Founding Brothers (32 page)

Given this
formidable array of bad luck, poor timing, and the highly focused political
strategy of his Republican enemies, Adams actually did surprisingly well when
all the votes were counted. He ran ahead of the Federalist candidates for
Congress, who were swept from office in a Republican landslide. Outside of New
York, he even won more electoral votes than he had in 1796. But thanks in great
part to the deft political maneuverings of Aaron Burr, all twelve of New
York’s electoral votes went to Jefferson. As early as May of 1800,
Abigail, the designated vote counter on the Adams team, had predicted that
“New York will be the balance in the scaile, skaill, scaill (is it right
now? it does not look so.)” Though she did not know how to spell
scale,
she knew where the election would be decided. In the final
tally, her husband lost to the tandem of Jefferson and Burr, 73 to 65.
⁶⁹

Though it
probably occurred too late to have much, if any, bearing on the results, the
most dramatic event of the campaign was provided by Hamilton. In October he
wrote and privately printed a fifty-four-page pamphlet assailing the character
of Adams, describing him as an inherently unstable creature, a man driven by
vanity and his own perverse version of independence, a pathetic bundle of
twitches and tantrums who was “unfit for the office of chief
Magistrate.” Adams responded with uncharacteristic calmness to this
personal vendetta. “I am confident,” he observed, “that it
will do him more harm than me.” He was right. Coming too late to affect
many voters, Hamilton’s diatribe exposed the deep rift within the
Federalist camp for all to see and suggested to most readers that Hamilton
himself was out of his mind. In political terms, the Hamilton pamphlet was
fully as fatal, and perhaps suicidal, as his subsequent decision to face Aaron
Burr on the plains of Weehawken. His reputation never recovered.
⁷⁰

The same
could be said for the Federalist party. The Jefferson-Madison collaboration was
not just committed to capturing the federal government for the Republicans. As
Jefferson put it so graphically, their larger goal was “to sink
federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection of
it.” When Madison declared that the Republican cause was now
“completely triumphant,” he not only meant that they had won
control of the presidency and the Congress but also that the Federalist party
was in complete disarray. Though pockets of Federalist power remained alive in
New England for over a decade, as a national movement with the capacity to
dominate the debate about America’s proper course, it was a spent force.
Jefferson had not yet invented the expression “the revolution of
1800” to describe the Republican ascendancy. Nor had historians
translated that term to mean the emergence of a more authentically democratic
brand of politics, a translation that Jefferson would have understood dimly, if
at all. (Jefferson actually thought that his victory represented a recovery
rather than a discovery, a renewal of the principles of ’76 and a
repudiation of the constitutional settlement of 1787 as the Federalists had
attempted to define it.) But the more historically correct reality was that no
one quite knew what the Republican triumph meant in positive terms for the
national government. What was clear, however, was that a particular version of
politics and political leadership embodied in the Washington and Adams
administrations had been successfully opposed and decisively defeated. The
Jefferson-Madison collaboration was the politics of the future. The Adams
collaboration was the politics of the past.
⁷¹

What died
was the presumption, so central to Adams’s sense of politics and of
himself, that there was a long-term collective interest for the republic that
could be divorced from partisanship, indeed rendered immune to politics
altogether; and that the duty of an American statesman was to divine that
public interest while studiously ignoring, indeed remaining blissfully
oblivious to, the partisan pleadings of particular constituencies. After 1800,
what Adams had called “the monarchical principle” was dead in
American political culture, along with the kind of towering defiance that both
Washington and Adams had harbored toward what might be called the
“morality of partisanship.” That defiance had always depended upon
revolutionary credentials—those present at the creation of the republic
could be trusted to act responsibly—and as the memory of the Revolution
faded, so did the trust it conferred. Of course Jefferson could, and decidedly
did, claim membership in “the band of brothers,” but his election
marked the end of an era. The “people” had replaced the
“public” as the sovereign source of political wisdom. No leader
could credibly claim to be above the fray. As Jefferson had understood from the
moment Washington stepped down, the American president must forever after be
the head of a political party.

