An October edition of the Boston paper carried a report of massacres in September in which 6,000 to 7,000 people had been slain, which was an exaggeration. Yet the truth of the September Massacres was hardly less appalling. Some 1,400 political prisoners—including more than 200 priests—were butchered in the name of the revolution. “Let the blood of traitors flow. That is the only way to save the country,” cried Marat, who had once been a physician pledged to save lives.
From London, Nabby wrote to her mother of reports from Paris “too dreadful to relate.” “Ship loads of poor, distressed, penniless priests and others are daily landing upon this island.” The Marquis de Lafayette had fled France and was being “kept a close prisoner by the Austrians.” Madame de Lafayette had escaped to Holland. That the French King and Queen would soon “fall sacrifice to the fury of the mobites,” Nabby had no doubt. “I wonder what Mr. Jefferson says to all these things?”
As it happened, William Short was writing to Jefferson from The Hague at the same time, and his descriptions of events greatly distressed Jefferson. In a stinging confidential reply of January 1793, Jefferson called them “blasphemies.” “The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain,” he informed Short, “on account of the extreme warmth with which they censured the proceedings of the Jacobins of France.” Jefferson would hear no more of it. “I consider that sect as the some with the Republican patriots (of America)....” He deplored the loss of life, Jefferson said, but only as he would deplore the loss of life in battle. Then Jefferson, whose personal philosophy was to get through life with the least pain possible, who shunned even verbal conflict, made as extreme a claim as any of the time.
The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest... rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every continent, and left free, it would be better than it now is.
He warned Short to take care in the future how he reported events in France. “You have been wounded by the sufferings of your friends, and have by this circumstance been hurried into a temper of mind which would be extremely disrelished if known to your countrymen.”
• • •
NOT UNTIL NOVEMBER did Washington announce that he would accept a second term, and only then did Adams conclude it was time to return to Philadelphia, setting off by public coach in heavy winter weather. Her health again a concern, Abigail remained at home, a temporary measure as they both supposed.
Snowbound in a tavern at Hartford, Adams fell into conversation with another traveler who happened not to recognize him. Knowing how greatly it would amuse Abigail, he described how the man had launched into a harangue on the state of national politics, declaring that the trouble with John Adams was that “he had been long in Europe and got tainted.”
I told him that it was hard if a man could not go to Europe without being tainted, that if Mr. Adams had been sent to Europe upon their business by the people, and had done it, and in doing it had necessarily got tainted, I thought the people ought to pay him for the damage the taint had done him.
Though the electoral vote would not be known until February, it was clear by Christmas that Washington was again the unanimous choice for President, and that Adams, for all that had been said against him, had won a clear second place, far ahead of George Clinton. In the final count Adams received 77 votes; Clinton, 50; Jefferson, 4; Aaron Burr, 1.
• • •
“MONDAY AFTERNOON and all Tuesday it rained, then cleared up, very cold and blustering,” Abigail began a Sunday evening letter to her “Dearest Friend.”
On Friday came a snow storm, wind very violent, at North East. It continued so through Friday night and Saturday, even until Sunday morning, when the snow was over the tops of the stone wall and so banked that no wheeled carriage can stir. We had not any meeting today, and some person[s] had their sheep to dig out from under the snow banks.
Separation had become a burden they must bear once again, and again an extended correspondence resumed, after a hiatus of nearly nine years, one letter following another, back and forth between Quincy and Philadelphia, week upon week. Abigail's intention to remain at home only temporarily proved wishful thinking. Traveling had become too difficult for her. Since Congress was only in session approximately six months of the year, and John could be at home the rest of the time, she chose to stay in Quincy through the whole of his second term as Vice President.
The state of her health was a prime consideration, but so also was economic necessity, as she would confide to Nabby. “A powerful motive for me to remain here during the absence of your father is the necessity there is that such care and attention should be paid to our affairs at home as will enable us to live in a humble state of independence whenever your father quits public life, which he daily becomes more and more anxious to do.” “He has ever sustained the character of the independent freeman of America,” she added modestly, neglecting to mention the part he had played in making that possible.
For both Abigail and John the stress of separation now was no less severe than in times past, for all the changes in their station in life.
My days of anxiety have indeed been many and painful in years past, when I had many terrors that encompassed me around [Abigail wrote on January 7, 1793, after John had been gone little more than a month]. I have happily surmounted them, but I do not find that I am less solicitous to hear constantly from you than in times of more danger.... Years subdue the ardor of passion but in lieu thereof friendship and affection deep-rooted subsists which defies the ravages of time, and whilst the vital flame exists.
For his part, Adams assured her, “I am with all the ardor of youth, yours.” “To a heart that loves praise so well, and received so little of it,” he told her another day, “your letter is like laudanum,” which someone had told him was “the Divinity itself.”
“I want to sit down and converse with you, every evening,” she would write. “I sit here alone and brood over possibilities and conjectures.”
“You apologize for the length of your letters,” he told her in a long letter of his own. “[They] give me more entertainment than all the speeches I hear. There are more good thoughts, fine strokes, and mother wit in them than I hear in the whole week.”
