Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  Hamilton did have grandiose plans. He was a Napoleonic figure who wanted glory both for himself and for the nation. He wanted to strengthen the Union, extend the judiciary, and amend the Constitution to break up the large states, especially Virginia. He thought a war with France would allow the United States, in cooperation with Britain, to seize both Florida and Louisiana. He even raised the possibility of aiding the Venezuelan patriot Francisco de Miranda in liberating South America from Spanish control.

  At first Jefferson remained sanguine in the face of all the Federalist talk of crisis and a French invasion. In June 1798, he sought to soothe the fears of John Taylor of Virginia, who had criticized the Federalists’ plans and raised the possibility of the southern states seceding from the Union. “A little patience,” he told Taylor, “and we shall see the reign of the witches pass over.” The Federalists in Massachusetts and Connecticut, “marked like the Jews with a peculiarity of character,” were now in control, but that was unnatural and only temporary. “The body of our countrymen is substantially republican through every part of the union.”95

  With the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the summer of 1798, however, Jefferson became more apprehensive, fearing that the Federalists might build on the success of their oppressive legislation. He saw that legislation as “an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the constitution.” If the people accept these acts, Congress might next attempt to grant the president life tenure, which would lead to making the office hereditary, followed by establishing the Senate for life. Since these attempts “to worm out the elective principle” were what Adams had long predicted, Jefferson had little doubt the Federalists were contemplating making them, and given the degree to which the American people had been duped so far, he was no longer confident of being able to resist them.96 Even more alarming was the possibility of Hamilton, “our Buonaparte, surrounded by his comrades in arms,” invading Virginia in order to put down the Republican opposition.97

  In the end Jefferson, actually now more fearful of what was happening than Adams, became convinced that he had to do something to combat the Federalist plans. With the Federalists in control of Congress and the presidency, he had come to think of the federal government as “a foreign jurisdiction.” Over the previous decade, he said, the general government had “become more arbitrary, and has swallowed up more of the public liberty than even that of England.” By contrast, “our state governments are the very best in the world.” Consequently, he and Madison plotted to use the state legislatures as the most effective instrument for contesting the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts.98

  Jefferson’s draft of the state resolutions was intended for the Virginia legislature, but when Madison’s draft went to Virginia, his ended up in the Kentucky legislature. In it Jefferson described the Constitution as “a compact” among the several states, with each state retaining final authority to declare acts of the federal government that exceeded its delegated powers, in this case, the Alien and Sedition Acts, “void & of no force” within that state’s jurisdiction. Jefferson labeled this remedy for abusive federal actions “nullification,” but, fortunately for his subsequent reputation, the Kentucky legislature edited out this inflammatory term when it adopted Jefferson’s draft in a set of resolves issued in November 1798.99

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  ADAMS’S EARLIER APPREHENSIONS about what the French and their Republican sympathizers might be up to were now overwhelmed by his hatred of Hamilton and the High Federalists. He had come to detest the entire Hamiltonian financial program, declaring that “there is not a democrat in the world who affects more horror than I really feel, at the prospect of that frightful system of debts and taxes, into which imperious necessity seems to be precipitating us.” Having been humiliated by Washington and the Hamiltonians over the appointment of the army’s generals, Adams was very bitter. His loathing of Hamilton was so intense that he came to regard him as something other than an American, calling him nothing but “a foreigner,” and “not a native of the United States.”100

  Sharing none of his fellow Federalists’ fears of a French invasion—he told Secretary of War James McHenry in October 1798 that “at present there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here, than there is in Heaven”—Adams was finally prepared to defy Hamilton and the High Federalists and defuse the warlike atmosphere they had created.101 In a December 8, 1798, speech to Congress, the president opened the door to further negotiations with France.

  Jefferson was impressed with its “moderation,” but doubted that it revealed Adams’s genuine feelings.102 But Adams had changed. Learning from various sources that France was finally ready to reach an agreement with the United States, Adams, without consulting anyone, including his own cabinet, decided in February 1799 to send another mission to France.

  This extraordinary action stunned the Federalists and divided the party. It was as if Adams’s long pent-up hostility to being attached to a party with which he had little in common could at last be released. “If anyone entertains the Idea that, because I am President of three votes only, I am in the Power of a party,” he told Charles Lee, his attorney general, they had another think coming. The president was ready to take on the “Combinations of Senators Generals and Heads of Departments” that had formed against him. So little had he come to think of himself as a Federalist that he even suggested that he would form a new party made up of independent-minded men from both existing parties.103

  He even saw himself as a kind of republican king ruling above all parties. He asked his ministers’ advice as to whether or not the president could establish “a Gazette in the Service of the Government.” After all, the king of England had a gazette, and “without running a Parallel between the President of the United States and the King of England, it is certain that the honor Dignity and Consistency of Government is of as much importance to the People, in one case as the other.” This remarkable proposal suggests just how much Adams modeled the American executive on that of England and just how out of touch he was with the realities of American politics.104

