The house, she told Mary in a letter of November 21, was twice as large as the meetinghouse at home. “It is habitable by fires in every part, thirteen of which we are obliged to keep daily, or sleep in wet and damp places.” The great, unplastered “audience room” at the east end of the main floor, she made her “drying room” to hang out the laundry.
There were many who would have refused to live in the house in the state it was in, but the Adamses made do without complaint. The “great castle,” Abigail knew, had been built for ages to come. She judged it would require thirty servants to run it properly. As it was, she had six, including John and Mary Briesler.
She had not liked what little she had seen of the South thus far. The presence of slaves working about the house left her feeling depressed. The whole system struck her as woefully slow and wasteful, not to say morally wrong. She watched twelve slaves clothed in rags at work outside her window, hauling away dirt and rubble with horses and wagons, while their owners stood by doing nothing. “Two of our hardy New England men would do as much work in a day as the whole 12,” she told Cotton Tufts. “But it is true Republicanism that drive the slaves half fed, and destitute of clothing . . . whilst an owner walks about idle, though one slave is all the property he can boast.”
With the weather turning colder, she found it maddening that with woods everywhere it was impossible to find a woodcutter to keep the fires going. She despaired that anything could ever be accomplished in such a society. “The lower class of whites,” she wrote, “are a grade below the Negroes in point of intelligence, and ten below them in point of civility.” But she wrote, “I shall bear and forebear.”
• • •
ON SATURDAY, November 22, Congress convened for the first time in joint session in the unfinished Capitol, and John Adams delivered what he knew to be his last speech as President.
“I congratulate the people of the United States on the assembling of Congress at the permanent seat of their government,” he began, “and I congratulate you, gentlemen, on the prospect of a residence not to be changed.” As he had privately for the President’s House, he now publicly offered a benediction for the Capitol, the Federal District, and the City of Washington:
It would be unbecoming the representatives of this nation to assemble for the first time in this solemn temple without looking up to the Supreme Ruler of the universe, and imploring his blessing.
May this territory be the residence of virtue and happiness! In this city may that piety and virtue, that wisdom and magnanimity, that constancy and self-government, which adorned the great character whose name it bears, be forever held in veneration! Here, and throughout our country, may simple manners, pure morals, and true religion flourish forever!
The speech that followed was a brief, gracious summation of the state of the union, notable for its clarity and absence of exaggeration. He praised the officers and men of the discharged temporary army, both for their patriotism and their readiness to return to the “station of private citizens.” He praised the navy and recommended further measures for a defensive naval force.
While our best endeavors for the preservation of harmony with all nations will continue to be used, the experience of the world and our own experience admonish us of the insecurity of trusting too confidently to their success. We cannot, without committing a dangerous imprudence, abandon those measures of self-protection which are adapted to our situation, and to which, notwithstanding our pacific policy, the violence of injustice of others may again compel us to resort.
Because he had still to receive official word of the negotiations with France, he said only that it was hoped that American efforts for an accommodation would “meet with a success proportioned to the sincerity with which they have so often been repeated” — which was as close as he came to speaking of his own persistent efforts.
He spoke of the need for amending the judiciary system, and congratulated the Congress for the revenue that year, the largest of any year thus far.
“We find reason to rejoice at the prospect which presents itself,” he said at the last. The country was “prosperous, free, and happy, . . . thanks to the protection of laws emanating only from the general will,” and “the fruits of our own labor.”
Shortly after, in reply to the then customary answer to his speech from the Senate, Adams said of the new Capitol, “Here may the youth of this extensive country forever look up without disappointment, not only to the monuments and memorials of the dead, but to the examples of the living.”
LESS THAN two weeks later, on or about December 3, the same day the electors convened, a postrider arrived at the President’s House with a letter from East Chester. Charles was dead. He had died on November 30 — of dropsy, it was said, but most likely of cirrhosis as well.
His constitution was so shaken [Abigail wrote to her sister Mary], that his disease was rapid, and through the last part of his life, dreadfully painful and distressing. He bore with patience and submission his sufferings and heard the prayers for him with composure. His mind at times was much deranged. . . . He was no man’s enemy but his own. He was beloved in spite of his errors.
To Charles’s widow, Abigail wrote, “[I] would to God I could administer to you that comfort which [I] stand in need of myself.” In his early life, she recalled, no child was ever so tender and amiable. “The President sends his love to you and mourns, as he has for a long time, with you.”
In another few days the outcome of the election was known. Adams had lost. “My little bark has been overset in a squall of thunder and lightning and hail attended by a strong smell of sulfur,” he wrote to Thomas. However crushed, disappointed, saddened, however difficult it was for him to bear up, he expressed no bitterness or envy, and no anger. Nor was anyone to feel sorry for him. “Be not concerned about me,” he told Thomas. “I feel my shoulders relieved from the burden.”
