John Adams

  Presently, when a series of spirited letters signed “Publicola” began appearing in Boston's Columbian Centinel, attacking The Rights of Man and its sponsor, Jefferson, like many readers, assumed “Publicola” was Adams. In fact, it was John Quincy, who, rising to the defense of his father, took Jefferson to task for claiming that a difference in political opinion might be declared “heresy,” and those who differed in view from the Secretary of State were therefore heretics.

  I am somewhat at a loss to determine [he wrote] what this very respectable gentleman means by political heresies. Does he consider this pamphlet of Mr. Paine's as a canonical book of political scripture? As containing the true doctrine of popular infallibility, from which it would be heretical to depart in one single point?... I have always understood, sir, that the citizens of these States were possessed of a full and entire freedom of opinion upon all subjects civil as well as religious; they have not yet established any infallible criterion of orthodoxy, either in church or state... and the only political tenet which they could stigmatize with the name of heresy would be that which should attempt to impose an opinion upon their understandings, upon the single principle of authority.

  Jefferson let three months pass before sending Adams a rather stiff letter of apology and explanation, which, though well intentioned, hardly sufficed. Written at Philadelphia, the letter was dated July 17, 1791. He had taken up his pen a dozen times and as often put it down, “suspended between opposing considerations,” Jefferson began. “I determine, however, to write from a conviction that truth between candid minds can never do harm.” He had written what he had about “heresies,” he said, only “to take off a little of the dryness of the note.” He had been “thunderstruck” by the printer's use of the note. He had hoped it would attract no attention and implied it might not have but for the fuss over the “Publicola” series. It was because of “Publicola” that “our names [were] thrown on the public stage as public antagonists.

  That you and I differ in our idea of the best form of government is well known to us both, but we have differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each other's motives, and confiding our differences of opinion to private conversation. And I can declare with truth in the presence of the Almighty that nothing was further from my intention or expectation than to have either my own or your name brought before the public on this occasion. The friendship and confidence which has so long existed between us required this explanation from me, and I know you too well to fear any misconstruction of the motives of it.

  Never in his life, Jefferson added, had he written anything for newspapers anonymously or under a pseudonym, and he never intended to.

  He did not tell Adams, as he had Washington, that he had Adams specifically in mind as the perpetrator of “heresies.” Nor did he say that he knew by then that “Publicola” was John Quincy. Jefferson's source was Madison, who had also observed that the young man's style was notably less clumsy than that of the father.

  Adams answered Jefferson at once and with obvious feeling. He accepted Jefferson's account of what had happened, but allowed that the printer had “sown the seeds of more evils” than he could ever atone for. He, Adams, had been held up to ridicule in one newspaper after another for his meanness (the New Haven Gazette had called him an “unprincipled libeler”), his love of monarchy, his antipathy to freedom. Adams vehemently denied that he favored monarchy. “If you suppose that I have or ever had a design or desire of attempting to introduce a government of Kings, Lords, and Commons, or in other words a hereditary executive, or a hereditary senate, either into the government of the United States or that of any individual state in this country, you are wholly mistaken.... If you have ever put such a construction on anything of mine, I beg you would mention it to me, and I will undertake to convince you that it has no such meaning.”

  The problem was that so many who criticized his writings had never bothered to read them, Adams said. Some misunderstood them, others willfully misrepresented them. Either way, he had been made the victim of “tempestuous abuse.” That Jefferson himself had once praised his Defence of the Constitutions, apparently finding no heresies therein, Adams, to his credit, made no mention.

  He took issue only with Jefferson's claim that their differences on the best form of government were well known to both of them. This was simply not so, Adams wrote. “You and I have never had a serious conversation together that I can recollect concerning the nature of government.”

  He was not “Publicola,” and he had had no hand in writing the essays, Adams assured Jefferson, but refrained from identifying the author. What troubled him most, he said, was the mounting enmity between public men. “I must own to you that the daring traits of ambition and intrigue, and those unbridled rivalries which have already appeared, are the most melancholy and alarming systems that I have ever seen in this country.” If this was what politics came to, then the sooner he was out of it, the happier he would be.

  At the last, Adams left no doubt of how much Jefferson and his friendship meant to him.

  I thank you, sir, very seriously for writing to me. It is high time that you and I should come to an explanation with each other. The friendship that has subsisted for fifteen years between us without the smallest interruption, and until this occasion without the slightest suspicion, ever has been and still is very dear to my heart. There is no office which I would not resign, rather than give a just occasion to one friend to foresake me. Your motives for writing to me, I have not a doubt, were the most pure and the most friendly; and I have no suspicion that you will not receive this explanation from me in the same candid light.

  Jefferson would have been better off had he let the matter drop. Instead, he wrote again, speciously insisting that blame for the controversy rested with “Publicola.” Then, in what must have been an effort to spare Adams's feelings, he went further. In direct contradiction to what he told Washington, Jefferson denied to Adams that he ever had him in mind when he wrote to the printer: “Indeed, it was impossible that my note should occasion your name to be brought into question; for as far from naming you, I had not even in view any writing which I might suppose to be yours.... Thus I hope, my dear sir, that you will see me to have been innocent in effect as I was in intention.”

