his side, he had no real need for a cabinet.
²⁷

Now that his
personal demons were out in the open and Abigail was on board, the
collaboration moved into high gear. In March and April of 1796, the Adams team
began to assess electoral projections on a state-by-state basis. He worried
that New England might not rally to his candidacy. She was confident it would
go solidly for him. (She was right.) Reports from New York and Pennsylvania
suggested a strong surge for Jefferson, who was clearly the main threat. Adams
foresaw a very close electoral vote, perhaps even a tie with Jefferson, which
would then throw the election into the House of Representatives. Or suppose
Jefferson finished a close second and therefore became vice president? (Until
passage of the Twelfth Amendment, electors voted for two candidates, not one
ticket of two.) Might this not create “a dangerous crisis in public
affairs” by placing the president and vice president “in opposite
boxes”? Abigail thought such speculations were too hypothetical to worry
about. (Here events proved her wrong.) Moreover, she still had a soft spot in
her heart for Jefferson and believed him fully capable of joining the Adams
team: “Though wrong in politics, though formerly an advocate of Tom
Paine’s
Rights of Man,
and though frequently mistaken in men and
measures, I do not think him an insincere or corruptible man.” And all
this fretful conjuring about prospective mishaps and crises, she scolded, was
unbecoming a man who would be first magistrate of the nation. In a recent
dream, Abigail reported, she was riding in a coach when, suddenly, several
large cannonballs were flying toward her. All burst in the air before reaching
her coach, the pieces of metal falling harmlessly in the middle distance. This
was a clear sign: Stop worrying. The voters and the gods were on their
side.
²⁸

E
VENTS PROVED
Abigail half-right. The
electoral vote split along sectional lines, Adams carrying New England and
Jefferson the South. As the results trickled in from different states in
December, Adams threw several tantrums that required Abigail to nurse him back
to composure. The Federalist ticket featured Adams and Thomas Pinckney of South
Carolina as a tandem. Behind-the-scenes maneuverings by Hamilton threatened to
propel Pinckney past Adams, though Hamilton claimed that his chief goal was to
knock Jefferson out altogether. For a while, when it appeared that Pinckney
might actually win and Adams come in second, the Sage of Quincy exploded:
Pinckney was a “nobody”; the humiliation of serving under him was
more than he could bear; he would resign the vice presidency if he finished in
second place. On December 30, however, when results from Virginia and South
Carolina revealed that Adams had captured one electoral vote in each of these
southern states, Adams ceased erupting and started celebrating. “John
Adams never felt more serene in his life,” he wrote Abigail. It was a
razor-thin victory, but he had prevailed over Jefferson 71 to 68, with Pinckney
a close third and Burr, Jefferson’s running mate, far back in the
pack.
²⁹

Jefferson’s posture throughout the drawn-out counting of the
electoral votes remained a combination of studied indifference and calculated
obliviousness. Quite obviously, he realized he was a candidate. Madison was
relaying state-by-state assessments to Monticello, which were also being
reported in the local press. Although Jefferson claimed to be too busy with his
renovations at Monticello and his crop-rotation scheme to notice such things,
some hidden portion of his mind was surely paying close attention, since he
predicted that Adams would win by three electoral votes—the precise
result—two months before it became official.

On December 28 he
wrote a congratulatory letter to Adams, regretting “the various little
incidents [that] have happened or been contrived to separate us” and
disavowing any desire to have been thrust into the presidential election in the
first place: “I have no ambition to govern men,” he explained.
“It is a painful and thankless task.” He also went out of his way
to squelch rumors that he might resent serving under his old friend and more
recent opponent: “I can particularly have no feelings which would revolt
at a secondary position to Mr. Adams. I am his junior in life, was his junior
in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in our civil
government.” Up in Quincy, Abigail reiterated her abiding sense that
Jefferson could be trusted to recover his earlier intimacy with her husband.
“You know,” she confided to Adams, “my friendship for that
gentleman has lived through his faults and errors—to which I have not
been blind. I believe he remains our friend.”
³⁰

Over the
course of the next few weeks Adams and Jefferson developed two equally cogent
but wholly incompatible political strategies in response to their somewhat
awkward reunion as a political pair. Both strategies began with the realistic
recognition that whoever succeeded Washington as president was likely to face
massive problems, in part because of the deep political divisions over foreign
policy that had haunted his second term, mostly because Washington was
destiny’s choice as the greatest American of the age and therefore
inherently irreplaceable. From that common starting point, they then devised
diametrically different courses of action.

The core feature of the
Adams strategy was to bring Jefferson into his confidence and his
councils—in effect, to create a bipartisan administration in which
Jefferson enjoyed the kind of access and influence that Adams himself had been
denied as vice president in the Washington administration. Adams began to leak
his thoughts along these lines in private conversations that he knew would find
their way back to Jefferson. And they did: “My friends inform me that Mr.
A. speaks of me with great friendship,” Jefferson observed, “and
with satisfaction in the prospect of administering the government in
concurrence with me.” Adams was suggesting that the old collaboration of
1776 be recovered and revived. If no single leader could hope to fill the huge
vacuum created by Washington’s departure, perhaps the reconstituted team
of Adams and Jefferson, which had performed so brilliantly in previous
political assignments, might enjoy at least a fighting chance of sustaining the
legacy of national leadership that Washington had established. Abigail
supported the initiative; indeed, it might very well have been her idea in the
first place, convinced as she was that the political split between Jefferson
and her husband had not destroyed the mutual affection and trust that had built
up over the previous twenty years of friendship.
³¹