Neither member of the Adams team could
ever comprehend this historical transition as anything other than an ominous
symptom of moral degeneration. “Jefferson had a party,” Adams
observed caustically, “Hamilton had a party, but the commonwealth had
none.” If the very idea of virtue was no longer an ideal in American
politics, then there was no place for him in public life. If the Adams brand of
statesmanship was now an anachronism—and it was—then the Adams
presidency would serve as a fitting monument to its passing. In February of
1800, Adams signed the Treaty of Mortefontaine, officially ending hostilities
with France. He could leave office in the knowledge that his discredited
policies and singular style had worked. As he put it, he had “steered the
vessel … into a peaceable and safe port.”
⁷²

Rather
ironically, the last major duty of the Adams collaboration was to supervise the
transition of the federal government to its permanent location on the Potomac.
Though the entire archive of the executive branch required only seven packing
cases, Abigail resented the physical burdens imposed by this final chore, as
well as the cold, cavernous, and still-unfinished rooms of the presidential
mansion. For several weeks it was not at all clear whether Jefferson would
become the next abiding occupant, because the final tally of the electoral vote
had produced a tie between him and Burr. Rumors circulated that Adams intended
to step down from office in order to permit Jefferson, still his vice
president, to succeed him, in an effort to forestall a constitutional crisis.
Adams let out the word that Jefferson was clearly the voters’ choice and
the superior man, that Burr was “like a balloon, filled with inflammable
air.” In the end, the crisis passed when, on the thirty-sixth ballot, the
House voted Jefferson into office.
⁷³

Despite all
the accumulated bitterness of the past eight years, and despite the political
wounds Jefferson had inflicted over the past four years on the Adams
presidency, Abigail insisted that her husband invite their “former
friend” for cake and tea before she departed for Quincy a few weeks
before the inauguration ceremony. No record of the conversation exists, though
Jefferson had already apprised Madison that he knew the Adamses well enough to
expect “dispositions liberal and accommodating.” On the actual day
of the inauguration, however, Jefferson did not have Adams by his side as he
rode down a stump-infested Pennsylvania Avenue to the yet-unfinished capitol.
Rather than lend his presence to the occasion, Adams had taken the four
o’clock stage out of town that morning in order to rejoin Abigail. He did
not exchange another word with Jefferson for twelve years.
⁷⁴

CHAPTER SIX

The Friendship

A
DAMS CORRECTLY
regarded
the five-hundred-mile trek back to Quincy as his final exit from the public
stage. Upon arriving home he noted that his barnyard was full of seaweed, which
then prompted a characteristically indiscreet observation: He had made “a
good exchange … honors and virtues for manure.” When a violent
storm struck on the day of his return, he took it as a providential sign that
trouble was following him into retirement, as he put it, “substituting
fermentations in the elements for revolutions in the moral, intellectual and
political world.” As one who had helped to make those political
revolutions happen, he claimed to be completely comfortable in stormy weather.
But now, at the advanced age of sixty-six, was it not natural to expect some
semblance of serenity? “Far removed from all the intrigues, and now out
of reach of all the great and little passions that agitate the world,” he
explained, “I hope to enjoy more tranquillity than has ever before been
my lot.”
¹

The trouble
with Adams was not that storms seemed to follow him, but rather that he carried
them inside his soul wherever he went. Abigail spied him in the field that July
of 1801, working alongside the hired hands, swinging his sickle and murmuring
obscenities at his political opponents. From his letters we know that Hamilton
topped his enemies list; he called him that “bastard brat of a Scotch
pedlar,” who was “as ambitious as Bonaparte, though less
courageous, and, save for me, would have involved us in a foreign war with
France & a Civil war with ourselves.”
²

Not far behind
Hamilton came his former friend and successor to the presidency. Though the
hate for Jefferson was far less, the hurt was more. They had done so much
together, struggled together against the odds in 1776, represented America in
Europe during the 1780s, risen above their political differences during
Washington’s administration. But during his own presidency Adams believed
that Jefferson had betrayed him and their friendship. And it was all done so
indirectly, so craftily, like a burglar who left no fingerprints. Jefferson was
“a shadow man,” Adams now believed, a man whose character was
“like the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see and make no
noise.” When commenting on his other enemies, Adams displayed
considerable flair. Tom Paine, for example, came off as “the Satyr of the
Age … a mongrel between Pig and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a
Butch Wolf.” With Jefferson, however, the colorful epithets and
irreverent images did not come so easily. It was difficult to be specific when
the core of a man’s character was elusiveness.
³