  Adams was no politician and certainly no party leader; and he had very little political sense. In 1799 he seemed oblivious to the political implications of counseling a federal judge to surrender to British authorities a sailor named Jonathan Robbins, alias Thomas Nash, who was accused of a bloody mutiny on H.M.S. Hermione in 1797. Only after Robbins was given up to the British did the sailor claim to be a U.S. citizen impressed into the British navy—a false claim, as it turned out. British subject or not, mutineer or not, Robbins and his extradition and subsequent quick execution by the British became a political disaster for Adams. The Republicans relentlessly criticized him in the press for being complicit in the murder of a “martyr to liberty,” and under the leadership of Edward Livingston in the House of Representatives, they threatened to censure and even impeach him.

  Jefferson followed these proceedings very closely and was well aware of the implications of the Robbins affair for the upcoming presidential election. As early as October 1799, he thought that “no one circumstance since the establishment of our government has affected the popular mind more” than the Robbins case. As an American presumably seized by the British navy, Robbins embodied the evil of British impressment. Indeed, many, including Jefferson, thought that Robbins’s martyrdom was a major reason for Adams’s defeat in 1800.105

  As his behavior over the Robbins affair indicated, Jefferson was a superb politician and party leader. While Adams did little or nothing to plan for his reelection, Jefferson was exchanging letters with his Republican colleagues, tallying votes state by state and plotting strategy. It was as if Adams didn’t care about the election. He told members of his cabinet that at their upcoming meeting there should be no discussion of the election. He knew where he stood in the eyes of the people and he was going to be “a President of three votes or no president at all”—
the difference in his opinion being “not worth three farthings.”106

  Since for Adams party had lost all meaning, he now felt free enough to criticize Hamilton openly and to do what he should have done long before—dismiss the Hamiltonians in his cabinet, Pickering and McHenry. In an explosive expression of rage, which had become increasingly common, Adams accused McHenry of being “subservient to Hamilton,” who was “a man devoid of every moral principle, a Bastard,” and the cause of all the Federalists’ problems. Jefferson, said Adams, was an “infinitely better” and “wiser” man than Hamilton, and if he should become president he “will act wisely.” Adams went on to say that he would rather be vice president under Jefferson, or even minister at The Hague, than be “indebted to such a being as Hamilton for the Presidency.”107 So strange and eccentric did Adams’s actions seem that some Federalists thought that he and Jefferson must have come to some secret agreement.108

  Learning of Adams’s tirade, and especially the reference to his illegitimacy, an irate Hamilton could only conclude that the president was “more mad than I ever thought him” and perhaps because of his praise of Jefferson “as wicked as he is mad.”109 Others too thought that Adams had become emotionally unhinged. Even the British minister described him as “the most passionate, intemperate man he ever had anything to do with.”110 Some Federalists questioned Adams’s mental stability and sought to find some alternative as president. In 1799 a few had even tried to talk Washington into standing once again for the presidency—an effort the ex-president in anger and despair dismissed out of hand, saying that in this new era of political parties even “a broomstick” properly supported by its party could win an election.111

  Hamilton was especially desperate. In the summer and fall of 1800, he composed a fifty-four-page privately published Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States. In this pamphlet Hamilton criticized Adams for his “eccentric tendencies,” his “distempered jealousy,” his “extreme egoism,” his “ungovernable temper,” and his “vanity without bounds.” He declared that Adams and his many “paroxysms of anger” had undone everything that the Washington administration had established. If Adams were to continue as president, he might bring the government to ruin. Despite stating that Adams was unfit to be president, Hamilton ended his invective polemic by supporting the president’s reelection. Apparently, he was hoping for some combination of electoral votes that would result in the election of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney as president.

  Although Hamilton’s Letter may not by itself have prevented Adams’s reelection, its publication revealed the deep division among the Federalists that made Jefferson’s election as president more or less inevitable. That division was caused by Adams’s courageous decision to send a new mission to France, the issue that Hamilton most emphasized in his pamphlet and the one that stunned and destroyed Adams’s reputation among many Federalists.

  Writing from Federalist-dominated Massachusetts, Abigail told her husband that his decision “universally electrified the public. . . . It came so sudden, was a measure so unexpected, that the whole community were like a flock of frightened pigeons: nobody had their story ready; Some call’d it a hasty measure; other condemned it as an inconsistent one; some swore, some cursed.”112

  Adams actually enjoyed angering the Hamiltonian Federalists, showing them that he was his own man. He considered this decision to try once more to negotiate with France, as he never tired of telling everyone, “the most disinterested, prudent, and successful conduct in my whole life.” He desired no other inscription on his gravestone than: “Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800.”113

  Although presidents probably should not make controversial decisions without consulting someone, Adams was right to be proud of his determination to send a new mission to France. Not only did his decision vindicate his theory of an independent executive—someone who stood above all parties—but it put an end to the war crisis, a crisis that in the minds of some Federalists and Republicans had threatened a civil war. News of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in October 1799 undercut the threat of a French invasion and made Adams’s mission possible. The plans of the extreme Federalists to strengthen the central government and the military establishment of the United States crumbled, and consequently they have never been taken seriously by historians.

