Authors: Joseph J. Ellis
Beyond the daunting task of following the greatest hero in American
history, Adams faced a double dilemma. On the one hand, the country was already
waging an undeclared war against French privateers in the Atlantic and
Caribbean. The salient policy question was clear: Should the United States
declare war on France or seek a diplomatic solution? Adams chose the latter
course; like Washington, he was committed to American neutrality at almost any
cost. He coupled this commitment with a buildup of the navy, which would enable
the United States to fight a defensive war if negotiations with France broke
down.
In retrospect, this was the proper and indeed the only realistic
policy. But successful negotiations required a French government sufficiently
stable and adequately impressed with American power to bargain seriously.
Neither of these conditions was present during Adams’s term as president.
Until the emergence of Napoleon as dictator, the French government, eventually
called the Directory, was a misnamed coalition of ever-shifting political
factions inherently incapable of either coherence or direction. What’s
more, from the French perspective—and the same could be said about the
English perspective, as well—the infant American republic was at most a
minor distraction, more often an utter irrelevancy, within the larger
Anglo-French competition for primacy on the Continent. In short, at the
international level, the fundamental conditions essential for resolving the
central problem of the Adams presidency did not exist. The problem was
inherently insoluble.
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On the other
hand, and to make a bad situation even worse, the ongoing debate between
Federalists and Republicans had degenerated into ideological warfare. Each side
sincerely saw the other as traitors to the core principles of the American
Revolution. The political consensus that had held together during
Washington’s first term, and had then begun to fragment into Federalist
and Republican camps over the Whiskey Rebellion and Jay’s Treaty, broke
down completely in 1797. Jefferson spoke for many of the participants caught up
in this intensely partisan and nearly scatological political culture when he
described it as a fundamental loss of trust between former friends. “Men
who have been intimate all their lives,” he observed, “cross the
street to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they should be
obliged to touch hats.” He first used the phrase “a wall of
separation,” which would later become famous as his description of the
proper relation between church and state; here, however, describing the
political and ideological division between Federalists and Republicans:
“Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being
here,” he reported to his daughter. “They seem, like salamanders,
to consider fire as their element.”
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Jefferson’s interpretation of the escalating party warfare was richly
ironic, since he had contributed to the breakdown of personal trust and the
complete disavowal of bipartisan cooperation by rejecting Adams’s offer
to renew the old partnership. But Jefferson was fairly typical in this regard,
lamenting the chasm between long-standing colleagues while building up the
barricades from his side of the divide. Federalists and Republicans alike
accused their opponents of narrow-minded partisanship, never conceding or
apparently even realizing that their own behavior also fit the party label they
affixed to their enemies.
The very idea of a legitimate opposition did
not yet exist in the political culture of the 1790s, and the evolution of
political parties was proceeding in an environment that continued to regard the
word
party
as an epithet. In effect, the leadership of the
revolutionary generation lacked a vocabulary adequate to describe the politics
they were inventing. And the language they inherited framed the genuine
political differences and divisions in terms that only exacerbated their
nonnegotiable character. Much like Jefferson, Adams regarded the impasse as a
breakdown of mutual trust: “You can witness for me,” he wrote to
John Quincy concerning Jefferson’s opposition, “how loath I have
been to give him up. It is with much reluctance that I am obliged to look upon
him as a man whose mind is warped by prejudice.… However wise and
scientific as a philosopher, as a politician he is a child and the dupe of the
party.”
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At the
domestic level, then, Adams inherited a supercharged political atmosphere every
bit as ominous and intractable as the tangle on the international scene. It was
a truly unprecedented situation in several senses: His vice president was in
fact the leader of the opposition party; his cabinet was loyal to the memory of
Washington, which several members regarded as embodied now in the person of
Alexander Hamilton, who was officially retired from the government altogether;
political parties were congealing into doctrinaire ideological camps, but
neither side possessed the verbal or mental capacity to regard the other as
anything but treasonable; and finally, the core conviction of the entire
experiment in republican government—namely, that all domestic and foreign
policies derived their authority from public opinion—conferred a novel
level of influence to the press, which had yet to develop any established rules
of conduct or standards for distinguishing rumors from reliable reporting. It
was a recipe for political chaos that even the indomitable Washington would
have been hard-pressed to control. No one else, including Adams, stood much of
a chance at all.
If hindsight permits this realistic rendering of the
historical conditions, which in turn defined the limited parameters within
which the policies of the Adams presidency took shape, it also requires us to
notice that none of the major players possessed the kind of clairvoyance
required to comprehend what history had in store for them. (They believed they
were making history, not the other way around.) In effect, the political
institutions and the very authority of the federal government were too new and
ill-formed to cope effectively with the foreign and domestic challenges facing
the new nation.
What happened as a result was highly improvisational
and deeply personal. Adams virtually ignored his cabinet, most of whom were
more loyal to Hamilton anyway, and fell back to his family for advice, which in
practice made Abigail his unofficial one-woman staff. Jefferson resumed his
partnership with Madison, the roles now reversed, with Jefferson assuming
active command of the Republican opposition from the seat of government in
Philadelphia and Madison dispensing his political wisdom from retirement at
Montpelier. While the official center of the government remained in the
executive and congressional offices at Philadelphia, the truly effective
centers of power were located in two political partnerships based on personal
trust. Having failed to revive the great collaboration of the revolutionary
era, Adams and Jefferson went their separate ways with different
intimates.
