Joseph J. Ellis (29 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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