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 one 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.”
For all the clamor over politics, the country was still at peace and more prosperous than ever. If there was a prevailing sentiment overall concerning national politics, it was one of regret, even sadness, that Washington would soon be stepping down. Abigail expressed what most Americans felt when, quoting Shakespeare, she wrote of Washington, “Take his character all together, and we shall not look upon his like again.”
On November 23, Adams bid her goodbye and started for Philadelphia, and again by public conveyance, John Briesler his sole companion. “Fear takes no hold of me,” he assured Abigail, as if to boost both their spirits. He reached Philadelphia on December 4, and the night of December 7, struggling with the prospect of defeat, he wrote again:
I laugh at myself twenty times a day, for my feelings, and [the] meditations and speculations in which I find myself engaged: Vanity suffers. Cold feelings of unpopularity. Humble reflections. Mortifications. Humiliation. Plans of future life. Economy. Retrenching expenses. Farming. Returning to the bar, drawing writs, arguing causes, taking clerks.
I can pronounce Thomas Jefferson to be chosen P[resident] of [the] U[nited] S[tates] with firmness and a good grace that I don’t fear. But here alone abed, by my fireside, nobody
to speak to, pouring upon my disgrace and future prospects — this is ugly.
But in a week or so, in an entirely different mood, he was writing to tell her it appeared he would be elected President. Though the final count would not be known until February, when the electors met, it was being said openly in and out of Congress that he had won, and that Jefferson was to be Vice President.
Overnight, Adams was being treated as though suddenly he had become a different man, and this he found most remarkable. Even Bache’s Aurora seemed to experience a miraculous change of heart. John Adams, the paper now declared, was clearly preferable to Washington.
There can be no doubt that Adams would not be a puppet — that having an opinion and judgment of his own, he would act from his own impulses rather than the impulses of others — that possessing great integrity he would not sacrifice his country’s interests at the shrine of party. . . . In addition . . . it is well known that Adams is an aristocrat only in theory, but that Washington is one in practice — that Adams has the simplicity of a republican but that Washington has the ostentation of an eastern bashaw — that Adams holds none of his fellow men in slavery, but Washington does. . . . The difference is immense.
To Adams’s particular delight, one of the most partisan of all the young Republicans, Representative William Branch Giles of Virginia, had been heard to say of him, “The old man will make a good President, too.”
AT MONTICELLO, Jefferson received word from Madison that he should be prepared for the likelihood of finishing second, and that for the good of the country and the “valuable effect” of his influence on Adams, he must accept the vice presidency. In reply, Jefferson expressed no reluctance to serve under Adams, since “he had always been my senior, from the commencement of my public life.” Then, three days after Christmas, Jefferson took up his pen to write an extraordinary letter to Adams.
From his latest information, Jefferson said, it appeared Adams’s election to the “first magistracy” was an established fact. But to Jefferson this had never been in doubt. “I have never one single moment expected a different issue.” And though he knew he would not be believed, it was true nonetheless that he never wished it otherwise. He warned that Hamilton had been up to some of his usual schemes, but doubted it would change the outcome.
I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with sound sleep and a warm berth below, with the society of neighbors, friends and fellow laborers of the earth, than of spies and sycophants. No one then will congratulate you with purer disinterestedness than myself. . . . I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office. . . . I devoutly wish you may be able to shun for us this war by which our agriculture, commerce, and credit will be destroyed. If you are, the glory will be all your own; and that your administration may be filled with glory and happiness to yourself and advantage to us is the sincere wish of one who though, in the course of our voyage through life, various little incidents have happened or been contrived to separate us, retains still for you the solid esteem of the moments when we were working for our independence, and sentiments of respect and affectionate attachment.
It was a fine show of magnanimity in defeat, as well as one of the warmest expressions of friendship Jefferson ever wrote or that anyone had ever addressed to Adams. But after finishing the letter, Jefferson had second thoughts and sent it on to Madison in Philadelphia — “open for your perusal” — so that if anything he had written “should render the delivery of it ineligible in your opinion, you may return it to me.”
Madison was appalled. He saw the letter as a dreadful mistake, and decided it must go no further. As he explained delicately to Jefferson, friendship was one thing, politics another. Adams already knew of his friendship, Madison advised, and were Adams to prove a failure as President, such compliments and confidence in him as Jefferson had put in writing could prove politically embarrassing.
The letter was never sent. It remained in Madison’s possession, in a file only a few blocks from where Adams resided.
