Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams

by Joseph J. Ellis

  If these were the realistic contours within which it is now clear that the Adams presidency took shape, they nevertheless allowed for some latitude of movement, for key decisions and choices that put the stamp of Adams’s personality on an important moment in the early history of the American republic. In the weeks before his inauguration he let it be known that he was willing to have Jefferson play a major role in his administration, perhaps giving the vice president a prominent place in cabinet meetings and a role in the looming negotiations with France. “My letters inform me that Mr. Adams speaks of me with great friendship,” Jefferson reported to Madison; he noted that Adams had even hinted at “the prospect of administering the government in concurrence with me.” For his part Adams apprised friends that he felt “no apprehension from Mr. Jefferson,” and that “the cause of the irritation upon his Nerves, which broke out in some disagreeable Appearances a few years ago, is now removed as I believe.” Adams’s original intention was to seek a peaceful resolution of the conflict with France, enlisting the support of Jefferson and his considerable political following to create a bipartisan administration and a foreign policy that remained true to what Adams called “my system,” which entailed a commitment to American neutrality at almost any cost and the creation of a naval force of sufficient size to fight a defensive war if either France or England left America no choice.6

  Much could be said for this vision. In his autobiography, Benjamin Rush, Adams’s dearest friend save for Abigail, claimed that it was the consensus of his contemporaries that Adams possessed “more learning probably, both ancient and modern, than any man who subscribed the Declaration of Independence.” And in the next century the prominent Unitarian minister Theodore Parker recalled that as a boy he had been taught that “with the exception of Dr. Franklin…no American politician of the eighteenth century was Adams’ intellectual superior.” Adams possessed a mind that grasped intuitively and comprehensively the essential ingredients of a strategic decision. He was a veritable genius at recognizing what was central and what was peripheral, what the national interest required and what history would allow. In the spring of 1797 he recognized that the Hamiltonians who would tilt the country toward England and the Jeffersonians who would lean toward France were both wrong. He understood that neither misplaced patriotism nor party spirit at home, nor for that matter the imperialistic maneuverings of the English ministry nor the hopelessly erratic policies of the French Directory, should be allowed to seduce America into a foreign war that diverted national energies from the main task of the next century, which was to develop stable domestic institutions and to expand across the continent. He realized that the creation of an American navy, what he called “wooden walls,” was vastly preferable to an army, for a navy allowed the new nation to defend its coastline and protect its shipping without running the risks of a large land force, which conjured up all the historical dangers posed by a standing army and would serve as an irresistible temptation for would-be American Napoleons like Hamilton.7

  Finally, he sensed that effective national leadership meant bridging the widening gap between the High Federalists and the Jeffersonians. Neither Adams nor Jefferson, nor any other member of the revolutionary generation for that matter, thought about political parties in anything like our modern sense of the term. So Adams did not consider his conciliatory behavior toward Jefferson as the gracious gesture of a Federalist president welcoming the leader of a Republican opposition into the councils of power. Instead, he saw it as an effort to carve out a centrist political position from which he might better implement policies that served the long-term national interest. His vision here was prescient, but it quickly ran afoul of the party spirit it was designed to transcend, as well as the quirks of his own personality.8

  The party spirit struck from both sides. Before sending off his own accommodating response to Adams’s conciliatory letter in January of 1797, Jefferson showed it to Madison, who immediately warned his mentor and fellow Virginian that working alongside Adams, inside the administration, would deprive him of the freedom to lead the opposition to Federalist policies. (Jefferson probably needed little persuading.) Over dinner two days after the inauguration Jefferson apprised Adams that he did not wish to be included in cabinet deliberations and that neither he nor Madison was willing to serve in the proposed peace delegation to France. “We parted as good friends, as we had always lived,” Adams recalled later, “but we consulted very little together, afterwards.”9

  By the summer of 1797 even the long-standing mutual respect was at risk. As Adams saw it, Jefferson had chosen “the future of his party [over] the future of his friendship.” When word reached Adams that Jefferson had written a critical account of a presidential speech to Congress, Adams exploded: “It is evidence of a mind, soured, yet seeking for popularity, and eaten to a honeycomb with ambition,” he complained, “yet weak, confused, uninformed and ignorant.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the political equation, his cabinet had balked at the suggestion of welcoming Jefferson or involving the Republican opposition in the negotiations with France. Adams later recalled that, when he proposed the idea, the entire cabinet threatened to resign. Not only was the hope for a bipartisan coalition dead, but the centrist position Adams had chosen to occupy was now a no-man’s-land, raked by a crossfire from what had now become two distinct political parties.10

  There was a sense in which Adams, or at least an important part of him, preferred it that way. He certainly could not be blamed for the drift of the Jeffersonian Republicans toward becoming the first opposition party. Nor was he responsible for the tendency of the High Federalists to rally around Hamilton. But whether it was a function of unconscious design, pure accident, or sheer fate, the isolated position in which he found himself as president replicated a familiar Adams pattern in which personal independence usually transformed itself into alienation. Commitment to principle somehow necessitated unpopularity for John Adams, and the fullest expression of his best energies occurred in singular acts of passionate defiance. Whether they knew it or not, his opponents inside and outside the Federalist Party had created precisely the political conditions in which Adams could act out his preferred role as virtuous statesman, above all claims of party.

