• • •
THE ATTENTION OF THE COUNTRY, meanwhile, had shifted to western Pennsylvania where an insurrection had broken out over a federal excise tax on distilleries, the only internal tax thus far imposed by the federal government. At home at Quincy through the summer, Adams had kept abreast of the crisis in the newspapers. An army of fully 12,000 volunteers marched over the Alleghenies in an unprecedented show of force, Washington himself riding at the head part of the way, with Hamilton second in command. By the time Adams returned to Philadelphia in December and established himself in different lodgings, at the Francis Hotel, the so-called Whiskey Rebellion had ended. It was a victory the Federalists were happy to drink to, but the Republicans soon had their own cause to celebrate, when Alexander Hamilton announced he would retire. Convinced he had accomplished all he could, the brilliant, headstrong Secretary of the Treasury returned to his lucrative New York law practice. No one, however, expected him to abandon politics.
With the retirement also of Secretary of War Henry Knox in December, the sense of an administration in ebb was strongly felt. Only Edmund Randolph, now Secretary of State, remained of Washington's original cabinet.
The threat of embroilment in the European war continued, America at the “precipice,” as Adams said, and still there was no word from John Jay in London. Adams's days went on much as before, the greater part of his time given to his duties in the Senate. At the Francis Hotel he occupied a small but comfortable room looking onto Franklin Court, and at meals he appears to have enjoyed the company of the other guests, most of whom were members of Congress. A young English visitor staying at the hotel, Thomas Twining, was delighted to find the Vice President “superior to all sense of superiority” and in appearance more like “an English country gentleman who had seen little of the world, than a statesman who had seen so much of public life.”
I was always glad [he wrote years later] when I saw Mr. Adams enter the room and take his place at our table. Indeed, to behold this distinguished man... occupying the chair of the Senate in the morning, and afterwards walking home through the streets and taking his seat among his fellow citizens as their equal, conversing amicably with men over whom he had just presided... was a singular spectacle, and a striking exemplification of the state of society in America at this period.
By the time the Jay Treaty at last reached the President in the spring of 1795, Philadelphia was in a frenzy of speculation over what it might contain. On June 8, the day Washington called a special session of the Senate to consider the treaty, he invited Adams to dine alone with him. The meeting was confidential, and Adams said nothing about it, except to caution Abigail that “mum-mum-mum” was the word.
That the terms of Jay's treaty would ignite a storm of protest was plain at once. Jay had given up virtually every point to the British, in return for very little. Conspicuously absent was any guaranteed protection of American seamen from British seizure. Further, the British had refused to open their ports to American trade, except in the West Indies, but there only to ships of less than seventy tons. The one important British concession was to remove the last of their troops from forts in the northwest by the end of the year.
But Jay had gained peace with Britain—“To do more was impossible,” he told the President—and Washington, though disappointed, concluded it was enough. The treaty, with his prestige behind it, went to the Senate for approval. Through thirteen days of furious debate behind closed doors, Adams could only watch and listen. What felt like a tropical heat wave descended on the city, making the cooped-up chamber all but unbearable. Finally, on June 24, by exactly the required two-thirds margin, the Senate consented to ratification.
Senators were enjoined to disclose nothing until the treaty was signed by the President. But in a matter of days the full text was published by the Philadelphia Aurora, which had replaced Freneau's National Gazette as the leading Republican newspaper. It was the first scoop in American newspaper history and a “battle royal” commenced at once. Mobs in the streets declared Jay a traitor and burned him in effigy. There were riots in New York and Boston. The President was assailed in print as never before, and nowhere more than in the Aurora, which was edited by young Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of Franklin who had once been John Quincy's schoolmate in France.
From the distance of Monticello, Jefferson saw what Jay had wrought as a “monument of venality” and sent a letter to the new French ambassador at Philadelphia to assure him of his own continuing enthusiasm for France.
Adams, who knew from experience—knew better than anyone—what Jay had been up against in dealing with the British, never doubted that a flawed treaty was far preferable to war with Britain. He stood by the President, unwavering in his support.
The common accusations notwithstanding, Adams was no Anglophile. As greatly as he admired the British constitution and the British structure of government, he considered the British as insolent as ever, and the unfortunate “mad” George III (by now the victim of porphyria), a hopeless blunderer. The day might come when America would have to “beat down” the “insolence of John Bull,” Adams told Abigail, but he prayed it would not be soon.
The furor over the treaty would continue until the House took up the necessary appropriations the following year. But that summer Washington's troubles grew still worse, when Edmund Randolph resigned as Secretary of State after being accused of taking money from France to influence the administration against Britain—a charge never proven.
With the departure of Randolph the brilliant cabinet that Washington had started with was entirely gone, replaced by men who were by and large mediocrities. Whether, in view of the charges and the abuse he was subjected to, Washington would agree to stand for election again, no one could say, but in his usual fashion, he would keep his thoughts to himself for as long as possible.
