I deny an “attachment to monarchy,” and I deny that I have “changed my principles since 1776.” . . . The continent is a kind of whispering gallery and acts and speeches are reverberated around from New York in all directions. The report is very loud at a distance when the whisper is very gentle in the center.
But this was written later, when the new government, as well as Adams’s own role in it, had become more stable. In the meanwhile, even Rush conceded that he was equally distraught over the moral temper of the times and the long-range prospects for America. “A hundred years hence, absolute monarchy will probably be rendered necessary in our country by the corruption of our people,” wrote the usually optimistic physician. He asked only that the republican ideal be given a fair chance, which Adams was not only willing, but determined, to do.
Many years afterward, reflecting on his friend Adams and the charge that he had been corrupted by his years in Europe, Rush wrote that, in fact, there had been no change at all. Adams was as “familiar and unaffected” as ever, “strictly upright,” and “a real American in principle and conduct.”
As distressing as almost anything for Adams was the flood of requests for his help in securing government jobs. His response was to refuse them all on the grounds that only the President had the power to make appointments. He himself, he insisted, had no say on patronage. Even appeals from deserving friends were denied. When Mercy Warren asked him to arrange a suitable position for her husband James, Adams replied huffily that he had no such influence and that even if he did he could not possibly allow the authority entrusted to him to become “subservient to my private views, or those of my family or friends.”
Adams detested the idea of friends trying to use him, but he could readily have done something for the Warrens, and with perfect propriety.
One further aggravation were the reports from home about young Charles, who had gotten into a scrape at Harvard. Abigail wrote of suffering “anxious hours” over what she had heard, though given the company Charles had been keeping, she was not surprised. She thought the boy belonged with his father. To Cotton Tufts, who apparently supplied more details on the matter, Adams wrote helplessly, “What shall I do with that tender-hearted fool?”
The exact nature of Charles’s difficulties was never defined in the correspondence, but from fragmentary Harvard records it appears that one student was expelled, others reprimanded, when the one, or all, ran naked through Harvard Yard, and the implications are that there had been drinking involved. In any event, Charles was with Abigail when she arrived by packet boat in New York at the start of summer, and life for the Vice President took a decided turn for the better.
ALL THE FRUSTRATIONS and feelings of stagnation that went with the vice presidency, all that so many others who followed in the office were to bemoan down the years, were felt intensely by the first Vice President. Yet for Adams it was by no means a time of unrelieved misery. Indeed, in their private lives, it was as happy a stretch of years as he and Abigail knew, beginning from the day of her arrival, June 24, 1789. “We are all very happy,” wrote Adams to Cotton Tufts. And so they were.
He had rented a proper country seat, Richmond Hill, a mile north of town on a high promontory beside the Hudson, with sweeping views and nearly always a breeze. Adams loved the location and that the rent was considerably less than for a comparable house in town. His salary as Vice President, a subject of much debate in Congress, would be set at $5,000, a figure lower than previously understood, and whether he could thus afford to live in a style befitting the office remained a worry.
“We are delightfully situated,” Abigail reported to Mary Cranch. “The prospect all around is beautiful to the highest degree.” Sailing ships of every kind were constantly in view, passing up and down the wide tidal river.
On one side we see a view of the city and of Long Island. The river [is] in front, [New] Jersey and the adjacent country on the other side. You turn a little from the road and enter a gate. A winding road with trees in clumps leads to the house, and all around the house it looks wild and rural as uncultivated nature. . . . You enter under a piazza into a hall and turning to the right hand ascend a staircase which lands you in another [hall] of equal dimensions of which I make a drawing room. It has a glass door which opens into a gallery the whole front of the house which is exceeding pleasant. . . . There is upon the back of the house a garden of much greater extent than our Braintree garden, but it is wholly for a walk and flowers. It has hawthorne hedge and rows of trees with a broad gravel walk.
She had her usual complaints — repairs were needed, good servants impossible to find, the local prices outrageous — but the longer she stayed at Richmond Hill, the more attached she became, and Adams concurred. “Never,” he wrote, “did I live in so delightful a spot.”
They were both happy to be near Nabby and the grandchildren, and Abigail unhesitatingly assumed her social obligations as the wife of the Vice President, making and receiving calls. “At Richmond Hill it is expected that I am at home both to gentlemen and ladies whenever they come out, which is almost every day . . . besides it is a sweet morning ride.” After she and Nabby paid a first call on Mrs. Washington, Abigail expressed complete approval. “She is plain in dress, but that plainness is the best of every article. . . . Her hair is white, her teeth beautiful.” Having attended several of the President’s levees, Abigail could attest that the “court” of the Washingtons was as crowded, the company as brilliantly dressed as at St. James’s, with the difference that here she thoroughly enjoyed herself. Her “station” at levees, she explained to Mary, was to the right of Mrs. Washington — though this Mary must keep to herself, “as all distinction you know is unpopular.” If someone mistakenly stood in her place, the President never failed to see the situation corrected without anyone being offended. He “has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point that if he was not really one of the best intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.