As always, both Adamses were entirely candid with their children. To Thomas, Abigail wrote, “For myself and family I have few regrets . . . I shall be happier at Quincy.” Only her private grief and public ingratitude could at times bear her down. “I lose my sleep often, and I find my spirits flag,” she wrote to Cotton Tufts. “My mind and heart have been severely tried.”
The election had been closer than expected. Adams carried all of New England, but lost in New York, the South, and the West. The Republican victory in New York had been all-important and was due largely to extraordinary efforts by Aaron Burr in New York City. But it was not until Federalist strength in South Carolina proved insufficient to carry the state, and its 8 electoral votes, that the outcome was settled.
In the final electoral count of all sixteen states, Jefferson had 73 votes to Adams’s 65; Pinckney had 63. But Burr had also wound up with 73 votes, and so was tied with Jefferson. The outcome, according to the Constitution, would have to be decided in the House of Representatives.
What was surprising — and would largely be forgotten as time went on — was how well Adams had done. Despite the malicious attacks on him, the furor over the Alien and Sedition Acts, unpopular taxes, betrayals by his own cabinet, the disarray of the Federalists, and the final treachery of Hamilton, he had, in fact, come very close to winning in the electoral count. With a difference of only 250 votes in New York City, Adams would have won with an electoral count of 71 to 61. So another of the ironies of 1800 was that Jefferson, the apostle of agrarian America who loathed cities, owed his ultimate political triumph to New York.
Had the news of the peace agreement at Mortefontaine arrived a few weeks sooner, it, too, could very well have been decisive for Adams. Also, were it not for the fact that in the South three-fifths of the slaves were counted in apportioning the electoral votes, Adams would have been reelected.
To Adams the outcome was proof of how potent party spirit and party organization had become, and the most prominent was Burr’s campaign in New York. Washington, in his Farewell Address, had warned against disunion, permanent alliances with ot
her nations, and “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” Adams could rightly claim to have held to the ideals of union and neutrality, but his unrelenting independence — his desire to be a President above party — had cost him dearly.
“How mighty is the spirit of party,” he wrote to Elbridge Gerry. There was nothing unexpected about Jefferson’s success, Adams thought, but Burr’s good fortunes surpassed “all ordinary rules.” All too plainly, times had changed:
All the old patriots, all the splendid talents, the long experience, both Federalists and Anti-Federalists must be subjected to the humiliation of seeing this dextrous gentleman [Burr] rise like a balloon, filled with uninflammable air over the heads. . . . What an encouragement to party intrigue and corruption!
In the last analysis, however, it was not Jefferson or the “dextrous” Burr who defeated Adams so much as the Federalist war faction and the rampaging Hamilton. And none of this would have happened but for Adams’s decision to send the second peace mission to France. It was his determination to find peace and check Hamilton that cost him the full support of the party and thus the election.
VI
TENSION AND UNCERTAINTY over the Jefferson-Burr deadlock increased by the day. Burr refused to step aside in deference to Jefferson and was said to be secretly bargaining with the Federalists in return for support when the issue went to the House. Hamilton, in an effort to play kingmaker at the last, was again in the thick of things. Given his intense dislike and distrust of both men, the choice was painful, but after consideration he had decided on Jefferson.
Mr. Jefferson, though too revolutionary in his notions, is yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly government [Hamilton wrote in explanation]. Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself; thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement. . . . In the choice of evils, let them [the Federalists in Congress] take the least. Jefferson is in my view less dangerous than Burr.
Adams, who could have applied influence behind the scenes, refused to say or do anything. Firm in his belief in the separation of powers, he saw it as a question for the legislature in which he, as President, had no business and he would stay far from it.
It was said Adams so bitterly resented that Jefferson had bested him in the election that he refused to come to his aid, and that if the truth were known he preferred Burr. But Adams expressed no enmity toward Jefferson; and in private correspondence, he and Abigail both said they preferred — and expected — Jefferson to be the one chosen. It was not that they had recovered their former affection for Jefferson, but they knew his ability, “all the splendid talents, the long experience,” in Adams’s words. Like Hamilton, they saw Jefferson as the less “dangerous” man. To Abigail, Burr was a figure “risen upon stilts,” with no thought to the good of the country.
If there was a gleam of justice to the crisis, it was the dreadful pass Hamilton had come to. “Mr. Hamilton has carried his eggs to a fine market,” Adams told William Tudor, using the old farmer’s expression. “The very man — the very two men of all [in] the world that he was most jealous of are now placed above him.”
On January 1, 1801, the Adamses held the first New Year’s Day reception at the President’s House. Several days later, they invited Jefferson to dine, one of several events that belie claims made then and later that Adams and Jefferson refused to speak. “Mr. Jefferson dines with us and in a card reply to the President’s invitation, he begs him to be assured of his homage and his high consideration,” Abigail wrote Thomas in a letter dated January 3, 1801. Adams having made the overture, Jefferson had responded graciously. Whatever private feelings either harbored, civility prevailed.
