In response, the president called for a special session of Congress for May 16, 1797, the first president to do so. Adams requested a buildup of American military forces, especially the navy, and condemned the French for trying to separate the American people from their government. Americans, he declared, must convince the French that “we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence.”46
Jefferson was incensed by Adams’s actions. He thought that Adams’s calling Congress “out of season” was totally unnecessary. Convening Congress in a special session was simply an attempt by the administration “to see how far and in what line they could count on it’s support.” The president’s speech, he told a Maryland follower, was “too bold” and actually endangered “the peace of our country.”47
A relative of this Maryland recipient read this letter and, despite being told that he should make no improper use of it, communicated the substance of it to Adams. The president found Jefferson’s comments “serious,” and reason enough among “many others . . . to be upon my guard.” Gone was his earlier confidence in his vice president. He now had “evidence of a mind, soured, yet seeking for popularity, and eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed and ignorant.”48
Adding to Adams’s awareness of the vice president’s hostility was the publication in the press of a letter Jefferson had written the previous year to his Italian friend Philip Mazzei. In its translation from English to Italian to French back to English, Jefferson was quoted as describing a separation between the “Anglo-Monarchical-Aristocratic party” that dominated the government and the mass of the American citizens who were still “faithful to republican principles.” The government, he said, was under the control of “apostates” who once were “Solomons in council and Sampsons in combat, but whose hair has been cut off by the whore England.” Although Jefferson was embarrassed and never publicly acknowledged the letter, the Federalists were delighted with it and never ceased using it against the leader of the Republicans. The comment seemed to indict Washington most directly, but it could also be construed as a criticism of Adams. Indeed, the French émigré the Comte de Volney observed that although most Federalists were not devoted to England, many did have “a taste for its constitution and M. Adams is at the head.”49
Hoping against hope that Jefferson in 1797 had moderated his views from what they had been a year earlier, Abigail described the Mazzei letter as something written when Jefferson “was anxious to convert all political Heriticks to French Faith.” Still, she told her son John Quincy, she was sure it would “never be forgotten by the Characters traduced.”50 In his reply, John Quincy told his mother that the Mazzei letter was “more than imprudent: it shows a mind full of error, or an heart full of falsehood.” But he could not believe the latter. “My old sentiments of respect veneration and attachment still hang about me with regard to that man”—evidence of how strong and warm the friendship between the Adams family and Jefferson had been in Europe. Nevertheless, said young Adams, the letter did reveal “a very weak man” and a hypocritical one. Indeed, “there could not be a stronger proof of the misrepresentations and calumnies” that lay behind recent French policy toward the United States. It showed just “how much the French depended upon an internal party in America to support and justify their treatment of us.”51
Adams himself was anxious about the strength of Jefferson’s attachment to France. He was convinced that from the beginning France had “invariably preserved a Course of Intrigue to gain an undue Influence in these states, to make Us dependent upon her, and to keep up a quarrel with England.”52 By the middle of 1797, he felt that the United States and France were on the verge of war.
Jefferson and the other Republican leaders dismissed the Federalists as warmongers, threatening a war that France did not want, and they urged delay. To Jefferson and the other Republicans, war with America’s sister republic was inconceivable. It would play into the hands of the English party in the United States and destroy the republican experiment everywhere. Besides, Jefferson believed that a French invasion of Britain was imminent and that its success would solve all of America’s problems with France.
Adams’s earlier plans to send a commission to France now became even more urgent, and he decided on John Marshall of Virginia, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who was already in France, to make up the diplomatic commission.
By November 1797, Abigail had lost all hope for Jefferson. “He is a child,” she said, “the dupe of party, . . . a Man whose Mind is so warped by prejudice, and so Blinded by Ignorance as to be unfit for the office he holds.”53 Adams himself was deeply discouraged. Congress was giving him little or no support in his dealings with France. And for over a year since his inauguration he had had no contact whatsoever with his predecessor, Washington.54
• • •
FOR SOMEONE LIKE JEFFERSON, who placed such a high value on politeness and social harmony, the political passions dividing the society were truly alarming. “Men who have been intimate all their lives,” he lamented, “cross the street to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.” He could have been speaking about his personal relations with Adams when he said that “party animosities” had “raised a wall of separation between those who differ in political sentiments.”55
That November, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives rejected Adams’s appeal to build up a naval force. Jefferson dismissed Adams’s efforts to call attention to French depredations as “inflammatory,” designed only to promote his desire to arm America’s merchant ships. Jefferson was delighted that the merchants themselves were becoming less and less interested in arming their ships. As far as the French government itself was concerned, the Americans seemed hopelessly divided and thus no threat whatsoever.56
Bad as things were, Adams and Jefferson were still speaking to each other, though not intimately. Jefferson recorded a conversation he had with the president when they sat next to each other at the end of a large dinner party in mid-February 1798. After discussing the high price of labor and rents and concurring in holding the banks and their issues of paper money responsible, the two turned to the Constitution. In the course of the conversation, which Jefferson recorded in notes shortly thereafter, Adams contended that no republic could long exist without a strong senate, “strong enough to bear up against all popular storms & passions.” He thought the U.S. Senate was probably “as well constituted as it could have been,” but still it was “not durable enough”; and eventually that would be its undoing. Certainly, trusting “a popular assembly for the preservation of our liberties . . . was the merest chimaera imaginable.” Although Adams was aware that Jefferson supported the French Revolution, he nevertheless told him to his face that “in France anarchy had done more mischief in one night than all the despotism of their kings had ever done in 20 or 30 years.”57
Polite as usual, Jefferson never fully revealed to Adams just how much of a true believer he was—someone thoroughly convinced that the success of the French Revolution would determine the fate of America’s experiment in republicanism. Just as Adams and the Federalists were frightened by the fifth-column-like activities of the Republicans, so too did Jefferson see the Federalists using their mercantile and financial connections to draw America “into war on the side of England” in order ultimately “to break up our union.”58 Jefferson believed that war with France would be a calamity and would play into the hands of monarchies everywhere.