For the Adamses the summer at Quincy passed uneventfully. Their one private worry was over Charles, who, just as his law career was getting under way, had fallen in love with Sally Smith, the pretty younger sister of Nabby's husband. Abigail and John both objected to the romance, and with the same line of reasoning they had used earlier with John Quincy. Charles agreed to a moratorium, but after several months candidly told his father, “Were I to declare that I did not entertain the same opinion of Sally Smith that I ever did, I should declare a falsehood.”
When the news reached Quincy early that fall that Charles and Sally had been married in New York, his parents were devastated. But Charles assured them he was never happier, and Nabby affirmed it to have been the best possible step for him. “After all the hairbreadth scrapes and imminent dangers he has run, he is at last safe landed,” she reported.
Stopping at New York en route to Philadelphia in December, Adams was delighted to find Charles well established in a “commodious” home and office on Front Street, and pleased, too, with Sally, who “behaved prettily in her new sphere.” “My love to Daughter Adams, the first I have had since your sister changed her name,” he later wrote affectionately to Charles.
• • •
“I AM HEIR APPARENT, you know,” Adams reminded Abigail after arriving in Philadelphia for the opening of the Fourth Congress.
The prospect of Adams succeeding Washington had been ever-present for seven years, but now, separated again by hundreds of miles, they addressed themselves to the growing likelihood of his actually becoming President, exchanged thoughts and feelings on the challenge in a way that apparently they never had before, and that perhaps they would have found impossible except at a distance. As Abigail had said herself in a letter years before, “My pen is always freer than my tongue.” Were it for her alone to decide, were personal considerations all that mattered, she wrote, she would unhesitatingly tell him to retire. But with a decision of “such momentous concern,” she dared not try to influence him. “I can say only that circumstances must govern you... [and] pray that you have superior direction.” If, however, he entertained any thought of conti
nuing as Vice President under someone other than Washington, he must forget it. “I will be second under no man but Washington,” she declared.
Adams expressed concern over the toll the presidency could take on his health. He felt perfectly strong, he assured her, but twice mentioned the tremble in his hands, and remarked that he could see the President rapidly aging before his eyes.
Early in February 1796, on the same day Benjamin Franklin Bache declared in the Aurora that “good patriot” Jefferson was the inevitable and ideal choice to replace Washington, Adams professed to be tired of politics.” I am weary of the game,” he told Abigail, then added with characteristic honesty what she had long understood, “Yet I don't know how I would live out of it.”
No successor to Washington could expect such support as Washington had, she warned. “You know what is before you—the whips, the scorpions, the thorns without roses, the dangers, anxieties, the weight of empire.” Still, the presidency would be a “glorious reward” for all his service to the country, should Providence allot him the task.
“I have looked into myself,” he wrote in another letter, “and see no dishonesty there. I see weakness enough. But no timidity. I have no concern on your account but for your health.”
I hate speeches [he continued], messages, addresses, proclamations and such affected, constrained things. I hate levees and drawing rooms. I hate to speak to 1,000 people to whom I have nothing to say. Yet all this I can do.
When she reminded him that he was sixty years old, he replied, “If I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above forty.”
IN MARCH, when the House of Representatives took up the Jay Treaty, it appeared a constitutional crisis was in the offing. The Republicans had pounced on the treaty with all their “teeth and... nails,” as Adams reported. “The business of the country... stands still... all is absorbed by the debates.... Many persons are very anxious and forebode a majority unfavorable, and the most pernicious and destructive results.” It was hard to imagine the Republicans being that “desperate and unreasonable,” but should they be, he told Abigail, “this Constitution cannot stand... I see nothing but a dissolution of government and immediate war.”
He was again invited to dine alone with the President, who in the course of the evening mentioned three times that he would likely retire. “He detained me there 'til nine o'clock,” Adams wrote, “and was never more frank and open about politics. I find his opinions and sentiments are more like mine than I ever knew before, respecting England and France and our American parties.”
To Adams, time was moving all too fast. (“Long! Nothing is long! The time will soon be gone and we shall be surprised to know what has become of it.”) Then, the first week in May, he could happily send Abigail word that the Jay Treaty bills had passed both Houses, “and good humor seems to be returning.” The constitutional crisis had passed, the threat of war was greatly diminished.
Requesting a leave of absence, he was on his way home by May 6. His time as Vice President was virtually over. He had served longer than in any other post in his career, and in all he had served extremely well—dutifully as president of the Senate and with unfailing loyalty to Washington. He had cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate of historic importance—in protecting the President's sole authority over the removal of appointees, for example, and in the several stages leading to the location of the national capital. In all, Adams cast thirty-one deciding votes, always in support of the administration and more than by any vice president in history.
• • •
AT QUINCY he threw himself into his other life as farmer Adams with greater zest than ever, as though determined to make the most of what might be his last extended stay for a long while.
It had been a particularly fine spring along the coast of Massachusetts, with warm days and ample rain. The farm “shines very bright,” he wrote. For the first time in years he revived his diary, keeping note of all daily activity and progress. He decided to build a substantial new barn, the first such project he had ever undertaken. “This day my new barn was raised near the spot where... my father... raised his new barn in 1737,” he recorded on July 13. He thought it looked “very stately and strong.”