Other guests were included and Abigail left an undated account of a conversation with Jefferson, who was seated beside her and professed not to know several members of Congress at the table. She said she knew them all. When he asked what she thought “they mean to do” about the election in the House, she said she did not know, that it was a subject she did not “choose to converse upon,” and then demonstrated that she could make him laugh.
I replied . . . I have heard of a clergyman who upon some difficulty amongst his people, took a text from these words: “And they knew not what to do,” from whence he drew this inference, that when a people were in such a situation, they do not know what to do, they should take great care that they do not do they know not what.
At this he laughed out, and here ended the conversation.
A month later, shortly before she planned to leave for Quincy ahead of the President, Jefferson would come to tea. He “made me a visit . . . in order to take leave and wish me a good journey. It was more than I expected,” she wrote. Were it ever in his power to serve her or her family, he said, nothing would give him more pleasure.
Abigail had come to Washington with a “heavy heart,” as she told John Quincy in a long letter, and events since had provided little relief. “My residence in this city has not served to endear the world to me. To private and domestic sorrow is added a prospect of public calamity for our country. . . . What is before us Heaven only knows.”
“The President,” she was pleased to report, “retains his health and his spirits beyond what you could imagine.”
They had no plans for the future, except to return to Quincy and take up the life they had both professed so often to want more than anything else, except that this time it would be to stay. To a suggestion from William Tudor that he and Tudor reunite as law partners, Adams replied in a letter of January 20, “I must be farmer John of Stoneyfield and nothing more (I hope nothing less) for the rest of my life.”
That evening, when fire broke out next door in the Treasury Building, Adams was immediately out the door and across the way to lend a hand. A newspaper described the event the next day: “The fire for some time threatened the most destructive effects — but through the exertions of the citizens, animated by the example of the President of the United States (who on this occasion fell into the ranks and aided in passing the buckets) was at length subdued.”
• • •
WITH LITTLE MORE than a month left to his term in office, Adams made one of the most important decisions of his presidency. Oliver Ellsworth had resigned as Chief Justice. To replace him Adams first turned to his old friend John Jay, but when Jay declined, he chose John Marshall.
According to Marshall’s account, Adams and he were conversing in Adams’s office at the President’s House. “Who shall I nominate now?” Adams asked. When Marshall said he did not know, Adams turned and declared, “I believe I must nominate you.”
But it is probable that Adams knew exactly whom he would choose before Marshall ever entered the room. In many ways the nomination was inevitable. Few men had so impressed Adams as Marshall, with his good sense and ability. Nor had anyone shown greater loyalty. He was Adams’s kind of Federalist and one who at forty-five — “in the full vigor of middle age,” as Adams said — could be expected to serve on the Court for years to come. On January 31, 1801, at the President’s House, Adams signed Marshall’s commission as Chief Justice, which the Senate confirmed without delay. In its far-reaching importance to the country, Adams’s appointment of Marshall was second only to his nomination of George Washington to command the Continental Army twenty-five years before. Possibly the greatest Chief Justice in history, Marshall would serve on the Court for another thirty-four years.
As time ticked away in the “castle house,” as he called it, Adams kept steadily at work, awaiting decisions in Congress on a judiciary bill that mattered greatly to him, the fate of the peace treaty, which mattered above all, and ultimately February 11, when the electoral vote would be officially declared and the House would go into special session to resolve the Jefferson-Burr tie.
On February 3, the Senate at last approved the Convention of Mortefontaine. No one was overly enthusiastic. As was once said of the Jay Treaty, it was thought to be about as good as could be expected under the circumstances. What was not known, or even
suspected, was that Bonaparte, at the very time he had been dealing with the American commission, was secretly negotiating a transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France.
Dreading her long trip home, with “so many horrid rivers to cross and such roads to traverse,” Abigail put off her departure until after February 11. “Today,” she recorded on February 7, “the judges and many others with the heads of departments dine with me for the last time.”
At the Capitol, Wednesday, February 11, the Congress met in joint session. The certificates of the electors were duly opened by the Vice President, who declared the result, and the House went immediately into session to start balloting. But days passed with the House deadlocked, unable to reach a decision. As crowds gathered outside the Capitol, the tension grew extreme. “The crisis is momentous,” reported the Washington Federalist. There was talk of desperate schemes to prevent the election, talk of civil war.
Abigail decided she should wait no longer. Early in the morning of Friday, February 13, she bid Adams goodbye and with her granddaughter, Susanna, set off by public stage through the “wilderness” to Baltimore, the first leg of the journey home. Her stay in the President’s House was over, and she was to have little to say about it ever again.
YEARS LATER, recalling the suspense of waiting for the House decision on the election, Jefferson would describe meeting with Adams on or about February 12 or 14.
“When the election between Burr and myself was kept in suspense by the Federalists,” Jefferson would write to Benjamin Rush, “and they were mediating to place the President [pro tempore] of the Senate at the head of government, I called on Mr. Adams with a view to have this desperate measure prevented by his negative.” According to Jefferson, Adams acted extremely displeased.
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