by Ron Chernow
Hamilton’s support for Pinckney’s candidacy set him on a collision course with Adams, who regarded himself as the legitimate successor to the presidency. There was a vague understanding among Federalists that Adams would be the presidential and Pinckney the vice presidential candidate. Hamilton’s unspoken preference for Pinckney was not immediately apparent because under the old constitutional rules electors did not distinguish between their votes for president and vice president. Some Federalists planned to withhold votes from Pinckney to insure that Adams became president, leaving Hamilton with a haunting fear that Jefferson might accidentally become president or vice president. (We recall his similar fear that Washington might be denied the first presidency by accident.) As a party chieftain, Hamilton stuck to his official position that Federalist electors should cast their votes equally for Adams and Pinckney. This surface neutrality, however, was really a stratagem to elect Pinckney as president. Since Pinckney was the stronger candidate in the south, if he managed to tie Adams in the north, he would roll up more total votes.
Hamilton bet on the wrong horse, a mistake that would haunt the rest of his career. As treasury secretary, he had only limited contact with John Adams, who was excluded from the inner policy circle. The two men had maintained a wary distance. Hamilton later said that by the time Washington left office, “men of principal influence in the Federal party” began to “entertain serious doubts about [Adams’s] fitness” for the presidency because of his temperament. Yet Adams’s “pretensions in several respects were so strong that, after mature reflection, they thought it better to indulge their hopes than to listen to their fears.”41
George Washington, who “consulted much, pondered much, resolved slowly, resolved surely,” was Hamilton’s ideal of presidential temperament.42 John Adams, by contrast, was fiery and dyspeptic, as volatile as Washington was steady. Hamilton contrasted Pinckney’s “far more discreet and conciliatory” personality to “the disgusting egotism, the distempered jealousy, and the ungovernable discretion” of John Adams.43 These observations, written later, probably expressed reservations that Hamilton harbored in more muted form at the time.
At first, Adams did not suspect Hamilton’s duplicity in the campaign. He told friends that Hamilton genuinely feared that his own weakness as a presidential candidate might elect Jefferson and that Hamilton supported Pinckney as an alternative only in case he himself could not win. When Jefferson wrote to warn Adams that “you may be cheated of your succession by a trick worthy [of] the subtlety of your arch-friend of New York,” Madison persuaded Jefferson not to send the letter, lest it be interpreted as a crude effort to stir up dissension among Federalists.44 In late December, however, Elbridge Gerry presented Adams with evidence from Aaron Burr, the self-promoting Republican favorite for vice president, that exposed Hamilton’s quiet efforts to elect Pinckney ahead of Adams. Both John and Abigail Adams were shocked. “ ‘Beware that spare Cassius’ has always occurred to me when I have seen that cock sparrow,” Abigail told her husband of Hamilton. “I have ever kept my eye on him.”
“I shall take no more notice of his puppyhood,” John replied, “but return to him the same conduct that I always did—that is, to keep him at a distance.”45 This was Adams’s opening volley in an unending stream of abuse against Hamilton, whom he termed “as great a hypocrite as any in the U.S. His intrigues in the election I despise.”46 He thought Hamilton had championed Pinckney as somebody more pliant to his own ambitions, someone who would create “an army of horse and foot with Mr. Hamilton at their head.”47 Madison likewise thought that Hamilton feared that someone such as Adams was “too headstrong to be a fit puppet” for his “intrigues behind the screen.”48 Adams’s wrath against Hamilton was understandable, but he immediately stooped to personal insults and called Hamilton a “Creole bastard.”49 Such scurrilous comments about Hamilton persisted throughout Adams’s presidency and inflamed the already tense situation between the two men.