  Over the course of the first two years as president, another familiar piece of the Adams personality gradually emerged. As he clung tenaciously to his policy of American neutrality and naval preparation—and this despite outrageous acts of duplicity by the French Directory in demanding payment of bribes from the American peace delegation—Adams began to focus his mounting frustrations on a single person who became, for him, the embodiment of evil. That person, of course, was Hamilton. Most members of the cabinet and many key Federalists in Congress were convinced that a war with France and a commercial alliance with England would best serve America’s long-term interests, and Hamilton’s advocacy of a large army was a central feature of that policy. Against Adams’s wishes, the High Federalists introduced legislation for the creation of an army of ten thousand regular troops, with provisions for an even larger force once hostilities broke out.

  Adams’s first reaction was incredulity and confusion. Even if his strenuous efforts to avoid war with France failed, what was the point of an American army? “Where is it possible for her [France] to get ships to send thirty thousand men here?” he asked. Armies were costly items; they would require heavy taxes and, most importantly, “at present there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here, than there is in Heaven.” When he recalled this moment long after his retirement, he remembered thinking that “this man [Hamilton] is stark mad or I am.”11

  Then it dawned on him that Hamilton intended to have himself appointed head of the army. Or rather that Hamilton was maneuvering to be appointed second-in-command to Washington, who would presumably remain at Mount Vernon and leave the actual command of the army to his former aide-de-camp. The whole horrid picture now came into focus for Adams. “If I should consent to the appointment of H
amilton,” he wrote to a member of his cabinet, “I should consider it as the most [ir]responsible action in my life.” Hamilton had talents, to be sure, but Adams claimed they were like the dangerous talents of John Calvin, recalling the old ditty: “Some think on Calvin, heaven’s own spirit fell; While others deem him instrument of hell.” Whatever his peculiar talents, Hamilton’s true designs were now clear. He obviously intended “to get an army on foot to give himself the command of it & then to proclaim a Regal Government, place Hamilton at the Head of it & prepare for a Province of Great Britain.” (If he had been able to read Hamilton’s private correspondence, Adams would have discovered that Hamilton’s plans were even more grandiose: he hoped to march his conquering army through the Louisiana Territory, then down to Mexico and Peru, liberating all the inhabitants from French and Spanish domination in the name of the United States.) By midway through his term Adams began to lash out in cabinet meetings against the man who had become the epitome of treachery. “His [Adams’s] language is bitter even to outrage and Swearing…,” Fisher Ames reported to his Federalist colleagues, and “he is implacable against a certain great little man [Hamilton] whom we mutually respect.” In addition to a well-thought-out policy and a position of principled isolation, Adams now possessed the final prerequisite for the release of his enormous moral energies—a personal focal point for his suppressed anger.12

  Adams acted decisively on February 19, 1799, when he forwarded to the Senate the nomination of William Vans Murray to serve as minister plenipotentiary to France, which was, in effect, his unilateral decision to send a new peace mission despite the failure of all previous efforts. Theodore Sedgwick, a Federalist leader in the Congress, claimed to be “thunderstruck” and summed up the reaction of all the High Federalists: “Had the foulest heart and the ablest head in the world, been permitted to select the most embarrassing and ruinous measure, perhaps it would have been precisely the one which had been adopted.” For by his action Adams simultaneously reopened prospects for diplomatic relations with France, ended all speculation about an alliance with England, and called into question the need for an American army. And if there were no need for an army, there would be no military command for Hamilton.13

  The British ambassador reported that “The federal party were thunderstuck with this step,” for it was taken “without the advice, indeed without the knowledge of the Secretary of State or the other members of the Administration, and without consultation with any of his own friends.” Abigail reported that in the bedrock Federalist enclaves of Massachusetts, “the whole community were like a flock of frightened pigions; nobody had their story ready; Some called it a hasty measure; others condemned it as an inconsistent one; some swore, some curs’d.” Timothy Pickering, the disloyal Secretary of State whom Adams had come to despise, also admitted to being “thunderstruck”—this was apparently the operative word of the day—and offered the most perceptive comment on Adams’s motives: “it was done without any consultation with any member of the government and for a reason truly remarkable—because he knew we should all be opposed to the measure!”14