For Adams it could have been one of the most important letters he ever received. Jefferson’s praise, his implicit confidence in him, his rededication to their old friendship would have meant the world to Adams, and never more than now, affecting his entire outlook and possibly with consequent effect on the course of events to follow.
Not long after, however, Adams did receive a letter from Abigail, written at Quincy on January 15, 1797:
The cold has been more severe than I can ever before recollect. It has frozen the ink in my pen, and chilled the blood in my veins, but not the warmth of my affection for him for whom my heart beats with unabated ardor through all the changes and vicissitudes of life, in the still calm of Peacefield, and the turbulent scenes in which he is about to engage.
CHAPTER NINE
OLD OAK
The task of the President is very arduous, very perplexing, and very hazardous. I do not wonder Washington wished to retire from it, or rejoiced in seeing an old oak in his place.
~Abigail Adams
* * *
I
THE INAUGURATION of the second President of the United States commenced in the first-floor House Chamber of Congress Hall in Philadelphia just before noon, Saturday, March 4, 1797.
The room was filled to overflowing, every seat taken by members of the House and Senate, justices of the Supreme Court, heads of departments, the diplomatic corps, and many ladies said to have added a welcome note of “brilliancy” to the otherwise solemn occasion.
There was a burst of applause when George Washington entered and walked to the dais. More applause followed on the appearance of Thomas Jefferson, who had been inaugurated Vice President upstairs in the Senate earlier that morning, and “like marks of approbation” greeted John Adams, who on his entrance in the wake of the two tall Virginians seemed shorter and more bulky even than usual.
It was a scene few who were present would ever forget. Here were the three who, more than any others, had made the Revolution, and as many in the audience supposed, it was to be the last time they would ever appear on the same platform. Adams felt as he had when he first appeared before George III — as if he were on stage playing a part. It was, he later told Abigail, “the most affecting and overpowering scene I ever acted in.”
Jefferson’s height was accentuated by a long blue frock coat. Washington was in a dress suit of black velvet. Adams, the plainest of the three, wore a suit of grey broadcloth intentionally devoid of fancy buttons and knee buckles.
Resolved to keep things as understated as possible, he had ridden to Congress Hall from his lodgings at the Francis Hotel in a “simple but elegant enough” carriage drawn by just two horses. The grand carriage and six white horses of Washington’s first inauguration had been dispensed with. Nor would Adams allow an official retinue to march in procession with him. As he confided to Abigail, he wanted few if any of the “court” trappings of his predecessor. On learning that she had had the Quincy coat-of-arms painted on her carriage at home, he told her to have it painted out. “They shall have a republican President in earnest,” he wrote.
Overcast skies had cleared by noon. The day turned bright and cloudless. But for Adams there was little cheer. With none of his family present, he felt miserably alone. He had been unable to sleep the night before, sick with worry that he might not make it through the ceremony without fainting. But he succeeded with flying colors, delivering an address that left little doubt as to where he stood on the Constitution, partisan politics, domestic concerns, France, and the pressing issue of peace or war.
Though in print the speech would seem a bit stilted, it was delivered with great force and effect. Stirred by emotion, and in a strong voice, Adams recalled the old ardor of the American Revolution and spoke of the “present happy Constitution” as the creation of “good heads prompted by good hearts.” In answer to concerns about his political creed, he expressed total attachment to and veneration for the presen
t system of a free republican government. “What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?” He spoke of his respect for the rights of all states, and of his belief in expanded education for all the people, both to enlarge the happiness of life and as essential to the preservation of freedom. The great threats to the nation, Adams warned, were sophistry, the spirit of party, and “the pestilence of foreign influence.”
He paid gracious tribute to Washington’s leadership. He lauded American agriculture and manufacturing, pledged himself to a spirit of “equity and humanity” toward the American Indian, “to meliorate their condition by inclining them to be more friendly to us, and our citizens to be more friendly to them.”
To Abigail he would later write, “I have been so strangely used in this country, so belied and so undefended that I was determined to say some things as an appeal to posterity.” But the strongest lines, those underscoring his determination to maintain American neutrality, were delivered directly for the benefit of Congress and the foreign diplomats present, not to say the opposition press. It was his “inflexible determination” to maintain peace with all nations, Adams declared, then expressed a personal esteem for France, stemming from a residence of nearly seven years there. Finally he affirmed an “unshaken confidence” in the spirit of the American people, “on which I have often hazarded my all.”
Then, having issued a solemn invocation of the Supreme Being, he stepped down from the platform to a table at the front of the chamber, where Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth administered the oath of office, Adams energetically repeating the words.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 204