The character
of Adams’s own complicated feelings toward Jefferson eventually revealed
itself through Abigail. The occasion was poignant. In 1804 Jefferson’s
younger daughter, Maria Jefferson Eppes, died from complications during
childbirth. Abigail decided to write a letter of consolation, explaining that
“reasons of various kinds witheld my pen, until the powerful feelings of
my heart, have burst through the restraint.” She recalled caring for
Maria as a nine-year-old girl just arrived in London. “It has been some
time that I conceived of any event in this Life, which would call forth,
feelings of mutual sympathy,” Abigail confided to Jefferson, but the loss
of a child overcame all her rational reservations. She wanted Jefferson to know
that her heart was with him.
⁴

Jefferson
normally had perfect pitch when interpreting the tone of a letter, but in this
instance, he missed Abigail’s clear warning signals and read her words as
an invitation to resume the friendship with the Adams family. He seized the
opportunity to review the long political partnership he had enjoyed with her
husband. Their mutual affection “accompanied us thro’ long and
important scenes,” he wrote, and “the different conclusions we had
drawn from our political reading and reflections were not permitted to lessen
mutual esteem.” Though they had twice run against each other for the
presidency, he insisted that “we never stood in one another’s
way.” The political rivalry had never eroded the personal respect between
them.

There was only one occasion, Jefferson confided, when a decision
by Adams struck him as “personally unkind.” That was his
appointment of Federalists to several vacant judgeships during his last weeks
as president. These appointments, somewhat misleadingly described as “the
midnight judges,” had occurred after the presidential election, and
therefore denied Jefferson the right to choose his own men. (The major offense
was the appointment of John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court,
arguably Adams’s most enduring anti-Jeffersonian legacy, in part because
of Marshall’s magisterial career on the bench and in part because
Jefferson and Marshall utterly despised each other.) But this one offense, as
Jefferson put it, “left something for friendship to forgive,” so
that “after brooding it over for some little time … I forgave it
cordially, and returned to the same state of esteem and respect for him [Adams]
which had so long subsisted.”
⁵

Jefferson’s letter sent Abigail into a controlled rage. “You
have been pleased to enter upon some subjects which call for a reply,”
she began ominously. The very notion that Jefferson should feel himself the
injured party with the moral leverage to forgive her husband was a preposterous
presumption. Now that Jefferson had raised the issue of political betrayal, he
would have to “excuse the freedom of this discussion … which has
taken off the Shackles I should otherwise found myself embarrassed with.”
The pent-up anger poured out: “And now Sir, I freely disclose to you what
has severed the bonds of former Friendship, and placed you in a light very
different from what I had once viewed you in.”

After delivering a
spirited defense of her husband’s right to make judicial appointments
before he left office, Abigail launched a frontal attack on Jefferson’s
character. Throughout Adams’s presidency, she claimed, Jefferson had used
his position as vice president to undermine the policies of the very man he had
been elected to support. This was bad enough. But the worst offenses occurred
during the election of 1800. Jefferson was guilty of “the blackest
calumny and foulest falsehoods” during that bitter campaign. While
affecting disinterest and detachment, he was secretly hiring scandalmongers
like James Callender to libel Adams with outrageous charges: Adams was mentally
deranged; Adams intended to have himself crowned as an American monarch; Adams
planned to appoint John Quincy his successor to the presidency. “This,
Sir, I considered as a personal injury,” Abigail observed, “the
Sword that cut the Gordion knot.” It was richly ironic and wholly
deserving that the infamous Callender had then turned on Jefferson and accused
him of a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings, his household slave. “The
serpent you cherished and warmed,” she noted with satisfaction,
“bit the hand that nourished him.” And so, if there was any
forgiving to be done, it would all happen on the Adams side. In the meantime,
Jefferson was the one who needed to do some soul searching. She concluded with
one last verbal slap: “Faithful are the wounds of a Friend.”
⁶

Throughout
his extraordinarily vast correspondence, Jefferson never received another
letter like this one. He had his detractors, to be sure, but Federalist critics
tended to attack him in the public press, which he could and did dismiss as
partisan propaganda. Abigail’s accusations, on the other hand, were
private and personal, came from someone whom he respected as an intimate
friend, and went beyond mere matters of political partisanship to questions of
honor and trust. His first instinct was to claim that both sides, Republicans
and Federalists alike, had engaged in lies and distortions during the election
of 1800, and that he had suffered equivalent “calumnies and
falsehoods” along with Adams. (This was completely true.) He then went on
to disclaim that “any person who knew either of us could possibly believe
that either meddled in that dirty work.” In effect, he had no role
whatsoever in promoting Callender’s libels against Adams. (This was a
lie.) “What those who wish to think amiss of me,” Jefferson
pleaded, “I have learnt to be perfectly indifferent.” But with
those like Abigail, “where I know a mind to be ingenious, and need only
truth to set it to rights, I cannot be as passive.”
⁷