He is polite with dignity, affable without formality, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good. These are traits in his character which peculiarly fit him for the exalted station he holds, and God grant that he may hold it with the same applause and universal satisfaction for many, many years, as it is my firm opinion that no other man could rule over this great people and consolidate them into one mighty empire but he who is set over us.
After Paris and London, however, she found New York extremely dull. There was but one theater and the local preachers were unbearably ponderous. Still being at the center of politics more than made up for it. “I am fearful of touching upon political subjects,” she wrote. “Yet perhaps there is no person who feels more interested in them.”
Through the sweltering summer, Adams never missed a day in the Senate, rolling in each morning from Richmond Hill in a one-horse chaise, not the fine carriage portrayed in hostile newspaper accounts. A Judiciary Act was deliberated and passed, establishing a federal court system, and set the size of the Supreme Court. Then a proposal that the Senate have a say in the removal of cabinet officers — a proposal put forth by Senator Maclay — set off fierce debate. To the Federalists, the bill was a flagrant attempt to diminish the power of the President to the benefit of the Senate, and they adamantly objected, arguing that the removal of ranking officials in the executive branch must be at the sole discretion of the President. Adams met with several senators — he was “busy indeed, running to everyone,” according to Maclay’s journal. Most important, he convinced Tristram Dalton of Massachusetts to withdraw his support for Maclay’s bill. Then, when the vote proved a tie, Adams performed his only legislative function and cast his vote against the measure.
Afterward, James Lovell wrote from Massachusetts to tell Adams people were saying he had cast his vote with the President only because he “looked up to that goal.” Of course he looked up to it, Adams answered. How could it be otherwise? “I am forced to look up to
it, and bound by duty to do so, because there is only one breath of one mortal between me and it.”
Another confidant, the Connecticut jurist John Trumbull, who had once clerked in Adams’s law office, told Adams the southern aristocrats naturally held him in contempt and remained his enemies because he was a New Englander without “advantages from pride and family.” They “suppose themselves born to greatness and cannot bear to be eclipsed by merit only.”
“You talk of my enemies, but I assure you I have none,” Adams said in spirited reply. That he was a New Englander, there was no denying. As for having no pride of family, there was little he was more proud of.
My father was an honest man, a lover of his country, and an independent spirit and the example of that father inspired me with the greatest pride of my life. . . . My father, grandfather, great grandfather, and great, great grandfather were all inhabitants of Braintree and all independent country gentlemen. I mean officers in the militia and deacons in the church. . . . The line I have just described makes about 160 years in which no bankruptcy was ever committed, no widow or orphan was ever defrauded, no redemptor intervened and no debt was contracted with England.
The old, stubborn independence of his forebears kept playing on his thoughts. It had been the bedrock of their integrity, and he was resolved to see it sustained. When his son Thomas wrote, expressing an interest in public life, Adams felt he was answering for generations of their line:
Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not. A young man should weigh well his plans. Integrity should be preserved in all events, as essential to his happiness, through every stage of his existence. His first maxim then should be to place his honor out of reach of all men. In order to do this he must make it a rule never to become dependent on public employments for subsistence. Let him have a trade, a profession, a farm, a shop, something where he can honestly live, and then he may engage in public affairs, if invited, upon independent principles. My advice to my children is to maintain an independent character.
OTHER THAN A FEW stiff social occasions, Adams had little contact with the President and no influence, but as yet it seemed no one had any influence with Washington. “He seeks information from all quarters and judges more independently than any man I ever saw,” Adams wrote approvingly. In the choice of the cabinet, Adams is not known to have been asked an opinion, or to have offered any.
It was to be a geographically balanced cabinet, with New England, the Middle States, and the South represented, and all four positions were promptly confirmed by the Senate: Hamilton of New York as Secretary of the Treasury; Jefferson, Secretary of State; Edmund Randolph of Virginia, Attorney General; and Henry Knox of Massachusetts as Secretary of War. (If not the most intellectually outstanding of the four, Knox was certainly the most physically noticeable, having acquired over the years an immense girth, to the point of weighing nearly three hundred pounds.) For Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Washington chose John Jay.
It was thus to be a government led by revolutionaries, all men who had taken part in the Revolution. Washington, by common agreement, was the greatest man in the world, and in Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Jay, the American people could fairly claim to have the best minds in the country. And however striking their differences in temperament or political philosophy, they were, without exception, men dedicated primarily to seeing the American experiment succeed.
Adams approved of all the choices for the cabinet. Such was his regard for Hamilton at this point, he arranged for young Charles to clerk in Hamilton’s Wall Street law office until Hamilton commenced his duties as Secretary of the Treasury, when Charles moved on to another firm. So through late summer father and son could be seen riding off to work together each morning in the one-horse chaise.