He kept three to ten men at work through the summer, including John Briesler, another of the numerous Bass family, Seth Bass, and a hard-drinking neighbor named Billings, who was an especially hard worker.
After the sedentary life of the Senate, Adams relished the days out of doors. He loved the work, the tangible results, the feeling that he had not only returned home, but returned, if only for a while, to the ways of his father and generations of Adamses.
July 15, Friday
... Went with three hands... [to] cut between 40 and 50 red cedars, and with a team of five cattle brought home 22 of them at a load. We have opened the prospect so that the meadows and western mountain may be distinctly seen....
July 16
... We got in two loads of English hay....
July 20
... Walked in the afternoon over the hills and across the fields and meadows, up to the old plain. The corn is as good there as any I've seen....
August 2
... finished the great wall on Penn's Hill.
August 5
... Sullivan and Mr. Sam Hayward threshing—Billings and Bass carting earth and seaweed and liming the compost.
He was up each morning with the birds, drank his usual gill of hard cider, and with Abigail passed quiet evenings reading, writing letters, or keeping up with his diary, where along with the chronicle of daily enterprises, he wrote of clear summer skies and described a morning shower as “a soft, fine rain in a clock calm... falling as sweetly as I ever saw in April...” Ever the realist, he wrote, too, of rattlesnakes and corn worms, Hessian flies and “mosquitoes numerous.”
Though Abigail's health remained a worry, she apparently felt well enough to entertain Parson Wibird at dinner and to ride to Weymouth to dine with Cotton Tufts, whose salted beef, shell beans, and whortleberry pudding Adams proclaimed “luxurious.”
“Of all the summers of my life,” he recorded, “this has been the freest from care, anxiety, and vexation to me. The sickness of Mrs. A. excepted.”
“Billings and Prince laying wall,” he wrote September 8. “Briesler and James picking apples and making cider. Stetson widening the brook.
I think to christen my place Peacefield, in commemoration of the peace which I assisted in making in 1783, of the thirteen years peace and neutrality which I have contributed to preserve, and of the constant peace and tranquility which I have enjoyed in this residence.
• • •
THOUGH POLITICS through the summer of 1796 had been in “a perfect calm,” as Abigail noted, neither she nor John had any illusions about what was to come. Mischief was surely brewing in “the Jacobin caldron,” she wrote, as “venomous as Macbeth's hell broth.” When the Boston papers carried news of Washington's retirement and the text of his “Farewell Address” of September 17, it was, as said, as if a hat had been dropped to start the race.
Adams and Jefferson were the leading candidates in what was the first presidential election with two parties in opposition, an entirely new experience for the country. Jefferson remained at Monticello, Adams at Peacefield, neither taking any part in what quickly became a vicious, all-out battle.
Adams was pilloried in the Republican press as a gross and shameless monarchist—“His Rotundity,” whose majestic appearance was so much “sesquipedality of belly,” as said Bache's Aurora. Adams, declared the widely read paper, was unfit to lead the country, and beneath a headline declaring AN ALARM, Bache warned that unless by their votes the people were to call forth Thomas Jefferson, “the friend of the people,” Adams, the “champion of kings, ranks, and titles,” would be their President. Were Adams to be elected, warned the Boston Chronicle, the principle of hereditary succession would be imposed on America, to make way for John Quincy. With Jefferson, said the paper, no on
e need worry since Jefferson had only daughters.
To add further fuel to the fire, Thomas Paine, in a fury over the Jay Treaty, unleashed an unprecedented attack on George Washington in the pages of the Aurora. Writing from Paris, Paine called Washington a creature of “grossest adulation,” a man incapable of friendship, “a hypocrite in public life,” apostate and impostor.
For their part, the Federalists were hardly less abusive. Jefferson was decried as a Jacobin, an atheist, and charged with cowardice for having fled Monticello from the British cavalry in 1781. “Poor Jefferson is tortured as much as your better acquaintance,” Adams wrote to John Quincy.
The candidates for Vice President were Aaron Burr of New York for the Republicans, and for the Federalists, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, thus providing regional balance on both sides. Adams was expected to carry New England, Jefferson, the South, while the Middle States could go either way.
To add to Adams's troubles, Alexander Hamilton was up to his old tricks behind the scenes, urging the strongest possible support for Thomas Pinckney, ostensibly as a way to keep Jefferson from becoming Vice President, but also, it was suspected, to defeat Adams as well and make Pinckney president—Pinckney being someone Hamilton could more readily control.
The rumors of this that reached Adams at Quincy would be confirmed before the year was out by his old friend Elbridge Gerry, who was a presidential elector for Massachusetts and, like Adams, an ardent antiparty man. For both John and Abigail, Gerry's report marked the end of whatever remaining trust or respect they had for Hamilton. Abigail henceforth referred to him privately as Cassius. John called him “as great a hypocrite as any in the U.S. His intrigues in the election I despise.”