  In sum, Jefferson refused to take any responsibility for what had happened. To Washington he cited the “indiscretion of a printer”; to Adams he said John Quincy was the cause of the trouble, and that he himself was innocent of ever even thinking of Adams in the first place.

  But it was not Jefferson who had suffered abuse and ridicule in the press. It was Adams, and the damage done was extreme, given the overwhelming popularity of both Thomas Paine and the French Revolution.

  From this point on, Adams and Jefferson were seldom to be perceived as anything other than archrivals. The public stage that Jefferson said he wished to avoid, the growing enmity between public men that Adams abhorred, had made them in the public mind symbols of the emerging divisions in national politics. Further, in what he had written to Madison, and in what he had said in his note to the printer, Jefferson had tagged Adams with being both mentally unsound and a monarchist, the two charges most commonly and unjustly made against him for the rest of his life.

  Adams let the matter drop. He made no reply to Jefferson's last letter, and there would be no further correspondence between them for several years. The “explanation with each other” that Adams hoped for would have to wait for more than two decades.

  • • •

  IN THE AUTUMN of 1791, alarmed to find they were living beyond their means, Abigail and John moved from Bush Hill to a modest dwelling in town at Fourth and Arch Streets. Servants were let go, except for Briesler and a cook, “a clever, sober, honest,” free black woman, as Abigail reported to Mary Cranch. “We live sociably and friendly together,” she wrote, and in many ways felt they were all better off living in town.

  But with winter came the inevitable siege of illnesses, and
for Abigail, beset mainly by rheumatism “attended with a violent fever,” it was as miserable a time as she had known. Her eyes became so inflamed she could not bear any light in her room, “not even the fire to blaze.” After six weeks in bed she was still too feeble to go downstairs without being carried. “I have scarcely any flesh left in comparison to what I was.” Dr. Rush came several times to draw blood, and, in the mistaken belief that the human body contained more blood than it actually does, it was his practice to bleed patients far more than customary. At times he was known to remove as much as eighty ounces, which could well explain Abigail's feeble state.

  The news that Colonel Smith, newly returned from London, was to sail again on the next packet, and would be taking Nabby and the children with him, left her feeling still more dreadful. The “everlasting fever” hung on, she wrote weeks later, confiding also that the “critical period” of midlife compounded her troubles. She brooded over the brevity of life. “How soon may our fairest prospects be leveled with the dust and show us that man in his best estate is but vanity and dust?” she wrote on March 21, 1792, after a particularly bad night of “nerves.” It was already another election year, the end of the President's and the Vice President's terms of office. Who knew what was to come? Southern members of the House seemed determined not just to oppose the Secretary of the Treasury but to destroy him, while much of the press joined in the assault. Not even the President escaped their venom any longer. Oddly it was only the Vice President now who was allowed to “sleep in peace,” though this hardly compensated for Abigail's worry for the country.

  “I firmly believe,” she darkly forecast to Mary, “if I live ten years longer, I shall see a division of the Southern and Northern states, unless more candor and less intrigue, of which I have no hopes, should prevail.”

  Adams was more sanguine. If frequently exhausted by his labors and distressed over her ailments, he appears to have come to terms with his marginal role in the order of things. It had been a painful process, but he had at last learned the part he was supposed to play and to a large degree accepted its limitations. Rarely did he speak in the Senate anymore. Rarely if ever did he intrude on Senate business. If the role of Vice President made him a political cipher—as it would anyone—he could at least serve faithfully.

  He was in the chair every day, all day, without fail, which was a point of pride with him, but also of some worry, since he knew such sedentary confinement to be good neither for the body nor the spirit of “a man habituated for a long course of years to long voyages and immense journeys.”

  Though loyal to Washington and the administration, Adams was but nominally a Federalist, refusing steadfastly to be, or to be perceived as, a party man. That he had allowed “no party virulence or personal reflections” to escape him was also a matter of pride and consolation. If called upon to maintain order in the Senate now, he apparently had only to tap gently with his silver pencil case on the small mahogany table before him.

  In mid-April, her health sufficiently restored for her to travel, Abigail returned to Massachusetts. Adams followed in May, once Congress adjourned, and the long summer at home, far removed from the hornets' nest of election-year politics at the capital, did much to restore them both.

  The one big change at home was that their part of town, the old, first-settled North Precinct, had been broken off from the rest of Braintree and renamed Quincy. Otherwise, town life and days on the farm went on refreshingly the same as always.

  • • •

  AMONG CLOSE ASSOCIATES the President had been expressing a strong desire to return to private life. He was weary of the demands of office, weary and disheartened, Washington said, by party rancor and a severely partisan press that had taken to calling him the American Caesar.