T
HERE WAS
an almost
tribal character to the Adams collaboration. Adams himself, while vastly
experienced as a statesman and diplomat, had no experience whatsoever as an
executive. He had never served as a governor, as Jefferson had, or as a
military commander, as Washington had. And he regarded the role of party leader
of the Federalists as not just unbecoming but utterly incompatible with his
responsibilities as president, which were to transcend party squabbles in the
Washington mode and reach decisions like a “patriot king” whose
sole concern was the long-term public interest. As a result, the notion that he
was supposed to manage the political factions in the Congress or in his cabinet
never even occurred to him. Instead, he would rely on his own judgment and on
the advice of his family and trusted friends.
This explains two of
his earliest and most controversial decisions. First, he insisted on including
Elbridge Gerry in the peace delegations to France. Gerry was a kind of New
England version of Benjamin Rush, a lovable gadfly with close personal ties to
the Adams family but with ideological convictions that floated in unpredictable
patterns over the entire political landscape. The most recent breezes had
carried him into the Republican camp as a staunch defender of the French
Revolution, which was the chief reason Abigail thought that Gerry “had a
kink in his head.” Adams himself warned Gerry not to confuse what was
happening in France with the American Revolution. “The French are no more
capable of a republican government,” he insisted, “than a snowball
can exist a whole week in the streets of Philadelphia under a burning
sun.” Despite Abigail’s reservations, Adams wanted Gerry on the
peace delegation to demonstrate his bipartisan principles and also to assure
that he would receive candid reports from a trusted friend.
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Second, he
appointed John Quincy as American minister to Prussia. His son objected,
protesting that the appointment would surely be criticized as an act of
nepotism and would fuel charges that Adams was grooming an heir for the
presidency: “Your reasons will not bear examination,” Adams
retorted. “It is the worst founded opinion I ever knew you to
conceive.” This was vintage Adams bravado, shouting his denial at
political advice he knew to be sound, refusing to listen because it was
patently political and merely self-protective. Mostly, he wanted John Quincy
located in one of the diplomatic capitals of Europe as his own personal
listening post. “I wish you to continue your practice of writing freely
to me,” he wrote, then added, “and more cautiously to the office of
state.” He would be his own secretary of state and trust his son’s
quite impressive knowledge of European affairs more than official
reports.
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Both of these decisions paid dividends the following year, when the
prospects for an outright declaration of war against France looked virtually
certain. The ever agile and forever unscrupulous Talleyrand, foreign minister
of France, had refused to receive the American peace delegation and had then
sent three of his operatives to demand a bribe of fifty thousand pounds
sterling as the prerequisite for any further negotiations. When Adams received
word of this outrageous ultimatum, he ordered the delegation to return home,
but he also withheld the official dispatches describing the bribery scheme from
the Congress and the public. Abigail described this decision as “a very
painful thing” because “the President could not play his strongest
card.” But Adams knew that popular reaction to what became known as the
XYZ Affair (after the three French operatives) would be virulently patriotic
and intensely belligerent. By delaying publication of the dispatches, he bought
time. And during that time, Gerry, always the maverick, had opted to remain in
Paris to confer unofficially with French diplomats about averting the looming
war. His reports home counseled patience, based on the growing recognition
within the Directory that the bribery demand had been a terrible
miscalculation. John Quincy’s network of European sources also urged
enlightened procrastination. Despite considerable pressure from the Federalists
in Congress and mounting war fever in the wake of the XYZ revelations, Adams
held out hope for reconciliation based primarily on these reports.
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Abigail was
his chief domestic minister without portfolio. In a very real sense Adams did
not have a domestic policy, indeed believed that paying any attention to the
shifting currents of popular opinion and the raging party battles in the press
violated his proper posture as president, which was to remain oblivious to such
swings in the national mood. Abigail tended to reinforce this belief in
executive independence. Jefferson, she explained, was like a willow who bent
with every political breeze. Her husband, on the other hand, was like an oak:
“He may be torn up by the roots. He may break. But he will never
bend.”
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Nevertheless, she followed the highly partisan exchanges in the Republican
newspapers and provided her husband with regular reports on the machinations
and accusations of the opposition. When an editorial in the
Aurora
described Adams as “old, guerelous [
sic
], bald, blind, and
crippled,” she joked that she alone possessed the intimate knowledge to
testify about his physical condition. Popular reaction to the XYZ Affair
generated a surge of hostility toward French supporters in America, and Abigail
noted with pleasure the appearance of William Cobbett’s anti-Jefferson
editorials in
Porcupine’s Gazette,
where Jefferson was described
as head of “the frenchified faction in this country” and a leading
member of “the American Directory.” She relished reporting the
Fourth of July Toast: “John Adams. May he, like
Samson,
slay
thousands of Frenchmen with the
jawbone
of Jefferson.” She
passed along gossip circulating in the streets of Philadelphia about plans to
mount pro-French demonstrations, allegedly orchestrated by “the grandest
of all grand Villains, that traitor to his country—the infernal Scoundrel
Jefferson.” She predicted that the Republican leaders “will
… take ultimately a station in the public’s estimation like that
of the Tories in our Revolution.”
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Although we
can never know for sure, there is considerable evidence that Abigail played a
decisive role in persuading Adams to support passage of those four pieces of
legislation known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These infamous
statutes, unquestionably the biggest blunder of his presidency, were designed
to deport or disenfranchise foreign-born residents, mostly Frenchmen, who were
disposed to support the Republican party, and to make it a crime to publish
“any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the
Government of the United States.” Adams went to his grave claiming that
these laws never enjoyed his support, that their chief sponsors were Federalist
extremists in the Congress, and that he had signed them grudgingly and
reluctantly.
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