Adams was the very opposite of a true believer. He was pessimistic, cynical about human nature, and sure about only one thing—that the French Revolution was an unmitigated disaster. He lacked Jefferson’s confidence in the future and was uncertain about what to do. In contrast to some High Federalists who favored war with France, he preferr
ed a peaceful resolution of the crisis, “provided that no Violation of Faith, no Stain upon Honour is exacted. But,” he told his son John Quincy, “if Infidelity, Dishonour, or too much humiliation is demanded, France shall do as she pleases and take her own course. America is not Scared.”59
Adams realized that England was as much a violator of America’s neutral rights as France. “If we believe Britain’s less hungry for plunder than Frenchmen,” he told his secretary of state, “we shall be deceived.” Still, unlike Jefferson, he was proud of his English heritage. Impressed by England’s skill and perseverance in the war at sea, he told Abigail “we are a Chip of that Block.”60 Since he believed in order, hierarchy, and the inevitability of social inequality, and was an admirer of the English constitution and suspicious of democracy, he was necessarily a Federalist, but he was not really a party man. And many of his fellow Federalists sensed that, which made him suspect in their eyes.
• • •
IN THE END FRANCE ITSELF RESCUED Adams from his despairing uncertain situation. The French government refused to recognize the credentials of the commissioners Adams had sent to France. French agents, later referred to as “X, Y, and Z” in dispatches published in America, demanded of the American envoys that the U.S. government apologize for President Adams’s allegedly unfriendly May 1797 speech to Congress and assume responsibility for any outstanding French debts owed to Americans. To top this off, the French agents insisted that the United States in effect give a bribe to the French government of fifty thousand pounds. Only then might the French government receive the commissioners.
In April 1798, after months of haggling, a disgusted Marshall and Pinckney returned to the United States. Gerry, fearful that a war with France would “disgrace republicanism & make it the scoff of despots,” decided to remain behind.61 Before returning, Marshall had sent to the president records of the XYZ Affair and the collapse of the negotiations with France. Without revealing the contents of the commission’s dispatches, Adams on March 19, 1798, informed the Congress of the failure of the diplomatic mission and called for arming America’s merchant vessels and other defensive measures. On March 23, he also called for “a day of solemn humiliation, fasting and prayer” to be held on May 9, 1798.
Jefferson was horrified by what he took to be Adams’s warlike message. He called it “insane.” Madison agreed, and said the message was evidence that “the violent passions, and heretical politics” that had long governed Adams privately had at last been publicly exposed. Desperate to avoid conflict with America’s sister republic, the Republican leaders sought to find some way of delaying action by Congress. “To do nothing, and to gain time is everything with us,” Jefferson told Madison. If war could be put off for six months or so, he said, events in Europe would save us. England was on its last legs, and a French invasion of the British Isles was bound to happen soon.62
The Republicans thought that Adams’s initial refusal to make the envoys’ dispatches public was a cover-up, and, unaware of how damaging they were to their cause, they called for their release. On April 4, 1798, Abigail told her son John Quincy that the Republicans wanted the dispatches, and she said, with smiling anger, “today they will receive them.” The dispatches exhibited “a picture of National Degradation and unparalleled corruption” and were so insulting, she said, that America ought to cut off all connection with that regicide republic.
When Americans finally learned how the French government had humiliated their commissioners in the XYZ Affair, most of them exploded in anger against France and the Republican Party. “The Jacobins in senate and House were struck dumb,” said Abigail, and not having received instructions from their French emissaries spread all over America, they didn’t know what to do.63
Jefferson himself was stunned. The publication of the dispatches, he told Madison, “produced such a shock on the republican mind as has never been seen since our independence.” Especially embarrassing were the French agents’ references to the “friends of France” in the United States, suggesting that there existed quislings in the country willing to aid the French. Many of the “vibrators” and “wavering characters” in the Republican Party, Jefferson groaned, were so anxious “to wipe out the imputation of being French partisans” that they were going over in droves to “the war party.” He himself felt especially persecuted. “At this moment,” he told James Monroe, “my name is running through all the city as detected in a criminal correspondence with the French directory.”64
Over the remainder of 1798 and into 1799, the Federalists won election after election, even in the South, and gained control of the Congress.