III
IN SEPTEMBER, as Congress took up the question of where to locate the permanent capital, and the President prepared for a tour of New England, news came of revolution in France. It was a bolt out of the blue, catching everyone by surprise, and the event that was to make the already difficult business of founding the new American government still more complicated and contentious. In the life of John Adams the old issue of America’s relations with France was to bear heavily and fatefully yet again.
On July 14 an enraged mob had stormed and captured the Bastille, the ancient Paris prison that had come to symbolize an intolerable regime. All its prisoners, numbering just seven and none of them political, had been set free. Its commander had been beaten to death and decapitated, his dripping head then carried through the streets on a pike. In the days that followed, as rampaging mobs took over the city, one elderly Paris official was hanged from a lamppost, another cut to pieces, his heart torn from his body and brandished from a window of the Hôtel de Ville.
The headline of the New York Daily Gazette, September 19, 1789, announced, A COMPLETE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. The National Assembly was proceeding to form a new constitution. France, friend and ally in America’s struggle for freedom, was now herself taking up the cause, and nearly everywhere in America the news was greeted with enthusiasm.
France seems travailing in the birth of freedom [wrote William Maclay]. Her throes and pangs of labor are violent. God give her a happy delivery! Royalty, nobility, and vile pageantry, by which a few of the human race lord it over and tread on the necks of their fellow mortals, seem like to be demolished with their kindred Bastille, which is said to be laid in ashes. Ye gods, with what indignation do I review the late attempt of some creatures among us to revive the vile machinery. Oh Adams, Adams what a wretch thou art!
For Adams the news from France had the effect of an alarm bell. Heedless of the troubles he had already brought on himself with his Defence of the Constitutions, he took up his pen and launched into a series of newspaper essays, determined to show again the evil effects of unbalanced governments. He consulted no one, asked for no advice or opinion from others. Working under intense, self-imposed pressure, he wrote straight out, on and on, never pausing to rewrite or edit himself, which would have helped and for which he later apologized.
He labored at these essays for months, during which Congress adjourned and he returned to Massachusetts to join Washington for part of his visit there, proudly escorting the President on a tour of Harvard. But even before the first of the essays appeared, he let it be known that while he understood the reasons for the revolution in France — the oppressive abuses of the government, the overbearing and costly “armies of monks, soldiers, and courtiers” — and though he strongly supported the ideals espoused by French patriots, he viewed the situation with dire misgivings. “The French Revolution,” he wrote to a Dutch friend, Francis van der Kemp, “will, I hope, produce effects in favor of liberty, equity, and humanity as extensive as this whole globe and as lasting as all time.” Yet, he could not help foresee a tragic outcome, in that a single legislative assembly, as chosen by the French, could only mean “great and lasting calamities.”
To the Reverend Richard Price in London, who had preached a widely publicized sermon in support of what was happening in France, Adams acknowledged feeling a sense of satisfaction and triumph in the revolution. Nor did he doubt its immense historic importance: “It appears to me that most of the events in the annals of the world are but childish tales compared to it,” Adams declared. Later, having read Price’s sermon, he said such principles and sentiments as Price expressed had been “from the year 1760 to this hour, the whole scope of my life.” But he had “learned by awful experience to rejoice with trembling.” He could not accept the idea of enshrining reason as a religion, as desired by the philosophes. “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.”
From experience he knew the kinds of men such upheavals could give rise to, Adams told another correspondent. In revolutions, he warned, “the most fiery spirits and flighty geniuses frequentl
y obtained more influence than men of sense and judgment; and the weakest man may carry foolish measures in opposition to wise ones proposed by the ablest.” France was “in great danger.” Ahead of anyone in the government, and more clearly than any, Adams foresaw the French Revolution leading to chaos, horror, and ultimate tyranny.
In London, meanwhile, the fiery Irish-born statesman Edmund Burke, who had once been the American Revolution’s strongest friend in Parliament, declared in a speech that the French were proving themselves the ablest architects of ruin who ever existed. “In one summer they have done their business . . . they have completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufacturers.” The French, said Burke, sounding very like Adams, had “destroyed all balances and counterpoises which serve to fix a state and give it steady direction, and then they melted down the whole into one incongruous mass of mob and democracy.”
Burke adamantly opposed such English enthusiasm for the revolution in France as espoused by Richard Price, which he thought woefully irresponsible, and the speech, which was published in full in New York in the Gazette of the United States, was but a prelude to what would be Burke’s most famous book, Reflections on the French Revolution, published late in 1790.
Adams, too, took up the architectural theme, in a letter to his old fellow revolutionary Samuel Adams. “Everything will be pulled down. So much seems certain,” he wrote. “But what will be built up? Are there any principles of political architecture? . . . Will the struggle in Europe be anything other than a change in impostors?”
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