To further reduce expenses, Adams had given up the small house in Philadelphia and taken a room with the secretary of the Senate, Samuel Otis, and his wife, who did not normally accommodate boarders but felt the Vice President of the United States should have something better than the usual lodging house. Never again would he spend money he did not have just to keep up appearances, Adams vowed. “I am so well satisfied with my present simplicity that I am determined never to depart from it.” He had a sunny room with a southern exposure and a fireplace that he kept going most of the time. “I am warm enough at night, but cannot sleep since I left you.”
They exchanged views on politics, events in France, family finances, reported on the weather and the doings of their scattered family. They wrote on everything from the price of clover seed to the meetings of the American Philosophical Society, where Adams had been asked to be a member. Reflecting on the outcome of the election, Abigail saw it as proof not only of the wisdom of the people, but their faith in the administration. The “newspaper warfare” had only strengthened support for the government, she felt certain.
“There must be, however,” Adams responded, “more employment for the press in favor of the government than there has been, or the sour, angry, peevish, fretful, lying paragraphs which assail it on every side will make an impression on many weak and ignorant people.”
Almost from the moment the election was decided—and the Republican campaign to unseat Adams had failed—the Republican press shifted its attacks almost entirely to the President, striking the sharpest blows Washington had yet known. Now it was he who had the deplorable inclination to monarchy. The “hell hounds” were in full cry, wrote Adams, who wondered how well
Washington might bear up under the abuse. “His skin is thinner than mine.”
For himself it appeared he had been granted temporary immunity. He was even warmly received on his return to the Senate, where, for the moment, a mood of “tranquility” had settled. He felt, Adams wrote, as though he were receding slowly into the background, yet professed to mind not at all.
The Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of State, meanwhile, were under constant fire from one side or the other. Jefferson was busy behind the scenes in a campaign to drive Hamilton from office. If unwilling to attack Hamilton directly himself, or to write under an assumed name, he was not above urging others to do so. “For God's sake, my dear sir,” Jefferson would admonish Madison, “take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.”
Jefferson's certainty that monarchists were poised to destroy the republic had become an obsession. Yet with Adams he remained on speaking terms—in part because he knew Adams to be too independent ever to be in league with Hamilton, and because he sincerely wished for no further rupture in their friendship. When Adams attended his first meeting of the Philosophical Society, Jefferson was “polite enough to accompany me,” as Adams reported to Abigail.
It was Adams's impression that Jefferson was pulling back from his habitual extravagances. To cut costs, the Secretary of State had sold a horse and some of his furniture. Jefferson's debt to his British creditors was a colossal 7,000 pounds, Adams had learned, which led him to ponder whether this might account for Jefferson's antipathy to the central government. If only someone could pay off Jefferson's debt, indeed pay off the personal debt of all Virginians, Adams speculated, then perhaps Jefferson's reason might return, “and the whole man and his whole state would become good friends of the Union.”
What vexed Adams most was Jefferson's “blind spirit of party.” In theory, Jefferson deplored parties or faction no less than did Adams or anyone. In practice, however, he was proving remarkably adept at party politics. As always, he avoided open dispute, debate, controversy, or any kind of confrontation, but behind the scenes he was unrelenting and extremely effective. To Jefferson it was a matter of necessity, given his hatred of Hamilton and all that was riding on what he called the “beautiful” revolution in France. To Adams, Jefferson had become a fanatic. There was not a Jacobin in France more devoted to faction, he told Abigail.
Continuing accounts of the chaos and bloodshed in France left both Adamses filled with pity and contempt. The French government was by now fully in the grip of the extreme radicals, and Adams shuddered at the thought. “Danton, Robespierre, Marat, and co[mpany] are furies,” he wrote. “Dragon's teeth have been sown in France and come up monsters.”
It was known that the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, philosopher and lover of liberty, one of the first in France to translate the Declaration of Independence, and one of the first, with his mother, to befriend Adams in Paris, had been stoned to death by a mob before his mother's eyes. Louis XVI, stripped of all power, was to go on trial for treason. But Adams was incapable of exulting as others were over the plight of the French monarch. He had no heart for “king-killing,” Adams said. Indeed, he was tired of reading all newspapers, he told Abigail on the eve of Washington's second inauguration. “The whole drama of the world is such tragedy that I am weary of the spectacle.”
• • •
ON MONDAY, March 4, 1793, in an inaugural ceremony of record brevity, Adams looked on respectfully as Washington took the oath of office. The event, held in the Senate, was simple and dignified. Washington's address, all of two paragraphs, lasted but minutes, and Adams, like others present, was soon on his way home, Congress having adjourned until December.
The prospect of months on his farm doing as he pleased gave Adams a lift of heart as little else could have. But the tragic drama that he had grown so weary of only worsened. No sooner was he home than the news arrived that on January 21, Louis XVI had been beheaded. The papers described the King's last ride, the scaffold where “his head was severed from his body in one stroke” by the guillotine, the cries of “Vive la Nation! “from the crowds, then hats thrown in the air.
