Joseph J. Ellis (28 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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