On October 15, 1796, John Beckley, the House clerk, alerted James Madison to a string of essays launched under the signature “Phocion” in the Gazette of the United States. Beckley divined that Hamilton was the author and guessed his dual intent: to denigrate Jefferson as a presidential candidate and tepidly endorse Adams. Between October 14 and November 24, the voluble Phocion published twenty-five installments of election commentary. Although John Adams also identified Hamilton as the author, these essays have inexplicably been omitted from Hamilton’s collected papers and biographies. They are not only unmistakably Hamiltonian in style— mocking, brilliant, prolix, bombastic, sometimes hairsplitting—but also characteristic in their obsession with Jefferson and the sanguinary turmoil of the French Revolution. Hamilton made little effort to conceal his identity, quoting earlier things he had written almost verbatim—a rare case of Hamilton cannibalizing his own work. For instance, writing as Catullus on September 29, 1792, Hamilton had called Jefferson a “Caesar coyly refusing the proferred diadem” and said he was “tenaciously grasping the substance of imperial domination.”50 Now, Phocion likened Jefferson to a proto-Caesar who had “coyly refused the proffered diadem” while “tenaciously grasping the substance of imperial domination.”51 Once again, Hamilton portrayed Jefferson as a closet voluptuary hiding behind the garb of Republican simplicity.
Phocion reviewed Jefferson’s career from the time when, as Virginia governor, he had fled from British troops. Hamilton detected similar cowardice in Jefferson’s departure from Washington’s cabinet at a moment of national danger. “How different was the conduct of the spirited and truly patriotic HAMILTON?” Hamilton asked, almost advertising his presence. “He wished to retire as much as the philosopher of Monticello. He had a large family and his little fortune was fast melting away in the expensive metropolis. But with a Roman’s spirit he declared that, much as he wished for retirement, yet he would remain at his post as long as there was any danger of his country being involved in war.”52
The Phocion essays contain the most withering critique that Hamilton ever leveled at Jefferson as a slaveholder, and they hint heavily at knowledge of the Sally Hemings affair. Visitors to Monticello noted the many light-skinned slaves in residence, especially the Hemings family. One such visitor in 1786, the comte de Volney, expressed astonishment in his journal: “But I was amazed to see children as white as I was called blacks and treated as such.”53 In theory, Jefferson could have fathered all of Sally Hemings’s children. Fawn M. Brodie has written, “Jefferson was not only not ‘distant’ from Sally Hemings but in the same house nine months before the births of each of her seven children and she conceived no children when he was not there.”54 Jefferson freed only two slaves in his lifetime and another five in his will, and all belonged to the Hemings family, though he excluded Sally. On her deathbed, Sally Hemings told her son Madison that he and his siblings were Jefferson’s children. In 1998, DNA tests confirmed that Jefferson (or some male in his family) had likely fathered at least one of Sally Hemings’s children, Eston. Reading between the lines of “Phocion,” one surmises that Hamilton knew all about Sally Hemings, quite possibly from Angelica Church.
In the first “Phocion” essay, Hamilton listed eight virtues claimed for Jefferson and demolished each in turn. Was Jefferson a good moral philosopher? Hamilton replied with sarcasm: “If it can be shown that he has disapproved of the cruelties which have stained the French revolution . . . his qualities as a good moral philosopher would be valuable ingredients in the character of the President of the United States.”55 Had Jefferson made discoveries in the useful arts? Hamilton drolly evoked an airy philosopher at Monticello “impaling butterflies and insects and contriving turn-about chairs for the benefit of his fellow citizens and mankind in general.”56 But Hamilton was just warming up for his real indictment of Jefferson as a hypocritical slaveholder. He observed that in Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the early 1780s, Jefferson had argued for emancipating Virginia’s slaves and shipping them elsewhere—“exported to som
e less friendly region where they might all be murdered or reduced to a more wretched state of slavery.”57 He ridiculed Jefferson’s pseudoscientific belief that blacks were genetically inferior to whites. In Notes, Jefferson had said of blacks, “They secrete less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour.”58 Hamilton further quoted him: “The first difference which strikes us is that of colour: whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and the scarf skin [epidermis], or in the scarf skin itself. Whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood or the colour of the bile or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature and is as real as if the cause were better known to us.”59
Hamilton taunted Jefferson about holding contradictory beliefs on race, saying that he could not make up his mind whether slaves belonged to the human race or not, with the result that he ranked blacks as “a peculiar race of animals below man and above the orangutan... a high kind of brute hitherto undescribed.”60 This referred to a passage in Notes in which Jefferson said that blacks favored the beauty of whites over their own kind and cited “the preferences of the Orangutan for the black woman over those of his own species.”61 (Orangutan also denoted the “wild man of the woods” in the Malay language.) Hamilton then touched on the subject that he must have known Jefferson would dread above all others: sexual relations between masters and slaves.