  In retrospect, of course, there was nothing misguided or crazy about Adams’s decision. In fact, avoiding war with France proved a wise and statesmanlike course of action, the first substantive implementation of Washington’s message in the Farewell Address, a precedent for American isolation from Europe that would influence American foreign policy for over a century. Yet if the decision itself has survived historical scrutiny, the manner in which it was made still appears as abrupt and bizarre to historians as it did to the High Federalists of the day. Adams apparently consulted not a single member of his cabinet or party, made no effort to persuade or prepare the political leadership in Congress and, most incredibly, proceeded to absent himself from the seat of government for the next seven months, remaining ensconced in Quincy while reading the collected works of Frederick the Great. During this extended interlude the delegation to France was not dispatched and the High Federalists continued to bemoan what Theodore Sedgwick called “the misfortunes to which we are subjected by the wild and irregular starts of a vain, jealous, and half-frantic mind.” Letters began to circulate among Federalist leaders, wondering how “the best friends of government” might find a way to “get rid of Mr. Adams….” Eventually Hamilton went so far as to admit that he preferred Jefferson to Adams in the looming election: “If we must have an enemy at the head of the government,” he told Sedgwick, “let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible.” Benjamin Stoddert, his newly appointed and completely loyal Secretary of Navy, pleaded with Adams to come out of hibernation at Quincy, reporting that “artful and designing men” were plotting to scuttle the mission to France as well as Adams’s reelection prospects. “I have only one favor to beg,” Adams replied to Stoddert, “and that is that a certain election may be wholly laid out of this question and all others.” Merely to notice the linkage between important matters of national policy and presidential politics was not permissible in the Adams scheme of things.15

  Abigail Adams (1801), at the time of John’s retirement. Gilbert Stuart oil on canvas.

  Courtesy, Massachusetts Historical Society

  Eventually Adams pried himself loose from his books and thoughts at Quincy. In October of 1799 he travelled down to Trenton, New Jersey, to meet with the members of the peace commission. In a dramatic encounter with Hamilton, who tried vainly to persuade him to change his mind, Adams remained serenely defiant. “Never in my life,” he recalled nearly a decade later, “did I hear a man talk more like a fool.” The peace mission eventually proved successful, negotiating a treaty with France that ended hostilities and restored diplomatic relations between the two countries. News of this success, however, did not arrive in time to affect the presidential election of 1800.16

  Whether it would have made any difference to the outcome remains, nearly two centuries later, a matter of lively historical debate. Historians of the Adams presidency also disagree over how to interpret his eccentric version of personal independence during the last half of his term, most especially his seclusion in Quincy during those critical months in 1799. Abigail was ill, probably with rheumatic fever, much of this time. Perhaps his concern for her explains the Quincy hibernation, an explanation he himself offered whenever prodded by friends to return to Philadelphia. Or perhaps Adams was deliberately delaying the dispatch of the peace mission until he was assured that political conditions within France made success more likely, all the while allowing more time for the infant American navy then being assembled by Stoddert to grow in size and strength. Or perhaps he was truly torn between the anti-French, pro-army position of the High Federalists and his desire for a peaceful settlement. All are plausible explanations; there is some semblance of historical evidence to support each view, although the latter interpretation would require us to accept a version of the Adams temperament completely at odds with the characteristic patterns of his personality.17

  Adams never doubted the essential wisdom of his French policy, which was rooted in convictions about American foreign policy that he had developed during a quarter century of public service. Nor did he have any second thoughts about breaking with the High Federalists, especially Hamilton. By doing so he placed himself in the most attractive position imaginable, at least for a man of his disposition: a leader without a party, whose independence is unalloyed and whose virtuous motives cannot be attributed to a crass craving for popularity. His reasons for remaining away from the government for so long at such a crucial time are more difficult to fathom with equivalent assurance. But it seems most likely that he sequestered himself in Quincy because, for good reason, he had come to distrust most members of his cabinet and, for reasons rooted in his own combustible temperament, he feared that regular exposure to them would produce the infamous Adams explosions, which were incompatible with the model of virtuous, self-possessed leader he wished to convey to the world as well as to himself. And once he finally did r
eturn to the capital, it did not take long for the fireworks to start. “He every where denounces the men…in whom he confided at the beginning of his administration, as an oligarchish faction,” Theodore Sedgwick reported, shouting out loud in cabinet meetings that “they cannot govern him” and that “this faction and particularly Hamilton its head…intends to drive the country into a war with France and a more intimate…union with great Britain….” Fisher Ames concurred with this image of the president, claiming that “he inveighs against the British faction and the Essex Junto like one possessed.”18

  During his last year as president, in short, Adams frequently behaved in the tempestuous, wild-eyed way that Hamilton was soon to describe in his open letter of 1800. Whether Adams’s avowed honesty allowed him to acknowledge the accuracy of Hamilton’s description during that last evening in Washington, we can never know. If so, Adams could certainly have justified his behavior, much in the way of a man accused of paranoia who is able to demonstrate conclusively that, in fact, his friends were attempting to do him in. As for the deeper sources of his virtuous ideal and his passionate disposition, we might try looking back to an earlier time, when he made his first appearance on the national stage.