Like Washington, Adams could not bring himself to say anything publicly. But to a correspondent in England, he warned, “Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots,” and he lamented that so much more blood would have to flow before the lesson was learned.
Jefferson, who had once called Louis XVI “a good man,” “an honest man,” observed privately that monarchs were “amenable to punishment like other criminals.” It was the view expressed in a letter in the New York Journal signed “A Republican”:
Mankind is now enlightened. They can discover that kings are like other men, especially with respect to the commission of crimes and an inordinate thirst for power. Reason and liberty are overspreading the world, nor will progress be impeded until the towering crown shall fall, and the spectre of royalty be broken in pieces, in every part of the globe. Monarchy and aristocracy must be annihilated, and the rights of the people firmly established.
Great Britain and Spain, too, had by now declared war on France. Britain's declaration came on February 1, 1793, and as no one could then have foreseen, Britain and France would be at war for another twenty-two years, well into the next century.
In early April, “Citizen” Genet landed at Charleston, South Carolina, causing a sensation. Edmund Charles Genet, the audacious new envoy from Jacobin France, was the son of Edme Genet, the French foreign office translator, with whom Adams had once worked in Paris, turning out propaganda for the American Revolution. Young Genet had been dispatched to America with instructions to rouse American support for France, spread the principles of the French Revolution, and encourage privateering against British shipping by American seamen. From the welcome he received at Charleston and along his whole four-week journey north to Philadelphia, he concluded all Americans were in sympathy with the French radicals and would, in keeping with the French-American alliance of 1778, gladly join France again in common cause. Jacobin clubs—pro-French democratic societies—sprung up along his route, and Genet liberally dispensed money to outfit American privateers.
But on April 22 in Philadelphia, before Genet arrived, Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality, a decision Adams had no part in but affirmed what he had long said about keeping free from the affairs of Europe. “Let us above all things avoid as much as possible entangling ourselves with their ways and politics,” he had written from France fourteen years earlier.
The welcome for Genet at Philadelphia was rapturous. Jefferson estimated that the crowd the night of Genet's arrival, May 16, numbered 1,000. Genet said 6,000, and gloried in the “perpetual fetes” that followed in the next several weeks. To the thrill of hundreds of dinner guests Genet sang the “Marseillaise” and rendered rousing new lines to a tune from a French operetta:
Liberty! Liberty, be thy name adored forever, Tyrants beware! Your tott'ring thrones must fall; Our int'rest links the free together, And Freedom's sons are Frenchmen all.
“All the old spirit of 1776 is rekindling,” exuded Jefferson, who saw in Genet's popularity eloquent testimony by the people against “the cold caution” of their own government.
Washington decided to receive the young emissary, and in a manner which, if not cold, was strictly formal. American neutrality remained firm, which led Genet, who knew nothing of American politics, to conclude he must rally the American people against the President. Only later would he admit his mistake, and blame Jefferson and the Republicans for deceiving him for their own purposes.
Many years afterward Adams would wildly exaggerate the tumult caused by Genet, claiming that 10,000 people had roamed the streets threatening “to drag Washington out of his house” and compel the government to declare war on Britain. Adams's alarm at the time was extreme, but he was by no means alone in wondering if a revolution were hatching. The
flourishing pro-French democratic societies were secret political clubs verging on vigilante groups and seemed truly bent on gaining French control over American politics.
Then, with summer, came the two calamities for which the year 1793 would be forever remembered. In France the Reign of Terror commenced, a siege of vicious retribution that would send nearly 3,000 men and women to the guillotine in Paris alone, while in the provinces the slaughter was even more savage. At Lyon, where the guillotine was thought too slow a means of dispensing with antirevolutionaries, hundreds were mown down by cannon fire. At Nantes, 2,000 people were herded onto barges, tied together, taken to the middle of the Loire and drowned.
In Philadelphia, beginning in August, yellow fever raged in the worst epidemic ever to strike an American city. Reports of what was happening in Paris would not reach America for months, but accounts of the “pestilence” in Philadelphia filled the newspapers soon enough. At Quincy the Adamses were in anguish over the welfare of young Thomas, from whom there was no.word.
By the last weeks of August people were dying in Philadelphia at a rate of more than twenty a day. In September, as the death toll rose rapidly, Benjamin Rush and other physicians, helpless to stop the plague, advised all who could leave the city to do so without delay. The federal government and most businesses shut down. Bush Hill, where the Adamses had lived, was converted to an emergency hospital. To avoid contamination people stopped shaking hands and walked in the middle of the streets.
According to common understanding, the cause of yellow fever was the foul, steaming air of late summer in cities like Philadelphia—“a putrid state of air occasioned by a collection of filth, heat, and moisture,” as Abigail explained to her sister Elizabeth—and the “proof” was that the disease always vanished with the return of cold weather. That yellow fever, like malaria, is transmitted by mosquitoes (which also vanish with cold weather) would not be understood for another hundred years.