At one moment he [Jefferson] is anxious to emancipate the blacks to vindicate the liberty of the human race. At another he discovers that the blacks are of a different race from the human race and therefore, when emancipated, they must be instantly removed beyond the reach of mixture lest he (or she) should stain the blood of his (or her) master, not recollecting what from his situation and other circumstances he ought to have recollected—that this mixture may take place while the negro remains in slavery. He must have seen all around him sufficient marks of this staining of blood to have been convinced that retaining them in slavery would not prevent it.62
It is this last suggestion that seems to betoken knowledge of Sally Hemings. Until this point, one can applaud Hamilton for satirizing Jefferson’s bigotry and raising taboo issues about his sexual behavior that were otherwise to slumber for two centuries. Unfortunately, the further one digs into the “Phocion” essays, the more apparent it becomes that Hamilton was engaging in devious manipulation of the southern vote. He was trying to turn southern slaveholders against Jefferson by asking whether they wanted a president who “promulgates his approbation of a speedy emancipation of their slaves.”63 Hamilton was trying to have it both ways. As an abolitionist, he wanted to expose Jefferson’s disingenuous sympathy for the slaves. As a Federalist, he wanted to frighten slaveholders into thinking that Jefferson might act on that sympathy and emancipate their slaves.
When Phocion turned to John Adams, the Massachusetts patriot appeared to great advantage compared to Jefferson. Hamilton paid Adams a mighty compliment, describing him as “a citizen pre-eminent for his early, intrepid, faithful, persevering, and comprehensively useful services, a man pure and unspotted in private life, a patriot having a high and solid title to the esteem, the gratitude, and the confidence of his fellow citizens.”64 (In September 1792, Hamilton had written as Catullus that Adams was “preeminent for his early, intrepid, faithful, persevering, and comprehensively useful services to his country, a man pure and unspotted in private life, a citizen having a high and solid title to the esteem, the gratitude and the confidence of his fellow citizens.)65 He cited thirty years of unblemished public conduct and said the Jeffersonian press had distorted Adams’s political writings, trying to convert him into a monarchist. “For my own part,” Hamilton concluded, “were I a Southern planter, owning negroes, I should be ten thousand times more alarmed at Mr. Jefferson’s ardent wish for emancipation than at Mr. Adams’s system of checks and balances.”66
At first glance, Hamilton’s paean to Adams suggests an unqualified endorsement and seems fully consistent with Hamilton’s stated position that Federalists should vote equally for Adams and Pinckney. Nonetheless, one wonders whether there was not a subtle strategy here to sabotage Adams. Hamilton knew that if he could prompt southern slaveholders to desert Jefferson over emancipation, they would opt not for Adams, an abolitionist, but for Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina. There was no way that invoking the slavery issue could assist Adams in the south, where he needed the votes.
When the ballots were counted in February 1797, the outcome was a split ticket. Adams became president with seventy-one electoral votes and Jefferson vice president with sixty-eight. Pinckney received fifty-nine votes and Burr, making a miserable showing in the south, only thirty. Renegade electors in New England had reversed Hamilton’s strategy and denied Pinckney eighteen votes. The New England states had voted solidly for Adams, while the south went for Jefferson. Adams had been prepared to resign if he was only reelected as vice president or subjected to the indignity of a tie vote that threw the election into the House of Representatives. He regarded his thin victory as also a blow to his pride, however, and blamed it on followers of Hamilton and Jefferson. “As both parties despaired of obtaining their favorite,” he later wrote with self-pity, “Adams was brought in by a miserable majority of one or two votes, with the deliberate intention to sacrifice him at the next election. His administration was therefore never supported by either party, but vilified and libelled by both.”67 He blamed Hamilton more than Jefferson for this slim margin and spent the next four years trying to punish him.