Following his initial shock, Jefferson soon recovered his natural optimistic faith in the French Revolution, and he began assuring his correspondents that only “the merchants & satellites of the administration” favored war. The farmers of America did not. He began making excuses for the French, arguing that the Directory in charge of the government knew nothing of the corrupt behavior of its foreign minister and his agents. The only real obstacle to negotiations, he claimed, was President Adams’s speech of May 16, 1797. It will be “the real cause of war, if war takes place.” If that “insult from our Executive should be first wiped away,” the French seemed willing to settle all other differences. It was certain, he said, that the revelations of these dispatches “do not offer one motive the more for our going to war.” The Republicans, or what he often called “the whig-party” in contrast to the monarch-minded Tories, were “willing to indulge the war-gentry with every reasonable measure of internal defense & preparations, but will oppose everything external.” He expected time would heal passions, “unless the Executive should be able to plunge us into war irrecoverably.”65
• • •
THE REVELATION OF THE XYZ AFFAIR suddenly made President Adams and the Federalists popular in a way they had not been before. “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute!”—the reply the American envoys supposedly had given to the French demand for a bribe—became the Federalists’ rallying cry. Songs and plays celebrated the president, and theater audiences that earlier had rioted on behalf of the French now sang praises of President Adams.
Acclamations and addresses cascaded upon the president—hundreds of them, from state legislatures, town meetings, college students, grand juries, Masonic lodges, and military companies. They congratulated him for his leadership, for his patience, for his impartiality, and for his wisdom in upholding the honor and independence of the United States. The addresses condemned those “characters in the United States who call themselves Americans and who . . . are endeavoring to poison the minds of the well-meaning citizens and to withdraw from the government the support of the people.”66
Beside himself with excitement, Adams answered all the addresses, sometimes with bellicose statements against the “inordinate Ambition and Avarice” of France and at other times with indictments of “designing men” who have appealed to “the Passions and Prejudices of the People” in an attempt “to separate the People from the Government.” In his answer “To the Young Men of the City of Philadelphia,” an answer that greatly upset Jefferson, Adams declared that, “without wishing to damp the ardor of curiosity, or influence the freedom of inquiry,” he guessed that after much impartial research the longest liver among the young men would “find no principles, institutions, or systems of education more fit, in general, to be transmitted to your posterity, than that you have received from your ancestors.” In other words, the wisdom of the past trumped the promises of the future. Nothing could be more contrary to Jefferson’s outlook on the world.67
Jefferson was fascinated by Adams’s answers, and he systematically compiled a list of all that were published, categorizing them under various headings: “favor to England,” “abuse of the French,” “libels against his fellow-citizens,” “anti-republican heresies,” and “egoisms.” He complained that these presidential responses were “full of extraord
inary things” and were more boastful and more damaging to the possibility for peace than the addresses themselves. Foreign nations might be able to pardon indiscreet and passionate statements made by local governments and private organizations, but, he said, they could scarcely ignore statements made by the president of the United States.68
All of Adams’s responses troubled Jefferson, but the one that most outraged him and the one he never forgot was Adams’s astonishing advice given to the young men of Philadelphia. It was, Jefferson exclaimed, “precisely the doctrine which the present despots of the earth are inculcating, & their friends here re-echoing; & applying especially to religion and politics.” He could hardly believe what Adams had said: “we are to look backwards then, & not forwards for the improvement of science, & to find it amidst feudal barbarisms and the fires of Spital-fields”—that is, amid the cremations from the Roman era discovered in London in the sixteenth century. “But thank heaven,” he said, “the American mind is already too much opened, to listen to these impostures.”69
Because Adams was finally receiving the popular praise and respect that he had long yearned for, all his doubts about his actions suddenly disappeared. He could only conclude that “the French and many Americans have miscalculated. They have betrayed to the World their Ignorance of the American Character.”70 Adams took the responsibility for answering all these addresses so seriously that Abigail feared for his life.71 But he himself was never happier than he was during the summer of 1798, lecturing his countrymen on the ignorance and dishonesty of both France and the Republican Party.
• • •
DESPITE ADAMS’S NEWFOUND CONFIDENCE, the situation in 1798 was exceedingly perilous. Groups of Republicans and Federalists adopted different cockades—the Federalists assumed a black ornament to contrast sharply with what they took to be the French tricolor cockade worn by the Republicans. Mobs wearing these contrasting cockades became involved in skirmishes, fistfights, and other violence, even at church doors. Abigail was beside herself with anger and anguish. She hoped that people were at last uniting against “foreign influence” in the capital and would crush “the Hydra Monster of Jacobinism” and prevent it from ever rising again. To some frightened observers, society seemed to be coming apart. “Friendships were dissolved, tradesmen dismissed, and custom withdrawn from the Republican party,” bemoaned the wife of a prominent Republican in Philadelphia. “Many gentlemen went armed.”72
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