Abigail was
having none of it. As she saw it, Jefferson’s denials only offered
further evidence of his duplicity. His complicity in behind-the-scenes
political plotting was common knowledge. Abigail had initially resisted the
obvious because, as she put it, “the Heart is long, very long in
receiving the convictions that is forced upon it by reason.” Even now,
she acknowledged, “affection still lingers in the Bosom, even after
esteem has taken its flight.” But there was no denying that Jefferson had
mortgaged his honor to win an election. His Federalist critics had always
accused him of being a man of party rather than principle. “Pardon me,
Sir, if I say,” Abigail concluded, “that I fear you
are.”
⁸

We can be
reasonably sure that Abigail was speaking for her husband as well as herself in
this brief volley of letters. The Adams team, then, was charging Jefferson with
two serious offenses against the unwritten code of political honor purportedly
binding on the leadership class of the revolutionary generation. The first
offense, which has a quaint and wholly anachronistic sound to our modern ears,
was that Jefferson was personally involved in his own campaign for the
presidency and that he conducted that campaign with only one goal in
mind—namely, winning the election. This was the essence of the charge
that he was a “party man.” Such behavior became an accepted, even
expected, feature of the political landscape during the middle third of the
nineteenth century and has remained so ever since. Within the context of the
revolutionary generation, however, giving one’s allegiance to a political
party remained illegitimate. It violated the core of virtue and
disinterestedness presumed essential for anyone properly equipped to oversee
public affairs. Neither Washington nor Adams had ever played a direct role in
their own campaigns for office. And even Jefferson, who was the first president
to break with that tradition, felt obliged to do so surreptitiously, then issue
blanket denials when confronted by Abigail. Jefferson, in fact, was on record
as making one of the strongest statements of the era against the influence of
political parties. He described party allegiance as “the last degradation
of a free and moral agent” and claimed that “if I could not go to
heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”
⁹

Jefferson’s position on political parties, like his stance on
slavery, seemed to straddle a rather massive contradiction. In both instances
his posture of public probity—slavery should be ended and political
parties were evil agents that corrupted republican values—was at odds
with his personal behavior and political interest. And in both instances,
Jefferson managed to convince himself that these apparent contradictions were,
well, merely apparent. In the case of his active role behind the scenes during
the presidential campaign of 1800, Jefferson sincerely believed that a
Federalist victory meant the demise of the spirit of ’76. Anything that
avoided that horrible outcome ought to be justifiable. He then issued so many
denials of his direct involvement in the campaign that he probably came to
believe his own lies. That is why Abigail’s relentless refusal to accept
his personal testimonials on this score struck a nerve. He was not accustomed
to having his word questioned and his excuses exposed, not even by
himself.

His second offense was more personal. Namely, he had vilified
a man whom he claimed was a long-standing friend. He had sponsored
Callender’s polemics against the Adams administration even though he knew
them to be gross misrepresentations. Adams had no monarchical ambitions, though
he did believe in a strong executive. He did not want war with France, though
he did think that American neutrality should take precedence over the
Franco-American alliance. Both positions were in accord with Washington’s
preferred policy. Unlike Washington, however, Adams had political
vulnerabilities, which Jefferson exploited for his own political advantage. If
the gross distortions had been orchestrated by Madison or any number of lesser
political operatives, it would have been bad enough. But for Jefferson himself
to have sanctioned the defamation was the essence of betrayal. It was akin to
Hamilton’s behind-the-scenes slandering of Burr, except in the case of
Adams, the slander was more contemptible because essentially untrue. If Adams
had been a believer in the
code duello,
which he was not (nor, for
that matter, was Jefferson), this defamation of the Adams character would have
presented a prime opportunity for a resolution with pistols on the field of
honor. For at the highest level of political life in the early republic,
relationships remained resolutely personal, dependent on mutual trust, and
therefore vulnerable to betrayals whenever the public and private
overlapped.