Jefferson did not especially mind winning second place. Since resigning as secretary of state, he had been in isolation at his mountain fastness at Monticello. “From 1793 to 1797, I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had on my own mind.... [I]t led to an anti-social and misanthropic state of mind,” he told his daughter.68 With his unerring sense of timing, Jefferson did not think the moment auspicious for a Republican president. Troubles were still brewing with France, and he was happy to let Adams bear the brunt. Sure that the wheel of history would soon turn in his favor, the prescient Jefferson counseled patience to Madison.
Many Republicans preferred President Adams to Washington, if only because of his distance from Hamilton. The Jeffersonian Aurora celebrated Adams’s anticipated victory with an implicit swipe at Washington and Hamilton: “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.”69 Similarly, Jefferson welcomed an Adams presidency as “perhaps the only sure barrier against Hamilton’s getting in.”70 Though currently estranged from Adams, Jefferson had been dear friends with him and Abigail in Paris, and once the election was over he sought to ingratiate himself with the president-elect and turn him against Hamilton by dwelling on the latter’s election machinations. “There is reason to believe that [Adams] is detached from Hamilton and there is a possibility he may swerve from his politics,” he told one confidant.71 Hamilton studiously monitored the attempted rapprochement between Adams and Jefferson. “Mr. Adams is President, Mr. Jefferson Vice President,” he reported to Rufus King, now the American minister in London. “Our Jacobins say they are well pleased and that the lion and the lamb are to lie down together.”72 Hamilton was skeptical about this truce, seeing Jefferson as too wedded to ideology to make compromises.
Hamilton received fair warning that Adams intended to retaliate for his disloyalty during the election. That January, Hamilton was laid up with an injured leg that resulted from serving on nocturnal patrols that sought to stop a rash of mysterious fires in New York—fires that may have been related to slave revolts. Stephen Higginson of Boston told Hamilton that the “blind or devoted partisans of Mr. Adams” were accusing him of leading a cabal that had tried to swing the election for Thomas Pinckney. “At the head of this junto, as they call it, they place you and Mr. Ja
y and they attribute the design to him and you of excluding” Adams from the presidency.73 Hamilton thus went from unmatched access to President Washington to total exclusion from President Adams. Given his belief in Hamilton’s treachery, Adams made the seemingly contradictory decision to retain Washington’s cabinet, which was filled with Hamilton’s friends, admirers, and former colleagues. Adams was to come to regret that decision as much as any other he made in office.
TWENTY-NINE
THE MAN IN THE GLASS BUBBLE
It was ironic that John Adams, like Hamilton, was denigrated as a monarchist, because he grew up without the patrician comforts enjoyed by Jefferson and Madison, who were the quickest to apply the epithet against him. He was born
in Braintree, Massachusetts, to a father who toiled as a farmer in summer and as a shoemaker in winter. Though his family lacked wealth, it boasted a proud ancestry, tracing its roots back to Puritans who had emigrated from England in the 1630s: “My father, grandfather, great grandfather, and great, great grandfather were all inhabitants of Braintree and all independent country gentlemen.”1
Adams was schooled in the ascetic virtues of Puritan New England: thrift, hard work, self-criticism, public service, plain talk, and a morbid dread of ostentation. As a young man, he wrote, “A puffy, vain, conceited conversation never fails to bring a man into contempt, although his natural endowments be ever so great and his application and industry ever so intense.”2 Much of his life’s drama arose from the intense, often fitful, sometimes tormenting struggle to measure up to his own impossibly high standards, and he never entirely made peace with his own craving for fame and recognition.