  Many of the harshest attacks on Hamilton's economic policies—and some of the more biting comments on Washington himself—came from the National Gazette, a newspaper newly established in Philadelphia as an antidote to the partisan Federalist views of the Gazette of the United States, to which Alexander Hamilton was a regular contributor of essays and money. But when it became known that the editor of the new National Gazette, Philip Freneau, had been encouraged to establish the paper by Madison and Jefferson, and that he was also employed by Jefferson as a translator in the Department of State, it appeared Jefferson himself had a hand in the attacks on the President and the administration. The most vicious assaults, however, were aimed at Hamilton, whom Freneau delighted in vilifying, and to add to the insults, such diatribes were nearly always accompanied by lavish praise for Jefferson.

  Washington claimed to disregard newspaper abuse but privately asked Jefferson to intercede with Freneau and remove him from the State Department. Jefferson insisted that Freneau and his paper were saving the country from monarchy and persuaded Washington that it would be a grave misstep to impede on freedom of the press.

  Even more aggravating for the President was the unrelenting feud between Jefferson and Hamilton, the two highest officers in his cabinet, and the most gifted. Animosity between them had reached the point where they could hardly bear to be in the same room. Each was certain the other was a dangerous man intent on dominating the government; and each privately complained of the other to the President.

  The one, Hamilton, disliked and distrusted the French, while, for the good of the American economy, strongly favoring better relations with Britain. The other, Jefferson, disliked and distrusted the British, while seeing in France and the French Revolution the embodiment of the highest ideals of the American Revolution. To Jefferson, Hamilton was “not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” To Hamilton, Jefferson belonged among those “pretenders to profound knowledge” who were “ignorant of the most useful of all sciences—the science of human nature.” The day would come, Hamilton warned, when Jefferson would be revealed as a voluptuary and an “intriguing incendiary.”

  Washington urged “mutual forebearances, and temporizing yieldings on all sides.” To Hamilton, he expressed a deep melancholy that” a fabric so goodly, erected under so many providential circumstances,” should be “wracked by controversy and brought to the edge of collapse.”

  On one issue only were Hamilton and Jefferson in agreement—that for the sake of the country, Washington must serve a second term, as he alone could hold the union together. “North and South will hang together if they have you to hang on,” Jefferson told Washington. There were very few such uniquely eminent individuals upon whom society had peculiar claims, Jefferson insisted. Among that indispensable few, however, Jefferson did not count himself. His own intention was to retire.

  In the National Gazette, Freneau warned that “plain American republicans” stood to “be overwhelmed by those monarchical writers on Davila, etc.,” who were spreading “their poisoned doctrines throughout this blessed continent.” To commemorate July 4, the paper declared, “Another revolution must and will be brought about in favor of the people.”

  Seeing themselves as representing the true spirit of republican ideals, Jefferson, Madison, Freneau, and others allied with them had begun calling themselves Republicans, thus implying that the Federalists were not, but rather monarchists, or monocrats, as Jefferson preferred to say. And while there was as yet some question whether it was Jefferson or Madison who led the Republicans, there was no doubt about who led the Federalists. It was Hamilton, who was more than a match for anyone.

  Hamilton, for his part, had no intention of diverting votes from Adams this time around. Aaron Burr, a New York Republican and Hamilton's nemesis, was in the running for Vice President and so Hamilton was happy now to laud Adams as “a real friend to genuine liberty, order and stable government.”

  Early in September, Hamilton sent an urgent letter to Quincy telling Adams he must return to Philadelphia with all possible speed. Adams's absence from the scene, Hamilton warned, was benefiting the candidacy of yet another, more serious rival for the vice presidency, the popular governor of New Y
ork, George Clinton, a long-time Anti-Federalist now in the Republican camp. “I am persuaded you are very indifferent personally to the event of a certain election, yet I hope you are not so as to the cause of good government,” Hamilton wrote.

  But with Congress not due to reconvene for another two months and the President still declining to say whether he would serve again, Adams saw no need for hurry and remained where he was. What annoyed him exceedingly, he confided to Abigail, was the idea that George Clinton could ever be regarded as a serious rival, given the immense difference in their sacrifices for the country, differences in experience and knowledge. To Adams this was not a question of vanity but of plain fact.

  • • •

  THE NEWSPAPERS, meanwhile, were filled with increasingly lurid news from Paris. With the whole country beset by chaos and violence, France by now was also at war with much of Europe. The King was being held a virtual prisoner in the Palace of the Tuileries, while the extreme radicals of the revolution, the Jacobins—Marat, Danton, Robespierre—were riding high.

  The Massachusetts Centinel carried a report from London dated August 14, describing how, on August 10, a riotous mob of thousands had marched on the Tuileries to proclaim the King a traitor and call for his head. The paper reported that 130 of the King's Swiss guards were cut down, countless others murdered, and “numerous heads, stuck on poles, were carried about the streets.” Actually more than 500 Swiss guards had been slaughtered, and at least 400 of the besiegers.