David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  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 York, 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.

  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 same 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 w
ould 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.

  IV

  “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 wheel[ed] 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 she 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 woul
d 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.