  After months of negotiations, France, now headed by First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, who would soon make himself emperor, agreed to terms and in 1800 signed the Treaty of Mortefontaine with the United States; it brought the Quasi-War to a close and suspended the Franco-American treaty of 1778 (and its related convention of 1789), thus freeing America from its first of what Jefferson would refer to as “entangling alliances.”114

  Adams realized that the “imprudent and disorganizing opposition and Clamor” of the High Federalists to his decision to send another peace mission had severely delayed the departure of the envoys, and that delay might very well endanger his reelection as president. So be it, he said. He was prepared to lose, he told John Trumbull in September 1800. “Age, Infirmities, family Misfortunes have conspired, with the Unreasonable Conduct of Jacobins and insolent Federalists, to make me too indifferent to whatever can happen.”115 He actually didn’t mean that.

  He was right to worry about the delay. News that the conflict was ended did not reach America until the Republicans had won the presidency. Jefferson received seventy-three electoral votes to Adams’s sixty-five. The twelve electoral votes of New York for Jefferson and for Aaron Burr, who had guaranteed those votes, made all the difference.

  TEN

  THE JEFFERSONIAN REVOLUTION OF 1800

  LIKE THE OTHER FEDERALISTS, John Adams had misjudged the future. He assumed that American society would eventually mature and become less egalitarian, more hierarchical, and more like the societies of Europe. He was so sure of the process of maturation that he wanted to prepare for it by having political officeholders serve for longer terms and perhaps for life. By contrast, Thomas Jefferson did end up on the right side of history, but inadvertently. He saw the future no more clearly than Adams. In 1800, however, he and his fellow Republicans did rightly see their electoral victory as more than one party replacing another.

  Jefferson sincerely believed that the Hamilton-led Federalists, fearful of the popular forces unleashed by the Revolution, had sought to turn the United States into a European-type state with an enlarged bureaucracy, a standing army, a national bank, high taxes, and a credit system that tried to tie the financial interests of the country to the government. Jefferson and the Republicans set out to repudiate as much as they could all of those Federalist dreams. Jefferson wanted no part of the hereditary aristocracies, gross social inequalities, bloated executives, oppressive debts, and the huge and expensive military establishments that characterized the traditional European monarchies. Despite the excesses and perversions of the French Revolution, he remained faithful to its goal of destroying the old monarchical world. He believed that his election had saved the United States from monarchy and had brought the entire revolutionary venture of two and a half decades to successful completion. Indeed, he was convinced that his election, “the Revolution of 1800,” as he later called it, “was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.”1

  Instead of the fiscal-military state the Federalists had wanted, Jefferson, as he said in his inaugural address, sought only “a wise and frugal government,” one that kept its citizens from injuring one another but otherwise left them “free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement” while at the same time avoiding taking “from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” He contemplated “a rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry,
engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.” For Jefferson, America had become “the world’s best hope” for the future of agrarian republicanism. It was “a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” For those who thought republican governments were too weak to sustain themselves, Jefferson replied that the United States, based as it was on the sovereignty of the people, was “the strongest Government on earth.”2

  Adams never witnessed Jefferson’s inauguration since he left before sunrise, becoming the first and only president not to greet his successor. It was an insult that Adams’s onetime friend Elbridge Gerry thought had “wounded his real [friends] & been severely censured by his pretended friends.” Gerry thought that Adams’s recent conduct toward himself had “by no means been satisfactory.”3

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  DESPITE SELF-PROTECTIVELY suggesting that he was indifferent to the results of the election, Adams had taken his defeat hard. It was humiliating. He believed that, like Washington, he should have been able to serve until he voluntarily stepped down. In the eyes of some observers, his “unexpected displacement” was unnatural and had to be an act of God. Sometimes Adams could not hide his bitterness, telling his son Thomas, for example, that “if I were to go over my Life again I would be a Shoemaker rather than an American Statesman.” Although that was never serious, the statement was a measure of his disappointment.4

  It had been a brutal campaign, perhaps the most vicious and scurrility-ridden in American history. Some Federalists feared that if the Republicans won, “the air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.” For their part, the Republicans claimed that if the Federalists won, they would sell out the country to Great Britain and establish a monarchy. Adams was accused of being a “poor old man . . . in his dotage,” who “merely pretended to be a true friend of revolutionary republicanism.” He even had the gall, the Republicans charged, to negotiate with Toussaint-Louverture, the black leader of the slave rebellion in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and to dine personally in the White House with one of the island’s black representatives.5